Fresh Spanish From The Mexican Barrio

The sentence that we are going to dissect today is a typical illustration of how Spanish sounds in the living rooms and the narrow alleys of Mexico. Loaded with not one but two local Mexican Spanish slang words, one of which might as well be the de-facto national expression of the country, it just doesn’t get any more Mexican than this! Other than its rich linguistic content (which is what must matter the most to those learning Spanish), there’s nothing special about this sentence which is neither a witty saying, nor a popular movie line. It is just something off a real conversation between real Mexicans in a real context.

Here’s the sentence in question along with its English meaning in parentheses (not to mention, it only translates the sense and is not a literal translation).

¡Este barrio es un cagadero, güey; es peligroso y asqueroso! (This neighborhood is a shithole, dude; it’s dangerous and disgusting!)

Time to get those knives and scalpels out now. Let’s start the disembowelment now and see if it helps expedite our process of learning Spanish by any degree.

The nuts and bolts

¡Este barrio es un cagadero, güey!
Photo credit: issa licensed CC BY-SA 2.0

Este – This is “this” in Spanish. A point to be noted here is that Spanish has different words for guys and girls no matter what we are talking about. So, even when it comes to pronouns like “this” and “that”, there is a male word and a female word in Spanish. Este happens to be for the guys and esta, for girls. And, why did we choose este over esta? Because the word it is pointing at is male. This is a key feature of all Romance languages and while learning Spanish, you must bear in mind that nothing exists without gender.

barrio – This is what made us choose este over esta in this sentence. A barrio roughly translates into a district or neighborhood of a town in a Spanish-speaking country and since it is a male or masculine noun (the -o ending gives it away), it accepts este instead of esta. So, now we easily know that este barrio simply means “this neighborhood”.

es – This is the simple present tense conjugation of the Spanish verb, ser, for a singular, third person, subject. And, I am just hoping we all know what ser means and, more importantly, why we chose ser over estar in this context. Just in case, if you don’t remember, ser is one of the two Spanish words for the English verb, “to be”, the other being estar. Since, we are talking about only one barrio, we use es and not son.

un cagadero – Must I explain here that un is one of the Spanish equivalents for the English article, “a”? Well, un is for the guys and una, for girls. Though, keep in mind that you don’t simply plug in an un wherever English uses “a”. The rules of article usage in Spanish are slightly different from those in English. Now, cagadero is interesting. It literally means any site where you would defecate, such as a lavatory, a john, or even a makeshift hole in the ground in some remote areas. However, in this context, we are using it as a common Mexican slang that means “shithole” in a disparaging tone and not necessarily an actual toilet. So, here, what we are indicating is a rundown neighborhood which the speaker obviously doesn’t find too appealing. Why, the second half of the sentence resolves the mystery.

güey – Here comes the word Mexicans love more than their bean burritos and tequillas! Ok, that might be a hyperbole but it is true that güey is the most frequently heard word in the Mexican world and identifies a Mexican pretty much in the same way as che identifies an Argentinean. And yes, you guessed it right, it just means “dude” in English. If you are learning Spanish as spoken by the Mexicans, you’d be better off making this word your top favorite. Incidentally, there are many other words for “dude” in Mexico but güey happens to trump all in popularity.

es – We have already discussed how ser morphs into es when used with a singular subject in the third person (of course, in the present indicative tense). But where is the subject? This brings us to another key aspect of Spanish which is omission of the subject pronoun unless there is an absolute necessity. Often, the context dictates your interpretation and, trust me, you will hardly make mistakes even if you have just started learning Spanish. Here, since the context already shows that it is “this neighborhood” that is under discussion, this es takes “it” (i.e., “this neighborhood”) as the implied subject.

peligroso – This is “dangerous” in English. Interestingly, it derives from the Latin, perīculum, from where English got its “peril”. My piece of advice for those learning Spanish here, try to dig out the etymology of the word you look up on a dictionary, whenever you do. Often, the word would share a common origin with some familiar equivalent in English and will make retention easier for you. Why? Because Spanish, being a Romance tongue, derives heavily from Latin while English, though essentially a Germanic language (which makes it closer to Dutch and German than to Spanish or Italian), has borrowed more than enough words from Latin!

y – This is the Spanish for “and”. Easy, wasn’t it? remember, though, that this y becomes e when the following word begins with the /i/ sound. Shouldn’t be hard to remember for, if you look closely, this is driven more by speech aesthetics than by mere grammar.

Peligroso y asqueroso
Photo credit: Oisin Prendiville licensed CC BY-SA 2.0

asqueroso – This Spanish word essentially represents the sense of something being unpleasant, loathsome, or disgusting, the magnitude of disgust often being dictated by the context.

Going beyond

Now that we are done interpreting the second half of the sentence, do you finally see why our Mexican friend called this neighborhood a “shithole”? Can you come up with a more apt description for a neighborhood that is both dangerous and repulsive?

We are hoping that playing with this typically Mexican Spanish sentence has loaded you enough to make learning Spanish a breeze. You will do well to start experimenting with your newly acquired Spanish at this stage. Try crafting your own sentences describing things around you and get them reviewed by your Spanish-speaking friends. Doing this is easier than it sounds. Start with modifying sentences that we have dissected from time to time and then gradually move on to more adventurous constructs.