Blanco! Bicho!
A certain Texas lawyer says that I'm obsessed with Negroes.
So I'll switch temporarily to Puerto Ricans.
My friend of the sponge diary and the German Intellectual & the Baby also grew up in Manhattan, also in the 1970s. But we didn't grow up together. Different sides of the island. We met in college. He wrote me to confirm what I said in my all apologies post:
Growing up, I always had black friends, but Puerto Ricans scared me. It was Puerto Rican kids who mugged me, Puerto Rican kids who threatened to beat me up, Puerto Rican kids who were always making trouble in the playground, stealing bikes and skateboards. Black kids and I got along fine. If I grew up with any strong racial reflexes, it was about Hispanics. (I won't bother listing the important exceptions. This is a generalization: true but not sweeping.)
My friend who would later be called Zebra got me to join his Boy Scout troop. Troop 520.
("We are 520! The mighty mighty '20! We come from Manhattan! The mighty Manhattan!")
I was the only white boy in 520.
The other scouts called me Blanco. (Or Blanca when they were really trying to be insulting.) The only Spanish I know is curses and insults.
A couple years after I dropped the Scouts, I was a day camp counselor and I was waiting with a bunch of younger kids for their parents to come pick them up. About a half-dozen Puerto Rican kids from the neighborhood came up to the group of campers, totally ignoring me, saying, "Lemme see your buss pass! Got any money? Yo, give it up!"
Most of the would-be muggers were about the same age as the campers in my charge, maybe a little older. They were being led by a kid who was my age -- teaching them the ropes I suppose. I recognized him from Troop 520.
I said, "Come on, Hector! Leave them alone."
Hector looked up as if noticing me for the first time, wondering no doubt how I knew his name. Then his eyes cleared and he got this big grin and said, "Blanco!"
He told his kids to leave my kids alone and they all wandered off.
All of this comes back to me today because I've been reading Spanish Calvin & Hobbes, using babelfish to translate, seeing if any of the vocabulary will stick.
(Click to Enlarge)
Anyway, the word that caught me off-guard is bichos. That's one of the insults I remember from Boy Scouts. Kids were always calling other kids bicho!
I always thought it meant "bitch". No: apparently it means "tiny beast".
Tiny beast? Street kids calling each other beasts?! What is this, Victorian England?
I don't know. Maybe it's what their parents called them.
So I'll switch temporarily to Puerto Ricans.
My friend of the sponge diary and the German Intellectual & the Baby also grew up in Manhattan, also in the 1970s. But we didn't grow up together. Different sides of the island. We met in college. He wrote me to confirm what I said in my all apologies post:
"See, in the NYC of my youth, white people imitating black people was considered quite passé. What was hip was for white people to imitate Puerto Ricans."Ah, but it's more complex than that.
Growing up, I always had black friends, but Puerto Ricans scared me. It was Puerto Rican kids who mugged me, Puerto Rican kids who threatened to beat me up, Puerto Rican kids who were always making trouble in the playground, stealing bikes and skateboards. Black kids and I got along fine. If I grew up with any strong racial reflexes, it was about Hispanics. (I won't bother listing the important exceptions. This is a generalization: true but not sweeping.)
My friend who would later be called Zebra got me to join his Boy Scout troop. Troop 520.
("We are 520! The mighty mighty '20! We come from Manhattan! The mighty Manhattan!")
I was the only white boy in 520.
The other scouts called me Blanco. (Or Blanca when they were really trying to be insulting.) The only Spanish I know is curses and insults.
A couple years after I dropped the Scouts, I was a day camp counselor and I was waiting with a bunch of younger kids for their parents to come pick them up. About a half-dozen Puerto Rican kids from the neighborhood came up to the group of campers, totally ignoring me, saying, "Lemme see your buss pass! Got any money? Yo, give it up!"
Most of the would-be muggers were about the same age as the campers in my charge, maybe a little older. They were being led by a kid who was my age -- teaching them the ropes I suppose. I recognized him from Troop 520.
I said, "Come on, Hector! Leave them alone."
Hector looked up as if noticing me for the first time, wondering no doubt how I knew his name. Then his eyes cleared and he got this big grin and said, "Blanco!"
He told his kids to leave my kids alone and they all wandered off.
All of this comes back to me today because I've been reading Spanish Calvin & Hobbes, using babelfish to translate, seeing if any of the vocabulary will stick.
(Click to Enlarge)
Hobbes: Qué haces?This is an answer I need to practice and apply:
(What are you doing?)
Calvin: Busco ranas.
(Looking for frogs.)
Hobbes: Por qué?
(Why?)
Calvin: Debo obedecer las inescrutables exhortaciones de mi alma.
(I must obey the inscrutable exhortations of my soul.)
Hobbes: Ah, por supuesto.
(Ah, of course.)
Calvin: Mi mandato incluye bichos raros.
(My mandate includes rare tiny beasts.)
"I must obey the inscrutable exhortations of my soul!"
Anyway, the word that caught me off-guard is bichos. That's one of the insults I remember from Boy Scouts. Kids were always calling other kids bicho!
I always thought it meant "bitch". No: apparently it means "tiny beast".
Tiny beast? Street kids calling each other beasts?! What is this, Victorian England?
I don't know. Maybe it's what their parents called them.
3 Comments:
How do you know I'm a "certain" attorney? Maybe I'm all confused and stuff. You dig?
I used to think that Puerto Ricans were Negroes. I did not learn that there was a distinction until basic training in the army where I met my first Puerto Rican. He was phenotypically identical to the black soldiers in my squad but insisted that he was not black.
When I moved to NY, I discovered that Puerto Ricans manifest a wide variety of phenotypes. I have yet to learn whether their intra-category racial typology is similar to those of English speaking West Indians.
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