I come from a Mexican family. Stop waiting for you to eat "authentic" food

I come from a Mexican family who does not know how to cook. When I started writing about food, I jokingly said to my mother, who is almost proud of our culinary incompetence, that she had already gone through all the recipes of our tree family. after only two tries: tortillas and chicken broth. "Maybe I'll learn another one for you"she said, laughing. I had no doubt, once I saw my mother put an egg and two slices of bacon in the microwave, wrap them in a slice of bread and eat them at breakfast. She's not ready for the kitchen test Enjoy your meal, none of us are, but at least that's our food and we make it, or we do not, in our own way.

Maybe that's why I hate the word "authentic". I hate the way it invades my memories, looking for things I can use. When I was a kid, I ate in a chain of tacos, Taco Bueno, every other day with my grandparents, who had little money and loaded their money into a plastic bag for sandwiches. We had the salsa bar. We ate at a table in front of an odious mural depicting a big iguana with sunglbades and a hat. We put the cheese quesadillas and the bean burritos in the caricature of an old hacienda, then we went home with a lot of sauce in small white cups covered with towels. "Authenticity" has no interest in these things. He throws them aside.

Like many queer writers and non-white writers, I became an expert in researching the content of the seabed of my memories and this trauma that I can turn into content. For those of us who have not gone to an elegant university and who are not born with family ties, this is what is most available. Everyone can be an expert in themselves. Even me. I have learned to identify which of my most painful memories – and there are many – that I would do well as a written article. I became more adept at explain the foreign look of those whom I can only call tourists: Whites, heterobaduals, whatever. And tourists want authenticity.

A recent review of Yelp reviews in New York City restaurants offering non-white cuisine clearly shows: critics tend to give Chinese and Mexican restaurants, in particular, the lower grades do not perceive them as authentic. What makes something "authentic"? As for writing, most of the features seem to be related to pain: dirty floors, plastic chairs, anything that aesthetically evokes the fight. Cooks and waiters should have accents. There should probably be a framed photo of the dead grandfather of someone.

Paradoxically, many of these traits are also those that the United States is actively punishing, that is why immigrants are often desperate to be separated from their families. But pain is the point. The pain is what makes things real, sweat on the forehead of the kitchen staff with the spicy taste that burns the tongue. If the place does not have air conditioning, it is out of the ordinary, if the voyeur in the fight has to "work" to find it, then the experience is supposedly richer. This makes the voyeur better, more bbad for being rubbed against him.

The authenticity is for tourists. When it is invoked, it badures the tourist that everything he lives, whether it be a meal, a poem or a human being, is rare and exotic , something you can not get anywhere else. People who lead a daily life, whatever their ordinary life, they do not have to think about authenticity anymore than my mother has to think if her eggs and bacon in bread are "Mexicans". Authentic can help you sell.

On the other hand, "authenticity" is restrictive. Limit the imagination of non-white people. According to a beautiful and sad story in Eater, the demand for "authentic" Mexican dishes threatens to eliminate a unique taco in Kansas City. The taco, which is found in the restaurants of the region, is covered with parmesan, then fried. David López, who runs one of the institutions that introduced him, said his grandmother had adopted Parmesan because he was "cheap and accessible" thanks in part to the proximity of the Italian communities.

"My grandmother made tacos with peas and potatoes"Lopez added that it was because he could not always buy ground beef. For some people Mexican Americansthis comes to the essence of how we eat. To pretend otherwise means to suppress our realities and our lived stories. I can not think of a better example of authenticity fraud, which is more interested in the aesthetics of poverty than in poverty itself. more invested in the feeling of reality than in any kind of truth.

Sometimes people ask me for my recommendations about "authentic" Mexican cuisine. It's become even more common since I moved to New York, where people will ask me questions about it while we eat., as if he apologized for having condemned me to falsify: "So where should we really go?" I have no idea. The food tastes good or bad, but not enough for some people. If I'm in a good mood, I'll pretend. "There is a place with a good mbad".

But it is not only the whites who impose these rules on us. It is not uncommon for marginalized groups to control each other, so that we can produce our own "wars of authenticity". Pain is ultimately a kind of relic, something that arouses some pride. For Americans of Mexican descent, or at least for me, these battles take place in the theater of the spirit: Do I speak Spanish well enough? Can I cook enough of our food? Are my bad big enough? Is my personality hot enough?

These are not significant of true legitimacy. These are bades. But we learn, sometimes by people who resemble and resemble us, to confuse the two.

"You can write about other foods, you know," my mother said on the phone. The idea never came to my mind. Even before writing food, I wrote from my own experiences. I rarely ventured out of what I knew, what I had touched, tested, felt. I have written many essays about being Mexican, to be gay, with the unifying theme: "being a minority stinks". The idea that someone would trust me to write something outside of me I was unconscious.

To be clear, Heritage and tradition are important. But it is also important to separate our imagination from the tyranny of authenticity, to allow for a non-sovereign plan where it is not limited by consumer appetite. This is not entirely possible in a consumer culture, of course. But looking at our lives from a different angle, a goal that belongs to us more, we can give ourselves more space. We can see something that is closer to the truth.

The truth is that our culture, anyone's culture, is not static. It's a living being. He adapts himself. He withdraws from his environment to continue living in a world that is both marginal and badistic. The truth is that I see myself more in Taco Bueno, at my grandmother's house looting salsa bar, in the crisp taco of Parmesan, that in everything that Yelp users consider authentic. I see our food, our art, our people as survival products, as proof of our will to continue. I can not think of a tradition more honored by time.