When did Mexican become a "dirty" word?

I'm approaching seventy years of age, less a few.

I see Sozobe's posts as both true and, however true and insistent, a rather recent phenomenon - more within the last thirty years.

It wasn't all that long ago that 'mexican' was a pejorative in parts of Los Angeles. Oh, just trust me.

I've no qualms that there were matching sets of feelings.

That Boomer is confused about this is just about a sunny thing to me.

It may be that what boomer is picking up is from the messy appellations Soz is talking about, but there could also be some residual or new xenophobia going on in the north. I didn't pick up strains of it in Humboldt County, but I might have missed it.


Or I'll have to find some references, including theater.

Well, for example, there's luis valdez..

http://biography.jrank.org/pages/3230/Valdez-Luis-1940-Playwright-Director-Writer-Actor-Teacher-El-Teatro-Campesino.html

A guy of my approximate age, made a lot pay attention; went to some of the performances.

(I also saw a bunch of SF Mime Troup performances at the Fox Venice, sigh)

On Valdez, Zoot Suit is the one I remember but think I saw more of the plays.

You want Mexican food, you better say Mexican. I prefer Northern New Mexican, myself, but if you mean Mexican, but say Spanish, you are in for a surprise.

By the way, I was with fbaezer in what we called a "Mexican Restaurant". Not a very good one, but he was able to assure us that it seemed kind of foreign to him. It was foreign to almost anything I had ever eaten, too. Mexico is a really big country, with several climates.

That's certainly true.

In my experience, which - I dunno, since I don't roam Albuquerque - Los Angeles has many more restaurants representing different exigenous mexican foods than does Abq - not to mention brazilian, peruvian, salvadoran, cuban places. Sure, food from different states in Mexico, but also areas. So far, to me, most NM places seem to be all about NM, except for the paleta place, la michuacana.

I haven't read all the responses here, just the first page of the thread. So, please excuse me, if what I say isn't exactly the news.

It sounds to me, reading some of the responses, that it's a regional thing. Around here -- i.e. in the Norheast -- one uses the expression Latino/Latina only if one doesn't know the actual nationality of the person being referred to. To say that someone is a Latino/Latina merely means that their heritage is Hispanic. They could be Mexican or Puerto Rican or Cuban or Guatamalan or Nicuraguan or . . . If you know someone to be from Mexico, there is absolutely no perjorative connotation to referring to that person as a Mexican.

That is not the case at all in Mexico. The Mexican people, more than 60 percent of which are mestizo (of mixed European [mostly Spanish] and indigenous ancestry) refer to themselves as Mexican, including the non-mestizo population. When Mexicans refer to the indigenous peoples they refer to them as indios. The indigenous peoples, when making a distinction between themselves and other Mexicans, will generally refer to themselves by the language of the tribes or peoples they identify with (e.g. Nahua, Zapotec, Tarahumara, etc.)

All to the good, probably, that no posters seem to remember the racism of not very long ago.

This reminds me of discussions I've had about how "Jew" carries some pejorative baggage even if you don't intend to use it that way merely by virtue of it being a pejorative epithet (to others) with widespread use. You may have nothing against Jews but the use of the word enough times as an epithet causes negative connotations to the word itself and no matter how innocent the use it carries the baggage of those who have rebranded it negatively. And in language, it doesn't matter what the "real" meaning of something is, if enough people use it differently it carries that meaning to others. So it doesn't matter if Mexican just means someone or something from Mexico to you it matters what it means to everyone else as well.

"Chinese" now contains negative connotations now just as "Japanese" did for a while. Mexican is used as a pejorative in many contexts in America and serves as a pejorative label to ostracize for enough people that the word carries this linguistic baggage.

This process where a word takes on negative meaning is called "pejoration" in linguistics and when enough people discriminate against Mexicans, advocate the exclusion of Mexicans from American society (anti-immigration) and forward a caricaturization of Mexican culture as poor, dirty corrupt and lazy there will be those who shun the implications of the label when it is applied to them because the word has taken on a pejorative meaning to others.

I remember my first day in Texas, someone mistook me for a Mexican and apologized profusely when it was no big deal to me. Well it later became clear that it was a big deal to many others, who discriminated against Mexicans. The children of Mexican immigrants often rejected the label due to this pejoration as well.

Here are some examples of the negative stereotypes about Mexicans being referenced in popular culture (South Park in this case):

Mexican Space Program



Cartman gets sent somewhere "worse" than Hell: Mexico.



And then there's what sozobe already touched on, where "Mexican" becomes a dismissive term for any Latin American or even any dark-skinned foreigner. Here's an Indian kid complaining about being labeled a Mexican immigrant on youtube.



Americans don't tend to be very well informed about Latin America, and the dismissive lumping of all of them together feels insulting to some, especially (as sozobe already noted) there is a dismissive "you are all the same" quality to it. Most of the western hemisphere can fall under this particular ignorance. It doesn't matter that Brazilians don't speak the same language, that they have only seen a burrito on TV, when they go to the US they are asked if they are Mexican. It sometimes doesn't matter if they say they are from Brazil, they'll face stupefying ignorance that often doesn't even know whether Brazil is a country or a city (perhaps in Mexico!) in America.



There is also a geopolitical dimension to this. When an American president (Reagan) visits Brazil and toasts the people of Bolivia it makes Brazilians feel unimportant on a fundamental level.

This is understandably insulting to some, a staple of discrimination is to view the discriminated as more monolithic than they are. When blacks all look alike, or when all Latin Americans are called Mexican it shows a lack of interest to distinguish between them as individuals in some cases. So if a Guatemalan immigrant (who is discriminated against in Mexico as well by the way) is called a "stupid Mexican" over and over by Americans it's going to have meaning to this individual beyond "from Mexico". It's going to represent racism and ignorance to them as well because the term is used so ignorantly.

And it's hard to ignore how much ignorance is out there, for many Mexican is tacos and burritos, funny accents and a dark people to make fun of. South Park satirizes it well so here it is again:



To put it very simply, pejoration of "Mexican" in America is largely a result of xenophobia and anti-immigration backlash and the general ignorance Americans have of Latin American culture. There is ignorant pejoration of "American" (think "Yanqui") in Latin American culture as well in this relationship.

I think this is the most logical explanation.

I'm as comfortable with Yanqui as I am with Anglo or gringo. I've never taken any as being pejorative.

If it's never been directed at you pejoratively I'm not surprised you are comfortable with it, but the terms are used pejoratively in some contexts and they still don't come close to the pejoration that you can see for "Mexican".

If I were Mexican, it probably would not bother me too much, but I do understand those who object to the pejoration or shun the label based on the negative connotations.

Thank you. (as in I haven't been making my memories up.)

I have had my niece, who is black, nastied at when I was walking with her, and when I wasn't, in northern california. This stuff is all around, almost fodder.

But back to 'dirty'. I very specifically remember being told that Mexico and Mexicans were dirty. I didn't record all that input but remember it from different sources. As it happened, my first real friends, the smart ass group (SAG) who later called themselves the salts and the peppers on a trip to europe without me. Some of them had close ties with Mexico, and so I soon went there with them. Shock, I didn't die from ordering breakfast. And an early visual - people brushing their pathways, cleaning, cleaning. I remember a sort of windshield wipe of my eyes. Not that I believed my mother in the first place, but, y'know, some temerity. That was an early clue on my mother's fear information. Like, skip it.

Yes! Robert, that is exactly what I was trying to get at -- the "real" meaning becoming irrelevant.

As an American in 2009 is it ever okay to refer to someone as Mexican? The real meaning of Mexican?

Like when I was trying to think of the name of the man who worked on my house -- I knew he was from Mexico. He was from Guadalajara. Mr. B spent a huge chunk of his childhood (his happiest times, I might add) in Guadalajara. The two had had a real connection over their shared memories of Mexico.

Was I being crass by referring to the man as a Mexican or was my neighbor being dense by thinking I was being insulting?

I feel like it is not okay to even use the word correctly anymore. Perhaps that is in recognition of other's ignorance -- their ignorance makes me appear ignorant so I use their terms in hope that I don't seem like an idiot.....

Is that the best course of action given that you can't give everyone a geography lesson?

Have we come to the point where the incurious and uninformed will dictate language?

I would use it any time it's accurate and appropriate (sometimes it's annoying in America that race and nationality are such common subjects) because I wouldn't want to give in to the pejoration of the term.



I don't think you were being crass, based on what I know about you and what you explained, but I also understand why some might take it differently.

For example, a black friend I had in high school once expressed his frustration with how he was always "that black guy" instead of just "that guy". I think most people use these labels innocently, and would use any differentiating factor (like "that tall guy") but some object to race or ethnicity being used as the label partly because of the less-than-innocent uses of such labeling.

Maybe for the neighbor it carried some other baggage, I don't want to get into that age old PC argument about what kind of sensitivity levels are appropriate though. I don't think there is anything inherently wrong with what you said but I do think there are scenarios where I'd find it ugly.

I get you didn't ask me, but, yes, the fellow from Guadalajara is Mexican. Well, that's personal, the people I know from there are prideful of that.

That's hilarious, but ever so true.

Really though, were we ever not at that point? Language is one thing where the inmates have always been in charge of the asylum.

Geez louise.