From The Daily Mail:

Many accused them of stealing by looking into the windows without permission

‘They wouldn’t tell us too much, but we were peeking into the windows of every kitchen, fascinated by how easy they made it look,’ Connelly told a magazine

While there, they learned the basics by ‘picking the brain of every tortilla lady’

Portland has an appropriation problem.

This week in white nonsense, two white women—Kali Wilgus and Liz “LC” Connely—decided it would be cute to open a food truck after a fateful excursion to Mexico. There’s really nothing special about opening a Mexican restaurant—it’s probably something that happens everyday. But the owners of Kooks Burritos all but admitted in an interview with Willamette Week that they colonized this style of food when they decided to “pick the brains of every tortilla lady there in the worst broken Spanish ever.”

… So let’s recap the story thus far: These two white women went to Mexico, ate tacos, and then decided they would just take what the locals clearly didn’t want to give them. If that wasn’t bad enough, they decided to pack up all their stolen intellectual property and repackage it in one of the few places where such a business could plausibly work: Portland, Oregon. …

Week after week people of color in Portland bear witness to the hijacking of their cultures, and an identifiable pattern of appropriation has been created. Several of the most successful businesses in this town have been birthed as a result of curious white people going to a foreign country, or an international venture, and poaching as many trade secrets, customs, recipes as possible, and then coming back to Portland to claim it as their own and score a tidy profit. Now don’t get me wrong: cultural customs are meant to be shared. However, that’s not what happens in this city.

Because of Portland’s underlying racism, the people who rightly own these traditions and cultures that exist are already treated poorly. These appropriating businesses are erasing and exploiting their already marginalized identities for the purpose of profit and praise.

People of color are nothing more than an afterthought when the white perpetrators of this tradition continue to do this on a regular basis. …

The list titled “White-Owned Appropriative Restaurants in Portland” provides a who’s who of culinary white supremacy.

An introduction to the document begins by saying, “This is NOT about cooking at home or historical influences on cuisines; it’s about profit, ownership, and wealth in a white supremacist culture.” And it ends by letting visitors know, “If you’ve come here in anger, please read at least a couple of these articles before continuing to the list on the next tab below.”

Despite this issue being dismissed by supporters of Kook’s Burritos—while our views were seen as just a bunch of angry minorities attacking innocent white women who only wanted to make tacos—the food cart closed as of late Friday.

While the closing of Kooks Burritos is a victory, it’s a small one and unless we continue to call this out it will happen again.