Al Pastor, but Make it Vegan
By Giuseppe Lacorazza
Tacos are the quintessential Mexico City food, and they’ve reflected the changes of the demographics and politics in the city since they were first invented. Photo by Jose Miguel Garcia Almaguer on Unsplash.
Tacos have been here in Mexico for a long time. Exactly how much time, nobody knows. Some people, like historian Sophie Coe, claim that there probably has been tacos since the first nixtamal tortilla was invented, more than 3,000 years ago. Others, like historian Jeffrey Pilcher, are skeptical about that, theorizing that maybe tacos were invented much later, specifically in the 18th century in the silver mines of Real del Monte, Hidalgo, receiving their now famous name from “the little charges they would use to excavate the ore,” as he put it in a 2017 interview published in Smithsonian Magazine. He was referencing the rolled pieces of paper filled with gunpowder that were detonated inside the holes carved in the rock, commonly known as tacos.
Some people take it a little further, like Domingo García-Garza, who suggests in “An Economic Ethnography of Mexico’s Taco Street Market: The Monterrey Case” that tacos are an invention of modernity itself, and that they only really became a thing in the 20th century when industrial tortilla-making machines allowed them to be mass produced. It’s impossible to say who’s right or wrong, but the truth is, like I mentioned, that tacos have been here for a long time.
I, on the other hand, haven’t. I’ve been living in Mexico City for just over two years, but in that time I’ve had more than my fair share of tacos. Al pastor, carnitas, longaniza, chorizo, suadero, campechano, de canasta, árabes, dorados, de barbacoa, birria, argentinos, de bistec, al carbón, guisados, milanesa, chicharrón—I’ve tried to have them all, and I’ve picked my favorites like everybody else.
Recently, though, I have a new obsession.
There’s a section of the taco world that seems to be growing faster and faster, that brings new ideas into the planchas and trompos and those colorful little plastic plates that you get in the street joints. This sector is not only open to deliciousness, indulgence and affordability but also to intellectual and social change: It’s vegan tacos. Just to clarify I’m not talking about vegetable tacos—those can be found everywhere and are as old as the taco may be—I’m referring to tacos made exclusively in vegan taquerias, for vegan and vegetarian (or really any other) customers to enjoy.
Why are they so exciting, you ask? Firstly, because Mexico City is a huge, huge, huge consumer of animal and dairy products. You can see it everywhere, just get out of the house, take a walk, go into a market or watch photographer and filmmaker Sam Youkilis’ Instagram stories. You’ll see sausages, bones and meats hanging and sizzling in broad daylight, chicken feet and pork heads laying on the shop counters, and a delicious smell of frying pork fat and smoky beef fat will be waiting to seduce you at any corner, anytime.
The data from USDA and the UN, collected by Consejo Mexicano de la Carne, an association of Mexican companies working in the meat sector, endorse my words: Mexico ranks fifth in the world in overall meat consumption, being fourth in chicken consumption, sixth in beef and eighth in pork, an average well above its rank as the tenth largest population on the planet.
But Mexico is also the country with the largest vegan and vegetarian community in Latin America, with 28 percent of the population not consuming meat and 9 percent living on a plant-based diet, according to the latest Nielsen Global Health and Ingredient-Sentiment Survey. That is a lot of people in a country of 130 million, of whom 21 million live in Mexico City.
So, if any of that is going to be reflected somewhere, it must be in Mexico’s delicious, incredibly diverse, multiculturally rich span of foods, and particularly one that stands out in popularity both within and outside the country: tacos.
Tacos are the quintessential Mexico City food, and they’ve reflected the changes of the demographics and politics in the city since they were first invented. Many times they have changed, and many more times they will change.
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If the first tacos were indeed born with the first nixtamal tortilla, then they must have been very different from what they are now.
In his 1967 book Historia Gastronómica de la Ciudad de México, Salvador Novo placed the beginning of the miscegenation of Mexican food to when Hernan Cortés was served “wine, pork carnitas in taco, with warm tortillas,” in his triumphant banquet in Coyoacán, suggesting one of the first and maybe most important changes in the life of the taco. It was the introduction of pork, by way of Cuba, that is most responsible for the tacos that we eat today.
After that came other changes. Tacos de canasta, the soft small-tortilla tacos presented inside baskets on the streets, came around the 18th century. They were first called tacos de minero, referencing those miners from Real del Monte who then moved into the cities, as documented by Jeffrey Pilcher in his 2006 essay “¡Tacos, Joven! Cosmopolitismo Proletario y la Cocina Nacional Mexicana,” and maybe this is where they got their name from.
Then came the hypernationalized sentiment of the post-revolution, and the surge of internal migration from the countryside into the cities that followed, making each regional food popular and a source of national pride. The taco, the taquerias and pulquerias became symbols of the Mexican proletariat.
The 20th century brought more changes and progress. As the processes to make masa and tortillas were industrialized and methods of food storage and distribution refined, the humble taco became what it is today: an enormous form of street-food, often meat, consumption.
Modernity allowed tacos to be produced massively, cheaply and quickly just as new immigrants came from abroad bringing new foods into the cities. Of these groups, the Lebanese immigrants made the most profound impact in the taco. Their traditional gyros and shawarmas became tacos arabes by using the tortilla instead of a flatbread, or filling the flatbreads with Mexican preparations. Eventually, as the lamb was substituted for pork and other condiments were added, the master stroke happened: the invention of tacos al pastor. Tacos al pastor came to define the street-way of eating of Mexico City, with many places claiming to be the originators of the recipe.
And now we live in a new era, a post-industrialized world that has produced a new generation of working-class activists concerned with animal rights and environmentalism. Such are some of our main generational conversations, or at least they are here, and they can be seen and felt in the streets and in its tacos. That’s the third exciting part of this tale: a new way of eating and living that is supported by the old ones.
As the processes to make masa and tortillas were industrialized and methods of food storage and distribution refined, the humble taco became what it is today: an enormous form of street-food, often meat, consumption.. Photo by ProtoplasmaKid, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
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Gatorta is a small street-food stand just south of the Insurgentes roundabout in Roma Norte, where Melissa Ayala, the owner, serves vegan tortas and tacos to daily regulars and passersby. She founded it almost seven years ago wanting a place where people could eat affordably while knowing that animals need not to be killed in order to make delicious and traditional Mexican food. It was her way to do pro-animal rights activism and to feed her community. As a vegetarian of 19 years and a vegan of eight, she realized that veganism was targeted only to a certain elite with a different financial status than the majority.
“Ideally, everybody should have access to vegan food,” she says. “That’s why it is a political act. Serving affordable vegan street-food is both a political and an ethical stand.”
Her menu is a collection of vegan versions of popular local foods, all with nonvegan names like suadero (brisket), pastor (the famous marinated pork), bistec (paper-thin steaks), and longaniza (sausage). She believes the flavor of these traditional recipes come from the vegetable ingredients like spices and herbs, and not from the meat itself, something I might not agree on, but found revelatory.
Melissa bases her recipes in these traditional street-food preparations but makes them her own: Her suadero has a lot of clove, cumin and what I imagine is some cooked down orange juice, the combination almost tasting like a full bite of sweet caraway seeds, not very traditional but tasty. The beef is replaced with seitan, and pork with soy protein. She adds some peanuts, almonds and other blended nuts for fat and texture. The mayo is made with homemade organic soy milk and no eggs. It all tastes a bit different than a meat torta and a pork taco, but these fillings are also rested on tortillas and inside bolillos, dressed in salsa roja and verde, and some even have the texture of the thing itself, like the milanesa, and they are still delicious, generous and fatty bites, just as one would expect in a street-food joint in Mexico City.
She told me that some of her more recurrent customers are older people whose doctors have prohibited them to have any more meat. She talks to them and even though they come from a different place, they are able to meet in the middle, right there in Gatorta’s vegan food.
Another interesting place is Por Siempre Vegano, a 10-year-old food cart turned restaurant in Roma Sur, where Rafael Cruz, the chef, serves a long menu of tacos and guisados at very affordable prices. Here, a taco al pastor made out of seitan costs only 10 pesos (50 cents in U.S. dollars).
Rafael also believes that vegan food should be taken out of its elitist context, but for him that’s just the beginning. Por Siempre Vegano is based in anarcho-veganism, the idea that consumerism and capitalism isolate human beings from their own conscience by imposing ways of life like the animal-based diet. They believe that by opening people’s perception into a cruelty-free diet each individual can access their own decision-making conscience and propose a different, personal, social set of rules. Those are the rules they want to respect. It seems like a big ordeal for a restaurant that serves cheap street-food, but it’s exciting to see the prospect of restaurants as centers of thought and social change, and not just businesses or high-end artistic performances.
The chicharron verde I had at Por Siempre Vegano was surprisingly similar in texture and flavor to the stewed chicharron verde that you can find in fondas and restaurants around the city, the nonvegan versions. Why imitate? I asked, and Rafael answered that they see their food as transitional food, intended for nonvegans to realize that the flavors and textures that they are used to eating can be achieved without the suffering of the animals. They also acknowledge that they are part of the tradition of Mexican food, and that’s what they base their recipes on. They don’t expect people to change their behaviors overnight, but they are willing to plant seeds, to make them think by informing their perception.
There are many places that are fulfilling this around the city, like Vegamo restaurant in Centro, Gracias Madre and Maria Bonita in Roma Norte, Groovy’s Taquería in Condesa, VEGuerrero in Colonia Guerrero, Gold Taco in Narvarte, or Vegetal in Roma Sur, a vegan butcher shop where you can find everything you need to make your own versions of Mexican food at home, and many, many more. Some are just plain vegan, but others share different causes.
Veganism is obviously a moral cause that lives within the food system, but not just there, and it doesn’t just involve diet. These folks are taking the conversation out of the academic, philosophical, political and conceptual contexts and into the urban practice of street food, and they’re essential to the success of their cause. They come from a lineage of activism that can be seen in organizations like La Revolución de la Cuchara and Food Not Bombs, the former offering zines and information in the streets about the perks of a vegan life all over Latin America since 2003, the latter collecting discarded ingredients from restaurants and markets that can still be used in order to feed a vegan diet to anyone suffering from food scarcity.
Cities change as generations do, and each of these is filled with particular obstacles before the introduction of new ideas can take root and thrive. This is where food can become art or activism, because it crosses the whole spectrum of human activity and thought, it involves so many things. In Mexico City, a historical ground where progressive, subversive and generally novel ideas have been introduced in as many forms as possible, a city globally recognized for the quality and diversity of its food, where the taco is king and queen, with a generation of young people who question every form of standard practice inherited, it makes sense that street food reflects emerging possibilities. Food changes are always exciting, even if you don’t fully buy them, because within them lies creativity, and in this case, reflection.
Giuseppe is a chef and writer from Colombia living in Mexico City. He is the editor of Gula (@gula.newsletter on Instagram), a biweekly newsletter of texts about food, cooking, eating, and everything that surrounds them, which is life. You can find him on Instagram as @giulaco and on Twitter as @apetitodemente.