Peruvian informal term for home — the place where you live, used casually among people you're comfortable with.
Jato is what Peruvians say when they mean their home — the actual physical place where they live. It emerged from Lima's streets in the 1980s, a word that feels entirely Peruvian even though it traces back to Quechua 'qata,' meaning roof. Most people using it today have no idea they're speaking an indigenous language. The word just feels local, natural, theirs.
The semantic path reveals something about how language thinks: roof became house became the place you crash. Some claim 'jatear' means to sleep, though everyday usage focuses on the house meaning — '¿Vamos a tu jato?' asks if you should head to someone's place. It's casual, friendly, the kind of word you'd use with the people you actually spend time with.
What makes jato interesting isn't its Quechua origins — it's how completely those origins disappeared. Peru's linguistic identity was shaped by centuries of Spanish and Quechua mixing, creating words that belong fully to neither language. Jato represents the deepest form of cultural blending: when borrowed vocabulary stops feeling borrowed and just becomes part of how a place speaks about itself. The word carries Lima's streets in it, not as history but as present-day reality.