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I slept eight hours for three days in a row last week, and—surprise, surprise—I felt great! This is your reminder to get close to eight hours of sleep a day. 6.5 is not 8.

Like my mini-docs, my newsletter explores the hyphen between various topics through the lens of Latino culture. In this newsletter, I’m exploring the hyphen between:

- Fernando

I’m starting this off by saying that the emoji on this headline is a red chile pepper because I was in New Mexico a couple of weeks ago, and they’re everywhere. In the food. In souvenirs. On buildings. People bunch them up into ornate strands called “ristras.”

The rest of this story has nothing to do with chiles (btw, it’s chile, not chili. Ask any New Mexican). On to the story:

If you speak Spanish, how would say “car brakes”?

I’ll give you a second to think about.

Ask a New Mexican in the parking lot of a Walmart in the town of Española, New Mexico, about it, like I did, and they’ll tell you “brecas.”

“Brecas” is what some linguists call “Traditional New Mexican Spanish,” a variety of Spanish spoken in northern New Mexico and the southern edge of Colorado.

“At the end of the day, it's really a rural variety that's hung on to a lot of words that have fallen into disuse and other dialects of the language,” said Damián Vergara Wilson, a linguist and director of the Center for Regional Studies at the University of New Mexico.

The dialect stems from New Mexico’s long and complicated history with language and colonization. It dates back to the late 1500s when Spanish conquistadors invaded the region, forcing the mixture of Indigenous languages and Spanish. Then came the 1800s and Mexican War of Independence, which saw New Mexico become a part of Mexico. And a couple of decades later, English came flooding in when we saw New Mexico become first a territory, then a state of the United States following the Mexican American War.

“It’s that particular variety that sounds to outsiders, especially as being very distinct from Mexican Spanish,” Vergara Wilson said.

It’s characterized by a bunch of features. One of them is what are known as “retentions,” or “old words” that have stuck around from the olden days.

Instead of saying “Yo traje agua,” New Mexican Spanish speakers would conjugate that verb as “Yo truje agua” to say “I brought water.”

There’s “tunico” instead of “vestido” to say “dress.”

And then there are three words that caught my eye: “asina,” “muncho” and “aiga.”

They caught my eye because they’re words I’ve heard in rural parts of Durango, Mexico, where my family is from.

“Asina” means “así,” which means “like this.” “Muncho” is “mucho,” which means “a lot” or “much.” Then there’s “aiga,” which is “haya” or “there are.”

“As different as New Mexican Spanish might sound to somebody who is mexicano, you know, we were a part of Mexico. We share the same history,” Vergara Wilson said. “And so essentially New Mexican Spanish has way more in common with Mexican Spanish than it does, for example, with the Spanish from Spain. There's a myth that we speak, you know, Golden Age Spanish straight from the peninsula, but we don't.”

New Mexican Spanish harkens back to a lot of the words that were used in colonial Spanish times. But it has its own creations, or “internal linguistic developments.” Words like “gallina de la tierra.” Can you guess what that means?

I went to northern New Mexico a couple of weeks ago to find answers to these questions:

You can see all those answers and meet some awesome New Mexicans, in my latest mini-doc.

Which other dialects should I explore? Reply to this email! I read every response.

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Anuel AA is making a corridos album. The reggaeton singer revealed he will be releasing an all-corridos album later this year during Billboard Latin Music Week. “I love corridos music—I fell in love with it 100%. I hardly ever listen to reggaeton or trap music. I’m all about corridos,” he said.

Why did NPR edit out the speech from Los Tigres del Norte’s Tiny Desk performance on YouTube? NPR journalist and producer Felix Contreras gave a brief speech before the bands’s performance where talked about Latinos in the U.S. being “under attack.” The speech went semi-viral on social media, but if you were looking for it on the NPR Music YouTube channel, where it once was, you couldn’t find it last week, at least not for a few hours. In its place was a jump cut, showing that particular speech, but not another speech, was edited out. I asked NPR why that was, and here’s what they said.

What issues are driving Latino voters to the polls this year? A new survey asked U.S. adults what their most important issues at the ballot box are. For Latino or Hispanic adults, the economy was No.1, followed by healthcare and education. Overall 53% of Latino voters say they’re really motivated to vote, up from 41% in the 2022 midterms.

Taco Bell is going all in on horchata. The company announced four new horchata drinks it’s bringing to its Live Más Café concepts. They’re the Purple Horchata Chiller, Horchata Cold Brew Float, Strawberry Horchata Refresca and a Vanilla Spiced Horchata Refresca. The chain currently has 39 Live Más Café locations across Southern California, Houston, Dallas, Indiana and Las Vegas.

California’s high-speed rail line displaces a tortillería. La Tapatía, tortillería in Fresno, California, is having some rail-induced headaches. The store says it’s suffered an “extreme loss in business” from the noise and rubble of construction on California’s high-speed rail, a project that will connect Norther California, the Central Valley and Southern California. It was able to move to a new location with some financial helps from the High-Speed Racial Authority, but the store owners say its problems aren’t over yet.

U.S. Latinos and the future of the U.S.-Latin America trade corridor. McKinsey has an interesting new report that talks about the potential for growth in trade between the United States and Latin America. It’s interesting because it calls out U.S. Latinos explicitly as a growth engine for the country. “Latinos wield a variety of unique cultural identities with influence that can extend beyond Latino markets,” the report says.

Your support helps fund my journalism. It’s what allowed me to travel to New Mexico for my latest story. It’s also what’s allowing me to go to Mexico and Texas in the coming months.

If you’d like to support my work, consider becoming a paid subscriber here. It gets you access to the weekly version of this newsletter (you’re only getting it biweekly right now.)

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This section is a random musing from the week that is not related to my work as a journalist, usually. 

This week’s musing:

I got bamboozled at the airport. I was beelining it to the TSA PreCheck line at LAX the other day. I wasn’t late. I was just walking with intention. An airport employee, or so I thought, saw that and asked if I had PreCheck. I said yes, and he told me he could actually get me in faster through a different line. He didn’t phrase it as a question. I thought it was an airport employee telling me “go this way—the line’s shorter.” Turns out he was a CLEAR employee, and he was taking me to a kiosk to sign up for one free week of CLEAR. It took me about three minutes to realize what was going on. Has that ever happened to anyone?

Side note: Shoutout to Cyrus in Los Angeles for reading my newsletter iykyk 🙂