FWIW the SJO guys have always been easy peasy in my experience over there. Give me an ESL controller in Latin or South America any day. Give them respect and you get it back.

I'm not a Spanish speaker and always tell my Spanish speaking FO's, "If you need to speak Spanish to clarify something or keep us out of trouble, jump right in and don't ask my permission". If we're in a stack getting cleared one by one into BOG, it sure is nice to have the additional SA when you have a Spanish speaking FO tell me "Yeah, we just got screwed, they just put Avianca ahead of us". Can't do anything about it, but it's nice to be in the loop.

Pause one second too long to verify a taxiway marking in ATL or ORD and they send you home feeling like a student pilot that just got a scolding from his Riddle CFI.