LA VIDA AMERICANA (Via Eve)

Inquiring Gringos Want to Know: In 'Ask a Mexican,' a politically incorrect OC Weekly columnist fields readers' frank questions. He's a wiseguy with a cultural objective (Daniel Hernandez, LA Times, 2/23/06)

Arellano satirizes what he insists is Mexicans' disdain for immigrants from that small nation to their south: "Guatemalans are the Mexicans of Mexico. And who doesn't hate Mexicans?"

Dear Mexican,

I am a Mexicana who is dating a gabacho. My gabacho always asks me why you see Mexicans lying in the grass under a tree…. ¿Por qué?

Dear Pocha,

… Mexicans, unlike gabachos, are good public citizens who know that parkland is best used for whittling the afternoon away underneath an oak, a salsa-stained paper plate and an empty six-pack of Tecate tossed to the side.

It's funny how, sometimes, the inability to assimilate looks exactly like the path other people took to assimilation.

MORE: Ask a Mexican (2/9/06)

Dear Mexican,

Why is it that from my personal, thoroughly unscientific observations it seems blue-collar, illiterate Mexicans are more prone to cheating on their wives than other races? Almost every other Mexican I have known seems to brag about how they got it on with their mamacitas while their wife and daughters of 7 and 8 were busy at the Sunday church.

Cheatie Cheatie Bang Bang

Dear Gabacho,

You’re right—sort of. In the landmark 1994 Sex in America: A Definitive Survey, researchers from the University of Chicago interviewed a random sample of 3,500 Americans and found that 25 percent of married men had strayed from their vows. Latino rates of infidelity were about the same, and lead researcher Edward Laumann told Hispanic Magazine that “he believed the stereotype of Latinos being more unfaithful than other people was overstated.” But there weren’t enough funds to create a Spanish-language questionnaire, meaning most of the 300 or so Latinos surveyed were pochos and not immigrant Mexican men. In the mother country, though, male infidelity is as Mexican as the tricolor—condoned by the church, tolerated by women, lionized in song. My favorite paean to cheating remains “Las Ferias de las Flores” (“The Flower Fairs”), a Chucho Monge composition immortalized by Trio Calavera that uses flowers as metaphors for mujeres and includes the immortal verse “And although another wants to cut her/I saw her first/And I vow to steal her/Even if she has a gardener.” So the question isn’t why Mexican men cheat, Cheatie, but rather why we tone down our tools upon immigrating to this country. Notch another victory for Manifest Destiny, which since the days of Cotton Mather has labored long and hard to turn this nation’s virile ethnic men into pussy Protestants.

Posted by David Cohen at February 24, 2006 10:22 AM