âGreasersâ and âgreaseballsâ likewise crossed (and were crossed by) racial and national lines. Originally a class and occupational term, greaser named those who greased sheep in preindustrial England and those who lubricated ships and railroad machinery in the nineteenth century. Both James Joyceâs Ulysses and the English translation of Emile Zolaâs Nana, for example, refer to greasers working on the rails. Apologists for U.S. slavery seized on the seeming anomaly of begrimed âfreeâ labor in criticizing the proliferation of âgreasy mechanicsâ in the antebellum North. But the term âgreaserâ acquired its ongoing status as what dictionaries have called a âreal Americanismâ in referring to Mexicans who came to be within U.S. borders during this period as the United States annexed land. Many stories of its racialized origins preserve association with dirty, manual work. Greasing oxcart and wagon wheels and the guns of Mexican War artillerymen was âMexican workâ in Texas and California when the word gained currency. Trade in tallow, which functioned at times as a kind of currency, also was said to mark Mexican teamsters as greasers in the vocabularies of whites attacking both their greasy jobs and greasy money.
Poorer Mexicans were particularly racialized as greasers. Bret Harte, the writer of humor and racial tourism, identified greasers as the âlower class of Mexicans.â The supposed presence of the âbloodâ of indigenous people gave a biological basis to the epithet. The 1855 Greaser Bill in California, for example, was an antivagrant, anti-Native American, anti-Mexican law passed at a time when the landholding Californio ranchero elite was legally, if tenuously, accepted as white. Other stories of origin are equally suggestive. In some cases the alleged greasiness of Mexican food, skin, and hair was connected to Indians who greased themselves and perhaps to black slaves who were greased when sold. Anglo settlers characterized the tejano Mexican American greaser population of Texas as mongrels with African American and Native American âblood.â âSketchesâ of the greaser appeared with tremendous frequency in the national press and constantly emphasized mixed-ness and proximity to other people of color. The fullest account, William R. Lightonâs Atlantic Monthly article âThe Greaser,â introduced âthe mestizo, the Greaser, the half-blood offspring of the marriage of antiquity with modernityâ as its âsunbrowned for centuriesâ subject. J. W. DeForestâs âOverlandâ has Texas Smith, âan American, a white man,â bristle at a perceived slight from a greaser and worry that he was being treated as âan âInjunâ or a ânigger.ââ
Lightonâs âThe Greaserâ ends, appropriately enough, on the same 1899 magazine page as the reformer Jacob Riisâs famous account of the life of the immigrant poor, âThe Tenement House Blight,â begins. In the twentieth century the terms âgreaserâ and âgreaseballâ were applied to many European immigrants, especially Italians and Greeks, as well as to Mexican Americans and to Filipinos. Indeed, the character Nick the Greek is a greaseball in the classic 1932 movie The Smart Money, while an early twentieth-century novelist could be sure his audience would understand his lampooning of grand opera as âa bunch of greasers [singing] a lot of Dago stuff.â In John Fanteâs arresting novel Ask the Dust (1939), the connections between Italian American and Mexican American greasers are intricately sketched. The Italian American central character Arturo calls his Mexican American love interest a âfilthy little Greaserâ and then absolves himself. The slur, he reasons, came not from âmy heartâ but from the âquivering of an old wound.â That wound, Arturo adds, opened during his childhood in Colorado, where âSmith and Parker and Jones ⊠hurt me with their hideous names, called me Wop and Dago and Greaser, and their children hurt me, just as I hurt you tonight." Mobsters, especially âunassimilated Sicilianâ mobsters, were greasers in San Francisco in the 1930s. William Foote Whyteâs Street Corner Society suggests that some Italian Americans applied âgreaserâ to less assimilated countrymen. When Greenwich Village Irish used the epithet âgreasy wops,â the supposed physical greasiness of Italians, whether of hair or face, received emphasis as it sometimes did in the slurs of the socialist writer Jack London, regarding Russian Jews. For immigrants who traded, greasy could imply being âslipperyâ when transacting business, a characteristic the celebrated sociologist Edward A. Ross imputed to Jews. The Dictionary of American Regional English gives âa Mexican or Mexican Americanâ as greaserâs primary meaning and âa person of Mediterranean backgroundâ as the second meaning. For greaseball, Mediterranean origins are in the first meaning, with Mexican below. There is no doubt that greaser was a racialized âfighting word,â as C. A. Barnhart put it. Indeed, in a letter to an editor of the Oxford English Dictionary in 1971, renowned student of U.S. language Peter Tamony identified greaser and greaseball as âbar-room brawl wordsâ in contrast to the class and occupational term âgrease monkey,â which can be âcaressivelyâ applied to workers in service stations and engine rooms. Attempts to embrace greaser identity awaited the 1950s and 1960s, when the term was conflated with Elvis, cars, gangs, motorcycles, Wildroot hair tonic, and ultimately Sha Na Naâs music to connote white (and, in the Southwest, sometimes Latino) working-class ethnicity. Sometimes, as in Maria Laurinoâs fascinating recollection of growing up âlabelled by [the] ethnic slurâ in Short Hills, New Jersey, Italian American young men were the group most commonly identified with the term as they worked on âbeat-up carsâ and fashioned an image from âtheir faint gasoline scent and oiled-down hair.â Stephen A. Buffâs account of hanging with greasers in the 1960s centers on style and class. The neighborhood of Buffâs ethnography includes mostly families of Slavic or Italian extraction. The greasers wore sleeveless undershirts called âdago-tees.
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