This article presents a conversational enactment of a leave-taking ritual, an archetype for Colombian spoken life, for the purpose of conversational analysis. This conversational enactment is drawn from audiotaped, naturally-occurring conversation recorded in Colombia in 1987. The purpose of analyzing this conversation is both to describe a conversational sequence which performs a symbolic activity among Colombians during leave-taking from social gatherings, and to elucidate what ethnographic information may (and may not) emerge from conversation analysis. The author of this article hopes to demonstrate that in this speech pattern an interpersonal ideology is revealed which revolves around the crucial importance of human connectedness, over and above individual desires. Colombians engage in the conversational exchange virtually every time they depart from a social gathering. Presented with the term "salsipuede," Colombians immediately recognize the kind of leave-taking behavior it connoted. Identifying and describing a repetitive conversational episode as a ritual depends on culturally contexted conversation analysis