Tacos de Tichinda de la Costa Chica

This is Oaxacan food, but not the Oaxaca most people picture. Forget the Valles Centrales, forget the moles, forget the mezcal bars of the capital. This is Costa Chica. The Pacific coast. The lagoons of Chacahua and Manialtepec, where the mangrove roots drop into brackish water and the tichindas cling to them in dark clusters like barnacles made of obsidian.

Tichindas are small mussels, Mytella strigata if you need the Latin, and they are harvested by hand from mangrove roots by the communities that live along those lagoons. Afro-Mexican families, indigenous Mixtec and Chatino communities, people whose relationship with these waters goes back centuries. The women wade in at low tide, pry the clusters off the roots, and bring them back in buckets. By afternoon, they are on the comal. By evening, they are on tortillas. Si no conoces el mercado, no conoces la cocina, and here the mercado is the lagoon itself.

The preparation is direct. You open the tichindas with heat, pull the meat from the shells, and sauté them al ajillo: whole garlic cloves, a branch of epazote, a squeeze of lime. The salsa is chile costeño, the small, fierce dried chile that belongs to this coast and nowhere else. It is not guajillo. It is not arbol. It is costeño, and if your chile vendor does not carry it, you need to find a vendor who knows the Oaxacan coast. Cada estado, su propia cocina, and within Oaxaca, each coast has its own pantry.

I collected this recipe in a palapa kitchen outside Chacahua from a woman who had been making it since before the lagoon became a national park. She opened the tichindas on a wood-fired comal, tossed them in a clay cazuela with garlic and epazote from her yard, and served them on tortillas she pressed by hand while the garlic browned. No recipe card. No measurements. Just the knowledge of how long the garlic takes, how much epazote is enough, and when the tichindas are done. I wrote it all down. Recetas probadas y garantizadas.