Notes on the "habla"

For all you hispanohablantes or general Spanish language enthusiasts, this is my entry on Latin-American slang and indigenous peoples.

So last month I went to go see a showing of a low-budget film called Peces de Ciudad by Peruvian director Felipe Degregori about the indigenous people of Peru who have either been driven from their homes in the highland villages either by political violence or by lack of economic opportunity.  These Indians move to Lima, where they live in depressed slums without electricity or running water.  Houses are made of straw, cardboard, plywood, and corrugated tin.  Indians suffer a tremendous deal of racial discrimination in Lima, and are called a variety of derogatory names: charapa, cerrana (as in cerro or "hill"; literally, "hillbilly") and cholo among others.

So I went to Google these names after I saw the movie.  The first hit for charapa?  An entry on Quechua Wikipedia!  I had no idea that a Wikipedia in Quechua (a language of the indigenous peoples of the Andes and a direct descendant of the language of the Incan empire) even existed, so this was as a pretty exciting discovery for me.  I had to figure out myself, too, what language it was--that NACLO practice exercise with Quechua finally came in handy!

It turns out charapa is a Quechua word for turtle.  Apparently this is an insult directed towards Indians in Peru.  Another word used is cholo, which surprised me because it means something entirely different in Mexico and in the United States (something like "Mexican gangster," which, like "nigger" probably began as a derogatory word and eventually was reappropriated by the group to which it originally referred).  So, I went to Urban Dictionary for some clarification.  Some entries do mention its use as a derogatory term for Indians in Andean countries.  Another definition clearly only references the Mexican-American meaning, but also offered a source of its origin.

"Like many words that originated in Latin Americas--tomate, chocolate, etc.--the word cholo originated from the Nahuatl language and was eventually Hispanicized.  The original word was Xoloitzcuintli, where the X is pronounced somewhere between the English SH and CH.  The Spanish had no letter for this sound and used the X as a placeholder.  Xoloitzcuintli is the native breed of Mexican hairless dog was valued by the Mextica (Aztec) and Mayan natives.  The Spaniards used the shortened version of this word, Xolo, to mean "Mexican dog" with derogatory conotations [sic] when used by Anglos or Mexicans, as noted in previous definitions." 

This seemed to good to be true to me, so I decided to e-mail the professor of my Mesoamerican  Art & Architecture class, who is familiar with Nahuatl languages (once the tongue of the Aztecs) to ask whether or not this etymology seemed legitimate or plausible.  (As an aside, we have a ton of Nahuatl speakers here in New Haven.  You don't have to go much further than the local supermarket to hear Nahuatl spoken, since there's a large Mexican Indian immigrant population.)  Here was her reply:

"There are lots of words in Mexican Spanish from Nahuatl, almost all of them nouns (like most loan words).  My favorite is pocho--quite fascinating word origin.  I think the derivation below is correct.  Too bad the spelling of 'connotation' is wrong.  Perhaps you'll go in and fix it."  

There you have it!  I'll leave you all to look into pocho...

--Amy