One man's take on his culture's stereotypes

Virgin of Guadalupe: The patron saint of Mexico. Appears everywhere in Mexican society, from churches to silk shirts to hubcaps.

One man's take on his culture's stereotypes

By Gustavo Arellano

Thursday, November 12, 2009

Dear Mexican: Whenever I see an ad for a Mexican ramera, they always describe themselves as “spicy.” Are Mexican women hiding habañeros in their panochas? --Concha Curious

Dear Gabacho: “I wish I could say that ‘Mexican Spitfire’ Lupe Velez was to blame for the ‘spicy’ epithet so often associated with Mexican femme pulchritude,” says William Nericcio, author of Tex(t)-Mex: Seductive Hallucinations of the “Mexican” in America, “or that ersatz Latinas Rita Hayworth or Raquel Welch had conspired with the intrinsically hot movements of their netherworlds to have forever etched the ghosts of their hot pudenda into the semantic pantheon of ‘spicy’ DNA. However, it’s far more simple: Adjective-challenged ’Mericans borrowed the epithet from Brit views of Spanish gals and their cuisine – namely paella, which would never give a Mexican a sweat, but might make a West End wonk spit fire and cry out for a bloody glass of water.” The Mexican agrees but ratchets up the gabacho-bashing by also blaming Protestant frigidity and its eternal efforts to dismiss Catholic cultures (French, Hispanic, Italian, Irish, y the like) as intrinsically, sinfully hot-blooded. So the answer, Concha Curious, is yes: Mexicanas have habañeros in their hoo-hahs that make them spicy, just like all women. Called the clitoris.

I always see Mexicans pushing their 10-and 12-year-old kids around in strollers. What gives? Why don’t you impose a maximum age for stroller usage? --Jealous Of Mexican Babies

Dear Gabacho: Same reason Mexicans don’t impose a maximum age for living with their parents until marriage – why deny a parent’s love?

The language spoken in the U.S. is European. Shouldn’t there be a Mexican movement to bring back the Nahuatl language? --El Boludo

Dear Gabacho: Mixteca is an Oto-Manguean tongue, while Nahuatl is of the Uto-Aztecan language family. Nahuatl might be the most-spoken indigenous language in Mexico (with about 1.38 million speakers), but that’s less than a quarter of the more than 6 million people who the Mexican government says speak an Indian idioma.