[ilbegone]

If you are serious with the question...

There is a multitude of different people in the Hispanic world, not all generally get along.

They speak different versions of Latin American Spanish with all kinds of dialects and localized versions of slang within those dialects.

Two Mexicans from different, far flung parts of Mexico might have difficulty immediately fully understanding each other's Mexican Spanish but both can immediately identify someone who learned Spanish in the home as a child in America. Certainly they're going to pick up on Cuban Spanish, which may or might not have been the source of your friends unease.

You could even dress up US Congressman "Working for Mexico" Joe Baca in second hand Salvation Army clothes and send him down to the swap meet to have some "cultural interaction" with some of the south of the border vendors. Before he gets close enough to even open his mouth and confirm it they will know he's American born. Doesn't matter how much Spanish he might have learned or how "real Mexican" his parents may have been nor how much he might wear UCR ethnic studies professor Armando Navarro's ass for a hat, they will know before he opens his mouth. And they won't be impressed in the slightest with his pretend "Mexican - ness". However, they might cynically kiss his ass for a freebie if they know who he is.

I personally saw a couple of occasions where Puerto Rican Spanish required some time for Mexican variant Spanish speaking (American born, learned Spanish as children in their homes) translators between English Speakers and Puerto Rican islanders (born American citizens who resisted English - knew more than were letting on) to catch on to the different Spanish (slang, manners of speaking, perhaps words of the trade).

Your friends might feel a lot more comfortable in Miami, which seems to me to be more Cuban than Los Angeles is Mexican. Very important differences between Miami and Los Angeles, not the least that Cuban immigrants are generally educated and I believe Miami actually has something financial going for it (in great contrast to Los Angeles).

Besides, what is meant by the word "Mexican", and who exactly were you dealing with in the panaderia? And was the panaderia Mexican or Guatemalan? Were the employees first generation immigrants or third generation Americans?

Lots of cracks and fissures in the Latino world.

"Pocho" is a Mexican term for someone with Mexican ancestry who is not fully of the Mexican culture, doesn't speak Spanish "right", maybe not up on the customs and tradition, and only slight Americanization qualifies one for the tag. "Pocho" might mean something roughly like "coconut", brown on the outside, gringo on the inside. As well, "coconut" is tossed out among some Americans with Latin American ancestors who either play the goofy (and packed with insecurity and inferiority complex) "I'm a more authentic Latino than you are" game, or by American brown supremacists who are describing a brown someone else who doesn't agree with or measure up to their racial nonsense.

"Pocho" might even be used by American cholo gang bangers to describe another American born who is not like them, but they are pocho themselves to a Mexican.

A few years ago Mexican woman once fairly spit out at me in angry tones that "those born here might eat beans and tortillas, but they aren't Mexican". She also said that when she had been detained by the border patrol that she would rather have been be handled by the white officers rather than the brown officers, because the whites treated them better. She was married to a white American and had two children by him when she said all this to me (struck me as ironic on a couple different levels).

As well, Guatemalans are to Mexico what Mexicans are to the United States, quite often not a lot of love lost between the two groups. As well, while Mexican nationals greatly object to their children becoming Americanized, Guatemalan parents in the San Fernando Valley fret over their children becoming Mexicanized in California.

Frothing at the mouth racist Reynaldo Berrios was born in El Salvador but became a Mexican - American style knife fighting street cholo who also bought into a deep end version of Chicano racist belief, wrote a book about it. I read it, the man is a racist loon ("The whites and N****** are pushing our barrios into the ocean!)

Chicano rhetoric and belief is all born in America crap borrowing and modifying heavily from Mexico, it's not Mexican - and Mexican nationals who come here as adults generally have little time for Chicano crap, maybe not the least because it's American.

Then there are the Mexican Indians, who occupy the bottom rung of Mexican society. "Pinche Indio!!" isn't a compliment, means something like F****** N*****.

They might be brown or even white or black with Spanish last names, but they are not all the same. Nationality, whatever squabbles and differences the foreign born have brought with them, differences among and between the American born, differences between the foreign and American born, changes and differences through the generations, basically decent and incorrigibly criminal and all types in between, etc etc etc ad infinatum.

They don't all get along, and there can be any two groups looking down on each other as being inferior or otherwise objectionable in some manner or another.

Including between Chicago "Cubans" who've been around Chicago "Mexicans". Lots of "Mexicans" in Chicago. Ask your friends about Chicago "Mexicans".

Ask them about "Puerto Ricans" too, see what they say.