Caló (Chicano)

Caló (also known as Pachuco) is an argot or slang of Mexican Spanish that originated during the first half of the 20th century in the Southwestern United States. It is the product of zoot-suit pachuco culture.

According to Chicano artist and writer José Antonio Burciaga:

Caló originally defined the Spanish gypsy dialect. But Chicano Caló is the combination of a few basic influences: Hispanicized English; Anglicized Spanish; and the use of archaic 15th-century Spanish words such as truje for traje (brought, past tense of verb 'to bring'), or haiga, for haya (from haber, to have). These words were left in isolated pockets of Northern New Mexico and the Southwest, especially New Mexico, by conquistadores españoles.

He goes on to describe the speech of his father, a native of El Paso, Texas:

My father had a vocabulary of Spanish words that to this day are not found in popular Spanish language dictionaries. He was born into a poor, migrant farm working family in a community of people that still used ancient words that some found improper and backwards but are to be found in Miguel Cervantez's [sic] classic Don Quixote. My father commonly used words such as minjurne for mixture, or cachibaches (also used in Cuban Spanish) for junk. I would hear them without knowing their definition but I knew exactly what he meant when talking within a specific context. Some words were archaic, others were a combination of English and Spanish. And though he knew "standard" Spanish of "educated" people, he also worked, lived, laughed and cried with words that were more expressive and indigenous to the border than standard Spanish.

The Caló of El Paso was probably influenced by the wordplay common to the speech of residents of the Tepito barrio of Mexico City. One such resident was the comic film actor Germán Valdés, a native of Mexico City who grew up in Ciudad Juárez (just across the US-Mexico border from El Paso). His films did much to popularize the language in Mexico and the United States.

...
Wikipedia