Hands down, Southwest Detroit is the absolute best, most dense, most authentic place to eat tacos.

Tacos originated from Mexico and, like many types of cultural food, has been shared across the country by peoples who have chosen to live in various communities in the US. Thankfully, Detroit is one such location. The Corktown area was well known for its growing Mexican-American population as early as the 1930s (See Mexicans of Detroit, 1979). However, recent reporting has noted the movement “Downriver” of Detroit’s Latino community, which you can see in the cluster of taco restaurants in Allen Park and Lincoln Park on the map.

This map pulls from common “point of interest” datasets, including Safegraph POI, verification using Google Places, and cross-checking with data from alltheplaces.xyz.

The map includes places with:

• “Taco” or “taqueria” in the name
• “Mexican” in the name
• “El ” or “Los ” in the name (excluding churches and doctors offices, i.e. El Bethel and El Sayid)

Some taco trucks made it in the list, but its likely that some did not without a fixed location. What stood out most from the data was the ubiquity of taco chains in the metro area outside of Detroit while the local, authentic tacos are best found in Southwest Detroit.