When Benjamin Galaz was 10 years old, a strange man came to live in the mining town of Nacozari de Garcia in the Mexican state of Sonora.
It was a food vendor named Rolando Mendivil, who was offering a new kind of hot dog that was wrapped in bacon, grilled, wrapped in a baguette-like bolillo roll under a layer of pinto beans, onions, tomatoes, mayonnaise, and salsa, and served with a mild guerro chile.
Galaz loved them and started hanging around the stands after school.
“I was a good customer. I always helped him out. That’s how I learned how to make hot dogs,” Galaz said. He is currently the owner of BK Carne Asada & Hot Dogs, a restaurant in Tucson, Arizona, where he serves up to 1,000 Sonoran hot dogs daily.
When he started his business in 1994, shortly after moving to Tucson, he was one of the first to introduce the hot dog style to the city. The reception was enthusiastic.
“For some customers, it was like an addiction,” he recalls. “Some people ate five or six hot dogs at a time.”
Today, the Sonoran hot dog is a local specialty in Tucson, and its transnational cuisine led to it being named America’s first UNESCO Creative City of Gastronomy in 2015. There are an estimated 200 dogeros selling Sonoran hot dogs in the city, and the Sonoran Hot Dog Trail connects some of the best hot dogs. Hot dog lovers can win prizes by finishing the list.
But the story of the Sonoran hot dog doesn’t begin in Sonora. It begins with immigrants who arrived in the United States centuries ago. They brought with them food that would become not only an all-American favorite, but also the ultimate symbol of this country’s ever-changing ideals of diversity and egalitarianism.
The traditional sausage, which eventually became known as a “hot dog,” arrived in the United States with German-speaking immigrants from Eastern Europe in the 19th century, writes food historian Bruce Craig in his book Man Bites Dog: Hot Dog Culture in America.
“The original peddlers were called ‘Wienerwurst’ men, but by the 1870s they were selling sausages along with German seasonings on the streets in cities across America,” Craig said.
They understood immediately. “This was the first portable handheld food to become popular in America,” Craig said. “It was a reliable, quick and meaty dish that people could eat in public places or on the run.”
For enterprising Americans with plenty of motivation but little cash, selling food on the street was a way to build capital.
“It’s very cheap to participate,” he said. “This is a global phenomenon. How many immigrants are starting life in many countries?”
Soon other immigrant groups began adapting the newly popular food. They flavored their German-style sausages with flavors and sauces derived from their own culinary roots. The Greeks added a fragrant topping of cinnamon and nutmeg. Italians eat it with layers of chopped pickled vegetables known as giardiniera.
The region began to develop its own distinctive style. Craig said New York, which has a large Jewish population, was known for its all-beef hot dogs topped with sauerkraut.
In the 1880s, new direct rail service between New Orleans and Chicago flooded Midwestern cities with chili peppers. By the 1890s, chili was a ubiquitous hot dog topping. “This is a culinary melting pot,” he said.
Americans have always loved hot dogs. But Craig explained that the sausage’s rise in popularity has also caused an ugly backlash.
“We identify others by what they eat,” he said. “When we want to talk about people we think of as ‘savages,’ food often becomes the focus.”
Beginning in the 1840s, jokes, songs, and cartoons spread the unsubstantiated idea that German immigrant butchers stole the cats and dogs of their English-speaking neighbors to make sausages. Craig suspects that the name “hot dog” may have arisen in part from such stories, the darkly chauvinistic suggestion that hot dogs contain actual dog meat. “It’s actually quite upsetting,” he said.
But somewhere along the way, the stigmatized immigrant dish became fully American. By the 1890s, it was commonly used at baseball games, according to the National Hot Dog and Sausage Council.
A hot dog stand where construction workers eat lunch with businessmen in suits has become a visual representation of the country’s democratic aspirations.
“The image of food carts in New York, where people from all walks of life congregate, goes back to the 19th century,” Craig says. “The idea is that even if we don’t have the same income, we have the same values. Eating hot dogs is part of that myth.”
When Crown Princess Louise of Sweden visited then-President Franklin D. Roosevelt in Hyde Park, New York, Eleanor Roosevelt served her a hot dog sprinkled with mustard. The hot dog is what The New York Times called the “national snack” in an article about the diet.
The following year, the Roosevelts again served hot dogs at another Hyde Park picnic for King George VI and Queen Elizabeth. The meal became known as the “Hot Dog Summit,” an effort to assert America’s egalitarian values through food.
Cuisine and innovation across borders
No one knows exactly how hot dogs made their way across the border from the United States to Sonora, a state in northwestern Mexico bordering Arizona and New Mexico. The most common theory is that they arrived with baseball teams and traveling circuses in the mid-20th century.
By the 1970s, beans, onions and salsa were added, and it became a popular late-night snack for students at the University of Sonora in Hermosillo, Mexico, said Maribel Alvarez, an anthropologist at the University of Arizona.
Alex La Pierre, founder of Borderlandia, a travel company that operates on both sides of the Sonora-Arizona border, said the campus remains a pilgrimage site for enthusiasts. La Pierre calls the Sonoran hot dog “the perfect symbol” of life in a region where cultural and culinary influences transcend borders.
“We’re bringing something quintessentially American to Mexico,” he said. “It will be modified and returned to the United States.”
And innovation didn’t stop even when it crossed borders. Tucson’s Sonoran Hot Dog Shop continues to reinvent the genre.
James Beard Award-winning restaurant El Güero Canelo was one of the first to bring this style to Tucson, and now offers a “Sammy” version featuring two bacon-wrapped dogs. At Tucson’s popular El Sinaloense hot dog cart, locals line up for vegetarian Sonoran dogs topped with fatty slices of guero chiles.
Tucson native Mariel Figueroa grew up eating the classic version her mother bought at El Cola Hot Dogs, now part of the Sonora Hot Dog Trail.
But Figueroa got creative when he opened his own hot dog cart in 2019. “We were experimenting and thought, ‘What if we put birria on it?'” he said, referring to the juicy, slow-cooked meat that originated in the Mexican state of Jalisco. “We tried it too and it was delicious.”
Currently, the Sonoran hot dog topped with birria is the most popular order at Figueroa’s Monster Sonora Hot Dog, which now has a brick-and-mortar location. The dogs are wrapped in bright red bread rolls made by a local bakery. This is also innovative.
“The response is always very good and very different,” she said.
And so much is tradition-loving that even Benjamin Galaz of BK Carne Asada & Hot Dogs has tweaked a recipe he learned decades ago in Sonora. He made the buns less sweet and added jalapeño salsa.
Decades after his food truck days, Galaz now operates two hot dog restaurants and is thinking of expanding. He said he is considering opening a store in Cancun, doubling down on the journey Sonoran hot dogs have taken from northern Mexico to the United States.
“I’m excited,” he said. “I’m sure it’s going to be a really big thing.”
