Spanish For Social Change

mainstream media: medios dominantes de comunicación This rendition caught my eye in the article Traducción y compromiso by Manuel Talens at...

the belly of the beast: las entrañas del monstruo; el corazon del monstruo; las entrañas de la bestia I hear corazon far more in social just...

an injury to one is an injury to all: un daño contra uno es un daño contra todos This famous IWW ( wobbly ) saying is widely used throughout...

espantabobos: drizzle not really a social justice term, but one of my favorite expressions - and wow, wouldn't it be bad news if this ...

solidarizar: be/work/struggle in solidarity with I was asked to by Ana to come up with a translation for this, I agree with her, fantastic v...

open source: codigo abierto the full word is really source code. funny how the code gets dropped in En, and the source in Sp. feeling depr...

mano dura: firm hand usually as in "firm hand policies" - a polite way of saying ruthless crackdown. there was a disturbing artic...

empire: imperio not a tricky term, though I could go on about capitalizing it a la Hardt and Negri or not (I vote not), but really, this is...

pasar la voz: give the floor As in when a speaker is done and wants to name the next person who gets to speak and says, "ahora paso la ...

progressive: progresista Progresivo is one of the funnier false cognates that I keep running in to. In Spanish it's widely understood a...

invierno: rainy, or rainy season You might have thought that invierno meant winter and verano meant summer, but really, in my experience in ...

so-called: mal llamado As in, the so-called Justice and Peace law in Colombia, es decir, el mal llamado ley de Justicia y Paz . More and mo...

vereda: township (Col) Of course it's not really the same thing since even the most rural place in North America is nowhere near as rur...

comunidad de base: organized community in the last post I argued that base is usually grassroots, but here is another example that occurred ...

trabajo de base: grassroots organizing I heard this rendered as "base work" - which has got to be one of the all time most dangero...

affordable housing: vivienda asequible, vivienda al alcance economico, vivienda economicamente accesible The first if the standard, and the ...

town hall meeting: cabildo abierto Sometimes, though less so, also called 'cabildo general'. I also recently heard "evento de ...

ground: poner polo a tierra In both English and Spanish this term comes from the electrical meaning , but is used metaphorically to mean to ...

veeduria: oversight We could certainty use more of it, in government institutions, NGO's, and in movements. I am a big fan of the Quake...

shopdrop: deja-compras Ready to engage in some anti-capitalist monkey wrenching after that commodity fest? Try shopdropping . Thanks to Jon...

commodity fetishism: fetichismo de la mercancía commodity is widely rendered as mercancía in academic literature (and in lefty rags, actuall...

people of color: gente no blanca This is a term in English that points to the politics of the person using the term, in particular to a reco...

sororidad: sisterhood Certainly not sorority! Maybe there are some feminist sororities out there, but they tend not to be. This term seems ...

hit the streets: quemar pavimento This is the first year in many many that I'm not hitting the streets on this weekend to close the Scho...

Spanglish: Inglañol Why do we always just leave it as Spanglish? English hegemony just maybe? The googlage difference between these two ter...