From the annals of remarkable commercial names, a delicious punmanteau name for a Phoenix AZ taco truck, which just flashed by, without remark, in the first sentence of the piece “Motor Mouth” by Aaron Timms in yesterday’s New York Times Magazine:
Keith Lee is sitting in the passenger seat of a car outside Juanderful Tacos in Phoenix.
Juanderful = Juan (a stereotypical Mexican name) + wonderful, so conveying something like ‘wonderfully Mexican’ or ‘wonderful in a typically Mexican way’.
(#1) The sprightly logo (you can imagine the patter: “Hi! I’ll be your carnitas tacos today! Enjoy my meat!”); the food truck has a website, here
More Juanderful food. On to burritos, and the Juanderful Burrito restaurant in League City TX:
(#2) The logo, just the name and the sombrero; the place has a website, here
On burritos, see the section in my 8/9/16 posting “Advances in the fast food world”.
Back to tacos (and more). Another playful name, for the Bay Area taco restaurants Cholita Linda, in Oakland, Alameda, Walnut Creek, and San Francisco (website here). From the website, an explanation for the name, from Vanessa Chavez, who founded the restaurants with her husband Murat Sozeri:
For as long as I can remember, my Peruvian born mother was called Chola or Cholita. In Peru, it’s a term of endearment that means a girl of native or mixed heritage and “Linda” means pretty or sweet. It’s sweet, warm and, full of love, which is the perfect representation of the food we cook.
The food. The Cholita Linda menu goes beyond tacos to sandwiches, salads, and platters of chicken, fish, and picadillo; the restaurants are known especially for their fish tacos:
(#3) The famous fish tacos (photo by Alix Wall on the restaurant’s site)
The song. Now, cholita is monstrously complex (hang on for a moment, especially if you know anything about cholos), but chola and its diminutive variant cholita are indeed terms of endearment in many Latino communities. What VC fails to mention — probably because she took it for granted as something everybody would know — is that Cholita Linda is a cute play on words, an allusion to the song “Cielito Lindo”.
From my 10/4/22 posting “All about /aj/: the trisyllables”, in a section on the song “Cielito Lindo” (roughly ‘Lovely Sweet One’): it’s a popular Mexican song (extolling the beauty of a young woman), commonly played by mariachi bands, which has become a kind of popular anthem of Mexico (often played, for example, at international sporting events). Pretty much everybody does know it. Even me: I learned it in school as a child, in both Spanish and English.
[A digression on the Spanish expression cielito lindo, which is, necessarily, of the masculine grammatical gender: cielo ‘sky’ is masculine in grammatical gender, so its diminutive cielito (usable as an endearment) is also, and so is any adjective modifying it, like the adjective with the stem lind– ‘lovely, cute’ (‘lovely’ when applied to a woman), so cielito lindo. These facts about grammatical gender are independent of the sex of the referent of the noun cielito — which can be female, as in the song; or male, in which case cielito lindo will be translated as ‘cute boy’.]
The noun stem chol–. From Wikipedia:
A cholo or chola [male or female, respectively] is a member of a Chicano and Latino subculture or lifestyle associated with a particular set of dress, behavior, and worldview which originated in Los Angeles. … Cholo was first reclaimed by Chicano youth in the 1960s and emerged as a popular identification in the late 1970s. The subculture has historical roots in the Pachuco subculture, but today is largely equated with anti-social behavior, criminal behavior and gang activity.
The intricate and shifting history of cholo is sketched in the Wikipedia article. The term was used to label mixed-race, or mulatto, people, so used as a term of contempt. But mixed-race people are also often seen as especially good-looking, so that terms for them can pick up positive uses, in particular as endearments — as with cholo / cholito / chola / cholita (see Vanessa Chavez above).
One more playfully named taco restaurant. Tacolicious, the San Francisco and Palo Alto taco restaurants; but this time I’ve already posted about it — in my 5/6/13 posting “Tacolicious”, about the restaurants, their food, and coinages in –licious.
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