The burrito began as a regional Mexican word for a rolled tortilla with filling, and it was in print by 1898. The second edition of Feliz Ramos i Duarte's Diccionario de mejicanismos, whose first-edition preface is dated September 1895, lists "burrito" for the state of Guanajuato and defines it as a tortilla rolled around meat or something else. The famous story of a donkey vendor named Juan Mendez comes later, and no record backs it up. The big stuffed burrito that fed San Francisco workers was built in the Mission District in the 1960s and 1970s.
The dictionary entry that came before the legend
Ramos i Duarte gave the entry in plain terms: "Tortilla arrollada, con carne u otra cosa dentro." That is a rolled tortilla with meat or other things inside. He marked the word "Guan.", for Guanajuato in central Mexico, and added that the same thing was called "cooito" in Yucatan and a taco in Cuernavaca and Mexico City. A scan of the 1898 second edition is on the Internet Archive, and the entry can be read there.
The same dictionary shows how loose the word was. A second entry, marked for the Federal District, gives "burrito" a different meaning altogether: corn that bursts open into the shape of a rose when it is toasted, which is popcorn.
The book is not a cookbook. Its full title calls it a collection of vicious phrases and expressions with their criticisms and corrections, drawn from every state of the Mexican Republic, and the author was a primary-school teacher. Ramos i Duarte was cataloguing words that people used locally and that a purist might frown on. A rolled tortilla called a little donkey in Guanajuato was one such word, noted in passing between a maize entry and a pile of other regionalisms.
So the early record is a scatter of local uses, not one invention. Nobody in the book claims to have made the first one.
The little donkey and the name burrito
"Burrito" means "little donkey" in Spanish. Why a tortilla would borrow the name is a guess, and every explanation we found is folk etymology. The dictionary gives no reason. The Mendez story is the popular answer, and it has no document behind it. What the record does show is that the diminutive was attached to a rolled tortilla in print by the 1890s.
Juan Mendez and the donkey in Ciudad Juarez
The story goes like this. During the Mexican Revolution, a man named Juan Mendez ran a food stand in the Bella Vista neighborhood of Ciudad Juarez. To keep the food warm he wrapped it in large flour tortillas, and customers called the bundles "burritos" after the donkey he used to carry his goods.
It is a good story. El Diario de Nueva York, retelling it, calls it a nice tale with little historical support, and it names no historian or archive that backs Mendez. We could not open a newspaper, memoir or archive that names him either. The date also fails: Ramos i Duarte's book is older than the fighting. Treat Mendez as folklore that explains a name the dictionaries had already recorded.
Big tortillas and the border
The large flour tortilla that makes a big burrito possible has northern roots. Gustavo Arellano, in Taco USA (2012), says that Febronio Ontiveros, the San Francisco grocer behind one of the Mission claims below, knew large tortillas from work camps in Sonora and southern Arizona, where he worked after immigrating, according to SFist's 2015 account of Arellano's argument.
SFist's writer argues that the original Mexican burrito did not carry rice and beans: in his account early burritos were meat, cheese and salsa, or meat alone. That is one journalist's statement, not a documented menu, but it fits the dictionary's loose definition of meat or something else. Rice and beans are what the Mission style added.
Cousins of the burrito sit close by. A folded tortilla with cheese gives you the quesadilla, and the taco family, including the rolled tacos that the burrito's early definition describes, is told in the history of tacos. The Texas border produced its own tortilla-and-meat inventions, such as fajitas and nachos.
Who made the Mission burrito in San Francisco?
The burrito most Americans picture is a San Francisco form: oversized, served assembly-line style with rice, beans, meat, cheese and vegetables. It grew in the taquerias of the Mission District in the 1960s and 1970s. Two claims compete.
| Claim | Who | Date |
|---|---|---|
| First San Francisco-style burrito, sold to firefighters on two 6-inch tortillas | El Faro, owner Febronio Ontiveros | September 26, 1961 |
| First burrito served by the family who later ran the taqueria | Raul and Michaela Duran, La Cumbre | September 29, 1969 (taqueria opened 1972) |
Mission Local reports that the Durans, Mexican immigrants, opened a meat market at 515 Valencia Street in 1967, served their first burrito on September 29, 1969, and became a taqueria in 1972. They made it for blue-collar workers who needed a filling, portable meal that needed little refrigeration. El Faro says it served its first burrito on September 26, 1961.
Arellano backs El Faro, according to SFist, which also notes that the La Cumbre family credits Michaela Duran with the idea of a big burrito in 1967 to get working people through a day. SFist adds that Mission burritos were made before 1967 and asks longtime San Franciscans to settle it. Nobody has produced a menu or receipt that does.
The difference between the two accounts is partly a difference in what counts as the first. El Faro's claim is about a single sandwich-sized order for a crew of firefighters, built from two six-inch flour tortillas. La Cumbre's claim is about a style: a large burrito sold across a counter, with the customer choosing each filling in turn. A shop can be right about one and a rival right about the other.
Questions people ask
Where did the burrito originate?
The burrito originated in Mexico as a regional name for a rolled tortilla with filling, recorded in Guanajuato in Ramos i Duarte's Diccionario de mejicanismos, whose second edition appeared in 1898. The big Mission burrito was developed in San Francisco in the 1960s and 1970s.
Why is it called a burrito?
"Burrito" is Spanish for "little donkey." Why a rolled tortilla received the name is not documented. The Ramos i Duarte dictionary gives no explanation, and the Juan Mendez donkey story has no document behind it. The word was already in a Mexican dictionary in the 1890s.
Did Juan Mendez invent the burrito in Ciudad Juarez?
Probably not. The tale says Juan Mendez sold food from a donkey stand in Ciudad Juarez during the Mexican Revolution, but no document names him, and the word burrito was printed in a dictionary years before the Revolution. A Spanish-language retelling in El Diario de Nueva York says the story has little historical support.
What is a Mission burrito?
A Mission burrito is the large San Francisco style of burrito from the Mission District, made with an oversized tortilla, rice, beans, meat, cheese and vegetables. El Faro claims the first one in 1961, and La Cumbre's founders date their first burrito to 1969.
Filed under Street Food
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