Feeding the Revolution

“As a child, I thought of the burrito as something predictable, filling, and reliable. It would be years before I saw it as a source of political conviction; something that once split my family’s loyalty between their hungry children and a revolutionary cause.” In this essay at Orion, Victoria Blanco writes about her Abuelita, whose family had owned a burrería in downtown Juárez during the Mexican Revolution, and how she worked hard there through childhood, making burritos for Pancho Villa’s troops—an army fighting for a better life for the next generation. “The food we ate was built for movement,” she writes, “the same way we were.” Blanco reflects on the burrito as a symbol resistance, the borderland, and belonging.

I found the unspoken parts of Abuelita’s childhood when I was working in a university archive as a student, examining photographs no one in my family had ever seen. One image stopped me completely: a rooftop terrace at the Paso del Norte hotel, where well-dressed Americans held cocktails and binoculars, watching the war across the river as though it were a form of entertainment. On the other side of that same river—a river with two names, Río Bravo on one bank, Rio Grande on the other—men were falling from gunfire while children went without food so that revolutionaries could have the sustenance they needed to keep fighting. I sat with that photograph for a long time, thinking about my abuelita, a girl somewhere in that city while Americans sipped cocktails and watched her world from a hotel roof.