I call it SouthWestern food. Being from the SouthWest i was raised on it. I eat SouthWestern food easily 2 times a week, sometimes more. The only thing that makes alot of those good food places Mexican is that the kitchen staff is almost entirely Mexican. Besides the language they speak in those places is Spanish, not Aztec or anything like that. Just be careful when the little buggers with bowl-cuts pop out from the kitchen with blowdarts, than you know that you have problems to worry about. Eat what tastes good to you. :)   PS: Homemade Mexican food or White-made Mexican food is always better tasting. I find it just tastes cleaner and not so thrown together.  PSS: I believe there are alot of things that are declared Mexican that are in fact heavily Texan influenced (Another poster made mention of that). Even Margaritas were created in Texas. Yeah, one of these off the top of my head is Banda music. You know..it's that Mexican Polka sounding stuff that the beaners love to blast through the barrio at all hours of the night. The reason it sounds like Polka, is because...it is lol. The Mexicans picked up polka music from German Texans and mexicanized it a bit.       Its roots come from the overlapping of Mexican music with German polka music. At the time, many German-Americans lived in southern Texas. This greatly influenced northern Mexican music. Immigrants from northern Mexico brought the music to the United States. Initially popular in the southwest  United States , primarily in  Texas ,  California  and  Arizona , banda has followed the movement of Mexican immigrants into the  Midwest United States  and the rest of the country.