Let me just say that I believe no words are bad in themselves. They’re just things, objects. They can be used for good or for ill. But the word itself is just a tool of expression. Sure it can be used as a weapon, but that’s not what it was made for.
When I was growing up my parents and my brother and I would go to Texas every summer and sometimes over Christmas. In later years, after Danny’s accident, we started flying rather than driving there. We would gather at an aunt and uncle’s house somewhere in the Houston sprawl or we would camp out at Grandma and Grandpa Martinez’ house in Corpus Christi. Things were very different there than they were back in South Carolina. The food was great and so was the music and the weather and some of the architecture but I think what made the deepest impression on me was probably the language.
Mom and her brother and sisters and Grandma and Grandpa would all carry on endlessly in Spanglish, seamlessly moving back and forth between Spanish and English midsentence. There were a lot of colorful expressions used. The one I remember most clearly and affectionately is “chingado.”
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It’s a very Mexican thing to say, from the verb “chingar,” which means “to fuck.” Like its English equivalent, “chingar” is one of the most flexible of utterances, being readily adaptable to any and all parts of speech. I learned how to say “chingado” if I accidentally broke one of my toys or stubbed my toe, “chingalo, pendejo” to asshole kids on the playground—they didn’t know what it meant and couldn’t remember it well enough to repeat to report me to the authorities—“¿qué chingados?” when confused. La Chingada is also a town in Veracruz, the Mexican state where my Grandma Martinez was born.
Of course I couldn’t say any of that shit around the adults. But all of my cousins and I cussed as much as we wanted when the grownups weren’t around, which was probably twice as much as they did. That includes my white cousins back in SC, but we just cussed in English.
The word “chingado,” in spite of and because of its vulgarity, is a source of great pride for me and many others. It’s a part of my essence that runs through my veins and can never be taken away from me. Octavio Paz wrote about the word in El Laberinto de la Soledad (The Labyrinth of Solitude) and my interpretation of it is that Mexico is a bastardized nation. The biggest ethnic group there is Mestizo, a mix of the indigenous people and the Spanish invaders. During the Conquest, Cortés relied on an interpreter to communicate with the Mexica and other native leaders, a woman called Marina or Malintzin, often referred to as “La Malinche,” and sometimes derisively as “La Chingada.”
I’ve lived in South Carolina pretty much my whole life. But Texas and Mexico go with me everywhere I go because I carry them around inside of me. ¡Ay la chingada do I love being alive!
Los Angeles
April 28, 2023