The Mexican Restaurants of New York City

“[New York City] is gripped by Mexican madness. Never before has there been such passion for Mexican food, or so many places to enjoy it,” New York Magazine proclaimed in August 1983. During the early 1980s, of the 2,500 Mexican restaurants in the United States, approximately 150 were located in the Northeast. Though it lagged behind other historically Mexican cities like Chicago, San Antonio, and Los Angeles, New York City’s number of Mexican restaurants increased exponentially during this decade. 

As the 1980s gave way to the 1990s, more Latin Americans began immigrating to New York and the United States. This migration was spurred by international developments and crises including the Central American civil wars, the devaluation of the Mexican peso, the Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA), and the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). While there were only 24,000* Mexican New Yorkers counted in the 1980 Census, this number rose to 62,000* by the 1990 Census, making Mexicans the fastest-growing Latino population across all five boroughs. 

*These numbers are assuredly undercounts, excluding the undocumented and others who went (or wished to go) uncounted.

Many of these Mexican newcomers to New York City decided to establish their own food businesses such as taco trucks and tamale pushcarts in Brooklyn and Queens; panaderías (bakeries) and bodegas in East Harlem and the Bronx; modest hole-in-the-wall restaurants in Midtown Manhattan; and   industrial tortilla factories  . New York’s dining public was eager and willing to try the various kinds of regional Mexican food (such as Pueblan and Oaxacan cuisine) that began to be made and sold by these entrepreneurs. By the turn of the twenty-first century, New York City was home to many kinds of Mexican food and Mexican people.

The Mexican Restaurants of New York City digital history project was built in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic’s first year. As of summer 2020, there were 27,556 total restaurants in New York City. Of this number, 1,011 were Mexican restaurants (338 in Manhattan, 301 in Brooklyn, 203 in Queens, 126 in the Bronx, and 43 on Staten Island). Having gathered data in the form of historical and contemporary restaurant reviews, newspaper and magazine advertisements, Zagat guides, city restaurant permit records, photographs, and menus, this digital history website offers a variety of maps that illustrate the extent to which Mexican creativity, migration, and cuisine transformed New York City’s culinary and social landscape. 

Our goals here are: to understand when and how Mexican food proliferated across the city’s boroughs; and to communicate the disturbing juxtaposition that exists between our national fascination with Mexican cuisine but concurrent anti-Mexican xenophobia and monetary devaluation of Mexican food labor. We have amassed data (restaurant addresses, chef and owner names, menu item prices, restaurant reviews, and opening and closing dates) for more than 350 historical and contemporary Mexican restaurants and street vendors in New York City’s five boroughs, with the earliest dating back to the 1930s.

The maps that follow help to visualize four different aspects of Mexican food history in New York: 

1) The proliferation of Mexican restaurants in New York over time, from the early twentieth century to the present.

2) Where Mexican New Yorkers live compared to where Mexican food establishments are located in the city.

3) The price levels of historical and contemporary Mexican food establishments in New York’s boroughs.

4) Food trucks’ presence in various New York neighborhoods. 

We believe our mapping allows our readers to absorb layered and non-linear stories about Mexican food and Mexican-origin people, combating simplistic notions and stereotypes about the two. Additionally, by using such an eclectic set of sources, we hope to show veteran and aspiring practitioners in Digital Humanities (DH) and Historical GIS (HGIS) how to create and analyze geospatial data outside of conventional datasets such as censuses or housing and agricultural reports.

Our first map allows viewers to see how the Mexican foodscape of New York grew and changed over the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

Once you click on a dot on the map, you will be able to see a restaurant's name and location; the names of the owner/s and chef; whether it was a single location or part of a chain; a description of the restaurant’s food and ambiance; a photograph if available; and its opening and closing years (as best as we could trace them). Using the time-slider, you can see when Mexican restaurants began emerging in specific parts of the city. Feel free to pause the time-slider, and zoom in on specific neighborhoods and streets. You can also click on the search button to find a restaurant by name.

We have decided to include panaderías, as well as taquerías found in the backs of bodegas, as restaurants. In addition, we have not limited our database to restaurants owned by people of Mexican descent, but have included all Mexican restaurants (single location and chain) regardless of the background of the owners and/or chef, for reasons that will be explained in Map #3.

The first year of the COVID-19 pandemic birthed new food businesses, with some entrepreneurs pivoting to mobile or pop-up formats. We were able to capture those transitions as well. In this way, our digital history project archives the disappeared, the disappearing, and the appearing. We hope to keep updating the map with more restaurant entries, and want to crowdsource further information from the community. Please contact us using the form at the bottom of this site if you want to add a restaurant or food establishment, give us a more accurate opening or closing date, or provide an owner/chef’s name. 

This second map illustrates where clusters of Mexican food establishments formed in New York City, compared to where enclaves of Mexican New Yorkers developed over the decades. Our data reveals a complicated story of labor, wages, and urban mobility. Significant separation exists between where Mexican restaurants are located and where Mexican-origin New Yorkers live because of gentrification, a lack of affordability, or the preference to live elsewhere to be near kin or cultural networks. Because there is only “Hispanic” demographic data and no consistent or comprehensive Mexican-specific census data to cull from, we have used a mosaical technique of piecing together evidence to create a picture of Mexican New York. Our sources include censuses, English and Spanish-language newspapers, City University of New York (CUNY) statistical reports, and the   New York City Planning Population Fact Finder  . 

What we do know is that by 1930 approximately 3,000 people of Mexican origin (¾ immigrant, ¼ U.S. citizen) lived in New York City’s boroughs, with the majority settling on the Upper West Side of Manhattan and Queens. An early Mexican food entrepreneur was Juvencio Maldonado, who owned a Mexican grocery store on the Upper West Side and a restaurant called Xochitl in Times Square. By 1960, the city counted 10,074 people of “Mexican stock” alongside 642,622 people of “Puerto Rican stock” and 233,271 people of “other Latin-American stock,” making a total of 885,967 Latinos in the city. Between 1980 and 1990, according to the Department of City Planning, the Mexican immigrant population of New York City increased from 23,761 to 61,722 people. Estimates for the year 2000 range from 275,000 to 300,000 residents of Mexican descent (with approximately 80 percent being immigrant and 20 percent being US born). The CUNY Urban Research Center created this   map  , used in sociologist Robert Smith’s book Mexican New York, to illustrate demographic change in this decade. At the turn of the 21st century, clusters of Mexican residents had formed in neighborhoods including Sunset Park and Bushwick in Brooklyn; East Harlem in Manhattan; Mott Haven in the Bronx; Port Richmond on Staten Island; and Elmhurst, Corona, and Jackson Heights in Queens. The 2010 census counted 377,000 Mexican-origin people within New York City’s population of 2.5 million Latinos (US and foreign-born). We plan to integrate 2020 census data soon.

This map illustrates where enclaves of Mexican New Yorkers developed over time, compared to where Mexican food establishments were opened in the city. The places where these two maps converge (or diverge) are illuminating. While there are some clusters of Mexican restaurants situated within Latino barrios or corridors (Roosevelt Avenue in Queens is one example), our spatial analysis revealed that Mexican neighborhoods in the city did not necessarily line up with concentrations of Mexican restaurants. For example, though there are several brick-and-mortar Mexican restaurants in Manhattan, there are not many Mexican enclaves in that borough, most likely because of unaffordable rents and chain migration networks that settled elsewhere. Meanwhile, in Queens, though many people of Mexican descent have settled there, this did not result in a high number of Mexican restaurants. Instead, as our final map illustrates, street food is more prevalent in that area. The dearth of Mexican restaurants in earlier decades in Queens might be historically accurate, or might be due to restaurant reviewers skewing their coverage more toward Manhattan than the outer boroughs.

You can use the time-slider tool here again to view change over the decades. 

A  2024 Pew Research Center study  concluded that 99 percent of all Americans now live near a Mexican restaurant. Yet there remains a disturbing juxtaposition between the nation’s enthusiastic embrace of Mexican cuisine and its concurrent anti-Mexican xenophobia and monetary devaluation of Mexican food labor.

Our third map addresses the literal and metaphorical value attributed to Mexican food in New York City during different eras. The long colonial and exploitative relationship that the US has enjoyed with Mexican land and labor since the 1800s, and US citizen tourism in Mexico that began gaining momentum in the mid-1900s, has certainly shaped perceptions of Mexico as an exotic vacationland where food, alcohol, and other vices could be consumed cheaply. 

As Jeffrey Pilcher writes in his book Planet Taco, “Very few Mexican restaurants can command prices comparable to those of French restaurants, even when using the same fresh ingredients and, in many cases, the same Mexican workers. Customers have simply refused to consider the two cuisines as equals.” Ironically, the cost of a Mexican dinner out in New York City was higher in the 1980s compared to the 2020s, because Mexican restaurants were rarer and menus were designed to encourage a multi-course meal. During the 1990s and 2000s, a wider availability of Mexican food at different price points (low, medium, and high) and different establishments (restaurants, food trucks, bodegas, tamale pushcarts) became available. The street food and taco craze that most might assume was lucrative for Mexican food sellers actually had the opposite effect—by being framed as “casual,” “quick,” or “street” food, the majority of Mexican food has been pigeonholed as inexpensive. In fact, when it comes to Mexican food in the US (proven by data mining of restaurant review sites like Yelp and Google), the word “authentic” is often used synonymously with the word “cheap” in consumer comments about restaurants and street food establishments. 

This map takes the same restaurants represented on the first map, and codes them by price level. We decided to use $ if an establishment’s main courses or offerings cost under $15, $$ for between $15-20, and $$$ for above $20. As we update our data past 2020, we may change these parameters to take recent inflation into account. 

Latinx food business owners suffer the most from the idea that the most “authentic” Mexican food is “cheap.” Customers can often balk at prices set by a Latinx entrepreneur, while some non-Latinx chefs can serve and sell “elevated” Latinx cuisine without being challenged or questioned. Thus, the reason we have decided to include all Mexican restaurants in our maps, no matter the racial/ethnic background of who owns them, is to investigate this price differential. Users can linger on this map, looking for disparities between Latinx and non-Latinx owners/chefs, and dwell on the classed ways in which Mexican food is organized, sold, and capitalized upon.

This final map--which is less historical and more contemporary--honors the “other” Mexican chefs and entrepreneurs in New York who operate Mexican food truck/carts in various boroughs and neighborhoods. From tacos to tamales to churros to elote and paletas, Mexican food items are available on commercial blocks, in parks, and outside or inside of subway stations. Sometimes, customers can track a roving taco truck on social media to find their location on a specific day. Street vendors are an integral part of New York and other places in the US where they provide food that is portable, affordable, and—to many immigrants—nostalgic. 

Using data from Yelp, Google, and foodie blogs from 2004 on, we have used circles of varying sizes to show the presence of Mexican street food in different locations. Once you click on a circle, a list of the food businesses found in the area is provided. The circular visualization not only illustrates the “blooming” of these street food businesses across the city, but communicates that these trucks often rove and sell within a certain radius rather than a fixed everyday location. We acknowledge that by focusing on mobile food businesses that are legible on social media or GoogleMaps, we have inevitably left out many unlicensed vendors wishing to keep their business and movements mysterious. 

This section, currently a work in progress, will feature a case study on the foodscape of East Harlem. Through images, interviews, videos, and more, it will highlight the Mexican foods, businesses, and workers in the barrio. This addition to the StoryMap is made possible by the students of Professor Ximena Lopez Carrillo’s ER&M 150: Mexicans, Mexican Americans, and the US Empire class:

Evelyn Alonso, Ethan Arreguin, Karen Dorantes, Karen Ramirez, Nicholas Vela, Isabella Caltitla, Gema Covarruvias, Satia Hatami, Jude Meares-Garcia, Belen Mendoza Cortes, Edward Nguyen, Jocelyn Perez, Leslie Garcia Reyes, Ashley Rostran, Mariana Ruvalcaba Cervantes, Edwin Saldivar, Anthony Sarceno.

Thank you for your hard work!

Check out this small taste of what's to come!

A Mexican foodscape is not only made of space but of personal stories too. Therefore, we collected oral histories that will inform journalistic profiles of Mexican food business owners.

Come back later to read the journalistic profiles! If you have a story to share, please email  mexican.foodscapes.nyc@gmail.com 

We also thank Yale’s Ethnicity, Race & Migration Program, and the Center for the Study of Race, Indigeneity, and Transnational Migration for funding this project.

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