This explains me so well.
A reprint of a letter from a column in the Westword Ask A Mexican:
Dear Mexican: I’m a pocha from SanTana now living in Portland, a town crawling with gabachos. Why? Because I married one. I love that silly gabacho pelón and, as a Mexican, I show him my affections the only way I know how — by teasing him. He doesn’t understand how humor at his expense is a sign of love, and I’ve tried explaining that there’s nothing that Mexicans cannot laugh at, love included. When a Mexican teases, it’s a sign of esteem. I loved my tía and primas no less for calling me gorda panzona growing up. How do I explain to my husband and gabacho friends that when I tease them and their mothers about how much they look like a Guatemalan when they act like tontos, I do it out of love and not to be a babosa?
Dear Funny Bad-Ass Wabette: Gracias for nothing. I just spent a couple hundred words arguing that thievery isn’t Mexico’s second national pastime after soccer — and then you try to take my job! Tell those Portland gabachos what you told me: that teasing is a sign of amor for Mexicans, that nothing is so holy that you can’t chop it down a couple of pegs with choice invectives like gorda panzona (big-bellied fatty) or pelón (baldy). If you really want to impress them, reference Mexican philosopher Jorge Portilla’s 1966 tome Fenomenología del Relajo y Otros Ensayos (Phenomenology of Relajo and Other Essays), in which he examines the uniquely Mexican concept known as echando relajo (roughly translated as “bullshitting”) and its relationship to the Mexican propensity to make light of everything. The philosopher’s take: “The moral subject is transformed into a humorist when she begins to understand suffering as necessarily derived from finitude, as something essential to the human condition.” Translation: faced with the terrifying reality of being Mexican, Mexicans must laugh or get drunk trying.
Wait a second.. You’re Mexican??
Full-blooded… no chincey 1/4 here, vato! No my mother’s, mother’s, father’s mother was Mexican going on here!
(Okay really I’m a mix of Spanish/Mexican/Indian but that’s expected in all Latinas!)