To understand the true geography of the American Southwest, don’t just look at a standard cartographical map. Look at a casing — specifically, the translucent skin of a sausage that, until recently, had been relegated to the dusty archives of memory and the fading stories of elders in the Tucson barrios.
Inside this casing lies a sensory collision of spices and flavors, a perfect metaphor for the cultural third space of the Sonoran Desert. It is the fermented, deep-plum tang of Chinese red wine meeting the searing, sun-bright heat of the chiltepin — the mother of all chilies that grows wild in the Arizona brush.
This is the Chinese chorizo, a 19th-century staple born of necessity, currently being revived to map out a unique cultural history.
The alchemy of necessity
Tucson is famously a UNESCO City of Gastronomy, a title largely earned through its Mexican heritage and 4,000 years of agricultural history. But for a century, there was another lifeblood in the city’s barrios: the Chinese-run grocery store. From the late 1880s to the 1970s, more than 100 of these markets populated the city.
They weren’t there by accident. The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 had barred Chinese immigrants from most professions, so they funneled into the merchant class as a way to make a living. Forbidden from owning land in many areas, these families opened shops in predominantly Mexican neighborhoods.
“The Chinese grocers that settled here in Tucson were trying to survive,” explains Feng-Feng Yeh, the chef and artist behind the Chinese Chorizo Project. “They opened these stores within predominantly Mexican neighborhoods. Because they wanted to cater to their neighborhoods, they made chorizo. They made it out of end cuts, scraps of meat, and revived it with Mexican spices, chiles, vinegars and red wines. And it turned into something desirable.”
Not quite Chinese, not quite Mexican, it was a hybrid born of shared proximity and economic marginalization. These grocers didn’t just sell food; they provided the neighborhood’s social safety net. On South Meyer Street in downtown Tucson, a concentration of these markets offered a system of mutual aid that feels radical by today’s standards: the grocery tab.
“You got your groceries at one store, you put it on your tab,” Yeh says. “You got your groceries at another store another day, and you put it on your tab. It was this beautiful kind of mutual aid component that I think is lacking today.”
The Chinese chorizo was an ever-changing recipe, shifting in spice level depending on what was on hand, but always representing the immigrant story — taking the little of what you have and turning it into something highly desirable.
Discovering the story
The revival of this sausage is as much a story of personal reclamation as it is a culinary one. Three years ago, Yeh was living a different life. After growing up in Tucson and feeling “very alienated,” she spent 20 years in New York City, building a successful career in luxury fashion.
The pandemic triggered what she calls “a midlife crisis” that brought her back to her parents’ home in Tucson. While doom-scrolling late at night, she stumbled upon an artist grant calling for community-driven projects. Looking for a way to reconnect with her city, she dove into the archives of the Tucson Chinese Cultural Center.
There, she found a video of former grocers discussing the chorizo. “I was fascinated that I never learned this story growing up in Tucson,” she says. “And I was wondering, why didn’t I learn this? I couldn’t find the chorizo anywhere because the stores had become obsolete.”
Yeh realized that the story of the Chinese chorizo was her story and also the mixed-race, hyphenated identity of the Southwest. She proposed a project that was part public art, part festival.
The project has evolved into a month-long event every October, where chefs across Arizona are given the chorizo to interpret with their own recipes. It has also expanded into Phoenix and a mini-festival in New York City.
Creating the flavor
To recreate a recipe that had mostly vanished by the 1970s, Yeh turned to Jackie Tran, a chef and the editor-in-chief of Tucson Foodie. Tran’s interest in the project was personal as well as professional.
“I’m primarily Vietnamese by culture, but I have a good amount of Chinese in me as well,” he explains. “I was curious about exploring more of that side of the art that she was doing. I looked through a few documentary-style videos that had a few recipes to start the research with her. ”
Tran was immediately struck by the parallels between the two different culinary worlds. “A lot of times, people associate cumin with Tex-Mex,” Tran notes. “But that also has a prevalent use in a lot of northern regions of China as well. Like cumin lamb, it’s a classic dish. Being able to find some of those parallel flavors was fun.”
The result is a sausage that uses the architecture of Mexican chorizo — the vinegar, the heat, the robust spices — but infuses it with Chinese aromatics like star anise, Szechuan peppercorns, and Chinese red wine. It is a flavor profile that Tran describes as “peaceful coexistence.”
Beyond the flavor profile, Tran notes that the project’s success relies on the sausage’s adaptability in a professional kitchen. “Chorizo itself has a pretty nice variety of ways that it can be used,” he says. “Because it’s a sausage, it’s something that can be formed into different shapes, or it can be crumbled, kind of loosely incorporated into sauces.”
One of the project’s early success stories was a collaboration at 5 Points, a local haunt located in the very area where the historic grocery stores once thrived. They served rice cakes shaped like coins that blended masa and sticky rice, grilled until crisp and tossed with the chorizo and bok choy.
“It was a beautiful combination to bring together another food of solidarity,” Yeh recalls. “Chinese is the rice, and Mexican cooking is the maize. It was a way to bring together two foundations of cooking into one dish.”
Food as activism
The Chinese Chorizo Project isn’t just a food festival. It’s a series of sobremesas, or conversations over the table about the borderlands, culture and historic preservation.
The project has historical markers across the city. At the Tucson Museum of Art, Yeh installed a replica of a Chinese grocery store in the Casa Cordova, one of the city’s oldest residential buildings. Visitors can pick up items from the shelves, and each item tells a story of the Chinese community that once lived there.
In Phoenix, she erected a public sculpture titled “Chinese Chorizo,” a shade structure shaped like a sausage that tells the history of the 200 Chinese grocery stores that once existed in the city’s predominantly Black Eastlake Park neighborhood.
Tran attributes this rapid expansion to Yeh’s tenacity and the local culture. “It’s a combination of her hard work and just putting herself out there,” Tran says. “Tucson is a pretty welcoming community, especially in the culinary scene.”
The project’s reach even extends to the next generation. At Manzo Elementary School, students in a food literacy program grew chiltepin peppers in their school garden. Yeh used those peppers in a batch of chorizo, which was then paired with focaccia made by James Beard Award-winning baker Don Guerra.
“It was a beautiful, full-circle experience,” Yeh says. “To show the kids, this is what you created, and now you can reap the rewards of this delicious bread. It’s about getting our community to engage with each other and to see, when we pull all of our resources together, what we can create.”
Invitation to the table
As Tucson continues to grow as a global food destination, the Chinese Chorizo Project serves as a reminder that the most authentic flavors of the West are often the ones that were born from the blending of cultures in the margins.
For Southern Californians driving east on the I-10, the project offers a new way to see the desert. It’s an invitation to step away from the tourist traps and into places like Ceres, where you might find a handmade pasta paired with a scoop of chorizo-infused ice cream. Or to Anello, where the map of the Southwest is written in the charred crust of a pizza topped with Szechuan-spiced sausage.
Thanks to Yeh, the Chinese chorizo is no longer a forgotten delicacy. It is a living cartography — a map in every casing that proves that acculturation, when ground with the right spices, can taste like home.
“People come up to me and say, “I’m mixed race, I’m part Chinese and part Mexican, and you’re telling my story,” Yeh says. “Hearing that feedback was so beautiful that I wanted to stay and see how I could grow this into something more.”
The 2026 Chinese Chorizo Festival will run through the month of October in Tucson and Phoenix. But the history it reclaims is on the menu year-round for those who know where to look.
