Columbia City Paper

Dear Mexican: Whenever I see an ad for a Mexican ramera, they always describe themselves as “spicy.” Are Mexican women hiding habaneros 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, I think its far simpler: Adjective-challenged ’Mericans merely 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 with the loco professor of English at San Diego State, but ratchets up the gabacho-bashing by also blaming Protestant frigidity and its eternal efforts to dismiss Catholic cultures (French, Hispanic, Italian, Irish and the like) as intrinsically, sinfully hot-blooded. So the answer, Concha Curious, is yes: mexicanas have habaneros in their hoo-hahs that make them spicy, just like all women. It’s called the clitoris.

Dear Mexican: I have a question regarding the legitimacy of Spanish as the predominant language of Mexico. In regard to the future reality of a United States overrun by Mexican people, I realized that the language spoken there is a European language, the same as Dutch, French or Euskadi. Shouldn’t there be a Mexican national movement to bring back the Nahuatl language, sort of on the same level as the Irish bringing back Gaelic? Just curious if I should go out and purchase a Mixteca-to-English dictionary.

El Boludo

Dear Big-Balled Gabacho: Go ahead and buy that bilingual dictionary, but don’t count on speaking like the Aztecs — Mixteca is an Oto-Manguean tongue, while Nahuatl is a branch of the Uto-Aztecan language family. Besides, you’re wrongly assuming that all Mexicans have Aztec roots when that’s not el caso. Nahuatl might be the most-spoken indigenous language in Mexico, with an estimated 1.38 million speakers, but that figure is less than a quarter of the more than 6 million people whom the Mexican government says speak an Indian idioma. (Maya is the second-most-spoken, while about half a million speak Mixteca’s many dialects.) You’re right to assume a mini-movement of learning Nahuatl in Chicano circles, but that’s based more on their lionization of Aztec culture and Nahuatl’s influence on Mexican Spanish than the tongue’s practicality or its place as Mexico’s rightful lingua franca. To say Nahuatl should be brought back and function as Mexico’s official language is the same imperialistic mierda that brought on the dominance of Spanish and the suppression of so many languages in the first place. That said, the Mexican is in favor of other Mexicans relearning their ancestral tongues, if only to further confound gabachos who are just beginning to grasp the language of Cervantes.

Ask the Mexican at themexican@askamexican.net or myspace.com/ocwab. Or write to him at: Gustavo Arellano, P.O. Box 1433, Anaheim, CA 92815-1433. Find him on Facebook and Twitter!

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