Among the more well-known Spanish words is gringo. Despite the fanciful popular etymologies you may have heard, gringo almost surely comes from griego ‘Greek’. It was at first used to refer to people whose language wasn’t comprehensible by Spanish speakers, but over time in Mexican contexts it came to mean something like ‘non-Spanish speaking foreigner, especially (or exclusively) white people from the US’.
Some Indigenous languages in Latin America also have terms that are mirror gringo in meaning and usage. Oftentimes these are loanwords from Spanish, like San Miguel Chimalapa Zoque’s yangke ‘yankee’. In some varieties of the Eastern Chatino language, the prevailing term for ‘gringo’ is analyzable as ‘turkey person’, as in San Juan Quiahije neqA piH (being neqA ‘person’ and piH ‘turkey’). However, I think this is actually a folk etymology of the Spanish loanword gachupín, which I believe referred to Spaniards in 19th century Mexico. My support for this comes from chpii defined in Leslie and Kitty Pride’s 1970 Tataltepec Chatino vocabulary as ‘güero, güera‘ or ‘pale’, and gachupín being part of the regional Spanish vocabulary, at least historically: the word shows up in a few place names on the Oaxaca coast.
In Tataltepec Chatino around 2010, I didn’t hear anyone use chpii, but learned a different word instead: ngu’ wransè. The first word just means ‘person’ or ‘people’ (the counterpart to Quiahije Chatino’s neqA), and the second is clearly a loan from Spanish francés ‘French’. But why would a language spoken in Mexico use a word meaning ‘French’ to refer to prototypically English-speaking foreigners?
Today is Cinco de Mayo, which in Mexico is the anniversary of the 1862 Battle of Puebla, and in the United States is… something else. The Battle of Puebla was a major Mexican victory during a tumultuous period when the republic was invaded and occupied by French forces in the 1860s. This French intervention naturally had a huge impact on the course of Mexican history, but it also may have left a mark linguistically in Tataltepec Chatino’s ngu’ wransè. I don’t know if the Chatino region itself was a theater in the conflict, but with Oaxaca city itself being under siege, and a large battle fought not too far away in Miahuatlán, the Chatino people would have certainly known about the invasion. Ngu’ wransè likely arose around then and remained in use in Tataltepec Chatino, with its meaning shifting over the 150-some-odd years from ‘French person’ to ‘non-Spanish speaking foreigner’.
I don’t know of any other languages of Mexico that use a term originally referencing the French as their term for ‘gringo’.
One final detail: Zenzontepec Chatino has a very different term according to Campbell and Carleton’s dictionary. TzǫɁ tyà, ‘gringo, estadounidense, extranjero’ appears to be the term ‘back’ followed by ‘water’. I don’t know what to make of that.
Ryan Sullivant 