Savage amor

I am addressing this to both ¡Ask a Mexican! and Savage Love, hoping one of you will have an answer to this: Why do Mexican chicks yell for their papi during sex?

—Daddy del Diablo

Dear Readers:

Daddy del Diablo sent the above query to both the Mexican and Dan Savage, author of the pinche hilarious column Savage Love. Dan suggested I answer the question in his column, and he answer it in mine. Without further ado, the Mexican turns over the burro to his favorite joto:

Dear Gabacho,

Latinas calling men papi (daddy) during sex or in day-to-day conversation is really more of a Caribbean thing, and my column is called ¡Ask a Mexican!, not ¡Ask J-Lo! Then again, there was that chilanga chula (hot-ass Mexico City chick) who’d whisper it whenever the Mexican slipped her the chorizo … so let’s answer your pregunta. In Mexico, as in the rest of Latin America, fathers stand atop the machismo mountaintop. They’re the hombres who allow or deny a daughter to marry or leave the household, the man that wives must tend to, and the man sons respect, fear and follow. Dads earned such a place in Mexico gracias to the cultures of Catholicism, the Conquest and the Aztecs, all governed by males who considered women little more than birth canals. Mix the three societies together, add some Freudian and Oedipal impulses, and you’re left with some fucked-up sexual mores that a half-century of Chicana feminism and modernity have yet to eradicate. But, hey: better your brown lady yell “Papi” during coitus than “¡Ay, chiquito gabacho!”, ¿qué no?

Gracias, Dan. Read Savage Love every week at www.thestranger.com/savage and send any sexy questions to mail@savagelove.com. Now, back to your favorite Mexican …

Dear Mexican:

When you strike out four times in a game in baseball, why is it called a golden sombrero?

—¡Viva Los Dawyers!

The why of your question is easy. A hat trick in hockey jargon is when someone scores three goals in a game, so some baseball joker over the years decided to invert the colloquialism to honor a player’s embarrassing four-strikeout day at the plate. The choice of words follows logic: the next step beyond a mere hat is a sombrero, and the “golden” is tacked on for ironic purposes. But the more interesting part of your question, ¡Viva!, is who created the term and when did it first occur. The 1999 Dickson Baseball Dictionary cites the earliest use of “golden sombrero” in the 1989 autobiography of former Chicago Cubs manager Don Baylor. But a June 16, 1987, Associated Press dispatch quotes then-Cincinnati Reds manager Pete Rose as saying, “We had two guys who got the ‘Golden Sombrero’ tonight. You know what the Golden Sombrero is, don’t you? It’s the hat trick plus one.” And the Sporting News archives show that the paper used the term in its September 26, 1983, issue. Rose’s quip suggests that “golden sombrero” was already popular in big-league clubhouses during the 1980s, but probably no earlier than that—the 1989 edition of the Dickson Baseball Dictionary doesn’t list it, while the 1999 paperback version does.

FYI: The Mexican initially leaned toward classifying “golden sombrero” as yet more proof of baseball bigotry against Mexicans, since the sport abounds in negative Mexican-themed terms: others include a Mexican standoff (used for match-ups where nothing ultimately happens) and the Mendoza line, named after Mexican big-league shortstop Mario Mendoza and referring to the .200 batting average all batters want to avoid. Ultimately, I decided against the race card: Really, is there a bigger hat out there than the Mexican sombrero? Maybe the cornette associated with the Daughters of Charity, but those nuns stopped using them around the time Sally Field hit the wall. Thus, the sombrero.