25 March 2018

gomero/gomera

noun

Mexican term for opium poppy worker. The person who slashes the poppy so that the “goma” will exude. During the 1950’s, the term was used to describe people who worked in the opium business in the golden triangle of Mexico (where Sinaloa, Durango and Chihuahua meet in the Sierra Madre Oriental). Un gomero is a male, una gomera is a female.

In the 1950’s, a nickname for people from Culiacán Sinaloa was “gomero”. Los gomeros from Sinaloa were also called “gangsters with huaraches”.

Example

His father had been a gomero, an opium farmer, like all his uncles and everyone else he knew, tending the fields, irrigating the crops, then slicing the seed head with razor blades and carefully collecting the thick white sap until they had enough to sell to the middlemen who drove around the area and screwed everyone on price: everyone except his father.
Chapter 48
Solomon Creed (Book #1)
Simon Toyne

Today’s quote

Don’t judge each day by the harvest that you reap, but by the seeds that you plant.

– Robert Louis Stevenson

On this day

25 March 1947 – birth of Elton John (Reginald Dwight), British singer-songwriter.

25 March 1957 – the Treaty of Rome is signed by France, West Germany, Holland, Belgium, Italy and Luxembourg, establishing the European Economic Community (EEC). In 1993, following the ratification of the Maastricht Treaty, the European Union (EU) was created, and the EEC incorporated to became known as the European Community (EC).