DEAR MEXICAN: Many of my friends think I'm loco for playing with my dad the way I do. See, mi padre is now retired and living in Mexico, and he is very worried that I am now 30 and not married, so he wants me to go to where he lives to try to take an india from there back here to los Estados Unidos, if only to at least look after me. I retaliate by kindly “reminding” him as much as possible that we are leprecanos (yes, I read your previous articles), to which he gets very angry. Everyone says he's going to beat me up one day, but it never happens. Last year, I gave him for Navidad a bowler hat, an Irish soccer shirt and matching knee-high socks. Let me tell you, he was so red for a second I thought he was going to explotar, but we still love each other very mucho. Are family relationships between gabachos so much different?
Concerned Green Bean
DEAR LEPRECANO: Just a quick reminder for the gabachos and wabs who might've forgotten your ethnicity: a leprecano is a half-Mexican, half-Irish person and therefore probably the most raza borracha of them all. As for your question: Why are you asking me about gabachos? They're a bigger mystery to me than the Mayan Long Count calendar. The one spiel I can pull out of your hilarious pregunta, though, is the idea of Mexican families in the United States sending their pocho sons to the motherland to find a nice rancho girl. While intermarriage rates among Latinos continue to rise—the Pew Hispanic Center reported this year that 26 percent of Latinos marry outside their ethnic group, second only to Asians among America's largest ethnic groups—the reality is that Mexican immigrants want their children to marry within their old social structures. That's why a Mexican-American teenager's life is a perpetual weekend of weddings, quinceañeras, birthdays, baptisms and boxing matches—they're all staging areas for courtship. Of course, the best-laid plans of Mexis and madres usually fail here in el Norte, what with all the girls from Jalisco, Zacatecas and Sinaloa flirting their way toward every Mexican man's heart. That's why the fail-safe measure for parents is the rancho option: There's always going to be a third cousin in the ancestral village who's still a virgin, waiting patiently for pocho peen salvation.
* * *
DEAR MEXICAN: Why do Mexicans all flock back to the motherland at Christmas for weeks at a time? They buy a shitload of presents, new clothes and basically check out of the USA. They blow their all feria, and then come back broke and start all over again. My folks are from the beautiful state of Chihuahua, and I cannot remember ever leaving at Christmastime for an extended trip to Mexico. . . . Come to think of it, I can't remember any presents either. Shit—sucks for me.
Mexicana Por Fortuna
DEAR WABETTE BY FORTUNE: Most of the Mexicans who historically made the trip back home (I say “historically” because fewer Mexis are making such trips at the moment due to the narcowars and pendejo border fences) loaded up on presents for relatives back home, relatives who were usually poorer than them. Also don't forget the conspicuous-consumption angle (immigrants want to appear as if they've found success, especially when going back home) and the fact that Mexicans return to Mexico because they're Mexicans and have Mexican relatives who still live in Mexico and want to see their Mexican relatives in Mexico because Mexico Mexico VIVA MEXICO, CABRONES!!!
This column appeared in print as “Special Navidad Edition.”
