My wife is from Michoacán state. We’ve bought a home in
the small town of her birth. I love everything about the quiet little
place. Even her mother is kind to me, as if I were her son. The food is
incredibly good. The puerco is killed that morning, and the
taste is like nothing you ever find north of the border. The federales stare me down, but so what? They mean well. Besides, they
rarely come around. My wife’s village is old Mexico at its
best.

The problem is, I can retire today, TODAY, and go live the good
life in Mexico. But my wife wants to stay here in California, where it
just gets worse by the hour. Why do Mexicans not want to go back to
their homeland, while Americans can’t wait to go live there? Please
help me convince my wife it’s time to retire to Santa Ines.

Camino a Michoacán

Dear Gabacho: Ever stop to wonder why your wife and millions of her
compadres left Mexico?

Sí, about a million yanquis now live in Mexico,
and the living is easier and cheaper—but it’s still Mexico. It’s
a place where any gabacho can live like a king, provided they
have mucho dinero and remember the William Walker part of their
American DNA, but regular Mexicans must deal with centuries of class
discrimination to eke out a living. Yeah, Mexicans up here weep
nostalgic tears a bit much over leaving their homeland, but again: Ever
wonder why they left in the first place?

Sorry to break it to you, Camino, but “Old Mexico” only exists in
Westerns, murals in Tex-Mex restaurants and in the Simpsons episode where Krusty the Clown takes a bunch of kids from Kamp Krusty
to Tijuana as atonement for his endorsements of shoddy products.

Why are Mexican men SOOOO sexy?! They have that certain
“machismo” thing white guys just DON’T have!

Waiting Güera

Dear Gabacha: It ain’t the machismo, chula; it’s our manhood.
Ever wonder why Mexican men are such prudes in locker rooms? Mere
modesty: We don’t want to give gabachos penis envy.

Is chingar really a Spanish verb? Or is it Mexican slang?
When I awakened my Spanish-speaking Chilean sweetheart one morning with
a grin and, “¿Quieres chingar?” she said she didn’t
understand. (I later learned that the word is a rather coarse version
of what one says to his/her sweetie when you want to … you know …
and that I was probably lucky she didn’t understand.) Are there
different versions of this verb for different Spanish-speaking
countries? I wonder because, in the Anglo countries (United Kingdom,
Canada, United States, Australia and New Zealand), we all use the same
cute little four-letter word.

Coarse Gabacho

Dear Gabacho: You might be coarse, but you’re really a
pendejo. If you want to ask a chica, “Wanna fuck?” in
Mexican Spanish, you don’t say, “¿Quieres chingar?” You’d
more properly say “¿Quieres coger?” (Actually, if you
want a real chance to get in her chonis, you’ll be a gentleman
about it and ask if you can pluck her flor.)

Although chingar (derived from
cingarár—”to fight”—in Caló, the
language of Spanish Gypsies that had a profound influence on
Mexican-American slang) can mean the act of coitus, the Royal Academy
of Spanish lists nine separate entries for the verbo, from the
aforementioned “to fuck” to “annoy” to “unevenly hang” in Argentina and
Uruguay, and to “cut the tail of an animal” for Central Americans (I
blame Guatemalans for that weak interpretation)—and these
definitions don’t include chingar‘s numerous slang versions and
tenses.

Like I discussed with the word pinche a couple of
columnas ago, many curse words in Spanish have benign meanings
in other Latin American regions. Remember coger? We Mexicans
might prefer the word in its sexy incarnation, but the Royal Academy of
Spanish includes 31 more definitions—chingao!

Ask the Mexican at themexican@askamexican.net or myspace.com/ocwab; find
him on Facebook or Twitter; or write via snail mail at: Gustavo
Arellano, P.O. Box 1433, Anaheim, CA 92815-1433!

This article appears in May 14-20, 2009.