Cultural mashup dictionary

The cultural mashup dictionary: Carwashero

Photo by TexasT/Flickr (Creative Commons)

It’s a term that’s in the news today, so it makes sense to include it as a dictionary entry.

Just as the sound of it suggests, a “carwashero” is someone who works at a car wash, otherwise known in Spanish as a “lava coches”, i.e. one who washes cars.

Carwasheros are making headlines this afternoon because they’ve made some history in Los Angeles, making the city the nation’s first to have three unionized car washes. Workers at two South L.A. car washes, the Vermont Car Wash and Nava’s Car Wash, have won union contracts, joining a third car unionized car wash in Santa Monica.

The carwasheros, mostly immigrants from Latin America, voted last year to join the United Steelworkers union, organizing as part of a larger effort that has been trying to curb worker exploitation in what is typically a low-paid and often hazardous occupation.

There’s even a song called “Carwashero (Lava Coches)” by Los Jornaleros del Norte (The Day Laborers of the North), a band whose songs cover political themes that relate to immigrants.

Unlike jornaleros, though, carwasheros are described by a term that’s purely a product of el norte. It’s terms like these that make up Multi-American’s evolving cultural mashup dictionary, a collection of bits and pieces of the evolving lexicon of words, terms and phrases coined as immigrants and their descendants influence the English language, and it influences them.

The most recent entry was gentefication, referring to how some upwardly mobile and mostly second-generation Latinos have been investing in older immigrant neighborhoods. Other entries have included informal coinages like Tweecanos, as used on Twitter, and Spanglish terms like Googlear and Twittear and Feisbuk. The series kicked off last spring with the etymology of the term 1.5 generation. Have suggestion for an entry? Feel free to post it below.

FILED UNDER: Carwashero, Cultural mashup dictionary

December 28, 2011 | 3:20 PM | By Leslie Berestein Rojas

The cultural mashup dictionary: Gentefication

Photo by Texas T/Flickr (Creative Commons)

I first heard the term “gentefication” uttered a few years ago by the proprietor of Eastside Luv, a Boyle Heights wine bar that opened on First Street during the height of the real estate boom and rising fear of gentrification in the historic seat of Mexican American Los Angeles.

At the time, locals were becoming worried (they still are) over encroaching development from the west, including the still-standing plans for an upscale redevelopment of the neighborhood’s vast Wyvernwood Gardens apartment complex. In the midst of this, Guillermo Uribe, a young Mexican American investor with L.A. roots farther east, had taken over and renovated the former Metropolitan, a former mariachi bar across from Mariachi Plaza. At the time, the corner’s best view was of Gold Line construction.

Some locals were worried about the new wine bar, too. Even as a Latino-owned business, was it a harbinger of higher rents? It has since become a popular gathering spot for a mostly second-generation crowd, many of them professionals with Eastside roots. In an email last week, after reconnecting with Uribe over a KPCC radio segment about Eastside Luv’s regular MorrisseyOke nights, he used the term again:

“I’ve flipped the gentrification issue to GENTEfication…all better,” he wrote.

Gente is, of course, Spanish for “people.” So I’ll offer my attempt at a definition here:

gen·te·fi·ca·tion (hen-te-fi-kā-shun), noun: The process of upwardly mobile Latinos, typically second-generation and beyond, investing in and returning to the old neighborhood.

The question remains as to whether Boyle Heights will truly gentrify, eventually attracting affluent non-Latino investors and residents who can pay higher rents in the wake of what has become a thriving Latino arts and entertainment scene. Perched on the edge of downtown, there’s a strong chance it might. But for now, it still belongs to the gente.

For the uninitiated, Multi-American’s cultural mashup dictionary is a collection of occasional entries, bits and pieces of the evolving lexicon of words, terms and phrases coined as immigrants and their descendants influence the English language, and it influences them.

Entries have included informal coinages like Tweecanos, as used on Twitter, and Spanglish terms like Googlear and Twittear and Feisbuk. The series kicked off last spring with the etymology of the term 1.5 generation. Have suggestion for an entry? Feel free to post it below.

FILED UNDER: Boyle Heights, Cultural mashup dictionary, Eastside Luv, Gente, Gentefication, Gentrification, MorrisseyOke

October 31, 2011 | 1:23 PM | By Leslie Berestein Rojas

The cultural mashup dictionary: ¡Tricotrí!

Photo by robpatrick/Flickr (Creative Commons)

Anyone remember walking up to a house on Halloween night as a child, goodie bag in hand, knocking on the door and shouting this?

Thanks to @rainmaker_mike and @ergeekgodess for tweeting the first pronunciation of ”trick or treat” as it has been hollered by generations of Latino kids making the rounds every Halloween in the U.S. Here’s one of their tweets from this morning:

LOL, so true! RT @rainmaker_mike: @ergeekgoddess: How do you say Happy Halloween in Spanish? ¡Tricotri!

This is what “trick or treat” sounds like phonetically to Spanish-speaking ears, and thus how it comes out when Spanish-dependent parents (and their kids) roll up to the door, their little Spidermen and Disney princesses screaming ”¡Tricotrí!” I distinctly remember shouting this outside a doorway in Bell once when I was five or six, dressed in a mummy costume made from an old sheet – and thinking, at the time, that this was actually how you said “trick or treat.”

I got candy, so it worked.

Have an entry to suggest? Multi-American’s cultural mashup dictionary is an evolving collection of occasional entries, bits and pieces of that fluid lexicon of words, terms and phrases coined as immigrants and their descendants influence the English language, and it influences them.

Recent entries have included Wi-5, Googlear, Twittear and Feisbuk (lots of social media) and perhaps my favorite to date, Tweecanos. The series started off with the meaning and etymology of the term 1.5 generation. Feel free to post new suggestions below.

And Happy Halloween.

FILED UNDER: Culture/Identity, Cultural mashup dictionary, Halloween, Trick-or-treat, Tricotri

August 26, 2011 | 4:33 PM | By Leslie Berestein Rojas

The cultural mashup dictionary: Wi-5?

Photo by TexasT/Flickr (Creative Commons)

Overheard in a public library in South L.A., this language gem is what “wi-fi” can easily sound like to Spanish speakers’ ears. There are, of course, those who prefer to turn the term into Spanish altogether, as in “el wifi” (pronounced “wee fee”), but say it out loud and it makes perfect sense: “el wi-five.”

This latest entry to the evolving cultural mashup dictionary comes courtesy of blogger, library worker and avid tweeter Art of @Chicano_Soul, who was on duty at the Junipero Serra Branch Library on South Main St. this week when he heard a girl nearby say it. He tweeted:

Sorry. No free “Wi-5” (@ The Circulation Desk)

Thanks for sharing, Art.

Multi-American’s cultural mashup dictionary is an evolving collection of occasional entries, bits and pieces of that fluid lexicon of words, terms and phrases coined as immigrants and their descendants influence the English language, and it influences them.

Recent entries have included Googlear and Twittear and Feisbuk (lots of social media) and perhaps my favorite to date, Tweecanos. The series started off with the meaning and etymology of the term 1.5 generation.

Have an entry to suggest? Feel free to post it below.

FILED UNDER: Culture/Identity, 1.5 generation, Cultural mashup dictionary

June 13, 2011 | 4:33 PM | By Leslie Berestein Rojas

The cultural mashup dictionary: Tweecanos

Photo by TexasT

I’ve never met @xicano007, but a tweet from this East L.A. blogger and sports card collector brings us yet another entry for our evolving dictionary of cultural mashup terms: tweecanas and tweecanos.

Here’s how it was used, in a tweet from yesterday mentioning an upcoming performance by Aztlan Underground:

RT @xicano007: Next Saturday at the BLVD in BOYLE HEIGHTS join @Aztlanug @laloalcaraz & some tweecanas/tweecanos for a night of rebeldia

It’s perfect. Not sure if @xicano007 coined it, but who cares? Plus it sounds like a great show.

Multi-American’s cultural mashup dictionary kicked off this spring. It’s a collection of occasional entries, bits and pieces of the evolving lexicon of words, terms and phrases coined as immigrants and their descendants influence the English language, and it influences them.

We’ve been on a social media kick so far, with entries like Googlear and Twittear and Feisbuk. The series started off with the meaning and etymology of the term 1.5 generation.

Have suggestion for an entry? Feel free to post it below.

FILED UNDER: Culture/Identity, 1.5 generation, Aztlan Underground, Cultural mashup dictionary, Feisbuk, Googlear, Language, Twittear

April 25, 2011 | 10:11 AM | By Leslie Berestein Rojas

The cultural mashup dictionary: Twittear and Feisbuk

Photo by TexasT

A recent post on the neologism Googlear has inspired two related entries to Multi-American’s evolving cultural mashup dictionary: The social media mashup terms Twittear and Feisbuk.

First, the Wiktionary definition of twittear:

Etymology

From the online microblogging website, Twitter.

Verb

twittear (first-person singular present twitteo, first-person singular preterite twitteé, past participle twitteado)

1. (Internet) to tweet

I’ve used and heard “twittear” among Spanish-English bilinguals for quite a while, but there’s also this adaptation below, as posted in the comments under the “googlear” post by ar2ro:

more than likely i see “el twitter” being used more in time than “twittear.”

ex: ya mandaste el tweet? (did you send the tweet?)
mire tu mesaje en el twitter. (i saw you message on twitter)
me gusta el twitter (i like twitter)

twittear somehow does not sound right. even googlear sounds a bit funky, but does roll off the tongue in spanish rather well.

Then there’s Feisbuk, which began as a Spanish-friendly unofficial phonetic spelling for “Facebook” but has taken on a life of its own. There are Feisbuk Facebook pages, a spoof analog version, even a page inspired by an alternate pronunciation (“Feisbul”) called “mi mama dice feisbul,” or “my mother says feisbul.”

“Twittear” has been similarly inspirational: There’s a Twittear.com, described in Spanish as “a place where people can meet and leave their ‘twitts.’ ”

The cultural mashup dictionary kicked off earlier this month with the etymology of the term 1.5 generation. Have suggestion for an entry? Feel free to post it below.

FILED UNDER: Culture/Identity, Cultural mashup dictionary, Facebook, Feisbuk, Google, Googlear, Language, Social media, Twittear, Twitter

April 13, 2011 | 8:01 AM | By Leslie Berestein Rojas

The cultural mashup dictionary: Googlear

Photo by TexasT

Thank you, News Taco, for calling to mind a term that merits a place in the evolving cultural mashup dictionary: Googlear.

Yesterday the website published a brief post on a report from ClickZ, which provides marketing news, on the Google search habits of Latinos. I’d seen the report earlier and it’s interesting in itself: Among other things, 93 percent of Latinos use Google for searches, 80 percent of Spanish keyword searches come from the search engine’s English interface (which likely means that bilingual Latinos are searching the English interface), and Latinos are big smartphone users, with a greater tendency to use cell phones in their searches than the general market.

But back to the term “googlear,” which the post featured prominently in a graphic. I say this all the time without thinking about it. It’s not just any neologism but a double one, a new term coined from another new term. Here is the sort-of official definition of googlear from Wikipedia:

Googlear (guglear o googlear) es un neologismo que es cada vez más corriente entre los usuarios de internet que utilizan el buscador Google.

Translated into English:

Googlear (guglear or googlear) is a neologism that is ever more common among Internet users who use the search engine Google.

The name of the search engine officially became a verb, as in “to google,” in 2006, when it was added to the Merriam-Webster Collegiate Dictionary.

There will be more entries of this ilk, such as “twittear.” In the meantime, if you have a suggestion, feel free to post it below.

FILED UNDER: Culture/Identity, Economy, ClickZ, Cultural mashup dictionary, Google, Googlear, Language, News Taco, Twittear

April 6, 2011 | 5:04 PM | By Leslie Berestein Rojas

Introducing the cultural mashup dictionary: Our first term, 1.5 generation

Photo by TexasT/Flickr (Creative Commons)

Just like Southern California’s culture is shaped by immigrants and their descendants, so is its language. There is an evolving lexicon of words, terms and phrases coined here and elsewhere in the U.S. where immigrants have influenced the English language, and it has influenced them.

And it’s worth compiling into its own dictionary of sorts. Today I’m introducing the first entry, a term I use often: 1.5 generation.

Here’s how Wikipedia defines it:

The term 1.5 generation or 1.5G refers to people who immigrate to a new country before or during their early teens. They earn the label the “1.5 generation” because they bring with them characteristics from their home country but continue their assimilation and socialization in the new country. Their identity is thus a combination of new and old culture and tradition.

There’s a bit more to it than that. I use it rather loosely to describe people who, like me, arrived in the United States as children. But the term, and how it’s used, is rife with complexity.

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