Spicing things up at El Hefe. Benjamin Leatherman
'Sex Mex' Is Trendy, but Using Sex to Sell Tacos Is Hardly New
PATRICIA ESCÁRCEGA | FEBRUARY 2, 2018 | 7:00AM
On a recent Friday night, throngs of 20-somethings were packed inside El Hefe, the “super macho taquería” in downtown Scottsdale that’s probably best known for two things: kiddie-pool-size adult beverages called Beergaritas, and the “Hefe Girls,” the restaurant’s crew of young, scantily clad female servers and bartenders, who regularly take turns dancing on the bar, Coyote Ugly-style.
On this night, the Beergaritas were flowing, the wordless thump of EDM vibrated in the air, and as promised, a couple of Hefe Girls danced on the bar. One of the women, gyrating in hot pants and a low-cut tank top, poured a waterfall of tequila, straight from the bottle, into the gaping mouth of a young bearded dude. His friends slapped him on the back in approval, and his face took on the glow of someone who had just taken communion.
El Hefe, especially on nights like these, is a conspicuous example of a certain type of modern Mexican restaurant: loud, style-conscious, and not shy about using sex appeal to sell tacos and tequila.
“Hmmm, how can we describe El Hefe?” the restaurant’s website reads. “Think Dia de Los Muertos — but with style (and great-looking servers!)”
In late January, Scottsdale’s nightlife district welcomed another stylish and “sexy” Mexican restaurant to the neighborhood: Casa Amigos, from Scottsdale-based Evening Entertainment Group, described in a recent press release as “a spicy, sexy Mexican restaurant.”
Evening Entertainment Group declined to be interviewed for this piece, providing instead a short written statement about the group’s design philosophy and commitment to “top-notch” food and drink. Riot Hospitality Group, who owns El Hefe, also declined to be interviewed.
El Hefe and Casa Amigos aren’t the only restaurants putting “sexy” at the center of their brand, of course. Hooters brought the “breastaurant” into the American dining mainstream in the 1980s and 1990s. Similar concepts have followed suit, replicating the boobs-and-booze formula to the tune of more than $1 billion in annual sales, according to several reports.
But there’s also a whole subgenre of these kinds of restaurants — call them “Sex Mex,” if you want — that appears to be growing. There’s the Florida restaurant that describes its menu as “sexy Mexican food and craft cocktails.” The San Antonio Mexican restaurant where the all-female wait staff wear lingerie and swimwear. The Harlem taco shop, Sexy Taco/Dirty Cash, whose logo features a pinup model straddling a hard shell taco with one hand while balancing a margarita in the other.
All of which begs the question: Is Sex Mex a new trend in Mexican dining? More to the point, should it be?
Art at Casa Amigos in Scottsdale. Benjamin Leatherman
“Sexy, spicy — those are the kinds of words that have historically been used to stereotype Latinas,” says Dr. Meredith Abarca, an English professor at the University of Texas at El Paso.
Abarca has written extensively about the intersection of class, gender, and Mexican foodways. She’s not sure what to think about a restaurant that markets itself as “sexy” and “spicy.”
“Spicy, in the context of chiles and Mexican food history, that makes sense to me,” she says. “But when you add the word sexy, it raises a lot of questions.”
“The first thing that comes to mind is ‘hot tamale.’ The old stereotype of Latinas as hot, sizzling things.”
Hot tamale. Spicy señorita. The words invoke a dark-haired, red-lipped, hypersexual Latina woman. It’s one of the oldest and most persistent Latina stereotypes in the book.
Mexican film actress Lupe Velez was sometimes marketed as “The Hot Pepper."Courtesy of Cine Mundial
Spicy is what Mexican film actress Lupe Velez, star of the “Mexican spitfire” silent film series, was called in turn-of-the-century Hollywood (Velez was sometimes marketed as “The Hot Pepper”). Spicy is “exotic” Carmen Miranda donning blood-red lipstick, a sequined bra, and pineapple headdress. Spicy is Sofía Vergara playing an archetypically loud, sexy Latina bombshell, well into the 21st century on ABC’s Modern Family.
Spicy suggests someone who is alluring, but also tempestuous and childlike. To be spicy is to be a person who cannot be taken entirely seriously, and possibly shouldn’t be trusted.
It might seem like a harmless, even flattering, cliché. But tell that to Josefa Loaiza, the Gold Rush-era Californian with the dubious distinction of being what many historians believe is the only woman to be lynched and hanged in the state of California. Her crime: stabbing a man who broke into her house. Reports from the era describe her as a hot-blooded beauty. From her saga, it’s easy to imagine the terrible ways that “spicy” and “hot-blooded” can be transmuted into “crazy” — or “dangerous.”
Gustavo Arellano Larry D. Moore
How does the “spicy Latina” trope intersect with the food world, though? I asked Gustavo Arellano, whose book Taco USA: How Mexican Food Conquered America charts the intriguing trajectory of Mexican cooking in the U.S.
Arellano, famous for gleefully imploding racist stereotypes in his popular long-running syndicated column “Ask a Mexican,” says that the “spicy Latina” is a very old trope that played a big part in popularizing Mexican food in the U.S.
“It goes back all the way to the first famous Mexican restaurateurs, when they were known as chili queens in San Antonio,” he says.
Arellano devotes a chapter in his book to the story of the chili queens. These were the Mexican female cooks who set up makeshift restaurants at night in the plazas of 19th-century San Antonio. The food — which included chile con carne and tamales dished out of big pots placed over open fires — attracted curious tourists drawn to the “exotic” local dishes.
They were drawn not only by the novelty of the food, but by the “coquettish señoritas” serving it, which is how writer O. Henry describes the women in his short story “The Enchanted Kiss.”
“They were literally the first spicy señoritas,” says Arellano. “And whether they did it purposely or not, a lot of their appeal was their sex appeal.”
The chili queens may have faded from the plazas of San Antonio decades ago, but the idea of “coquettish señoritas” lives on to this day.
Before there were overtly sexual breastaurants, Mexican restaurants were adept at highlighting female sexuality, albeit in slightly more subtle ways than today’s Hefe Girls.
Like other “ethnic” cuisines angling for the American mainstream, Mexican restaurants in the latter half of the 20th century often played up the romance of exoticism, in this case the romance of “Old Mexico.” Portraying Mexican women in a certain light was a big part of that romantic image.
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