Hermosillo

I drove through Hermosillo twice before I actually stopped. The first time I was on my way to the coast and the city looked, from the bypass road, like a flat expanse of commercial sprawl — OXXO convenience stores, car dealerships, the mid-sized Mexican city infrastructure that is functional and not particularly welcoming from a moving vehicle. The second time I was on my way back from Bahía de Kino and told myself I’d stop next time. The third time I stopped, found a room in the Zona Centro, and spent three days and came away with revised opinions about several things.

Hermosillo is a ranching city. This is the key fact that organizes everything else. Sonora is cattle country — the northern Mexican breed of ranching, where the animals roam large private holdings in the scrub desert and the beef is consumed with a regional specificity that Sonorans defend against the rest of Mexico with the particular intensity of people who know they’re right. The carne asada here is not the same animal as the carne asada of Guadalajara or Oaxaca. The technique, the cut, the quality of the animal, the relationship between the grilled beef and the flour tortilla — flour, not corn, which is the northern preference — all of it is different.

The Best Taco I’ve Eaten in Four Years

I am going to be specific about this. It was a street cart on a side street off Boulevard Rodríguez, the kind of setup that is a modified pickup truck with a gas grill bolted to the back and a woman doing four things at once. It was eleven at night in March, which in Hermosillo is about twenty-two degrees and pleasant.

I ordered two tacos de carne asada. They arrived on flour tortillas that had been made that day — not that morning, that day, meaning they were still soft at the edges rather than the slightly stiffened tortillas of a morning’s production — with the beef already inside, a handful of fresh pico de gallo, a slice of avocado, and a lime. The grilling was high-heat and fast, the beef slightly charred at the edges and pink in the center, which is not the style everywhere but is the Sonoran style and requires good beef to work.

I stood at the cart and ate both tacos and immediately ordered another two. The woman who made them accepted this without comment, which I respect. By the time I left I had eaten five tacos. I cannot account for the fifth except to say that it seemed necessary at the time.

In France we have a version of this instinct toward perfect simplicity in protein — the steak frites at a brasserie that is excellent for reasons that are almost impossible to articulate without embarrassing the chef. The carne asada taco at its best works the same way. The quality of the ingredients is everything and the preparation is almost nothing, and the combination is better than any of its parts should be able to produce.

Zona Centro and Proyecto Industrial

During the day, the Zona Centro rewards walking. The historic center is not particularly dramatic — Hermosillo was never a colonial showpiece, and the architecture is utilitarian rather than spectacular — but the scale is human and the streets are lined with a mix of buildings from different eras: colonial vernacular, porfiriato-era civic architecture, mid-century modernist commercial buildings that are aging into something interesting. The contemporary murals on several buildings in the Zona Centro are good — better than tourist murals, which is to say they seem to have been made by people who had something to say rather than an image to produce for the Instagram aesthetic.

The Proyecto Industrial quarter, a former industrial zone that has been converted into galleries and studios and workshop spaces, is smaller and less polished than Mexico City’s equivalents, but there’s a gallery district emerging here around the Universidad de Sonora (UNISON) cultural infrastructure that has real energy. The university’s cultural center runs programming — exhibitions, cinema, music — that gives the city a cultural metabolism uncommon in a city of this type.

The Heat

I need to say something about the summer, which I did not experience but which is a presence in every conversation in Hermosillo. July temperatures of 45°C are not unusual. 50°C has been recorded. People who live here describe the summer with a kind of dark humor — the hottest city in Mexico, maybe in North America, operating normally because what else are you going to do. The orange groves on the city’s outskirts, which produce a significant percentage of Mexico’s orange crop, somehow survive this. The people somehow survive this.

Visit between November and March, when the city is operating at something resembling a comfortable temperature and the light in the evenings is golden and the street carts are out and Hermosillo is exactly what it is: a functioning northern Mexican city that didn’t design itself for tourism and doesn’t particularly need to, and which contains, on certain streets at certain times of night, the best taco you have eaten in four years.