I love tacos!

"I love tacos!" This might sound like a cheesy statement for a Mexican restaurant advertising campaign. For me, it was my punishment for leaving my laptop unattended and my social media accounts a facile target to my friend Ani. Ani would just swarm to my computer and leave an tasty message for the public to read, a message that drew from her Mexican roots and our mutual appetite for tacos. Thinking back, my friendship with Ani has been marked by this small tortilla folded Mexican delicacy. 

Dictionaries and other reference scripts describe a taco as a popular Mexican food, comprised of a tortilla wrapped around a filling. Food historians locate the root of this delicacy back to the Aztecs and the Mayans, civilizations that used flat breads to wrap their food. Truth to be told, wrapping food around a piece of dough is a common cooking and serving practice in almost all civilizations around the globe. 

Historian Jeffrey M. Pilcher supports that the word "taco" started being a proper name for the food we know today around the 18th century from a group of Mexican silver miners. For them, a taco was a piece of paper used to wrap gunpowder to create excavating charges. Apparently, those miners found visual similarities between their bread-wrapped food and the little paper pouches. Not to mention the fiery taste effect of the chilies they used abundantly in their food, which reminded them of the explosion of rocks, caused by the small dynamite bags. Thus, taco, the plug, became taco, the tortilla wrap.

Tacos have always been associated with open air, as it is considered the ultimate street food, along with hot dogs. In the beginning of the 20th century the Chili Queens were selling tacos out of their carts in the South boarders of the American soil. Although the dish has gone many culinary changes since then, like the introduction of hard shell corn tortilla in 1947, and can be served in many restaurants, from a humble Mexican joint to award-winning restaurants, still it tastes better if it comes from a truck. And that is something I learned from Ani.

In one of our trips, our quest for the perfect taco bite brought us to Pasco, a small picturesque town in Washington, with a considerable community of Mexicans. Our friends back home suggested this town as the place to find the "original Mexican taco". Ani and I decided that if that was the case, it was worth to make an hour detour to taste a piece of her culture. I can never deny a foreigner to seek for their roots, being away from home myself, thus I agreed to have a friendly encounter with this new and exotic culture. 

The minute we entered Pasco, there it was! A taco truck. I do not know if it was my bad first impression of the place or my sightseeing itch, that I suggested we go a bit further into town to find a better place.

"NO!" Ani cried. "This is the place. This is the original taco truck. You can't get anything more Mexican than that. Trust me, I am Mexican."

Since I was holding the wheel of the car, I ignored her and kept driving into a town that had no other obvious taco place. I pulled into a parking lot, approached a group of Mexican and Ani asked them where we can find good tacos. The answer shocked me.

"If you turn around, there is a great taco truck at the beginning of the town".

I do not know what was screaming louder "I TOLD YOU SO!", words or Ani's facial expression, which led to an insane blabbering, from which the only thing I could hear was "tacos". 

"Stop! I'm driving, you are distracting me and I'll make a serious mistake" I asked her in a demanding voice. It was only one second after finishing my sentence that I realized I was crossing the road on a red light. Higher powers must have really wanted me to try those damn "original tacos" that we did not cross paths with the incoming vehicles!

I do not remember how the Pasco tacos tasted. Probably they did not make a lingering impression on me and I definitely had better ones. The little adventure in that small town though marked my life and my memories of the US and Ani. At the risk of sounding like a cheesy Mexican restaurant advertising campaign, I can say out loud "I love tacos"!