Op-Ed: Taco Bell Is Shameless Appropriation, Should I Order With You Or At The Kiosk?
Sometimes racism is blatant. It’s not hard to recognize hatred when you hear the slurs and see the violence. But other times, it’s subtle and systemic, so built into the culture that you don’t even recognize it. And as much as we might be used to it, the time has come to acknowledge that Taco Bell is a shameless cultural appropriation of Latinx culture, and here's what I order like every other week.
That’s right: you might look at Taco Bell and think “so what? It’s just fast food.”
Wrong!
Taco Bell was founded in 1962 by Glen Bell, a man with the whitest name possible. He ran a failing hot dog stand in San Bernandino, and noticed that his Latinx neighbors did much better business with their taco shop. So you know what he did? He befriended that family, learned their ancestral recipes and techniques, then drove them out of business by opening a competing taco stand benefitting from the established white supremacy of America. All they had was their locally famous hard shell tacos, and Bell took it from them.
And those hard shells live on today as the Nacho Cheese Doritos Locos Tacos. I always start with two of those bad boys to get my Fourth Meal started.
Taco Bell is now a subsidiary of Yum! Brands Inc., one of the world’s largest corporations. They operate over 40,000 individual restaurants around the world, and their Taco Bell arm is built on the bastardization of Latinx culture. Their adoption, denaturing, and commercialization of Mexican cuisine is a tragedy on a global level.
But what’s not a tragedy is their Crunchwrap Supreme, #2 on this guy’s Friday Night Feast and the centerpiece. It’s a flour tortilla layered with seasoned beef, warm nacho cheese sauce, a crispy tostada shell, crispy lettuce, ripe tomatoes and topped with sour cream. All that wrapped in a signature Crunchwrap fold and grilled to fucking perfection.
More than being a ruthless corporation, Taco Bell is a symbol. It represents the centuries-long degradation of Latinx culture. It is part of a direct lineage of appropriation and destruction that leads back to Hernán Cortés. It turns a vibrant, beautiful culture into a burlesque of itself, a cartoon mockery of an entire world.
And a world of flavor is what you find in the pièce de résistance of my whole order: the Nachos BellGrande Combo. A heaping order of signature hot nachos and a Crunchy Taco Supreme, all washed down with an ice-cold Baja Blast. You gotta blast. Whether I’m out with the boys or spending a night in working to topple the white supremacy in this nation, nothing satisfies like Taco Bell.
Because there’s a lot of things wrong with Taco Bell and how they represent Mexican culture, but there ain’t a thing wrong with my go-to order.
