Yo gusto mucho la comida Mexican.

Tonight was exciting. I set fire to a tortilla on the stove. It's really not very funny is it?

Rather then write something about my negligable safety skills in the kitchen, I'd rather talk about the tortillas. Besides the weather, my biggest complaint about living here is the lack of Mexican food and Latino culture. Whether it's the corner street cart vendors with finely sliced slabs of fruit doused in lime juice and chili powder or the endless pumping of overly-bassy ranchero blasting out from the dashboard of old Corollas, I'll take a greasy bean buritto over an egg cress sarnie any day. It's no coincidence my fondness for all things Echo Park revolve around smells and sounds. It's not that I get to hang out with that many people from Mexico. But the Mexican sensibility is the most definable and recognizable feature of where I used to live, followed in an unfortunate second by hipsters.

My point is this: a colleague from college who is from Mexico City recently told me that there does in fact exist a place in South East London where the tortillas are corn and the salsa spicey. I was giddy and went to investigate.

When I walked into the Elephant & Castle (get the colonial reference? scary!) shopping mall, I was surprised I had never been inside given my penchant for dodgy bargain shopping and weird urban/suburban enclaves. What I found - besides the first bowling alley I've seen in Britain (!) - was also the first Cuban cafe with the first actual Cubans. Though hankering to sit down and order a coffee, I soldiered on to find the shop in question. El Axteca. It was a very small, clean, orderly room with a counter down an alley way outside the mall. It was very straightforward and limited, but had just the few things you can't find anywhere else - chipotle peppers, hominy for posole, green chili salsa, a bag of 50 fresh frozen homemade corn tortillas for 5 quid.

The funny thing is, there are in fact well over 200,000 Latin Americans in the city. Maybe it's cos Cinco de Mayo is in the air, but even my local Sainsbury's has been sporting an increasingly large selection of Mexican food items. The problem is, they are all of the El Paso brand, and well, though a bottle of pickled jalepenos and flour tortillas is an excellent start, the fact they are surrounded with packaged fajita sauce kits makes it feel a bit like the Paz Easter Egg dye kits and a lot less like Los Angeles.

Which brings me to my final point. I'm not Mexican yet this feels like my home town food. I also don't want to essentialise the whole thing by sounding like I have some connection to the Mexican homeland I don't claim to. But it's a funny thing and it challenged my sense of place in funny ways. I live with a Spaniard and an Argentinian. Spanish is the first language in my house and unfortunately I don't speak it. I know South America is not Central America is not Spain but still find myself surprised by the Mexican and Central American things they are unfamilar with that are second nature to me.

I suppose I could end this on a note of Angelino pride about coming of age in a multi-ethnic city that I try to take part in. Instead I'd rather just make fun of my flatmate for saying my salsa had a kick in it when it was clearly very mild.