Ask a Mexican!

Dear Mexican: How can I get Mexicans to arrive to a meeting ON
TIME?

Punctual Pete

Dear Gabacho: Tell them you’re offering green cards on a first-come,
first-serve basis. And then diles a gabachos to eliminate
the concept of arriving “fashionably late” the same way they did the
Polish joke.

I was reading through the glossary in your ¡Ask a
Mexican! book, and I came upon the word pocho, an Americanized
Mexican. To me, it suggests some sort of essential Mexican-ness that I
find to be disturbing. There is a similar ethic in the black community.
The term “Uncle Tom” comes to mind. It is used as the ultimate
humiliation to a black person, and I wonder if pocho has the same
weight to it.

Being a person who has never fit into the ideal of anything, I
sympathize with anyone else who finds themselves on the outside. The
pressure to relate to everyone else in your gene pool is ridiculous. In
my experience, it often comes from the most mentally and economically
impoverished, hence the term “ghetto pass.” The pressure is so great in
the black community that black professors regularly use the words ain’t and folk, as if to prove their blackness. I suspect
that there is a class component in the Mexican community, too. What say
you, wise Mexican?

Alma on Ice

Dear Negrito: The idea of ethnic or national purity of course isn’t limited to Mexicans, and I’m with you in ridiculing anyone who
subscribes to such pinche notions.

In the Mexican case vis-à-vis the negrito community
example, differences exist. Pocho doesn’t necessarily signify a
betrayal of the Mexican community to shuck and jive for the
gabachos like Uncle Tom does for blacks; it just means the
dilution of Mexican cultural and linguistic features in someone of
Mexican descent. (The term comes from an alternate meaning for
pocho—rotting fruit—but not even the Royal Academy
of Spanish has a clue about the word’s etymological origins.) The most
immediate corollary to Uncle Tom in Spanish is Tío
Tomás or Tío Taco, but both are
pochismos (pocho sayings) with little usage in Mexico, where the
slur for a sellout is malinchista, referring to Cortes’ Indian
translator, or a vendido.

As you imply, the only Mexicans who care whether someone is Mexican
enough are insecure twits who aren’t Mexican enough, and some of the
most notorious examples come from Chicano studies professors (but not
all of you, o noble researchers of everything wab!) and Carlos Mencia.
Oh, and immigrant elders, but their angst is excused—that’s the
American immigrant experience, after all.

Why can’t Mexicans seem to learn and use English like most other
immigrants elsewhere around the country?

Fucking Mexicans

Dear Gabacho: Consult Page 21 of my ¡Ask a Mexican!
libro, then go ask New York Jets quarterback Mark Sanchez about his
family. Hopefully, he’ll aim a spiral at your huevos.

¡ASK A MEXICAN GRATIS BOOK CONTEST!

Sí, gentle readers: It’s that time of the
año again where I give away an autographed copy of my
book to one lucky reader from each paper that carries my
columna, and cinco readers from everywhere else. The
challenge: In 25 words or less, tell me your favorite local Mexican
restaurant and what makes it so bueno. I’ll be traveling ’round
los Estados Unidos in my trusty burro soon to research my coming
book on the history of Mexican food in the United States, and I need
places to haunt and cactuses to sleep under. One entry per person; one
winner per paper; and the contest ends when I say so!

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

This article appears in Jul 16-22, 2009.