jacals

Noun

jacal (plural jacals or jacales)

1. A wattle-and-mud hut common in Mexico and the southwestern US.
   • The leaning jacal of dried rush-withes and corn sheaves, bound to tall saplings thrust into the earth, roofed with yellowed maguey leaves flattened and overlapping like shingles, hunched drowsy and fragrant in the warmth of noonday.1930, Katherine Anne Porter, “María Concepción”, in The Collected Stories of Katherine Anne Porter, New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, published 1965, page 5