DEAR MEXICAN: Tell me one thing Mexico is good for?
MAGA Man
DEAR GABACHO: Paying more taxes than Donald Trump. Read on . . .
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DEAR MEXICAN: I teach a volunteer class to kids in the ‘hood, most of them Latinos (many of them Mexican). I like the kids a lot, but how can I justify teaching kids that may be illegals over kids that are legal? Shouldn’t I cater to kids whose parents have been paying taxes for years? Shouldn’t we “take care of our own” first?
Gabacho’s Moral Dilemna
DEAR GABACHO: Since you’re volunteering your time, you have every right to be a pendejo in your private life. But refry the following frijoles: Primeramente, the Supreme Court’s 1982 decision in Plyler v. Doe found it unconstitutional to deny public education to undocumented kiddies, so if you’re doing this via a school, better keep your bigoted views to yourself lest you get a lawsuit. Also, don’t forget that “illegals” pay un chingo of taxes; a report released this year by the Institute on Taxation & Economic Policy found undocumented immigrants pay about $12 billion in state and local taxes despite their lack of legal status. “Undocumented immigrants’ nationwide average effective tax rate is an estimated 8 percent,” the report said. “To put this in perspective, the top 1 percent of taxpayers pay an average nationwide effective tax rate of just 5.4 percent.” That’s probably more than Donald Trump! Finally, study after study shows that those illegal kids are more driven and smarter than “legal” kids. Besides, these are children we’re talking about; hating on kids trying to get ahead in life is all we need to know about our modern, paranoid 21st-century ‘Murica. With morals like yours, the U.S. deserves our future Chinese overlords sooner rather than later.
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DEAR MEXICAN: The other weekend, I met a Mexican girl at a bar. Hoping to score some points, I pretended that I, too, was Mexican. Between my nondescript ethnicity (Eastern European and Vietnamese . . . chabacho, perhaps?), my command of Spanish, and some carefully timed quotes from Blood in, Blood Out, I managed to pull it off . . . con mucho éxito.
It got me thinking: do Mexicans ever pretend to be other ethnicities? Do light-skinned jaliscienses ever go under cover as gabachos? Do Mexicans sometimes set aside their orgullo to go the Lou Diamond Phillips route? I’m dying to know.
Carlos Chan
DEAR CHINITO: All the time! When Mexicans hang out with Middle Eastern folks, we like to boast that we have an uncle that looks just like Saddam Hussein; when we’re with Jews, we say that our grandmother observed weird rituals, like lighting candles on Friday and never preparing pork. The lighter-skinned among us continually claim that we had a Frenchman in our family tree that decided to stay in Mexico after the Hapsburg occupation; Xicanxs with full beards will attend Native American powwows and boast they’re a direct descendant of the last honest tlatoani of Tenochtitlán. That’s the thing about Mexicans: We’re everything . . . except Salvadoran.
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