Tejanos and the Making of Tex-Mex

A people older than the border

Tejanos are Texans of Mexican descent, many of whose families were established in the region when it was still part of Spanish Texas and later Mexican Texas, long before the 1836 Texas Revolution redrew the map. That history matters for understanding Tex-Mex food: it did not arrive as an import from "Mexico" to "America." It developed continuously within communities whose land, in many cases, changed political hands around them while their foodways kept evolving in place.

Historians writing for the Texas State Historical Association describe Tejano ranching families as central to South Texas's cattle economy from the eighteenth century onward, which is precisely the economy that later produced dishes like fajitas, carne guisada, and barbacoa as practical, resourceful cooking rooted in ranch labor.

What "Tex-Mex" actually names

Tex-Mex is a regional cuisine that emerged from the blending of Tejano home cooking, available Texas ingredients (beef, wheat flour, cumin, yellow cheese), and the commercial restaurant trade that grew up around San Antonio, Austin, and the Rio Grande Valley starting in the late nineteenth century. Dishes like the combination platter, the crispy taco, chili con carne, and cheese enchiladas either originated in Texas or were transformed there into forms distinct from their counterparts in central and southern Mexico.

Food historians are careful to describe this as adaptation and regional invention, not a lesser or "inauthentic" version of another cuisine. Tex-Mex has its own techniques, ingredient ratios, and serving conventions that reflect the specific agricultural and cultural realities of Texas — wheat flour tortillas rather than corn in many dishes, for instance, reflecting Texas wheat production and Tejano ranch-kitchen practice.

Tex-Mex was not a substitute for something else. It was its own cuisine, cooked by people who never left home.

The San Antonio chili queens

One of the best-documented chapters in early Tex-Mex commercial history is the "chili queens" of San Antonio: Tejanas who sold chili con carne and other dishes from outdoor stands in the city's plazas from roughly the 1880s through the 1930s. Newspaper accounts and later historical scholarship describe these vendors as instrumental in introducing Tex-Mex cooking to visitors, journalists, and eventually a national audience, decades before fajitas appeared on a restaurant menu.

The chili queens were eventually pushed out of the plazas by local health ordinances and shifting city politics, but their stands are widely cited by historians as an early, visible bridge between home-style Tejano cooking and public commercial dining in Texas.

Fajitas as a Tejano and Tex-Mex dish

Fajitas sit squarely within this Tejano and Tex-Mex lineage rather than being a generic "Mexican food" export. The dish's raw material — skirt steak distributed to ranch workers — and its cooking method — open-flame grilling and thin slicing — both come out of the same South Texas ranching world that produced the broader Tex-Mex table. When fajitas moved to restaurant menus in the 1960s and 1970s, they followed a path the chili queens and generations of Tejano cooks had already cleared: home and ranch cooking becoming public, commercial, and eventually national.