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Órale, the onda this week is tartamoche. It’s a portmanteau, a word made up of two other words. In this case, the two base words are tartamudo, stutterer, and mochado, cut off. Together they mean something said or done completely wrong. The idea behind by the term is that of someone who stutters through a story and on top of that misses key points of it.

Órale, the onda in Caló this week is qüajedas, alternatively spelled and pronounced quahidas for primarily English-speakers. It comes from the Texas dialect of English. It came into that tongue as a borrowed word from the Comanche (Numunu), for whom it served as the name for the band of their tribe that lived in what’s today eastern New Mexico and the Texas Panhandle; namely, the Quahadas. Because this band was the last of the Numunu to live autonomously, the Europeans, including the Spanish, Scots, Anglos and Saxons, warred with them the longest—well into the 1800s. Out of this experience, came the expression “put the quahedas” to something or someone, which came to replace locally the expression for stopping something, or “putting the kibosh” to something or someone. Quahedas is in the Caló lexicon in Texas, but it also appears elsewhere along the Rio Grande, including Mexico, as cuajar, which also means to freeze in Spanish and has the same meaning and sounds the same when quajedas is turned into a verb, cuajar.

It features prominently in the earliest European account of the American Southwest, and it’s a fascinating chapter in Texas history. And yet, much about La Junta – the Native American society that flourished at the confluence of the Rio Grande and Rio Conchos, at present-day Presidio-Ojinaga – remains mysterious. Archeologists haven’t given it the same attention as other farming and village societies.

Órale, the onda this week of Caló is chucho. It means candy. It comes from the Romaní word for a mother’s breast, chuchai, as in the source of nourishment for a newborn. It’s indeed an exaggerated metaphor for mere candy, but the term speaks to the primal desire for candy, not so much the substance itself. It says humans want chucho because it takes them back to the first sweet they ever tasted. In this sense, even the best candy is a faint approximation of a chucho.

Órale, the onda this week of Caló is bola. In Spanish, it means ball, but in Caló it has many different meanings. Bola means street, street life or anything having to do with streets, like mobs and prowling on the street. A once-popular expression for an errant son or daughter is that they went off to the bola. It also means a bump or crash, as in bolas— he hit the wall! Bola is also what’s used to denominate currency, like the dollar or peso. Ten dollars is 10 bolas.

Big Bend Ranch State Park is promoted as “the Other Side of Nowhere,” and the park’s River Road – FM 170 between Lajitas and Redford – fits that billing. It’s a breathtaking landscape of volcanic badlands and imposing canyons, and it can seem like a timeless wilderness, untouched by history.

Órale, the onda of this week is the word, tutú. It means a diminutive religious character or idol. It’s shorthand for the name, Jesús, but it’s not specific to any religion or creed. It’s also non-value laden. It simply means junior or baby idol. What’s intended to be conveyed with tutú is the image of a miniature statue of a religious character, like a saint or other religious icon. Perhaps the best example of a tutú is the statuette you’ll often find on the dashboard of a lowrider, typically the image of San Martin de Porres, a 1600th century Afro-Peruvian saint.

Texas state parks showcase a host of treasured resources – canyons and caverns, dinosaur tracks and hiking trails, waterfalls and whitewater rivers. The parks also preserve a remarkable archeological record, rich evidence of Texas’s Indigenous past.

Órale, the onda this week is La Llorona (the female crier), a scary mythical character that evolved from Spanish colonial times. There are many versions of the myth. All of them center on a woman who cries by the river for her children. There are many different stories about who she really is, why she’s crying and whether it’s a tale or a real story. La Llorona is alternatively crying because her children have been drowned by their father or because she drowned them. There’s also an interpretation that La Llorona’s a metaphor for La Malinche, a famous Aztec historical figure who married a Spanish conquistador in 1492 and divulged her country’s strategic weaknesses and divisions. In this version of the myth, the children for whom La Llorona cries are really her kin and countrymen who’d been metaphorically drowned by the conquistadors. The myth is retold from Chile to Colorado.

Known only from sites in southern Presidio and Brewster counties, “Big Bend Bold” rock art is distinctive for the size and style of its imagery, which is painted in black or dark green. The style was named by archeologist Tim Roberts, who argues it was created by Indigenous Big Bend farmers and foragers at the time the Spanish first arrived here.