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In a town where you're never quite sure if you're in Mexico, the Old West, a down-home
US city with classic Americana feel or just up another cul-de-sac in Southern California's
endless suburban sprawl, the one thing that seems to unite everyone is a love of good
Mexican food. I'm not just talking about your standard tacos, burritos and chips and salsa.
In this town, I'm looking for mole.
There are moles galore. You've heard of guacamole, but there are red moles, black moles, green
moles, there are moles with namesakes like the famous mole poblano from the town of Puebla.
In Mexico, these are often linked proudly to some place or region - Oaxaca is the "tierra
de los 7 moles" - the land of the 7 moles. But don't forget, we're back up here in San
Diego.
Our story starts a few blocks past this beautiful stretch of architecture at the city's famous
zoo, with this guy. I bring him up for two reasons. One, he's a subject of extreme interest
to some members of my travel party, and two, his historical territory includes much of
Mexico, where he was and even still is a iconic figure for many traditional cultures. Cultures
like the Aztecs. And that's where I show you that we're on this tangent for a reason, besides
showing you fuzzy animals, because, like the Maya and the Zapotecs, Aztec peoples ground
up chiles and other ingredients and cooked them together to form these beautiful, and
they've done this for hundreds and hundreds of years. Don't think that these groups are
all just Pre-Columbian peoples of ancient Mexico, either. The language of the ancient
Aztecs was Classical Nahuatl, and today there are more than a million speakers of modern
Nahuatl.
That brings us to the real stuff: these savory, spicy, complex sauces. (That's what you're
here for, right?) The Aztec word is mōlli. The Spanish added some ingredients to the
mix, and added their language to the mix, too, but sometimes the mixing went both ways.
The Spanish borrowed the word mōlli, pronounced it "mo-le", and that's the way it sounded
when these hearty Mexican sauces made their way to the Southwestern quadrant of these
United States, where a lot of people speak English, at least in some towns on some days.
Thanks to all this history, you can scour San Diego for "mow-layz" in English or "mo-les"
in Spanish, but I don't know how much luck you'll have speaking Nahuatl around here.