Caló: A Borderland Dialect
Caló is written and hosted by the program's founder, Oscar Rodriguez, who sometimes goes by the name "El Marfa."
The show honors the patois commonly called Caló and spoken from Denver, CO to Brownsville, TX on the U.S. side of the border and from Juarez to Matamoros on the Mexican side.
Oscar grew up speaking this language. He remembers the unique dialect filling the barrios and countryside of his childhood. Each week, Oscar presents Caló words and phrases then explores their meaning with a personal anecdote.
Oscar was raised in Ojinaga and the Permian Basin. He has lived in and out of this region since he graduated from Ector High School in Odessa in the late-1970s, including a couple of years in the late-1990s when he lived in Marfa and taught at Sul Ross State University. Oscar is also an enrolled member of the Lipan Apache Tribe and an avid researcher of Native history in the La Junta (Big Bend) region.
He hopes that by sharing his knowledge of this colorful language he can help keep it alive.
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Órale, the onda this week in Caló is Monitos, AKA, Monahans. When they hear that placename, many Caló-speakers hear Monohants, which sounds very foreign to them. The abbreviated, Monitos, sounds more familiar and softer, a key dictate of the dialect. All the raza knows where Monitos is. Nobody knows where Monohants is. -
Órale, the onda this week in Caló is Mirlangas, AKA, Midland. While the resemblance between the two words might seem tenuous for a non-Caló speaker, it’s quite on the mark for everybody else. It’s based on how the older, non-English speaking raza used say Midland: Mirlang. The next generation found levity in it and incorporated the mispronunciation into Caló and added the a and s at the end to align with Caló’s aesthetic need to end all words, most especially placenames, with a soft sound.
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Órale, the onda this week in Caló is Comanche, AKA, Ft Stockton, also known as Stakitas. The name likely came from the old springs there that bear the same name, Comanche Springs, an oasis in an otherwise dry plain. That name in some fashion came from the Comanche people, who used to hunt bison that watered from those springs.
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Órale, thanks for the vacation last month, raza. I enjoyed it de amadres. I did the vuelta y came back with lots of new words and a special onda that used to be a big huato in West Texas and Southeast New Mexico: a semi-pro baseball league. We’re gonna ponerle with this onda the rest of the year. No doubt there’s still raza out there who used to play in this league. Y pos, since baseball’s not really a Caló onda, the episodes are gonna be more about the romance and drama that moved around with this league than the game itself. The featured words are gonna be the placenames in the region.This first place we’re gonna talk about is Tarilas, AKA, Pecos, which is next to Bastos (Barstow) and Cremitas (Kermit) and Monitos (Monahans).
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Órale, the feature this week in Caló is the expression, se la robó. In modern Spanish, it means he stole her. In Caló it means he eloped with her. In that tight knit world, an elopement is a theft, but there’s no victim or perpetrator. Both parties to the elopement, the robón and the robada, bear equal responsibility. All of this said, robos like this do occur; and when they do, both parties talk about it as if they’re both the stolen and the stealer.
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Órale, the feature this week in Caló is rayar. It comes from the same Indo-European roots that give us ray and rayo, as in a ray of light. In modern Spanish, it means to draw a rayo or move straight and fast like a rayo. In Caló it means to mark over or draw lines across something or someone, which is to curse someone or something. So when somebody rayas a person, they’re curing them out. The worst curse would be to rayar someone’s mother or an important saint or icon, in which case you’d say, le rayó la madre.
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Órale, the feature this week in Caló is the expression, como la gente. In modern Spanish it simply means like the people. In Caló, however, the expression has a much deeper historical and anthropological meaning. To be como la gente, is to be like people who are not of your community—the others. The general idea being conveyed is that you and your raza (community) are one way, and the rest of the people in the world, la gente, are different. In a previous episode we talked about the term gabacho, which simply means others or non-Caló speakers. Como la gente means the behavior of the others. So when it’s said that a Caló-speaker is behaving como la gente, they mean they’re mimicking gabachos, the others.
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Órale, last week we featured the Caló word for drive, arrear. This week we’re gonna continue with a different nuance of it, arre, which means move out of the way, get away from me, or simply stop engaging with me. It comes from the same old Castillian word for mule team driver, arrero, but it’s what arreros would say to their mules to drive them through a muddy creek crossing, up a steep hill, or for the last stretch of a long haul, arre. Indeed, it’s not a polite request. It’s a sura, pugilistic sound you blurt out to dominate and offend somebody and, with that, move them away from you. Arre at once calls someone a mule and gatcho de amadres commands them to move.
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Órale, the Caló onda this week is the verb arrear. It comes from the Spanish word for mule team driver, arrero, which was a brutish but well-known trade in Spanish colonial times. Arreros made their living driving the wagons that hauled goods from the provincial capitals to the outlying villages in the countryside, often days and weeks away. As the work was hard and perilous, so too were the men who arreaban those wagons. Out of that harsh experience, came many sayings and words. There are two primary nuances to arrear in Caló. One is what an arrero would yell to drive the mules through a muddy river crossing or up a steep hill. The other nuance is that of the action of driving a mule team, arrear, which many in the world of Caló today use to say they’re driving a car. We’ll focus on the later nuance in this episode and go back to the other, more colorful one in the next episode.
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Órale, the onda this week in Caló is úcale. It’s a convergence of a spectrum of expressions of dismay and upset, from “what’s the point” to “qué fregados.” It’s a ubiquitous expression that’s effective and appropriate as much in tense conflicts as in comedic situations. Woke up early for a meet-up but the other party arrived two hours late? Úcale. Your horse loses to the low-odds entry? Úcale. You were invited to a party, but there’s no dancing? Úcale.
