A Taco Stand on Every Corner
35 prints and sound
In September 2016, the Mexican-born founder of Latinos for Trump went on national television and declared, “My culture is a very dominant culture….If you don’t do something about it, you’re going to have taco trucks on every corner.” A Taco Stand on Every Corner speaks back to this delicious prediction through a coordinate system of tiny snapshots of taquerias that exist along the National Historic Lewis and Clark Trail—a trail forged by an expedition that played an essential role in Euro-American territorial, cultural, and economic expansion across the continent in the 19th Century. Plucked from the 100s of taquerias and Mexican restaurants that stretch across this 11-state trail, these 35 images are a powerful way to explore the cognitive dissonance of accepting the food, but rejecting the body. Given the ubiquitousness of tacos, and of ‘Mexican’ food more broadly, and the extent to which Americans eat vast quantities of Mexican-inspired food, this grid-like network of taquerias gives visual weight to a demographic reality. A taco stand on every corner? Too late!