The Arab-Andalusian Inheritance

The immediate origin is the Lebanese emigrant community in Puebla, established in significant numbers before 1914 and growing through the 1920s. Behind that lies the Arab-Andalusian culinary tradition of the Iberian peninsula, transmitted to New Spain from 1519 onward through Spanish colonial settlement, the convent kitchen, and the households of the colonial elite.

In the middle decades of the twentieth century, a new taco appeared on the streets of Puebla. It was made not on a comal but on a vertical spit — a trompo — and served in pan árabe, a thick, pocketless flatbread closer to a Levantine ka'ak than to any tortilla. The meat was lamb or mutton, marinated in achiote and dried chiles and wrapped in the bread with chipotle and raw onion. The people who made it were Lebanese, and the taco was called árabe. By about 1930 the form was established enough to name. By the 1950s and 1960s, a version had migrated to Mexico City, where the lamb gave way to pork, the bread to a corn tortilla, and the spice paste acquired pineapple as an acidulating agent and tenderiser. That dish, al pastor, became one of the defining street foods of the capital. Who first made it in this form, and who first called it al pastor, is not established. The emigration that produced this cooking began in the late nineteenth century, when Lebanese and Syrian Christians — mostly Maronite, some Greek Orthodox — left the Ottoman Levant in large numbers. A first wave arrived in Mexico before 1914; a second, larger wave came after the First World War and the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. They settled across the country, but Puebla received an early and significant community. Mexican immigration records of the period grouped these emigrants collectively as 'turcos', a word that followed Ottoman citizenship rather than actual ethnicity. The community's own term, and the term now standard in Mexico, is libanés. What the Lebanese brought to Mexico was not a single recipe but a set of techniques and flavour preferences: the vertical rotisserie (shawarma in its Arab form, itself descended from the Ottoman döner kebab), a habit of marinating meat in acid before cooking it, a taste for allspice and cinnamon and cumin alongside dried chiles, and a tradition of wrapping spiced cooked meat in a flatbread with raw accompaniments. The meeting with Mexican chile culture was not a collision but a negotiation. Chipotle, achiote and the dried Pueblan chile palette entered the marinade. The vertical spit remained. The result was something neither Lebanese nor classically Mexican, but permanently and specifically Poblano. This is not the only thread that connects Mexico's kitchens to the Arab world via Iberia. The Spanish who arrived in the sixteenth century carried with them a cuisine that had spent nearly eight centuries in conversation with Arab Andalusia. That conversation had left deep marks. Almonds ground into sauces; the use of sour-sweet flavour combinations; the pairing of dried fruit with meat; the technique of thickening liquids with ground nuts and seeds; frying in deep oil; the use of cumin, cinnamon, and clove in savoury contexts — all of these entered the cookery of New Spain from the Iberian peninsula, where they had been shaped by contact between Arab, Berber, Jewish and Iberian traditions across seven centuries. The great moles of Oaxaca and Puebla are sometimes described as purely Indigenous, and sometimes as purely Spanish. They are neither. Ground chile, tomato, and local seeds — pepita, achiote — are Indigenous. But the grinding of nuts and seeds into a sauce thickener, the layering of aromatic spice, and the use of dried fruit to balance bitterness: these have clear parallels in the Andalusian kitchen that reached New Spain through the convents and the great colonial households. The Florentine Codex, compiled by Bernardino de Sahagún with Nahua collaborators and completed in 1577, records pre-contact sauces of ground seeds and chiles; the colonial elaboration that followed drew on both traditions without erasing either. The Arab-Andalusian thread is easiest to trace in the sweets. Alfajores, alfeñiques, polvorones, mazapanes: the names are Arabic-derived Spanish, and the techniques — honey syrup, almond paste, sesame, orange blossom water — move in a line from the medieval Arab kitchen through Andalusia to the colonial confectioner's table in Puebla or Mexico City. Many of these preparations were made in convents, where Iberian, Moorish and to some degree Indigenous traditions met in the same pastry kitchen. The result, particularly in Puebla, is a confectionery tradition of unusual complexity. Tacos árabes and al pastor stand at the most recent and most visible point of this long inheritance. They are useful precisely because the story is documented rather than speculative: the community that brought the trompo to Puebla is historically traceable, the timeline is recoverable, and the transformation of the dish as it moved to Mexico City and adopted pork and corn tortilla is observable across living memory. That clarity makes them a good entry point into the longer, murkier history of how Arab technique and flavour passed through Iberia, crossed the Atlantic, and entered the colonial kitchen three centuries before the first Lebanese family landed in Veracruz.

The Arab-Andalusian inheritance is, in the end, a flavour inheritance: the layering of warm spice (cumin, cinnamon, allspice, clove) with acid and dried chile; the use of ground nuts and seeds to build body in sauces; the sour-sweet register that appears in moles with dried fruit, in tacos árabes with chipotle and raw onion, and in al pastor with pineapple. These are not ornamental elements. They shape the fundamental flavour logic of a number of Mexico's most complex preparations.