My Mom Wrote Her Master’s Thesis on “Mexican Women’s Sexual Jokes”

I have been thinking about circles lately. They are round. They never end. You think that you are moving away from point A, but then you find yourself at Point A again. You thought you were traveling somewhere, but ended up where you started.

Lots of things seem to be coming full circle these days. One of them has to do with the fact that this Fall I am returning to Yale University to teach standup comedy. I still can’t believe that I went to school there, let alone that I will be going back, let alone that I will be teaching, let alone that I will be teaching stand up comedy. I don’t have an MFA and standup comedy was the last thing I expected to become associated with Yale University.

Some circles we really have no control over; our family, our genetic make-up, our origin stories…these are things from which you cannot run. No matter how hard you try, life sends you back like a science fiction movie. Like when a character decides beat the hell out of the creepy small town via the main road…only to return…oh, hey, isn’t that the same 7-11 parking lot where we started?

This is how I felt when over the holidays my step father casually dropped that my mother’s masters thesis was on “Mexican Women’s Sexual Jokes”….What?” I asked. What???????

Now I probably should have known this already given that Rafaela G. Castro is indeed my mother. In my defense, though she a) never talked about her dissertation with me as an adult and b) when she got her Master’s degree I was about 12 or 13. At that point in my life, I was busy with more important things, like applying Aqua Net to my hair and then putting it in front of a lighter. With all the Wet n’ Wild eyeshadow I had to shoplift and then apply in copious layers, I really didn’t have time to listen to her mumbo jumbo about “Mexican Women’s Sexual Jokes.” In retrospect, both my mom and I were on wild rides, I was going through a parents’ worst nightmare adolescence and my mom was writing about dirty jokes. Regardless, when I heard this news from my step-father, I was stopped in my tracks. You mean, my interest in comedy has something to do with my mother?!!

I knew my mom always loved comedy, and that she loved to laugh. But somehow never realized that she had a deeper knowledge of this field. And then I READ THE ARTICLE. (This is an excerpt from the whole dissertation that was published by the University of Arizona). *MIND BLOWN*

My mom writes about one of her “informants,” a Mexican woman (born on the American side of the border) in her late 50s who works at a candy company and loves to tell jokes of a sexual nature that have been passed around her family and culture. This woman is clearly my grandmother who worked at See’s candy for 20 years. Aside the fact that my grandmother’s sex life is not something I think about, what really stopped me in my tracks was the fact that my grandmother was a joke teller. I remember her making everyone laugh in Spanish at family get togethers…but it never dawned on me that she was what we call today, a STANDUP COMIC.

A lot of people think jokes are stories. They are not. A story does not have to end with a laugh, a joke does. Like most art forms, joke writing requires endless refinement and word economy. It must be relatable and resonate and it must have a punchline. It is usually told to an audience of any size. Now my grandmother told jokes that had been passed around, thus refined and rewritten by a collective of women (maybe some men, too). My grandmother didn’t have a stage or a mic, but she did have an audience; her friends, coworkers, sisters, daughters and grandchildren.

Now to be a female comic is to hear men say that “women aren’t funny.” Because I have internalized misogyny, I naturally assumed that any comedy gene I had came from the X chromosome or my father’s family, many of whom would do quite well on stage. But the fact that it came in large part from my migrant farm-working Mexican grandmother who had three children by the time she was 21, who did not graduate high school and who spent much of her life performing rote labor, like picking cotton or dipping chocolate, rearranged my brain. Yes, the patriarchy was wrong about women in comedy. Not only have women always been funny (as I have always known), but women HAVE ALWAYS TOLD JOKES. My grandmother was skilled smart and creative. And a much better comic than many comics dick jokes in LA. (However, as you will see if you read the article, many of these jokes are about penises, which is synonymous with ‘“dicks.” So you could say she was telling dick jokes. But these were from woman’s perspective and MUCH funnier.)

I am so happy to realize that my grandmother gave me this gift, whether through genes or exposure of telling jokes as a woman. I am also proud of my mother and her forward trailblazing mind that bothered to document what many would dismiss. And God bless Professor Dundes, my mom’s advisor at UC Berkeley for supporting her.

Once again, here is the link this article by Rafaela G. Castro “Mexican Women’s Sexual Jokes.”

Here is a picture of her and my grandfather: