Former U.S. Rep. Mayra Flores (GOP) accused of cribbing others' pictures of Mexican food as her own cooking [View all]

https://www.texastribune.org/2024/01/03/mayra-flores-mexican-food-photos/

Former U.S. Rep. Mayra Flores accused of cribbing others’ pictures of Mexican food as her own cooking

In a bizarre micro-scandal that some have dubbed “GrubGate,” a former GOP congresswoman who is running for her old seat in South Texas is being accused of routinely stealing photos of Mexican food from other social media accounts and passing them off as her own cooking.

Earlier this week, Mayra Flores, the first Mexican-born woman to serve in Congress, posted a photo on social media that she described as “gorditas de masa" with the caption, “the Ranch life with family is the best.”



Soon after, a user on X, formerly known as Twitter, pointed out that that the image was previously posted on a Facebook page, “Visit Guyana,” in March 2022. Others said that the food in the photo was not gorditas de masa. That prompted the conservative website Current Revolt to dig further into Flores’ social media accounts, where they found numerous other posts in which Flores used others’ photos of campfire cooking or homemade tortillas to illustrate her own idyllic life on a ranch.

“As a proud Latina who knows how to cook, homemade Mexican food tastes better from a gas stove,” she wrote alongside one photo of eggs and tortillas on what appears to be a wood-burning stove. The photo was initially posted on Facebook in 2021 by a Spanish-language magazine.