Naco: a Mexican category

A little Mexican fox and a little Mexican chicken crashed in the middle of a farm.
Both had lost their memory.
-Who am I? –Where do I come from? Who are you?-They asked each other.
-Ok, I will describe you to make you remember who you are, and then you can describe me, ok?-Said the little fox, and he started.
-You are yellow and little, very cute, you have a little beak…
-Wait, wait! I know who I am! I am a chicken! Now I can describe you! You are brown, you have straight, black hair and your smell is not really nice…
-Stop!- said the distressed little fox -do not tell me any more…I am a “naco”!-

Popular Mexican joke

“Naco”, there is not a specific description for this Mexican term. It can be used as an adjective, a substantive or an adverb. The term Naco has many different connotations, it can mean vulgar, naughty, awful, or improper. However, an understanding of naco is undoubtedly part of the Mexican identity; it is a cultural category that has been used for decades by all spheres of Mexican society.

Bibliographical references to the term naco as a cultural phenomenon are few. Even though the term does not appear in the dictionary as a category, every single Mexican has a notion of what a naco is. However, the meaning of this word changes depending on the context in which the person is using it. This notion is interpreted by the cultural, social and economic background within which it is used. For this reason, naco is a problematic term to universally define because of the variances in its origin, meanings and its daily usage.

In the beginning to be identified as a naco was an identification “imposed by others ”. When I was a child, I was not allowed to call someone naco because it was deemed as extremely offensive. However, today everyone can use it as a little insult or a joke for describing a specific characteristic of another’s identity. Nowadays, some people are proud to be naco and in some cases it is becoming a part of the self identity in various social and economic spheres. It is common to hear someone saying “I am naco, but rich”, or “I am proudly naco” or “is more fun to be naco”.

Nacos y menos nacos

In some Mexican films this term appears commonly, emphasizing the Mexican slang . In addition, a very famous clothes company, called Na.Co is making large sums of money integrating the Naco fashion, taste and slang. It uses terms that usually are qualified as naco ways of calling different things. For example, saying “picsa” instead of pizza or “Hola Ester” instead of Hoollister (an American famous brand). Na.Co sells different kinds of products adorning logos spelled the way that an ignorant Mexican person would say them.

Naco is a category that can include a social, economic and/or cultural background but at present there are not enough cultural studies regarding this issue as it is a relatively new phenomenon. However, the use of the term continues to invoke a wide camp of cultural investigation about its origin, connotations, and shifts. As with all cultural categories, it is not static and it changes as fast as the society is changing. It is therefore difficult to make a cultural analysis about it. Naco is a category that determines some ethnic and racial implications in the imagined national community of Mexico.

Origins and implications

To gain a clearer understanding of the origins and implications of naco, we have to start with a brief approach to the Mexican history after colonization. The mix of Mesoamerican and the Spanish cultures after the sixteenth century is one of the biggest myths that shape the Mexican identity. In the imagined national all Mexicans are a product of mestization, a mix of races and cultures that became in a new one; a fusion of “Cosmo visions”, ways of perceiving and understanding the world that characterized the colonial period in this country for more than 300 years and gave birth to a new entice group: Mestizo.

Unlike other colonies the original inhabitants, of the conquered lands in Mexico were not exterminated or moved to special reserves. In this way, this process of cultural and biological mestization became part of the national myth and part of the official discourse as an intrinsic characteristic of the Mexican identity. What emerged after the colonization process was a hybrid culture, a product of Spanish and Indigenous mix; “neither colonizer nor pre-colonial subject, the post-colonial subject exists as a unique hybrid which may, by definition, constitute the other two as well” . This new condition permitted the inclusion of other ethnic groups into the Mexican society such as the Chinese or African , and avoided the excesses of racism that can be found in other countries of America. Indubitably, the best example is the United States, where we can find reserves of the few Indians left by colonization.

In Mexico, a country performed as a product of mestization there was no place for racism or exclusion because of ethnic category, at least in the official discourse. However, the reality seems to be different. Although racism is not one of the problems in this country, the ethnic exclusion based on a cultural background has been always been present. The real Mexico is not culturally homogeneous, the indigenous people, as a unique category are still there, but they are definitely not the dominant class.

Even during times of revolution in Mexico, the plight of the indigenous population was commonly ignored by the revolution leaders and the native Mexicans continued to suffer the effects of discrimination resulting in poverty and lower social status. The indigenous background is useful for the Mexican identity and the imagined national but, as part of the personal identity of Mexicans, it is sometimes denied or even hidden.

A bit of history

National identity is created in a historic process that generates new integrations in each stage of history, but the indigenous people have always been a differentiated category that has been socially relegated. After the Mexican independence we find a shift of political, economic and social power from the colonizers to the colonized. This redistribution of power generated new categories and it became more difficult for the dominant group to relegate indigenous people because of their ethnic characteristics.

In the official discourse, there were no distinctions made between Spanish or indigenous people, the National Identity was a mix, but the cultural, social and economic differences were clear between indigenous and the other ethnic groups. The Mexican Revolution emerged as a response to these differences, and as a response to the new created common identity, the political action was possible, and there was a change in the structure of the society; it was an attempt to change and rebuild the political structure of the country with an end to discrimination.

However “the political agent attempts to win privileges for all or many of its members in relation to the members of other groups (…) With the political entity, there are identities which are more privileged that others” . The categories can only shift or change in a society but they are always going to be part of it. The most powerful group after the Mexican Revolution was more homogeneous and the imagined national of the community was more solid than ever. The indigenous people were a basic part of it but most of them as a group, or an identity were still marginalized, they never gained social, political or cultural power.

In the early years after the revolution, Mexico began to grow and underwent important changes and developments. At the same time, the social evolution generated a resetting of groups and identities. In this context, in the first decades of the twentieth century, elitism became one of the core characteristics of the upper classes. This elitism was based on economic issues rather than cultural or social differences. However, the ethnic implications that were involved in these new phenomena of elitism were already an intrinsic part of the Mexican identity. After more than four centuries of foreign invasions and clear differences that were determined by the ethnic background, Mexicans learnt to be “malinchistas ”, to deny their own ethnic and cultural indigenous background and admire the foreign ones.

This characteristic of Mexican society is still present and there are a lot of studies about it. It is described as a “dissociative identity disorder caused by ritual racial abuse” and is very complex. In terms of beauty, quality and taste, what is foreign seems to be the best for a considerable number of Mexicans. In these cultural circumstances the cultural category of naco appeared. Naco referred to the poor, the Indian, the dirty, the uneducated, the one who did not have enough opportunities to get a rich cultural background and did not behave as the upper class did. The upper class of the first part of the twentieth century in Mexico consisted of Anglicism’s and European influence. An upper-class definition of a desirable culture consisted of a combination of aspects from European cultures as well as that of Mexican culture.

A cultural category

In this sense, the term naco as a cultural category emerged as a product of the upper class, a Naco was someone who did not embrace foreign cultures but maintained the Mexican way of life. “The most powerful members of any particular nation are likely to have greater control than others in the society over the determination of which types of cultural forms are recognized as authentic culture”.

This power is based on economic issues. In this way, the group who has more economic resources is the one that can determine the cultural categories of what is or not naco. The other groups can adopt this new category and even modify it, but the elitist origin of the term as an identity category comes from the upper class. Hence naco is installed in the urban Mexican speaking as a pejorative concept; it is a racist and classist expression that describes in a negative way the cultural hybridity of the marginalized groups in the society.

According to the Royal Spanish Academy, the word has different meanings: rolled tobacco-leaf; mash potatoes; a big impression or scare; or solid excrement, specially the human . In Nahuatl, indigenous Mexican dialect, it means “town of the heart or three hearts”; it is as well, an entity of Sonora, one of the Mexican states; it refers to the totonaca people; and to nopal (a Mexican cactus) in opata, another dialect.

Pejorative term

The cultural implications of naco as a pejorative term are clear and they are going to be explained later in this essay. As a category term there are some other words that have the same connotation and all of them are related to indigenous culture: some examples are “Indio” and “nahual”. Both are used as synonyms of naco. However, naco is the most commonly used. Totonaca ethnic people were labeled by the citizens of Mexico City as ignorant people with a different accent and indigenous background, they did not fit in with the model imposed by the post- revolution upper Mexican class.

The category has its origins in the indigenous background, it has a racial overtone if we consider that the word comes from the Mesoamerican Indians and now it is used to describe every kind of person or attitude that does not fit in a specific context. That is why “racial and ethnic groups should be viewed not merely as static entities, but also as products of labelling identification processes that change and evolve over time”.

We can find this kind of category in almost all cultures but with different kinds of connotations because it seems the term naco, does not have a translation even in other dialects. In the United States we can find the term “white trash”, it is a similar kind of category, but the cultural implications are extremely different. “White trash surfaced briefly as a way to name the social discrimination and scorn for lower class whites”; naco is different.

Nacos somos todos

Today, the meaning has changed and everybody, regardless of skin colour, economic, social and cultural background can be naco. There is not a determined meaning for it, or a specific stereotype for naco. A stereotype can be understood as a “form of knowledge and identification that vacillates between what is always in place, already known, and something that must be anxiously repeated” . However as was previously mentioned, naco is a category that can be applied depending on the characteristics and context of the one who is using it, and the one who is going to be categorized as naco. For some people, personalities such as George W. Bush, Britney Spears or Gianni Versace could be considered as examples of naco for different reasons. Naco is a person, who is out of his proper context; who has bad taste or poor education; who does not respect others; who tries to gain the attention of others at no matter what price; or who exaggerates the dressing or accessories. Naco is something or someone coarse, eccentric, and grotesque.

The problem is that everybody could be naco, because no matter the social class, Mexicans use this term. It depends on the context and on the person that uses this term. For the poor a rich can be naco; and for the rich a poor can be naco too. It depends on personal appreciation and on the opposite term of this category. “Any identity (…) depends upon its difference form, its negation of, some other term, even as the identity of the latter term depends upon its difference, its negation of the former (…)Identity is always a temporary and unstable effect of relations which define identities by marking differences” . Naco is an identity term that interacts with the term “good or chic” (bien), what is chic is not naco. What is naco, cannot be chic. In the same way, if one of both categories would disappear, the other would disappear too.

At the same time, naco and chic exist in all social spheres. Every single social sphere can be naco and chic at the same time. This is because every sphere calls itself chic, and what is outside this sphere is naco. For the indigenous people, naco is a Mexican who does not eat chilli or does not know how to prepare tortillas; for the rich, naco is a person who does not know to behave in a social event or who does not have good taste. It is not a static category and is always changing. What today is naco, tomorrow could be not. And what is naco for someone, for other is chic.

It is difficult to define ourselves as naco. However, there are several people who accept it as part of their own identity. Everybody can be naco when is out of the own normal environment, it is a category that can be applied to everybody. But what is the own normal environment in a world that is becoming global? Even when globalization is homogenizing a lot of aspects of culture, there are several differences from one cultural or social sphere to another. There is a rich mix of influences in taste and culture that are coming from everywhere and are creating new categories and definitions of what is chic or what is naco.

Different forms of capital

The value of the personal cultural capital varies depending on the social and cultural context where the person is, it is relative. For this reason naco is a relative category that goes from one definition to another one. The significant importance of the term relies in its origin as category. It was created when a dominant group noticed that there was a differentiated group of people that did not fit in their cultural model. It is one of the most pejorative and elitists’ identity terms because its real sense is the differentiation between people. In a beginning this differentiation was based in the race and ethnicity, and today it is based in a large number of characteristics that can include the first.

The variation is that today, the world is changing incredibly fast, people build their identity with different cultural models from numerous cultural groups, for this reason, we are becoming more naco every day, and more chic as well. So naco and chic, as Paris Hilton in the Aztec Mexican Stadium with a Louis Vuitton bag in one hand and a Corona Beer in the other, enjoying a Mexican football match.