Dispatches from Puerto Nowhere by Robert Lopez

Author:Robert Lopez
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Two Dollar Radio
Published: 2023-03-14T00:00:00+00:00

Dispatch From Panama City

The word spic according to most sources comes from the digging of the Panama Canal.

Writing for NPR, Juan Vidal says that in 1908 the Saturday Evening Post sent a reporter to Panama to write about the thousands of North American laborers digging out the canal. He kept hearing the word spiggoty, which he learned the northerners had taken to calling Panamanians.

As in the Panamanians saying, I don’t spiggoty English.

My sister doesn’t remember if she was ever called a spic. But I’m going to say that she probably wasn’t.

I’m sure she was called other things, but none of them ethnically motivated. Her friends used to call her Coco for Coco Lopez, which is a Puerto Rican coconut product used in many popular drinks.

From there spigotty moved around and migrated north and morphed to spigoties and then shortened to spig and finally spic, where it has remained ever since.

My grandmother, Lola DeLeon, known as Delores, never tried to teach me Spanish. I don’t remember her ever trying to teach my sister or me a single word.

It’s possible her name was Delores and she was known as Lola.

I didn’t know my grandmother’s maiden name so I asked my mother, who also didn’t know. She was in touch with one of my grandmother’s sisters on social media and looked her up. This is when my mother told me that Grandma’s last name was DeLeon.

Not five minutes after I typed DeLeon for the first time my sister said that our grandmother’s last name was Colon. I asked her how she knew and she said she didn’t know how she knew but was confident it was Colon.

Why she knows this and not if she was ever called a spic shouldn’t call anything into question.

Colon seems right to me. It rings a faint and distant bell.

This is what happens when you come from nowhere.

I come from people who either were the people or came from the people who changed their names and only spoke English to their children and they’d forbid them from speaking Spanish or Italian, perhaps even punishing them for doing so, corporally and vigorously, so that they would grow up to be good Americans and accepted by all Americans.

Sixto spanking his eight-year-old daughter for saying, Yo tengo hambre, on a Thursday night at dinner time. His wife, Lola, in the bathroom, applying lipstick and eye shadow.

This was common for immigrants in this country for a long period of time, particularly the first half of the 20th century, particularly if you were working class.

It seems less common now. Yesterday on Meet the Press, television journalist Tom Brokaw said, I also happen to believe that the Hispanics should work harder at assimilation… They ought not to be just codified in their communities but make sure that all their kids are learning to speak English.

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