Everyday Spanish has a common way to report a mishap. The speaker does not say “I dropped the glass.” The speaker says se me cayó el vaso, literally “the glass fell, to me.” The same form gives se me olvidó (it slipped my mind), se me rompió (it broke on me) and se descompuso (it broke down).
In this construction the object is the subject of the sentence. The person appears only as the one it happened to. The form is common in everyday Spanish, in Mexico as elsewhere.
Ni modo is one of the most common expressions in Mexican Spanish. It means roughly “no way around it” or “oh well.” The dictionary of the Spanish Academy marks it as colloquial and Mexican. It is used “to indicate that something no longer has a remedy.”
People say it when a bus is missed, a deal falls through or a plan fails, and the conversation moves on.
Fue sin querer queriendo, “it was without wanting, wanting,” is what El Chavo says to explain things he did not mean to do. El Chavo is the boy at the center of El Chavo del 8, the comedy by Roberto Gómez Bolaños, known as Chespirito. When a rude word slips out of him, he says se me chispoteó, “it sparked out of me.”
The series began as its own program on February 26, 1973. Its last episode aired on January 7, 1980.
On the night of July 6, 1988, the vote count of Mexico’s presidential election stopped. Manuel Bartlett Díaz, the official in charge of supervising the election, announced that the system had failed. The night entered Mexican memory as se cayó el sistema, “the system fell.”
In 2023, Bartlett said in an interview with the journalist Ciro Gómez Leyva: “Yo no dije que se cayó el sistema” (I did not say that the system fell). He called it a phrase that was used “to put the result of the electoral fraud on me.”
On September 1, 1982, President José López Portillo gave his last annual report to Congress. In it he nationalized the banks and imposed exchange controls. He described his share of the blame this way: “Soy responsable del timón; pero no de la tormenta” (I am responsible for the helm, but not for the storm).
On the night of May 3, 2021, an elevated section of Line 12 of the Mexico City Metro collapsed. Twenty-six people died. The Norwegian firm DNV analyzed the collapse and found four failures: in the design, in independent certification and supervision, in the installation of bolts, and in maintenance and inspection.
The report pointed to responsibility in three city administrations, those of Marcelo Ebrard, Miguel Ángel Mancera and Claudia Sheinbaum. Sheinbaum, then head of the city government, rejected DNV’s third report as “tendencioso y falso” (biased and false). In October 2021, prosecutors announced homicide charges against ten former officials, among them the head of the original construction project.
Mexican football fans speak of la maldición del quinto partido, “the curse of the fifth match.” Mexico was eliminated in the round of 16 at seven World Cups in a row, from 1994 to 2018. The fifth match, the quarterfinal, never came. In 2022, Mexico did not get past the group stage.
In 2026, the expanded tournament added a round of 32. Mexico beat Ecuador 2-0 at the Estadio Azteca and so played a fifth match. The press debated whether the curse had really been broken, since Mexico had still not passed the round of 16. In that fifth match, the round of 16, Mexico lost 3-2 to England.
On June 29, 2014, Mexico played the Netherlands in the round of 16 of the World Cup in Brazil. In the 94th minute, Klaas-Jan Huntelaar scored a penalty after a play between Rafael Márquez and Arjen Robben. The Netherlands won 2-1. Thousands of Mexican fans answered with the hashtag #NoEraPenal, “it was not a penalty.”
Robben later said: “Es deporte, es futbol, y creo que era penalti” (It is sport, it is football, and I think it was a penalty). In 2020, Márquez said in an interview: “Yo acepto el error porque al final fue penal porque lo marcaron” (I accept the mistake, because in the end it was a penalty, because they called it).