Along the Way

The Navajo Taco Is Really a Creation Myth Engineered by a Greek Restaurateur

If you spend any time in Arizona's Indian country, sooner or later you are bound to encounter the Navajo taco. If you're on the Hopi reservation, the Navajo taco turns up on menus as the Hopi taco. Down where I live, at the edge of the Yaqui and Tohono O'odham reservations in southern Arizona, the Navajo or Hopi taco becomes the more generic "Indian taco." None of these tacos is to be confused with the ubiquitous Mexican taco. If you order three Mexican tacos, you have a meal; you order three Navajo tacos, you have a feast. Yes, they're huge.

So it makes you wonder, doesn't it? What is a Navajo taco, and where did it originate?

A Navajo taco (or its cousins) begins life as a piece of fry bread. Fry bread is sort of a lazy man's sopapilla, a mixture of white flour, baking powder, and salt. The dough is cut into squares and fried in oil. That's how Spaniards and Mexicans usually make it. When the sopapilla evolved (or devolved) to fry bread, nobody bothered cutting the batter into nice symmetrical squares. Why bother when you can just take a chunk of dough and flatten it into the space of a frying pan that's been coated with mutton grease? Who needs aesthetics when all you really want are calories?

At this point, we've probably lost most of the health food enthusiasts out there, and that's a shame because the rest of the ingredients are, more or less, nutritionally correct (maybe even politically correct). To wit: You toss onto this warm chunk of fry bread about eight ouncesof meat and chili beans, a cup of shredded lettuce, a quarter cup of diced tomatoes, a quarter cup of shredded cheddar cheese, and sprinkle the top with taco sauce or salsa. Then you put on a white shirt or blouse and try to lift chunks of the thus-burdened fry bread to your mouth without turning into a complete slob.

Every year thousands of tourists and starving writers risk gastrointestinal distress consuming tons of Navajo tacos. Many Indians do the same, so many, in fact, that a lot of Navajos think the Navajo taco is a traditional food and often regard it with a reverence usually reserved for mutton stew.

As a result, says Martin Link, there's a Greek in Albuquerque whose eternal rest is probably seriously disturbed. When Link was director of the Navajo Tribal Museum, he and many other employees ate at the restaurant nearest the tribal offices in Window Rock. It was managed by Louis Shepherd and his wife, Mary, both Greek immigrants.

"Louis Shepherd invented the Navajo taco in 1963," Link said with unswerving authority.

"Wait just a minute," I said. "You're telling me this food that everybody thinks is a traditional Indian dish was invented by a Greek who lived at Window Rock, of all places?"

"That's right," Link said. "The Navajos had opened this place called Window Rock Lodge in the 1950s, and they advertised for somebody with restaurant experience to run it, and Louis and Mary responded and stayed there about 15 years."

"How do you know he invented the Navajo taco?" I asked.

Because, Link replied, he was present the morning after the taco was born. Bill Donovan, who reports for The Navajo Times and is Link's business partner at the Indian Trader, wrote that one day in 1963 Shepherd told his regular lunchtime crowd about his new dish.

"He told the group that he had gotten hungry in the middle of the night and had gone to his kitchen (which also was the restaurant's kitchen) and started looking for something to eat," Donovan wrote. "What he found was some cold fry bread and some leftovers, including salad fixings, chili con carne, and grated cheese. Since he didn't want to dirty any plates, he decided to warm up the fry bread and heap the stuff on it and eat it that way."

The result was so delicious he couldn't wait to tell his customers about it the next day, Link said.

It occurred to me that many of the customers were probably Navajos. "Say," I asked, "did Louis speak any Navajo?"

Link chuckled. "Well, he spoke about as much Navajo as most non-Indians, which isn't much, and he spoke it with a Greek accent."

Nowadays, Louis Shepherd is not widely remembered except perhaps by those who played on the basketball and baseball teams he sponsored. And neither is his fathering of the Navajo taco. Ironically, many Indians who never knew Shepherd think Navajo tacos are a food handed down by their ancestors from 100 years ago.

"Today everybody remembers when their ancestors or their grandmother made them," Link said. "Poor Louis, he's probably rolling over in his grave."