Dear Mexican: An uninsured wetback just hit my car and totaled
his. He had no insurance and no license, but he did have a nice cell
phone. I asked him if he was OK in my limited Spanish, but he did not
ask about me or my children. He was handcuffed and taken away to be
booked for one hour so authorities could get his real name. This
incident will cost me hundreds of dollars, even with my insurance. My
insurance company tells me 60 percent of accidents in California
involve uninsured Mexican drivers. Why don’t they just take buses like
I did when I couldn’t afford a car?

Stranded With No Rental Insurance

Dear Gabacho: Yeah, you really care if the man who rammed
into you was OK when you smirk at his cell phone and call him a
wetback. (And real pronto, readers: Please eliminate that word
from your Rolodex of Racism. Like “beaner,” it’s so 1950s. Use
“wab” or the cooler-sounding Spanish translation, mojado.) Cry
me a pinche río.

Also, your insurance agents have no sabe what they’re talking
about sobre the figures you provided. The Insurance Research
Council’s Uninsured Motorists, 2008 Edition estimated that only
18 percent of Californians drive uninsured; a 1998 study,
California’s Uninsured, by the Policy Research Bureau of the
California Department of Insurance, did determine that 35 percent of
Latinos had no insurance, but didn’t bother to figure out whether they
caused the majority of accidents. Both studies showed that the rate of
insured drivers in California and the United States had actually
increased over the years, so that figure your agent gave you was
just to soothe your frayed gabacho ego—it simply has no
basis in fact or statistical projections.

Finally, regarding your actual question: Uninsured Mexicans drive
cars for the same reason uninsured non-Mexicans do—the buses are
too overcrowded with Mexicans.

I live outside of Tucson, a big city only about 50 miles north of
the la frontera. Every year, we celebrate the birthday of the
town, and a major attraction is our dear and famous Spanish mission
built by the Padre Eusebio Francisco Kino, a Jesuit extraordinaire of
German extraction, with help from uncounted native Tohono O’odham. This
mission is named Mission San Xavier. It is always, and I do mean
ALWAYS, pronounced San Ha-Veer, very heavy with the H. So why do
teachers who have students with the name Xavier always pronounce it
Zay-Vee-Irr? (Or does my question go the other way around?)

Old Native Just Asking

Dear Gabacho: For being a self-proclaimed native of the Old Pueblo,
you sure are a pendejo. Father Kino was of Italian extraction
(though born in the Austrian Empire), and the full name of the mission
is San Xavier del Bac, named after Society of Jesus (better known as
the Jesuits) founder St. Francis Xavier (so named because he was from
the town of Javier in the Basque country).

As to your pregunta: You’re just hearing the Spanish and
English pronunciations. The English version of the letter x almost
always sounds like the letter z at the beginning of words; la
letra x at the beginning of Spanish words is almost always
aspirated like the letter j. Of course American teachers will pronounce
Xavier as Zay-vee-Irr, the same way they turn Guillermo into Billy, but
I think the question you have is why the velar fricative took hold for
x en Español and not in English. La respuesta:
While the English were going through their Great Vowel Shift toward the
end of the Middle Ages, los Españoles decided to follow
their own route to ensure confusion among future generations of
gabachos—just another grievance alongside the Reconquista
and uninsured Mexicans, you know?

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 Oct 15-21, 2009.