Órale, the word for this episode is maestro. It’s an honorific, a title of recognition of an individual’s mastery of a certain subject matter. It’s conferred informally but universally by the community. It evolved in a setting where, in the absence of degrees or journeyman certificates of any kind, and people earned their bona fides through demonstrated skill and acumen. There were maestros in every field, music, teaching and coaching, auto mechanics, carpentry, and of course, matanzas.

Órale, the next few episodes of Caló will be dedicated to the ritual of the matanza. It’s Spanish for the the killing or slaughter of an animal for its meat. The term and custom is well-known up and down the Rio Grande. Matanzas are celebratory and collective acts associated with important social events, like weddings. They’re led by maestros whose knowledge of the ritual is passed down from generation to generation. Matanzas are celebrated in a wide spectrum of ways. Some communities deliver the coup de grace with a firearm. Others do it with an heirloom knife. In some places, women dominate the ritual. In other places, men do. Some matanzas are completed in a matter of hours, while others take days to run their course. The crowd that gathers also makes a difference in a matanza.

Órale, the Caló word of the week is cácaro. It means a person with a pockmarked face. It comes from the Spanish word, cacarizo, an adjective that means pitted or pockmarked. The term, cácaro, has been in Caló since at least the time of smallpox epidemics, which left survivors with lasting pockmarks all over their body. Cácaro is mostly a pejorative that reduces a person to their bad fortune of having an unattractive face. There’s a bitter-sweet tragedy about El Cácaro passed down from generation to generation throughout La Junta that should help the curious know how this term is used in Caló.

Órale, the Caló word of the week is pos. It’s appeared in many previous episodes under the assumption that it was so self-evident it didn’t need translation. We’re now gonna unpack this tiny word to make clear its expansive meaning. It comes from the Spanish word pués, which is a contraction of después (after or then), that means so, then, well or therefore, as in getting to or asking for the dots to be connected or the conclusion or motive to be stated. Examples in English are “well, you gonna do it or not?” or simply “so what?” Pos in Caló goes further and connects the dots under the assumption, stretched or not, that the conclusion or motive is known to all the interested parties. Pos nada. Pos don’t eat so much chile next time, ese. Pos you know. Or simply pos…

Órale, the word this week in Caló is cuerda. In modern Spanish, it means chord, string or line. In Caló, it means a person who’s serious, morally upright, self-assured or uncompromising. A cuerda is opposite of a relaje, a goof-off or an unserious person—we’ve covered this term previously. There are cuerdas in all walks of life, perhaps the same for relajes. Priests, athletes, classmates, and even influencers can be cuerda, The history of this term along the Rio Grande is associated with that of the the colonial rural police during Spanish rule, which was called the cordada after the leather cords, cuerdas, they used to arrest scofflaws and heretics. It was a local all-volunteer irregular posse called together by the upstanding people of the community to enforce local customs, likely more so than the official law. As you can imagine, cuerdas predominated the cordadas. Of course, cordadas—like irregular posses—no longer exist, but the cuerda archetype is still very much present in Caló.

Órale, the Caló word of the week is bronca. It’s a noun that means a fight or conflict. It comes from the Spanish word, bronco, which means harsh, ungovernable, or brutish. In Caló, it means the tension that a bronco generates, not the fight itself but the bad feelings and unease that leads up to one.

Órale, the featured word for this episode is raza. In modern Spanish, it means race or breed. In Caló, it’s a catchall term for a social group or category, as in your friends and acquaintances or the people in your barrio. It’s intentionally imprecise, where agreement on the boundaries and/or membership is assumed but not critical. Raza can mean a gang, a cohort of average Joe’s, your workmates, the people sitting around you at the baseball stadium, even the people who mostly think like you. You know, the raza.

Órale, the word of this episode is peseta. It means a quarter-dollar coin in US currency. It comes from the old Spanish monetary standard, the peseta, which once circulated along the Rio Grande. It’s the root word and concept for the peso, the standard in most Latin American countries today. It exists in Caló as a vestige of the Spanish governance era, which ended in 1825. Pesetas began to disappear soon after then, but the US began circulating a similar coin a few decades later. The people of the Rio Grande remembered the look and feel of the peseta and brought back the word and attached it the American quarter. Peseta soon outcompeted the English alternative and attained a high profile in pop culture in the early-1900s. What were the jukeboxes geared for? Pesetas. Quarters. The Rock-olas took no other types of coins. What got the thing, including the juke box, going? A peseta. This led to the saying “ponle una (put in a) pesata” to get whatever it is you’re talking about going, like a romance, a dance, a drama, a party, or even a fight.

Órale, the word of this episode is chansa. It means chance, but in Caló the predominant nuance is that of “maybe” as in a 50/50% chance. We’re gonna use it in a story told by a northern raquetero about a tricky vato who, when accosted by a gang of robbers, cast a spell over them that let him get the better of the encounter.

Órale, we’re gonna keep with the witchcraft theme we started on last month. But we’re gonna focus on a single spell told in four episodes. Simón, it’s gonna be a spell cast as a story. The witchcraft of it is that it exposes a distortion in time and, with that, changes current reality. The distortion is an event that recurs every few generations, same event and exact setting and context and occurs often enough to keep being passed down from one generation to the next. Because it recurs, it’s timeless. A pillar of reality. All else comes and goes, but not this event.The featured word for this episode is mitote. It’s a Nahuatl (Aztec) word that means a ceremonial event. In Caló, it means a big to-do, commotion, or disturbance. In this case, the mitote arose from an encounter between two raqueteros, people who spin yarns and webs of intrigue.