The venerable corn chip whose life is a Tex-Mex history lesson.

The Frito is only a corn chip. It is one and a half inches long, half an inch wide, and seventy thousandths of an inch thick. It is made of cornmeal masa -- the same stuff tortillas are made of -- which is extruded into strips and then fried in vegetable oil and salted. Sixty thousand acres of Texas are devoted to growing corn (half yellow, half white) whose destiny it is to become Fritos. The American people buy about 170 million pounds of Fritos a year. That's three quarters of a pound a piece.

In 1982 the Frito was fifty years old. In 1932 a San Antonio producer named Elmer Doolin paid $100 (borrowed from his mother, who, legend has it, hocked her wedding ring to get it) for the recipe and the seven-outlet sales territory of a corn chip he'd happened to taste in a cafe. He set up a production facility in his mom's kitchen and sold the chips out of the back of his Model T. Company lore has it that he tinkered, Edisonlike, with the product until exactly the right combination of corns, chip-forming technique, and frying system was achieved. In 1933 Elmer moved to Dallas, where his company has remained ever since, because it was a better distribution center, and he quickly became the snack food lord of the Southwest. After the war he went national, and by the time he died in 1959 the Frito was an institution, one of the cornerstones of the snack food industry.

In 1961, the Frito Company merged with the Lay Company, maker of Lay's potato chips, to become the giant Frito-Lay, which dominates the $14 billion snack food market. In 1965 Frito-Lay merged with Pepsi-Cola to become the even more gigantic PepsiCo. Since then, certain vagaries of the corporate life have befallen the company. One of its commodity buyers was investigated for conspiring to corner the peanut oil market. Several of its executives were indicted for extorting money from contractors. It was accused of overcharging small customers. A Mexican-American group threatened to sue the company over its advertising mascot, the Frito Bandito. But the Frito itself has remained relatively pristine. There is a king-size version (invented in 1954 to cash in on the dip craze) and a barbecue-flavored version, and now Frito Lights. With the exception, quite frankly, of the barbecue Frito, they all taste great.

The larger context in which the Frito is properly contemplated is that of Mexican-American relations. The Frito is a typical second-generation Texan of Mexican origins. Its parent, the tostada, is a venerable and purely Mexican product that was never widely accepted by Anglos. The Frito itself eagerly embraced mainstream American values -- mass production, packaging, distribution, advertising -- and was in turn more richly rewarded by America than its parent had ever been. The Frito's own child, the Dorito (introduced by Frito-Lay in 1965), tries, in classic third-generation fashion, to be more openly and proudly Mexican than its assimilated parent (hence, it tries to look like a tostada), but in its soul, it is even more American than the Frito -- and sells better.

There is another way in which the story of the Frito can stand as a parable, and it has to do with the chip's inventor, the man to whom Elmer Doolin paid the $100. The company doesn't know his name; all that's officially recorded about him is that he was a Mexican who sold his little food concern because he was eager to return to Mexico. But in the spring of 1981 at a genteel rooming house in Oaxaca, a young Texan (who has requested anonymity) met an elderly Mexican gentleman named Gustave Olguin who claimed to be the Frito's long-lost inventor. He was a dapper man with a perfect white mustache, confined to a wheelchair, attended by servants. He said he had spent his post-Frito years managing a national soccer team in Mexico. He died in 1981 at the age of 82, having outlived Elmer Doolin by 22 years but not having achieved eternal life conferred by a reputation, as Doolin did. That was because what Don Gustavo made was a corn chip, whereas what Doolin made was a business.