Walk into any taquería in Mexico City after dark and you will see it: a glowing, rust-red cone of pork turning slowly next to a vertical flame, a pineapple perched on top. Al pastor feels like the most Mexican food imaginable. But its roots are in the eastern Mediterranean.
From the Levant to Puebla
Between the late 1800s and the 1930s, thousands of immigrants from Lebanon and the wider Levant, then part of the Ottoman Empire, came to Mexico. Many settled in Puebla, Veracruz, the Yucatán and Mexico City, working as merchants and building communities that endure today. They brought their food, including shawarma: layered, seasoned meat, usually lamb, roasted on a vertical spit and sliced thin.
The birth of tacos árabes
In Puebla, around the 1930s, Lebanese-Mexican cooks began selling spit-roasted meat in a form their neighbors understood: the taco. These tacos árabes (“Arab tacos”) used marinated pork instead of lamb, wrapped not in corn tortillas but in pan árabe, a thin, pita-like flatbread. They are still a Puebla specialty, often served with a chipotle salsa and a squeeze of lime.
Al pastor is what happens when a shawarma spit meets a Mexican pantry.
Every food historian, more or less
Mexico City makes it red
The next leap happened in Mexico City, by most accounts in the 1960s. Second-generation Lebanese-Mexicans and local taqueros swapped the Middle Eastern spice mix for a Mexican adobo of dried chiles, achiote and vinegar, which gives the meat its signature color. The pork went into small corn tortillas, and the name became al pastor, “shepherd style,” a nod to the lamb origins. Several Mexico City taquerías claim to have invented it; El Tizoncito, which dates its version to 1966, is one of the best-known claimants. The trompo-top pineapple became standard somewhere along the way; nobody agrees exactly when.
A family tree of spits
| Dish | Place | Meat | Wrapper |
|---|---|---|---|
| Shawarma | Levant | Lamb, chicken or beef | Pita |
| Tacos árabes | Puebla | Pork | Pan árabe |
| Al pastor | Mexico City | Pork in chile adobo | Corn tortilla |
Shawarma itself descends from the Turkish döner kebab, and the same vertical spit gave Greece the gyro. Al pastor is its most colorful cousin. Want to cook it? Try our al pastor at home recipe.