No single person is credited with inventing tacos; they developed over time in Mexico from indigenous people using corn tortillas as edible “plates” and wraps for fillings like fish and meats, long before detailed written records.

Early taco origins

Anthropological and historical evidence suggests that people in central Mexico were eating something very much like tacos—corn tortillas folded around fillings—before the Spanish arrived, so the dish predates any named “inventor.” Some historians think early versions were common among Indigenous communities around the lakes in the Valley of Mexico, where tortillas were filled with small fish.

The “taco” name and miners

A common theory is that the word “taco” as a food term is linked to Mexican silver miners in the 18th century, who used the word “taco” for paper-wrapped gunpowder charges and also ate portable tortilla-and-filling meals called “tacos de minero” (miner’s tacos). This connects the modern name to working- class miners, but again not to any specific individual.

Modern and hard-shell tacos

Modern street-style tacos with a wide variety of fillings became especially visible in Mexican cities in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, spreading with urbanization and street vendors. The hard U-shaped taco shell used in much fast food today appears to have been developed and patented by Mexican- American restaurateurs in the 1940s, then popularized nationally in the United States by chains like Taco Bell, but even here there is no single uncontested inventor.