The Golden Age of Mexican Food Is Here. And It’s Complicated.

Along the old path of Route 66, America’s mother road, the drive-ins and lunch joints of Oklahoma City look a bit different from the picture postcards in nearby souvenir shops.

In the state that gave us Sonic Drive-In, the carhop craze of the 1950s and ’60s has long since withered as customers preferred to drive-through to satisfy their fast-food fix. But in recent years, the strip of Western Avenue has been revitalized by another kind of menu: Instead of burgers and shakes, you’ll find superspecific varieties of tacos, tortas de albañil, traditional Mexican stews and tostadas de pollo.

El Primo Loco, a grilled chicken drive-through (right next door to a Sonic, as it happens) offers a tostada Siberia, made famous by its namesake restaurant in Monterrey. Hang a right onto Southwest 29th Street and you’ll find a paleta and bionicos dessert shop, a panadería and a Mexico City-inspired torta spot that’s a tribute to the beloved TV character El Chavo.

Bookending the scene are the markets La Aguascalientes Mercado de Carnes and La Aguascalientes Super Market, which feature dishes rare outside Aguascalientes, one of Mexico’s smallest states.

In a former drive-through oil change shop, Crudoolandia sells ceviches and aguachiles alongside Clamato cups and beers for customers to mix into micheladas to drink, well, anywhere but there (per local liquor laws).

“We’ve always wanted to capture that Mazatlán, Sinaloa vibe,” said Nancy Soto-Hallman, who opened the spot with her husband in 2012. “Of course, we don’t have seafood as delicious as Mazatlán’s — it’s one of the cities with the best seafood in Mexico. But we wanted to copy that style — the banda Sinaloense-style, the festive atmosphere.”

A little piece of Mazatlán in O.K.C.? A generation ago, that notion may have sounded unlikely. In 1980, fewer than 10,000 people of Mexican descent lived in the metro area. Today, that number is about 180,000, nearly 12 percent of the population. And the variety of culinary offerings across the city reflects the size and regional backgrounds of that community. The Mexican food scene here is booming, and Oklahoma City is hardly an outlier.

In the past 50 years or so, the population of people of Mexican descent in the United States grew nearly fivefold, from about 8.5 million to more than 39 million. And according to a Pew Research Center ***ysis in 2024, one out of 10 restaurants in the United States serves Mexican dishes, and about 85 percent of all counties have at least one Mexican restaurant.

That means a vast array of regional Mexican food can be found across the country, from the Gulf Coast to the Pacific Northwest. There are pocket-size food scenes in New Haven, Conn.; Charlotte, N.C.; and the Armourdale neighborhood of Kansas City, Kan.

Eleven Mexican restaurants in the United States received Michelin stars this year, including Californios in San Francisco, the only Mexican restaurant anywhere in the world to get three stars.

In just the last 15 years, the American palate has expanded well beyond combo plates and game-night nachos. Mexican food in America today is a dynamic cuisine all its own, created by Mexicans and Mexican Americans apart from Mexico — and as American as any food.

But there is a jarring split-screen. Just as Mexican food is flourishing in the United States, so are nativist politics. Latin Americans, including Mexicans and Mexican Americans working in hospitality, have been swept up in aggressive deportation campaigns that have been a pillar of President Trump’s second term.

The paradox is not lost on Gustavo Arellano, a columnist for the Los Angeles Times and the author of “Taco USA: How Mexican Food Conquered America.”

“Basically Mexican food now is where Italian food was in the ’90s,” Mr. Arellano said. “You had chefs showing people that there was all of this regional variety.”

He pointed to birria tacos as an example. They are a staple in Zacatecas, where his parents are from, but he never saw them in restaurants, even in Southern California, until the mid-2010s. Not long after that, he came across a list of the best places to find them in Boston, not historically a hotbed of Mexican culture. “I could never have imagined a day where such a regional specialty would become not just ubiquitous, but a cliché,” Mr. Arellano said.

“From the moment Americans tasted Mexican food, they have never wanted to move on from it,” he said. At the same time, he added, “You have the continuation of Mexican immigration into this country, but also the spread of Mexican people to where they were not before. Where there are more Mexicans, you are going to see a backlash. History has taught us this.”

‘We Want to Be Ourselves’

The story of Mexican food in the United States really began with the American annexations of the Mexican territory that became much of the U.S. Southwest. In his book, Mr. Arellano chronicled the rise, starting in the 1800s, of Mexican purveyors like the Chili Queens of San Antonio and tamale wagons in Los Angeles. In the decades that followed, Mexican American cuisine evolved to cater to the brief lunch breaks of blue-collar crowds.

Entrepreneurs of Mexican descent began to serve generous, one-plate, multicourse meals — wet burritos, stuffed sopaipillas and cheesy enchiladas. By the 1980s, Mexican food was widespread, the margarita emerged as one of America’s most beloved ***tails and American corporations like Frito-Lay and Pace Picante made tortilla chips and salsa ubiquitous.

In the 1980s and ’90s, Oaxacan immigrants went to California to work in great numbers. Most were Indigenous, and they formed a large population and culture of transnational people known as Oaxacacalifornia. Lugya’h, Casa Gish Bac and Comedor Tenchita are just a few examples of restaurants that carry on the legacy of Oaxacan immigrants who helped make moles, tlayudas and quesillo famous in the United States.

This sharing of Indigenous traditions and stories through food also set an example for other Mexican immigrants to showcase dishes from their own regions, be it plate-size tacos placeros in New York, chorreadas in Compton or birria estilo Aguascalientes in Oklahoma City.

Today, there are thousands of Mexican restaurants in Los Angeles, where the cost of living is among the highest in the nation. So, like many other Americans, Mexican immigrants and their descendants have looked elsewhere for work and more affordable housing.

That’s what brought Salvador Alamilla’s family to Idaho. Mr. Alamilla started cooking at a Tex-Mex restaurant in Boise called On the Border — “avocado fries, taquitos, every fried thing that you can think of” — working his way up from dishwasher to several cooking positions.

When he opened his own restaurant, Amano, in Caldwell, Idaho, Mr. Alamilla wanted to hew to the foods his family used to make in Michoacán, in southwest Mexico. That meant short ribs, and lamb shanks roasted for 12 or more hours in an underground oven like the one his grandfather used. The distinctive wood-smoke flavors of the region are married to a depth of spice, “the way we grew up eating.” He’s even slow roasting papayas and guavas for a smoky, fruity ***tail.

The move was a bit of a gamble. “Because we are not in the L.A. Arts District, we didn’t start off with that ready audience,” said Mr. Alamilla, the restaurant’s chef and co-owner. “But over the years, I brought the community along with us on our ride.”

Turning diners on to such regional specifics would have been difficult for Mexican chefs a generation ago, particularly in Idaho, he said.

“There was different pressures to try to ***imilate, because the food that they were eating in the back was probably different than the food they were serving,” he said. “But for us, as their kids, because we grew up here, maybe we’ve been a little bit more privileged, we feel like we can be ourselves more, or at least we want to be ourselves.”

The tensions of the political moment weigh on Mr. Alamilla, whose parents brought him to the United States as a 5-year-old using another child’s papers. He did not become a doblockented permanent resident until high school. In a town the size of Caldwell, he said, it’s not hard to know your neighbor’s views. He sometimes looks out at the dining room and sees people who he knows support the ICE deportation campaign.

“It gives me a lot of sadness,” he said, “that the same people who want our people to be deported are the same people that are enjoying a chile colorado.”

‘Brown Excellence’

At 7:30 on an overcast Sunday evening in March, the line was 40 deep at El Volcancito, one of the busiest tacos al pastor stands in East Charlotte, N.C. The stand is near the impressive Pulga Rodeo, a Mexican flea market teeming with regional cuisine, including Mexico City-style quesadillas at Los Machetes and soursop ice cream at Don Ruby.

Standing at the trompo, a standing spit of roasting pork, the taquero Daniel González said he honed his craft in Los Angeles’s competitive street-food scene at a chain of tacos al pastor vendors that are among the best in Southern California. “I was at La Güera out there in Los Angeles,” said Mr. González, smiling with pride as he turned the trompo to cook his mound of marinated pork.

As Mr. Gonzalez flicked small chunks of pineapple from atop the vertical spit and caught them on corn tortillas lined with strips of freshly carved pork, a woman in line exclaimed that they were just like the ones in Los Angeles, a sentiment echoed by many on TikTok.

Crowding around the salsa bar and huddling onto patches of gr*** to eat tacos standing up, locals debate whether Charlotte’s best al pastor is at El Volcancito, El Nazareno, Tacos El Regio, Compa Tacos or La Cumbre. But the fact that there is such a debate — in a county that had fewer than 7,000 Hispanic residents, according to the 1990 census — tells much of the story. Today, that population is around 60,000.

Maria Hernández, who owns El Volcancito, said she doesn’t mind the healthy competition. In the local al pastor scene, “el sol sale para todos,” she said — “the sun shines for everyone.”

The budding culinary renaissance has reconnected many Mexican American chefs with their home country’s cuisine. Gustavo Romero built his career cooking Italian after immigrating to the United States as a teenager from Hidalgo, Mexico. The first time he cooked Mexican food professionally was in 2017, at Calavera, a Oaxacan restaurant in Oakland, Calif.

“I understood more about myself through the process,” he said.

The experience led Mr. Romero to start Nixta Tortilleria with his wife, Kate, in Minneapolis, in 2020. Oro by Nixta, a full-service restaurant, followed three years later. Customers come from across the metro area to visit the side-by-side storefronts in northeast Minneapolis, both fueled by Mr. Romero’s p***ion for heirloom Mexican corn.

“We started treating the tortilla the way you treat a baguette,” Mr. Romero said.

Carlos Salgado helped create the surge of American chefs learning to nixtamalize heirloom Mexican corn to make tortillas in the traditional, labor-intensive way in his 10 years cooking at Taco Maria, in Orange County, Calif. The chef and his wife, Emilie Coulson Salgado, closed the Michelin-starred restaurant in 2023, and moved to Ms. Salgado’s native Door County, Wis.

La Sirena, their new restaurant, is finishing its second summer in Ephraim, population roughly 400. Wind blew in off nearby Eagle Harbor in late May, as diners filled the 22-seat restaurant for the evening’s featured dish: arrachera con mole negro, made with Wisconsin Wagyu and served with warm heirloom corn tortillas.

Door County, where the Hispanic and Latino population is around 4 percent, is a long way from Southern California. But Mr. Salgado said he’s as inspired as he ever has been to cook world-cl*** Mexican food.

“It’s not an exaggeration to say that we wanted nothing less than to substantiate this example of brown excellence in a place that maybe hadn’t seen it before,” he said, “kind of like Taco Maria did 15 years ago.”

‘One Perfect Dish’

If rural Wisconsin and East Charlotte seem like unexpected places for remarkable Mexican food, until fairly recently New York City may have been just as surprising. But today, the well-worn line that “there is no good Mexican food in New York” says more about the speaker than the city.

“Before, you would see these large menus with enchiladas, burritos, tortas, tacos and all of that,” said Tania Apolinar, a co-owner of Carnitas Ramirez in the East Village. Now one perfect dish is plenty, whether it’s her own carnitas from Michoacán, flour tortillas from Sonora at Border Town or chalupas from Puebla Chalupas Poblanas El Tlecuile.

One of the more vibrant concentrations is at Sunset Park Plaza, a makeshift mercado that on weekends occupies a vacant parking lot in southwestern Brooklyn. Sonia Cortés started the Sunset Park Plaza in 2025, after another outdoor market in the neighborhood was dismantled by local officials. Ms. Cortes, an organizer, was selling pozole from a pushcart when police restrictions forced her to pivot.

In 2024, Ms. Cortes and other vendors rented the space, where they now operate under tented stalls, rain or shine. “Why not create a safe space where vendors could work, support their families and share their culture without having to worry about being moved from the streets?” Ms. Cortes said.