Quesadillas, variations thereof

There are two very popular kinds of cheese in Oaxaca: quesillo and requeso. Quesillo is like string cheese, and it comes in long wide tape-like strips wrapped into a tight ball. Find the end of the strip and peel it away, then peel off smaller strips. It melts really well and is sort of like a firmer, chewier, stringier and much saltier fresh mozzarella. Requeso has the texture of ricotta, but almost no taste. It takes on the flavor of whatever you mix into it (jalapeños, cilantro, etc.). One, or both, of these cheeses is in pretty much every dish here.

There are many, many local dishes with both indigenous and Spanish names: quesadillas, enfrijoladas, tlayudas, tostadas, memelas, etc. But basically everything is a variation on a quesadilla: tortilla (crunchy or soft), cheese, black bean sauce (a pureed sauce with no actual bean chunks in it, unlike black beans in the US), maybe some hot sauce (green or red), maybe some tomatoes or avocados or lettuce, and some kind of meat or pork lard. Assume you're going to have tortilla, bean sauce and cheese, and you've got a pretty good picture of what you just ordered.