Reddit mentions: The best southwestern cooking books

I think you are starting from the wrong place if you think it will be like Texan chili [con carne]. Mole negro and soft cheeses are the main culinary exports of Oaxaca and they are fantastic. This is one of my two favorite culinary regions in Mexico!

Mole negro
First off, the famous mole negro using the regional pasilla de Oaxaca pepper (aka "chile negro" when dried). There are many recipes for that; find one that has ingredients you can pick up at your local Mexican supermarket or order online. You can cook meat (often chicken) in it or use it to make enchiladas enmoladas. They're soft, cheesy, and the rich, black sauce has a great pepper flavor but also a complex mixture of spices that lend subtle notes to the flavor like a fine wine. Every abuelita in Oaxaca has her own special variation on the recipe.

Traditional meal: nopales + meat + oaxaqueño cheese + guajillo sauce
Another personal favorite coming straight out of restaurants in Oaxaca is often called the Conquista Plate. As you can see, a thin steak over grilled cactus, Oaxaca cheese and chile guajillo sauce. The cactus is nopales; learn to love it's mild flavor, as it's in tons of authentic Mexican dishes. Guajillos are a fairly mild chili with a distinct, tart taste. They're also used all over Mexico so you should be able to find them pretty easily. Oaxaca is famous for cheese, so you can also easily find that in most Mexican markets.

Recipe for the sauce (use only guajillos and ancho). You can find your own instructions on grilling nopales and the steak or whatever meat you want to go with it. That red sauce can basically go on anything.

Chile verde: more like a SW "chili"
Although it's not from further south than Chihuahua and Sonora and has become a staple in New Mexican cuisine, chile verde is probably going to be the best marriage of rich Mexican sauces and a more traditional southwestern US "chili" where chunks of tough meat are stewed or braised in the sauce until tender. I've tested and approve of this recipe as a basic starting point. However, in The Food Lab, Kenji goes into detail about why it's better to let this dish braise in the oven. Here is his final recipe, which is amazing and pretty simple once you get through it a couple times (and usually provides leftovers for days). I do believe he is a bit misinformed (in the book, in particular) about how unique Hatch chilies are; the exact same chilies are widely available as "Anaheim peppers" in addition to other sub-cultivars of the classic "No.9 chile". But I digress.

More about chile verde and SW food
I collected about a dozen cookbooks when living in NM trying to find more chile verde recipes to try. Two more recent ones I highly recommend are New Mexico Cuisine: Recipes from the Land of Enchantment and Red or Green: New Mexico Cuisine. For authentic Oaxaqueño recipes, I have only read Oaxaca al Gusto: An Infinite Gastronomy but it's very good and sub-divides the region to give you a sampling of coastal seafood, cheese from the mountains, and about a thousand mole recipes!

Finally, I want to say I agree with your friend: Tex-Mex is a mistake and traditional Mexican food is where the good eats are at!

The closest things I can think of in Mexican cuisine would be barbacoa and cochinita pibil. These are both traditionally done in an earthen pit, and both pick up a subtle smoky flavor.

The barbacoa I had was a cow's head rubbed with chile and salt, wrapped in burlap and buried in coals and dirt. The meat was then pulled and used for tacos. I've made puerco pibil lots of times with pork butt. Its rubbed with an achiote paste, wrapped in banana leaves, then oven roasted, pulled and used for tacos.

Mexican chorizo is usually sold raw, and the casings are split and the bulk sausage chopped and crumbled when cooked. But you can sometimes find it smoked.

Barbecue is a US culinary technique that's not to my knowledge found in any other traditional cuisines. Lots of folks smoke meat, but it's always done with the intention of preservation. Lots of folks pit roast and spit roast, that's the closest you'll find. No one else just smokes meat in a smokehouse low & slow for 8-12 hours then has it for dinner.

There's huge potential right now in barbecue fusion, combining US barbecue technique with the cuisines of other countries. You can discover a lot of this cross-pollination in northern Mexican - southwestern US border cuisine. I can tell you from experience that Mexicans love KC style barbecued ribs, especially if you goose the BBQ sauce with extra chile.

Puerco pibil is rubbed with a paste made from a product called achiote condimentado, which comes in little red bricks. It's achiote, salt, chile, garlic and other spices. It's thinned with vinegar or citrus juice, then rubbed on the pork butt. The pork butt is then wrapped in banana leaves, and oven roasted to 205F. The banana leaves give off a wonderful perfume, so it's not the same as just wrapping in foil. You can buy them frozen.

To cook this in the smoker, I'm a bit concerned about the achiote paste making a bitter bark if you don't use the banana leaves. Applied as a paste, it goes on a bit thicker than a standard rub. I'd probably smoke it for 4-5 hours, then foil it. Or you could just smoke it the whole time wrapped in banana leaves and tied with string. It won't get as smoky as regular smoked pork, but a lot of smoke will still make its way in. That's what I wish I could have done when I made it in a restaurant; it would have tasted more like the Yucatan original.

There are TONS of great recipes out there that don't involve that.

I suggest the book Not Your Mother's Slow Cooker Cookbook, it has tons of from scratch recipes for the crockpot.

I also enjoyed Southwest Slow Cooking for that same kind of deal.

Alton Brown has a couple of keepers for the crock pot as well. I would suggest poking around foodnetwork, allrecipes, and foodwishes for some other good stuff.

Simple, basic, red chile enchiladas. Good, lard-based, refried beans, and fresh flour tortillas. Refer to "The Border Cookbook" for any/all recipes.

I cook Mexican food a lot and this is my go-to resource. I've given over a dozen copies to friends over the years. It's soooo worth having.

Texans vs. Texan's is a thing? It's used both ways quite often.

Amazon book

From Houston Chronicle

There are definitely more instances of "Texans" vs. "Texan's". If both a book and an article from Houston refer to "Texan's", then the use of "Texan's" doesn't appear incorrect.

The Homesick Texan has some good recipes: https://www.homesicktexan.com/

She also has a few cookbooks:

https://www.amazon.com/Homesick-Texan-Cookbook-Lisa-Fain-ebook/dp/B006HAPP8Y/

https://www.amazon.com/Homesick-Texans-Family-Table-Cooking-ebook/dp/B00FO61A1S/

https://www.amazon.com/QUESO-Regional-Recipes-Favorite-Chile-Cheese-ebook/dp/B01MT4WC2K/

Here you go!