- In some previous papers on this phenomenon
(cf. Hill 1993b),
and in several lectures, I referred to this
system as ``Junk Spanish''. I found that this term was very
frequently misunderstood as a reference to so-called ``Border
Spanish'', the code-switching, somewhat Anglicized forms of
Spanish that can be heard from some speakers in the
U.S. Southwest. I am indebted to James Fernandez for a very
convincing explanation of why this misunderstanding was so
pervasive, and for the suggestion of ``Mock Spanish''. Fernandez
points out that for English speakers the
association between ``junk'' -- ruin and decline -- and the
Mediterranean areas of Europe (and their colonial offshoots) is
hundreds of years old. The use of ``junk'' plays into this
system. ``Mock'' both avoids this metaphorical system and makes
clearer the central function and social location of the
register of English that I address here.
- The term ``Anglo'' is widely used in the
Southwest for ``white people''. It is an all-encompassing term
that includes Italians, Greeks, Irish, etc. Its existence (it
is a short, monomorphemic element) is eloquent testimony to the
social reality of this group, the members of which often like
to argue that they are too diverse internally for such a single
label. I will use this term for this social unit in the
remainder of the paper.
- In Arizona, ``Official English'' legislation,
pushed by the national organization U.S. English, took the form
of an amendment to the state constitution that included
particularly restrictive language, that in the business of
``the state and all its dependencies'' (which include the
University of Arizona), officers of the state (which includes
me), ``shall act in English and in no other language.'' The
only exclusions were for the criminal courts, the teaching of
foreign languages, and health and safety emergencies. Both the
federal district court and the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals
have held this amendment to be in violation of the first and
fourteenth amendments of the U.S. Constitution Woolard
(1989)
is an excellent treatment of the ideological foundations of a
comparable statute passed in California.
- Mock Spanish continues to be a source of campus
humor; I hear it frequently at the University of Arizona, and
it is documented in the everyday usage of Anglo students at the
University of California at San Diego in a project recently
concluded by Kathryn Woolard and her students. I thank
Kathryn Woolard for sharing with me these materials.
- Note, however, that KOHT's billboard does have
an intertextual relationship with Mock Spanish, and is almost
certainly based on a ``More X, less Y'' frame that comes from
English. An unquestionably Mock Spanish usage of the same
structure was passed on to me by my colleague Mara Rodrguez. A
flyer advertising a Mexican-food restaurant features the slogan
``Mas Dinner, Less Dinero'' (``More dinner, less money'').
This slogan echoes the Mock Spanish strategy of adding Spanish
morphology to an English word to form the ``Dinner/Diner-o''
pun, and also makes a characteristic association of Spanish
with cheapness. The rest of the text of the ad is entirely in
English, and the two branches of the restaurant are located in
Anglo neighborhoods on the north side of Tucson.
- This name borrows from ``Nouvelle Southwest
Cuisine,'' a kind of food that includes items like lobster
fajitas with mango salsa, and chiles rellenos stuffed with
pistachio nuts, goat cheese, and sun- dried tomatoes.
- I take this expression from the work of Muriel
Schulz (1975)
on the historical semantic trajectory of words
with female referents, such as ``queen'' (which has acquired
the sense of ``transvestite'', in contrast to ``king'') and
``housewife'' (which has the contracted offshoot ``hussy'', in
contrast to ``husband'', which has no such derogated relative).
- The correct use of the accent mark on the o
here is nothing short of astonishing. Written Mock Spanish is
usually orthographically absurd.
- ``John Connor'' has been ``raised up rough'' by
an aunt and uncle, since his mother is locked in a lunatic
asylum because she keeps talking about the first terminator.
He is represented at the beginning of the film as running wild
in the streets. I have no idea whether working-class white
kids in Los Angeles today actually talk like John Connor. I do
know, however, that the exposure of the screenwriters of such a
film to the talk of kids is far more likely to be at the
catered birthday party in Bel Air or in the parking lot of the
Montessori School than on the actual mean streets of L.A.
- There is no doubt that ``Adios'' is also used,
at least in the Southwest, when speakers wish merely to be
``warm'' rather than funny and insulting. In this case, the
stereotype of ``Mexicans'' (or perhaps the stereotype is of
some gruff old Anglo rancher from the 1860's who has helped you
fight off the Apaches) is that of generosity and hospitality.
This usage does not, of course, cancel out the force of the
very common use of ``Adios'' to convey insult.
- I owe the ``Hasta la baby, vista'' example to
Jodi Goldman, who found it in The Koala a satirical
newspaper published by UCSD students, in the March 8, 1993
Edition. The phrase appears in an ad parodying the
advertising for ``Terminator 2: Judgment Day''. I thank
Kathryn Woolard for sending me the work of Ms. Goldman and
other students.
- In the film, the miraculous properties of the
terminator metal permit the pieces of the evil terminator's
shattered body to flow together and reconstitute him; he comes
after Schwarzenegger and his charges again! This detail is
neglected by politicians who use ``Hasta la vista, baby'' as an
expression for final dismissal.
- In Texas, the Democratic candidate Robert
Krueger used ``Hasta la vista, baby'' in a
television commercial where he dressed in a peculiar black
suit apparently intended to allude to ``Zorro'', a sort of
Robin-Hood-like Mexican bandit from 1950's television. This
commercial was considered especially absurd, and did nothing
to dispel Krueger's reputation as a panty-waist college
professor who was hopelessly distant from the Schwarzenegger
image.
- Illustrating the presence of such usages among
elites, and attesting again to their geographical spread, I was
informed by a colleague who teaches in a university in the
northeastern U.S.(in a city with many Spanish speakers) that
the graduate admissions committee in her department referred to
the stack of rejected applications as the ``Nada pile''.
They've now changed the name. At the other end of the social
continuum, ``nada'' provides one of the few examples of Mock
Spanish that I have heard from a person whom I would evaluate
as perhaps working class. I was trying to pick up
a prescription at the pharmacy in a nearby grocery store that
is located in a neighborhood that is distinctly down-scale.
When the pharmacist's assistant (who might have been 18 or 20)
couldn't find my prescription, she returned to her register
and told me ``Nada''.
- Spanish is, of course, by no means the only
European language that is used as a source of ``softened''
scatological and obscene expressions for English speakers; one
thinks immediately of Yiddish dreck and French
merde. But Mock Spanish is a far more productive
source. Another example along the same lines is a Mock Spanish
version of the widely-distributed slogan ``Shit Happens'', seen
on bumper stickers and other paraphernalia. Bumper stickers
are available that read ``Caca Pasa''.
- It would be useful to have clear evidence that
most English speakers believe that this word is Spanish (as
opposed to, say, Old French). I believe that this is the case.
I remember studying Mexico and learning that its ``haciendas''
had ``peons'' in the fifth or sixth grade!
- I am indebted to Jay Sanders for drawing my
attention to the use of Mock Spanish by Southern California
teens; he contributed to a course in Discourse Analysis tapes
of young female friends of his (who were from Thousand Oaks,
not Encino), chatting casually on the phone using unusually
high frequencies of Mock Spanish. Pauly Shore has made several
films since ``Encino Man'' that probably deserve attention as
well.
- Note that `E' is used rather than ``epsilon'',
since ``epsilon'' cannot reliably be represented on most
WWW browsers. Currently, most browsers support HTML 2, which
does not represent ``epsilon'', among many other characters.
HTML 3 will resolve most font representation problems, but this
specification is still incomplete and so not yet widely
available in commercial WWW browsers. For this
reason, note the following conventions. C hacheck is
represented by `C', delta by `dh', epsilon by `E', schwa by
`@', and theta by `th'. Dental t is represented by `T'.
- The pronunciation ``No problem@''
also exists; I have the impression that ``No problemo'' is
more common.
- This personal ad may have been attempting a
parody of a ``Sicilian Mafia'' usage. But the ``Arriba!''
definitively suggests that Mock Spanish has swamped ``Mock
Sicilian''. I owe this example to Kathryn Woolard.
- I owe this suggestion about the relationship
between Ivins and Briggs to Don Brenneis.
- There is another, more vulgar version of this
greeting that I have not seen. I owe the description of it to
Barbara Babcock, who received a card where the front showed
Hawaiian hula dancers, face forward, and the word ``Muchas''.
Opening the card revealed a rear view of the dancers, buttocks
clearly visible through their grass skirts, and the word
``Grassy-ass''.
- The treatment of the Spanish syllable
mu- as English ``moo'', complete with cow,
is attested in several examples collected by Woolard's
students at the University of California at San Diego. Jodi
Goldman found a (presumably ``Christian'') bookmark featuring a
picture of a cow reading a book entitled ``God is MOOOY
BUENO''. Gina Gemello reported a billboard for Clover Dairy
(in the San Francisco Bay area), that featured a cow saying
``Moooy Bueno.''
- I thank Gerardo López Cruz for providing me
with a copy of his video of this skit. (N.B.: This clip is too
long for inclusion or reproduction. --Editor.)
- I develop this point at greater length in Hill
(1993a).
- Susan Philips found a card that actually shows
a ``Mexican'' sleeping under an enormous sombrero, under the
question, ``¿Cómo esta frijol?'' (Punctuation as in the
original). Inside, the card reads: ``[English translation] How
ya bean?'' (Of course it is printed on ``100% recycled
paper''.)
- A particularly egregious example occurred on
the 1994 Christmas gift wrap chosen by a local store, ``Table
Talk.'' Many items in the store were prewrapped in a dark
green paper that featured howling coyotes and striped snakes
wearing bandanas, and a repeated figure of a ``Mexican'' asleep
under his sombrero, leaning against a saguaro cactus. Diego
Navarette reported to me that he actually complained at one
Table Talk branch, and received an apology from the manager and
a promise that the offending wrap would be withdrawn. However,
when I visited the store just before Christmas, the offending
wrap was still available for custom wrapping, and the
prewrapped gifts were still stacked in the aisles as part of
the Christmas decor.
- Dominique Louisor-White and Dolores Valencia
Tanno (1994),
of the Communications department at California
State University at San Bernardino, found that Mexican-American
television newscasters in the Los Angeles area were
increasingly likely to choose fully Spanish pronunciations of
names when reading the news, starting with the pronunciation of
their own names, since they regarded the usual Anglicized
pronunciations as disrespectful. (They often encountered
opposition to their pronunciation from Anglo station managers.)
- Members of historical Spanish-speaking
populations do not, in my experience, use Mock Spanish much
when speaking English. I have heard such a usage only once,
when a highly-placed Mexican American man, prominent and
powerful in the Tucson community, said ``Adios'' as an Anglo
subordinate left a meeting. Certainly such people code-switch
frequently from English to Spanish when talking to other
Spanish speakers. This codeswitching, however, is a completely
different phenomenon from Mock Spanish.
- I do make a claim to a sense of humor. But I
have stopped using Mock Spanish, and I urge others to avoid it
as well. As soon as Spanish is used within English in such a
way that de lujo is as common as de luxe,
that camarones en mojo de ajo are as prestigious a
dish as truite a la munière, and that
señorita, like mademoiselle, can
allude to good breeding as much as to erotic possibility, I'll
go back to being as funny as possible with Spanish loan
materials. Given the present context, I think that
Mock Spanish is harmful -- it is humor at the expense of
people who don't need any more problems.