CABAL (kah-bahl)

Means exactly. Used when you agree with someone or if you try a pair of shoes that fit perfectly. If used as cabalito, it’s even more exact.

Ex.: The stock market will suffer its biggest downgrade this year.

Gregory: Cabal! That’s what I told Aubrey yesterday.

@Guanaco2English. “Guanaco to English Dictionary Entry.” Twitter, 1 April 2019, 8:20 a.m.

I did not know how much I said cabal until a Mexican classmate asked what it meant during a discussion in our tenth grade Spanish Literature class. I did not know how much of an accent I had until the others in that classroom stared at me blankly after the end of an oral presentation. I did not know how different my vocabulary was until I received an essay back marked with red circles and question marks beside the words my Cuban teacher did not understand. I did not know that pisto in Mexico meant alcohol and not money (like it did back home) until I arrived at a party with fifty pesos in my hand instead of a six-pack, much to the disappointment of my new friends. I did not know how wrong my Spanish was until I moved to Mexico, and I did not know how right it felt until I left for the United States.

In El Salvador, we do not pronounce our s’s—instead, they turn into hard h-sounds (or soft j’s in Romance languages) whenever paired with another consonant. We conjugate differently: puedes, for example, becomes podés. Both mean you can. Small tweaks: change the stress of the word to the last syllable, simplify diphthongs. Instead of tú for the informal you we use vos (anyone in a position of authority, any elder relative must be addressed with the formal usted). And there are so, so many words with ch: chucho (dog), colocha (curly-haired), chicharra (cicada), cachimbón (cool), evidence of Náhuatl latching on to a strange new tongue.

This is the Spanish I was born into. It’s expressive and cacophonous, intended for efficiency and wordplay. In first grade, when our teacher insisted we pronounce the z as they do in Spain—like a th—we laughed and retorted that this was Centroamérica. At six years old we had marched in enough Independence Day parades to color our classroom jokes with postcoloniality. Throughout elementary school, even though I drudged over conjugation tables as outlined by the Royal Spanish Academy (the equivalent of the Oxford English Dictionary) and mastered the art of tildes, my everyday lexicon remained intact.

My Spanish was fun and fast—but also became increasingly secret. I attended the international school where my half-Californian, U.S.-educated mother taught. As my schooling progressed, so did the expectation that we would speak English the majority of the time. The hours I spent under my Irish-American grandmother’s wings meant that this was not an especially difficult transition for me. After all, we celebrated the Fourth of July and watched Peter Pan in English and in Spanish. English was for convincing people, for singing The Mamas & the Papas, for telling fantastical stories about fairies. Now English was also for being serious, for communicating needs, for analyzing. English promised that the stories I wanted to tell would reach the most people. And especially that it would reach the people that mattered, like my expat teachers, the President of the United States, the editors of the Good Housekeeping magazine subscription my grandmother kept. If I spoke English, I could become like one of those girls I saw on the Disney Channel, who biked to school with their perfectly straight hair and didn’t have to wear a uniform.  To become a citizen of America—and not just Central America—you spoke English with mastery, as if the world owed you an explanation, as if you could explain the world.

And so I spoke in English with my mom and grandmother—at first, to keep secrets from my sister before she learned the language fluently in school, and then just out of habit. My friends and I splattered our conversations with English phrases and slang. I devoured novel after novel set in Regency England, nineteenth-century Canada, a fragmented, futuristic United States. This felt like more of a merging than a bifurcation of the self, or at least a revelation of the possibility that I could be someone more.

We moved to Monterrey, Mexico, in 2014 and I was forced to second-guess my first language once more. Now, it was not enough to translate from Spanish to English; I had to translate my Spanish as well. In private, my sister and I made fun of the overly pronounced Norteño accent, where our classmates spoke in a sing-song, either with a “potato stuck in their throats” (a little nasally) or as if they were recovering from a coughing fit (low, husky rumbles). But in public, we learned when to say neta (“no kidding?!”) and that the j is thrown towards the roof of your mouth and that the s is always, always an s. To make my story heard I had to adapt, assimilate, relearn. Over the three years that I spent in Mexico, I came up with a softer Spanish, precise in its pronunciation yet tauntingly cacophonous in its vocabulary. If I had to adapt to be understood, those around me could deal with learning a few new expressions. My true accent was a sign of intimacy and trust reserved for a few, but I refused to let go of the words of my youth.

Now, in the United States, my entire life is in English. Spanish has become both respite and resistance. I ride a bike around my college campus (but let my hair be curly) and joke with friends that the American Dream is disappointingly underwhelming. I realize that I crave the specificity of emotion that Spanish declensions enable and reach for my first language’s poetry regardless of the author’s national origin. I take Spanish courses and challenge myself to view Spanish as an academic language, because the topics I want to dive into should be honored in their original form, not just in translation. Always with a critic’s eye, I take advantage of English’s universality to keep sharing and keep learning.  I find little pockets of immigrant communities and delight in sharing, comparing, and never changing how we speak: an unspoken agreement with my Dominican neighbor that we would never complain about how loud we were during late-night phone calls; an animated dining-hall line exchange with a treasured Honduran friend; a TA meeting in Spanglish. Cabal: this is the tongue I was supposed to speak with. A tongue that may trip over itself when ordering tea, but a tongue that is always sure of where it came from.

Isabel was born and raised in San Salvador, El Salvador. Since 2014, she and her immediate family have called Monterrey, México, home. At Smith, she is an Art History major with a Museums concentration, interested in the political aesthetics of the Americas. She will go anywhere to find a bag of maseca in the Pioneer Valley.

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