Gringo is a slang Spanish and Portuguese word used in Spanish-speaking and Portuguese-speaking countries in Latin America, to denote foreigners, often from the United States. The term can be applied to someone who is actually a foreigner, or it can denote a strong association or assimilation into foreign (particularly US) society and culture. While in Spanish it simply identifies a foreigner, without any negative connotation,[1] in English the word is often considered offensive or disparaging.[2]
The word was used in Spain - although the word is nowadays rarely heard there - long before it crossed the Atlantic to denote foreign, non-native speakers of Spanish.[3]
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The word is first attested in Terreros y Pando's Diccionario castellano con las voces de Ciencias y Artes y sus correspondientes en las 3 lenguas francesa, latina e italiana in 1786, which says:
Gringos llaman en Málaga a los extranjeros que tienen cierta especie de acento, que los priva de una locución fácil y natural Castellana; y en Madrid dan el mismo nombre con particularidad a los irlandeses
Gringos is what, in Malaga, they call foreigners who have any kind of accent that prevents them from speaking easy and natural Castillian; and in Madrid they give the same name in particular to the Irish.[4]
Most scholars agree that gringo is a variant of griego 'Greek' (cf. Greek to me);[5][6][7][8][9] but it has also been argued that griego > gringo is phonetically unlikely (it requires two separate steps, griego > grigo, and after, grigo > gringo), and that it may instead come from the language of the Spanish Romani, Caló, as a variant of (pere)gringo 'wayfarer, stranger'.[6]
Its entry in a 1817 French-Spanish dictionary, written by Antonio de Capmany,[10] includes:
Also in common Spanish language it is frequent to say "hablar en chino" (to speak in Chinese) to refer to somebody whose language is difficult understand, re-enforcing the notion that alluding to other nations is a frequent "cliché". Johann Jakob von Tschudi observed that the term "gringo" was used in Lima, Peru in the 1840s:
Gringo is a nickname applied to Europeans. It is probably derived from Griego (Greek). The Germans say of anything incomprehensible, "That sounds like Spanish,"--and in like manner the Spaniards say of anything they do not understand, "That is Greek." [13]
"Gringo" has been in use in the English language since the 19th century.[14] According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the first recorded use of the term in an English source is in John W. Audubon's Western Journal of 1849;[14] Audubon recalls that he and his associates were derided and called "Gringoes" while passing through the town of Cerro Gordo, Veracruz.[15]
One common folk etymology purports that gringo comes from a tune Green Grow the Lilacs sung around campfires by invading Anglo-Americans, not only English but Irish and German. When the Mexican-American War began in 1846, from a few to several hundred recently immigrated Irish, German, and other Catholic Americans who were sent by the U.S. government to fight against Mexico came to question why they were fighting against a Catholic country for a Protestant one, combined with resentment over their treatment by their Anglo-Protestant officers, and deserted to join forces with Mexico. Led by Captain Jon Riley of County Galway, they called themselves St. Patrick's Battalion (in Spanish, Batallón de San Patricio).[16] Green was the color of the Irish, who also first used the Gaelic slogan Erin go Bragh (Ireland forever), but more importantly the soldiers frequently sang "Green Grow the Rushes, Oh!," an old folk song (and most likely not the song based on the similarly-entitled Robert Burns poem, "Green Grow the Rashes"),[17] or an earlier Scottish tune Green Grows the Laurel, which they called Green Grow the Lilacs,[18] which traces back to a song composed in the early 16th century by English king Henry VIII called Green Grows the Holly.[19]
Rafael Abal considers the origin of gringo as "green horn", an apprentice jeweller in Europe. In the United States, men from the west coast are called "westman", while people from the east coast are called "green horns". Spanish speakers called them "gringo".
All these folk etymologies place the origin of the word gringo in the 19th century. This is a problem because the word has been documented from the 18th century, including the 1786 Diccionario castellano con las voces de Ciencias y Artes y sus correspondientes en las 3 lenguas francesa, latina e italiana by Esteban de Terreros y Pando, and South American literature. In Esteban Echeverría's El matadero (1840), and in José Hernández's Martín Fierro (1872, 1879), the word gringo refers to persons from England.
In Brazilian and Portuguese popular culture, someone unintelligible is traditionally said to speak Greek.[20]
Absorption from Spanish is also reflected in that the word usage is not naturally widespread and only generally in regions exposed to tourism like Rio de Janeiro. There, the word means basically any foreigner, North American, European or even Latin American. Generally it applies more to any English-speaking person, not necessarily based on race or skin color but on attitude and clothing. The more popularly-used terms for fair-skinned and blond people would be "alemão" (i.e., German), "russo" (Russian) or "galego" (Galician).
The opposite of alemão/russo/galego among white people in Brazil is branco moreno, or white people of dark hair or darker complexions. Moreno is actually the opposite of the most formal term for people of fair complexion (including most East Asians and many Levantine Arabs, among others Middle Easterners and other ethnicities of light skin), pálido (IPA: [ˈpalidu], Portuguese: pale).
Moreno white people includes most Brazilians of pure or mostly European, Romani, or Levantine descent. It also includes mixed-race people perceived as phenotypically closer to Caucasians than to Pardos—caboclos (Pardos, or Brown people. The majority of Brazilians are of some Amerindian descent, and some may have more Amerindian features than many people labeled as mestizo in nearby nations—since it actually describes strictly non-white people (and not those somewhere in-between). This broader definition of white people also includes light-skinned mulattoes of loosely coiled or straight hair and generally European features. Moreno can describe people of all races and ethnicities in Brazil, but most often refers to White Brazilians and Pardos. It is not politically correct to refer to an Afro-Brazilian by this term (because some may interpreted blackness being a minor deniable element of the person's characteristics—the stigma of being Black or partly Black in Brazil caused the phenomena of racially promoting: educated or affluent Afro-Brazilian historically "elevated" as Pardos, or very colloquially, morenos, and Pardos being seen as white people.
The most pejorative terms for white people in Brazil, both for locals and foreigners, even used by brancos morenos against fair-skinned White Brazilians, are branquelo (IPA: [bɾɐ̃ˈkɛlu], literally Portuguese: whitey, or also honky) and the even more disparaging leite azedo (IPA: [ˌlejtʃ(j) aˈzedu], Portuguese: rancid milk, in reference to the combination of an unusual light complexion, almost white as the milk, and the negative stereotype of the bad smell in Westerners — in most of Brazil, including White-majority states of Centro-Sul such as Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo, the normative social habit is to take at least one bath per day year-round, and Westerners are said to generally be not used to this — still the term is so common that in some regions it does not carry more the same negative conotation it carried in the past, although without losing its disparaging meaning). Gringo, on the other hand, is almost absent of pejorative connotation outside politically nationalist circles.
In Portugal the word is seldom used and so is "Ianque" (Portuguese spelling of Yank). It is never used in a formal context. It specifically describes someone from the USA (as does "Ianque"), and is not related to any particular physical or racial features.[21]
In Mexican cuisine, a gringa is a flour tortilla with al pastor meat with cheese, heated on the comal and then served with a salsa de chile (chile sauce). It is thought that the dish was born when an American citizen living in México City went to the same taco place and always ordered a pastor taco with cheese. The waiters started calling this dish "taco de la gringa."
In the 1950s, the blue fifty Mexican peso bill was called an ojo de gringa ("gringa's eye").[22] In Brazilian and Portuguese popular culture, someone unintelligible is traditionally said to speak Italian.[20]
Absorption from Spanish is also reflected in that the word usage is not naturally widespread and only generally in regions exposed to tourism like Rio de Janeiro. There, the word means basically any foreigner, North American, European or even Latin American. Generally it applies more to any English-speaking person, not necessarily based on race or skin color but on attitude and clothing. The more popularly-used terms for fair-skinned and blond people would be "alemão" (i.e., German), "russo" (Russian) or "galego" (Galician).
The opposite of alemão/russo/galego among white people in Brazil is branco moreno, or white people of dark hair or darker complexions. Moreno is actually the opposite of the most formal term for people of fair complexion (including most East Asians and many Levantine Arabs, among others Middle Easterners and other ethnicities of light skin), pálido (IPA: [ˈpalidu], Portuguese: pale).
"Moreno white people", apart from most people of pure or majoritarily European, Romani and/or Levantine descent in Brazil, also includes those of mixed-race perceived as physically closer to Caucasians than to Pardos—fcaboclos (Pardos, or Brown people, of both Amerindian and White ancestry: the overwheming majority of Brazilians, of all races/skin colors, possess some Amerindian descent), for example, generally have more Amerindian features than many people labeled as mestizo in nearby nations, since it actually describes strictly non-white people (and not those somewhere in-between), but this broader definition of white people also includes light-skinned mulattoes of loosely coiled or straight hair and features more resembling Europeans than Africans. Moreno can describe people of all races and ethnicities in Brazil, but is most often used for White Brazilians and Pardos, and nowadays is not politically correct referring to an Afro-Brazilian by this term (because it can be subtly interpreted as blackness being a minor deniable element of the person's characteristics — the stigma of being Black or partly Black in Brazil made the phenomena of "racially promoting" i.e. highly educated or affluent Afro-Brazilian being historically assumed as Pardos, or very colloquially, morenos, and Pardos being assumed as white people).
The most pejorative terms for white people in Brazil, both for locals and foreigners, even used by brancos morenos against fair-skinned White Brazilians, are branquelo (IPA: [bɾɐ̃ˈkɛlu], literally Portuguese: whitey, or also honky) and the even more disparaging leite azedo (IPA: [ˌlejtʃ(j) aˈzedu], Portuguese: rancid milk, in reference to the combination of an unusual light complexion, almost white as the milk, and the negative stereotype of the bad smell in Westerners — in most of Brazil, including White-majority states of Centro-Sul such as Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo, the normative social habit is to take at least one bath per day year-round, and Westerners are said to generally be not used to this — still the term is so common that in some regions it does not carry more the same negative conotation it carried in the past, although without losing its disparaging meaning). Gringo, on the other hand, is almost absent of pejorative connotation outside politically nationalist circles.
In Portugal the word is seldom used and so is "Ianque" (Portuguese spelling of Yank). It is never used in a formal context. It specifically describes someone from the USA (as does "Ianque"), and is not related to any particular physical or racial features.[21]
For most Latin Americans the word has only very mild pejorative connotations, or none at all. Typically, the word is simply used to describe someone from the US. The other two options would be either "Estadounidense" (Unitedstatesan), which is unwieldy, or "Americano," which many Latin Americans begrudge, since they consider all inhabitants of the Americas to be Americans. However, there is variation between individual Latin-American countries in how the word gringo is used:
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