Foreign Native

Malinchista is a term some Mexicans use to describe other Mexicans who show a preference for foreign things, speak gushingly of the order and tidiness to be found abroad, or are critical of Mexico and Mexican ways vis-a-vis their foreign counterparts.
The expression malinchista (or the practice, malinchismo) harks back five centuries to the native woman […]

Standard abbreviations of household words are as much a part of Mexican Spanish as they are of English. One of the most common is fridge instead of refrigerator, in Spanish refri instead of refrigerador.  La tele for televisión, has been in use for as long as most people can remember.
Over the years, more and more […]

Object pronouns in Spanish are reasonably straightforward unless you’re dealing with third persons singular and plural, when some complications arise.
The object pronouns - me, te, lo/la/le, nos, os (Spain), los/las/les - are applied much as the English - me, you, him/her, us, and them.
Whether to use “lo” or “la” for “him” and “her” and when “le” […]

Thanks to catalytic converters, unleaded fuel, ozone monitoring and restrictions on dirty industry, air pollution in Mexico City is much less than it was in the early 1990s. Noise pollution, however, has survived the endeavors of planners to improve environmental conditions in one of the world’s largest cities.
The birds - of which there are a considerably large number […]

Downtown Mexico City is humming again - the museums and shops are all open, the restaurants are back in full swing, and the streets running off the Zocalo are teeming with the usual weekend crowds.
Some people are still taking the precaution of wearing face masks, but the city center now appears much as it did […]

We dealt some while back with Mexico’s cavalier attitude toward the “official” use of conditional verb tenses, and how the conditional and imperfect subjunctive are applied interchangeably.  That entry omitted mention of  the verb “poder” - already quite  irregular.
It so happens that the equivalent “to be able” is also a cause of many headaches for Spanish speakers learning […]

A fair rule about torn banknotes is that if you have more than half of the note, then it’s valid, but less than half isn’t. In Mexico merchants of all kinds will reject banknotes that have any part missing, and many will refuse to receive bills that are torn in any way, taped together, or […]

One of the concomitants of Mexico’s large informal economy is a large number of hand-painted signs, and these provide undisputable public evidence that spelling - ortografía -  is not one of the people’s fortés.
The practical thing to do when making a sign for a shop or even a street stall would be to go to the professional signmakers - […]

The Sven-Goran Eriksson “era” in charge of Mexico’s national football team came to an end when, for the second time under the Swedish boss, the team went down to Honduras in San Pedro Sula. Last time could be considered bad luck, a single own-goal decided the match. On Wednesday night, despite having most of the […]

A certain parallel could be drawn between British and American English, and the Spanish spoken in Spain and that of Mexico. Both languages underwent some minor changes in the New World, including the use of different words for certain objects, and some grammatical adaptations.
Some changes are merely the use of different names for things: whereas Americans say […]