Dear Mexican: I was riding the local light rail when two female
Mexicans sat down and start talking rapid-fire Spanish, nonstop, for 45
minutes! It seemed as if neither one stopped to take a breath. They
were loud and could be heard the length of the train. Question: Is this
why Mexican men are notorious for beating their women? If not, where
did this notoriety originate?
Stonedeaf Whitebread
Dear Gabacho: And are you still beating your wife? Loaded
question aside, Mexican men have an infamous tendency for spousal abuse
in the gabacho mind, partly out of stereotype (thanks to the
machismo cult, the most misunderstood cultural tendency since the
American love of empire-building), but also partly out of truth. Sure,
Mexican men beat wives, just like gabacho, negrito and
chinito maridos. But the prevalence may surprise people.
The Department of Justice, in its latest National Crime
Victimization Survey, found that spousal abuse suffered by “Hispanic”
(read: mostly Mexican) women fell two-thirds between 1993 and 2005, and
that “on average from 2001 to 2005, rates of intimate partner violence
were similar for both Hispanic and non-Hispanic females and males.” In
other words, gabachos and wabs beat their mates at similar
rates.
Of course, the feds only track reported cases, and the 2003 book
Family Violence in a Cultural Perspective: Defining, Understanding,
and Combating Abuse has a fascinating essay about the disparities
among different Latino groups in reporting the crime. We can pin this
pathology on mexicanidad, but that facile tactic absolves other
groups of the similar sin and disregards legitimate factors (e.g.,
poverty, following parental examples, alcoholism) as the roots of
spousal abuse. Besides, I don’t understand the glee people take in
attributing societal ills to an ethnic or religious group’s essence;
that reasoning is as weak as Chicanos blaming all of Mexico’s missteps
on the U.S. theft of the American Southwest so long ago.
You have to stop calling gabachos gabachos, my man. That’s
our word for when we’re talking about the whites when one is within
earshot. Whitey is far more familiar with us calling them gringos. If
they become too familiar with gabacho, we’ll have to move to the
standby güero, ¿qué no?
Chicano Gordito
Dear Chubby Wab: While I like your thinking, I must respectfully
disagree. This column provides a public service by explaining and
debunking Mexican culture to all interested parties, and what’s more
important for gabachos to know than whether we’re saying bad
things about them in Spanish?
Don’t believe the hype, gabachos: We don’t care caca about y’all, and the proof is in our respective slurs for each other.
We call you gringo (white foreigner), gabacho (French idiot),
güero (light-skinned), bolillo (French roll we love)
and yanqui (imperialist), and my friend Cheeser from El Modena
came up with anglosangrones (Anglo-assholes). Ustedes deride us as beaners, greasers, pepper bellies (insults toward our
diet), wetbacks (a ridicule of the arduous journey many of us took to
invade this country), aliens, wife beaters and so much more. We can’t
hold a vela to your linguistic disgust and invective obsession
for us! I get a few letters each week from Know Nothings whining that
I’m a nasty racist for calling them gabachos, but you know what?
Ustedes should be grateful I don’t run a contest to create a new
insult for Mexicans to deride white Americans. In the grand Rolodex of
Racism, gabacho is as soft of a jab as calling someone a
scoundrel.
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 Jun 11-17, 2009.