Tacos al pastor Period BOrigin theory BVerified

Tacos al pastor took on their present form in Mexico around the middle of the twentieth century, roughly between 1940 and 1966. Both their timing and their immigrant lineage are relatively clear.

The meat is stacked in thin layers on a vertical spit, then roasted and shaved off as the spit turns. This way of cooking was not old to Mexico; it arrived from the Middle Eastern shawarma. It was carried by Lebanese immigrants who settled in Mexico, and what they brought was not a new ingredient but the craft of roasting meat upright.

The path by which that craft reshaped itself on Mexican ground can be traced in stages. By the 1930s, Puebla had tacos árabes—spit-roasted meat sold by Lebanese immigrants and tucked into pita bread—and places such as Taquería Bagdad had become local institutions. The change from there to al pastor most likely took place in Mexico City. The pita gave way to a corn tortilla, the seasoning shifted to pork dressed in adobo and achiote, the annatto seed that stains it red, and by the 1960s the dish had taken the form we know.

Tacos al pastor come with a story that names who made them and when: that the Mexico City taquería El Tizoncito invented them in 1966. Complete with the name of the shop, the street, and the founder, this anecdote has been repeated across the media.

But the invention claim comes from the shop itself. El Tizoncito calls itself the creator of tacos al pastor, and the shop also says it started the showmanship of tossing a slice of pineapple into the air to catch it on the taco. Meanwhile, according to a line from Alejandro Escalante's La Tacopedia quoted by the Mexican magazine chilango, the first taquería in Mexico City to serve al pastor was not El Tizoncito but El Huequito, founded in the 1950s and thus earlier on the timeline. The Mexican food publication Food Police treats the invention tale as one of the origin myths with nothing to support it.

Food Police takes the view that the real beginnings were a fusion with no particular person behind it. On its reading, al pastor was likely a blending of cultures that grew out of the tacos árabes of Puebla, changing little by little as it put down roots. As for where the change happened, Mexico News Daily writes that the shift from taco árabe to taco al pastor most likely occurred in Mexico City, and that the dish as we know it took form by the 1960s. Several decades passed before the vertical roast the Lebanese brought met Mexican pork and tortillas and fused with them.