The Great Taco Paradox

Nearly 60% of Americans who support border crackdowns can't imagine life without tacos. That's not a joke—that's America.

Last Tuesday, parked outside Los Amigos Mexican Restaurant: a lifted Chevy Silverado, chrome everything, MAGA sticker collection including "Just a Mom Trying Not to Raise Liberals."

This patriot drove straight to a Mexican restaurant. The people her bumper stickers suggest should be shot at the border? She's eating their food for lunch.

Inside Los Amigos

Lunch rush. $12.95 enchiladas. $15.50 fajitas on screaming hot cast iron. Kitchen staff invisible behind swinging doors, cranking out orders under sombreros and serapes nobody from Mexico would actually hang on a wall.

Back there, line cooks burn through another Tuesday. Rapid Spanish about covering a shift after a cousin is in ICE detention. Again. These cooks torch their hands seventeen times a night, wrap them in wet bar towels, keep moving. Their fingers could tell you about sacrifice, but you're not asking.

Truck mom is three tables over, chatting with her server. All smiles. Thanking him for the food. She's not faking it. She genuinely loves this meal and genuinely wants these people gone. The human brain is a miraculous thing.

Welcome to TACO

Truth About Craving Others' food. Where we document the mindfuck that is American eating.

The people voting to militarize the border will drive an hour for "authentic" street tacos. They want the wall built with a taco truck-sized gate that only opens outward.

U.S. restaurants employ 2.6 million immigrants on the books. The real number? Nobody wants to know. Walk into any kitchen in America—English is the third language after Spanish and exhausted silence.

Behind the fake cheer of the dining room, it's burns, blood, and people working sick because calling out means no rent. The entire American food system runs on people we've spent decades demonizing. We want enchiladas without Enrique, tamales without Teresa, flavor without faces.

The Big Lie

We've engineered an immigration system that's a "Closed" sign on a door we're holding open. We need farm workers, construction crews, kitchen staff. So we created a system guaranteeing they come illegally, then we act outraged when they do.

H-2A agricultural visa: designed by someone who hates both farmers and workers. Family immigration from Mexico: twenty-year wait. TWENTY YEARS. We've made legal immigration impossible, then militarized the border against the inevitable result.

The numbers:

• Legal visa fee: $190
• Coyote cost: $7,000
• Making sense of this: Priceless

We're charging people 3,600% interest on the crime of feeding us.

Kitchen Reality

Every cook making your food has a story you don't want to hear. The guy perfecting your chile rellenos can't legally drive to work. Pays taxes he'll never see returned. His kids are Americans who pledge allegiance every morning while he preps food for people who want him deported.

These workers fled violence our drug hunger created, work through DACA anxiety, send money to families they haven't seen in decades. They close restaurants at 2 AM and catch buses to apartments where eight people share three bedrooms. They've transformed American eating so completely that Peoria has taquerías and salsa outsells ketchup everywhere.

We absorbed their cuisine and rejected their existence. It's the most American thing we do.

Salinas Truth

I grew up outside Salinas—"Salad Bowl of the World." Every morning, workers bent double in fog-covered fields, picking strawberries for less than you tip for coffee.

Their hands are destroyed. Stained, split, arthritic by forty. Those perfect farmers market berries? Picked by someone who can't afford to shop there.

Local kids worked retail, sold Steinbeck postcards to tourists who thought "Grapes of Wrath" was history. The same exploitation, different century. But Americans weren't lining up for field work then, and they're not now.

All that "they're stealing our jobs" bullshit? Show me one American teenager who quit Target to pick lettuce. I'll wait.

The Real America

Every industry runs the same scam. Tech companies hire "contractors" with no benefits. Hotels staff housekeeping with women who sleep four to an apartment. Construction sites run on crews that scatter when ICE shows up.

The executive who rails against "illegals" at the shareholder meeting? His house was built by them. His office cleaned by them. His lunch prepared by them. He knows this. He doesn't care. The mental gymnastics required to live this contradiction every day would snap a normal person's spine.

But we're not normal. We're American. We've practiced this doublethink so long it feels natural. We perfected the art of dependence and denial—needing people while insisting they don't belong here.

Walk through any downtown after dark. Watch who's actually working. Security guards, cleaning crews, kitchen staff streaming out of restaurants. The entire infrastructure of American comfort runs on people we pretend don't exist during daylight.

That's not a bug in the system. That's the system.

Truck mom isn't special. She's America. We're all living this contradiction, she just put hers on a bumper sticker.

Our national cuisine is theft rebranded as tradition. Pizza, hamburgers, hot dogs, tacos—we stole it all then forgot we stole it. We put a Taco Bell in the Pentagon. We let Glen Bell get rich selling "Mexican" food while blocking Mexicans at the border. We gatekeep "authentic" guacamole while voting to keep out anyone who knows how to make it.

The Dance

Here's what we've built: a system where we gorge on Mexican food while demanding Mexican removal. Where kitchen staff know exactly what your MAGA hat means but still make your food with care because that's what professionals do. Where we all pretend this arrangement makes sense.

Truck mom votes for deportation in November. Today she's funding the people she wants deported. They both know it. Nobody mentions it. That's the American way—a kind of collective insanity we've agreed to call normal.

We're junkies for what we claim to hate. The whole country runs on this—borrowed culture, stolen labor, beautiful food from people we treat as disposable.

Why I Keep Going Back

Maybe that's all we've got—this fucked up arrangement where we despise each other over appetizers and call it civilization. Where a lifted truck covered in hate parks next to a kitchen staffed by its targets, and everyone pretends it's fine.

I keep returning to Los Amigos. Not for the enchiladas. For the show. For these small, broken moments where people who vote against each other's existence share space and salsa.

It's not enough. It's not healing. It's not even particularly noble. But it's honest—the one place where our need for each other overcomes our talent for hatred, even if just for the length of a meal.

The chaos continues. Pass the hot sauce.