St. Louis Riverfront Times

Tag: Ask a Mexican

Ask a Mexican: Where’s the beef? Why Mexicans like their steaks cut thin.

Dear Mexican: Mi hermano y yo tenemos un dispute. We all know that Mexicans love their bistec sliced muy thin, but why? My brother is adamant that the diet of free-range vacas mexicanas results in tough meat, necessitating a thin slice for easy mastication. I think the reason is purely an economic one, since Mexicans are famously poor. Are mis amigos south of the border just trying to pinch a peso? We both know that usted es the sole hombre qualified to answer this question. So, what’s the scoop?
Two Meatheads

Dear Gabachos: The Mexican’s theory: you won’t find many thick cuts of meat in Mexi kitchens because carne delgadita is easier to cook, simpler to stuff into tortillas, and ultimately more delicious. However, your wabby servant is a mere novice in Mexican food knowledge compared to James Beard Award-winning Robb Walsh, one of the most Mexican gabachos after George Lopez, and author of the recently released Sex, Death and Oysters: A Half-Shell Lover’s World Tour. His thoughts? “Thick steaks became popular in the 1960s, when the U.S. switched over to a national beef production system,” Walsh told the Mexican. “Calves were born in Florida, raised on ranches in the West, injected with chemicals and fattened on feed lots in the Midwest, butchered at large central slaughterhouses and aged by meat packers in Chicago. Premium thick-cut ‘corn-feed’ beef steaks became available under this system.” Before that, American cows were much like their brown cousins — grazing on open ranges, always near local butchers, and so never bulked up to the freakishly large sizes reached by modern-day gabacho cows (can bovines belong to a race? In this column they do!) — and American beef was thin as a result. The introduction of NAFTA, however, has flooded Mexico with inferior American beef, and restaurants south of the frontera now offer thick cuts. “Famously poor”…for crying out loud. Such racism! Save that thought when you ask me about Mexicans living eighteen to an apartment, m’kay?

Dear Mexican: Do Mexicans hurt more and longer after lost amores, more than gabachos? I’m asking, vato, because I can’t get someone out of my mind and my heart yearns for her, even though I last saw her in 1995. Y está casada también.
Confessin’ a Feeling

Dear Wab: Most of us can’t get over the fact that the United States stole half of our territory 160 years ago — what do you think?!

Dear Mexican: The recent death of Samuel P. Huntington begs the question: What sort of dance should one do on his grave? A snappy son jarocho zapateado would rattle his bigoted bones pretty good, but you’d probably opt to see couples twirling over his plot to the brassy strains of some banda sinaloense. I know how much you love that oompah-loompah crap.
El Jefe

Dear Boss: Have some respect: Mexican brass music is not Oompah Loompah doodlings. Anyways, the holidays did bring some cheer to the world: the death of the Harvard historian Huntington, the most overrated public intellectual since Mark Steyn. Huntington, who famously predicted the rise of worldwide cultural conflicts in the 1993 essay “The Clash of Civilizations ” spent his last years arguing that Mexicans were almost as grave a threat to the American nation as Al-Qaeda because we come from a culture altogether incompatible with American ideals, a hilarious thought when one considers how easily Dallas Cowboys quarterback Tony Romo throws interceptions. Mark my words: Huntingon’s theories will one day be held in the same respect as phrenology and Bernie Madoff. I thereby curse Huntington with the worst possible hex for Know Nothings: brown descendants. And guess what? If Huntington is proven correct, my curse will become reality. Either way, Mexicans win — ¡arriba, arriba!

Ask the Mexican at [email protected], myspace.com/ocwab, or write to him via snail mail at: Gustavo Arellano, P.O. Box 1433, Anaheim, CA 92815-1433!

05/20/2009
Ahoy, amigos: Did Mexican pirates ever sail the high seas?

Dear Mexican: My wife and I have an argument going
on about pirates. And since you are the source for all things Mexican.
I’d thought I’d ask: While I know there were Spanish and Portuguese
pirates back in the early 1600s and 1700s, were there ever any Mexican
pirates? Not pirates from Spain who pirated in Mexico, but real, honest
to hay-soos Mexican pirates! Would be interesting to know!
Pirates Pat McGroin and The Right Reverend One Eye

Dear Gabachos: It depends by what your definition of “pirate” is. If
you’re looking for a famous swashbuckler from the days of Blackbeard,
tough tamales: Historians never bothered to glorify the numerous
buccaneers who ransacked Spanish galleons laden with the gold and
silver of Mexican mines off the Mexican coast. The most famous Mexican
pirate was Fermin Mundaca, who operated a contraband empire from the
island of Islas Mujeres off the coast of Quintana Roo during the
mid-1800s — but Mundaca was a Spanish native. Why look back in
the past, though, when so many Mexican pirates exist in the present?
Piratería is as Mexican an industry as tortilla-making
and immigrant-smuggling: The International Federation of Phonographic
Industry, an international organization that fights music piracy
worldwide, estimates Mexicans make more than $220 million off of
illegal CDs, most sold at the nearest swap meet, bodega or taco truck
near you. And before some of you readers start insinuating that such a
startlingly large amount is somehow indicative of the Mexican culture’s
tendency to steal, what would you call file-sharing?

Dear Mexican: Do Mexicans get annoyed that whenever
a Hollywood movie calls for a Mexican character actor, Cheech Marin
gets the job? This is great for Cheech, but must be bad for Mexican
actors struggling to land a good part in Hollywood. Danny Trejo gets
the badass roles, Antonio Banderas gets the leading man roles, and
character roles go to Cheech (in case of a small budget, maybe Tommy
Chong, but he’s cast more for being an old stoner than Mexican). With
the blooming careers of truly great Mexican directors Alfonso
Cuarón and Guillermo del Toro, don’t you think Hollywood should
give some other Mexicans a chance in the limelight? Cheech is already
rich — let someone else have a slice of the pie!
Celluloid Culero

Dear Gabacho: No argument from me, except Tommy Chong and Antonio
Banderas ain’t Mexican!

Dear Mexican: If we stereotype a person by drawing
attention to the fact that someone is Mexican instead of the content of
their actions, why do minority cultures celebrate the very fact that,
say, Mexicans fought for certain types of rights? Aren’t they
stereotyping themselves by doing so? If I did the same thing as a white
person, I’d be considered racist. So, why aren’t you considered racist
as well?
14/88

Dear Gabacho: I’ve contestado many a silly question in
this column, but yours takes the pastel as the stupidest I’ve
yet answered. What Know Nothings such as yourself don’t understand is
that when minority groups struggle for civil rights, they’re merely
calling America on its founding bluff — you know, that whole “all
men are created equal” bullshit. So, when Mexican parents in Orange
County in the 1940s sued four school districts for segregating Mexican
kiddies away from gabachitos, the parents didn’t do it just to
benefit wabs; the resulting lawsuit, Mendez vs. Westminster,
served as a precedent to the much-more-famous Brown vs. Board of
Education. When Cesar Chavez marched and fasted for justice in the
fields, his ultimate causa was the same as European unionists at
the turn of the twentieth century: a fair shake for the working man.
When millions march for amnesty for the undocumented, it’s a protest
against a hypocritical, Byzantine immigration system that entangles all
foreigners, not just Mexicans. Whites fighting for “white” rights only
shows how freaked some gabachos get about realizing that
minorities are actually, finally being treated like Americans. If
trying to battle hate makes me a racist, then here’s a Roman salute to
your face, pendejo.

Ask the Mexican at [email protected],
myspace.com/ocwab, find him on
Facebook, Twitter, or write via snail mail at: Gustavo Arellano, P.O.
Box 1433, Anaheim, CA 92815-1433!

05/20/2009
Ask a Mexican: Dumping Grounds: Do Mexican workers poop in fields?

Dear Mexican: You seem like a smart guy and your input regarding an ethnic phenomenon I’ve observed would be of interest. I live in a tiny, gated neighborhood that I would describe as solidly middle- to upper middle-class. On each side of me live Vietnamese small business owners whose kids attend prestigious universities; across the street is a Filipino medical technologist, and four doors down is the Korean engineer. On the next block over is the Sikh Indian family and a family from Nigeria. They are all recent immigrants and except for the Indians, none of them speaks English fluently. What is conspicuously missing is even one single Mexican immigrant family, with the exception of the rich Mexican nationals from Saltillo — but they only visit on Christmas, Easter and shopping holidays. How come immigrants from south of the border stay stuck on the bottom rungs of the proverbial ladder of success for generations? By contrast, other recent immigrant groups, particularly Asians, are kicking whitey’s ass, economically speaking, by the second generation.
Puzzled in San Antonio

Dear Gabacho: “First of all, the children of immigrants from south of the border make steady intergenerational progress. In other words, each generation is doing better than the one before it in terms of socioeconomic indicators. DUH!” says Jody Agius Vallejo, assistant professor of sociology at the University of Southern California and a scholar who specializes in the study of the Mexican-immigrant y Mexican-American middle class. “Latino immigration is generally a low-skilled, low-wage labor migration; how can you even compare that to your Korean engineer and Filipino med tech neighbors who migrate to the U.S. with college degrees and who start off in the middle class?” Vallejo also points out that more than a few non-Latino immigrants get resettlement assistance or initially qualify for welfare, “which greatly facilitates their upward mobility.” The Mexican will only add the reality of middle-class suburbs like Whittier, California where Mexis moved into a generation ago once they made money, only to have their gabacho neighbors white-flight it out of town — you can look it up!

Dear Mexican: Is it true that women migrant workers who work in the fields wear skirts or dresses over their pants so that when they have to use the bathroom in the fields, their private parts will be covered?
Screw Latrinos

Dear Gabacha: No, but I see where you’re getting at. One of the great Know Nothing conspiracies is the fundamentally fecal nature of Mexicans — essentially, that we’re shit and proof is in the periodic E. coli outbreaks that sicken and even kill Americans. They blame the disease on illegals not washing their hands properly or cagando next to tomorrow’s grilled asparagus, not bothering to blame the farm owners who push workers to skip bathroom breaks under threat of a lesser wage, or ridiculous regulations that allow farmers to have restrooms as far away as a quarter mile from work sites (let’s see you march five minutes under a sweltering sun, with the pennies in your paycheck slipping away, just to take a piss) per Occupational Safety and Health Administration standards. Even more telling, incidents of E. coli entering the public have increased in los Estados Unidos even as sanitation standards are higher than ever before, suggesting something other than shitting migrant workers is amiss in our nation’s food chain — but why bother with reasoning when it’s always easier to blame Mexicans? By the way, the only report the Mexican was able to find on defecating farm workers was in a 1995 issue of the American Journal of Public Health, which showed 15 percent of them did the deed — 15 percent too many, but hardly a sea of brown.

GOOD MEXICAN OF THE WEEK! Gay Latino Studies: A Critical Reader is a collection of essays that’s a literate chinga tu madre to the heteronormativity that’s still endemic in Mexican (and Latino) society. Remember, gentle raza readers: we can’t be homophobes and whine about Mexi discrimination in the same breath. Help eradicate H8 by buying this libro.

Ask the Mexican at [email protected], be his fan on Facebook, follow him on Twitter or ask him a video question at youtube.com/askamexicano!

05/20/2009
Ask a Mexican: Why do so many homes have wrought-iron fences?

Dear Mexican: What’s up with all the elaborate wrought iron fences in the Mexican parts of town? It almost seems like everyone is trying to outdo each other with these amazing displays of metallurgy. Is it just another way to try to protect the cars parked on the lawn and keep the livestock from wandering off, or is it a pathway to instant respect and envy among the neighbors?
WHrought Iron To Envy (WHITE) Guy

Dear Gabacho: This is a question that fascinates even sociologists. At a 2005 seminar called “The Latinization of American Culture,” UCLA professor David Hayes-Bautista showed pictures of wrought-iron fences to describe what gabachos can expect when Mexicans move into their neighborhoods. But you can find the answer on the United States-Mexico border, WHITE: fences. Miles and miles of American-made fences. Triple-layered. Jagged. Deadly. That’s our introduction to American society when we illegally enter los Estados Unidos.All Mexicans want to assimilate, so fences are usually the first thing we erect once we buy a casa: pointy, menacing bars wrapped with organic barbed wire like bougainvilleas or roses to keep the damn Mexicans at bay. And still—as evidenced by the lemons stolen from my front lawn every night—Mexicans jump them.

Dear Mexican: What is it about the word “illegal” that Mexicans don’t understand?
D.G.

Dear Gabacho: Take your pick, D.G. Mexicans don’t understand the word “illegal” because: (A) when paying their gardeners, nannies, busboys and factory workers in cash (and forgetting to withhold payroll taxes), U.S. employers don’t seem to understand the word “illegal,” so why should Mexicans? (B) The Anglo-American trappers and traders whom you and I were taught to admire as tough, self-sufficient frontiersmen and pioneers were among the American Southwest’s first illegals. Who are you calling illegal, gabacho? (C) Presidente‘s proposal to offer amnesty and a guest-worker program during his administration to all illegal immigrants—a move designed to appease his supporters in the business community—means even Republicans don’t understand the word. (D) Whether they buy a fake passport or take a citizenship oath, Mexicans will never be more than wetbacks in the eyes of many Americans, so why bother applying for residency? (E) The Society of Professional Journalists just passed a resolution asking newspapers to require its reporters to describe as “undocumented workers” the men and women you call “illegal.” (F) Little-known fact: the fragment of poetry on the Statue of Liberty (“Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,” etc.) does not, because of a French engraver’s error, include Emma Lazarus rarely cited footnote: No Mexicans, please. Fucking French. But the real answer is the word itself. Illegal is an English word; Mexicans speak Spanish yet you never hear Mexicans whine that their bosses don’t understand such easy Spanish phrases as pinche puto pendejo baboso, do you?

Ask the Mexican at [email protected], be his fan on Facebook, follow him on Twitter or ask him a video question at youtube.com/askamexicano!

05/20/2009
Ask A Mexican: Why are there Mennonites in Mexico?

Dear Mexican: A few years ago, my girlfriend and I visited the beautiful city of Merida in the Yucatan. We were surprised to see a sentence in our guidebook warning us to be on the lookout for Mennonites pedaling queso in the mercado. Sure enough, we bumped into a bearded, light-skinned Mennonite carrying cheese! As we left Merida and drove into the heart of the peninsula we noticed that the Mennonite farmers were the only ones to own modern farm equipment. After seeing two Mennonite farmers broken down on the side of the road, it was clear no Mexicans were going to stop and help them. Can you tell us more about this unusual population of Mennonites in a predominantly Catholic country? How did they get to the Yucatan, why are they seemingly better off than other Mexican farmers and how do Catholic Mexicans feel about them?

Ecumenical Eric

Dear Gabacho: Actually, Mexico’s main concentration of its 26,000 Mennonites is in the northern part of the country, specifically in the state of Chihuahua. Their ancestors arrived in the 1920s from Canada at the invitation of then-president Álvaro Obregón, who’s perhaps better remembered for erecting a monument in Mexico City to his blown-off arm. Obregón gave the Mennonites special economic protection, which allowed their religious colonies to quickly prosper, especially in the agriculture that Mennonites (God bless their Anabapist ways) concentrate on even to this day. Mexicans generally like Mennonites — they’re not heretics like Mormons or those pendejos Pentecostals and pose little threat to the Catholic Church. More importantly, however, Mexis can’t get enough of their legendary queso menonita, milky cheese sold acrosss the country, soft and mild and bueno. They remain the best Europeans to ever invade Mexico, with the exception of the Doors when they toured the country way back cuando.

Dear Mexican: Your two responses to the recent questions about Mexicans not wanting to migrate legally to the United States and how you would secure our borders couldn’t be more guilty of skip-logic. There are a finite number of resources in this country, a finite number of jobs, housing, etc. It has nothing to do with what country you are coming from — if you enter illegally, you are breaking the law, and every day you are here illegally you are breaking the law. Period. Bringing in drugs, or more border guards or fences isn’t the issue. You’re criminals if you are here illegally. I don’t care how crappy the water or housing or whatever in Mexico City is. Be born here, or come here legally; other than that, you are no different than a drunk driver or robber or carjacker. You’re breaking the law.

Made in ‘Merica

Dear Gabacho: …except that the crimes you mentioned are usually felonies committed with malice, while the act of entering this country illegally is generally classified as a misdemeanor for the first offense, and the super-vast majority of those initial offenders are coming in for a better life. Please take your Malthusian conspiracies elsewhere, pendejo.

GOOD MEXICAN OF THE WEEK: Is actually a gabacha: Enamorada Gabacho. In 2006, she asked the Mexican how she could calm down her nervous Mexi guy. My response was wisdom for the ages: give him a blow job. She just wrote in with an update five years later:

Enamorada Gabacha and her gorgeous, kind Mexican guy are still together after all these years. We bought a house together not too long after my initial letter to you, so it definitely wasn’t a one-night stand or a midnight run to the border. Must have been your marvelous advice! Best of all my white, Midwestern farm/ranch family loves him because, finally, I got a real man who knows how to work with his hands and build things instead of some dumb white city boy. It’s all good!

Gracias for the update — now, go make some beautiful tan babies!

Ask the Mexican at [email protected], be his fan on Facebook, follow him on Twitter or ask him a video question at youtube.com/askamexicano!

05/20/2009
Ask a Mexican: Why do Mexicans call people with curly hair chinos?

Dear Readers: The Mexican is currently dealing with deportation issues but will return next week once he builds his fifteen-foot escalera to climb over that pesky fourteen-foot wall. In the meanwhile, here’s some oldies-but-goodies to tide you by like yesterday’s menudo. Enjoy!

Dear Mexican: It seems that whenever Chicano professors want to show off their mexicanidad, they wear a guayabera. In fact, I saw a picture of you in the Los Angeles Times donning the shirt, along with Dickies pants and Converse All Stars. How trite and bourgeois! You go to a café or bar in any university town in Mexico, and the students will think you’re totally naco. I stopped wearing the guayabera when a friend said I looked like a waiter in a Mexican restaurant. Do certain clothes determine your Mexicanness?
Sexy Mexy

Dear Wab: Abso-pinche-lutely. “The bigger the sombrero, the wabbier the man,” is a commandment all Mexicans learn from the Virgin of Guadalupe. But seriously, Mexican clothes correspond to social and economic status — sweaty T-shirt indicates laborer, calf-length skirt means a proper Mexican woman, and if a cobbler used the hide of an endangered reptile to fashion your cowboy boots, you’re probably a drug dealer or a Texan. The guayabera (a loose-fitting, pleated shirt common in the Mexican coastal state of Veracruz and other tropical regions of Latin America) also announces something about its owner: the güey is feeling hot and wants to look sharp. Why the hate, Sexy? Remember what Andy Warhol said: “Nothing is more bourgeois than to be afraid to look bourgeois.” Who cares if people mistake you for a waiter if you sport a guayabera? Just spit in their soup. And who cares if Mexican university students call me, you or any guayabera wearer a naco (Mexico City slang for bumpkin)? They can’t be that smart if they’re still in Mexico.

Dear Mexican: Why do Mexicans call people with curly hair chinos? Most chinos I know have very straight, hard-to-curl hair.
China Confundida

Dear Confused Chinita: The Mexican has discussed the word chino before, as in why Mexicans call all Asians chinos (same reason gabachos call all Latinos “Mexican”). Chinos is one of the more fascinating homographs (words with the same spelling but different meanings) in Spanish. Its Old World meaning specifically refers to a person of Chinese descent, but in his Dictionary of Latin American Racial and Ethnic Terminology, Rutgers linguist Thomas M. Stephens documents how chino assumed different connotations once the conquistadors pillaged the Americas — and none of those connotations was positive. Stephens’ book devotes an incredible seven pages to chino; some of its more peculiar Latin American definitions include “female servant,” “slave from Mozambique,” “concubine,” “young Indian female who served in a convent,” and, yes, “curly-haired.” Chino also was the category in the Spanish Empire’s Byzantine castas (caste) system designated for the offspring of parents with varying degrees of African and Amerindian blood. Stephens’ only sin is that he doesn’t explain why chino took on so many non-Chinese connotations, though he did write that china in Quechua signifies “female servant or animal,” while Nahuatl speakers used chinoa (“toasted”) to describe dark-skinned people. And he offers no insight into the chino-curly connection.

But it doesn’t take a Ph-pinche-D to identify the common threads in chino’s various meanings: African blood and servitude. Many blacks, of course, have naturally kinky hair, so at some point over the centuries, chino became an ethnicon (a term meant to comment on an ethnic group’s prominent cultural characteristic that become popular shorthand for said characteristic) for both “black person” and “curly.” Mexicans then went on to drop the black denotation and kept the curly connection. Such linguistic amnesia isn’t unprecedented in Mexican Spanish: marrano, which many Mexicans use to call someone a “pig” or “filthy,” comes from the Inquisition-era slur used against Jews who converted to Christianity. All this wordplay is further proof that Mexico is a country with a racial problem that makes America seem like Sesame Street. The proper Spanish word for “curly,” by the way, is rizado.

Ask the Mexican at [email protected], be his fan on Facebook, follow him on Twitter @gustavoarellano or ask him a video question at youtube.com/askamexicano!

04/30/2009
Ask a Mexican: Why can’t we all call the Rio Grande the same thing?

Dear Mexican: Why can’t the United States and Mexico agree on one only name for the Rio Bravo-Grande river? And I don t understand why the Americans lo dice in español?
Marfa Maven

Dear Wabette: The Mexican is a Californian by the grace of God so doesn’t dare tread the intellectual waters of the Lone Star State unless absolutely necessary—recently, he declared Dallas as more influential in the course of Mexican food in this country than Houston, and got holy hell from it by Houstonians while folks in El Paso and San Antoni snickered! Gotta love those locos…anyhoo, I forwarded the question to Joshua S. Treviño, vice-president of communications for the Texas Public Policy Foundation and one of the few conservative Mexis that doesn’t give the Mexican Montezuma’s Revenge. “This question is near and dear to my heart: though the Mexican who usually answers your queries is born and bred in sunny Orange County, California, my family is from the Texas-Mexico borderland along the Rio Grande,” Joshua writes. “My Treviño grandfather would swim in the river between his childhood home of Roma, Texas, and Ciudad Aleman, Mexico, on the opposite bank. Thankfully, he married a Laredo gal and lived the rest of his life in Texas — else my Treviños might have ended up like the most (in)famous Treviños today: senior enforcers in the Los Zetas narco-cartel.

“That’s right, I wrote ‘Rio Grande’ above,” Treviño continues. “That’s what we call it here en los Estados Unidos—and it’s just as proper to call it Rio Bravo del Norte when you’re in Mexico. The dual name stems from colonial-era confusion about whether the upper and lower courses of the river were connected. In 1840, Mexican revolutionaries in Laredo established the short-lived República del Rio Grande; the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo that ended the U.S.-Mexican War refers to the river demarcating the new boundary as ‘the Rio Grande, otherwise called Rio Bravo del Norte.’ In time, Anglo settlers in Texas adopted one, and Mexicans — perhaps inspired by the connotations of bravo en español signifying ‘wild’ or ‘turbulent,’ which aptly describe the region— adopted the other. Rest assured, this is the source of absolutely no confusion here. As for why we Americans say Rio Grande in Spanish, that must remain a mystery, unsolvable until we discern why we say California, Nevada, Colorado, Arizona, Florida, San Antonio, Los Angeles, and San Francisco en español tambien.“

Gracias, Joshua! The next breakfast taco at Torchy’s in Austin is on me…

Dear Mexican: What’s up with the trucks full of mattresses and other junk on the freeways? Mexicans get a bad rap for being lowly laborers, but I think they’re secretly engineers. It’s the only explanation for the ridiculous loads they fit into their 1995 Chevrolet Dually pick-up trucks. Where the heck are they going and what are they doing with all of our junk and old mattresses — taking it to TJ? Driving the old gas hogs they are, how can they make any money? I have asked other Mexicans I work with, but they said they don’t know…they might not really be Mexican.
A Confused White Commuter

Dear Gabacho: Of course we’re engineers! How else do you explain how we stuff thirteen kids, four uncles, the abuelita and a hell of a lot of clothes in a truck for a trip to Mexico? Or how we stuff ourselves into car engines when we sneak back into the United States?

Ask the Mexican at [email protected], be his fan on Facebook, follow him on Twitter @gustavoarellano or ask him a video question at youtube.com/askamexicano!

04/30/2009
Ask a Mexican: How did tamarind make its way to Mexico?

Dear Mexican: What do we need to do to make the güeros understand we come in peace As Mexicans, we are from this great American continent as well, but in the average close-minded English-speaking folks’ definition of “American,” it’s amusing to see they don’t understand what it really means, as in: unless you are from one of the few nature-communing groups of people now dubbed “Native Americans,” then you cannot say you are American; being that either yourself, your parents, grandparents or great-grandparents (you get the point) came from the Old World and hence have been in this land “illegally” for much much longer than us bean lovers. So I repeat my question: how can we make these green-gos understand we come in peace? That we are here to live a good life in peace and to take it or leave it: we are here TO STAY! Help me make these McDonalders understand already so we can all learn from each other and live in peace!

El Frijolero

Dear Beaner: Gracias for showing American that Mexis can be as meandering as gabachos. As to your question: shit, we’ve tried everything to Hispander to gabachos over the years. We gave them half of Mexico, we called ourselves “Spanish,” we considered ourselves white, we made amazing dishes that other gabachos turned into multi-million-dollar empires — and, still, they hate us. What to do? Not a single pinche thing: Mexicans in this country are no longer at a place where we have to grovel to anyone. If gabachos don’t want to accept that aquí estamos and we ain’t vamos, then they deserve the beautiful brown grandkids that are coming their way.

Dear Mexican: I noticed that my favorite candies are primarily made out of chile and tamarindo. I understand that chile is indigenous to the Americas, but tamarindo is not. I found that tamarindo originates from the Middle East and Africa. And through the slave trade and the dreadful European expansion, tamarindo found its delicious way to the Americas. What I don’t get is how and why tamarindo became so popular amongst nuestra gente? We consume mega-tons of it! We drink it, we make candy out it, I sometimes have dreams about it…¿que onda?

Pocho De Ocho

Dear Pocho: Actually, tamarind came to Mexico through the Manila galleons and has no Middle Eastern connection whatsoever — the Levantine’s contribution to Mexico’s fruit culture is granada (pomegranates) via the Spaniards via the Moors. But it was only by a brain pedo of God that tamarind isn’t native to Mexico, as no other culture save certain Hindoos loves it the way we do. It’s not much of a mystery: Mexicans love sweets with tropical verve and fleshiness, whether it’s mamey, mangoes, papayas, guanábana, tunas (the prickly pear) or boring-ass pineapple. But tamarind is the king of the jungle, because — as you pointed out — we can turn it into so many things: ice cream, fruit leather, salads, salsas, on chocolate, paletas, and so much more. And when we pare it with chile (which we always do), it’s the greatest product of foreign-yet-similar cultures since the leprecano.

Ask the Mexican at [email protected], be his fan on Facebook, follow him on Twitter @gustavoarellano or ask him a video question at youtube.com/askamexicano!

04/30/2009
Ask a Mexican: Why are Mexicans such mama’s boys?

BUY TACO USA! Gentle cabrones, my much-promised Taco USA: How Mexican Food Conquered America has finally hit bookstores! Place your order with your favorite local bookstore, your finer online retailers, your craftier piratas, but place it. My libro editor has already promised to deport me from the publishing industry if we don’t sell enough copies!

Dear Mexican: I’m getting sick and tired of all these dirty, stupid Mexicans running around. The first part is easy: As Mr. Dix says in David Copperfield, when asked what to do with David, “Why, bathe him.” The second part could be just as easy: Pay them to learn English. There is no damn crime in knowing two languages. If they are kids brought here illegally by their parents, pay the parents to learn English also. And don’t ever, ever tell me that there’s no money. I HATE MEXICANS EXCEPT FOR THE GIRLS!
Wrote My Question Via Snail Mail

Dear Gabacho: And as Dickens wrote in Martin Chuzzlewitz, “What is exaggeration to one class of minds and perceptions, is plain truth to another.” I agree it’s no damn crime to know two languages, so please tell your gaba raza it’s OK to learn Spanish — shit, Mexicans learned English long ago!

Dear Mexican: Why are Mexican men so attached to their mommies? My boyfriend is an only child, and his mom is loca for him. When he goes out to dinner with his parents, she never has anything to say. But if I am around, she will talk to him forever. I tried to be friends with her, but she looks like she just want to have a civil relationship with me, not a “mother-daughter” relationship. He isn’t crazy in love with his mom because he has stopped speaking to her for ten days because of su novia and had arguments with her because of things she did against me in the past, but he is still kind of…blind. How can I take him away from her? Somebody told that the food will. I already know how to make three Mexican dishes and he loved! What else can I do besides cook and have sex (which he enjoys a lot!)?
Confused Nuera

Dear Daughter-in-Law Confundida: It’s not so much a Mexican thing as it is a Catholic culture cosa. One of my favorite cross-cultural moments happened in The Godfather 2, where the young Vito Corleone (as played by Robert DeNiro) saw an opera in Little Italy in which the protagonist, upon learning about the death of his saintly mother, proceeded to sing that he was going to kill his…was it a wife? Lover? Don’t have my Netflix right now. Anyhoo, Catholic culture teaches the male worship of moms and the dismissal of all other woman as inadequate — it’s the whole Madonna/whore complex, and it’s a cycle that not even the best panocha on Earth can break. And as the eldest son of a wonderful mami, I say let this benevolent tyranny reign FOREVER.

Ask the Mexican at [email protected], be his fan on Facebook, follow him on Twitter @gustavoarellano or ask him a video question at youtube.com/askamexicano!

04/30/2009
Ask a Mexican: Why is it that people from Chihuahua and Monterrey are such jackasses?

Dear Mexican: Why is it that people from Chihuahua and Monterrey are such jackasses? They come from pinches ranchitos and talk about their haciendas, They cross the border and act as if their cagada does not stink. Why do pinches chihuahuenses act as if they are better than us American citizens? They eat at all-you-can-eat $6.99 buffets and still want to take a plate to go for their abuela and primos and try to feed the whole familia. They stay at our hotels and treat the maids like rats, as if they were conquistadores. They speak loud as if every one wanted to hear what they have to say — they are not E.F. Hutton. They think that their putos pesos can buy anything, When you ask them where do they come from, they start by telling you that their abuelos are Spaniards and most of their familia are Spaniards as if they are ashamed to be called mexicanos. The women wear their pantalones so tight that when they walk, they go up their puto culo, with their fake blond hair. Please tell those cabrones chihuahuenses and putos monterreyes que cool down, they are just as Mexicans as the rest of us, that they still smell like frijoles and are not Spaniards.
Hernan Cortez

Dear Gachupín: Nothing like some intra-Mexican hatred to prove that the idea of a Mexican nation united for Reconquista is as realistic as a Mexican government free of narco money! Your specific insults toward people from the Mexican state of Chihuahua (or, as they’re known in El Paso, fronchis) and city of Monterrey (their nickname is regiomontanos) marks you as someone from Texas, as that’s where the majority of immigrants from northern Mexico have landed. And the reason they act so uppity isn’t so much because of where they’re from but what they are: ricos who have fled the chaos of their home states for the safety of Texas, where pompous, ostentatious pendejos are not only welcomed, they become governors and presidents.

Dear Mexican: I’m a gabacha…kind of. I was born here but my padres are mexicanos. So I’m a gabachacana. Anyway my question is in regards to fixing my authentic mexicano’s papeles. He’s 23, and I heard that once you’re past 18, it’s harder to do it. He’s never been in trouble with the law, he pays taxes and he’s a hard worker. But I heard that even all that would do him no good and if I go through trying to fix his papers, he would need to spend like 10 years in Mexico. Now, I’m a patient person, but que chingado man? I’m not gonna risk him meeting some paisana hoochie over there and having me wait 10 years for him. So, what steps can I take to prevent such an atrocity? What would you suggest be the best way to go about in fixing his papers without the risk of having him meet some skeezer down south?
Gabachacana

Dear Wabette: While I’m all for people making up ethnic labels to describe themselves, gabachacana makes you sound like an apricot. The easy answer is marrying the chavo — you’re still going to face a long process, but it’s faster than waiting for the Obama administration to make Dios-knows-how-many deals with labor, the Mexican government, and Republicans to offer a “comprehensive immigration reform” that’s as comprehensive as a tortilla chip covering a bowl of birria. Better yet, why not just move to Mexico with him? As I’ve said before, Mexico is the true land of liberty now, a libertarian paradise that becomes more and more appealing as technocrats up here try to game the system for themselves and make los Estados Unidos into just another Mexico–oh, wait…

Ask the Mexican at [email protected], be his fan on Facebook, follow him on Twitter @gustavoarellano or ask him a video question at youtube.com/askamexicano!

04/30/2009
¡Ask A Mexican! Well, pinche me and call me gabacho: A Mexican Spanish vulgarity may not be so vulgar.

Dear readers: Before we move on to your spicy preguntas, a bit of housecleaning. Primeramente, gracias to all the Know Nothings who responded to my 100-word-essay challenge asking them to justify loving legal Mexicans but not the illegal ones; I will publish the best entries on the Mexican’s April Fools’ edición.

On a more important note: pinche. Many of ustedes offered alternate meanings to this Mexican Spanish vulgarity beyond “cooking assistant” and “fucking in the adverbial sense.” From our Puerto Rican brothers:

In Puerto Rico, pinche is simply the term used for a wooden clothespin. There is no negative connotation of the word on the island.

From a gabacho married to a Colombian chica:

When my in-laws were in recently, my cuñada saw us drinking margaritas from a margarita glass. “Eso es muy pinche,” she said, and our mouths dropped. But according to my mother-in-law, pinche in Colombia just means that one is putting on airs.

Next is my pal Tigrillo, a proud Mexi grad of Princeton University, voicing something echoed by many other tejanos who wrote in:

In south Texas, they use pinche to refer to people being tight with their money. Kind of weird, since so many folk in south Texas have roots in Monterrey, the supposed land of the codos. I think that meaning of pinche is Tex-Mex, and I have never heard it used similarly elsewhere.

Something for the Spanish-speaking readers of this column. Oh, my god: the Reconquista has even hit ¡Ask a Mexican!

Soy un nostálgico ex-neoyorquino que ahora vive en Chilangolandia. Leyendo la respuesta que diste al uso de pinche, pienso que no puedes decir “¡Pinche!” a secas, porque además de adverbio es un adjetivo que necesita calificar a un nombre (adverbios se convierten en adjetivos, es mi punto). Tienes que decir, como le explicaste al gabacho: “¡Pinche gringo culero!,” o “¡Pinche güey!” como decimos mucho aquí en Mexico City. También decimos mucho: “Eso está muy pinche,” para determinar la mala calidad o mal gusto de cualquier cosa. ¿Y qué tal el superlativo pinchísimo? También se debe incluir como adjetivo, ¿no?: “¡Esa película estuvo pinchísima!” es una gran palabra y por supuesto es muy buena traducción para fucking. Me gusta particularmente: “Fucking bitch!” Pero no por misógino, sino porque suena tan bien como “¡Pinche puta!”

The final word goes to a gabacho living in Mexico:

Actually, Mexican: here in Sinaloa, pinche is a pretty mild word, more like your (and mine for years) definition, “worthless.” Commonly used by la gente educada y religiosa, pinche just doesn’t have that connotation of “fucking” that it seems to have gained from you pinche wabs y Chicanos in the borderlands and in the U.S.

One qualifier to the Mexicanized gabacho: he lives in Sinaloa, a Pacific coastal state notorious for its tough, vulgar residents. Need proof? This is where most of Mexico’s drugs lords originate — and now, I shut up.

Dear Mexican: Have you seen the Simpsons figurines from Kid Robot? The Bumblebee Man is the hardest to get, therefore the most valuable of the bunch. I’ve seen it on eBay going for $75 when they cost seven bucks in the store. You think Matt Groening did this on purpose ’cause he really does love the Mexicans, or you think it was just a funny character and a funny coincidence?
Señora Ding Dong

Dear Wabette: Of course Groening loves Mexicans, and not just because he freely admits that the legendary Mexican superhero El Chapulín Colorado (The Red Grasshopper) inspired Bumblebee Man. As I argue in an essay included in my ¡Ask a Mexican! compilation, The Simpsons is the most Latino show ever to appear on English-language television, one so wabby it makes The George Lopez Show seem as gabacho as Friends. Want a full explanation? Buy my book, because I’m over my word count that the gabachos give me!

Ask the Mexican at [email protected], myspace.com/ocwab, find him on Facebook, or write via snail mail at: Gustavo Arellano, P.O. Box 1433, Anaheim, CA 92815-1433!

04/04/2009