Arts & Entertainment

Mexican-American Culture

By Gustavo Arellano 

Dear Mexican,

So often when we see Mexican bands perform in the U.S. and Mexico, the crowd at some point starts chanting "¡Cu-le-ro (Ass-hole)!" Why does the crowd yell "Cu-le-ro" at a band that they seemingly adore and paid a lot of money to see perform? Even fellow Latinos are really confused by this one.

Need Más Earplugs

Dear Wab,

"People yelling ‘Cu-le-ro' doesn't happen at every concert," says Javier Castellanos, owner of world-famous Latin nightclub JC Fandango in Anaheim. "It's more of the chilango (nickname for people from Mexico City) crowd — they're always a little bit more rambunctious. And it's not just for any kind of music — it's usually the heavier, more metal stuff. I see the same rudeness at American concerts for that type of music, too." Castellanos is being too modest. Fact is, culero (always chanted in the singsong manner as you described) is the Bronx cheer of Mexican society. We use it to taunt anybody we think is acting haughty — favored targets include politicians, sports teams, Miss America contestants and especially lollygagging bands who can't return for an encore fast enough even though their adoring crowd probably shelled out muchos pesos to hear a 45-minute set and drink crappy beer.

Dear Mexican,

I've been on sex offender registry Web sites a couple of times, and it seems there are a lot of names ending with -ez. Is there an elevated rate of sexual deviancy amongst Mexicans? If so, why?

El Güero Guapísimo

Dear Super-Handsome Light-Skinned Gabacho,

Methinks you doth look for brownies too much. But I don't blame you. Turn on the television and radio, and you're likely to hear anti-immigrant pendejos screech about how Mexicans will rape you while stealing your job and playing banda music really loud. You'll probably hear them invoke the work of Dr. Deborah Schurman-Kauflin. Her 2006 paper "The Dark Side of Illegal Immigration: Nearly One Million Sex Crimes Committed by Illegal Immigrants in the United States" came to some startling conclusions, not least of which was that there are 240,000 illegal immigrant sex offenders in this country, and that 93 of these cretins enter this country daily.

Schurman-Kauflin based her findings on a 2005 Government Accountability Office survey that showed two percent of illegals in federal, local or state prisons had committed a sex crime. She then applied that percentage to the illegal immigrant population at large — voilà! Instant endemic perversity! This statistical sleight-of-hand, however, withers by employing the very stats she uses. GAO data for 2003 (the most recent year available) showed about 308,000 criminal aliens (legal as well as illegal immigrants) were in American prisons; they constitute about three percent of the nation's 12 million illegal immigrants. If only two percent of incarcerated illegals committed a sex crime, then it's intellectually misleading to arrive at the 240,000 figure, ¿qué no?

For the Mexican, a more telling number in determining sexual deviancy among an ethnic group is the percentage of criminals arrested for such crimes. So, let's go to the scoreboard: In 2003, gabachos incarcerated for sex crimes represented about 18 percent of all gabacho inmates in state prisons; perverted Hispanics, conversely, made up just 11 percent (strangely enough, the U.S. Department of Justice doesn't keep the same statistics for federal prisons). According to this comparison, gabachos are more likely as a group to sexually assault you than Mexicans — but betcha you won't hear Lou Dobbs repeat that factoid ad nauseam.