Breakfast in Juárez didn’t feel foreign to me. It felt like home—only louder, warmer, and with a better horchata.
As an adult, I live in a neighborhood that’s nearly half Hispanic. The grocery store at the end of my block doubles as a restaurant, and its scent—of fresh tortillas, grilled meats, and something always just about to sizzle—floats down the street like a kind of welcome. I’ve spent years ordering tacos through a sliding glass window, fumbling my way through Spanish and always receiving kindness in return. So when we sat down to eat in Mexico, it didn’t feel like crossing a border. It felt like stepping further into a room I’ve already been learning how to enter.
We didn’t go for a show. There were no dancers, no sombrero-clad mariachis serenading the gringos. Just food. A table full of it. Tacos for breakfast, and then a plate filled to the brim—eggs, beans, rice, meat, things I didn’t know the names of but ate anyway. A pitcher of horchata sweet enough to make my teeth ache and my heart happy.
What caught me off guard was the recognition. These weren’t unfamiliar flavors. I’ve tasted them before, blocks from my front porch. At birthday parties in my neighborhood, in foil trays passed around after church, from street vendors who operate more like institutions than small businesses. That familiarity made me comfortable—not because I was in Mexico, but because Mexico had long ago come to me.
Food, I’ve realized, is often the first cultural bridge we cross. Before we share language, before we share stories, we share meals. A taco becomes a kind of translator. A plate of mole says, “You’re welcome here,” without needing subtitles.
And it works both ways. The longer I’ve lived where I do, the more I’ve seen how food becomes a shared grammar in neighborhoods like mine. People who might not understand each other in conversation still pass each other recipes. Grocery stores become gathering places. Barriers melt over simmering pots. It’s one thing to study a culture; it’s another to live beside it and slowly find that its rhythms have begun to shape your own.
So breakfast in Juárez wasn’t a revelation. It was a confirmation. A warm, delicious reminder that we’re already more connected than we think. That culture is not something sealed behind borders, but something handed across them, one plate at a time.