Brete
Work, the job, the graft — with its own verb, "bretear". What Costa Ricans say instead of "trabajo".
Related lesson: Costa Rican Spanish: A Survival Guide.
Hear it in context
Mañana no puedo, tengo brete desde temprano.
I can't tomorrow — I'm at work from early on.
Lleva tres meses breteando en un call center.
He's been working in a call centre for three months.
¿Y usted en qué bretea?
So what do you do for a living?
What It Actually Means
Brete is the job: the place you go, the hours you owe and the thing that stops you coming out. It works as an uncountable (tengo brete, “I’ve got work on”) and as a countable position (conseguí un brete nuevo), and it generates the verb bretear, to work or to graft. It is informal but perfectly respectable — Costa Ricans use it about their own careers without irony.
Where It Comes From
From the general Spanish brete — a cattle chute or a set of stocks, and figuratively a tight spot, which is why estar en un brete still means “to be in a bind” almost everywhere else. The usual explanation is that Costa Rica narrowed the bind into the daily grind, which is plausible and, as far as anyone has shown, unrecorded: no one has documented the step from the chute to the payslip.
How Natives Use It
Everywhere below the level of a formal document, from a WhatsApp excuse to a radio interview. Every Spanish-speaking country has its own word for this — Mexico’s chamba, Argentina’s laburo, Chile’s pega, Colombia’s camello, Spain’s curro — and brete is the one that marks you as tico within a sentence.
Common Pitfall
Take it across a border and it inverts. Say “estoy en un brete” in Madrid or Buenos Aires and you have announced that you are in serious trouble, not that you are at your desk. Inside Costa Rica the reverse trap applies: on a CV or a contract, the word is trabajo or empleo.