What Is the True ‘Gringo’ Origin Story Anyway?

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.

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.

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?

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.

¡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’

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.’

esteban de terrero

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.’

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sources:

https://www.vocabulary.com/articles/wordroutes/the-colorful-origin-stories-of-gringo/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gringo

https://explorekyhistory.ky.gov/items/show/209

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/gringo/

https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2013/08/07/209266300/who-exactly-is-a-gringo

http://thevirtualarmchairgeneral.com/901-US%20MexWar%20Uniforms%20Page.html