What does “mijo” mean in Colombian Spanish?

Mijo and mija are contractions of mi hijo and mi hija (“my son,” “my daughter”), but in Colombia they’re used for almost anyone — a shopkeeper greets a customer with mijo, a stranger calls out mija, and it lands closer to “sweetie” or “dear” than “my child.” In a corner-store sketch, a boy asks the vecina to say chao, hijo when he leaves, the way his late mother used to.

The word doesn’t stay confined to children: in Colombia mijo can also be how a wife refers to her husband, and vecina/vecino (“neighbor”) work the same warm, informal way between people who barely know each other. That warmth is the whole point of this sketch — the boy is asking a stranger to echo the one word that made him feel like somebody’s kid.