For the first time, here's the real story behind the Great Breakfast Taco War of 2016.
It's not about whether Austin or San Antonio had the best tacos and never was.
Welcome to The Experiment, where if you need me you can probably find me drinking beer in this parking lot listening to free music. Happy SXSW, everyone. It’s good to have you back. Rachel Megan Barker is having an interesting reaction to feeling helpless now that her job doesn’t require her to respond to the pandemic. In the latest chapter of Regulator, Frank A. Spring introduces us to Marshall Efrain Guerra, and I, for the first time, give you the real story behind the badly misunderstood and misremembered taco war between Austin and San Antonio.
As always, we offer things to do (hunting wayward camels), read (Jill Lepore on the timeless school wars), watch (The Adam Project on Netflix), and listen to (Ezra Furman’s “Point Me Toward the Real”).
But first, did I ever tell you the real story behind the taco war?
Having just co-written a book about how we’re remembering the Alamo all wrong, I should not be surprised that people have likewise mythologized an ahistorical account of an intrastate conflict of equally enduring fascination: the taco war between Austin and San Antonio. The way people talk about it today is not at all how it went down.
Recently, Pedro Pascal was in Austin to promote The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent at the South by Southwest Film Festival and was asked whether Austin or San Antonio, where he used to live, had better tacos.
“It's San Antonio, people. It’s San Antonio. If we’re talking about tacos? Chile con queso, maybe you can get that in Austin. But you get a taco in San Antonio, por favor! As far as I remember, yeah. Sorry, I love Austin,” he said.
The published account does not clarify whether the Chilean-born actor, whom you might know from Game of Thrones and The Mandalorian, had any clue he was being asked “to weigh in on the Austin-San Antonio taco wars,” as the article put it. Perhaps he thought the journalists in Austin are besotted with culinary provincialism. Maybe he thinks, probably rightly, that local reporters are unduly preoccupied with tacos. Regardless, kudos to Pedro for being game.
“It's San Antonio, people. It’s San Antonio. If we’re talking about tacos?”
That meme-able moment set off a chain reaction that continues as of this writing. The shared assumption of everyone on the Twitter is that Austin says it has better breakfast tacos than San Antonio, that Austin in fact has the worst tacos in all of Texas, and Austin is terribly insecure for saying otherwise.
The truth is that this is all just a joke, at least on Austin’s part. At the time of the conflict that made international news before devolving into diplomatic farce, I was the communications director for Austin Mayor Steve Adler. We thought we’d settled things back then in 2016, but it keeps coming up, getting retold further afield from the truth each time.
It’s time to tell the whole story.
I didn’t know what a breakfast taco was when I moved to Texas in 1993. I still remember my first one. I got it from a gas station in Palacios after a night of elbow bending, and I’ve been a fan ever since. At its most basic, it’s a tortilla, usually flour but sometimes corn, with egg and potatoes, bacon, or sausage, and often but not always with cheese. Breakfast tacos are staples of diets for migrant workers and college students, construction workers and corporate executives. Everyone in Texas eats them, and they’re a big reason why this state is worth the effort.
So let’s start with this shared understanding, because if we don’t agree on this then nothing that follows will matter: Texas has great breakfast tacos and great cities. Regional variations of breakfast tacos, therefore, differ only in their expression of greatness. Choosing which city has better breakfast tacos is like picking which of your children you like best. The answer, of course, is which one is better behaved at the moment, and how you interpret the following account will produce your answer to that question. But people, all these damn tacos are good.
“Tacos are good everywhere.” -James Barragán
“Both cities have great tacos. Like, tacos are good everywhere,” said journalist James Barragán, a California native who like me brings an outsider perspective to this internecine conflict.
Everyone agrees that the conflict arose when a New York-based writer Matthew Sedecca wrote an article for Eater Austin that quoted a Texas food writer as saying that “Austin … is the birthplace of the phrase breakfast taco, and thus the original catalyst for its widespread, and originally unexpected popularity.”
I’ve read that article a few times over the years, and every time I look for where Sedecca wrote that Austin invented the breakfast taco or quoted anyone saying Austin had the best breakfast tacos, I come up empty. He just wrote that an Austinite renamed the breakfast taquito [which was probably not true] and adopted a fast-food model from California Cal-Mex taco joints [true], and—because people come to Austin from all over the world every March for SXSW—Austin spread the idea of breakfast tacos all over the country [probably true]. Sedecca even took pains to write that Austin did not invent the breakfast taco.
People in San Antonio lost their damn minds.
“Do we really need Austin? Nah.” -San Antonio Express-News
Some wit created a website WhoInventedBreakfastTacos.com; click on it, and it says in all caps, “NOT AUSTIN.” A change.org petition demanded that Matthew Sedecca be exiled from Texas “for taco negligence.” At least three writers at the San Antonio Express-News devoted actual column inches over several days to “the foodie war.” The one piece everyone remembers is Joshua Fechter’s effortful “10 reasons to hate Austin beyond its breakfast taco arrogance.”
“Do we really need Austin?” went the lede by Fetcher, who now works at the Texas Tribune with Barragán. “Nah.”
Among Austin’s sins? We have hipsters, traffic, and a minor-league soccer team, the last of which is no longer true, though we are still recovering from the sickness of the twin burns of hipsters and traffic. To San Antonio’s advantage is Tommy Lee Jones (debatable), George Straight (undeniable), and the San Antonio Scorpions, a soccer team that played in a league that dissolved three months before the Express-News, which still does exist, published Fechter’s listsicle.
“I just looked this up this morning. I'm gonna go give him sh*t about it later,” said Barragán.
But by now the war was being fought not about who invented breakfast tacos or really over which city had the best ones. It was only ostensibly over foodstuffs. San Antonio was Big Mad about the attention Austin was claiming for itself over something that rightfully belonged to San Antonio. That had an unspoken racial angle, namely that the wealthier, whiter city was getting credit and attention for something San Antonio was justifiably proud of. But this reasonable point was being expressed as a resentment toward Austin for something that it has never done to San Antonio. The war had become about how San Antonio resents Austin.
“People hate Austin because it's awful.” -San Antonio Express-News
“Austin is the little red headed brother of San Antonio,” wrote a commentor on the original Eater Austin. “Best BBQ, Tacos and Mexican Food can be found in San Antonio. Everything in Austin is 2nd tier.”
“[M]any people hate Austin because it's awful,” wrote Fechter.
The story grew legs. Texas Monthly asked whether any city could claim the breakfast taco as its own. NPR led Morning Edition “with the story of a food fight.” UK’s The Guardian told British readers the story of, “in what San Antonians took as a declaration of war, a food critic wrote about how Austin became home of the breakfast taco.”
Meanwhile, in Austin—and I cannot emphasize this enough—we did not care. We were fighting with Uber over requiring their drivers to undergo criminal background checks (the head of the local women’s shelter told me they’d taken to calling Ubers “rolling frat houses”). SXSW was the next month, which meant we were hosting several mayors from out of town while Mayor Adler was giving up to seven speeches a day. Oh, and the President was coming to town. It wasn’t that we were looking down on San Antonio. While they were losing their minds down there, we were kinda busy. Also, real talk? They’re just breakfast tacos.
Meanwhile, in Austin—and I cannot emphasize this enough—we did not care.
I would have been content to leave well enough alone had then-San Antonio Mayor Ivy Taylor not tweeted at my guy. I can’t find the tweet, but in my memory she struck a jovial enough tone in demanding my mayor’s agreement that San Antonio had better breakfast tacos. My mayor was busy mayoring, and it was my job to manage his social media, so what happened next is kind of on me. If we had not been doing civic battle with Uber at the time, I might have shrugged off her breezy declaration of taco supremacy like I did all the other stuff down in San Antonio. I did not respond on Mayor Adler’s behalf, but neither did I let it go.
Besides, San Antonio—Mayor Taylor, Fechter, e’rbody—was taking this seriously and acting sincerely angry at the prospect that anyone would think that Austin had invented the breakfast taco or had better tacos than San Antonio, which, I need to point out, no one had done. And if there’s one thing I always think is funny, it’s when serious people get sincerely up in their feelings about things of not much consequence, such as breakfast tacos.
Another thing I did for the mayor was write his speeches. Shortly after Mayor Taylor’s tweet was UT’s Largest Day of Service. It’s pretty cool. They pick a school and neighborhood and assign teams of students to specific projects. On the year I wrote the remarks for Mayor Adler, 1,500 students gave up a perfectly good Saturday to work on 85 projects at 17 sites. This was unimpeachably good stuff.
When you’re speaking to 1,500 college kids early in the morning of a long day, you need to abide by the Liquor Store Rule of speechmaking: get in, get out, no one gets hurt. But I needed a little color, some detail to give the words some life, so I hunted around and found out that the Texas Cowboys, a service organization of students who wear matching cowboy hats, white shirts, and blue jeans with leather chaps, would be there with Smokey the Cannon. It was the cannon and the vast, volunteer army of students that did it. The Mayor was not going to get a “you’re so great” speech.
“I come to you this bright morning with grave news.”
Barragán was writing for the Austin American-Statesman back then and was assigned to cover this event. His editor probably expected an article about volunteerism. That is not what he got. First, then-state Sen. Kirk Watson spoke and told the students how great they were. Then Rep. Lloyd Doggett spoke and told the students how great they were. And then Mayor Adler, wearing a khaki sport coat over a white, buttoned-down shirt, took his turn at the podium in front of 1,500 college students who were probably not looking forward to another speech about how great they were.
“I am speaking to you today to congratulate you on your service to my city,” began Mayor Adler. “But I come to you this bright morning with grave news. The City of Austin is currently at war with San Antonio over a subject I know we all hold dear to our hearts, and that of course is breakfast tacos.”
Adler allowed that “Austin might not have invented breakfast tacos” before bringing it home:
“Some may look out at all of you and see 1,500 shining examples of volunteerism and virtue. But I see something even greater. I see an army in our war with San Antonio,” he said.
“We march to San Antonio at dawn, right after we get some tacos!”
“As your Commander-in-Chief in the breakfast taco war, it is my solemn duty to inform you that after you have selflessly given of yourselves I will be drafting you into the Great Breakfast Taco War of 2016! What starts here today will change Austin for the better, but it will change San Antonio in ways they can scarcely imagine and are afraid to contemplate. We march to San Antonio at dawn, right after we get some tacos!”
“I think I got out of there after Adler, ‘cause it was such a clear, funny thing to write,” said Barragán.
“Austin mayor declares ‘taco war’ on San Antonio,” was the headline on the web story that the Mayor texted me later that day when I was grocery shopping at H-E-B. Until that moment, it hadn’t really occurred to me that any reporter would want to cover the event. In other words, we were doing this to make light of a ridiculous situation and to entertain the students. I just thought it would be a funny speech for the students, and apparently the Mayor agreed.
“It was so tongue in cheek, you know, ‘we march on San Antonio and after we get tacos and stuff.’ I don't know why people get so worked up about it,” said Barragán, who didn’t think Mayor Adler was insulting San Antonio or even sincerely claiming that Austin’s breakfast tacos were better. “I don't know if he actually said we got better tacos than San Antonio, but as a mayor, you understand why he's boosting for his.”
“It was so tongue in cheek. I don't know why people get so worked up about it.” -James Barragán
People, it was just a joke, and even in telling the joke, no one ever said Austin has better tacos than San Antonio. Barragán’s story never appeared in print. No one ever wrote a listsicle about San Antonio, nor did anyone in Austin appear to take much notice.
Still, the Express-News leapt once more into the breach, with two more stories (“Breakfast taco war between San Antonio, Austin heats up” and “Austin mayor declares 'breakfast taco war' on San Antonio during community service event”) by two more writers, bringing the total number of bylines the daily had devoted to the story to five. Real people in San Antonio seemed genuinely upset about anyone questioning the supremacy of their tacos (which no one ever did).
The more seriously San Antonio took this, the funnier I thought it was. When Vice called to talk about the taco war, I made it explicitly clear that this was just a war being fought, at least on our sides, on completely comedic terms, and if San Antonio kept pressing, we were prepared to escalate accordingly.
“San Antonio, and to a lesser extent, Corpus Christi and the valley, completely lost their minds. I am afraid that they may be taking this seriously. We, as a matter of official policy in the city of Austin, are not, and we fail to see that we have much to prove in this matter. …
“We have, to our advantage, the world's only taco cannon,” he boasted. “It is a military advance in the martial arts of breakfast tacos that the world has never seen, and I don't think anyone else can answer this. I think we have, at least in the theater of war, breakfast taco supremacy. And not just in Texas. I don't think that Putin has a breakfast taco cannon and I don't think he's man enough to try us.”
Undeterred by the threat of heightened mockery, San Antonio Chef Johnny Hernandez challenged Austin to a breakfast taco showdown, an idea that died for lack of interest on Austin’s part. Mayor Taylor demanded victory in yet another Express-News article (to the Statesman’s single web story). I got a call from her office demanding an adjudicated taste test to determine who had the best breakfast tacos. I countered that we could have a summit and declare peace, or they could stay angry and never hear the end of it. People were apparently calling Mayor Taylor’s office and demanding that San Antonio do something about this injustice. Austin, to the extent that anyone was paying attention, recognized this as a joke. In San Antonio, however, this was serious.
“I don't think that Putin has a breakfast taco cannon, and I don't think he's man enough to try us.”
Mayor Taylor chose peace. A cease fire was declared, a room at the convention center hotel was secured in the middle of SXSW, an official proclamation declaring peace was drafted, and the press was notified. Monte Williams, a local wit and radio personality who has written often for The Experiment, was recruited to chair the peace talks. Elie Jacobs and Frank Spring, whose bylines have also appeared here, were drafted to write the Mayor’s remarks.
“Alright, what kind of speech are we talking about?” asked Frank.
“Wilson's WW1 ‘peace w/o victory’ kind of thing?” suggested Elie.
“What's the general tone of this? Lincoln's Second Inaugural? Pericles's Funeral Oration?” asked Frank.
“Clinton's speech after Oklahoma City could be a good base...if memory serves. It's all about community,” offered Elie.
All true, dear reader, except for the spin they put on it. An excerpt:
We know there are bad tacos in the world, and they need to be destroyed. We also know that Austin is strongest when it leads with its breakfast tacos, when its breakfast tacos can stand as an example to the world of everything that breakfast should be. What Austin can do - what Austin must do, and will do - is lead. And that means celebrating the fact that there is more that unites our tacos than divides them.
Because, the world over, in the places unlit by tortillas and eggs and chorizo and cheese, people breakfast on mush. They breakfast on sludge. On dust. They breakfast on despair. Those people need Austin. And, yes, they need San Antonio. It is for them that we must fight, that the breakfast taco may be known the world over, that we may bring a glimmer of light to their darkest mornings. And so we, the sons and daughters of Austin, with pride in our traditions and joy in ours hearts, invite our neighbors to join us as we break our fast upon the tortilla of hope, and the egg of peace.
For one precious moment, Frank, Elie and I contemplated the possibility that Mayor Adler might actually read these words. Out loud. In front of cameras. Surely he’d tell me to tone it down, right? There’s no way we were going to get to turn this into an extended bit, right?
“This is the best thing to happen in Austin since Darrell Royal was alive,” said Frank.
“This is brilliant,” said Elie. “This will make us legends.”
“And also quite possibly fired,” responded Frank. “WORTH IT.”
I, the only one of the three getting paid for this and thus the only one eligible to be fired, could not but agree.
On the blessed day, San Antonio’s delegation arrived with several hundred breakfast tacos and large chips on their shoulders. “How can anyone say that their tacos are better than ours?” said someone from San Antonio, appearing all up in his umbrage with complete sincerity.
Monte, wearing a blue dress shirt with the sleeves rolled up and his tie loosened, struck the perfect note in kicking it off:
“I believe, as I think many do in the room, that breakfast is the most important meal of the day,” he said. “Bagels are OK. Yogurt’s OK. Fruit is OK. Cereal’s fine. Wheat germ is not so good. But the breakfast taco reigns supreme here in Texas. It’s the best breakfast there is even if you have to stay up all night drinking to get to it.”
Mayor Taylor, bless her heart, promoted her panel at SXSWedu, which is kind of like bragging to the mayor of the city hosting the Super Bowl that you’re sponsoring a happy hour at Dave & Buster’s, but cool, you do you.
When it was his time to speak, Mayor Adler reminded her that he was on the same panel before diving into his prepared remarks. (He was going to read it!) He thanked Monte, the San Antonio Tourism Board, and Juan in a Million for providing 50 of Mayor Taylor’s favorite, bacon and egg on corn.
“Some of you may look upon these breakfast tacos and feel only hunger,” he began, in earnest sincerity befitting a completely different event. “I pity those people, because when I look upon these tacos I feel hope and a renewed friendship between our cities.”
“We will have guac in our times.” -Mayor Adler
“They say that it must be peace without victory, and it is not always pleasant to say this, but as St. Paul admonishes us, ‘Let us not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with breakfast tacos,” he said at another point. “We will have guac in our times.”
It goes on like that for several minutes, and at no time did Mayor Adler think, F*ck a bunch of these donuts and bail out as anyone would have rightly expected. He soldiered through the entire ridiculous text, sight reading the jokes and warming eventually to the satirical tone. I love him for this.
The proclamation declaring March 10, 2016 as “Breakfast Taco Day” was signed, as was the I-35 Accord that Monte had written up. Mayor Taylor gave Mayor Adler a rubber taco that they give out to tourists in San Antonio, and we all went back to work happy and better fed. The press for the most part had no idea what to do with the spectacle with the notable exception of Fox7’s Casey Claiborne, who put up a YouTube video of the whole thing, and Jamie Lovegrove of the Texas Tribune, who got it:
“With an escalating culinary battle threatening to destabilize the region, the mayors of Austin and San Antonio met Thursday morning to announce a taco truce,” he wrote.
So here we are at what we thought would be the end of this story, and at no time did Austin say its breakfast tacos were better than San Antonio’s, let alone that it had better tacos than San Antonio or given the slightest hint that any of us in Austin were taking this the least bit seriously.
“I don't think he ever said anything like mean or bad about San Antonio. Not at all,” said Barragán. “He was just saying, ‘Hey, our breakfast tacos are good.’ And I don't think he ever said they're better than San Antonio’s.”
The next day, Mayor Adler met President Barack Obama on the tarmac at the airport. Obama, who was in town to give the SXSW keynote, invited Adler to ride into town with him in the presidential limo. They stopped for lunch along the way at Torchy’s Tacos. The press pool included a caution that the presidential taco run could reignite Austin’s taco war with San Antonio, but Mayor Adler assured a worried populace via Twitter that “stopping for tacos with the President does not violate the terms of the I-35 Accord with San Antonio.”
It has been an uneasy peace. When D Magazine tried to claim in 2018 that Dallas was “taco city,” the lede in the San Antonio Current read, “San Antonio may have shut down Austin’s claims of being superior on the taco front, but now another Texas city is trying to start another taco war.” On top of the tweet announcing the article, the new San Antonio mayor, Ron Nirenberg, quote-tweeted, “LOL.” The Dallas article, by the way, was written by José R. Ralat, who is now the taco editor at Texas Monthly. Ralat offered to take the mayor on a taco tour of Dallas. Instead, an unfunny albeit brief Dallas-San Antonio taco spat ensued.
And now, thanks to Pedro Pascal’s answer at SXSW, we’re having to endure a new round of online chest-thumping and tut-tutting, all of which is based on the mistaken assumption that Austin ever said we had the best tacos or that we had ever taken any of this seriously for even a second.
“Every once in a while it comes back up, like, the taco war, the taco war. And I'm just like, man, you guys gotta find better stuff to do with your time,” said Barragán, who is still amused that what was so clearly a joke the mayor was telling to college kids has become an enduring and misunderstood source of hurt feelings. “Tacos are good. Everywhere tacos should be bringing people together, not tearing them apart. You know?”
Jason Stanford is the co-author of NYT-best selling Forget the Alamo: The Rise and Fall of an American Myth. His bylines have appeared in the Washington Post, Time, and Texas Monthly, among others. He works at the Austin Independent School District as Chief of Communications and Community Engagement, though he would want to point out that these are his personal opinions and his alone, but you already knew that. Follow him on Twitter @JasStanford.
Más
How we’re getting through this
Putting camels down
Mocking the Russians
What I’m reading
Sarah Hepola: “The Things I’m Afraid to Write About” - Can’t tell you how closely this tracks with a lot of my writer friends. Me? I try only to censor myself when it comes to public education.
The tragic result is a disturbed public forum where it often seems like no adults are in the room. Prickly issues that deserve a full airing are being treated as settled law. A human life is morally complex, filled with ambivalence and uncertainty, and accepting the quickly assembled dogma of social-media feeds lets us bypass messier realities that we ignore at our own peril. Staying silent as writers in this fractured world is understandable, maybe even wise; it’s also a disservice—to society, the career we fought so hard to claim, and ourselves.
Jill Lepore: “Why the School Wars Still Rage” - Smart stuff.
…history as doctrine is always dangerous. “Probably no deeper division of our people could proceed from any provocation than from finding it necessary to choose what doctrine and whose program public educational officials shall compel youth to unite in embracing,” the Supreme Court ruled in 1943, in West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette, when the Court struck down, as a violation of the First Amendment, a statute that required schoolchildren to salute the flag and recite the Pledge of Allegiance. “Those who begin coercive elimination of dissent soon find themselves exterminating dissenters. Compulsory unification of opinion achieves only the unanimity of the graveyard.” History isn’t a pledge; it’s an argument.
What I’m watching
OK, raise your hand if you expect this to have moments of genuine emotion. Keep ‘em up while I count…. Wait, none of you? Well, it does.
What I’m listening to
“Let us be angry then,” said Ezra Furman before launching into the most sincerely angry 45 minutes of rock ‘n roll I’ve ever seen in person. She played for free at SX San José, a free day show at SXSW. At 4 o’clock in the afternoon, tears were running down my face while I stood in a parking lot.
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