Mexican Food(an essay presented to the Tucson Literary Club, March 16, 2015) Joseph C. Wilder (bio) If you have lived long enough around here—that is, Tucson, Arizona, and various points nearby—you will have experienced the singular and enduringly devastating loss occasioned by the death of a favorite Mexican restaurant. I grew up in the fifties in Tucson, and I have a keen appreciation for a very particular food of my childhood and youth, a kind of Mexican food that has been fairly eclipsed and, who knows, might not stand up to the present-day competition. But for me, it remains a standard against which I judge the plate before me. Sometimes a restaurant can open and close and a half century can go by before its tales are revealed. There is always a significance, sometimes lasting, to these human endeavors, however obscure. We remember and our lives are so formed by these memories and the understandings of self and world they indicate. They constitute for us our history in place, writ small, but with importance and value and rich in human meaning. Out of this well of memory we construe our biographies and assemble a history of place. Possibly my earliest memory in this lineage is being happily sandwiched in somewhere between mother and father or mother and siblings, the youngest, my eyes virtually level with the tabletop, eating at El Charro on Broadway, across the street from Ronquillo's Bakery and the gazebo in the Plaza de la Mesilla, Kippy's, the bus station, and Pat's. I always ordered a beef tamale—yes, I know, "tamal" chronically mispronounced, but nonetheless… There must have been years and years of tamales, before I graduated to the harder stuff: that being, of course and invariably, no matter the venue, the classic Number 2 Combination: cheese enchilada, taco, tamale, and rice and beans. The food was different elsewhere. In New Mexico it struck my young palate as weird, enchiladas swimming in heavy, crude red chile sauce—stacked, [End Page 572] not rolled—no bean tostadas, plates of chile, red and green, and too, too hot and lacking a certain refinement. In California the food was bizarre: tasteless, smothered in cheddar cheese, pretty to look at, impossible to eat, digging through piles of shredded lettuce, surmounted by heaps of yellow cheese. But at home, in the heartland of Arizona, it was done just right, according to an unsophisticated boy, who would dream of his next plate. Years and years later, starving in Europe during my so-called teenage gap year when I searched out a penniless existence to better taste the true essence of life, my mother merrily wrote to me (the only and slow way of communication, you may recall) "I bet you wish you had a bean burro right now." I did. Oh, I did. In high school in the late sixties, the treat for me (maybe I had aced a test or maybe it was judged I had gone too long without) was to be taken to Tia Elena's on Grant—first the original, later the replacement down the block—with its incredible architectural sculptures like something out of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. In the original you would sit in a hall-like narrow room with the fantastic sculptures snaking up the walls and looming over you, like a well-lit cavern. The Number 2 Combo, if I recall correctly—and I do—was $1.65. The loss of Tia Elena's many years later remains particularly painful—couldn't they find someone in the family to carry on?mm,, The other beacons of my life were reserved for road trips. To paraphrase the great American folk poet Donald Rumsfeld, there are known knowns and unknown unknowns and Sofia's in Casa Grande, a definite known known, was called on whenever we traveled somewhere plausibly near, to Phoenix for example. I have distinct memories stretching into middle and late youth of stopping at Sofia's a block off the main drag through town—you could see their sign, like a big fountain, above the rooftop line—and parking next to this big warehouse of an...
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Dec 1, 2022
R Doszhan 
Open Access