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I went to a cooking class last year in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico at the “Traditional Mexican Cooking School” and came away with a number of delicious recipes to make authentic Mexican food. One of my favorites is for traditional salsa verde. This recipe is extremely fast and easy, and can be used for anything from enchiladas and tacos to a classic dip for tortilla chips. The recipe calls for tomatillos, a small green tomato-like fruit that, when fresh, comes in a thin husk that you have to peel away before washing. You should look for tomatillos on the smaller side, since the larger ones tend to be bitter. If you can’t find fresh, you may find canned tomatillos in the canned vegetable or Mexican section of the supermarket.
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Turning 16 is seen as a turning point for girls in the U.S, but for latinas the big day comes a year ealier. The quinceañera, the Latin American version of the sweet sixteen, is for some girls the biggest event next to their wedding day. The day marks the transition from childhood into womanhood, and traditionally includes a church mass, followed by formal photographs and an elegant party that could best be compared to a debutant ball in the U.S. Traditionally, the birthday girl (also called the quinceañera) wears an elaborate ball gown and the climax of the night is the performance of carefully choreographed waltzes, first with her father, and then with each of her chambelanes, or male attendants.
The quinceañera is often an expensive affair, and especially in smaller pueblos where the entire town comes out to celebrate, the cost can represent a large portion of the family’s earnings. These days, however, the quinceañera is likely to forgo the formalities and ask that the investment instead be made on a special trip with friends or a first car. Some, of course, go for both.
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Latin America is generally known as a region of ubiquitous red tape, where bureaucratic procedures and long wait times to complete them can cause ones patience to wear thin. Yet to what extent does this image hold true in the reality of doing business in Latin America? For some idea of the business climate of the region, we can turn to the recently released World Bank Group’s report “Doing Business 2008.”
According to its website, the Doing Business Project annually seeks to “provide objective measures of business regulations and their enforcement across 178 countries.” The guide ranks countries on overall ease of doing business based on ten indicators, including the ease and cost of starting a business, paying taxes, acquiring warehouse licenses, and trading across borders.
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If it has ever happened to you that you rattle off what you think is a perfectly correct sentence in Spanish, only to have the other person just look at you, head cocked to the side with a bewildered look on his or her face, you are not alone! You may have just fallen into the very common trap of the false cognate, also called a false friend: a foreign word that looks or sounds deceptively similar to a word
in English, but whose meaning is entirely different.
I learned to be careful of false cognates the hard way: through personal experience. When I first studied in Mexico in high school, I told my host family “Estoy tan embarazada!” wishing to express my embarrassment over getting sick to my stomach my first night in their home. In fact, I had just informed them that I was “so pregnant”. Years later I saw that my Spanish students made this same mistake all the time.
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When I spent my first Columbus Day in Mexico, my first reaction was “Mexico celebrates Columbus Day?” It is embarrassing to recall now, but I think after years of elementary school training, I was conditioned to think “Columbus discovered America” and, in typical egotistical fashion, I assumed “America” referred to the United States. Somehow, even knowing that Columbus landed in the Caribbean and never saw the U.S. didn’t alter my narrow-minded thinking. My teacher said “Columbus discovered America” and my young brain left it at that.<br /
It took just a nanosecond to realize my surprise was illogical. October 12th is a date of enormous significance for the Spanish-speaking world. Before dawn on that day in 1492, Christopher Columbus (Cristóbal Colón) and his crew first spied land from the decks of the Pinta and later that day dropped anchor off the shore of a Bahaman island. By December he had also explored Cuba and the island of Hispañola (today the island shared by Haiti and the Dominican Republic). The “discovery” was made in the name of the Spanish crown, the voyage’s financier. Within fifty years of Columbus’ first voyage, nearly all of Central and South America had been colonized by the Spanish
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