In this section, we trace the twin histories that shaped El Gringo:
the figure and the collection
We discuss how El Gringo the figure and El Gringo the collection came to be. And we try to do so genealogically. Though we apply the historical technique only informally, we find it to be revelatory and generative.
We hope to illuminate how El Gringo emerges at the intersection of Eastern migration, Mexican culture, and the language of fashion.
Migration​
Since its inception, Les Benjamins has been a vessel for stories about the movement of people.
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Migration isn’t just a “brand theme.” It’s the foundation. Founder and creative director Bünyamin Aydın embodies this duality: born in Germany as a third-generation Gastarbeiter, raised in the cultural hotbed of Istanbul, forever navigating the space between East and West. This lived reality has shaped a design language that treats borders as points of connection.
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This is the lens through which every collection at Les Benjamins is produced and presented.
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The brand has resurrected the journeys of Altai nomads, paid homage to the historical relationship between Türkiye and Japan, and reimagined ancestral mythologies as contemporary fashion codes. Each season functions like an atlas: a map of movement drawn in fabric, silhouette, and motif.
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El Gringo extends this archive of migration across the Atlantic, telling the story of an Eastern outsider arriving in Mexico. Here, carpets become passports, embroidery becomes a shared language, and tacos al pastor become the culinary echo of döner kebab. The character is a testimony – a new commitment to cultural storytelling.
Who is El Gringo
A “gringo” from the East who arrives in Mexico, carrying with him fragments of heritage, memory, and exile.
Both outsider and insider, belonging to neither place entirely but shaping something new in the in-between. He is neither an ancient figure, nor a modern one.
The figure represents the collection, and the collection embodies this liminal identity.
Cycle of Migration from East to Mexico
The figure of El Gringo has been shaped by three distinct cycles of migration.
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The First Cycle: Ancient Origins
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There’s no historical evidence of a Turkic or Proto-Turkic people landing on the current territory of Mexico.
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But the signs are certainly there for those with eyes to look.
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Patterns move where people cannot. Rug motifs that once traveled from the Altai steppes into the Ottoman Empire later found uncanny echoes in Navajo weavings. The hooked diamonds, zig-zags, and tree-of-life patterns that defined the portable identity of Turkic nomads appear in the woven handiwork of the Americas. The same can be said of cosmology: the shamanic world tree of the steppes finds a strange kinship with the sacred trees of Mesoamerica. And when the Spanish reintroduced the horse to the Americas, Indigenous peoples of the plains built equestrian cultures that mirrored the nomadic mastery of the steppe.
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The Altai nomads never set foot in Mexico, but their aesthetic fingerprints, carried by the global circuits of empire, trade, and memory, resurfaced in the desert Southwest.
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The Second Cycle: Industrial Magnetics
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By the 18th and 19th centuries, the great Ottoman world was in motion.
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Economic pressures, collapsing borders, and the lure of opportunity sent its citizens across the Atlantic.
Among them were Turks and Greeks, Arabs and Armenians – Levantine families, who arrived in Latin America as merchants, craftsmen, and migrants. In Mexico, they were all called Turcos: a single word that collapsed their diverse origins into an outsider identity.
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Food became the most immediate site for cultural negotiation. Railroad l traded rations. Pitas sat next to tortillas. Eventually, the vertical spit of the döner arrived. But in Mexico, the dish was reimagined with local ingredients. Over time, local tastes for pork replaced cultural and religious dietary preferences for lamb. Thus spoke tacos al pastor. The dish itself represents a dialogue between East and West – a culinary middle ground where memory of the old world met the palette of the new.
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This was a cycle of industrial magnetics when steamships, railroads, and global markets pulled people and their crafts across oceans. Migration here was less mythic than mercantile, but no less transformative.
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The East did not vanish in Mexico; it found new life and brought new life alone with it.
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The Third Cycle: Creative Watershed
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Today, Mexico City is a magnet for the global creative diaspora.
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Young artists, designers, and musicians from every corner of the world are flooding CDMX, drawn by its cultural energy and openness. In this third cycle, El Gringo lives. An outsider from the East entering a contemporary global crossroads, where art itself is a shared language.
Roma Norte and Condesa are the laboratories of this cycle. Their cafés, galleries, and cantinas serve as stages where identities are tested and remade. Here, migrants and locals negotiate belonging over mezcal and Manu Chao. This is not the migration of survival, but of invention.
In CDMX today, El Gringo finds kinship among wanderers, in a city that thrives on perpetual reinvention.
Fragments
About a Young Rug Weaver
In a café in Condesa, a young Cappadocian weaver admires a rug hanging on the wall. She starts sketching the diamond-like shapes into her notebook. Then it hits her.
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She’s seen the pattern before.
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She hasn’t yet visited Oaxaca or Chiapas. But she’s studied Turkic nomads for years. Her professor tells her it’s impossible; that the Altai and the Americas never touched. But the resemblance is uncanny: the hooked diamonds of Navajo rugs sit like hooves on the steppe.
Some say it is coincidence, others whisper of forgotten caravans, lost sailors, buried empires.
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Whatever the route, the motif survives. Maybe it isn’t proof of anything historical. But does prove something about migration. And in contemporary CDMX, that speculation becomes fuel.
The rug motif is no longer evidence of where we have been, but a challenge to imagine how far we can travel.
The History of Al Pastor
Fire and meat have always danced together. In Central Asia, nomads turned lambs on open fires, whole animals slowly rotating in the wind. These were the earliest shadows of what would later become the spit.
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It was in the Ottoman 19th century that the idea crystallized into its iconic form: a vertical, rotating column of meat. In Bursa, Anatolia, it was called döner kebab and carved in thin slices. From there, it spread through the empire, becoming shawarma in the South (Lebanon & Syria) and gyros in the West (Greece).
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A simple migration machine: a steel, rotating rod and an ancestral flame…
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Then came the crossing.
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In the late 19th and early 20th century, waves of Ottoman subjects – Lebanese, Syrian, Greeks, Turkish, Armenian – carried the spit across the Atlantic. In Mexico, they were called Turcos, because their passports were Ottoman. They settled in Puebla, and there the first translation took place: lamb gave way to pork, scarce ingredients gave way to abundance. Thin slices of spit-roasted pork were folded into pan árabe. These were the tacos árabes. Immigrant food at its finest. Near and Middle Eastern memories translated into Mexican form.
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For generations, Pueblans ​​and their new compatriots enjoyed tacos árabes. But it wasn't until the mid-1970s that they went mainstream. Founded by Esperanza Bank, a Polish migrant, El Greco serves the contemporary iteration: doneraky tacos árabes. Marinated pork carved from a trompo and served on a thicker tortilla, reminiscent of a Greek pita married to an Anatolian dürüm.
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Tacos árabes were truly Mexicanized in 1966 in Mexico City when Doña Conchita founded El Tizoncito. Today a haven for digital nomads, she opened the restaurant in Condesa, at the corner of Tamaulipas and Campeche. There, she created tacos al pastor. Inspired by shawarma, she created a pork-based trompo roasted over charcoal, marinated with achiote, chiles, and spices. The pita dissolved into the tortilla, and a slice of pineapple became the crown jewel of toppings including onion and cilantro.
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A dish born from Ottoman fires and Levantine memory became one of Mexico’s most iconic foods, and yet, an echo of much older flames. That’s El Gringo, too.
A Statement on The Character of East-West Relations
For too long, the value of the East has been measured by what it can explain to the West. Cultures were reduced to footnotes in someone else’s narrative, objects of fascination rather than subjects of their own stories.
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Les Benjamins rejects that hierarchy. The East isn’t a far away, exotic place. We are not an oriental other. We do not design to be legible to the West. We design to be legible to ourselves, from Near East to Far East.
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El Gringo, like Altaicana before it, is not an explanation of the East for outsiders. It is a conversation within. Our ancestors have carried their food, their language, their entire lives across geographies stretch from Istanbul to Neuss, from Dubai to Mexico City. Our collections are not bridges built for approval; they are meeting grounds for collaboration, discourse, and re-imagination.
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The East is not a reflection. It is not derivative. It is not waiting to be discovered.
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The East is already here.
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And Les Benjamins exists to amplify that presence, to remind the East that its greatest source of inspiration is itself.