Vecino le dice 'chao hijo' y todo cambia

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.