Dear Mexican: In President Bush’s State of the Union address, he reiterated a need for a guest-worker program. What is your opinion of such a program? The program seems like mierda that screws people over in the long run to me, but what do I know?
Una Guerita Por Un Mundo Sin Muros 🙂
Dear Gabachita for a World Without Border Walls: Sorry I’m answering your question—what, five years later? ¿Siete?
The sad part about my laziness is that the question remains relevant, and what Republicans once dismissed as Aztlanista claptrap from the mouth of Dubya (who will remain the best GOP friend to Mexis we’ll ever have—mark my palabras) is now the gospel they’re preaching after the disaster that was their outreach efforts to Latinos during the 2012 presidential election. It’s been absolutamente HILARIOUS to see Republicans wake up and smell the tacos more than a decade after Latinos became a political force, to see them lamely prop up Florida Sen. Marco Rubio as a presidential candidate (the only position he’s worthy of is being Secretary of Coños), to see gabacho pundits ask themselves what Latino voters want without having a Latino on their panels or asking said voters, and—most laughably—to watch them introduce the idea of resurrecting the guest-worker program.
Conservatives love the idea of having Mexicans work cheaply but not being able to become citizens, but it’s an idea that’ll fail as badly as it did the first time around, from the 1940s until the 1960s. For the last time, America: Mexicans are not just workers; they’re humans who’ll notice living conditions are better here and will want to stay here—how ya gonna keep ’em down on the rancho after they’ve seen Paree? A border fence? P-shaw.
While it’s true some Mexicans might want to only work here and go back to Mexico, demographics and history show otherwise. “Immigration reform” without some sort of amnesty is like a burrito without the tortilla—and who the fuck besides calorie-conscious hipsters wants that?
I was with some cousins for a week in Lindsay, a major orange-picking city in Central California. They own a mini-market, and I’d go help them every day, and got to know some customers. Many of the Mexican customers would come in and yell “Agooshtoo” or “wey” to me and my cousins, and we’d yell it back, and they would smile and get their beer. When they would leave, they would say “a rato,” and we’d yell it back. I asked my cousins, but they didn’t really know much except that the first two were probably curse words. Any help?
Gabacho From Gilroy
Dear Gabacho “Wey” is easy—they’re saying güey, which, as I wrote so long ago in one of the first ¡Ask a Mexican! columns, is the “ass” of Mexican Spanish, even though it derives from the word for “ox.” But it’s not a fighting word, and you and your primos should be honored—Mexi men use güey as a form of endearment among each other, à la the American English “fucker” and “man.” If they really wanted to insult you, they’d call you puto, pendejo, baboso or—better yet—pinche puto pendejo baboso.
“Agooshtoo” sounds like a gusto (to be at ease), but it very well could be from an indigenous language like Mixtec or Triqui, since the Central Valley is home to tens of thousands of folks from Oaxaca. “A rato” is the elided form of al rato, which means “later”—in this case, they’re telling ustedes güeyes that they’ll be back in a bit for more beer.
Now that I answered your pregunta, do me a favor, and leave some cerveza on credit for my güeyes so they can be agusto, por favor!
This article appears in Nov 29 – Dec 5, 2012.
So … going with the human theme – what part of human is not operable in Mexico – you see this stopped being immigration when the numbers soared to millions – I am more concerned about a government which methodically exports millions of its own citizens breaking up families ( a real tear jerk-er on this side of the border) – sometimes brutally – and setting wages so low they cannot support themselves … all the while huffing and puffing about “human rights” … so help me here – human rights start north of the border and south of the border at the southern end of Mexico but not in between?
When you look at the potential number of immigrants from all countries of the world that want to come to the United States, the number is in the hundreds of millions . . . if they all came in the same year, it would be a humanitarian disaster. Yes, the United States is strengthened by immigrants, but I believe that the system should be setup to favor legal immigrants from a plethora of countries, not primarily Mexico and central American/South American countries.
Immigrants from Mexico have an advantage due to the close proximity, but because coming here illegally is wrong, (violating the laws of another country), they have a need to psychologically justify it by arguing that their ancestors had a tie to the land, and/or thinking that whites are inherently racist and therefore breaking U.S. laws is ok.
If I illegally entered Germany, I’m not so sure I would be demanding that the German public school system educate my children with special English/German classes, and that they employ affirmative action programs to help me, and my children, get jobs, while I attack the Germany government as being full of “Nazis” and that Americans like me should have special privileges, such as special history classes that focus on American history, rather than the history of the host country.
I feel sorry for what is happening to people in Mexico, such as those women mayors/police chefs who have been attacked and killed. But, MAS supporters who are militantly hateful of Americans are a problem as such attitudes should not be codified in special classes for certain ethnic groups. From many accounts, the MAS course texts seem more like supplemental reading that is not peer reviewed, than history texts which try to be objective and which look at everything that has happened in this country.
Would white students be allowed to have a special course using books written by Limbaugh and Fox News folks? Doubt it. I really don’t like Limbaugh, and I really don’t like MAS studies and the attitude they perpetuate and don’t want either in the public schools that my tax dollars fund.