When you can’t travel due to coronavirus, blog…I guess.
Welp, with my usual gift for reading
the tea leaves and spectacular timing, I have managed to finally, at
long last, launch a travel blog right at the moment when global
travel is shutting down for the foreseeable future.
That’s beyond a Homer Simpson ‘D’oh’
moment.
That’s a head-smack of such force that
you push right through your brain to the back of your skull and
beyond.
Of course, it’s not my fault. (By which
I mean Covid-19. In this case I really am innocent, I swear.)
It’s also not my fault that I ramped up
a travel blog at a time when no one (apart from some plugged-in and
utterly sociopathic
U.S. Senators) could have known that travel was going to undergo
such a dramatic shift.
Times have been weird for everyone, of
course. I currently live in Valparaiso, Chile, a town that is heavily
reliant on tourism, and the abrupt shift has been devastating to
local businesses and vendors. There was a hapless cruise ship
floating out in the bay for a good four or five days after the
government handed down with the order that no cruise ships would be
permitted to dock, but they finally must have found somewhere else
they could go.
(I imagine a modern-day, aquatic version of Sartre’s No Exitin which cruise ship passengers must spend eternity at various buffets, attending karaoke night in the Rainbow Room, and walking the Promenade deck. ‘Same thing we do every night, Pinkie: eat gristly prime rib and listen to Cruise Director Tad remind us about Sunrise Aerobics and Salsa Class.’)
Perhaps Sarte was right: hell really is other people…
And Covid-19 has been devastating for people around the world as we all know, not only in terms of the direct threat to human health, but also by grinding the entire global economy to a halt. It is an enormous mess that is illustrating in sharp, eye-watering detail the many shortcomings of the current global system we live under.
And things are bound to get worse –
at least for some of us and probably for a lot of us – before they
get better.
But despite all this, despair is simply
not an emotional texture that adheres to me very well, apart from
those night-sweating, ceiling-staring, 4 a.m. ‘O what the hell am I
doing with my life’ moments.
I can feel despair, sure, like
any sensible person living in this era who has an IQ that reads more
like Farenheit than Celsius. But I personally can’t maintain despair
over time.
I think that’s another signpost on my
personal road of life, if you will: rather than truly dwell on the
despair and loneliness that all humans feel from time to time, my
thinking has always gone to, ‘What’s next? What’s around the next
bend in the road?’
So rather than simply packing in
Dirtbag Traveler and assuming we’re all going to be spending the rest
of our lives imprisoned in underground chicken-wire bunk beds a la
the brilliant (and prescient?) Terry Gilliam film 12 Monkeys,
I think what I’m going to do is allow my native optimism to percolate
here in my personal bunker, and keep sharing posts, regardless of
whether I can actually, currently go anywhere new right now.
I have tons of material in the form of
notes from recent travels in Europe that were after all the ‘inciting
incident’ that prompted me to start the blog in the first place, and
I also have a ton of stories from back in my old hitchhiking days
that I’d love to share.
All of this I plan to do with the hopes that we will soon (soon-ish, anyway) be free to not only move about the cities where we each live, but also resume traveling the world, albeit in a different, and hopefully more thoughtful way. For starters, we will no doubt face a different kind of security inspection taking place not only in the country where our flights originate, but where we land as well, in the form of temperature-taking and etc.
Who’s the real monkey here, TSA?
Makes the recent years of silly TSA security theater stateside in which you’re forced to take off your shoes, give up your water and carry only 3 ounces of shampoo seem quaint in comparison, no?
So, whatever. I’m shouting into the void anyway, as it’s not like I had any readers to speak of even before the crisis hit, haha.
But thanks for checking this out, and I
hope you’ll keep reading!
You might be surprised who’s ultimately to blame for the word ‘gringo.’
If you’re from the
United States, there’s a word you’ll no doubt encounter if you spend
any time traveling South or Central America: ‘gringo,’ or ‘gringa.’
It’s mostly used to refer to white people from the U.S., and
sometimes white Europeans.
But if you ask
people for the ‘gringo’ origin story, nine times out of ten they
either won’t know, or they’ll subscribe to one of the common but
apocryphal stories about it.
The Meaning of
Gringo
But first, one of
the most common search terms when it comes to this strange word is
‘what does gringa mean?’
Typically, a gringo
or gringa is a person from the U.S., usually Caucasian. I’ve had
conversations with people native to South America who say that
Europeans are never gringos, only people from the U.S.
Others say that white people of European descent, whether they’re from the U.S. or elsewhere all qualify as gringos. Still others say that ‘gringo’ can be applied to anyone who doesn’t speak Spanish, or even people of Hispanic descent who aren’t in touch with their roots. So this is a point of contention that I have no intention of trying to sort out.
Howard Yanes / NPR
Is gringo
offensive?
As to the question is gringo offensive, I can only really speak from my own experience of living in Chile and the conversations I’ve had here and while traveling around the rest of South America. (In my experience, the word gringo isn’t commonly used in Spain, which in itself is interesting, when you see where this gringo origin story is going.)
But based on those
purely anecdotal observations, ‘gringo’ as it’s used today could be
seen as a tiny bit derogatory, but in a tongue-in-cheek kind of way.
It was probably a much more salty sobriquet years and decades ago.
Get the gringo some mental help, maybe…
Today it’s a word
with just a little bit of denigration built into it, a sense of
light-hearted mockery more than true offensiveness or a nasty insult.
So, yes, while ‘gringo’ is something of an epithet, for the most part
it’s used in a gently teasing kind of way – or even as a
matter-of-fact reference.
As in, ‘Did you
meet the gringa who’s also staying at the hostel?’ You might say that
in the same way you’d ask after ‘the redhead,’ or ‘the tall guy.’
Now, a HUGE caveat:
is it possible that I only ever hear the word gringo used in this
particular way because I happen to BE a gringo? Particularly, a
large-ish and rather scary-looking one with ‘resting bitch-face’ for
days?
This isn’t even my final form. kjb / Toledo, Spain 2018
Sure, of course. Nonetheless, if you’re asking me, is ‘gringo’ offensive, I’ll stand by my impression that it’s rarely if ever meant as a truly vile word anymore, like the n-word or something. It just isn’t used like that. Unless the person saying it has run out of every single curse word they know and already hit 10 or 12 ‘conchatumadres’ and they’re still angry.
Gringo Origin –
Green Go?
But what’s truly
fascinating is the myriad of legends and myths surrounding the gringo
origin story.
One of the most
common tales of the origin of ‘gringo’ has to do with the color of
the uniforms of U.S. soldiers who were deployed in Mexico during the
Mexican-American War from 1846 to 1848. The story goes that the
Mexican people, quite naturally despising the invaders, shouted
epithets at them when they saw their green uniforms:
‘Green, go home!’
And, so the story goes, from ‘green, go,’ we get the shortened
version ‘gringo,’ as the letter ‘I’ as it’s pronounced in the Spanish
language has a sound like ‘ee’ in English.
It’s not easy being green-go.
¡Verde,
vayanse a casa!
Now, astute readers
might notice right away that there are a couple of problems with this
‘gringo’ origin story.
First and most
pressing, why on earth would Mexican people yell at the soldiers in
English? A more accurate phrase, assuming it were true that it
originated with angry Mexican soldiers, farmers, and townsfolk in the
mid-1800s might be ‘Verde, vayanse a casa!’
So, I guess if the
shortened term were something like, ‘verdevaya,’ we could maybe
believe this gringo origin story.
Another sticking point in this tale of the origin of gringo is that during the Mexican-American War, U.S. soldiers mostly wore blue uniforms. So even if the people of Mexico – the masses of whom surely were not bilingual – had made up a word to insult the U.S. soldiers, in English no less, it likely would have been based on blue uniforms, not green ones, wouldn’t it?
‘Vayazul,’ anyone?
Gringo Origin –
Green Coats?
Now, one regiment
from Kentucky allegedly did wear green, and were known as the
Kentucky Green Coats. You may notice a sound in their name that rings
a bell. Some people have opined that this single regiment, with their
green coats, had their nickname bastardized into ‘gringo’ and that
the name was then applied to anyone from the U.S.
This is also pretty
unlikely, even if we ignore the previously mentioned linguistic leap
the Mexican people would have been required to make to even refer to
their coats as green and not ‘verde.’
That’s
because of all the U.S. military to serve in Mexico during the war,
only 5,000
total came from Kentucky, and it’s pretty clear that not even all
of those 5,000 were from the Green Coats regiment. But even if they
were, those 5,000 guys would have to have made quite an impression
among the sea of blue-uniformed U.S. soldiers for this epithet to
have been coined to refer to all white people from the north.
Gringo Origin –
‘Green Grow?’
Another version of
the gringo origin story that I had heard – and which seems
plausible at first glance – has to do with a number of songs the
U.S. soldiers supposedly sang to keep their spirits up while deployed
in Mexico.
One of these songs
is the English traditional song ‘Green Grow the Rushes, O.’ Another
is a Robert Burns song called ‘Green Grow the Rashes, O,’ and still
another candidate for a tuneful gringo origin story is ‘Green Grow
the Lilacs,’ which was appropriated and altered to create an American
cowboy song, ‘Green Grow the Lilacs’
Apparently these are ‘rushes.’ Now, as to why everybody was always singing about them, I can’t help you. Image by Lucian Aeris from Pixabay
Turns out that there’s no real contemporaneous evidence that the soldiers sang any of these songs en masse. And if enough of them were singing it, presumably singing it constantly to the point where the Mexican populace took notice and actually gave them a nickname based on it, you’d assume it would show up in contemporary records, and it just doesn’t.
You’d also assume a much shorter war, because apparently all these dudes were doing was walking around singing about grass all the damn time.
Gringo Origin: First Time in Print in the U.S.
However, in 1849, shortly after the war ended, the word ‘gringo’ does appear in print in the U.S. in two places. The first was the diary of John Woodhouse Audubon, the son of the famed wildlife painter John James Audubon. The younger Audubon joined a trek from New York to California during the Gold Rush, with a plan to collect specimens and document the mammals of North America for a book.
You could say the
expedition took the long way around, as they passed through northern
Mexico, prompting Audubon to make this journal entry in July of 1849:
‘Cerro Gordo is a miserable den of vagabonds, with nothing to support it but its petty garrison of a hundred and fifty cavalry mounted on mules. We were hooted and shouted at as we passed through, and called “Gringoes,” etc., but that did not prevent us from enjoying their delicious spring water; it was cool and delightful. Our men rushed to it, and drank two pint cups full each, hardly breathing between times; it was the first good water we had had since leaving the Mississippi.’
John WOodhouse Audubon
While Audubon’s journal wasn’t published until years later, another book that became quite popular using the word gringo hit the shelves toward the end of 1849, titled Los Gringos; or, an inside View of Mexico and California. The book was written by one Lieutenant Henry Augustus Wise, who wrote in the preface:
‘The title — Los Gringos, with which this volume has been christened, is the epithet — and rather a reproachful one — used in California and Mexico to designate the descendants of the Anglo-Saxon race.’
Lt Henry Augustus Wise
Gringo Origin: Journalists and ‘Green Grow’
It was over 30 years later in 1883 when an article was published that retroactively ascribed the origin of gringo to ‘Green Grow the Rushes, O’:
‘The word Gringo, the term applied to American and English by the Mexicans, is said to have had an amusing origin. A lot of sailors belonging to an English man-of-war at Mazatlan went ashore, and got on a rip-roaring drunk. While parading the streets one of them was singing “Green Grow the rushes,” etc. The Mexicans only caught the first two words, and dubbed them Grin-go’s, and it has stuck ever since.’
unknown, Newspaper article circa 1883
Popular journalist Nellie Bly added fuel to fire of this particular version of the gringo origin story when she wrote a piece reporting on a six-month trip to Mexico that was published in newspapers all across the U.S.:
‘People often wonder and ask why the Mexican calls the American a “Gringo,” or what the word means… When the Americans went to war with Mexico, a melody, every verse of which ended with “Green grow the rushes, O,” was very popular. It pleased almost everybody’s fancy, and was sung by old and young. While in camp the soldiers would sing it constantly, and all the Mexicans could hear was “Green grow the rushes, O.” They immediately began to call the American soldiers by the first two words as it sounded to them, “grin go,” They made it into one word, by which they will ever know the American — “Gringo.”‘
Nelly Bly
Whether the song ‘pleased everybody’s fancy’ or not, Bly’s gringo origin story turns out to bullshit.
People were already pushing back against Bly’s explanation of the origin of ‘gringo,’ even in the late 1800s. Unfortunately, they pushed back with their own dubious versions of the gringo origin story. Another journalist, S.E. Roberston, wrote in 1889 in the Washington D.C. Evening Star:
‘”Nellie Bly” makes more errors still. Her explanation of the word “gringo” — a familiar native designation for the American — is absurd. Instead of attributing its origin properly to the “green coats” of a Kentucky regiment stationed in Mexico during the war of ’40-47 she says it came from the popularity of the song, “Green Grow the Rushes, O,” in the American camps.’
s.e. Robertson
Gringo Origin – It’s all Greek to Me
But turns out Robertson was just as wrong as Bly. In 1889 American scholar William Dwight Whitney published the ‘G’ volume of his Century Dictionary which included an entry for the word ‘gringo,’ attributing its origin story thusly:
‘[Sp. gibberish; prob. a pop. var. of Griego, Greek.]’
William dwight whitney
The basis of Whitney’s explication of the origin of gringo as a bastardization of the Spanish word ‘griego,’ meaning Greek, came from a Spanish language dictionary that was published in 1787, a good 60 years before the Mexican-American War.
The reason for this is that it turns out English-speaking people aren’t the only ones to call any unintelligible language ‘Greek,’ as in ‘It’s all Greek to me.’
In El Diccionario Castellano, Esteban de Terrero wrote:
‘Foreigners in Malaga are called gringos, who have particular kinds of accent that deprive them from easy and natural Castilian speech, and in Madrid the name is given especially to the Irish for the same reason.’
From the 1600s through the 1800s, Irish soldiers of fortune often went to Spain to fight in the Spanish army, so the Spanish soldiers and townsfolk would have been acquainted with what was apparently their mangling of the Castilian accent.
So if you’re looking for someone to blame for the origin of the word gringo, you need look no further than the Irish, and their ‘particular kinds of accent.’
My first time setting foot in Europe at
long last was…effervescent. From head to toe, those first few days
were like having a fizzy drink bubbling inside my brain, just
wandering around giddy. Like, I imagine I looked like Danny Devito’s
character Martini from “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” just a
permanent idiot grin plastered across my face and a little giggle
perpetually on reserve, one that could come tittering to the surface
at any moment.
I was in Europe at long last, the
Europe of my ancestors, the Europe of so much western history for so
many millennia, the place where Shakespeare and the Romans and Don
Quixote and Beowulf and Monty Python came from. The place where so
many had lived and died, where so much had been built and torn down
and rebuilt, over and over again.
I think this is in Parque Retiro. kjb / Madrid – 2018
Part of my joy was simply the notion of
finally being on this other continent – this was 2018 and I am
very, very old – this continent that I had read so much about and
longed to visit for so many years. I wonder if my feeling was similar
to the sense you still get from native Europeans about their desire
to come to America.
But I wonder if it matches our reverse
longing to visit Europe. It seems like it might be a bit different;
their longing to come to America seems like a hopeful, wide-eyed
springing forward, even at this late date. On the other hand, our
desire to see Europe seems more like a longing to look backward, a
need to touch the glory of the past, an expression of our national
insecurity, a declaration of fealty to our betters. Both attitudes
are hopelessly bound up in romanticism and delusion, of course.
Accordion player in Parque Retiro kjb / Madrid – 2018
The other giddifying factor (yes, it’s
a word, but don’t look it up) that enraptured me was that I had just
come from four years in Chile.
Now, I have a great love of Chile, and
especially Valparaiso, as I hope to share with you on these pages.
But the simple truth is that the South
American standards for a lot of things, and especially public
facilities and cleanliness are significantly different than those of
the US or EU. There are of course economic factors; colonizer states
that spent centuries conquering other peoples and extracting wealth
from them are by definition going to be more wealthy, and are thus
likely to have a better standard of living.
But there is a certain grim ugliness in
Chile when it comes to providing anything for the public, a sense of
doing just the barest of bare minimum necessary to get by. I suspect
that this attitude comes straight out of the Dictadura years and the
brutal crush of the Chicago Boys neoliberal economic system that was
imposed on Chile in the 1970s.
‘Fuck the people,’ in a nutshell.
According to this economic model, all public goods are to be
extracted, exploited and sold off.
Thus, things like public restrooms,
public wifi, parks, buses, the metro, street cleaning and garbage
pickup, the nation’s Social Security administration – ownership of
the fucking water of the entire nation – pretty much all of these
things are run with the very visible hand of a not-at-all-free market
guiding them. Public places and public services are kept at just the
bare minimum of functionality in Chile; wherever there is no money to
be made, no one in charge gives a shit about how shabby things get.
Even down to something as pedestrian as
walking out to the baggage claim area after passing through customs
in the Madrid airport I was struck by the comparative opulence of the
place: clean, roomy toilets, hand driers that work – my God, hot
water! You can’t get hot water in a public restroom sink anywhere in
Chile.
Atocha Station in Madrid kjb / Madrid – 2018
Even stupid things like the comfy,
plentiful chairs arrayed around the baggage claim belts in Madrid
were a joy – things like benches and seating in public waiting
rooms in Chile always seem to have been furnished begrudgingly, as if
they searched out the very cheapest, shoddiest, oldest furniture that
they could find out by a dumpster – and there it remains until it
literally falls apart underneath you. And that is only if they have
seats at all. Baggage claim in Santiago has none.
All of this has something to do with
money, of course, and those colonizer coffers that have been
overflowing over the course of 500 years of exploiting the resources
of places like Chile. But it also has to do with the attitudes about
how to spend what public money there is.
Not that the people themselves, the
actual public wouldn’t prefer things to be nicer; just that the
public in Chile always seems to be the last to get any benefit from
public funds, and then only with the maximum of resentment from the
state or whatever subsidiary, for-profit entity is providing it.
But that’s of course not where the
differences between Chile and Spain end.
There is a buoyancy and a freedom that
permeates the Spanish crowds; people talk loudly and laugh out loud
as they navigate the sidewalks in an open, easy manner that Chileans
would never dare. In Chile there is often a furtiveness, a sense of
gloom and a barely-concealed hostility as you maneuver in the
streets, always in a rush to get somewhere, always worrying about
money, always fearful, always suspicious. (All of this of course goes
out the window when Chileans, especially young Chileans, are drunk.
Then it’s like the cork has been let out of a bottle of baking soda
and vinegar that has been held in check for a very long time.)
Metropolis Building from afar kjb / Madrid – 2018
Please, please understand that these
are overly broad (and slightly ridiculous) generalizations that don’t
apply to every single individual. But I think a point about a Chilean
cultural norm of blending in can be illustrated by how prevalent
clothing that is the color black, gray, or dark navy blue is in
Chile. There’s a grayness to the faces and oftentimes a black look
that crosses them when you’re out and about making your way through
the city streets. There’s a sense of not wanting to stand out, of
laying low, of getting your business done and getting on with it, of
getting away.
Not to belabor the point, but I think
it’s not at all crazy to view these observations through the lens of
nations that were conquistadores versus those who were conquered. And
especially in Chile, where first the violence and cruelty of the
Spanish, then later the Dictadura and the imposition of stark
austerity and the monetizing of public goods and services have all
served to crush so many people’s economic hopes for so many years, it
just makes sense that a logic of avoiding trouble underlain with
sublimated anger and despair would bubble under the surface.
But back to Madrid. Whatever parallel
sense of being crushed by their own dictatorship the Spanish people
may have had as a culture before it ended in the 1970s was not
terribly evident (at least not in Madrid. That’s a very different
thing in Catalonia, as I later learned.) No, what I observed was a
people much more open and free with themselves, chatting on the
streets not only with their friends and family but also with
strangers, passing the time of day in vast, green parks, strolling on
broad, pristine, well-maintained sidewalks, sitting at overflowing
sidewalk cafes every night of the week drinking, chatting, eating in
voices loud, triumphant, free.
Hanging with my homies in the park. kjb / Madrid
Truth be told, I was terribly confused
when I first sat at table at a little cafe in the neighborhood where
I was staying (near Metro Embajadores or Las Delicias, if anyone’s
interested. Very cool hood, not fancy but not run-down either, with
plenty of shops and restaurants and bars, and easy access to a number
of tourist destinations.) That was my first night there after rolling
off the plane early in the morning all jet-lagged and sleeping for a
few hours that afternoon in my Airbnb.
I sat at a table in the
plastic-windowed tent set up on the sidewalk and ordered a beer. The
old man server – one of those wiry, tough, beef-jerky old men who
operate without a single wasted motion and have been waiting tables
for decades – brought me some tapas with my beer and I was puzzled.
And then a second beer, and a second
plate. And I was worried I was being suckered into paying for
something I didn’t want, haha.
Sunset in Spain kjb / Madrid 2018
Of course in Madrid the tradition still
stands of serving some kind of tapas along with each round of drinks
you order, as I quickly learned. The bars often have serving lines of
cafeteria-style, glass-covered pans displaying the various tapas that
are on offer that day, and you can choose among them if you want, or
just take your chances with whatever the beef jerky server man
decides to bring. Some places have a full-time chef or cook on hand
to whip up new batches of whatever strikes their fancy throughout the
course of the shift as various tapas run out. It’s kind of a cool
system, and really nice to have a snack with your beer.
I admit I ate more than a bit of meat
while I was there, trying the Iberica ham and other tidbits. I’m a
bad vegetarian…
