Jen Rose Smith, CNN
(CNN) — When Benjamin Galaz was 10 years old, a stranger arrived in Nacozari de García, a mining town in the Mexican state of Sonora where he lived.
It was a food vendor named Rolando Mendivil, who was serving a new kind of hot dog: bacon-wrapped, grilled and served in a baguette-like bolillo roll under a layer of pinto beans, onions, tomatoes, mayonnaise and salsa, with mild güero chiles on the side.
Galaz loved them, and started hanging around the stand after school.
“I was a good customer, I was always helping him — that’s how I learned how to make them,” said Galaz, now the owner of the Tucson, Arizona, restaurant BK Carne Asada & Hot Dogs, where he serves up to 1,000 of the “Sonoran hot dogs” daily.
When he started the business in 1994, shortly after moving to Tucson, he was among the first to introduce the hot dog style to the city. The reception was enthusiastic.
“It was kind of like an addiction for some customers,” he recalled. “There were people eating five, six hot dogs at a time.”
Today, the Sonoran hot dog is a local institution in Tucson, whose border-straddling cuisine helped make it America’s first UNESCO Creative City of Gastronomy in 2015. The city has an estimated 200 dogueros selling Sonoran hot dogs, and a Sonoran Hot Dog Trail that links up some of the best; hot dog lovers can earn prizes by eating their way through the list.
But the story of the Sonoran hot dog doesn’t start in Sonora. It begins with immigrants who arrived in the United States centuries ago — bringing with them a food that would become an all-American favorite, but also the ultimate symbol of the country’s ever-changing diversity and egalitarian ideals.
‘It’s this culinary melting pot’
The traditional sausages that would eventually become known as “hot dogs” came to the United States during the 19th century with German-speaking immigrants from eastern Europe, writes food historian Bruce Kraig in his book, “Man Bites Dog: Hot Dog Culture in America.”
“The original vendors were called ‘wienerwurst’ men, and by the 1870s, in American cities all across the country, they’re selling sausages on the street with German condiments,” said Kraig.
They caught on swiftly. “It’s the first portable, handheld food that became popular in America,” Kraig said. “It was this go-to, quick meaty dish that people could eat in public places and on the run.”
For enterprising new Americans with lots of motivation and little cash, selling food on the street was a way to build capital.
“You can get into it really cheaply,” he said. “It’s a worldwide phenomenon — how many immigrants get their start in lots of countries.”
Soon, other immigrant groups began to remix the newly popular food. They riffed on the German-style sausages using flavors and sauces from their own culinary roots. Greeks added toppings that were aromatic with cinnamon and nutmeg; Italians layered on chopped, pickled vegetables known as giardiniera.
Regions began to develop their own signature style. With its huge Jewish population, New York was known for all-beef hot dogs topped with sauerkraut, Kraig said.
In the 1880s, newly opened direct rail service between New Orleans and Chicago flooded the midwestern city with hot peppers; by the 1890s, chiles were a ubiquitous hot dog topping there. “It’s this culinary melting pot,” he said.
From xenophobia to all-American food
Americans loved hot dogs from the start. Yet Kraig explained that the sausages’ growing popularity also sparked an ugly backlash.
“We identify other people by what they eat,” he said. “If we want to talk about people we think of as ‘savages’ … it’s often centered on food.”
Starting in the 1840s, jokes, songs and cartoons spread the baseless idea that German immigrant butchers were stealing their English-speaking neighbors’ cats and dogs to make into sausages. Kraig believes that the name “hot dog” may have partly arisen from such stories — a dark and xenophobic suggestion that hot dogs contained actual dog meat. “It’s actually pretty revolting,” he said.
But somewhere along the way, a stigmatized immigrant food became an all-American one. By the 1890s they were common at baseball games, according to the National Hot Dog and Sausage Council.
A hot dog stand, where construction workers might eat lunch alongside businessmen in suits, became a visual shorthand for the country’s democratic aspirations.
“The image of the New York food cart with people of all walks of life goes back to the 19th century,” Kraig said. “It’s this idea that even though we may not have the same income, we have the same values. Eating hot dogs is part of that mythos.”
When Crown Princess Louise of Sweden visited then-President Franklin D. Roosevelt in Hyde Park, New York, Eleanor Roosevelt served her mustard-slathered hot dogs — what The New York Times called the “national snack” in an article about the meal.
The next year, at another Hyde Park picnic with Britain’s King George VI and Queen Elizabeth, the Roosevelts again served hot dogs — the meal became known as the “hot dog summit,” an assertion of America’s egalitarian values through food.
Border-crossing cuisine and innovation
No one knows exactly how hot dogs crossed the border from the United States to Sonora, the state in northwestern Mexico that borders Arizona and New Mexico. The most popular theories hold that they came in the mid-20th century with baseball teams or traveling circuses.
By the 1970s — and with the addition of beans, onions and salsas — they were a popular late-night snack for students at the University of Sonora in Hermosillo, Mexico, according to University of Arizona anthropologist Maribel Alvarez.
The campus is still a pilgrimage place for aficionados, said Alex La Pierre, founder of Borderlandia, a tour company that operates on both sides of the Sonora–Arizona border. La Pierre calls the Sonoran hot dog the “perfect symbol” of life in the region, where cultural and culinary influences ricochet back and forth across the international boundary.
“You take something quintessentially American, [and] bring it to Mexico,” he said. “It receives a makeover and then it returns to the US.”
And the innovation didn’t stop when it crossed the border; Sonoran hot dog vendors in Tucson are still reinventing the genre.
El Güero Canelo, a James Beard Award–winning restaurant that was among the first to bring the style to Tucson, now serves a “Sammy” version loaded with two bacon-wrapped dogs. At Tucson’s beloved El Sinaloense Hot Dog Cart, locals line up for vegetarian Sonoran dogs covered in fat slices of güero chile.
Tucson native Mariel Figueroa grew up eating the classic version, which her mom picked up from El Kora Hot Dogs, now a stop on the Sonoran Hot Dog Trail.
But Figueroa got creative when she opened a hot dog cart of her own in 2019. “We were experimenting and thought, ‘Why not throw birria on it?’” she recalled, referring to the juicy, slow-cooked meat that originates in Mexico’s Jalisco state. “We tried it and it was delicious.”
Today, Sonoran hot dogs topped with birria are the most popular order at Figueroa’s Monster Sonoran Hot Dogs, which now has a brick-and-mortar location. The dogs are nestled in bright red bread rolls — another innovation — that are crafted by a local bakery.
“The reaction is always that it’s very good, and very different,” she said.
And for all his love of tradition, even Benjamin Galaz of BK Carne Asada & Hot Dogs tweaked the recipe he learned decades ago in Sonora. He dialed back the bun’s sweetness and added jalapeño salsa.
His food truck days decades behind him, Galaz now oversees two hot dog restaurants, and he’s thinking of expanding even further. He’s considering opening a place in Cancun, he said, doubling back on the journey that Sonoran hot dogs took from northern Mexico to the United States.
“I’m excited,” he said. “I’m pretty sure it’s going to be something really big.”
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