Unflattening the Plate

Mexican Food, Market Contradictions, and the Sacred Labor of Memory

Mexican food in the United States has never been just one thing. It is pre-Columbian agriculture, colonial rupture, Catholic ritual, borderland invention, migrant labor, corporate abstraction. It is memory folded into masa, and it is melted cheese on a combo plate. But for much of the last century, all of that complexity was compressed—streamlined into an American fantasy of Mexican food, engineered for speed, predictability, and comfort.

Tacos, enchiladas, burritos, chips and salsa. Delicious, yes—but also distorted. What had once been a constellation of regional cuisines became a single, scalable format. What had been ceremonial became casual. What had been labor-intensive became microwavable. This flattening—driven by chain restaurants, industrial agriculture, and Anglo-American palates—rendered Mexican food not as culture, but as content: easy to consume, hard to trace.

More recently, a different kind of restaurant has emerged. One that claims not innovation, but inheritance. These kitchens—often described as “memory-forward” or “ancestral”—grind their own nixtamalized corn, simmer family recipes passed down through generations, and reject the shortcuts of prepackaged authenticity. Mole, cochinita pibil, caldo de piedra, tamales steamed in banana leaves—not as novelties, but as acts of remembering.

At first glance, this looks like recovery. But even recovery lives in contradiction.

There is no fixed “authenticity” to return to. Mexican food has always been syncretic—an evolving negotiation of geography, conquest, migration, scarcity, and invention. What we call “traditional” today was often once heretical, adaptive, or pragmatic. Tex-Mex itself—often maligned as the pinnacle of flattening—was born of ingenuity, cultural code-switching, and working-class creativity. If today’s restaurants signal a return to complexity, they do so by adding another layer, not peeling back to some imagined original.

And this complexity is expensive.

Many of the memory-forward meals served today—$18 mole plates, $5 heirloom corn tortillas, $14 cocktails with regional mezcal—are priced beyond the reach of the very communities whose culinary traditions they showcase. There is a deep irony when working-class Mexican families cannot afford to eat at the restaurants that are praised for “honoring” them. Sometimes, tradition returns in a form unrecognizable to those who lived it daily.

Beneath that, a deeper contradiction remains: who is making this food, and under what conditions? Culinary memory does not cook itself. Behind the dining room—beneath the mango-colored walls, the curated playlists, the aestheticized narratives—there is labor: prep cooks, dishwashers, line cooks, many of them undocumented, underpaid, and unseen. The romance of “ancestral cuisine” often obscures the reality that it is being cooked within the same exploitative infrastructures that flatten everything else.

Even good intentions are shaped by bad systems.

The visibility economy—Instagram, TikTok, “chef’s tables,” media writeups—rewards certain performances of care. A well-lit plate of mole becomes more valuable than a family’s unphotographable kitchen. Memory becomes currency. Even sincerity becomes content. In this environment, it is hard to tell where cultural reclamation ends and branding begins.

Still—despite all this—the food remembers.

Not all of it, not always. But there are plates that carry something unflattenable. Not because they resist commodification, but because they hold something that refuses to be fully named: a way of cooking that is also a way of grieving, a way of surviving, a way of keeping time. For many families, food is not just culture—it is sacred technology. The slow layering of mole, the folding of tamales, the timing of meals to saints’ days or anniversaries of loss—these are rituals of continuity. They are acts of devotion, not just expression.

When those practices enter restaurants, something is always lost. The altar is repurposed as a counter. The calendar collapses into a menu cycle. But still—somehow—the sacred leaks through. A warmth that doesn’t come from spice. A texture that slows your chewing. A flavor that startles memory.

Mexican food in the U.S. is not springing back. It is mutating. Adapting. Remembering and forgetting at the same time. What we once called flattening might now be understood as survival. What we call revival may still be shaped by marketing. But in that messy middle, there are still tortillas passed hand to hand. There are still smells that call the dead back to the kitchen. There are still meals that carry more than taste.

And sometimes, even in the stylized frame of a restaurant, you can hear it:
the quiet weight of something sacred, still simmering.