During the Labor Day weekend, Denver closes the summer season with the Taste of Colorado, a festival in downtown Denver where dozens of local restaurants offer a “taste” of their best dishes. At that festival, I met a dish until that moment unknown to me, the Indian taco.
The Indian taco is prepared with Indian (Native American) frybread and with the normal ingredients you will find inside a Mexican taco, including tomatoes, onion, green chili, olives, salsa, sour cream and cheese.
I have to confess I didn’t know Indian tacos have been part of the American menu for a long time and that there are national competitions to find the best Indian taco in the country. Only last weekend I became aware of this dish combining Native American frybread with Mexican taco elements.
This combination is hardly a surprise, since Natives and Mexicans coexisted during several centuries in the American Southwest, enjoying many years of peaceful exchange and some other years of unavoidable violent conflict.
There are, of course, other dishes combining elements from different cultures, such as the mooshoo burrito. Unfortunately, it was not served at the Taste of Colorado. The mooshoo burrito combines the Mandarin or Chinese pancake (mooshoo) with the elements of a traditional Mexican burrito. (For the cultural impact of this combination, see the book The New America: The America of the Mooshoo Burrito, by author, writer, and pastor Stan Perea.)
I have never heard anybody referring to a taco as “a Mexican-style Indian frybread,” or talking about a burrito as a “Mexican mooshoo.” Regardless, this combination of foods and flavors reveals a cultural and social interaction that creates and sustains a market where such mixed foods are possible.
Such a mix of ingredients is not a surprise. In most Latin American countries, the local cuisine is a mix of Native and European traditions. However, we should note that the combination of bread from one culture with meat from another culture reveals a significant and deep cultural exchange.
If somebody can share a piece of bread with another person, even if that other person has nothing in common with the first one except sharing the same bread (and perhaps the same salsa), then those two persons can also share other things, from a ephemeral commercial transaction to a long-lasting friendship.
This kind of social integration can’t be explained using the traditional metaphors of “melting pot” and “garden salad,” previously used to describe the process of immigrants’ “assimilation” into the mainstream culture. And those metaphors can’t be used to talk about the new “inter-minorities integration” because (for reasons we are not going to analyze here), the mainstream culture is excluded from that process.
If we can share bread (and perhaps some salsa) with others then, at the same time and for that same reason, we can also share many other things, because sharing our bread forces us, from a spiritual and existential perspective, to see the other as our brother, regardless of how different he may be.