I moved to Boston from Chicago, where the odds of a Latino person being of Mexican descent are extremely high. Here, I had the exact opposite experience - I was lucky to find any Mexicans at all. But when I did, whether at a supermarket, a restaurant, or one of the handful of Mexican establishments in the city, most of them seemed to have come from one place...Sinaloa.
Picture a family from Sinaloa, sometime in the late twentieth century, deciding to make a go of it in Boston. They come from Mexico's Pacific coast, where seafood is everything and the food carries its own regional accent. They land in a working-class neighborhood across the harbor...maybe East Boston, maybe Chelsea...because that's where the rent makes sense and where other newcomers have already put down roots. The cooking that fills their kitchen is nothing like what passes for "Mexican" in the city's restaurants. So they make it for themselves, then for friends, then for friends of friends. Word travels. A cousin comes north. Then a neighbor from back home. A tiny storefront opens. The line out the door grows.
This narrative is completely imagined, but it's how I like to picture the Mexico-to-Boston pipeline beginning. It's the kind of quiet, family-driven origin that actually built this city's Mexican food scene. Not a marketing plan...a chain of relatives and neighbors cooking what they knew, and a city slowly realizing it had been missing out.
I'll take this moment to own my bias. Back in the '90s, when I was at Boston College, I dragged what felt like the entire student body to Anna's Taqueria. I was evangelical about it... it started with my then-girlfriend, then her friend, then my roommates, their friends, and people I barely knew in lecture halls. So when I talk about how Mexican food took hold here, understand I'm not a neutral observer. I like to think I helped move a few thousand burritos.
Anna's opened in 1995 in Brookline's Coolidge Corner, and its whole concept was borrowed from San Francisco's Mission District...the assembly line, the foil-wrapped burrito the size of a forearm, the rice and beans done right. It was West Coast street food transplanted east. That's not a knock. For a city that thought "Mexican" meant a hard shell and a seasoning packet, Anna's was a revelation, and it became the gateway drug for a whole generation's palate. Once you know what a properly griddled tortilla tastes like, there's no going back to the box.
The 2000s were when the floodgates opened. Anna's kept multiplying across Greater Boston...Cambridge, Somerville, Brookline, Newton...until it felt like there was one near every T stop. And it had company. In April 2004, Tom Brush and Felipe Herrera opened Felipe's Taqueria in Harvard Square, which became a late-night institution for Cambridge students with its rooftop deck and its lines snaking out the door past midnight.
This was the fast-casual burrito era...the build-your-own, customizable, college-budget version of Mexican food. It was accessible, everywhere, and trained an enormous audience to crave it daily. But it was, in a sense, the front door. The deeper rooms were across the water.
The version of Mexican food that matters most in Boston didn't come from a campus or a chain. It came from immigrant families who built communities in East Boston and Chelsea... neighborhoods often skipped by the brunch-guide version of the city, and exactly where the food is most alive.
When I met my then fiancé, we moved to East Boston, or Eastie, where you could walk down Bennington Street and hit Taqueria Jalisco, a compact, family-run spot that locals will tell you serves some of the best tacos in the city...birria on weekends, lengua, al pastor, handmade tortillas, the works. It's the kind of place you order from and run home with, half-tempted to keep it a secret.
A block from our apartment was Angela's Café, and here the regional accent shifts. Angela's was the work of Ángela Atenco López, who learned to cook at her mother's side in Puebla starting at age eight, ran her own restaurant there at twenty, and eventually brought half a century of Poblano cooking to East Boston when she opened Angela's in 2007. Her mole poblano became legendary...Guy Fieri famously showed up and marveled that a neighborhood everyone associated with Italian food was quietly turning out some of the most serious Mexican cooking around. Ángela passed away in 2020, but her family has kept her kitchen and her mole going.
Each family brought food from a specific region, and the richness of Eastie and Chelsea is exactly that layering...coastal seafood traditions, the complex moles of Puebla, the taquería styles of central and western Mexico, all within a few blocks of each other. That's without even talking about the cuisines of the many other Latin cultures along the same streets. This is food made by people cooking for their own community, not for an algorithm.
There's a tendency to tell Boston food stories as a tidy arc of "discovery"...as if a neighborhood doesn't exist until a magazine writes it up. The truth is that the most important Mexican food in this city has been here all along, sustained by immigrant families who turned modest storefronts into anchors of their neighborhoods.
So give Anna's its due, and Felipe's too...they opened a lot of doors, mine included. The burrito boom of the oughts made Mexican food part of the city's daily diet. But if you really want to understand how it evolved here, you have to cross the water. Skip the assembly line for a day. Go find the birria at Taqueria Jalisco or the mole at Angela's. Order something you can't pronounce, talk to the person behind the counter, and remember that the best version of this story was never about a campus or a chain. It was about families, from Sinaloa, Puebla, and everywhere in between, who brought a piece of home with them and quietly made this city taste better.
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