From: "Gary Britt" 

caca is Spanish word or Mexican slang for shit or nasty bad substance of
unknown origin.  My wife has never heard of "macaca" as a word,
but she's only 50% fluent in Spanish.

Gary

"Rich Gauszka"  wrote in message
news:44e32557$1{at}w3.nls.net...
> monkeys, mullets and mohawks
>
> http://www.tpmcafe.com/blog/coffeehouse/2006/aug/15/monkeys_and_mullets
>
> Much of the speculation today about Sen. George Allen's bizarre comments
> about a Webb campaign tracker named S.R. Sidarth revolves around defining
> exactly what he meant by calling the young man "Macaca." Ezra Klein
> suggests the word may be derived from a French insult often aimed at North
> Africans; Garance Franke-Ruta says it may have a Spanish-language origin.
> Both theories stipulate that the word connotes some kind of monkey, and is
> typically aimed at immigrants. Allen says he has no idea what he meant,
> which is really comforting in a man who wants to be president.
>
> But less attention is being paid to the indisputable part of Allen's
> remarks: his "welcome to America, and to the real world of
Virginia" bit,
> which obviously assumes that any dark-skinned person with an Indian
> surname is a recent immigrant (as it happens, Sidarth, unlike George
> Allen, was born in Virginia).
>
> It's hardly a news flash that Republicans in Virginia and elsewhere have a
> weakness for immigrant-bashing, particularly racially-tinged
> immigrant-bashing. But on a day when the Washington Post reports a new
> study showing that more than one million immigrants now live in the
> Washington, DC, metro area--with probably half of them, roughly, living in
> Virginia--Allen's casual immigrant-baiting can be viewed as either
> politically stupid, or as reflecting a calculation that anti-immigrant
> sentiment in the Old Dominion is sufficiently powerful to run the risk of
> alienating a growing voter bloc.
>
> In any event, you don't have to have any particular prejudice against
> George Allen to be skeptical of his claim that he pulled the word
"macaca"
> out of thin air. There's a long and disreputable European-American
> tradition of associating immigrants with "monkeys," and it's
not limited
> to people of color. Anyone familiar with the work of Thomas Nast, the
> godfather of American political cartoonists, knows that he routinely
> caricatured Irish-Americans as having distinctly simian features.  It's a
> classic dehumanizing tactic.
>
> The funniest aspect of this incident is the argument by some of Allen's
> flacks that their man was trying to say "mohawk," which is what the
> campaign called Sidarth because of his hair style.  Sidarth replied that
> his hairstyle was actually a mullet.
>
> Well, I suppose "macaca" and "mohawk" are similar
words, sorta like
> "baboon" and "bouffant" are similar.  But Lord
'amighty, how can anyone
> confuse a mohawk hairstyle with a mullet?  And moreover, how can anyone
> look at a man with a mullet and think of him as anything other than
> uniquely American?  I guarantee you there are a lot more people in rural
> Virginia sporting mullets than those who share George Allen' upbringing in
> Southern California in a Frenchified chateau, where monkeys and immigrants
> alike may well have been known as "macaques."
>
>
>
>

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