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Dear Mexican: I just read that Speedy Gonzales is getting his own feature film and will be voiced by George Lopez. I read in the The Hollywood Reporter that Lopez said he gave Speedy his “Latino Seal of Approval.” Who grants this seal? What does it look like? And how did Lopez get it?

Hija of the MiscegeNation

Dear Wabette: Isn’t it nice to know that Mexicans in Hollywood, once they reach a modicum of success, become as hackish and hackneyed as their gabacho counterparts? Sorry to sound so whiny, but shame on Lopez for bringing back Gonzales. For starters, only Mel Blanc and his imitators are allowed to voice Speedy—Lopez’s gravelly voice will turn the mouse’s high-pitched voice into a cacophonous bola de caca. Lopez also shows that by resurrecting Speedy from the celluloid graveyard, he’d rather rip off the works of others than try to give young Latino talent a chance, just like Sandra Bullock gave Lopez a shot with his eponymous sitcom so long ago—way to pay it forward, George! Finally, the assurances by Lopez and his wife that their Speedy film won’t showcase the “racist” Speedy proves that the two are not only PC pendejos, but also pendejos, period. As the Mexican has written before in this columna multiple times, Speedy Gonzales cartoons were not racist depictions of Mexican culture, but rather clever allegories in which the seemingly dumb Speedy—standing in for mexicanos—consistently outwitted the dumb gabachos portrayed by Sylvester the Cat and, occasionally, Yosemite Sam. You want stereotypical depictions of Mexicans? Tune into Lopez Tonight, and just try to stay awake past the opening monologue.

Dear Mexican: In Mexican culture, do you know of any special significance attached to a woman giving a lock of her hair to a man as a gift?

Peludo Nuevamente

Dear Newly Hairy Gabacho: If you can’t get that a mujer giving you a lock of her hair wants you, then you probably thought she wanted you to use it as a mustache. No seas pendejo.

Dear Mexican: This column—although very intelligent and respected for the knowledge that the answers or responses are derived from—is, I find, very degrading to the Mexican culture. The broken Spanish is very New Mexican. I believe that throwing in some Spanish words here and there teaches the use of improper English, and I think it’s you who will set an example for the Mexican people who read your column. They should get to see there are intelligent Mexican people who learned the English language and master two languages, rather than running it all together and sounding ridiculous and feeding the “Mexican” stereotype.

Custodian of Cervantes

Dear Wab: Roto Spanish, muy New Mexican? Yo thought era Tex-mexicanos who hablar Spanglish very mucho. Spanglish es the modo in which yo can enseñar my facilidad with las two idiomas, fucking pinche asshole pendejo loser. Besides, más better a show gabachos that mexicanos can usar two lenguas instead que just una—and también elite fresas such as usted.
Ask the Mexican at themexican@askamexican.net

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!

Dear Mexican: I’m a Spanish teacher. I’ve been hearing my students say a phrase, and I am unsure what it means (if it truly means anything, which they swear it does). They say it’s a Mexican saying: Tiki tu madre. I don’t know what “tiki” means. So, I was wondering if you could shed some light on the subject for me.

Maestra de Español

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My co-worker Maria and I are having a disagreement about the meaning of
the word gringo. Would you be able to tell us the true meaning and
street meaning of gringo?

Veritas vos Liberabit

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I don�t know if someone has asked you this before, but with all the
talk of problems with illegal immigrants and with all the obvious
racial tension in this country between whites and Mexicans, do you
think that Mexicans are the new blacks of this country?

Division Street Dude

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  Dear Mexican: I know youâ��ve been asked variations of this before, but Iâ��m going to ask you again anyway. Iâ��m a gay white guy, and Iâ��ve had three relationships with Mexican men in the past seven years. Each lasted from three to six months. This past relationship actually lasted a year and culminated with us moving in together for a month before it ended badly. Mexican: Iâ��ve never been treated worse than by the Mexicans Iâ��ve datedâ��and yet Iâ��ve also never been happier.

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Dear Readers: I don�t like to rerun columns �cause it makes me look like a lazy Mexican, but I realize that, as my column invades foreign terrain (Chattanooga! Columbia, South Carolina! Steamboat Springs, Colorado!), new readers might not understand some of my running gags. Following, then, are the two most-frequently asked questions about the Mexican�s methodology:

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Dear Mexican: I�m half-Catalan, and the women on my mom�s side of my family have spent most of their lives being hated by Mexicans. I�ve never understood it. My mom and aunts warned me as soon as I hit junior high that I was going to have a target on me because they had one too when they were my age. It didn�t make sense�I�ve had the same Mexican friends since kindergarten. Most of my life, I grew up in a mostly Mexican neighborhood, and I speak their language. But it didn�t matter�my mom, her six sisters, and most of my cousins and myself have been called �coconut� or some other mean thing because of our background, and all of us have been threatened by at least one MEChA member. It wasn�t only our fellow students�none of us could take a Spanish class without a teacher telling us that we were completely wrong, that no one talked or wrote like us anymore. But no males in my family ever experienced this. Can you please tell me why Mexican women hate Spanish women?

Barcelona Babe

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WHO IS THE MEXICAN?
I’m Gustavo Arellano. I was born in Anaheim, California, to a tomato canner and an illegal immigrant. My ¡Ask a Mexican! column won the 2006 Association of Alternative Newsweeklies award for the best column in a largecirculation weekly. I’m a contributing editor to the Los Angeles Times and have appeared on Today, Nightline, NPR’s On the Media, The Situation with Tucker Carlson, and The Colbert Report. I also mow lawns for $15 – $10 if I get a water break.
 City Paper welcomes Gustavo Arellano and feel free to send your questions to themexican@askamexican.net

Dear Mexican,

My friend and I were wondering why Mexican girls are so beautiful
when they are teenagers, then over the years, they become fat, old bags?

Mark M.

Costa Mesa

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