Mission burrito Period BOrigin theory CVerified

The Mission burrito is a large wheat tortilla stuffed without restraint with rice, pinto beans, beef, cheese, avocado and more, then wrapped snugly in aluminum foil into something portable. Held in one hand and eaten on the move, it is far larger and far richer than the burritos that came before it.

It took shape in San Francisco's Mission District in the 1960s and 70s. The fillings were all easy to come by in the city of that day, but wrapping this much into a single tortilla calls for a large wheat one. Until the mid-twentieth century, tortillas that big were found only in Sonora in northern Mexico and the stretch of southern Arizona. According to the food historian Gustavo Arellano, the man who began using these large tortillas in the Mission District came from Durango and brought the giant tortilla he had learned in a bracero (migrant labor) camp into the city.

The stage was the taquerias of the Mission District, where Mexican immigrants gathered. A neighborhood shop served the big burrito as a filling meal, and it spread beyond the district and eventually across the country, becoming the very image people hold of a burrito. It is a dish that took the traditional Mexican burrito and grew it larger, its form settled by the eateries of the street.

The origin of the Mission burrito is unsettled, with two taquerias each claiming to have made it first.

One is the claim of El Faro. Its owner, Febronio Ontiveros, is said to have served a large 'Super Burrito' to a firefighters' crew on September 26, 1961. The early version was two six-inch tortillas layered together, later becoming a single large one. The other is the claim of Taqueria La Cumbre, where Raul and Micaela Duran are said to have created the San Francisco burrito on September 29, 1969. The shop began as a butcher's and, the story goes, turned into a taqueria in 1972.

Both claims are stories the shops told and retold in later years, not accounts backed by contemporary records. La Cumbre's beginning is variously reported as 1967 or 1969, the year shifting from one outlet to another. In his book Taco USA (2012), Arellano sides with the El Faro account, while adding that origin stories in Mexican food are, for the most part, 'not indisputable.'

Push further, and there is a view that the name 'Mission-style' was itself an outside marketing tag. When KQED asked the established taquerias of the Mission District itself, Miguel Jara, founder of La Taqueria, called the origin story something he 'couldn't say was true,' and the owner of El Metate laughed it off, saying he just makes them the traditional way. The longer a shop had stood in the neighborhood, the more its people kept their distance from the name and from the founding dispute. Even with specific dates named for the founding, no contemporary record confirms them, and the origin of the Mission burrito remains in exactly this shape: a question of who came first that cannot be decided.