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."

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

And therein lies the problem...

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.