Bacán — A Word That Crossed Continents

A word that began among Italian immigrants in nineteenth-century Buenos Aires and has since traveled most of South America, picking up slightly different meanings as it goes.

If you spend any time among Spanish speakers in South America, you will eventually hear the word bacán. A Chilean might use it to mean cool or great — a film was bacán, a weekend was bacán, a friend is bacán. A Peruvian might use it in much the same way. A Colombian might use it more sparingly, often with the older sense of a well-off person, someone who has the means to live well. An Argentine of a certain generation might use it to mean a sharp dresser, a man with a particular kind of urban polish. The word is the same. The meanings have moved.

I have been collecting words like this for years — words that began somewhere small and ended up somewhere larger, words whose journeys you can trace if you know where to look. Bacán is one of the most interesting examples I have encountered. It is a word that began among immigrants, traveled with the people who used it, and settled into the Spanish of five or six different countries along the way.

A word from the Italian quarter

Bacán begins in the Italian dialects of southern Italy, where the word baccàn or baccano meant, roughly, a noisy person or a man of substance who makes himself heard. The Italian sense was already double — it could be admiring or slightly mocking, depending on context. A baccàn was a man who had arrived, and who was not shy about letting others know.

The word crossed the Atlantic in the late nineteenth century, when millions of Italians left southern Italy and the Veneto for Argentina. The Italian arrivals settled mostly in Buenos Aires and Montevideo, in the dock neighborhoods and the working-class barrios, where they encountered the local Spanish and began to shape it. The slang that emerged from this contact — Lunfardo, the speech of the late-nineteenth-century Buenos Aires underworld — took in Italian words and reshaped them. Bacán, in Lunfardo, came to mean a man of means, a patrón, someone with money and the bearing that came with it. The word kept the Italian sense of one who has arrived. It dropped the slight mockery and gained a sharper class edge.

By the early twentieth century, bacán was part of the standard Lunfardo vocabulary. It appeared in tango lyrics — Carlos Gardel sang of bacanes in the great tangos of the 1920s and 1930s — and in the slang of the porteño streets. The word was Argentine. It belonged to Buenos Aires.

The word travels

But words travel. Bacán moved north out of Argentina in the twentieth century, following trade routes, migration patterns, and the spread of Argentine cultural production across South America. Tango music carried the word into Chile, Peru, and Bolivia. Argentine films and television in the mid-twentieth century carried it further. And in each country it arrived in, the word found new ground and grew slightly different.

In Chile, bacán shed the class associations almost entirely and became a general expression of approval. A bacán movie is a great movie. A bacán day is a good day. Está bacán — it is bacán — means it is excellent. The word is now so thoroughly integrated into Chilean speech that many Chileans do not know it is not native. It feels Chilean, the way che feels Argentine, and the Italian origins have largely been forgotten.

In Peru, bacán is similarly used to mean cool or great, but with a slightly older flavor. Older Peruvians may remember when it meant a wealthy man or a dandy, and the modern cool sense has not fully erased the earlier meaning. The two senses coexist, distinguishable mostly by context and by the age of the speaker.

In Colombia, particularly in the interior, bacán tends to keep more of its older meaning. A bacán in Colombian usage is more likely to mean a well-off person or someone living comfortably. The word has not made the full transition into generic approval that it has in Chile.

In Ecuador and Bolivia, the word's use sits between the Chilean cool sense and the older Argentine man of means sense, with regional and generational variation. Bacán is recognized everywhere it travels, but its precise meaning shifts by border.

What a single word teaches

The biography of bacán is the biography in miniature of a particular kind of linguistic life — the life of a word that began in a specific place among specific people, traveled with them and after them, and accumulated meanings without losing its sound.

It is also, more specifically, a biography of how Italian immigration to the River Plate shaped the Spanish of an entire continent. Bacán is not the only Italian-origin word that traveled north out of Argentina. Laburar — to work — is another, from the Italian lavorare. Mina — a woman, often in a slangy or affectionate register — is another, from a now-debated Italian root. Pibe — a kid, a boy — is another, also Italian. These words are not random borrowings. They are the linguistic residue of six million Italians who arrived in Argentina between 1880 and 1930 and left their imprint not only on the porteño accent — which I have written about elsewhere — but on the vocabulary that porteño Spanish then exported to the rest of the continent.

A word like bacán carries this history in it. Every time a Chilean uses it to mean cool, the word is doing more work than the speaker intends. It is connecting the speaker, however invisibly, to a southern Italian peasant who left his village in 1895, to a tango lyricist in 1920s Buenos Aires, to a generation of Chileans in the 1960s who heard the word in Argentine films and adopted it because it sounded right. The word does not announce its history. It simply carries it.

This is one of the things I love about regional varieties of Spanish — the way a single word, used casually, can be a small monument to the movements of human beings across vast distances. Bacán is one such monument. The next time you hear it, listen for what it is doing under the surface. It has come a long way to reach your ear.