I Pledge Allegiance to Tacos

07.10.07

I ate my share of deviled eggs on the Fourth of July. Burgers, too. These were not lowest-common-denominator eats. My wife, Blair, dusted her deviled eggs with smoked paprika. I topped our burgers with Wickles, those hot-and-sweet pickles from Alabama. Such is our standard fare on the Fourth. Each year. Every year. Come to think of it, I could eat pickle burgers and deviled eggs every night of the week. And so could Jess, our six-year-old son. Usually, during the week following the Fourth, Jess begs Blair for deviled eggs. And he bugs me until I light the grill again. But not this year. What really stuck with Jess—and with me—this year was not our traditional dinner feed, but our lunch foray to the first true taqueria in Oxford, Mississippi. It’s an unassuming place, a no-name bodega with a takeaway counter, set in the back of a strip mall. The kind people who run it are from Zacatecas. They speak little English. We speak menu Spanish. Jess ordered tacos with carne asada. Blair went for picadillo tacos. I got tacos al pastor. Salsa verde came on the side. Neither Blair nor I realized we were making a remotely political move by eating a Fourth of July lunch in a taqueria. But I guess we were. At table, we talked about the immigration bill that had been bouncing around Congress. And we cursed the move to outlaw taco trucks in Jefferson Parish near New Orleans. In those tacos, Blair and I tasted the future of the South. As for Jess, he smiled and said, “I hope they like it here as much as I like having them here.”

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