“Wedo!!” | The Dialect

Gringos, Gaijins, and Haoles: Installment No. 1

I walk into the bodega at 8 am to the cheerful chorus of “WEDO!!!”  I’m feeling all warm inside, like ‘Norm’ from Cheers must have felt.  In addition to “¿Que pasa carnal?”, three or four of my co-workers greet my entrance enthusiastically with this seemingly friendly ‘wedo’ jab.  And because they call the light-skinned guy from Guatemala by the same name, I don’t feel so bad being the only white guy in a workplace that’s 90% Latino.  I stroll as casually (looking) as possible up to Ulises, my closest work buddy, as he speeds around on one of many near-graveyard-quality forqlifs.

“Chango!” says he, with a bright smile.

“¿Que pasa?” I reply, proud of my successful execution of a full Spanish greeting.

I then attempt to ask in Spanish ‘what are we loading, where is the clipboard, and what can I do to help?’.  Of course, having never taken a single Spanish class and knowing nothing of Spanish grammar, what came out was something like, “What to go in truck?  Where ‘clipboard’?  My help you?”  Looking back, I can see now what horrible Spanish I was speaking and, perhaps, why chango, or ‘monkey’ as it was told to me, was a popular address for me at two different workplaces.  [Looking at my slang dictionary while writing this, I just now discovered that it also means pussy!!  Doh!!]

‘Wedo’ was explained to me by my co-workers as ‘white skin guy’ and now, years later, I have determined that the proper spelling for it is güero with the dictionary definition being ‘blonde’ but used informally as ‘whitey’. (I have also seen huero in some dictionaries.)  However, güero or güera as simply ‘blonde’ is complicated with several other tidbits I’ve discovered.  My slang dictionary says that güera means ‘prostitute’ in the Caribbean.  Furthermore, güero might also have an additional connotation of ‘gay’ with the idea that ‘that guy that dyes his hair blonde must be a fag’– or so speculates my Spanish teacher who likely heard it in a Puerto Rican context.

I also suspect, against the admonition of friends, that güero is connected in some way to güevón and güey:  Güevón being used as an address among male friends roughly equivalent to moron or lazy-ass, in my experience, and güey used more generally as a filler word equivalent to ‘dude’, or ‘man.’

As it played out in the warehouse, it meant ‘whitey’ the same way that ‘gordo’ was employed for fat guys and ‘Chinita’ was universal for Asian women of all backgrounds.  Nevertheless, I appreciated all these new terms of endearment and friendly insults and I found it fun to try to add other words into the mix.  I was called chango, güero, jefe (boss) (when the owners attempted unsuccessfully to promote me to supervisor without my consent), hijo de papi or hijo de Chal (the white owner) (‘daddy’s little baby’), carnal (‘brother’ or as I’d like to think, ‘blood’ as in “what’s up, blood?”), and compañero (companion or comrade).  I, in turn, added that I was nobody’s jefe, or hijo but rather, “Todos somos esclavos” (we are all slaves) and thusly esclavo (slave) became a word we all had fun using together.

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