Chimichanga Period BOrigin theory CVerified

A chimichanga is a burrito, filled with meat and other ingredients wrapped in a wheat tortilla, deep-fried whole. The shell turns crisp and golden while the filling stays hot and moist inside. It reads as a Mexican classic, but its shape was worked out on the tables of the border country centered on Arizona.

Both of its main ingredients were ordinary in early-twentieth-century Arizona. Wheat tortillas and meat fillings were already a fixture in the kitchens of Mexican-American families along the border country reaching up from Sonora. What set the dish apart was a simple gesture: lowering the wrapped burrito straight into hot oil. Once frying took hold in the diner kitchen, the chimichanga stood up as a dish of its own.

The setting was the border country from northern Sonora into southern Arizona, where wheat and beef were both at hand, and the time was roughly the middle of the twentieth century. Unlike the many regional dishes that carry a long prehistory as preserved food or festival fare, the chimichanga is a comparatively young dish. And because it is young, the question of whose hands first made it stays unusually raw.

The chimichanga carries a famous origin story. Monica Flin, who founded El Charro Café in Tucson, is said to have accidentally dropped a burrito into the frying pan in the early 1950s; as the oil spat, she started to swear in Spanish, but—with her nieces and nephews present—caught herself and said 'chimichanga' (roughly, 'thingamajig') instead. This, the tale goes, was both the naming and the invention. The Smithsonian's food map carries the story, and the local press has reported it. It is a story the restaurant itself has handed down; no account written at the time, describing that moment in an early-1950s kitchen, has yet been confirmed.

The word, though, was in print long before. On 2 September 1906, a comic verse on page two of La Opinión, a newspaper published in Xalapa in the Mexican state of Veracruz, uses 'chivichanga' to mean something like 'the way things stand' or 'that business' (the page survives in Mexico's national digital newspaper library). It is not the name of a dish, and the spelling is one letter off. Even so, the page shows that a word of much the same sound was already part of Mexican Spanish before Flin. If Flin reached for a word that already existed and it then stuck to the dish, the anecdote and the 1906 verse sit together without conflict. Finding the older word does not make the story an invention.

The invention story is not single, either. Woody Johnson, who founded Macayo's Mexican Kitchen in Phoenix, claimed he devised the dish by frying a burrito at his original restaurant in 1946—placing the birthplace in Phoenix and the date earlier than the El Charro anecdote. And the oldest print reference traced by Barry Popik, known for etymology work built on newspaper searches, is a May 1960 advertisement for Casa Molina, a third Tucson restaurant, offering it filled with chicken, beef, and beans; another shop was already selling it.

Jim Griffith, a folklorist at the University of Arizona, reads these conflicts from a different angle. The chimichanga, in his view, was no one person's invention but a folk food that grew up in the border country where wheat and beef live side by side. Griffith himself came upon it in a Yaqui village outside Tucson in the mid-1950s and reckoned it had been around long before that. He has also written that there are many legends about where the chimichanga came from, and that he does not know which of them, if any, is true. Seeing a dish that spread across several shops and a whole region at once fits the surviving print better than looking for a single inventor.