"Macho": The singularity of a mock Spanish item

Abstract

This paper scrutinizes the path of the semantic extension of the originally neutral Spanish term macho‘male animal’ to the pejorative ‘animal-like man’. Semantic pejoration belongs to one of the techniques that Hill (1995b) identifies when describing Mock Spanish, a type of racist discourse used by monolingual English speakers when using single Spanish words. My objective was to identify if the origin of this pejoration and its subsequent proliferation had some relation to Mock Spanish. Methodologically, this is conducted by means of a lexical research of diachronic corpora in Spanish and English. I trace the origin of macho as an exclusively Spanish and neutral term to an international word with a pejorative connotation. My analysis leads me to conclude that the semantic shift of macho, at least in its written form, developed in both sides of the Mexican-American border in the first half of the XX century. Macho as an ‘animal-like man’ acquires a negative meaning northwards and a positive southwards. The latter during the Nationalist uproars of the Mexican Revolution.