By Ed Boyer — 1999

I remember once talking to a Latino colleague back in my days at the Los Angeles Times about Father Gregory Boyle and the work he does with Eastside gangs when the conversation turned to one project, Homeboy Bakery.

“I’ve always found it interesting how a term arises from one culture and is expropriated by another,” I said.

“What do you mean?” my colleague asked.

“I’m talking about ‘Homeboy,”‘ I responded. “It’s interesting to me how Latinos have embraced the term ‘Homeboy‘ and practically made it their own,” I said.

“It is our own,” he insisted. “‘Homeboy’ comes straight from the barrio.”

“No way,” I told him. “That expression has been around since at least since the early 1940s.”

Then I proceeded to explain that I had first heard “Homeboy” used by black migrants from the South who had moved to the North. Students at historically black colleges back in the 1950s and before referred to fellow students from their hometown as “homeboy” or “homegirl.”

I can’t say he looked at me with skepticism. He downright didn’t believe what I was saying.

So I continued. A guy moves from Rome, Ga., to Detroit, for example. Someone he knows from Rome later moves to the Motor City. Routinely they would refer to each other as “Homeboy.”

The usage was easily understood. They both came from the same hometown.

The same was true of “Homegirl.” Those terms were so commonly used that it never occurred to me that anyone could possibly not understand their origin.

Then I moved to Los Angeles in the 1970s and found that “Homeboy” and“Homegirl” were thought of as expressions arising from barrio culture.

I knew better.

But first I have to make a confession. When I was a youngster attending college, I was twisted. Some might even call my interest perverse.

Somehow, I became interested in English linguistics. I spent more time than I care to remember in undergraduate and graduate seminars discussing phonemes, morphemes, etymology, philology, dialect geography.

There was a time when I could hold forth at great length on why English spelling is such a mess, carefully explaining how it is a blend of Romance and Teutonic languages — how French became the dominant language in England after the Norman Conquest, how English became the language of the lower classes and was committed to paper by largely illiterate scribes.

All of that was a long time ago, and mercifully many of those linguistic concepts are now only vague memories. But the business of words, expressionsand where they come from has remained an interest.

That is probably why I was so surprised by misconceptions over the origin of “Homeboy.” During the second Great Migration of African Americans in the 1940s, when the term was being widely used in Detroit and other Eastern cities, those cities had no Mexican-American communities to speak of. That fact pretty much rules out black youngsters having picked it up from contact with Latinos. The question then becomes, how did it move to the Latino community?

“No, Ed, you’re wrong,” he said. “‘Homeboy’ is ours.”

One plausible theory has to be via the armed forces where blacks and Latinos would have been in contact even in the segregated armed services of those days. Another theory is that the term also could have been transferred in prisons or much later in neighborhoods in cities like Los Angeles where blacks and Latinos grew up together.

None of those explanations satisfied my Latino colleague.

“No, Ed, you’re wrong,” he said. “‘Homeboy’ is ours.”

I could see that I had about as much chance of convincing him of the origin of “Homeboy” as I had of convincing him that Zoot Suits were a style adopted by black youngsters long before the wartime Los Angeles’ Zoot Suit riots when white sailors assaulted Latinos in the streets.

We ended the discussion amicably, and I couldn’t help but feel that despite whatever tensions exist between blacks and Latinos, there is still a wholesale exchange between the two cultures as anyone who listens to old-school R&B and rap music knows.

And speaking of rap, a national magazine once described it as a term that came from shortening the word “rapport,” meaning that people who rapped to one another had a rapport.

Logical, but wrong. Anyone who grew up in a black community in the 1950s and 1960s knows that when a boy approached a girl with designs on getting to know her better, he was said to be “hitting on” her.

But there were times when the approach was more tentative, more exploratory. That was not considered a serious “hit.” It was referred to as a light “rap.”

The rest is history. ◼︎

After this column appeared, several African American readers offered their experiences with using “homeboy.” One reader noted that she had gone to college in the 1940s in the South and regularly said homeboy and homegirl. “And there were no Mexican Americans anywhere near us,” she said. Another reader pointed out that Black novelist, ethnographer and folklorist Zora Neale Hurston had used “homeboy” in one of her pieces to refer to someone who from from “Down Home,” or the American South. In that sense it meant something close to “country boy.”