If the 19th-century chili queens are considered, San Antonio was a Creative City of Gastronomy long before the official designation of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) was achieved in 2017.
Such was the suggestion of a Thursday afternoon gathering organized by the Main Plaza Conservancy to discuss the legacy of the enterprising Mexican American women of the late 1800s and early 1900s who turned chili con carne into a popular household dish nationwide.
Once railroads brought people from all over the U.S. through San Antonio in the late 1800s, word of the already locally popular tradition of serving Mexican food on city plazas spread throughout the country. Anglo entrepreneurs adapted the flavors of chili to create powdered spices sold nationwide, helping to popularize the dish for those living outside of San Antonio.
Main Plaza Conservancy Program Manager Lisa Cortez Walden moderated a one-hour panel discussion at the AC Marriott Hotel downtown, asking panel members and an audience of 50 in what way the pioneering chili queens should be properly recognized.
Panelist Lilliana Patricia Saldaña, an associate professor of Mexican American studies at the University of Texas at San Antonio, emphasized the importance of creating an annual public event to celebrate this rich part of San Antonio history.
“We are a culinary destination because of the chili queens, because they carved out that public space,” Saldaña said. She recounted their forced removal from downtown plazas and mercados by city leaders for “sanitary” reasons, which occurred in 1902, and said they have not been properly recognized for their recipes.
Pachanga or fandango?
The 65th Texas Legislature adopted a lighthearted resolution declaring red chili the official state dish of Texas in 1977. While San Antonio was recognized as its originating home, the chili queens were not mentioned.
“There needs to be some sort of public acknowledgment of who they were,” Saldaña said. “They were working-class women. They were responsible for creating food communities. And I think that’s a beautiful story, and it speaks to their resilience.”
Other panelists included Colleen Swain, director of the City of San Antonio World Heritage Office, Arisa Larios of the San Antonio City of Gastronomy department, Antonio Coffee of the Texas Historical Commission and Casa Navarro, and Bruce Shackelford and Cassandra Santillán, both of the Witte Museum.
Suggestions from the audience included an annual pachanga, a chili cook-off and a historical reenactment, but the idea of staging a public fandango received the most attention.
The fandango idea was suggested by Marivel Tamez, Bexar Heritage outreach manager, who said the traditional Mexican gathering would pay homage to fandangos of the 1700s and 1800s, wherein “they would make chili and make food and have music and dance sort of in a festival way.”
Onetime San Antonio author O. Henry wrote in his short story “The Enchanted Kiss” that “the once-famous purveyors of the celebrated Mexican national cookery” drew throngs to Alamo Plaza for “a [nightly] carnival, a saturnalia that was renowned throughout the land. Then the caterers numbered hundreds; the patrons thousands.”
But O. Henry’s story was written in 1904, and the chili queens had been chased off downtown plazas two years earlier. The above passage continued: “But now no longer. To some half-dozen tents, fires, and tables had dwindled the picturesque festival, and these had been relegated to an ancient disused plaza.”
Panelists agreed that combining food with music and dancing would not only celebrate the chili queens but also honor such Tejana musicians as Lydia Mendoza, who got her start singing alongside them in the city’s Westside plazas and mercados after they were forced out of downtown.
A pinch of this and that
Erlinda Cortez, mother of Cortez Walden, was in attendance at the forum. Her mother Herminia Leal was a chili queen in the 1920s and ’30s, though Cortez Walden insisted Leal would not have identified as such, rather merely as “a woman who worked on the plaza.”
Cortez said Leal, who operated one of the many booths called baratillos ringing what is now Market Square, was a teenager renowned for her cooking, and for her beauty.
Leal’s famous chili con carne recipe did not survive, however. “She never wrote it down,” Cortez said. “I would ask her, and she said ‘It’s a pinch of this, and a pinch of that.’”
Santillán noted the challenge of tracking down and archiving authentic chili queen recipes. “Because they were competing against each other” as enterprising businesswomen, “all of these recipes were secret. So they’re not written down anywhere.”
Nonetheless, Cortez Walden said the Main Plaza Conservancy would undertake an effort to collect oral histories of those connected to chili queens of the past, in an effort to preserve this distinctive facet of local history and to pave the way for a future formal celebration that both honors the past and celebrates the city’s present-day culinary culture.
And if Tamez has her way, a chili queen would join the celebration, at least in spirit.
Having helped bring the bronze statue honoring 18th-century founders of what would become San Antonio and Bexar County to Main Plaza, Tamez confirmed that her suggestion had already been forwarded to Cortez Walden.
