Malinche marketing.

By Gonzalo López Martí  – Cretive director, etc./ LMMiami.com

  • If you read my columns -thank you!- you probably know that “malinchismo” is one of my pet peeves.
  • A full-fledged obsession.
  • Lemme ‘splain: historians are not fully in agreement and accounts vary but, legend has it, “La Malinche” was an indigenous woman who became translator and spy for Spanish Conquistador Hernán Cortés in his quest to overthrow Aztec emperor Moctezuma.
  • She was also his “mistress”, but this assertion might have a bit of a sexist tinge to it: they eventually got married.
  • Allegedly.
  • See, history NEVER tells the full picture.
  • Historians are humans and as such, inevitable biased.
  • Admittedly or not.
  • One of the worst mistakes humans make is to consider history an exact science: a recipe for self-righteousness, fanaticism, chauvinism and hatred.*
  • Anyhoo, malinchismo is Mexican slang describing a sort of inferiority complex suffered by folks who are drawn to all things foreign while dissing the culture of their own country.
  • A malinche is either a traitor, a groupie, a snob, a suck-up, a sucker.
  • Or all of the above.
  • Paradoxically, malinchismo is both a sign of curiosity and a lack thereof.
  • We all are malinches so some extent.
  • On a conscious or subconscious level.
  • Whether we like it or not.
  • In México, the accusation is bandied about liberally.
  • Fairly or not, it tends to reach home.
  • Nobody likes to be deemed a malinche.
  • Even when it is just innuendo, it hurts.
  • No matter one’s nationality, ethnicity or religion.
  • Comedian Sarah Silverman, a notorious cultivator of salt-in-the-wound jokes, usually says in her routines that she will never understand why Jews drive German cars.
  • For us Hispanics, the very fact that we left our home countries to settle in ‘Murica is, to some extent, malinchismo.
  • Life is short, no hard feelings.
  • We invented the ultimate oxymoron to soothe our guilt: Mexican American, Cuban American and so on and so forth.
  • Which brings is to marketing.
  • Malinchismo is a great insight to separate fools from their money.
  • It might be one the most powerful consumer behavioral drivers in our toolbox
  • Hipsters in Argentina are eating overpriced American-style T-bone steaks.
  • Gabriel García Márquez’s “One hundred years of solitude” was rejected by various editors until some publishing house in Buenos Aires decided to give it a chance, but it only became really popular when the New York Times gave it a thumbs up.
  • Chilean author Roberto Bolaño died in quasi anonymity -a writer’s writer in the most pejorative sense of the expression- until some critic of the New York Times literary section praised him in one of his reviews.
  • We Hispanics are notorious malinches.
  • Starbucks is selling with big fanfare a cappuccino topped with caramel (caramel as in dulce de leche).
  • Why did nobody ever come up with this idea in Argentina before?
  • I’m talking about a country that consumes gallons and gallons of espresso per capita per year.
  • And tons of dulce de leche.
  • Why did a multinational corporation based out of the Pacific Northwest come up with the idea first?
  • What’s our excuse?
  • This is not hi end technology requiring billions of dollars in funding for R&D.
  • This is not big pharma, where every single innovation has to jump through rigorous FDA hoops throughout decades.
  • Or big oil, exploring and drilling for crude in remote, politically unstable regions.
  • We are not talking about an industry with insurmountable barriers to entry.
  • It’s just coffee.
  • Moral of the story?
  • I don’t know.
  • I’ll take a stab at one here: next time you are tempted to blame your shortcomings or failures on racism, bias or some sort of conspiracy theory, remember that, maybe, just maybe, your lack of imagination and initiative is partly to blame too.

*History is chockfull of inaccuracies and weird footnotes, for instance: nobody knows exactly when Fidel Castro was born. He came to this worl the old-school way, at home on some hacienda. It is unclear how long his father took to make the trip to the closest village to get a birth certificate. He might’ve waited weeks, even months. People were not particularly observant of these formalities back in the day. The same was true of my paternal grandmother, who was born on a remote vineyard in the San Juan province of Argentina: she was somehow amused by the fact that her birthday had to be celebrated with a two to three-week margin of error. Mind you, we’re talking about the 20th century. In the bearded tyrant’s case, to add fodder to the confusion, he took pleasure in muddying his DOB, possibly out of vanity, to appear younger than he actually was. Or simply because he was just an unhinged attention whore psychopath who loved to keep people guessing.

 

 

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