Fired
Up

My father was a maestro of the cookout. Fajitas and tablitas, or short ribs, were his specialty.

For our family carne asadas, he’d hold court at his enormous grill in our backyard in Del Rio. He’d poke at the crackling fire as it burned down to cooking coals, a row of aluminum pans full of skirt steak marinating in a light lager—usually Budweiser. Around him, my brothers and assorted cousins and friends bantered, trading stories and jokes while radio station 580 AM, La Rancherita del Aire, blasted conjunto from his workshop. On summer evenings, lightning bugs glowed in the dark pasture beyond our fence. When winter came, another fire would be lit in the pit just for warmth, the guys bundled in their Carhartt jackets.

“Bring me another tray,” my dad would request. He asked me for any number of things over the course of the evening. Bring him a particular knife. Find his other tongs. Get him a glass of water. Take this batch inside; it’s ready. My mother and tías in the kitchen warned us not to start eating because the rice wasn’t ready, but everyone snuck a piece of meat, piping hot and delicious. Back and forth between the kitchen and grill I’d go, catching a dance with my brother if a real rola perrona, a kick-ass jam, was playing. We’d whirl around the patio, careful not to step on the family dog, who refused to budge from his spot as he waited to catch discarded bits of beef.

Preparing for a carne asada, what we call a backyard barbecue, is a lot of work. Getting the fire for the grill going takes about an hour. And preparing the meat to make fajitas—the foundation of our meal—takes time, too.

Though the scrappy piece of beef has its roots in South Texas, fajitas rose in popularity in the 1970s and have since become a beloved Tex-Mex staple. The name comes from the Spanish word “faja,” or belt, and describes grilled strips of outside skirt steak. Starting in the early 1900s, out on ranches where cattle were slaughtered, offal such as cow’s head, entrails, and beef skirt were given to vaqueros as part of their pay, according to Colorado College anthropology professor and author Mario Montaño. Dishes like barbacoa de cabeza, menudo, and fajitas all come from people making do with what they had.

What began as a humble meal cooked over an open flame to feed ranch hands is now served in national chains like Taco Bell and Chili’s—the latter of which sells more than 60 million pounds of fajitas annually. Despite their commercial availability, the strips of savory meat remain the heart of modern Tejano family cookouts.

“You really have to know what you’re doing,” says Melissa Guerra, food historian and author of the James Beard Award-nominated cookbook Dishes from the Wild Horse Desert. “Fajitas are meant to be eaten fresh from the grill—hot.”

I lived outside of Texas for more than a dozen years, zigzagging around the Midwest and the South before finally settling in Fort Worth. I’ve had good barbecue in Atlanta, even somewhat credible Texas-style brisket along the way. But for me, nothing beats a backyard carne asada. The scent of a mesquite fire and fajitas cooking is home, the aroma of familial harmony. There are birthdays, graduations, and, of course, the apex of Tejano family cookouts, the joyous Easter pachanga celebrating the end of Lenten Fridays with cascarones and a wild smorgasbord of beef. Christmas carne asadas, too, are a visceral holiday memory. My Navidad associations are crisp, gray evenings and mesquite smoke wafting from somewhere in the neighborhood, often from more than one house. When I was muy lejana, far away, my family loved sending me photos of sizzling meats, fresh from the grill. If I stayed away long enough, I’d get plaintive texts from my primas. Come home already. Your dad won’t cook out.

Cooking out was a way my father celebrated his family. When I graduated from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, he toted a giant cooler of meat and a cord of mesquite from Del Rio to Iowa City and barbecued for me, much to the delight of my East Coast classmates. Years later, when my prima Janina married in Germany, he put 30 pounds of frozen beef in his carry-on to cook out in her honor. Grilling fajitas was his love language, and every bite was a blessing.

My father hailed from Del Rio, a border town situated at the edge of southwest Texas, nearer to Langtry and Alpine than McAllen or Falfurrias. Though the town is the birthplace of the popular Tex-Mex fare Julio’s corn chips, fajitas weren’t commonplace when my father was young. But he learned the art of grilling fajitas when he married my mother, a Laredo girl with three older brothers. They taught him well.

Family legend says my father brought South Texas-style fajitas to Del Rio. My mother remembers him pestering the local carnecería to start carrying beef skirt. “Before that, you couldn’t get it here,” she says. “Your dad was the one.” It seems like a real stretch that my dad single-handedly introduced fajitas to my hometown. But it was around that time, in the 1970s, that fajitas started making their way to Texas’ larger cities.

The word “fajita” was first recognized by the Oxford English Dictionary in 1971.

According to a 2005 article in the Austin Chronicle, fajitas started cropping up at rodeos and fairs around 1969. That was the year Juan Antonio “Sonny” Falcon, an Austin meat market manager from the Rio Grande Valley, set up a concession booth selling fajitas at the Diez y Seis Fiesta in Kyle. “Dad would play around with different cuts of meat and, of course, he knew about skirt steak growing up in South Texas,” says Robert Falcon, the son of the late “Fajita King.” “He really liked the cut of beef and how it grilled.”

By the 1970s, another restaurateur from the RGV, the late Maria Ninfa “Mama” Ramirez Laurenzo, had introduced fajitas to Houston. Opened in 1973, Ninfa’s became a hit, serving the likes of John Travolta, Jerry Garcia of the Grateful Dead, and Andy Warhol. Today, Ninfa’s is led by executive chef Alex Padilla, whose mother worked as a line cook at the restaurant in the ’80s. “Fajitas then were very underappreciated,” Padilla says. “Mama Ninfa started grilling and chopping them and putting them in the tortillas, calling them tacos al carbon. Now everyone in Houston knows where Ninfa’s is.”

But there’s one woman whose name doesn’t come up as often. A 1993 article in Texas Monthly credits Otila Garza, the leader of the shuttered Round-Up in Pharr in the RGV, with creating the iconic fajita presentation around 1969: After being served queso flameado on a skillet in Mexico, she began serving fajitas on a sizzling platter.

But it wasn’t until the ’80s that fajitas began to gain national popularity. In 1982, the Hyatt opened a hotel in Austin and its chef, George Wiedmann, put fajitas on the menu. They were a hit. Eventually, Hyatt started serving fajitas at its hotel restaurants across the country. A couple years later, Chili’s, which had opened in Dallas in 1975, began serving fajitas at 23 of its locations nationwide. According to a cheeky statement on the company’s website, Chili’s “taught America how to pronounce” fajita.

These days, the term “fajitas” might be used to describe grilled chicken, vegetables, and other cuts of beef. But if you ask Falcon what a fajita is, he’ll tell you it’s simple: outside skirt steak grilled to perfection. The secret, he says, is finding a good butcher, getting the right cut, and never letting the beef grill too long on one side. “That’s what my father would say is a true fajita,” he says.

Padilla grew up attending carne asadas, absorbing the flavors his late mother cooked with. “She was my book,” he says. “She taught me how they used to do things back then.”

He agrees a fajita should be simple and lets the ingredients speak for themselves, seasoning the beef with just salt, pepper, and a little bit of garlic. At Ninfa’s, they cook the pieces of outside skirt steak over an open wood fire, using Texas pecan and red oak. Padilla says what he loves about fajitas is the memories they evoke. “Making fajitas, it’s a fiesta every day,” he says.

In my family, we prep fajitas by marinating the meat in lime juice or beer and grilling over mesquite, a traditional South Texas method. “There is no other wood like it,” says author and RGV native Rubén Degollado. “My dad calls it leña de oro,” he says, meaning golden wood.

Guerra calls carne asadas “muy de rancho”—agrarian, simple, and deeply communal. “Feeding a lot of people all at once is the foundation of a carne asada,” Guerra says. “They are more than outdoor grilling—they are a 360-degree view of the family.”

On New Year’s Eve 2022, I drove from College Station to my brother Sam’s house in rural Ellis County to celebrate a belated Fuentes clan Christmas. We arrived to find both my brothers in the driveway, unloading a pile of freshly cut mesquite wood from my late father’s F-350.

Sam and Robert are now 40-something dads. They took over the role of cooking out for family gatherings in 2015, when my father died. The first few meals were a little wobbly. My brothers cooked and grieved, all of us ate and grieved. Not because they didn’t do it right. Because they did: perfect fajitas and tablitas, perfect chicken and sausage.

I still miss my dad, every time. But my brothers have mastered their own way, cooking for family gatherings together as a team. Some things haven’t changed. When my brothers grill, the air fills with mesquite smoke and weepy, “corner of the bar” accordion jams, Vicente Fernández rancheras—and if it’s December—the George Strait Christmas album. Now there are three family dogs who arrange themselves around the grill, hoping for tidbits. I am asked for tongs, aluminum trays, another beer, and yes, my brothers still dance me around the patio.

The famed fajita can be found all over the United States, but the most authentic place, for me, is in my own backyard. That’s also how Falcon’s father initially intended it: “For customers to come to the store, buy the meat, go home, cook it in the backyard,” he says, “and be the hero for their families.”

Editor’s Note: The recipe we included in this package originally featured a line about using gasoline as a way to light a fire. This was a family recipe meant to convey how the Fuentes family makes their traditional fajitas. It is not advisable to use this method. Use of flammable liquids like gasoline, acetone, or alcohol to light a fire is dangerous. We regret this error. 

A former Cameron County Juvenile Detention Center worker stole about $1.2 million in fajitas from the center over the course of nine years. Known as the “Fajita Bandit,” he was sentenced to 50 years in prison.