Tacos Are for Sharing and Dia de Los Muertos

When I started work at my current job about two months ago, I made friends quickly with the remarkable Aurora, custodian, grandmother, and Spanish-tutor. She pleasantly tolerates my imperfect usage of her language, jokes that she will bring me a pillow and blanket so that I can camp out under my desk at night, and one time even stopped into the office to give me a shoulder massage while I sat doing mind-numbing data entry for grant compliance.

Our friendship hit a rocky patch over a linguistic misunderstanding in which she, reading a religious tract, joked that I was Satan's friend (I still can't really figure out where that one came from). In a amiable tone, I called her what my Spanish-English dictionary had clearly taught me was the word for rude: maleducada. Aurora immediately looked sad and offended and I felt like a jerk. I feel like both of our jokes landed a little harder than intended out of cultural context, but we got past it somehow and on Thursday, she brought me tacos!

I'd asked Aurora a few weeks back where the best places to get breakfast tacos was and she suggested Los Jaliscienses which I will still have to try, but said there was a place she liked even better. She claimed she couldn't remember the name, but the bag she brought me was from La Michocana. La Michocana actually has six locations around Austin, but as they advertise themselves primarily as a meat market, I've never bothered to go in. Yes, I'm a vegetarian, and Aurora brought me three kinds of veggie tacos: papas a la mexicana, huevos a la mexicana, and huevos con papa.

I'm not going to rate La Michocana at this time because I didn't get an ideal taco eating experience. Aurora brought them into work and I then waited for my co-worker Amanda because half of the tacos were for her as well. That day we had a evening event at work that quickly ate up our day, so much so that Amanda ended up not even eating her tacos (I've never been that distracted.) I reheated mine and ate them while Amanda was running errands... then I reheated Amanda's and ate them the next day while speculating on whether the unrefrigerated eggs would make me sick or not (they didn't). The papas a la mexicana were really tasty, surprising me since I would probably die without my egg intake. A business trip to La Michocana is pending.

Yesterday was the Viva La Vida Festival put on by the Mexi-Arte Museum here in Austin. My girlfriend and I decided that this was a nice moment to celebrate my moving to Austin and hosted an apartment warming to coincide with the Day of the Dead/Dia de Los Muertos festivities.

Perhaps the victim of too few breakfast tacos?

Dia de Los Muertos themed cupcakes.

That Austin throws such a passionate Dia de Los Muertos celebration warms my heart. This is the kind of fusion I came to love in my time of living on the border and what I am grateful for being able to learn from every day.