Mexican Food of the World

I’ve been eating Mexican food my whole life. My parents claim that “bean juice,” the thin, light-brown broth in a pot of whole pinto beans, was the first food that my siblings and I ate after breast milk. In 1992, the Los Angeles Times honored our mother, an immigrant from the Mexican state of Sonora, as a Great Home Cook. I’ve always associated her handmade, flour tortillas, savory beans, and smoky sauces with home. So when I encounter Mexican food outside of Greater Mexico, I find it to be both familiar and strange. (Greater Mexico, a concept I borrow from the pioneering tejano scholar, Américo Paredes, refers to the world beyond the sphere of Mexican demographic concentration.) This gallery is part of my ongoing attempt to document the travels and transformations of Mexican food, one of the world’s greatest and most humble cuisines.

Read more about my encounters with Mexican food in Madrid, a city I was fortunate to live in, and check out my Instagram account @mexican_food_of_the_world.