«Cateto»: from insult to banner

Some words Spanish kids learn before their seven times table. «Cateto», bumpkin, is one of them. You hear it in the school playground if you're wearing the wrong clothes, if you don't know a song everyone else knows, or if the accent of your grandparents' village slips out. And you understand it instantly, without anyone explaining. It means: you're not from here, you don't know how things work, you're lagging behind.

«Tan Cateto» (Such a bumpkin) was the door a lot of people came in through, thanks to TikTok. So I find myself thinking about that word more than I ever expected. And the longer I look at it, the more I find underneath.

A word that measures distance

«Cateto» is, above all, a word about geography. It's about where you come from. The cateto is the village boy, the one who arrives in the capital and can't find his way round the metro, the one who says things the way they're said back home. It has close cousins: «paleto», «palurdo», «de pueblo», said in a certain tone. Other Spanish-speaking countries have their equivalents, each with its own freight of class and territory. Everywhere there's that word the city uses to look down its nose at the countryside.

The funny thing is that in Spain almost everyone has a village. The grandparents, the summers, the house with the patio. So whoever calls someone else a cateto is very often insulting their own family two generations late. I find that rather delicious. The insult works like an awkward mirror.

The bumpkin in gay culture

Inside the gay world, the word takes one more twist. For a long time the story we told ourselves was very simple: to be gay you had to leave the village. The city was freedom and the village was the closet. The real gay was urban, modern, knew about music and fashion. Whoever stayed behind, or turned up with the accent still on, was a bit of a cateto. Even among our own.

There's some truth to that picture. For many people, leaving the village was the only way to breathe. But it also bred its own snobbery. There's a gay classism that laughs at the boy who can't pronounce a designer label, the one who goes to the gay bar in his wedding shirt, the one who hasn't seen the series everyone's talking about. I've seen it. I've probably done it myself once or twice without noticing.

And then there's reality, which is bigger. There are gay men in every village. Some stay because they want to. Others go back. Some live in a city and feel like village boys their whole lives, and three master's degrees won't scrub it off. The border between the bumpkin and the sophisticate is far more porous than the insult pretends.

How you turn an insult around

The LGBT community has had a lot of practice at this. «Maricón», «bollera», «travelo», Spanish slurs for gay men, lesbians and trans women, and even the word "queer" itself in English: all of them started out as stones, and many have ended up as names people give themselves with pride. Not always, not in every mouth and not without argument. But the mechanism is well known. When you put the label on yourself before anyone else can, you take away some of their ammunition.

Something similar happens with «cateto», even though it isn't a specifically gay insult. Saying "I'm a cateto" with your chin up means: I come from where I come from, I talk the way I talk, and I'm not apologising. It's a kind of pride in your origins. And for a queer person from somewhere small, putting the two together has a certain charm. Being marica, queer in the old reclaimed Spanish sense, and from a village. Two reasons to be mocked turned into one identity that doesn't say sorry.

I'm not going to explain what «Tan Cateto» is about, because the lyrics are on the website and everyone hears it their own way. What I will say is that I love that «tan», "such", in the title. It doesn't say "a bit of a bumpkin" or "somewhat of a bumpkin". It says «tan». It's an everyday intensifier, the kind we use to exaggerate. And exaggerating an insult is a way of emptying it. If you're that much of one, there's nothing left to hide.

The banner and its limits

Now, an honest doubt. Turning an insult around works when you do it from the inside. If I, living in Madrid, fly «cateto» as a banner, am I within my rights or playing with something that isn't mine? I've asked myself. My working answer is that the word belongs to anyone who has ever felt out of place in a city, and that's a lot more people than it seems. But I haven't fully settled it.

I also know that reclaiming a word doesn't defuse it for ever. «Cateto» is still said with malice every day, in playgrounds and group chats. A song doesn't change that. What it can do is offer another way of hearing it. So that next time someone throws it at you, a chorus plays in your head as well.

In the GAYFOLK trilogy there's a planet people long to reach, a place where you can be who you are. Sometimes I think that planet is more like a village, with its familiar faces and its gossip, than a big city. A village where nobody calls you a bumpkin because everyone's a bit of one. I don't know if that's a serious idea or a joke. Probably both.

The full lyrics of «Tan Cateto», with the music video, are at mikesaintlouis.com.