Back when burritos were called tacos

Daughter Berney called Saturday, while I was driving home from Hot Desert Night, to report on the packing for her family's trip back to the Northwest.

"We're going to the store to get a bunch of tortillas and some chorizo so we can make burritos," she said.

Did you have to tell me that? I protested.

"Whaaaaaaat?" she responded.

I'm jealous, I said.

I flashed back to the 1950s, when my siblings and I ate burritos every day. We called them tacos.

They were mom's fluffy out-of-this-world tasty homemade flour tortillas wrapped around fried spuds and chorizo, scrambled eggs and chorizo, plain old fried spuds and refried beans.

Sometimes, mom threw in a dessert of buttered soft flour tortillas with jelly.

Refried beans were my favorites, but it was all good, especially at 7:00 in the morning, alongside other farm working families, after about three hours of spud picking.

We still harvested potatoes by hand in the 1950s. Only my little brother David didn't have that experience. He was born in '57. Digger-loaders took over about 1960.

Seven of us - Della, Fran, Teresa, myself, Jenny, Richard and Bob - lived to tell the stories. Except for our late sister Della, we still wake up at around 3:30 every morning.

"Sleep is overrated," Dad would say when we complained about the early mornings.

But there was justice. Mom and Dad rose at 2:30 to make breakfast and lunch.

We started to pick spuds as soon as we could see a single one. In July that was about 4 a.m.

At 7 a.m. the picking was halted, and all of the families gathered at the edge of the field. Moms brought out big cardboard boxes filled with enough soft flour tortilla tacos for an army. Sitting in cars, sitting on piles of gunny sacks or sitting on the ground picnic style, we replaced expended energy.

Fifteen or 20 minutes later we were back to picking. We stopped again at around 11 a.m. so the exposed potatoes would not burn in the sun. And we ate our lunch from the same boxes. Then it was off to the cucumber fields.

One day our Granger High School Spanish teacher, Thelma Masini, Italian by heritage, told us we were going to have a taco experience. The Hispanic kids chuckled. Every day was a taco experience for us.

We were nearly shocked when she brought out packages of corn tortillas. We were not used to them. She insisted these were truly tacos, that this was how real Mexicans ate.

We protested. What were we?

But we ate the corn tortilla tacos, and they weren't bad.

I've never heard, officially, how it came to be that people on one side of the U.S.-Mexico border, who were essentially the same as people on the other side, came to eat differently.

My guess is that corn was not as available as a human food commodity in the U.S. as in Mexico when northern Mexico became the southwestern U.S. Mexicans on this side of the border adapted.

And if that's not true, I really don't care. After Berney's remark, I had to go find me a soft flour tortilla taco.

Burrito, to you.