Big Jim: A short glossary of our local vocabulary

Here a few Spanish words common in our region, which don’t exist or have different meanings in other parts of the Mexican world. Some are loan words from native languages, others simply have their own local meanings. Let’s start with the first category.

bichi – naked, dry. A loan word from Yaqui.

chúcata – the black, sticky gum of the mesquite tree. It can be chewed like gum, and was also used for patching pottery vessels. A loan word from Yaqui.

equipatas – light winter rains, often lasting as long as three days. They contrast with the heavy, often localized cloudbursts of the summer rainy season. A loan word from Yaqui.

péchita – mesquite seed pods. When ground they can be mixed with water to form a gruel, or made into flour. Mesquite flour is becoming locally available and popular in Tucson. A loan word from Ópata.

Yorimuni – a Sonoran white bean, sold at Native Seeds/SEARCH, and in some Mexican markets. A loan word from Yaqui, literally “white beans”.

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The above words exist in everyday Sonoran Spanish and nowhere else. Now we come to the tricky part — the words that mean one thing here and something quite different everywhere else.

Cimarrona – a traditional word for “snow cone.” Now to a great extent replaced here by raspado (literally, “scraped thing.”) Elsewhere, a “cimarrona” is a female mountain sheep. The term “cimarrón is also applied to wild or untamed individuals

Pico de gallo - In Sonora, a fruit salad lightly dusted over with chile powder, salt, and lime juice. Elsewhere on the border, especially in Texas, a kind of uncooked salsa containing green chiles, tomatoes, and onions. Literally, “bird’s beak.”

There are even a very few such expressions in local English in which the meaning and connotations differ from usage elsewhere – southern Arizona code words, if you will. One such is “But it’s a dry heat.” That’s literally true here, of course, but the phrase has locally become tinged with a sort of wistful sarcastic humor. When the thermometer hits 110 degrees, it is indeed a relief that the air isn’t muggy and moist, but it’s still HOT.

We still hear about “the ice breaking on the Santa Cruz River.” (Not ‘melting,’ mind you, but “breaking.”) That, of course, is our local code indicating that the local temperature has hit 100 degrees. It’s not as common as it was a few years ago, but it’s still heard.

I’m sure I missed a few, but these are some of our strictly local words. It says a lot about our multicultural, multilingual region that the words are in four distinct languages: Yaqui, Ópata, Spanish, and English.