Ah, Mexican Spanish: the language that, pound-for-pound, has more double entrendres, puns, and desmadre than any language on Earth. And a great example of the language's ever-charming vulgarity comes courtesy of Pizza Patrón, the Texas-based chain that sells pizzas marketed toward Mexicans and has a sole OC outpost in–where else?–SanTana.
They're currently marketing a pizza called “La Chingona,” a paisa pie with jalapeño-flecked pepperoni topped with more jalapeños. The controversy, though, comes with the name, which literally translates as “The Fucking Bad Ass” because its root verb, chingar, means “to fuck up.” Mexicans, however, understand “La Chingona” to mean “The Badass”–in other words, it's no more a vulgarity in contemporary Mexican Spanish than “badass” is in contemporary American English.
But it's chingona's root meaning that have radio and television stations in a tizzy, leading to them banning any mention of Pizza Patrón's “La Chingona” from their airwaves.
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NPR has the story and the proposed ad, which you'll have to find over there because those non-chingones didn't allow it to be embedded.
The pathetic thing about all this is that Univisión Radio and other networks refused to air Pizza Patrón's ad out of deference to the FCC even though the offending word and all of its derivatives were bleeped out, and these same networks air far-more offensive things. As I tweeted a couple of weeks ago, there was a Spanish-language radio DJ here in Southern California that recently gave a shout-out to the leaders of the Sinaloa drug cartel while trash-talking the Zetas cartel–and that's somehow less offensive than going on and on about a chingona pizza?
Pizza Patrón, of course, is loving the manufactured controversy, claiming it's being censored for “speaking Mexican” when they could've easily accomplished the same by calling the pizza “La Perrona,” which also means “The Badass” but whose root comes from “dog”–didn't I say Mexican Spanish is a chingona language?
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