Maria's Tacos

"Did you have the breakfast tacos? Oh, you gotta have the breakfast tacos in Austin. Austin is so cool isnt it? The tacos are lit." Alright I may have gotten the last turn of phrase wrong but you get what I'm saying. I'd guess Maria's had a lot to do with that cultural phenomena or nonsense, whatever you want to call it. When I lived in that neck of South Austin I went there a few times. I found the tacos mediocre and it was a little run down. And the beer sucked. But they had live music and a cool vibe if youre got a bit of a hippy and counter culture fool in you like me. Maria's used to have that corner pretty much by herself. The city made the developer who built all the other shit around Maria's pay to move and preserve it. That's back when the city leadership still tried to make it look like Austin was weird. Its not unique or special and it never was. It was all a gimmick by boosters that eventually led to the present which is a corporate city with bourgeois citizens who like it and go for it and vote for it. Some old timers wanted to preserve the small city elements of Austin which are cool. Family neighborhoods and good local schools, funky small businesses, a public culture of coming together as a community, ethnic neighborhoods with their own subculture. or they said so but they've been pushed out, left, or got bought by the liberal establishment who gives them crumbs in return for acquiescing to the destruction of this city. Let me repeat, Austin is not cool.