I was sitting in a Yucatecan bar in Mexico City, drinking tequila with friends new and old after a book presentation, when I received the cover of Taco, my forthcoming volume in the Object Lessons series at Bloomsbury. Even after publishing twenty books, seeing for the first time still fills me with joy and giddiness, and I am very exciting to see the book coming into the world! For those readers who have not seen it on social media, here is the cover:
Taco is a short book, about thirty-two thousand words. It is written inspired by the Latin American genre of the crónica, a nonfiction hybrid form between the literary essay, the personal narrative and the travelogue that has a long history in representing urban spaces. The book is written following my story as a Chilango who grew up in the vertiginous world of Mexico City street food, moved to the US to confront the tacos of both Mexican Americans and non-Mexicans, and came back to the tacos of gentrification. In the process the book discusses the history of technology in tortilla-making, praises both corn and flour, and challenges the idea of authenticity. This is my table of contents:
Preface
1. Taco Tour
2. Taco de Nada
3. Pillows of Wheat and Lard
4. We Have Never Been Authentic
5. They Have Always Been Authentic
6. Tacos Without Mexicans
7. Elevated and Gentrified
8. Every Taco Everywhere All at Once
Further Reading
Acknowledgments
Index
The book’s publication date is October 16. In the meantime, the book can pre-ordered in your local bookstore, your favorite online outlet or directly in the Bloomsbury website, both in print and electronic edition. Pre-orders help bookstores decide whether to carry it in stock, so if you think reading me is in your future, please consider ordering now!
As a little tasting, here is the first paragraph of the Preface:
Taco offers a textual journey that goes from the essential to the supposedly authentic to the beautiful and beyond. The book traces its arguments in parallel to my experience as someone born in Mexico City, where tacos are integral to everyday life, who came to confront tacos in the United States. There are various journeys in the book, from taco tours in spaces with intensive presence of street food, through the various forms of tortillas and shells, all the way into the gentrified economies of contemporary Mexican food and even taquerías in Denmark and South Korea. I hope to present the taco as a social object, not just a food wrapped in a flatbread. Tacos exist predominantly bound to the cultural practices of Mexican societies in a continuous process of development and transformation. Tacos are modernity.
Thank you for reading! I owe readers of this Substack more posts! There will be some in the summer., I have a lot of culture to share, but teaching over 220 students this school year without assistants while having deadlines for this book and three edited collections just killed any other writing time.