“Tacos on every corner?” Almost, according to a study

Has it finally happened? Has the nightmare scenario of Marcos Gutierrez, right-wing activist and cofounder of Latinos for Trump, come true? 

Tacos may not be on every corner just yet, but according to a report released by Pew Research, about 1 in 10 restaurants in the country serve Mexican food. 

About 22% of all the restaurants nationwide serving Mexican food are considered fast food restaurants and 12% sell tacos, 8% are food trucks or carts and last but not least,  6% have “Tex-Mex” food. 

The data that Pew Research Center analyzed from SafeGraph indicates that there are Mexican restaurants in 85% of counties in the nation. That’s not just in California, although California takes the top spot with 22% of all Mexican restaurants, and in second place is Texas with 17%.

It may not be surprising Mexican cuisine is just a food truck away, given that Mexican Americans are the largest group of Latinos in the U.S. with about 37.2 million people who trace their ancestry to the country south of the border according to another Pew report. 

Of all the counties, LA County has the most tacos, burritos and quesadillas, accounting for 30% of Mexican restaurants in California. But surprisingly, Mexican restaurants only share 17% of all restaurants in the golden state. That means California has a lot of taquerias, but also has a lot of other restaurants, like sushi, Thai, and Italian. 

Why are there so many Mexican restaurants? One reason may be affordability. Most of the restaurants are affordable, except for the fittingly 1% of them which have three or four dollar signs on Yelp, like Enrique Olvera’s downtown restaurant Damian. 

So the U.S. may not quite have “tacos on every corner,” but given that 1 out of every 10 restaurants serves Mexican food, you might at least have nachos close by if you travel outside of California.