Cholo

Cholo, broadly, is a term applied to persons of mixed American and Spanish ancestry. However, its precise usage has varied widely in different times and places. It is used in the masculine and neuter; the feminine form in Spanish (and sometimes in English) is chola.

The term's use is first recorded in a Peruvian book published in 1609 and 1616, the Comentarios Reales de los Incas by Inca Garcilaso de la Vega. He writes (in Spanish) "Cholo is a word from the Windward Islands; it means dog, not of the purebred variety . . . . the Spaniards use it for insult and vituperation."^[1]

In Colonial Mexico, the terms cholo and coyote co-existed, indicating mixed Spanish and Amerindian ancestry, or a poor background, or both.

Cholo as an English-language term dates at least to the early 1900s, derived from the Peruvian reference mentioned above. Isela Alexsandra Garcia of the University of California at Berkeley writes that the term can be traced to Mexico, where in the early part of the last century it referred to "culturally marginal" mestizos, or people of mixed Spanish and Native American origin.^[2]

An article in the Los Angeles Express of April 2, 1907, headlined "Cleaning Up the Filthy Cholo Courts Has Begun in Earnest," uses the terms cholos and Mexicans interchangeably.^[3] The term cholo courts was defined in The Journal of San Diego History as "sometimes little more than instant slums as shanties were strewn almost randomly around city lots in order to create cheap horizontal tenements."^[4] The use of the term in these articles indicates that it meant simply poor Mexicans.

The term has two somewhat different meanings, one in the United States, Canada and Mexico and another in the rest of the Americas.

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