“It tasted pretty much like you would imagine a tortilla in a can would taste,” said Tony Ortega, the editor of The Village Voice, who grew up in Los Angeles and recalls making enchiladas with canned tortillas, refried beans and salsa in a Columbia dorm in 1982. “There wasn’t even a Taco Bell in New York City back then, and I was desperate.”

There are a few happy endings for Mexican cooks in “Taco USA”: one is Mariano Martinez, the Dallas restaurant owner who invented the frozen-margarita machine. His original contraption, adapted from a used soft-serve ice cream machine, is now among the holdings of the Smithsonian Museum of American History. Without it, Mr. Arellano said, the mass success of restaurant chains like Chipotle, Chili’s, and El Torito would never have been possible. (Margaritas are often the most profitable menu item in Mexican restaurants; the food is expected to be inexpensive.)

Mr. Arellano is far from a Mexican-food purist. (“You would have to go back to before the Spanish conquest: no carnitas, no cheese, no beef, no thank you.”) Some of his favorite Mexican-American foods are the Sonora dogs found in Arizona, bacon-wrapped hot dogs stuffed into soft bolillo rolls with salsa, pinto beans and mustard; the breakfast burritos stuffed with Tater Tots served at a chain called Taco John’s that he tried in Brookings, S.D.; and the Mexican hamburger at Chubby’s in Denver, a hamburger patty pressed into a burrito with beans and crisp pork rinds, then drowned with green chile sauce, which he anoints the single greatest Mexican dish in the United States. That burger/burrito hybrid is, he said, “the dish that best personifies the Mexican-American experience, a monument to mestizaje.”

But he is wary of the many non-Mexicans who have anointed themselves as ambassadors for Mexican food in the United States, from Bertha Haffner-Ginger (who taught cooking classes at The Los Angeles Times in the early 20th century and wrote an influential and confusing cookbook called “California Mexican-Spanish Cook Book”) to more modern arbiters of taste like the British expatriate Diana Kennedy and the Chicago chef Rick Bayless.

For Mr. Arellano, non-Mexicans who glorify “authentic” Mexican cuisine, even with respectful intent, are engaging in a kind of xenophobia. “It’s a different way of keeping Mexican food separate, out of the American mainstream,” said Mr. Arellano, who calls Mexican-food purists “Baylessistas.” (Mr. Bayless declined to be interviewed for this article.)

Mr. Arellano, 33, has lived in Orange County his whole life, remaining inside what he calls the “Mexican bubble” through high school, eating mainly fast food and his mother’s cooking. His parents were born in Zacatecas, in the mountainous center of Mexico, where potatoes, beans, beef and cheese are plentiful; chiles rellenos, stuffed with aged cheese nicknamed queso de pata (foot cheese) are a family favorite.