Tomato, Tomahto, Mapache, Mapuche OR How I Put My Foot In My Mouth BIG TIME!

Learning another language can be simultaneously fun, frustrating, rewarding, stimulating and disappointing.  Sometimes I feel like I am flying with my Spanish and sometimes I feel like I could not carry a conversation with a two year old.  However, it is important to be patient and to not be afraid to make mistakes.  Making mistakes is inevitable and even if on the inside you feel stupid, foolish and/or ashamed of what just came out of your mouth, it is the only way you can learn.  So as expected, I have had PLENTY of misunderstandings these past few months.  For example, one time I told someone, "Excuse me, I have to go take my clothes off."  The context of this situation is that at the time I had clothes hung up on the line and I meant to say "I have to go take my clothes off the line"  In this situation, you can't help but laugh.

However, while making Thanksgiving dinner with one of the people at Centro Emmanuel I managed to surpass all my other previous Spanish goofs.  Recently at La Obra, I read a kid a children's book about animals in Spanish and learned that the word for raccoon in Spanish is mapache.  So I was talking in Spanish about all the different animals in the United States and about how people hunt raccoons.

Fun Random Fact about me: The only time a book has made me cry was when I read Where the Red Fern Grows 

Anyway, so I thought I said En los Estados Unidos, hay personas que cazan mapaches, which would be "In the US, there are people that hunt raccoons.

However, that is NOT what came out of my mouth.  Instead what my brain did was switch one vowel. One little vowel was the difference between what I wanted to say and what I spouted. What I actually said was En los Estados Unidos, hay personas que cazan mapuches, which translates to "In the US, there are people that hunt Mapuches"  Mapuche, mapache.

The reason why this is such an epic Spanish flub is because Mapuche is the name of one of the original indigenous peoples of the southern part of Argentina and Chile.  In a similar way to the westward expansion of the US during the 19th century, the Argentine government fought a series of campaigns in southern Argentina against the Mapuche during the 1870s and 1880s.

So what I said was "In the US, there are people that hunt Mapuches (Native Americans)   I quickly realized my mistake, corrected myself and laughed at myself for making such a big mistake but inside I felt slightly ashamed for what came out of my mouth because violence towards indigenous peoples is NOT something that is in any way, shape or form, humorous

After this incident, the word for raccoon in Spanish has been firmly planted in my brain.

Mapuche

Mapache