cachacos: Colombians who come from the capital city of Bogotá.

champes: a term used in a mostly pejorative way to describe people who listen to the champeta brava musical genre from Cartagena; also used in San Andrés as a pejorative term for working-class mainland migrants.

Intendencia: a defunct status of territorial administration, which I’ve translated as ‘the Intendancy’, that governed San Andrés and Providencia between 1912 and 1991.

nativo: often used interchangeably with Raizal. I have translated this as ‘native’, in keeping with English-language literature from and about San Andrés.

paisas: mainland Colombians from the coffee-growing region of Antioquia, Caldas, Risaralda and Quindío.

pañas: people born or residing in San Andrés who aren’t of Raizal descent.

parce: a colloquial form of address in the tone of ‘man’, ‘mate’.

turco: a blanket term used generically to describe Middle Eastern immigrants to Colombia, and/or their descendants. I have translated this as ‘Turk’.

Recently, as I prepared to write this brief note, I came across ‘A Manifesto for Ultratranslation’ for the first time: a thrilling text written and published by the Antena collective (now known as Antena Aire) in 2014. ‘Ultratranslation’, they write, ‘labors to translate the untranslatable, and also to preserve it: not to reduce the irreducible.’ And later: ‘We live and work in the clutter of untranslatability. The discomfortable snag where we no longer know what to say, how to say, or even quite what saying is – but we continue in our saying… Untranslate this space. Retranslate from this space.’ I see Cristina Bendek’s book as an exploration of what it might mean to not reduce the irreducible, and to continue in our saying: to think, in embodied and intimate ways, about empire and language and the innumerable migrations within families, countries and cultures. English, too, is an empire to be unsettled. I’m grateful to Salt Crystals, and to Cristina, for this continual conversation about translating, untranslating, retranslating; after all, to quote Antena Aire again, ‘We translate into our language to rewrite our language.’

Robin Myers

Mexico City, February 2022

Director & Editor: Carolina Orloff

Director: Samuel McDowell