Topic - Local Custom

Cold weather in the temperate areas of central Mexico comes and goes throughout the winter months in a series of “fronts” that bring icy gusts and early frosts for a few days at a time. Then it warms up for some days before the next numbered front makes its way down from the U.S. — […]

A notable thing about Mexico is the great variety of foods and dishes that can be easily identified with the country. Most of the traditional foods are available all year round, although certain dates and holidays are associated with particular dishes.
September, the Mes de la Patria because of the Independence Day, brings chiles en nogada, hot green peppers filled with walnuts and […]

A versatile phrase making the rounds uses the title of a book by Colombian author Gabriel García Márquez  - “Crónica de una Muerte Anunciada,” or “Chronicle of a Death Foretold.”
Often when something happens that was or might have been predicted, a commentator, writer, or speaker somewhere will refer to their version of the event as “the […]

Some people have an annoying habit of resettling already settled matters through the use of unnecessary analogies.
This isn’t limited to politicians  and conference speakers, just about anyone, having explained a situation in perfectly clear terms, and their case being, a priori, incontestable, will suddenly launch into “it’s as if your neighbor had a dog and […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 - […]