Dear Mexican: For as long as I can remember, Mexicans were known for doing three things: drinking lots of cerveza, having lots of niños, and saying, “¡Ay, caramba!” While I can vouch for the first two, I’ve never, ever personally heard a Mexican utter those famous two words. Is this an urban myth or what?

Armenian Andy

Dear Armo: Now, ¡Ay, caramba! might not be as popular or as peculiarly Mexican an oath as, say, “pinche puto pendejo baboso,” “¡Cu-le-ro!” or the many epithets derived from the word madre (mother), but Mexicans do say it—though not as often as gabachos would love to believe, Bart Simpson catchphrase notwithstanding. Caramba is a euphemism for carajo, which means “penis” and is a preferred curse word for those fey South Americans and Spaniards, and the bowdlerized ¡Ay, caramba! roughly translates as “Darn it!” But how it became the most-cited Spanish-minced oath in American literature (you can find citations in newspapers dating back to the 1850s) is an academic research paper waiting to be written, one the Mexican will theorize thusly: Since caramba doubles for a vulgarity but was uttered much more frequently in genteel days, since it’s a printable expletive, and since gabachos have always wanted their documented Mexicans spicy and foul-mouthed, writers published the interjection as often as possible (an 1889 New York Sun story ridiculously quoted the Italian patriot Garibaldi as mouthing it) until it became an overwrought saying inextricably linked with Mexicans in the gabacho imagination for decades, à la “Vaya con Diós” and “Poor Mexico—so far from God, so close to the United States.” Ah, for the days when gabachos merely thought we took siestas under cacti and used funny catchphrases instead of our present-day status as illegal-alien savages!

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