Hey DD, the Republic has good archives. This is what I remember reading/absorbing; we still lived in Scottsdale at the time.
http://www.azcentral.com/home/food/mexico/articles/0427chimichange27-CR.html Burro tale origins of the elusive chimichanga still remain buried in local food lore
Jill Jordan
The Arizona Republic
Aug. 26, 1987 06:27 PM
As far as Mexican food goes, the chimichanga is about as un-Mexican as it gets.
Granted, all the self-proclaimed inventors of the fried burros are of Mexican descent. And, granted, they all run Mexican restaurants.
With only one exception, the tales of the chimichanga's invention stem from north of the border. The exception traces the chimichanga to a bar in Nogales, Sonora, called the Chimi Chango. However, many people say it doesn't count because it involves baked, rather than fried, burros.
Tucson restaurateur Carlotta Flores says she once heard that in the 1940s the bar featured a baked ''chimi chango,'' which was said to mean ''toasted monkey.''
The dish supposedly found its way into Arizona when a marriage joined the family that owned the bar with a family that ran a Mexican restaurant in Tucson, Flores said.
The story makes a good rumor, but a search for someone to testify to its truth proved fruitless.
Several longtime Nogales, Ariz., residents, including retired grocer Edmundo Puchi, who has lived in the town since 1922, said they have never heard of the bar.
''The Chimi Chango? No, not on either side of the border,'' Puchi said.
Even Flores doubts the story. She said chimichangas were invented by her great aunt, Monica Flin.
Flores' version begins in the late 1950s, with Flin in the kitchen of El Charro Mexican Restaurant in Tucson, which Flin opened in 1922.
A leftover burro was sitting on a counter, and Flin accidentally dropped it into the deep fryer and said a ''terrible cuss word,'' Flores said.
When she sampled her new concoction, she liked it so much she decided to give it a name and put it on the menu.
''She couldn't call it what she originally called it, so she gave it the name 'chimichanga,' which doesn't really mean anything,'' Flores said.
Another account of the chimichanga's birth has it in 1945 in Phoenix.
Alex Moreno, then owner of Mi Ranchito Restaurant in Maryvale, was visiting his mother in Tucson.
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