Little Burros, Good to Eat

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Good morning. This is Quincy Orhai in Bozeman, Montana.

Hi, Quincy, in Bozeman.

Welcome, Quincy. What can we do for you?

This came up the other night, and we were talking about how strange the word burrito is.

In America, it almost always means a little packet of some kind of often spicy food wrapped up in a flour tortilla.

But of course, the word comes from the word burro, which is a jackass or a donkey.

So how did we get there?

How did we get there from here?

Yeah, that’s a good question.

Let’s see.

So why do we call the food that?

Why do we call it a little burro?

Yeah, burrito.

Burrito, yeah, because that ito suffix is a diminutive,

Which means that when you tack it on, whatever word you tack it on to,

You’re indicating that now it’s a new word that’s indicated as a little smaller

Or maybe cuter or more adorable.

Right.

In Spanish, burro obviously means the animal.

But as a carpenter, I happen to know that burro is also, at least in Mexico,

The word that’s used for sawhorses.

Well, there are a couple different theories, stories,

About why we call the food burrito burrito.

And one of the basic ones is that the idea that this big tortilla, this flour tortilla, looks a bit like a blanket.

And you fill it full of things just like you would fill the back of a burrito.

So it looks kind of like the blanket that you would throw on the back of a burro before you loaded it up and it carted your stuff off for you.

Another idea is that the burrito is, once it’s full, it’s bulging.

Sometimes when you put stuff on the back of a burrow, you tie it up.

You tie the blanket up or you tie the canvas up and it bulges.

And a burrito that’s really loaded down with the fillings of beans and meat or whatever just bulges in the same way.

But there’s another story that I found in the Dictionary of Chicano Folklore that talks about burros on the trail with vaqueros, which are the Spanish word for cowboys, are kind of the regular companions of horses.

And they bring burros along as pack animals, but they also kind of calm the horses at night, you know, when there are coyotes around and so forth.

And vaqueros on the trail would bring burritos because they’re easy.

They travel easily.

You put a little cheese, a little beans, you wrap them up, and they keep all day long.

And they were so common.

They were kind of like the common companions to the vaqueros in the same way that burros were the common companions to the horses.

So they were kind of like little burros to the vaqueros, burritos.

And I don’t know if there’s anything to that, but that’s one story that they told.

Yeah, we find burrito as a similar food dish mentioned in a dictionary of Mexicanism as far back as 1895 in Guanajuato and in Mexico City itself.

And it pops up again and again in the 20s and 30s and 40s here and there, but usually in the northern states of Mexico and in the southwest of the United States.

But anyway, there’s some other theories that we don’t need to share here, but basically that’s why we think that they’re called burritos.

Wow, that’s pretty amazing.

So it actually has quite a long history.

Absolutely.

I think it’s time to go make some chilaquiles.

No, that’s making me hungry.

Thank you for your call, q Quincy.

Yeah, good luck on the show.

All right, take care.

Bye-bye.

Thank you.

Bye.