Chips and queso. Beef enchiladas topped with chile con carne and smothered with cheddar cheese. Sizzling fajitas served with grilled onions and peppers.

Sound familiar? That’s because Tex-Mex is what most Americans picture when they think about Mexican food. 

The blog Thrillist even put together a list of the best queso in Austin. Lyanne Guarecuco, a St. Edward’s University junior and the online editor-in-chief of Hilltop Views grew up close to the Texas-Mexico border and doesn’t buy it. 

“Queso is a super myth,” Guarecuco said.  “It has absolutely no place in Mexico.”

Only when English expat Diana Kennedy, a passionate advocate for authentic Mexican cuisine, published “The Cuisines of Mexico” in 1972 was Tex-Mex firmly established as separate and distinctly different from traditional, authentic Mexican food. Often called the Julia Child of Mexican cuisine, Kennedy, 92, has spent half a decade traveling throughout Mexico and writing about its food.

Read Kennedy and talk to other experts and they’ll tell you that the main difference between the real thing and Tex-Mex is in the ingredients.

For example, though beef isn’t common in most of Mexico, because there were so many cattle ranchers in South Texas and Northern Mexico in the 1800s, beef became a main ingredient in Tex-Mex. 

The heavy use of cumin in Tex-Mex dishes is inspired by the Canary Islanders who the Spanish colonizers brought to San Antonio in 1731. After Texas became a state in 1845, Anglo-American settlers began to move westward into the newly acquired land. They encountered Mexican food and made it their own, according to the Texas State Historical Association.

“Tex-Mex tastes to me like people wanted to create Mexican food but they had to use only the ingredients available to them,” Celeste Donohue, who moved from Mexico to North Carolina in 1999, said.

Tom Gilliland, co-owner of Fonda San Miguel, an interior Mexican cuisine restaurant that has served Austin since 1975, said it is hard to define Mexican food; it varies from region to region, just like in the United States.

“Mexico has at least seven distinct culinary regions,” all of which are different and use specific ingredients, Gilliland said.

Coastal parts of Mexico often use seafood in their dishes, southern Mexico often uses pork and indigenous areas like Yucatán prefer deer meat. Mexico’s various regions each also feature all different kinds of mole, including mole poblano, red mole, yellow mole and green mole, Gilliland explained.

According to Gilliland, there is just one commonality between authentic Mexican food and Tex-Mex: tortillas. And even they differ. Tex-Mex favors flour and Mexicans almost exclusively use corn to make tortillas and masa. All different kinds of chiles are also a very integral part of traditional Mexican cuisine.

Gilliland was raised in Nebraska and moved to Austin in 1962 to pursue law at the University of Texas at Austin. He soon got the opportunity to travel to Mexico City through a summer exchange program at the Universidad National Autónoma de México with other Texas law students. The food he ate there changed his life.

“It was nothing like the Mexican food I knew,” Gilliland said. “My first introduction to Mexican food was the canned tortillas my mother loved.”

Back in the states, Gilliland met Miguel Ravago, a self-taught Mexican chef who learned his authentic style of cooking from his grandmother. Ravago’s grandmother inspired Gilliland to open a restaurant that served her kind of food. With Ravago as chef and Gilliland managing the front of the house, they opened two authentic Mexican restaurants: San Angel Inn in 1972 in Houston and Austin’s Fonda San Miguel three years later. 

Kennedy worked with Ravago to develop and perfect the authentic Mexican cuisine they serve. She still visits Fonda every six months, according to Gilliland.

Gilliland and Ravago make sure that Fonda has access to the right ingredients by growing them in the homegrown restaurant’s garden. The home-grown vegetables include Swiss chard, cherry tomatoes and chiles. The restaurant also imports almost all of its beans from Mexico.

If they can’t get the right ingredients to make a certain authentic Mexican dish, the chefs at Fonda San Miguel do not make it.

“We don’t ‘gringoize’ our food,” Gilliland said.

Alexis Gonzales, a senior at St. Edward’s, grew up in San Antonio and ate both Tex-Mex and authentic Mexican food. Gonzales said the most obvious indicator of whether a dish is authentic is the time spent making it.

“Authentic Mexican often goes through a long, hand-made process,” Gonzales said. “It doesn’t cut corners.”

Priscilla Phinney, 50, raised in San Antonio by her Mexican father and her South Texan mother, didn’t eat typical American fare until she was in her late teens. She moved to Austin to attend the University of Texas at Austin, where, not surprisingly, she found the best Mexican food in predominantly Hispanic neighborhoods.

“Initially when I moved here in 1983, anything that even resembled Mexican food tasted repulsive,” Phinney said. “I searched and found that the only edible dishes could be found at eateries on the east side of Austin.”

For some, the issue isn’t authentic cuisine versus Tex-Mex, it’s the quality of Tex-Mex itself.

Chandler Spires moved to Hillsborough, North Carolina from Dallas with his family the summer before he began high school. 

Now a sophomore at Western Carolina University, Spires, a loud and proud Texan, views Mexican food in North Carolina like he views its barbecue: inadequate.

“It’s smothered in sauces like queso and it’s mostly all just grilled onions and peppers with the meat,” Spires said. “Tex-Mex is more.”

Robb Walsh, a Texas food writer and author of three Tex-Mex books, agrees that Tex-Mex should definitely not be considered Mexican food. Instead he argues that Tex-Mex is part of American culture, including the culture of Mexican-Americans.

Walsh compares the relationship between Tex-Mex and Mexican food to Creole food and its older cousin, French cuisine. While Tex-Mex may have Mexican influences, it is an American cuisine of its own, and most Americans are aware of that. 

As authentic Mexican cuisine becomes more popular in the United States, it will soon be easy to tell the difference between Tex-Mex and traditional Mexican food.

“I’m willing to accept that Tex-Mex isn’t really Mexican food,” Walsh, who co-owns El Real Tex-Mex in Houston, said. “It’s American. Everything north of the border is Tex-Mex.”