WHERE INDIA & MEXICO MEET: RIGHT AT YOUR MOUTH
SOURCE • SANDYA KOLA
As a young Indian girl, I used to always want to eat — much to my parents’ dismay — at Taco Bell. So in order to make me eat more home-cooked meals and cut down my fast-food intake, my father learned how to make his very own seven-layer burrito.
He would use the same seven ingredients but — here’s the catch — would wrap it all up in a roti, fried in buttery ghee that gave the burrito an extra crunchy bite. This was my first experience of a somewhat Indian-Mexican crossover dish.
And although my younger self always thought my dad’s Taco Bell-meets-India invention was innovative and unique to our household, turns out Indian-Mexican restaurants all over the country have been one-upping the Indo-Mex blends of the Kola family with new, adventurous tastes — and their menus feature more than just roti-wrapped burritos.
Little me and dad bonding over melting ice cream
If you happen to step into one of these fusion restaurants, expect your taste buds to be greeted by tacos filled with street-side-style paneer, or Punjabi burritos served with basmati rice, seasoned chickpeas and curried pumpkin, all rolled together in a whole wheat tortilla.
You may even find quesadillas filled with cheese and chicken tikka (or paneer tikka for us vegetarians) sandwiched inside a potato-stuffed paratha. Some Indian-Mexican restaurants have even taken this fusion cuisine to a whole new level by making an in-house hybrid flour that creates a blend of Indian rotis and Mexican tortillas.
Paratha quesadilla
SOURCE • CURRY UP NOW
Crossover cuisines and fusion restaurants have become the norm in today’s international food scene, which is far more globalized than ever before. Chefs from every background are mixing ingredients and culinary techniques from across the globe in an effort to find the next big thing. However, the Indian-Mexican cuisine sets itself apart as something uniquely different.
Aloo gobi tacos
SOURCE • CURRY UP NOW
In the early 20th century, men from the Indian state of Punjab came to the United States in search of work, many of whom eventually settled in California. At one point, almost 2,000 Punjabi men lived in California, writes anthropologist Karen Leonard in Making Ethnic Choices: California’s Punjabi Mexican Americans.
Yet because of California’s miscegenation laws, which didn’t allow these Indian workers to marry outside their race, along with the Immigration Act of 1917 that restricted these men from bringing Indian wives into the country, many Punjabi men ended up marrying Mexican women. The confluence of these various laws and policies created not only a distinct bi-ethnic community of Punjabi-Mexicans, but also a rich micro-cuisine in the unsuspecting town of Yuba City, California.
Punjabi-Mexican family
SOURCE • KAREN LEONARD, STANFORD UNIVERSITY LIBRARIES
Although not all Indian-Mexican restaurant owners today may attribute their food to this history, it’s a cuisine whose cultural DNA nonetheless represents an organic community of Indians and Mexicans brought together by a delicate alignment of immigration policies, miscegenation laws, migratory patterns and cultural similarities.
