Gringo Words: On Anglicisms in Mexican Spanish Ioana Alexandrescu, University of Oradea Octavio Cano Silva, University of Barcelona More than three thousand kilometers of border join and separate Mexico and the United States. This very long demarcation line is incessantly being crossed, on both ways, by people. Some of them come to Mexico on holiday, some of them looking for cheap medication etc. As for the Mexicans, many of them go to the United States to work, as mojados (with the border being crossed by 3 million illegal immigrants every year), or legally. Goods come and go from one country to another, merchandise of various types, especially from North to South, since Mexico, with its 100 million inhabitants is the United States’ second largest export market, with more than $1 billion in cross- border commerce taking place every day. Wall-Mart, Sam’s Club are present in Mexico, so are guacamole, tacos, tortilla, cilantro (as opposed to Brit. Coriander), in the US. With people and things, come, naturally, words. Some of the English words traveling to Mexico make it to penetrate the speech and become part, as Anglicisms, of Mexican Spanish. Our paper brings some considerations on these Anglicisms (only lexical, not syntactical), as compared to the Anglicisms registered in peninsular Spanish, that is, spoken in Spain, since the very different geographical distance Mexico and Spain have to an English speaking country is likely to translate into important differences in the impact of the English lexis on both variants of Spanish 1 . In order to tackle this issue, we first made a list of Anglicisms from: 1. the main dictionaries of Spanish (Diccionario del Español de Mexico [DEM], printed 2011; Diccionario de la Real Academia Española, [DRAE] printed 2001, internet 2014, Diccionario Panhispánico de Dudas [DPD] 2005), 2. the main corpora of Spanish (CREA; CORDE), 3. the Internet and 4. our personal experience as native and non native Mexican Spanish speakers. In the second stage, we pre-fabricated three simple categories in order to distribute these Anglicisms: 1. Anglicisms that are used in Spain AND in Mexico 2. Anglicisms that are used in Mexico, NOT in Spain 2 . 3. Anglicisms that are used in Spain, and are NOT used in Mexico. By fitting the list of Anglicisms we had made into these three categories, other subcategories arouse: 1. Anglicisms that are used in Spain AND Mexico 1.1 Words having the same form, the same pronunciation and the same meaning in both variants of Spanish: internet, web, jazz, blues, blazer , flash, hall, jet, hockey, lady, etc. Most of the Anglicisms 1 On this topic, see Moreno de Alba (1999). Also, on Anglicisms in Mexican Spanish, Lope Blanch (1977) and López Chavez (1991). 2 This slightly unfortunate and clumsy way of putting it is due to the fact we wanted to avoid the use of the adverb only, as in better resounding “only used in Mexico” , or “only used in Spain”, since these Anglicisms may not be exclusive of these countries.