easy there. I'm not Texan and never even spent much time there. But texmex is its own thing.

If you look up "queso recipe" it often begins "take a pound of Velveeta."

Yeah and I get that, but I just don’t think TexMex is good, and I grew up in a part of the south where people fully believed it was real Mexican food.

Americanized Mexican food should be distinguished from formerly-Mexican food. The southwest has it's own food traditions which are often similar, but distinct, from contemporary Mexico-Mexican food. Dismissing those traditions as "TexMex", like they were made up by Anglos is both offensive and inaccurate.

Go easy on your parent, they're just parroting the 2005 version of Mexican food snobbery

And therein lies the problem...