The Great Story Behind the History of Nachos

America loves nachos, and duh, they're delicious. You can find nachos at thousands of bars and restaurants and at every Major League Baseball and NFL stadium in the country. But they also tell a great story about the relationship between the U.S. and Mexico. So we came here to El Cholo to find out more. Hi, Gustavo. Hey, nice to see you, yeah. Thanks so much for meeting me here. Of course. So this is a nacho table. I've never sat at a nacho table. So you know the story about it, right? I don't. So El Cholo, this was a place that made nachos famous in the United States. So any time you sit here at the nacho table, you get free nachos. Great, free is great. Hello. Hi. Thank you, Gustavo. Hello. How's that? I love this place. It's so good. And that's how nachos are supposed to be. And what I like about them is that the chips are not super hard. They're kind of fluffy, you know? Like, I think they use sometimes flour tortillas or like a lighter corn tortilla mix. So it just makes it a really great experience. It's great. And why is El Cholo known for nachos? Why did we come here? Yeah, so El Cholo is historic in many ways. It's the second oldest Mexican restaurant in the United States. It's 95 years old. Yeah, it started in 1923. So it introduced a lot of the meals that we now consider Mexican food, like the combo play. It brought in like corn tamales and all sorts of stuff. These are different than what you get at like a ballpark because it doesn't have that kind of, I don't even know what that is, like the artificial cheese. Mystery cheese, yeah. You can find them at like a movie screen. You can find them, you know, at home. You can find them at restaurants and everyone has their different iterations. This seems like kind of the classic combination. The old school one, yeah. But the nacho, it's an interesting story with the nachos because the nachos were not invented in California. Nachos weren't even invented in the United States. They were actually invented in Mexico by a chef named Ignacio Anaya. And in Spanish, the nickname for Ignacio is nacho. Ignacio Anaya worked at the Victory Club in Piedras Negras, Mexico. In 1943, a group of American military wives walked in after the kitchen was closed. And he said, well, I don't have anything, but let me go back to the kitchen. So he gets some tortillas, chops them up, fries them, gets some cheese, melts it. He has some good jalapeño, just throws it on. They gave it, he gave it to the women and they liked it so much, like, oh, what do you call it? So he's like, let's just call it nacho special. Like my nacho, like my name's Nacho, so nacho special. Then they asked for the recipe. They were from San Antonio. So they go up to San Antonio, they take their recipe with them. They start spreading around in like church cookbooks. Eventually it starts going into the restaurant. This is all like late 40s, early 50s. So they're only popular in Texas, San Antonio, but not really like known. And then everything changes with Carmen Rocha. Carmen Rocha was working at San Antonio. She's a waitress. She moves to Los Angeles and she becomes a waitress here at El Cholo. And when, for her favorite customers, she would make her version of nachos, they became, and they weren't on the menu, but they became so popular that they eventually came on the menu. This is LA. Everyone loves Mexican food. All the Hollywood crowd was coming in here. So the nachos started becoming popular all across California and then the United States. Carmen Rocha worked at the original El Cholo restaurant in Los Angeles for nearly 40 years. She died at age 77 in 2008, but her legacy lives on all over the restaurant. When Carmen Rocha passed away in the LA Times obituary, they actually interviewed Jack Nicholson. And he said she was amazing, like a neighborhood institution. So it's a real deal here. But then we all know about the movie theater- The ballpark nachos. Yeah, the foodie cheese, and that's like the same type of cheese in all these places. So where did that come from? Then the ballpark nachos were created by a man named Frank Liberto. And weird music trivia, he was a cousin of the first wife of Johnny Cash. I know, random. Interesting. So Frank Liberto, he had a food company, started selling processed cheese, and he figures, you know, nachos are pretty popular, so how about if we make ballpark nachos? Frank Liberto created a processed cheese that didn't need to be melted. It could be pumped and didn't need to be refrigerated. He started selling it out of carts at Arlington Stadium in 1976. He passed away just last year in 2017, and became a multi-multi-millionaire based on that recipe. And of course, everyone ended up copying him. And so, I mean, what an American story. An Italian-American, because of a millionaire, based off a Mexican dish that was created for American military clients. But with the nachos, Mexican-Americans historically have said, oh, nachos are not Mexican. But you go to a lot of these old-school Mexican-American restaurants, they all have nachos. And people, Mexican-Americans themselves, they're eating nachos. And in Mexico, the idea of nachos are now being twisted around with it. I mean, when people try to say to Mexican-Americans, oh, you're Americanizing your food, you're not really Mexican, what's your response to that? Is that fair to them? It's not fair at all, because, again, who are you to, who made you the arbiter of what makes a real Mexican? But, you know, growing up, Mexican kids, we're eating chips all the time. Throwing cheese in it, that makes nachos. Are we somehow less Mexican? That, to me, is a silly argument. Well, and that brings up the point of the tortilla chip itself is a huge part of nachos, right? And that's sort of become the new potato chip in the United States. How did that happen? Frito-Lay, so the Frito was actually, again, going back to whether it's Mexican or not, the guy who made Frito-Lay, the company Frito-Lay, was a man by the name of Elmer Doolin, from, also from San Antonio. Elmer Doolin, though, bought the recipe for Fritos from a Oaxacan immigrant named, I can't remember his last name, but his first name was Gustavo. Gustavo Alguin made his version of corn chips But in 1932, he sold his recipe to Charles Elmer Doolin, the eventual founder of the Frito company. So it was a Mexican recipe that a white man bought and then started throwing out to, like, white folks across the country. But it's easy for people to say, oh, that's not real Mexican food, it's like assimilated Mexican. One of the pioneers of Chicano studies, he had this concept that he called Greater Mexico. In other words, that Mexico does not stop on the U.S.-Mexico border. Mexico is wherever there are people of Mexican descent. So they take- Like a diaspora? Yeah, like a diaspora. The diaspora takes Mexico with them and maybe they might not be speaking Spanish anymore. Maybe they're preferring flour tortillas over corn or, like, Coke over, like, agua fresca. But they're still Mexican, and that just adds to the diversity of the Mexican experience overall. To bring it back a little bit, so when Ignacio created this, this was at a time when, theoretically, it was a lot easier to go from over the border. So, you know, these American women were living in San Antonio or near San Antonio. And they were military wives. Exactly. And they were able to go to his restaurant, probably fairly easy, have this meal very late, kind of like your mom when you're hungry at night, throwing stuff together and you make something for them. And then they go back. And now it is not that way at all. No, no, no, no. It is a much more difficult process. So could something like nachos even be created now with the current administration and all that? It's a goddamn shame because, I mean, that was back in the days. Going across the border was like nothing. When my great-grandpa and my grandpa first came to the United States in 1918, all they had to do was pay a penny for their passport and they were let in. Wow. It's absolutely insane. And the sad thing is right now, I mean, just Mexico in general, but in Tijuana, there's an exploding food scene. There's craft beers, craft wines, all this high-end Mexican food that is perfect for Americans. And most Americans are not trying it because they believe the rhetoric coming out of the White House that Mexico's a dangerous country and you shouldn't go there. And even if they went over there, they think they don't know what to do. And that's the thing. Mexican people, we're very hospital people. I know it's a stereotype, but it's absolutely true, especially when it comes to food. We want to share our food with the world. Let's call it what it is, a closed border. You're not allowing the hybridity and fluidity of foods to be created. And more importantly, you're antagonizing a longtime friend of the United States, which is Mexico. Yeah, I mean, that also sort of brings back to the point of Mexican food has really influenced American food in so many ways, especially if you look at something like nachos, that is literally everywhere, in every major city in America, probably every city. And people don't necessarily have the same appreciation for Mexican people. Love the Mexican, no, love the Mexican food, hate the Mexican. It doesn't surprise me. I still say that that's actually an improvement because if you really, truly hate a society, you will eradicate everything. Look at what happened with Native Americans. We never embraced Native American cuisine. We considered them subhuman. At one point, Americans really considered Mexicans to be subhuman. Now they just hate them. But the food, it's a big step in the right direction that if you're eating the food and you're enjoying the food, look at the younger generation. Younger generation's more tolerant than ever before. Younger generation's also eating more Mexican food than ever before. Great, so thank you so much for coming here and teaching me about nachos. And now, I think we should eat all of that. We gotta grub. We should take a nap after this. Let's eat. Gotta get the sour cream in here. I like the little sauce on it, like nice and fresh. It's really satisfying, it's making me happy.