By Andy Griffin

Ya gotta love King Alfonso the Wise. Hear me out.
One of the virtues of selling produce to restaurants is that with a little effort you can make friends with people who really know how to cook. An excellent cook I’ve befriended from the restaurant trade is a fellow named Martin Bournhonesque who fled a busser’s life in a fancy fish joint to grow and distribute specialty produce. Yesterday I saw Martin in a greenhouse near my home where he was harvesting precious little chicory salads and he pressed a bag of black squash seeds into my hand. “Try these,” he said. “Chilacayotes.”
It turns out that a chef Martin works with is ever-so-expert at Mediterranean cuisine – Tuscany, Liguria, Provence, etc., but his real dream is to return to his roots and open his own place that serves really good, really authentic food in the style of his own two-donkey burg in the highlands of southern Mexico. And that means having a local source for all the heirloom crops that are specific to his home region and its cuisine. Like chilacayote.
Martin and I had a good laugh over the peril facing Mediterranean cuisine should all our chefs get back to their roots because as far as I can tell most of the best Italian cooks on the West Coast are hispanic. (Hint to potential students: speaking Spanish may help you sell stuff as well as grow it. Never forget that the Spanish-speaking guy shucking favas today will be a sous chef tomorrow when the English-speaking sous chef quits, moves on, or ends up in the slammer.) I’m not worried because I like real Mexican food a lot. The dark chilacayote seeds reminded me, too, how Spanish is not always very hispanic.
Unless you have a really macho Spanish-English dictionary the noun chilacayote isn’t even mentioned. Chilacayote is a new world squash, vining and broadleafed, that produces a green pumpkin-like squash, given the appropriate conditions. I didn’t know this until two minutes ago when I spoke to my farm foreman Gildardo España. Don’t be fooled by his surname. Gildardo doesn’t have much of España in him. He’s Mixteco, from Oaxaca, like Martin’s chef friend. España informed me that chilacayote is cultivated in his hometown but the best yields come from even higher up in the mountains where the temperatures are cooler.
It’s not clear to me that chilacayote is a Oaxacan word. In the old days (30 years ago) España’s family spoke Mixteca, but so linguistically diverse are the Oaxacan highlands that a local dialect can vary over a matter of a few kilometers. Other languages indigenous to Oaxaca include Zapoteca, Trique, and Mixe. Each of these languages lives on but has lent many words to Spanish. The chilacayote has been cultivated all over the Americas from Peru north for over 4000 years. I’m not sure which of the many American dialects has lent us the noun chilacayote. Some native Mexican words like the Nahuatl word chocolatl have even made it through Spanish all the way to English.
What this means to you as a Spanish student is that you don’t only have Spanglish to worry about, but Span-trique Span-Mixe, Spanoteca, and Zaponish too. Luckily, we have the wisdom of King Alfonso the Wise to fall back on. Way back when the Catholics were reconquering the Iberian peninsula from the Muslims the king needed to dumb down traditional Castillian so that recently conquered Arabic-speaking people could learn Spanish quickly. Alfonso convened a tribe of scholars to help him make Castillian an easier language to learn and they achieved this by giving the language many of the streamlined, logical rules it enjoys today.
One reform was to modify the practice of having verbs end with either er, ir, or ar, each with its own irregular conjugation. From Alfonso’s time forward, almost all new verb formations have followed the regular ar conjugation. In backwoods America this meant that indigenous nouns could be adapted to Spanish by being given regular Castillian ending. My favorite new world formation is the verb coyotear, meaning to coyote. The evasive, tricky behavior of a new world canine becomes enshrined in an old world language with the addition of a couple of letters. It’s fun. Follow Alfonso’s rules for the ar ending verb conjugations correctly and you can invent ‘Spanish’ verbs. The lesson here is, if you’re having a hard time understanding a word like chilacayote or finding it in the dictionary it may not be Castillian Spanish. Don’t worry. Just find out where your companion is from, how to spell the word, or how to pronounce it. (see below) and work backwards to the meaning. What I know now is that chilacayote is a perennial, climbs trees and it likes high altitudes.. It may or may not grow well here in coastal California. Maybe Martin is trying to get me to take the risk on an unknown crop. ¡Qué coyote!

¿De dónde está Usted? Where are you from?

¿Cómo se deletrea? How do you spell it?

¿Cómo se pronuncia? How do you pronounce it?

A couple of ‘ar’ verbs:

Zacatear to weed, literally to grass, from zacatl, Nahual for grass or herb.

Here’s the conjugations for ‘zacatear’ :

Zacateo. I weed.

Zacatea. You weed. (formal)

Zacateas. You weed (informal)

Zacatéamos. We weed.

Zacatean. They weed.

Lonchear to have lunch, this is solid, common Spanglish in the US, or at least in California

Some useful vocabulary if you’re taking an order from a Spanish-speaking sous chef:

una orden an order

una docena one dozen

un bonche one bunch

no sirve it’s no good, it’s rotten
¡bonita! beautiful, nice