De tu casa a la mía, Cielito lindo, no hay más que un paso

"Tortilla isn't a word that sounds like it lives anywhere near loss," writes Lliana Rocha in Ode, one of the most painfully beautiful pieces of writing about Mexico that I have ever read. I had Maria and her mother to bring me up when I lived there. I will miss them forever.

"I was snoozing in the backseat. The noise woke me up. I asked what it was. "They're crabs," writes Carmen Boullosa.

Mais has been cultivated in Mexico for more than 8000 years and there are over 60 native species of corn but did you know that a lot of the countries' tortillas are made using maseca, which is itself often made from American corn? This is so perverse. In Modern Farmer, Leila Ashtari looks at the movement to save the tortilla.

I love Gustavo Arrellano's writing and in the New Yorker, he takes on the flour tortilla, often seen as Tex Mex when in fact it is a staple across parts of Northern Mexico. I lived in Saltillo, around 160 miles from the American border and we ate flour tortillas every day. Yes, they are not indigenous (but neither are pork and cheese, as Arellano points out) but I was taught to make them Sonoran style and although I adore corn tortillas, I am heafed to leafy, flaky tortillas made from flour, cold water, and back lard as fine and thin as a babies caul. If you make them yourself, remember to griddle them on the comal until the brown speckled heat bubbles are as large and bulging as the eye of an octopus. Here's a short film.

More on Tamales- and Trump. We have to remember that his border strategy is not solely about the dissolution of ties between countries. It is about the deliberate weakening of family ties and this is a lynchpin of his domestic and international policies. A weakened family cannot fight back.

Cristina Potter's Mexico Cooks! is an invaluable source. Cristina runs food tours and when I visit Mexico again, I'm definitely going on one.

This Sabor podcast is one of my favourites. Rocio Carvajal's accent is so transporting, especially the way she says 'tommy' ("tummy") which I used to say, and "loff" for 'love' (I still slip up sometimes!). She talks about Mexican food as a "comprehensive cultural model" and frames this within the literary tradition of Laura Esquivel's 'Like Water For Chocolate'.

Anthony Bourdain just gets it.