‘Don’t Call Me Stupid’

As a nurse therapist, I learned that we all keep reliving our childhood. Sometimes we repeat old triumphs, but usually we’re stuck in old conflicts, living up to labels pinned on us by those in power, usually parent figures. To help them get unstuck, I’d advise, “Change your language and you change your life.” Now I teach Mexican American literature at San Diego State University and I see people living out the childhood messages embedded in their heads.

The writer Victor Villasenor always gets a laugh when, speaking to students, he shouts the word “pendejo!” They nod, knowingly, when he explains how his father called him pendejo at home and how his teachers reinforced the message that Mexican American children are stupid.

Villasenor dropped out of high school. Dyslexic, he writes with great difficulty; his success as a writer is a credit to his grit and determination.

All Mexicans were stupid, he thought, until he traveled in Mexico and had a broken finger treated by a Mexican doctor. Though impressed that Mexicans are smart enough to be doctors and architects, he still uses the term pendejo, jokingly, but trapped in its curse, as are so many Mexican Americans who turn that word upon themselves.

In “Drink Cultura,” Jose Antonio Burciaga also treats pendejismo as a joke and quotes his high school principal’s “favorite proverb” to his students, “Naces pendejo, [morira] pendejo--Born stupid, you’ll die stupid.” Imagine the head of the school telling his students they are fated to be stupid. Some joke.

When I first heard Villasenor shout “pendejo!” I laughed, too. I didn’t want to be left out of the joke, but the word was foreign to me. My Chicano father and Mexican mother never used it. When I asked my mother what it meant, she became flustered. “It’s a bad word. Don’t use it.”

I decided to research it on a recent visit to Cuernavaca. At dinner one night, in the home of a gracious, prosperous and well-educated family, I said that I wished to know more about a word. They nodded, ready to be of assistance.

“The word is pendejo.”

The hostess’ jaw slackened. My mother blushed and covered her face with a napkin. “Escandalosa!” a guest exclaimed. The consensus was that this word simply is not spoken by educated Mexicans.

Once home, I thought about that term, “educated Mexicans,” and about the Mexican American students I’ve encountered who lack confidence in their academic skills.

The word, on the surface, may seem innocuous, but so do deadly germs. Like a disease-causing micro-organism, pendejismo infects our culture, weakens its ability to compete with the majority population on an intellectual playing field. Shouted, snorted, snarled or whispered sweetly, “pendejo” weakens the spine. We’re not stupid. We just keep telling ourselves that we are, setting ourselves up to be kicked around by the political immigrant-bashers and destroyers of affirmative action.

Disturbed by the self-fulfilling prophecy of pendejismo, I asked two Mexican American colleagues if they didn’t think there’s a problem in calling little children “stupid.” Both laughed and assured me that it was an endearment, a joke, nothing serious.

But the joke is on us. In his book “Scripts People Live,” Charles Steiner describes as “gallows transactions” the laughing exchange between people when someone acts stupid. The laughter, Steiner writes, “tightens the noose around ‘stupid’s’ neck.” Pendejo is a noose. Every time we laugh, we tighten that noose around our own necks.

The National Center for Education Statistics warns of a crisis in dropout rates for Latino children. Escandalosa! Maybe if Mexican Americans quit calling their children pendejo, the children would not live down to the label. Maybe they wouldn’t drop out as readily. The only way to find out is to stop sending children to school with the message that they’re pathologically and permanently stupid.

The tragedy of being human is how obedient we are to destructive parental messages. With increasingly hostile Anglo attitudes toward Mexican Americans, our children need to hear how bright and capable they are. Remember, change your language and you change your life.