The Director's Cut, Chico and the Man, Freddie Prinze, and the Sonic #Mextasy of Spanish-accented English in a Small Texas Bordertown

Nota bene: A shorter, edited version of this piece originally appeared 20 June 2022 as a 

part of the Kojak Your Enthusiasm series (#24) on 70s television by Josh Glenn 

and his crew of hermenauts on Hilobrow.com. 

What appears below is the full, "Director's Cut" version of the short essay. 

Gracias Josh for letting me play in your semiotic sandbox! 

See all my Hilobrow.com dispatches here.

The Director's Cut

Chico and the Man, Freddie Prinze, and the 

Sonic #Mextasy of Hearing Spanish-accented English 

on TV in a Small Texas Bordertown

William "Memo" Nericcio

20, June 2022

Currently roiling the worlds of Hispanics, Mexican-Americans, Puerto Ricans, Dominicans and what have you are all sorts of controversies surrounding the value or sickeningness (depends what camp you are in) of the moniker “Latinx.” Designed by well-meaning folx to skirt the discomforting reality of a language, Spanish, that assigns genders to nouns (hand, feminine, la mano), (tiger, masculine, el tigre). Short of boycotting the Royal Academy in Madrid for it’s non-wokiness, I say we let folks or folx or gente, call themselves what they want.  

Which brings us to September 1974 and the debut on NBC of Chico and the Man, starring Freddie Prinze, loud proud and funny Boriqua genius/funnyman playing a West Coast Chicano mechanic in a garage with a mean old racist (think Archie Bunker, but skinnier) played by Jack Albertson. 

Holy Latinx, Batman! A puertoriqueño passing as a Chicano from East LA!? It gets better, my sources at Wikipedia, always to be trusted, just shared with me that Prinze was born “Frederick Karl Pruetzel at Saint Clare's Hospital in Manhattan, the son of Edward Karl Pruetzel and Maria de Gracia Pruetzel (née Graniela y Ramirez). His mother was a Puerto Rican Catholic and his father was a German Lutheran immigrant who had arrived in the U.S. as a youth in 1934.” So our would-be Chicano star on national TV was a mixed race American of German and Puerto Rican descent raised in Washington Heights. 

None of that meant anything to me in 1974. Back then I was a 13 year old Tejano being raised by nuns in Laredo, Texas, starved for anything (and I mean anything, not for nothing did I write the book on Speedy Gonzales) that had the trace of Mexican culture and a Spanish accent. Laredo was 99% Mexican and Mexican American and TV then, a little like TV now, was a desert when it came to the representation of Latina/o/x cultures--more on this in Talking #BrownTV. If Mel Blanc mouthing the voice of a Mexican mouse could bring a smile to our eyes, a warmth to our heart, imagine the joy when a streetwise Freddie Prinze, handsome, smart, hard-working, clever, and funny trod the stage with curmudgeon Anderson, who held his own with the snappy Latino New York superstar.

The idea for the show is another moment in the history of Chicanos on TV (not a thick tome in anybody’s library) as the producer, James Komack (The Courtship of Eddie’s Father, Welcome Back Kotter) was inspired by Cheech and Chong performances he had on his radar for ages. 

Those that despise the Latinx moniker do so for the same reason the Nixon-era “Hispanic” name rankles to this day as there are more differences than similarities when it comes to the histories, language(s) and culture(s) of Hispanos/Latinos in the Americas. But for 13 year-old Laredo-based me, the show was a revelation, a respite from the gringolandia that played out on the nightly television and that had nothing to do with the Mexican American universe I lived in.

Walker Percy’s “certification,” from his utterly under-rated The Moviegoer, holds that you don’t exist till you see your town or neighborhood on television. Freddie Prinze’s NYC-accented Spanish was a cheap substitute for the heavily accented Mexican English I heard growing up, but to me, it was like an existential aural salve, reminding me that I too existed and that I just might have a future in this bizarre amalgam of people and cultures we call the “united” states. 

When Prinze shot himself January 28, 1977, it was more than the death of a celebrity, it was also the death of a wealthspring of existential reassurance—one less “Mexican” voice to reassure me that I was still here.