One Friday every month, a group of dedicated Spanish club members meet in room A107 to enjoy snacks and Spanish-language conversation. The event, Café Hispano, was founded last year by seniors Iona Pfingston and Molly Wagschal, who were looking to provide an opportunity for all South students to practice their conversational skills in an immersive environment.

“Café Hispano was created as an IU program with versions for lots of other different languages like Portuguese and Catalan. It was made for people who want to have a more immersive experience and practice their language skills. So at IU’s Café Hispano everyone would come and casually converse but entirely in Spanish for an hour,” Pfingston said.

Pfingston had been interested in going to IU’s Café Hispano to practice Spanish but was intimidated knowing that only college students and staff would be there. “We basically wanted to replicate the same sort of structure, but in a way that is more accessible to high school students at South,” Pfingston said.

South’s Café Hispano started having monthly gatherings in the spring of 2017, and it has been a success.

“I typically bring coffee for everyone, and anyone who goes usually brings snacks. Then we usually have some form of conversation questions, would-you-rathers, Kahoots, and other activities like that to get the conversations going,” Pfingston said in regards to the routine of the meetings.

Spanish speakers of any level are welcome to attend Café Hispano. “We would love to have new members, but we are pretty strict about people putting their best effort into speaking no English,” Pfingston said.

Although there is currently no regular schedule for the event, the organizers “usually post about it in a lot of the Spanish classrooms.” If you would like better reminders, you should “get in contact with with your Spanish teacher or with the organizers (Pfingston and Wagschal) to be added to our Groupme chat,” Pfingston said.