Tag Archives: spanish

Bolas/Empanadas de Verde

Nationality: Ecuadorian
Age: 19
Residence: Los Angeles, CA
Performance Date: 4/1/16
Primary Language: Spanish
Language: English

“Okay, so basically, ummm, una bola de verde is a platano ball, but you will put meat or vegetables or chicken or whatever you want inside of it. Ummm you can put, you can make it in like bola form which is, like, you put it in soup, ummmm, or you can, like, fry it, and it’s an empanada de verde. So good. So good.”

This traditional Ecuadorian meal is quite mouthwatering. It translates directly into “Ball of Green” or “Empanada of Green” depending on which form you use. For the bola or ball form, you take a green plantain or platano, as it’s called in Spanish, chop it up, and flatten the pieces. Once they’ve been flattened, you take ground meat or vegetables, put it on top of the flattened plantains, and wrap the plantains around the filling, rolling it into a ball. Then, you deep fry the filled plantain balls until crispy. The other method is to flatten the whole plantain, put the filling on top, and then fold the plantain over itself, creating a whole moon shape. Then, you put this in the oven and bake it, turning it into an empanada.

Plantains are an Ecuadorian staple. Because they grow so easily in Ecuador’s climate, the country has an abundance of them, and they make hundreds of recipes using plantains. However, most people use them when their still green. The greener the plantain, the less sweet. Sometimes, if people want the dish to be sweeter, they’ll wait for the plantain to ripen longer, and they’ll use it once it’s yellow or blackening.

Burning the Past Year

Nationality: Ecuadorian
Age: 19
Residence: Los Angeles, CA
Performance Date: 4/1/16
Primary Language: Spanish
Language: English

“So, in Ecuador, around New Year’s Eve, around the holidays really, we have this tradition of burning el año viejo. And what that is is that artists from around the country will each work on, uhhh, these piñata-type things, uhh, and they’ll be different characters, and the characters will range from Kung Fu Panda, Bugs Bunny to Donald Trump, Obama, uhh, like political figures to cartoon characters like they cover the whole spectrum,and their life-size and little and and they cost, they cost money to get these. And inside they have explosives. Umm… *laughs* And on New Year’s Eve, ummm, what everyone will do was, is that you’ll gather around el año viejo, umm, and at midnight you burn it, uhh, so you light a match and the thing will go off. Umm, and it’s supposed to be like quemando like burning all of your grievances from the past year and like starting anew from like the ashes. So that’s what we do. It’s fun.”

Burning el año viejo or burning the old year is a tradition that I’ve heard of in another societies, as well. In Cuba, for example, people will make effigies out of straw that represent the past year, and they will burn them on New Year’s Eve. Ecuador seems to take it a step further, though, by bringing in artists to make special effigies. It seems the burning has become less rigid in their culture, since they’re burning even cartoon characters or whatnot. The symbolism has been lost. It sounds more like a celebration, something to do out of habit, than something that’s supposed to be symbolic. In fact, it almost seems like a joke, especially if they’re burning effigies in the shape of political figures such as Trump or Obama.

Yet nonetheless, the source acknowledges the sense of burning away “grievances” and whatnot. So while the tradition may not look the same as it maybe did in the past, it still holds the same meaning. It reminds me of the phoenix when it bursts into flames and is born again from the ashes. Perhaps it has some kind of connection to there.

La Llarona

Nationality: Mexican-American
Age: 20
Occupation: USC Student
Residence: USC
Performance Date: April 23, 2015
Primary Language: English
Language: Spanish

INFORMANT: “So, La Llarona, sometimes in English it’s referred to as “the Woman in White,” and basically it’s a story about a woman who, um, was in love with a man but he didn’t love her back so it was unrequited love, so she drowned her two children in the river in order to be with the man that she loved, but he didn’t want to be with her. So after being refused by him, she then drowned herself in a river in Mexico City. And so, basically with the whole heaven and hell aspect of life, she’s kind of stuck in the in-between, and she kind of wanders around at night in Mexico City, so today a lot of parents use this story as a way to keep their kids from wandering out at night. Or else La Llarona will come and kidnap them. Basically she is said to appear at night around rivers in Mexico, and that’s it. I heard about it in Spanish class and then I went home and asked my mom about it, and she was like ‘oh, yeah.'”

COLLECTOR (myself): “How did your mom learn the story?”

INFORMANT: “I think growing up. It’s a traditional Mexican story that a lot of Mexican parents will tell their kids growing up.”

—

This legend appears to be a Mexican story within the widespread genre of ‘legends parents tell their children to keep them in line.’ This breed of legend seems to exist in almost every culture – I suppose childrens’ fear of the supernatural is culturally ubiquitous, because they’re more compelled to obey their parents if there’s a supernatural risk involved.

This story was also an interesting case because my friend Taylor is Mexican-American but not very in touch with Mexican culture. She told me that she felt her mother purposely tried to separate her from her Mexican heritage, so she was never told this story as a child, even though her grandmother told it to her mother. In fact, Taylor didn’t hear about the legend until she read about it in Spanish class. On a related note, Taylor did not know Spanish until she took classes in school, another point that makes her feel alienated from her heritage.

ANNOTATION: Several films have been made about the legend of La Llarona, including the Mexican movie La Llarona (1960) and Her Cry: La Llarona Investigation (2013).

“El Mano Peluda”

Nationality: Columbian/American
Age: 18-22
Occupation: Student
Residence: Los Angeles
Performance Date: April 19th, 2014
Primary Language: English
Language: Spanish

Information about the Informant

My informant is an undergraduate student majoring in Philosophy at the University of Southern California. He is half-Columbian and was raised in the Jehovah’s Witnesses Christian denomination.

Transcript

“It’s called, um, ‘El Mano Peluda [sic?],’ and that’s supposed to mean ‘The Hairy Hand.’ And, um, I think that was so I wouldn’t get up at night, or, like, move around or make too much noise. But basically, um, when you’re sleeping, this hairy hand would come in through the windows or through the vents or something.”

Collector: “Just a hand?”

“It’s just a hairy hand. That’s it. Um, and I actually Googled it. Apparently, it’s some guy had his hand cut off during the Inquisition and he revenged–he said he would get revenge on the people who were the culture that killed him. So, um, the hand would come out of its grave and it would grab children or it would grab their legs from either under the bed or it would crawl up their blanket. It was just really scary. Um, and yeah, occasionally my mom would  use it as kind of like a, um, you know when you rile up little kids, you say something like ‘The hand’s coming, the hand’s coming,’ and she’d grab my leg and I’d go like, ‘Oh my god!'”

Analysis

This, unlike the other stories this informant told me, does not seem to be a case where the parent scares the child in order to get them to behave, but is more of a ghost story with purpose of entertaining/scaring rather than coercing. This story does give the figure in it a backstory, according to my informant’s research, which also supports its position as more of a ghost story than a story to get children to behave with. The strange part of this is the commonality of the concept of a “hairy hand,” with disembodied hand stories all over the world constantly needing the hand to also be hairy. This is possibly a remnant of the historical theory that criminals were closer to our purported ape ancestors and thus displayed features that are more akin to those of primates, including excessive body hair.

For another “hairy hand” story, see:

Gilbert, Jane . “Letterboxing on Dartmoor: An Addictive Pastime… for the Brave!”. Time Travel-Britain. Web. 01 May. 2014. <http://www.timetravel-britain.com/articles/country/dartmoor.shtml>.

Guatemalan Proverbs

Nationality: Guatemalan
Age: 60s
Occupation: Nurse
Residence: Southern CA
Performance Date: 2/03/14
Primary Language: Spanish
Language: English

Context: The informant is a grandmother in her 60s, originally from Guatemala, but now lives with her family in Southern California and works as a home-health nurse. When asked some of her favorite proverbios (proverbs), she gave me the following examples and attempted to translate them for her American audience (me). I also looked up the proverbs online for further clarification and explanation. The results are below.

  • Porque te quiero, te aporreo: Literal translation is “Because I love you, I hit you.” Seems to be a cultural explanation or excuse for spanking or other corporal punishment, similar to the old saying, “Spare the rod, spoil the child.” In online discussions, teh general consensus seems to be that it is (or used to be) a parent’s job to correct bad behavior and promote good behavior by any means necessary, so that beating was an accepted way to discipline your child and ensure they became good, moral adults.
  • Salir de Guatemala y entrar en guatepeor: This was the most interesting proverb to me, because it is both a proverb and a pun. The meaning is something like, leaving one bad situation and entering an even worse one–like “Out of the frying pan and into the fire.” But the pun part comes from the name Guatemala, where mala means ‘bad’, and guatepeor, where peor means ‘worse’. So the proverb is literally saying, going from bad to worse, but it does so through by locating the concept in a Spanish-speaking country that, presumably, most of the Spanish-speaking world would know of and therefore have some preconceived notion of.
  • El perro que ladra no muerde: The dog that barks does not bite. Seems to be similar to the American/English saying that some(one/thing)’s bark is worse than its bite, in that they may put on an intimidating show and seem very formidable, but really they’re harmless or nothing to worry about.

Analysis: I think it is quite interesting that these proverbs are all very similar to ones that I know in English, either the general content/concept of them, or the exact wording of the phrases. This makes me wonder whether these proverbs originated in either English or Spanish and then were translated for that language group; or perhaps they came to both languages around a similar time period and from the same source (is Latin too pretentious a guess?) (one source claims that the “frying pan into the fire” saying and its many European variations is ultimately derived from an ancient Greek saying. however, the Guatemala/guatepeor saying seems to be uniquely for a Spanish-speaking audience, based on its unique play on words, so it is possible that the sayings evolved independently.)