Spanish For Social Change

The site News in Slow Spanish is intended for Spanish language learners, but it seems to me that it could also be used to practice simulta...

I've been struggling with this term since the then Colombian Defense Minister, Luis Carlos Villegas, argued that the wave of murders of ...

tranque [Nicaragua]: barricade You could also use blockade or roadblock - though those terms don't necessarily convey the temporary an...

I have blogged asistencialismo twice before - it's a term that is difficult to convey in English but this gets much closer than my pr...

There have been two radio pieces lately, this one in English , this one in Spanish , about the struggle to get this racist character in blac...

Velatón is a neologism in Spanish, recently used for an event held on July 8th, 2018 in over 100 cities across the world and across Colom...

The newly elected right wing vice-president of # Colombia Colombia, Marta Lucía Ramírez, (Colombia's first woman VP) says she is a fe...

The most poetic rendition of this I have seen is "high Andean moor." But more usefully, you could keep the term in Spanish and def...

This article usefully describes the various ways that the implementation of the Colombian peace accords has gotten 'empantanado' - w...

Not a social justice term - except that in my utopia everyone gets to drink lots of this! I ran into this rendition in, of all places, th...

In Colombia the ELN guerillas have declared a 'paro armado' for February 10th through 13th. As I explained in my previous post on th...

I was reminded of this term by this Aquí estamos article  by Vivian Martínez Díaz about a debate in the Colombian media around feminists...

Not really a social justice related term exactly. I stumbled on this term in Alfredo Molano's last weekly column (for now) in El Espect...

I've often struggled to render racist terms of endearment from Spanish into English like chinito and negrito. It is hard to convey in En...

partners: copartes In a social justice context socios does not work, since it implies business associate, not social change organization...

Homophobia and islamophobia are not actually phobias. I do not believe that they are mental health conditions (like agoraphobia or claustrop...

peacemaking: el restablecimiento de la paz peacekeeping:  la conservación de la paz peacebuilding:  la consolidación de la paz These we...

For some reason mindfulness is often imported into Spanish, as it is in the poster here - even though a term does exist in Spanish. It is...

For some reason the term gentrification is widely imported into Spanish, even though there's this other great option that is more eas...

On May Day the NY Times ran an article about Colombia with what I thought was mistranslation. It was an article about Julian Conrado, a FAR...

The NYT today ran a story with this great headline: ‘Penis Seat’ Causes Double Takes on Mexico City Subway The sto...

The literal rendition of this is of course violence based on prejudice, but in English it is far more common to use the term hate crime. I s...

This expression is often used to argue against  an "add and stir" approach. This would be, for example, hiring a few women without...

Amazingly there is a mainstream movie out where a woman academic saves the day with her language skills! I can't recommend it enough. Bu...

[update: the official translation of the peace accords uses the term "gender-sensitive approach"and so I have changed it here from...