Mota

Mota is the everyday word for marijuana in Mexico, and in Guatemala, El Salvador and Costa Rica as well. People say fumar mota, to smoke mota, and argue about legalizar la mota. It is informal but not obscure: El Colegio de México’s dictionary of Mexican Spanish and the Royal Spanish Academy both list it.

It is also a much older Spanish word that meant something else entirely. The Academy’s dictionary gives the origin as unknown, and no one has shown how the old word became the new one.

A speck of fluff

In general Spanish, a mota is a small thing that does not belong. The Academy’s first senses are a little knot that forms in woollen cloth and has to be picked off with tweezers, a bit of thread that sticks to clothes, a small dot or spot, and a slight flaw. In Mexico it is also the fluff on wool or cotton, a ball of cotton, and a powder puff.

The linguist Luis Fernando Lara, author of the Diccionario del español de México at El Colegio de México, told AFP in 2016 that the word appeared in eighteenth-century Spain for residue from linen production. He placed its established Mexican cannabis meaning at the end of the nineteenth century, while acknowledging that the connection remained unknown.

A connection between fluff and dried, crumbled leaves is easy to imagine, and so is one with a small amount. Neither has been documented, and the dictionaries do not offer one.

The words around it

Lara was adding about fifty words from the drug world to the second edition of his dictionary, from newspapers, police reports and medical files going back decades. Those for marijuana include a small family built on mota.

Word	Meaning	Where
mota	Marijuana	Mexico, Guatemala, El Salvador, Costa Rica
moto, motorolo, pacheco	A smoker of it	Mexico
churro	A joint, named after the fried pastry	Mexico
toque	A drag	Mexico
grifo	High	Mexico
tabique	A pressed brick of it	Mexico
bareta	Marijuana, in slang	Colombia
maría, juana	Marijuana	Listed by the Academy as synonyms

The Academy treats mota, bareta, maría and juana as synonyms of marihuana. It records the marijuana sense of mota only for the four countries above, and gives bareta as Colombian slang.

A word on an underground cover

MOTA Comix is an independent Mexican publication from Editorial PirataZ. It began in 2017, combining underground comics, cannabis culture, satire and criticism of prohibition.

In its own account of the project, the publisher connects freedom to consume and cultivate with individual liberty. It describes humour directed at prohibition and the criminalisation of consumers, alongside space for Mexican artists and alternative graphic expression.

The cover of No. 8 puts MOTA across the top in oversized illustrated letters, above a crowded scene of fantastical characters and surreal imagery. The ordinary slang becomes a public title rather than a word spoken privately. The comic did not invent it: Lara’s account places the cannabis meaning more than a century before the publication began.

The law’s word

The law does not say mota. Mexican decrees and rulings speak of marihuana, and lately of cannabis; for the history of that word, see marijuana. The Mexican dictionary’s own definition of the plant ends with a plain statement: “Es una droga tradicionalmente popular; su cultivo y su uso están prohibidos.” It is a traditionally popular drug; growing and using it are forbidden.

The ban in that sentence dates from 1920, when a federal decree removed marijuana from the medicines recognised by the sanitary code and penalised its sale and possession. It has been loosened since. In 2021 the Supreme Court declared the ban on adult personal use unconstitutional, but Congress never passed the law to regulate it, and there is still no legal market. The dictionary’s sentence is out of date in part; the word it defines is not.

Brick weed describes compressed cannabis plant material, a form also known as prensado. Its blocks should be distinguished from pressed resin.^{[1][2][3][4][5][6][7]}