What Is The Spanish Lady Saying In ‘Leave The World Behind’?

About midway through Netflix’s hit Leave the World Behind, Ethan Hawke‘s character Clay Sandford is heading into town to try and figure out what is going wrong with the world (you know, the one they left behind). While driving on a road through a long, empty field, he sees a woman waving him down. The scene that follows, which is interspersed with the other characters in the movie engaging in tense confrontations, is only amped up by the woman babbling in Spanish at Clay. So what is the Spanish Lady saying in Leave the World Behind?

Great question, friend. Best friend? Are we best friends? I bet we are. Anyway, let’s get into it.

Who Is The Spanish Lady In Leave The World Behind?

Not surprisingly, her character’s name is not “Spanish Lady.” She’s actually named Salvadora and is played by actress Vanessa Aspillaga. You might recognize Aspillaga best as Ursula in Only Murders in the Building, though she’s had numerous other roles. The point being, she’s more than just “Spanish Lady” — though the fact that people think that’s what her character is named is sort of the point. More on that below.

Leave The World Behind Spanish Lady Translation:

The main thing you’re probably wondering is what the Spanish Lady, who we now know is named Salvadora, is saying in the scene. Thankfully, the good folks over at Blurred Reality already did the hard work to translate the scene, which does not have subtitles:

“Thank God I found someone! I’m trying to get back to my home! I’m lost! I’ve been walking for a while! I need to use your phone! You’re the first person I’ve seen all day! We have to get out of here!

I just saw a plane that was spraying red gas in the vicinity. I saw some deer, more than 50. They were coming out of the woods. Please! I need to go home, sir. A military plane appeared and fled. There’s no one around! Is it a chemical attack?”

So there you go! Translation problems solved. But what does it mean? What does it meeeeean???

What Is The Purpose Of The Spanish Lady Scene In Leave The World Behind?

There are a lot of different themes being played with in the movie, and this scene crystallizes pretty much all of them. Let’s break it down!

There’s a running theme of deeply embedded racism, mostly coming from the white couple played by Hawke and Julia Roberts, through both micro and macro-aggressions. Here Hawke is approached by a strange woman babbling in Spanish, and very quickly gets freaked out, driving away instead of doing the basics of trying to help her. In the scene, he stares straight ahead terrified, knowing he’s done the morally wrong thing as he rolls up his window and drives away from her.

This pivots into “fear of the other,” which happens on a one-to-one basis, but also in the form of red leaflets that seem to say “Death to America” dropped from a drone in a following scene. However, as we find out late in the movie, different enemies of America seem to have dropped leaflets on different parts of the country. It’s all part of a (potential) false flag type operation to get America to destroy itself out of fear. Again micro/macro, but Clay being terrified of Salvadora is a micro way to look at the macro place we end the movie, with nuclear bombs being dropped on major cities when all we Americans are doing is attacking ourselves.

Another theme? Communication and connection. In the movie a cyberattack takes out everything digital, as well as TV, GPS (as seen in the driving scene with Hawke where he keeps trying the GPS beyond the point of reason) and more. Without our doohickeys, Hawke is — as he says later in the film — a completely useless man (he’s a media studies professor, to drive the idea home), and any sort of connection he might have made with the only woman he saw on the road all day was lost because he didn’t have Google Translate.

But the biggest part of the scene, which is as darkly hilarious as anything else in the movie? Hawke headed out to find out information about what is going on, and this woman — in Spanish — lays out all of it. The red gas is the leaflets, which he’s about to encounter and be terrified of. She warned him! The 50 deer is a running plot that 13-year-old Rose (Farrah Mackenzie) tries to warn everyone about repeatedly, but nobody listens. And then just overall the idea that nobody is around to help is information that Hawke’s character would have found helpful.

Instead, he ignored her as something to be scared of, instead of identifying the same fear he had in himself, rolled up his windows, and drove away. Qué vergüenza.