Mexican Enchiladas Traveled Far Enough to Lose Their Birth Certificate

In Mexico, an enchilada is sold as a symbol of heritage, comfort, and belonging. But its real story is messier: an empire’s banquet, a conquest’s hunger, a border’s contempt, and a working-class lunch that survived being mocked.

A Royal Bite That Europe Couldn’t Stop Watching

When Bernal Díaz del Castillo entered Tenochtitlán on November 8, 1519, he didn’t write first about stone and ceremony. He wrote about food, about abundance so overwhelming it sounded like a dare to the imagination. In his account, Moctezuma II ate like a universe: three hundred dishes prepared for him, one thousand more for guests, served on “red and black Cholula pottery,” with “two thousand pots of chocolate” and a catalogue of birds and beasts too long to finish. There was even, he said, talk of human flesh, a rumor placed like a shadow at the edge of the table.

Then came the detail that matters for the rest of us, centuries later, when we scroll menus and argue about what counts as “real” Mexican food. Midway through the meal, Díaz wrote, two young women brought the monarch tortillas “as white as snow,” dressed with eggs and other nourishing ingredients, delivered on clean napkins like a small ritual between larger courses. The description is brief, but it’s often read as the earliest European glimpse of what would become the enchilada, an ordinary object made suddenly historical because a conquistador noticed it. The moment is almost unfair: a dish that existed long before the Spanish arrived becomes “born” in the record only when a foreign pen decides it is worth naming.

Chīllapīzzali And The Food Of The Street

Long before Díaz looked down at that plate, corn tortillas and tlaxcalli had been made in southern Mexico for thousands of years, serving at first as edible tools: a plate, a spoon, a wrapper. Over time, they became a method for carrying flavor. In the preclassical era, roughly 2000 to 250 BC, the Maya of the Yucatán Peninsula were already dipping tortillas in pumpkin seeds, rolling them around chopped, hard-boiled egg, and finishing them with tomato sauce. The enchilada, in other words, did not appear as a single invention. It emerged the way rivers do: fed by smaller streams of practice, need, and taste.

The Aztecs gave the dish its most recognizable spine: heat. The Nahuatl name chīllapīzzali, often translated as “chilli-flute,” points straight at the ingredient that made it distinctive. Chilli was ground into a paste; tortillas were dipped; fillings could be beans, squash, fish, game, or eggs. And crucially, it was not only a noble indulgence. It lived in the marketplace, available to ordinary people who needed food that was portable, cheap, and satisfying.

A few decades after Díaz, Bernardino de Sahagún described stalls in his Historia general de las cosas de la Nueva España (1575–86) with the attention of someone who understood that empires actually happen in daily life. He found tortillas dipped in chilli and filled with shelled beans, cooked, uncooked, mashed, mixed with maize, sometimes with meat, accompanied by sauces that could be, in his telling, terrifyingly hot. The enchilada’s early identity was not a museum piece. It was a system: corn, heat, filling, and the social world that gathered around it.

From Conquest To Texas, The Dish That Crossed With The Workers

Then Hernán Cortés came, and Tenochtitlán fell, and what followed was not merely a change of rulers but a violent reordering of memory. The account is blunt: culture destroyed, temples sacked, palaces and records burned. Yet cuisine proved harder to erase, and easier to steal. Enchiladas were appealing to the conquistadors because they were tasty, simple, and practical, even on the march. They could also be bent to Spanish appetite: cheese, pork, and chicken entered the picture; sauces began to replace the chilli paste that had once been central.

By the time Mexico settled into colonial life as the Viceroyalty of New Spain, the enchilada had become a hybrid, shaped by new ingredients and new hierarchies. It began as curiosity, then turned into a symbol, and the symbolism was never innocent. For ordinary people, especially those whose lives were braided by intermarriage and local survival, the dish could express a mixed identity, half-Spanish, half-Aztec. For colonial elites, the same dish could be worn like a badge: proof of superiority and, later, of distance from Iberia and of desire for autonomy. Food, in this telling, becomes a language that everyone speaks but no one admits is political.

By the mid-eighteenth century, as colonial rule began to chafe, enchiladas shed their earlier labels and started to read as distinctively “Mexican.” By 1821, at independence, they were close to a national dish. When the first Mexican cookbook appeared in 1831, Cristina Barros included two recipes, an act of pride that also suggests variety, not purity, was already part of the tradition.

The next transformation was driven not by romance but by borders and labor. After the United States annexed Texas (1845) and took California and the Southwest (1846–48), Mexican dishes moved into American culture, laying the groundwork for what would later be called “Tex-Mex.” Enchiladas led the way, becoming a favorite among hard-up farmhands and factory workers, with food cooked on makeshift stoves or bought at roadside stalls. In this version, meat grew less common, cheaper ingredients like lettuce and onion appeared, and chilli’s role softened.

An early recipe surfaced in the Centennial Buckeye Cook Book (1876), contributed by Anson Safford, territorial governor of Arizona. The instructions were domestic and practical: process the corn with lime or lye, bake tortillas, fry them, make a sauce with ground red pepper, “chili colorad”, sweet oil, vinegar, then dip, add cheese and onions, and there you have enchiladas. It is a recipe that reads like adaptation under constraint, not betrayal.

But alongside this culinary borrowing ran contempt. Mexicans lived and worked beside Americans across the frontier, yet hostility followed them, expressed in slurs and in disgust aimed at their food. A visitor in 1883 dismissed enchiladas as “greasy tortilla sandwich[es]” and “nasty messes,” complaining of a “pungent, nauseous smell.” The insult is revealing: what the traveler couldn’t stomach wasn’t only chili and lard, but the proximity of cultures, bodies, and lives that refused to remain separate.

By the early twentieth century, wider acceptance arrived through migration, growing city influence, and changing tastes, especially in places like San Antonio. In 1921, food writer Louise Lloyd Lowber described enchiladas at the “famous Enchilada House in Old Albuquerque” with the reverence of someone trying to translate pleasure into print: tortillas layered with rich red chile and cheese, crowned with chopped onions, an egg nestled on top, lettuce as cooling garnish, an enchilada presented as art, not stigma.

And yet the argument over “authenticity” persists. Some Mexicans, especially in Mexico itself, have rejected the heavy, lavish estadounidense versions as inauthentic and called for a return to simpler recipes. But the dish’s own history complicates the demand. Enchiladas have been appropriated and reshaped so many times that claiming they “belong” to only one people risks repeating the very prejudice that once made them a target. If this food carries a lesson, it is not that recipes should be guarded behind walls. It is that a tortilla can travel, survive contempt, absorb loss, and still arrive warm, asking to be shared with an open mind, a warm heart, and a friendly smile.

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