Gustavo ArellanoDear Mexican: So often when we see Mexican bands perform in the U.S. and Mexico, the crowd at some point starts chanting “¡Cu-le-ro (Ass-hole!)!” Why does the crowd yell “Cu-le-ro” at a band that they seemingly adore and paid a lot of money to see perform? Even fellow Latinos are really confused by this one.
I’ve been on sex-offender registry Web sites a couple of times, and it seems there are a lot of names ending with -ez. Is there an elevated rate of sexual deviancy amongst Mexicans? If so, why?
Dear Super-Handsome Light-Skinned Gabacho: Methinks you doth look for brownies too much. But I don’t blame you. Turn on the television and radio, and you’re likely to hear anti-immigrant pendejos screech about how Mexicans will rape you while stealing your job and playing banda music really loud. You’ll probably hear them invoke the work of Dr. Deborah Schurman-Kauflin. Her 2006 paper “The Dark Side of Illegal Immigration: Nearly One Million Sex Crimes Committed by Illegal Immigrants in the United States” came to some startling conclusions, not least of which are that there are 240,000 illegal-immigrant sex offenders in this country and that 93 of these cretins enter this country daily. Know-nothing politicians and even the House Homeland Security Committee’s Subcommittee on Investigations have cited Schurman-Kauflin’s paper in arguing against amnesty.Schurman-Kauflin based her findings on a 2005 Government Accountability Office survey that showed 2 percent of illegals in federal, local or state prisons had committed a sex crime. She then applied that percentage to the illegal-immigrant population at large — voilà! Instant endemic perversity! This statistical sleight of hand, however, withers by employing the very stats she uses. GAO data for 2003 (the most recent year available) showed about 308,000 criminal aliens (legal as well as illegal immigrants) were in American prisons; they constitute about 3 percent of the nation’s 12 million illegal immigrants. If only 2 percent of incarcerated illegals committed a sex crime, then it’s intellectually misleading to arrive at the 240,000 figure, ¿qué no?
For the Mexican, a more telling number in determining sexual deviancy among an ethnic group is the percentage of criminals arrested for such crimes. So, let’s go to the scoreboard: In 2003, gabachos incarcerated for sex crimes represented about 18 percent of all gabacho inmates in state prisons; perverted Hispanics, conversely, made up just 11 percent (strangely enough, the U.S. Department of Justice doesn’t keep the same statistics for federal prisons). According to this comparison, gabachos are more likely as a group to sexually assault you than Mexicans — but betcha you won’t hear Lou Dobbs repeat that factoid ad nauseam.
Got a spicy question about Mexicans? Ask the Mexican at themexican@askamexican.net. Questions will be edited for clarity, cabrones. And include a hilarious pseudonym, por favor, or we’ll make one up for you!
Advertising disclosure: We may receive compensation for some of the links in our stories. Thank you for supporting LA Weekly and our advertisers.