Quotes from Gustavo Arellano

Espero la cosecha de mi sueño sirva como inspiracion a todos!" he enthused via Twitter. "I hope the harvest of my dream serves as inspiration to all!

Chingar: To fuck up. Its various derivatives are used for a delightful array of insults, such as chingadera (fucked-up situation), chingazos (punches thrown), and Chinga tu madre, cabrón (Go fuck your mother, asshole). Chinga tu madre, cabrón—if you don't stop this chingadera, I'm going to chingar you with chingazos.

Chúntaro: A Mexican redneck. Term used mostly by Mexicans against each other. Jeff Foxworthy is a white chúntaro.

Gabacho: A gringo. But Mexicans don't call gringos gringos. Only gringos call gringos gringos. Mexicans call gringos gabachos.

These weren't the tamales of my youth—they were smaller, but that was okay.

Pocho: An Americanized Mexican.

We must consider the infinite varieties of Mexican food in the United States as part of the Mexican family—not a fraud, not a lesser sibling, but an equal.

Aztlán: The mythical birthplace of the Aztecs. Chicanos use this term to describe the southwest United States. Chicanos are idiots. Citlali says Aztlán is somewhere in Ohio.

Raza cósmica, la: "The cosmic race." Refers to a movement by Mexican intellectuals during the 1920s arguing Mexicans have the blood of all the world's races—white, black, Indian, and Asian—and therefore transcend the world.

tomatoes, corn, and chile peppers, found lives outside the Mexican diet and came to define other cuisines. And then there's the two filched foods: vanilla and chocolate, indisputably Mexican, beloved by almost all, creators of fortunes for nearly everyone but their motherland.

Tellingly, the Latinos who frequented his stand eschewed the tacos in favor of hot dogs and hamburgers. He racked up sales that opening day, but no one wanted the tacos. Finally, a white man ordered one, mispronouncing it as "take-oh." The shell was already cold, waiting for its fillings; Bell prepared it and handed it to the gentleman. Juice from the ground beef inside dribbled on his pinstriped suit, but the man ordered another. Bell was ecstatic.

Food became one of the primary tests the Spaniards and the Aztecs used on each other to determine if the other side was amigo or foe. Moctezuma

Taco Bell, which he launched in 1962 in the Los Angeles suburb of Downey.

brought [Mexican food] down to their lowest common denominator," wrote Diana Kennedy, with "an overly large platter of mixed messes, smothered with a shrill tomato sauce, sour cream, and grated yellow cheese preceded by a dish of mouth-searing sauce and greasy deep-fried chips.

Farnsworth's innovation of offering multiple items on one plate, but added even more combinations. Someone at the restaurant numbered the different options, making it easier for non-Mexicans to order a plate instead of pronouncing each item on the menu, and the—pick your favorite: #1? #5? #15?—numbered combo plate became de rigueur.

meat didn't come from the actual meat around the diaphragm of hens. As long as guests had the opportunity to see a waiter bring a sizzling platter of something to their table and warn them that the platter was hot, that was a fajita.

We changed the eating habits of an entire nation," Bell states near the end of Taco Titan, and for once he isn't merely self-mythologizing. Bell showed other Americans that their countrymen hungered for Mexican grub sold to them fast, cheap, and with only a smattering of ethnicity. Tacos the way Mexicans ate them were out of the question: tortilla factories were still concentrated in the Southwest, and tortillas didn't last long.

La América Tropical stayed hidden from public view and history until the 1960s, by which time the elements washed enough white away so that ghostly outlines emerged. The mural is currently undergoing a restoration effort sponsored by a new generation of city fathers, its promise intimidating: you can hide the Mexican, but the Mexican will emerge.

The United States in the 1890s was in the midst of a tamale man invasion that strolled hand in hand with the chili con carne craze.

Even after California became part of Mexico upon the country's independence from Spain, the region's inhabitants thought of themselves differently from their fellow Mexican citizens—they were gente de razón (people of reason), a term that distinguished them from the Indians or those of mixed blood, frequently called cholos.

legend has it that Mexican food made its national debut at the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition, better remembered as the Chicago World's Fair.

The oldest city in the United States is St. Augustine, Florida, founded by Spaniards in 1565,

The oldest American capital is Santa Fe, founded in 1609, over 150 years before the United States was even born and almost 250 before the United States eventually conquered what's now the Southwest from Mexico.

While the tamale dates to the foundation of civilizations in Meso-America, food historians will forever debate the origins of chili. Only