Feeling Better Instead of Bitter about the Latino Immigrant
Copyright © 2012
by Max T. Russell
Smashwords Edition
Copyright © 2012
by Max T. Russell
Published by Fine Gold Press,
Publisher of Notable Books
Box 141, New Palestine, IN 46163
Printed in the United States of America
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means--such as electronic, photocopy, recording--without the prior written consent of the Fine Gold Press. The only exception is in the form of brief quotations in reviews.
This work is registered in the Copyright Office of the United States of America.
To all the wonderful Latino immigrants I have met as I traveled the USA over many years. I thank you deeply for your openness and your magnificent and undeserved trust as you've shared your hearts and food and time with me. Many thanks also to people of other colors and cultures who make up Beautiful America, land that I love. Thanks to y'all for being you!
Other products by the author and his twin
Max and Max Spanish
Videos for PK-8
Cultural Insights Video Series
Students’
Choice 1 Spanish Software
Students’ Choice 2 Spanish
Software
Bilingual Story Time for Preschool to First Grade
Ten
Things You Must Understand If You Want to Reach the Latino Immigrant
(Learn more at IncludingLatinos.com)
Dating
Latino Immigrants
Make Your House an International Home
Live
Before You Die: Tips for Staying Out of the Ditch of Mediocrity
A
Box Full of Paper Clips
Available in paperback:
Feeling Better Instead of Bitter about the Latino Immigrant
Note to Businesses and Organizations
If you have an entrepreneurial spirit and you want to go beyond feeling better instead of bitter, you really should invest in Ten Things You Must Understand If You Want to Reach the Latino Immigrant.
Be ready to throw out the clichés that keep many people angry and in the dark about immigration, and get ready to enjoy newcomers first as individuals and then as prospects, clients, customers, vendors, employees, and even lovers and neighbors.
Go to IncludingLatinos.com and find out about this private membership and what makes it so valuable and so different. Look the page over and then click on "Learn about Ten Things" toward the top.
Guatemalteco at the grocery store
Standing in the Atlantic with a colombiano
More than color, more than language
Hungry immigrant, lazy immigrant
Why fluency is difficult and How to achieve it
How much language do you need to know?
Aunt Grace doesn’t speak Italian, because this is America
I'm lucky if I can speak English
Why U.S. citizens love Mexican restaurants
Introduction
You drive by their neighborhoods and business districts and see people from somewhere else, recent arrivals who have been here for a day or a few years, others who have been here for ten or more years. You hear them talking Spanish. You hear their children speaking English with a strong Spanish accent and with no Spanish accent. You’re pretty sure their parents are from somewhere else, and you are correct in the overwhelming majority of cases. Most of the adults are without citizenship in this land.
You can spot their shiny dark hair and brown skin far down the street. You hear their music on a local radio station. You know they’re from somewhere else.
I saw one walking along the property line in back of my house five years ago. I spoke to him in Spanish and told him I was surprised to see him walking there along the edge of the big soybean field. He said he was feeling mal de la panza. He had a tummy ache. I offered to run inside and fetch him some Pepto-Bismol. He declined. He was just taking a walk to see if the discomfort would somehow go away.
This man from Mexico did not speak much English, although it is likely that he speaks much more now. He was working for a contractor who was laying a foundation for a garage that one of my neighbors was going to build. So I went a few yards over to meet the contractor. As I approached, I realized that he was the father of two boys I taught at the local elementary school. He told me the two Latinos who were helping with the foundation were hard-working family men he could count on. I had just gone through a series of unfortunate attempts to get U.S. contractors to do roof work and crawl space repairs, which would be followed by a local roofing contractor ripping me off, after another local contractor backed out of a deal that he proposed and which I had accepted and paid for. He repeated the stunt shortly after on a civic group two miles from my house.
It didn’t bother me one little bit that my neighbor was using a contractor who was using two Latinos that I knew were illegal. Here’s the simple plan:
Neighbor needs foundation for big garage.
Local contractor needs dependable workers to help him do
the job.
The foundation is laid.
Neighbor can now have another local contractor build
garage.
Everyone was happy except the people I’m reading about today in an email from an influential lobby that is trying to get our borders secured and immigration controlled. The complaint in the email is about all the U.S. citizens who are without work because illegal immigrants are stealing their jobs. I’m sure some employers are choosing illegal immigrants over citizens and legal residents. One reason I’m so sure is that some employers unfairly choose certain citizens above others, quite often to pay a lower wage. I’ve heard all sorts of people complain about unions and non-unions controlling who gets a job. I’ve seen lots of citizens squeezed out of their jobs by other citizens for unfair reasons and by cruel methods. If we were to survey our entire population, we would find countless millions of such stories. I hear them all the time, every year of my life. They are either in the news or in my social circles. Sometimes I know the people involved, sometimes I don’t, but one thing’s for sure – there are countless such stories involving only citizens. In fact, I’ll tell one right now that you could probably match with a few of your own.
Citizen Man has been working at an institution of higher learning for more than 20 years. He loves his work. He helps a lot of people get on the right path in life.
Citizen Woman has been his boss for the past two years. She doesn’t like the way Citizen Man operates. He’s an independent thinker who asks why his boss makes the decisions she makes. He’s in a position to do so because of his own rank and experience and because, as we all are told, universities are all about free thinking.
Citizen Woman starts taking him down, making a list of offenses. He’s unacceptable. He must go.
Citizen Man is getting bad vibes. He suspects that his boss is up to something. He is called into a meeting where he is told he can depart with a regular severance package or try to defend himself, which will be a waste of his time and money. Citizen Man retires, feeling betrayed.
Meanwhile...
Citizen Woman has overreached. It’s obvious to others and it’s not her only serious blunder. But there’s a big problem. Two of them. One, she’s a woman. Two, she’s not white.
Now the upper administration scrambles to keep her from doing more damage. She stays, but she is moved into a position with less authority. Citizen Man feels better, because at least he knows that other people in the organization disapproved of her management style and ethics. And, in case you’re interested, within only a few months he senses a calm that he never had during his two years under Citizen Woman. He’s free from interruptions on the job that never made sense. Now he can focus very pleasantly on whatever he wants to focus on. He won’t go back to the job. He just wishes that his long, loyal history with the place would’ve finished fair and square. It will always have a dirty ending that other people could have prevented. Put yourself in Citizen Man’s shoes and feel the pain and disgust. Do you think he wanted a retirement party? That would only have rubbed more salt into the wound.
These situations happen so often that they’re almost not worth talking about – except that they’re so disgusting!
Now let me tell you a story about an illegal immigrant who stole a citizen’s job.
Immigrant Man asked the owner of a Virginia landscaping business if he needed a helper. The owner said he would hire him if he were willing to work for five dollars an hour. Immigrant Man happily accepted the terms. The owner could now afford to fire a faithful employee who was born and raised in Alabama. Because of the savings in wages paid, the employer was able to do his next customer a favor and offer a price break. The owner felt better about the turnover.
Which of these stories makes you feel worse? Does one make you feel angrier? Do you feel anger toward Citizen Woman? How about toward Immigrant Man? Or toward the owner of the landscaping company? I made the second story up, but a lot of people would say it actually is what happened to them. Some people might say that the story involving an illegal immigrant is worse than the crooked ways of Citizen Woman. Those are the people who weren’t ripped off by her. They might say, “At least she’s legal.”
Sorry, but that’s no comfort at all to the victim of a dirty deal. “Oh, well, I got ripped off in such a nasty way, but at least I have the peace of knowing that it all happened at the hands of a fellow citizen. I’m so glad she was legal. I can’t imagine what it would have been like to be betrayed by someone from another country after more than twenty years of loyal service.”
Please.
Now I’ll tell you a true story that happened to me.
I tried to get an American contractor to replace the roof of a house I was about to buy. I waited and waited and waited. I finally decided to buy another house. Four months after my first call to the roofing contractor, he called to see if I was ready for him to replace the roof on the other house. I let the phone ring and then listened to the voicemail. He was ready to do my roof. Was I ready for him to do my roof? Call him and let him know.
The guy continued calling periodically for a long time.
The house I did buy needed work in the crawl space before the sale could be closed. I tried over and over to get another American contractor to come and do the work. He came once. Then he didn’t come. He said he would, but he didn’t. I eventually had to call him and press him for an answer: “Are you coming? The seller has already contracted with you for $2,000.”
The contractor sent another man to go under the house and assess the situation. I never saw that guy again either. The seller and I both pressured the contractor, who responded by telling me, “I could have your house condemned! Your plumbing problem under there is in violation of code.” I told him we’d find someone else to do the job. He voided the agreement and another contractor made the repairs. This one said, “You have the worst crawl space I have ever seen.” I don’t doubt it. I have been down there many times, and at the beginning of my time in the house, the crawl space was probably the scariest place I’ve ever been. The first contractor was too lazy to do the work, too dishonorable to honor his contract. The hungrier and more ethical contractor did the job. He had the same motivation that many, many immigrants have and which lazy American workers don’t have.
One reason I produced the audio and video series called “Ten Things You Must Understand If You Want to Reach the Latino Immigrant” is to show my fellow entrepreneurs and other business owners that many of the things that irk them about immigrants, especially the illegals, are nothing special. With a dab of remembering, we can come up with more undesirable behaviors in American workers and businesses than we care to count. Lots of people get irritated in special ways over immigration issues, concluding that nothing could be worse than being here illegally. We have to do a much better job of controlling our borders, but I don’t care who works on my roof or crawl space or driveway or the foundation for my neighbor’s garage. If I can’t get the born-in-the-USA contractor to do the work, I’ll hire the worker who will work for pay and who doesn’t make me search the wide country to find him. Since that has become harder and harder to accomplish, I have no guilt feelings about hiring whomever it takes to get the job done.
This book is related to “Ten Things You Must Understand If You Want to Reach the Latino Immigrant”. I wrote this book to help people see from a perspective that can help them feel better instead of bitter about the unstoppable shifting of populations around the world. People keep moving, for sad and happy reasons. You may remember that a few Africans were dragged over here to the Americas. That was immigration against their will. Because of the severe treatment and great losses of every kind which they suffered, blacks in the U.S. determined to preserve certain parts of their heritage. Of course, most of them have very little idea of where they came from. That is a sore spot that white people don’t usually take time to assess. Blacks born in the U.S. have preserved some cultural traces from Africa, adopted others as they learned of them, and created some of their own. They generally speak with a distinct black dialect, you might say, and they are known for freedom of expression and for tolerating certain differences better than other people do. All of this is part of the way blacks have been able to hold together, often with only a bare thread, through thick and thin, enriching our culture in certain undeniable ways, while people all around the world keep pulling up roots and moving and trying to find a community where they can survive and flourish and preserve part of their own heritage. I don’t like the term “melting pot”. I love the strong traces of varied heritage, people who hang on to recognizable pieces of what they came from, individuals who haven’t melted into one lump of sameness.
This book mainly deals with Hispanic Latino immigrants, which for convenience I will define as those who come from Spanish-speaking countries in the Western Hemisphere, and within the past twenty-five years or so. Brazilians are Latinos, but Portuguese is the language of Brazil. Other countries in Latin America are Latino, and Spanish is not their main language, either. This book includes some encounters with non-Latinos in order to show enjoyable differences among long-established citizens. We should take time to notice the differences. They can be a lot of fun, and, besides, we need each other. We are different, and we need our differences.
I don’t celebrate every difference. Nobody else does, either. I myself celebrate the interesting linguistic and cultural details that give a particular group of people their identity. The strange thing is that our country has always been full of such details, but because people tend to separate from each other or melt into one, a lot of the details go unnoticed because seeing them requires that they continue to exist and that the different people get close enough to each other to see the beautiful details. The United States has ALWAYS been a land of many languages and cultures, and it is all the more so with each passing year. This is America.
Section 1
Guatemalteco at the grocery store
Standing in the Atlantic with a colombiano
Guatemalteco at the grocery store
I met the guatemalteco in the meat and dairy section of the grocery store three days ago on one side of Charleston, South Carolina. My son Luke and I went to the store to gather supplies for our business road trip, because my wife and his mother was back in Indiana letting us starve to death. We would have to fend for ourselves for a whole ten days. And most frightening of all was the observation that almost everybody else in the store was black. Oh, good Lord! We’re the only whites in the store! What will become of us? This is so dangerous! These are the wilds of Africa! Maybe a giraffe will attack!
Some people would feel safer in a store full of illegal immigrants. They’re all dangerous, you know, those legal blacks and those illegal browns. A friend of mine packs a handgun. I said, “You always take it with you?” He said, “Yes, and especially when I go into Wal-Mart.” It’s true that the Wal-Mart not too far from his house always has a lot of blacks and Latinos in it, and a black woman was going crazy in there recently, screaming and screaming and screaming, and the blacks were embarrassed by her. Just an observation.
While Luke went to the far side of the grocery store in Charleston in search of cheese, I asked the guatemalteco where it was. He looked as though he didn’t hear a word I said, as if he didn’t even notice that I was speaking to him. So I asked in Spanish and he answered. Then I asked him where he was from and he said Guatemala. In Spanish, you don’t capitalize proper adjectives, such as Guatemalan. He’s a guatemalteco. Es guatemalteco.
Personal Details
He is married to a Mexican woman who is on the path to
citizenship.
He is divorced from a woman in Guatemala.
He has two grown children there. He stays in touch.
He came to the U.S. to find work, and is employed by a
federal institution.
He works very long days.
He came here illegally – with the help of a coyote, or
smuggler – which means he paid a lot of money to enter.
You may want to know how I know these things. Well, I simply asked him. He gladly told me everything. He could tell right off the bat that he was safe with me and that I was knowledgeable and genuinely interested. He also knew nobody else could understand. This is America. This is the world power. This is the home of people who believe the whole world should speak English here and there and everywhere. The guatemalteco felt perfectly safe telling me how he came here. Not only did he feel safe, he was safe, because only I understood him.
El guatemalteco works seven days a week. Most of us aren’t interested in doing that. He also works twelve-hour days. Twelve times seven. Do you really think he’s stealing anyone’s job? I said, “That’s a pretty tough work schedule, isn’t it?” Es muy difícil, ¿no? What do you suppose he said? Do you think he said he liked it? Would you guess that he said he didn’t like it?
I can’t wait to tell you. This is what he said: Si se quiere, se quiere. If you want to, you want to. In other words, he intends to survive. Beggars can’t be choosers, as the saying goes. He’s not interested in complaining. He came here against the law, and he’s going with the flow. He needs work. Someone offered him work. He’s working. Citizens are saying he’s mistreated, taken advantage of. He says, Si se quiere, se quiere. He’s working as hard as an entrepreneur, the same long hours.
We exchanged goodbyes.
He said, “Nos vemos, primo.” I’ll see you later, primo.
Primo, literally cousin but meaning buddy or friend or anything friendly along that line. Then our conversation resumed just a bit and we again said goodbye.
“Ha sido un placer,” I told him. It’s been a pleasure.
“Que le vaya bien, maestro,” he said. Maestro means teacher, of course, but here it’s another term of friendship.
Primo.
Maestro.
And I called him compa, an abbreviation used often in Mexico. Short for compañero. Friend.
Compa enjoyed the conversation. He may not have spoken Spanish with anyone else since he left for work thirteen hours earlier.
Standing in the Atlantic with a colombiano
My son Luke and I traveled up the coast the next day and circled a parking lot in search of an open space. It was early evening and the lot suddenly began to clear. We parked near the ice cream shop, picked out some tasty treats there and carried them to the edge of the sea. We heard various languages and accents. A white man speaking an odd-sounding language was in constant happy conversation with a black woman and with dark-skinned and lighter-skinned children who seemed to be their children. They were building a sand castle at the water’s edge. Closer inspection revealed that the man was speaking English of a peculiar variety. He spoke plenty loud but was very difficult for me to understand. The more clearly I heard him, the more peculiar he sounded.
The water was ninety-some degrees, too warm to be refreshing. Luke and I walked into it only a short distance so that it wouldn’t splash us higher than our knees. We had forgotten to bring our swimming trunks.
Two men about twenty-seven years of age walked past us, farther into the water, one of them carrying the odd shell of a football-like object. He and his friend tossed it back and forth until a long throw put it on the shore, by me. One of them came for it. I asked him what it was. He answered with what sounded like a Spanish accent. He was not Mexican, as most people in the U.S. assume, nor did he look Mexican.
He said, “It’s a football.”
“Como un huevo,” I said. Like an egg.
“Sí, como un huevo,” he replied. That switched us into full Spanish.
Personal Details
He’s from Colombia, South America. Es
colombiano.
He is divorced, with one child.
He’s been here for twelve years.
He is on a slow path to citizenship.
He came here legally.
He came in search of work.
How this young man got here legally is probably easy to explain. I’m sure he obtained a six-month work visa or student visa and then overstayed it. Then he married a citizen and was permitted to get on the path to citizenship. Since he is now divorced, he is legally detached from the wife who has citizenship, but he is legally attached to the child. He told me he was married for three years, which tells me he probably will not have any particularly difficult problems moving toward citizenship. Without a good immigration attorney, however, he seems to be moving very slowly toward it, and that bothers him. That leads me to believe an unspoken complication exists.
“Todos venimos por trabajo,” he tells me. We all come here for work.
I tell you this little episode simply because it illustrates how a citizen can encounter a Latino immigrant almost anywhere – behind my backyard, a grocery store, the seashore. I was floating on an inner tube down a rural Indiana creek several years ago when I heard a snorting sound, an aggressive snorting. I turned to my left and saw a deer that wanted to cross. We moved past the animal and soon stirred up a large blue heron, which squawked and flew on ahead and around the next bend. We continued stirring the huge bird, only by riding the current, until it finally flew out of the creek zone.
The stream quietly carried us another quarter mile, where the trees that had lined the water on the left side gave way to wild, short grass, and there on the bank were two Latinos fishing. I could tell from their clothing and their facial expressions that they were illegal. I didn’t care about that, and you might wonder why I would dare to conclude that they were illegal. Sometimes it’s so easy to tell if they are. Immigrants, like most of our ancestors, have many apprehensions that show on their faces at certain times. Mere discomfort, uncertainty, fear, confusion, questions, hunger, rays of hope, desire to be accepted, desire to be safe, desire to make it through another day, desire to start a new life. You can probably read expressions on your family’s faces at lightning speed – and accurately so in many cases. That is partly how I can zero in on an immigrant’s situation in a mere instant. Thousands of conversations have confirmed these instantaneous readings. I’m no better at them than any other person experienced in this. We have an expression in English: It’s written all over your face. Sometimes it’s written all over a person.
José, married for love
Luke and I decided on a buffet restaurant for supper or dinner or whatever people around this place call it. Even growing up in Indiana I never knew the difference. Some people called supper dinner and others called dinner supper. At least I thought they did. Actually, I never knew what they were trying to say. I eventually concluded that some called lunch dinner and that nobody called lunch supper. Then I noticed that only big lunches and late lunches were called dinner. By some people. A two o’clock lunch became a dinner – if and only if it were something like a supper, like a fuller meal, not a light meal as lunches often are. The main problem I had was this: If you have a late lunch, and if it meets the standards for sliding into the dinner range, what will you call the next meal? That is the problem that hounded me for years, and I still haven’t figured it out.
Whatever the reason Luke and I had for being at the restaurant, whether for a late dinner or for supper, we went with the intention of eating a full meal, which qualifies whatever we were going to eat as a supper. I’m more comfortable calling it supper, since I don’t use the word dinner so often.
We lined up at the counter that was the entrance to the supper area, which would have been the breakfast area earlier in the day. The Southern woman at the Southern counter took our orders in her Southern accent. Although I can’t promise that I remember exactly what she said, it had to be something like “What would y’all like to drink?”, to which I answered, “What do I look like I want to drink?” She looked at me, turned her head slowly without losing eye contact, then tilted her ahead away, still eyeing me. I looked away and then back. She was still searching my face and thinking. I looked away again and then back. There she was, still searching me.
“I think you need either a something-or-other or a Sierra.”
She didn’t actually say “something-or-other”. I just couldn’t understand her. And Sierra is not a name I use for a soft drink. We say Sierra Mist if it’s a Sierra Mist. But I understood that part. So that’s what I ordered.
One of us paid for the meal that we were about to make sure would deserve to be called a proper supper. We moved to the end of the counter and waited. The reason we waited is that a sign standing there told us in crystal-clear terms to wait. Anyone could read it. “Please wait to be seated.”
We stood there waiting.
And waiting.
The customers behind us began to step past us and into the supper area. We moved out of the way so we wouldn’t block anyone who wanted to barge in. Then I got suspicious.
I said to the Southern woman at the Southern counter who was ringing up more customers, “How do we do this?”
She said in her Southern accent, “Y’all just go on in and have a seat.”
Now, that’s weird, I said to myself. Why in the world would somebody put a sign up like that and then tell us y’all go on in and have a seat?
I craned my neck to see the front of the sign. It sure enough said, “Y’all please wait to be seated.” Or something like that. I took a closer look.
“Hey, Luke, look at this,” I said. Luke looked. The sign didn’t say, “Y’all please wait to be seated.” It didn’t even say, “Please wait to be seated.” That would be a very, very big total of six words. We can’t read that many Southern words at a time. The sign said, and if you went back and checked, it probably still says in clear Southern English, “Please be seated.”
Well, guess what – we don’t have that in Indiana. Our signs say, “Please wait to be seated,” unless you’re supposed to seat yourself, in which case the signs say, “Please seat yourself.” You can’t tell Hoosiers in the upper two thirds of our state, “Y’all please be seated,” or we’ll think you told us to wait to be seated. You can talk that way to people in Evansville and as far north as New Albany and maybe Corydon, but the rest of us, we’ll stand at the sign all day long, sign or no sign, and we’ll wait to be seated until we get hungry enough to leave and go somewhere else. We might not do anything else you tell us, but we will wait to be seated.
Notice the big, big difference:
Please be seated. (Southern)
Please seat yourself. (Hoosier)
No wonder Luke and I couldn’t understand. We read English just fine, but the linguistic differences are astounding. I’m not sure what they are in this case, but they’re there and they are so obvious as to surpass argument. Otherwise we wouldn’t have stood there for four and a half hours waiting to be told that we could ignore the sign and just go on in and sit down and y’all enjoy your dinner or supper or whatever y’all call it.
José came by our table. He is stately, respectful, alert, about 40 years old. His appearance and his accented English told that he was Mexican. I couldn’t understand his English very well, but he was making a strong effort – certainly more than most U.S. snowbirds make to learn Spanish when they spend long vacations in Mexico – and much of what José said was quite well enunciated. He was making a mighty effort that earned my respect.
He asked what we wanted to drink. I couldn’t understand. He asked Luke. That time I understood. He asked me again and I switched to Spanish. After that, we spoke Spanish only.
The only thing I could see wrong with José is that the Southerners are teaching him to talk funny. He came by our table a few times and asked if we wanted a drink. I thought he was asking if we wanted something from the bar. Then I realized the restaurant only has food bars. He meant soft drinks and water. I have never heard this in the North. I’m used to being asked if I would like something to drink. If someone says, “Do you want a drink?”, that means one thing: Do you want a drink with alcohol in it?
Personal Details
He is married to a Mexican woman who is on the path to
citizenship.
He too is on the path to citizenship.
He came here legally.
He obtained a visa from the Mexican consulate in Mexico.
He married for love.
Well, that’s what everyone wants to say. Married for love. José wasn’t kidding. I pushed his button.
“Did you marry an American woman?”
“No. I married for love.”
He knew what I meant. Lots of illegal immigrants marry citizens in order to get a legal status that can lead to citizenship. The journey to citizenship is still long for them, but it can be shorter than it would be.
“¡Felicidades!” I said. Congratulations! That seemed to smooth things over, because José knew that I knew that he had held out for true love with a view to a lasting commitment, rather than seeing a marriage license as citizenship papers.
I could tell José had come to the United States in search of work. I could also tell he had been illegal. He said he came on a plane eight years ago. I said that was quite an accomplishment, since some people I know couldn’t get the visa but came on a plane anyway, somehow. He said, “We can only fly here if we have a visa.” I said some are doing it without a visa. In a very gentle exchange, he acknowledged that he had come on a six-month work visa. Translation: he overstayed it, took a job, fell in love along the way with a Mexican woman. True love. Truly good work ethic. Truly the kind of people we want here.
Coffee shop talk
The young woman behind the coffee shop counter said, “Well, now, do you like chicken or turkey or ham or all of them?”
I said I liked them all but that I preferred chicken and turkey. “But I want chicken.”
“Ok, you want chicken. So I’m going to recommend this sandwich. Now, do you want soup or a salad?”
“Do I want soup or salad? I asked you to make the decision for me, and now you’re putting all this on me.”
“All right, well, that’s where I come in.“
“I don’t want salad. I don’t want salad.”
“All right, then, since you’re going to get the chicken sandwich, I’m going to say that you need this soup right here.”
“Okay.”
“And do you want an apple or chips?”
“I thought you were going to decide.”
“Well, that’s where you come in.”
“I don’t want an apple. I just had one.”
“All right, that’s where I come in. I’ll give you chips.”
With these and all the rest of the decisions out of the way, Luke placed his order, and we took a table where we could plug in our laptops. A college-aged black girl was cleaning tables. We began a long discussion.
“Are people around here mad at the Latino immigrants?”
“Well, yeah. Mostly there are black people around here, and, yeah, they’re mad because, you know, they take the jobs.”
This young woman’s interest in the people and history of Latin America went on and on. We discussed color, race and racism in Latin America, how indigenous people are often victims of severe prejudice of brown people and how brown people there are often prejudiced against darker people or people who have more indigenous blood and more evident indigenous features.
I told this young woman, “In a lot of places there, if you’re indigenous or if people know you come from a certain region, like a mountain area where los indios live, or a certain village, you might as well be a nigger.” She told me of an Argentine man who did not appreciate anyone mistaking him for a Mexican. He had his own nationality. Everybody’s not from Mexico.
The girl and I were eye to eye. She wanted to know more. No matter what I told her, she wanted to know more. How do people in our southern hemisphere think of themselves in terms of race, ethnicity and nationality? How can you tell where a Latino is from just by looking?
It was a really fun conversation. We talked about how one black professor says black people in America like to claim that they’re part Native American, but they rarely are. “And if they say Cherokee,” said the girl, “you know they’re not Cherokee. They like to say they’re Cherokee.”
I wondered if this college girl or very many other blacks know how many blacks the Cherokee bought and stole and kept as slaves. American history is so bizarre.
After ten minutes, she clenched the wipe cloth she was holding and said, “I better get going. I don’t want my manager to have to wonder about me.” I’m not one to say this more than once in a great long while, but I think something happened to that girl during our conversation. I think her mind zoomed around the world and saw the beautiful variety of culture, language, history, and color, and that she loved what she saw. I don’t think she will ever be happy to live in the world as she has known it. She’s thinking beyond the usual complaints about immigrants and language and all the shouting about racism. She wants to understand and enjoy this changing world as far as she possibly can. She’s rethinking history. That will change anyone with an open mind.
On the way out of the store, I asked the black girl at the counter who took my order earlier, “How do you say pop here?”
“Soda.”
“How do you say ‘you guys’?”
“Y’all.”
Now, why would I or anyone else want to go and standardize everybody’s speech and destroy the delightful differences that make traveling fun and the world a far more interesting place? Y’all know better’n that.
Black in white
Black women in egg-shell-white classy dresses bustled the about hotel. “Hello, sister. Hello, sister,” they said for three days in a row as they moved in small groups to the in-house restaurant or sat in the fancy furniture or rode the elevators together. I believe they even went to the bathroom together. Girls are that way.
These chicks all looked alike in their uniform dresses. Grab any two and you had twins, all in their 40s, 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s. Proud women, proud sisters, proud to be together. Most of the time.
Three walked past me.
“She could’ve at least said hi,” said one.
“Oh, now, calm down,” said a sister.
They walked to the restaurant while I retraced every hall in the place, thinking through a project. I noticed some of the blacks in white arranging jewelry on tables inside the gift shop they had taken over for the week. I brought Luke down to marvel at it with me. We headed to the pool for an hour and a half, dried off, and went to buy some jewelry.
Necklaces. Bracelets. Earrings.
Thirty dollars. Twenty-five dollars. Fifteen dollars.
One or more blacks in white were standing at each table of jewelry. The table Luke and I were interested in was the one with the jewelry that was obviously hand-made. I like stories, so I asked the black in white about the maker of the necklaces, bracelets, and earrings, many of which projected an African motif of the most pleasant kind. Beautiful handiwork of one Gwendolyn, 54, suffering back pain, going in for surgery, going to get an injection, first cousin. The woman explaining this to us was Gwenevera. Gwen and Gwen. And Gwen said Gwen was a wonderful woman. It’s just that she had back pain and, I guess, she wasn’t able to be there in such a condition.
We studied each necklace on the table, many of which came with bracelets and earrings. “I’ll work with you,” said Gwen. She said we could call her Gwen.
“No, you won’t,” we told her. “You’re not going to work with us. This stuff is worth the money. Your cousin worked hard to make these. They’re beautiful.”
Gwen helped us decide. I made her take each necklace out of its little plastic bag that dulled the true sheen and color, and hold it against herself so we could see how the jewelry looked on a woman. Luke was in a gray T-shirt and I was in a dark, ugly green one.
“Don’t touch me!” I said to two blacks in white standing almost against me while surveying items on an adjacent table. “We’re wet.”
After at least a half hour, we decided on five sets. We were so touched by Gwen’s cousin Gwen’s eye for combining colors and materials that we wanted to buy everything on the table. Gwen took the five choices and put two of them on one corner and began the count.
“Twenty-five.” She looked at me and started to continue. “I’m working with you.”
“No, you’re not,” we told her. “You’re not going to work with us.” Luke told her we were going to pay full price, and I made sure she knew we weren’t backing down. I mean, I made some kind of a face to back Luke up. Gwen said, “Ohhhh, okay,” and came to an honest count of $125, much less than Gwen’s cousin Gwen deserved, but at least we paid full price and made our joy obvious. Cousin Gwen would hear about it and savor the accomplishment of having placed her gorgeous handiwork in the hands of two admiring guys who couldn’t wait to give the jewelry to a mother, a sister, and a girlfriend. We would make sure they knew about Gwen and Gwen.
Out in the parking lot that evening, we met three women from the group who were now in spectacular long dresses. I walked right up in my fashion and told them I wanted to know where those spectacular dresses came from. Each woman explained how the three different dresses arrived from Africa. It’s a funny thing to stare at a woman’s dress, because, in a way, you end up staring at the woman. But you actually can stare at a dress without staring at the body it’s on. The ladies didn’t mind, and I wasn’t finished staring at the marvelous fabrics.
“These women are out picking up men,” I said loudly to Luke as we walked away.
“We let you get away,” said one of them.
We met Keron in the swimming pool. That’s pronounced kay RON. He’s a barber with a gift from God. He said so and he’s an honest man and I believe him. He can cut a design into a head of hair like you can’t imagine – words, a picture, whatever you need. But he burned out in that work, probably from the high demand. Everybody wanted kay RON to do their hair. Now 45, he’s taking a break and working in manufacturing. But what really makes him hoot is talking about his family’s cooking.
There in the pool, with two sons and a nephew behaving like they should at the shallower end, we bobbed up and down talking food with Keron, married to his only wife for 25 years going strong. He is clearly a super-dad and super-uncle, and he says the trouble with most black couples is that the women don’t let the men be men.
He talked of turkey, fried turkey, his brother’s fried turkey.
“What are you talking about?” I asked. “I’ve never heard of fried turkey.”
That was throwing gasoline on the fire. Keron began hooting, his face toward the open night sky. Let me tell you, just taking him at his word, which I’ve already said I do, if you haven’t had fried turkey, you honestly don’t know what you’re missing. I’m not saying you’re intentional ignorant, since it wouldn’t be fair or right for me to say something like that, but if you think you know fried turkey, well, we’re talking about Keron’s brother’s deep-fried turkey. Maybe you thought I meant any ol’ fried turkey. Wrong. I’m talking kay RON’s brother’s fried turkey. Drops the whole bird into a large deep-fryer and leaves it there for one hour per pound.
“That would be a long time for a big turkey,” I said.
“Well, maybe I exaggerated,” Keron said. “You could probably cook the whole thing in two hours. You could do it in two hours. My brother does it in two hours.”
Keron told us about potato pie, which turned out to be what anyone up north would always call sweet potato pie, but Keron takes the liberty of calling it potato pie, even though he explained that it is made from sweet potatoes.
“So it’s sweet potato pie...that’s what we’re talking about?”
“Yeah,” he said. “Potato pie.”
And oh what can be done with string beans. Since his wife doesn’t like to experiment with recipes, Keron found a friend who was willing to make a string bean casserole according to a recipe that Keron found. By the time he was through detailing it for us, Luke and I were ready for another supper or dinner or whatever y’all wanna call it. The main thing as far as I’m concerned is that the string beans – “They need to be string beans” – and mushroom soup and onions and ground beef are covered with a top layer of tater tots. That was terribly irresistible to me, but I needed to clarify terms.
“You say ‘tater tots’. What are tater tots to you?”
“You know, they’re potatoes, little potatoes, they’re square.”
I’ve never seen square tater tots, but Keron said it’s fine to use round tots. He hooted and hooted to high heavens and went on explaining more mouth-watering dishes until Luke and I could hardly stand it. However, it was too late to eat, unless we were at a taquería in Mexico City where meal time is on another schedule and nobody confuses the word for lunch with the word for supper, and there is no distinction between dinner and supper or between supper and a late supper. And where nobody hoots like Keron the Magnificent Barber, Husband of One Wife for Twenty-Five Years, Super Dad, Super Uncle. He’s a hard act to follow. You don’t get that in Mexico City. No, no, eso no se ve en México, D.F.
We told Keron we might show up on his doorstep one day for Thanksgiving. He said, “Come on over!” He said Thanksgiving or any other time, come on over! We’d love to be there. And maybe he would create a work of art in our hair. Or maybe we’d just sit around and listen to his food stories and let him hoot into the night and make our mouths water on a full stomach of string bean casserole, square tater tots, potato pie, and fried turkey.
Four blacks in white were at the elevators the next morning, near where I was sitting and working. One pressed the button. Three stood in front of the middle elevator, while the fourth went and stood in front of the elevator on the right.
“You always do that,” said one of the blacks in white in front of the middle elevator. “But I know it works.”
The doors to the elevator on the left opened first and the three women in front of it boarded. The fourth black in white followed.
“You’re going to need a new trick,” I called out.
She told the other three, “I was gonna take y’all down in that elevator.” The four women disappeared out of sight and a few moments later the other elevator opened, which proves her plan would’ve worked.
An hour or so later I was sitting in a chair on the ground floor, still working. I heard music, soft, beautiful melody. Must be a CD playing, I thought. The music continued, and now I was hearing singing, soft singing, women’s voices, soft, steady, fearless voices.
Victory is mine
Victory is mine
Victory today is
mine
I left the chair and peered around the corner into a large hallway. There they were, the blacks in white, in three columns, clapping softly, stepping forward with a turn to the right, to the middle, to the left, repeatedly, slowly moving forward and disappearing three at a time into a ballroom where hundreds of blacks in white clapped and sang the simple words in utterly beautiful unity.
A 75-year-old member of the society stood against the wall in the wide corridor and explained the ceremony to me. She appreciated my appreciation. Meanwhile, the columns of blacks in white disappeared into the ballroom too soon. Four women sat at a long table in the hall. One of them said, “You can’t see no more.” I sat down beside her and, in an astonishing voice, she sang me the whole song. She said I could record her if I wanted.
Americans
People born and raised in the United States are known around the world for thinking everything’s supposed to go their way. The world is supposed to revolve around us. This is especially true of patriotic Americans. If our politicians order our armed forces to destroy some village controlled by a band of rebels considered at the moment to be against the best interests of the U.S., or to overthrow a government, then millions upon millions of U.S. patriots will back up the decision. It can be way too disturbing to lean toward the possibility that the decision was political or unwise or not what God wanted. Yet, if the same politicians make a decision affecting anything at all about our domestic policies, millions of patriots will rise in anger against the selfish, power-hungry, clumsy, immoral, stupid, ignorant, heretical, inhumane, traitorous lawmakers and policy-makers who need to be yanked out of office so we can keep their fingers out of other people’s business.
That is a problem. Not the politicians, but people. Humans. They’re everywhere, patriotic and not-too-patriotic people who know God is on their side when the selfish, power-hungry, clumsy, immoral, stupid, ignorant, heretical, inhumane, traitorous lawmakers and policy-makers disrupt or take advantage of other societies, and who also know that God is on their side when the selfish, power-hungry, clumsy, immoral, stupid, ignorant, heretical, inhumane, traitorous lawmakers and policy-makers do anything that disrupts our internal affairs. We’ve got liberals praying God’s blessings down upon what liberals do, and we’ve got conservatives praying God’s blessings down upon what conservatives do. People tend to think God thinks like they do. Their nice thoughts and great ideas are from God. God thinks great thoughts. The army invades a country and explodes a building and forty-five civilians die. Tough. That’s war. They were pro-Americans, maybe even Jews. Oops. Well, uh, um, oh, well! That’s the price of war! Sorry about that, but war is dirty business.
Then the local government here in the States rezones part of your neighborhood, allowing businesses to build there and alter your routine. How can they do this? What is America coming to? It’s all about money and political gain! They’re destroying our way of life! Doesn’t anyone care about constitutional rights anymore?!!!
Oh, well, that’s the price of living in an economy. Sorry about that, but life is dirty business.
Liberals cite unmistakably clear constitutional support for what they do; conservatives cite constitutional support for what they do, and if you can’t see how unmistakably clear it is, you aren’t serious about America and all she stands for and all the hard work and suffering that made this nation what it is today – a bunch of belly-aching people who are constantly at word wars with each other. Every single year, every single year, decade after decade, we listen to political smear campaigns and we hear the candidates themselves say the exact same thing: “Americans are tired of smear campaigns.”
Well, not really. If they are tired of hearing them on traditional TV, they sure as heck aren’t tired of calling in and ranting and raving about it on their favorite talk shows. Americans LOVE to cut each other down to nothing day after day, year after year. Americans are tired of smear campaigns? Hardly. It has become the nonstop content that fills so many people’s day. The kids have their mini-headsets in their ears while the adults are stuffing their heads full of deep-fried, anti-fellow-American junk. Junk brain food. Food-for-thoughtlessness. Automatic reactions to what they’re told is brilliant news analysis. It’s hammered into their heads. They like it hammered into their heads. They plug into it every day and consume it as though it were the latest, most urgent, most insightful, God-blessed information that makes a day worth living and keeps America free and saves the world. Millions of Christians have replaced the teachings of Christ with the perpetual smearing of talk radio hosts and callers who together sling mud in Jesus’s name. They feast ravenously on junk talk. God bless the host. God bless America. Sling the mud with gratitude. Some countries don’t allow their people to sling so much mud.
Sling, sling, sling. Mud, mud, mud. God, God, God. A daily rhythm, a very, very stupid daily rhythm that contaminates the mind with attitudes that are forbidden in the Bible that is so often quoted by opposing sides. One loud theme of Jesus’s famous Sermon on the Mount is that you must not grind people into the dirt. Most of what is said on liberal and conservative talk shows – whether they are called magazines or analysis – could be discussed in civil ways that might not lure as many listeners but might keep the program ratings up. Even programs on National Public Radio that claim to be fair and balanced are some of the most unbalanced. I have listened to the hosts defend their biases as balanced considerations, and I am always amazed at their blind spots. It takes more than the tone of one’s voice to be calm and balanced. Not that you should always be balanced, but if you’re going to claim to be, your very message must be.
I don’t spend all my time worrying about the problems of the world. I know plenty of people who think they need to keep their ears glued to the radio for the latest “developments”. Who was hit by a hurricane? Who raped whom? Who shot and killed whom? Who was ripped off? Who was arrested in violation of their rights? How many people are coming into the country undocumented? How many workers are working without authorization?
In most cases, I know a hundred times more about immigrants than the talk radio celebrities. Conservative talk radio keeps the phones ringing off the wall with the immigration controversies. When times are tough, recent immigrants in America are blamed. It doesn’t matter that you can easily show the ways that citizens are milking the system. The immigrants are the problem. It doesn’t matter that a few citizens can make decisions with horrible effects on everyone’s wallet. The immigrants are the problem.
It is so easy to blame, and even easier to blame newcomers or people who look and sound different. It’s so easy to do it in the name of God and country. Americans have a powerful self-centeredness. Without necessarily having a good reason, we can blow countries to pieces, causing social upheaval that causes populations to uproot and flee across borders. We can accomplish the same result by toppling a tyrant. And we can do it without sympathy for innocent citizens of the country who have no say in their countries political affairs, and no sympathy for the countries that “have” to take in the fleeing immigrants.
I realize that winning a war usually requires a country to be savage, and some wars are inevitable. I am saying that Americans, because of their self-centeredness and their isolation from language and culture, have a hard time caring about foreign or foreign-born people with whom they have no personal relationship. Americans will donate profusely to disaster relief here and abroad, but they are relatively slow to empathize with foreigners who suffer unnecessarily because of our military and political maneuvers or who come to this country with low English skills the way most of our ancestors did, or who come with unfamiliar complexions the same way our ancestors appeared to the “First Americans”.
Yes, there are lazy immigrants, not near as many by any means as the millions of citizens who don’t carry their own load, and there are immigrants who deserve to be deported for misconduct, but the numbers are nowhere near as scary, nowhere nowhere nowhere as scary as the FAR bigger numbers of citizens that we know are milking our system and throwing wrenches into it. When we get past ourselves, past thinking from our own points of view, we can leave silly and damaging preconceptions behind, just in time to avoid ridiculous conclusions about people that I happen to know you would love to get to know. When you spend the time it takes to understand their ways of thinking, you will find that they can be great friends, employees, associates, and clients.
In my honest opinion, that’s much easier than me trying to understand my wife. I’ve been trying to figure her out for more than thirty years, and in this case, it’s not a matter of whether she’s worth it; it’s just part of the package. As the song goes, “I still ain’t got them women figgered out.” Someday when I have nothing more important to do, I may write a book called Ten Million Things You Must Try to Understand If You Want to Start Understanding Your Woman.
Section 2