But that was then. This is now. Which is the other reason I’m eating Taco Bell tonight: I want to sink my teeth into the culture clash between past and present — the whiter, more monocultural society we were, versus the hyphenated nation we’ve become. Taco Bell harks back to the Wonder Bread America of 1962, when the chain was founded on the assumption that real Mexican food was too slow, too spicy, too unpronounceably foreign, even in the Los Angeles suburb of Downey, where Glen Bell launched his chain. “Buh-ree-toh,” I ordered, prompted by the painfully phonetic rendering on the early Taco Bell menu boards. “Toast-ah-duh.” Ordering in Español when you can’t even habla! How bitchin’ is that?
Paradoxically, even as its architecture and barefoot, serape-clad mascot, the “Taco Bell Boy,” insisted on the Mexican-ness of the brand, Taco Bell was taking the “Mexican” out of Mexican food — destigmatizing it by deracinating it. Since the 19th century, the racial unconscious of white Southern California had projected its fear and loathing of brown-skinned people onto the food they ate. The racist commonplace that Mexican food is dirty — a coded way of saying that our brown-skinned neighbors to the south are third-world cucarachas, peeing in the Great Race’s gene pool — is a durable myth. In 1895, the chronicler of frontier life John G. Bourke noted that the “abominations of Mexican cookery have been for years a favorite theme with travelers,” then joined in the fun, deploring Mexicans’ “indifference to the existence of dirt and grease” (not to mention their “appalling liberality in the matter of garlic” and their “recklessness in the use of chili colorado or chili verde”).
Taco Bell made Mexican food safe for postwar white America by turning down the tongue-searing heat, translating alien ingredients into the gabacho idiom, and automating food prep: The queso fresco sprinkled onto Mexican tostadas became cheddar cheese; the fragrant, meltingly delicious tortillas made by hand in Tijuana taco stands became prefab taco shells, uniform as widgets.
Most important, Glen Bell recontextualized the experience of eating Mexican food. In the gothic fantasies of white America, taquerias indifferent to the existence of dirt and grease served meat of uncertain origin and colon-scarring spiciness, calculated to exact Montezuma’s revenge from whimpering, backfiring whites. Bell moved Mexican food to the right side of the tracks: Brightly lit and spotless as operating rooms, early Taco Bells were staffed and patronized exclusively by Anglos, at least in my experience. (Times have changed, apparently: SoCal-based Mexican-Americans interviewed for this story claimed that the sight of Latinos working and eating at Taco Bell is not at all uncommon.)
