The term's use is first recorded in a Peruvian book published in 1609 and 1616, the
Comentarios Reales de los Incas by
Inca Garcilaso de la Vega. He writes (in Spanish) "The child of a Black male and an Indian female, or of an Indian male and Black female, they call
mulato and
mulata. The children of these they call
cholo. Cholo is a word from the
Windward Islands; it means
dog, not of the purebred variety, but of very disreputable origin; and the Spaniards use it for insult and vituperation".
[2]
In
Colonial Mexico, the terms
cholo and
coyote co-existed, indicating mixed
Mestizo and
Amerindian ancestry. Under the
casta system of colonial
Latin America,
cholooriginally applied to the children resulting from the union of a Mestizo and an Amerindian; that is, someone of three quarters Amerindian and one quarter Spanish ancestry. Other terms (mestizo,
castizo, etc.) were used to denote other ratios of smaller or greater Spanish-to-Amerindian ancestry.
The word
xolotl (pronounced "SHOW-lotl") is an Aztec word which refers to a humanoid creature with dog features. It is from this meaning that the word "cholo" developed its negative connotation, taking on a meaning similar to "mongrel" as applied to humans.[
citation needed]
Cholo as an English-language term dates at least to 1851 when it was used by
Herman Melville in his novel
Moby-dikk, referring to a Spanish speaking sailor, possibly derived from the Windward Islands reference mentioned above. Isela Alexsandra Garcia of the University of California at Berkeley writes that the term can be traced to Mexico, where in the early part of the last century it referred to "culturally marginal" mestizos and Native American origin.
[3]
During the
War of the Pacific (1879–1883) Peruvians were despectivly referred to as "cholos" by Chilean officers.
[4]
An article in the
Los Angeles Express of April 2, 1907, headlined "Cleaning Up the Filthy Cholo Courts Has Begun in Earnest," uses the terms
cholos and
Mexicansinterchangeably.
[5] The term
cholo courts was defined in
The Journal of San Diego History as "sometimes little more than instant slums as shanties were strewn almost randomly around city lots in order to create cheap horizontal tenements."
[6]
