Order a combination plate in Texas and you might get cheese enchiladas covered in chili gravy, a pile of refried beans, yellow rice and a basket of warm tortilla chips. Eat lunch in Oaxaca and the table might hold a dark mole, fresh corn tortillas, quesillo and a bowl of chapulines.
Both meals are delicious. Both have Mexican roots. But they are not the same cuisine, and the difference says a lot about history, geography and how food travels.
Where Tex-Mex comes from
Tex-Mex grew out of the Tejano communities of Texas, people of Mexican descent who lived in the region long before it became part of the United States. Their cooking drew on the ranch food of northern Mexico and adapted to the ingredients available north of the border.
Over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries that cooking met American tastes, American groceries and American restaurants. Chili stands in San Antonio, cafés along the border and family restaurants across Texas shaped a style of food that is now loved far beyond the state.
The term itself came from the railroad. "Tex-Mex" was first used as a nickname for the Texas Mexican Railway, and only later attached to the food.
How the name stuck to the food
Food writer Diana Kennedy helped make the distinction clear. In her 1972 book The Cuisines of Mexico she argued that much of what Americans called Mexican food was really a separate, Texan style.
That idea upset some cooks at the time, but it also gave Tex-Mex an identity. Today Texans use the word with pride, and Tex-Mex is studied and celebrated as a regional American cuisine in its own right.
Mexican food is many cuisines
Mexico is a large country with very different regions, and its food reflects that. Yucatán has cochinita pibil, pork marinated in achiote and bitter orange. Oaxaca is known for its moles. Puebla has mole poblano and chiles en nogada. The north grills beef and makes flour tortillas.
At the centre of much of it is corn. Nixtamalization, cooking dried corn with lime before grinding it into masa, is an ancient technique that makes corn more nutritious and gives tortillas their flavour.
In 2010 UNESCO added traditional Mexican cuisine to its list of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity, citing the ancestral community model of the state of Michoacán.
The cheese tells the story
One of the easiest ways to tell the two apart is the cheese. Tex-Mex loves melted yellow cheese, such as cheddar or processed cheese, in enchiladas, on nachos and in the famous chile con queso dip.
Traditional Mexican cooking leans on fresh white cheeses. Queso fresco is crumbled over dishes, cotija adds salty sharpness, and Oaxaca cheese, or quesillo, melts into stretchy strands in quesadillas.
Spices and sauces
Cumin is a signature flavour of Tex-Mex. It shows up in chili, beans and taco seasoning, and gives the food a warm, earthy taste many people associate with Mexican food in general.
Mexican cooks use cumin too, but often more sparingly. Regional cooking depends on a wide range of dried and fresh chiles, herbs such as epazote and hoja santa, and complex sauces built from roasted and ground ingredients.
Chili gravy, a brown sauce thickened with flour and seasoned with chili powder and cumin, is a Texas classic poured over enchiladas. It has little in common with the red and green salsas used in Mexico.
Dishes born in Texas
Some of the most famous dishes on Tex-Mex menus have Texan origins. Chili con carne is closely associated with San Antonio, where the "chili queens" sold bowls from open-air stalls in the nineteenth century.
Fajitas began as a ranch dish made from skirt steak, a cheap cut that vaqueros grilled over open fires. Restaurants in Texas helped turn sizzling platters of fajitas into a national favourite from the 1970s onwards.
Crispy hard-shell tacos, combination platters and queso dip are also typical of Tex-Mex rather than Mexican cooking.
A dish born on the border
Nachos are a good reminder that the line between the two is blurry. The story usually told is that Ignacio "Nacho" Anaya created them in the 1940s in Piedras Negras, a Mexican town just across the river from Eagle Pass, Texas.
He served fried tortilla pieces topped with cheese and jalapeños to American visitors. The dish crossed the border and became a stadium and bar classic in the United States.
Tortillas: flour or corn?
Flour tortillas are often seen as a Tex-Mex marker, but they are traditional in northern Mexico too, especially in Sonora and Chihuahua. Burritos, likewise, have northern Mexican roots.
Further south, corn tortillas dominate. A taco in Mexico City is usually served on small, soft corn tortillas, topped with onion, coriander and salsa rather than lettuce and grated cheese.
Neither one is "fake"
It is tempting to rank one above the other, but that misses the point. Tex-Mex is not a failed copy of Mexican food. It is a regional cuisine with its own history, created by Mexican American families in Texas.
Food has always moved with people. Families who crossed the border, or who found the border moving across them, cooked with what they could buy and what their neighbours liked. That is how most regional cuisines are born.
Mexican food, in turn, is not one thing. Treating the cooking of an entire country as a single cuisine is just as misleading as calling every dish with a tortilla "Mexican."
Southern tables and border flavours
Here in the South, we know how regional food carries a whole history on the plate. A bowl of shrimp and grits tells the story of the Lowcountry, just as a plate of cheese enchiladas tells the story of Texas.
Tex-Mex also fits beautifully into a relaxed weekend gathering. A pot of chili or a tray of fajitas works well alongside the dishes in our Sunday supper ideas, and everyone can build their own plate.
Cooking both at home
If you want to explore the difference, try cooking one dish from each tradition. Make a classic Tex-Mex chili with cumin and chili powder one night, and a simple Mexican salsa verde with tomatillos and fresh chiles another.
Pay attention to the tortillas. Warm corn tortillas from fresh masa taste very different from store-bought shells, and making them yourself is easier than it sounds.
For tested Mexican recipes, from tacos and salsas to mole explained step by step, Lucky Bird is a lovely source of inspiration.
Eating your way through both
When you travel, look for the local version. In Texas, go to an old family-run Tex-Mex restaurant and order the combination plate. In Mexico, eat at markets and street stalls, and notice how much the food changes from one region to the next.
And if you are visiting Charleston, our guide to things to do in Charleston includes some of the city's best tables.
Two cuisines, one family tree
Tex-Mex and Mexican food share roots, ingredients and a long border. The differences come from geography, history and the cooks who adapted old recipes to new places.
Understanding them makes both more enjoyable. Next time you dip a chip into queso or fold a corn tortilla around a little carnitas, you will know a bit more about the story behind the plate.
Cover photo: Ella Olsson / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0.
