The Meaning of Bean

Ethnic slurs are double edged, use them enough and the become ironic rather than hurtful.

In the case of the Mexican, Beaner, while still patently offensive to me, has lost most of it's intended meaning to most.

In fact, some are rather gleeful about embracing the repurposing of the meaning of beaner, Gustavo Arellano, quoted in the Washington Post, explains:

Gustavo Arellano, a writer for the Orange County Weekly, an alternative newspaper, does a column called "¡Ask a Mexican!" He's heard the term all his life, but says, " 'Beaner' is now nearly an inoffensive term among many Mexicans." He says it sounds funny, outdated, retro -- "like calling an Italian a pizza-eater."

For an Anglo to use it as a pejorative, "it just means they're not up on their racial slurs." Arellano says it's not really used much among Mexican Americans, except as a joke. It has a connotation more like "hick," but it would probably be more common for Mexican Americans in California to call a recent arrival a "wab," he says, which he speculated in a recent column was the mongrelization of "wetback" and "wop," though several of his readers contend that it stood for "walk across the border," or some variation of that.

For the offended among the Latino community, Arellano says: "Get a life. Get some humor. The majority of Mexican Americans like Mencia because he uses those words."

OC Latino, the web log

I am P. Sergio Serrato, an Orange County Latino currently living in exile in the Washington, D.C. area where I work in Market Research.

My co-web logger is the the very definition of indefatigable: Gustavo Arellano. The OC Weekly has written of his output: Gustavo Arellano: "Seems to think that if he fails to write, la migra will find him."

Gustavo and I are known for our pugnacious brand of nerdiness and eclectic tastes in culture, politics and art.

We met in the last days of the Twentieth Century on the well manicured lawns of Chapman University and no - we were not mowing them, we were undergraduates at Orange County's finest private university.

Gustavo, I liked to point out from time to time, liked to use his intellect like a blunt instrument, that is, use his learning and fury to inflict educational violence upon the misguided, the criminal, the crypto-racist (of all colors - lily white and earth-toned) and the terminally dishonest.

This blog is the outgrowth of a webzine I started back in November of 2001 that ran until the Fall of 2003 called OCLatino.net - for what OC Latino was - a whopping three digit budget, and the only office space dedicated mostly to OC Latino being located on the sixth floor of a dormitory in Berkeley, California and I say this with no undeserved bravado - rocked my argyle socks, rocked'em hard I say in terms of quality and innovation. [I'll post all the articles soon]

Naturally, OC Latino couldn't last.

But the friendships that withstood the stresses of that, and of life in it's cloyingly mundane glory and even literally death, remain.

All involved with the OC Latino.net project moved onward, and most importantly for this OC Latino - upward.

Gustavo was during the whole of the OC Latino years a writer for the OC Weekly. And for those of you who don't know, the OC Weekly is the chesty blond of the sprawling Village Voice Media empire, it's shallow intellectual fun with a snarky attitude that you'd not feel too comfortable taking home to mother.

Mostly because of the advertisements for porn - but nevertheless, a fine publication that is the only game in OC if you want reportage with a jolly anarcho-capitalist point of view and a steely eyed sense of justice.


And that sense of justice and anarcho-capitalist bent saved my home from the greasy clutches of my hometown's very own parliament of real estate whores (sometimes known as the Placentia City Council) who threatened to ethnically cleanse the barrios of Placentia by invoking the despotic power of eminent domain to evict my family and my neighborhood from our homes (my family had been there since the 1950s) in order to build parking lots, shopping malls and hotels that would never return the investment it took to build them.

All in the name of economic development.

Gustavo brought the blunt instrument down on the city, and was able to rile up some media attention (beating the Register and the Times, again) and things got better what I now refer to as the Despotate of Placentia.

We were both web logging before web logging was cool yet another tool for corporations and individuals to try to capture attention and break through the clutter of modernity's communications overload.

I started a web log in Fall of 2000. Gustavo started in 2001.

So here we are, ¡Bienvenidos! to the OC Latino Web Log.