Category: Mexicans

I discuss issues about Mexican culture in the U.S. and Mexico.

Good Friday


Holy Cross Church, Back of the Yards, Chicago, Illinois

Good Friday always reminds me of many things. I know, I know, it’s Saturday. I’m not late. I’m running on Mexican Time. I once saw that on a T-shirt.

If you ever have a party and invite some Mexicans, make accommodations for Mexican Time. If you want everyone to be at your house by four, tell them the party’s at three. Well, because 3:00 o’clock lasts until 3:59! 3:59 is still 3:00 in the mind of a Mexican. Say 3:59 out loud. Go ahead. Did you hear all three digits? If you did, you’re not Mexican. A Mexican will only hear the initial digit “3” and then block out the rest of the digits. That’s just how Mexicans process time.

Anyway, I forgot all about Good Friday until late last night when Jay Leno mentioned that it was Good Friday. And then I felt guilty. Because I’m a lapsed Catholic who suffers from constant guilt. It’s like being Mexican. You never stop being Catholic–or feeling guilty about something. Well, during the day yesterday, I remembered that it was Good Friday. I thought I should celebrate it in my own lapsed-Catholic fashion to ease some guilt for forgetting about not going to church on Good Friday. So, I had decided to write a blog entry about Good Friday. But then I forgot all about it. Or I blocked it out. And now I feel extremely guilty. That’s why I’m writing this while Good Friday is less than twenty-four hours over. I feel a little less guilty now.

Toluca, México

As Mexican Catholics, we attended a Lithuanian Catholic church in the Back of the Yards. Holy Cross Church was our parish. I also attended Holy Cross School from kindergarten through eighth grade. There was no separation between church and school. We were taught lessons in church, and we prayed in school. In church, we were taught by Lithuanian priests and in school Lithuanian nuns taught us, with the occasional visit by the pastor who would give us holy cards if we answered his catechism questions correctly. We never forgot about religious holidays because we were in school five days a week and in church six days a week. We would be reminded for weeks in advance of an upcoming holy day. Holy Week was one of the most important times of the year for us. It began on Palm Sunday and ended on Easter Sunday.

Mexicans in Chicago commemorate many of these events by reenacting them. I’ve been to reenactments of the Last Supper, Jesus Christ’s procession to Golgotha, and the Crucifixion of Jesus Christ. This always struck many people, who were of the non-Mexican persuasion, as sacrilegious.

To this day, the holy day that I remember the most is Good Friday. That was the day that Jesus Christ was crucified for our sins. And we should never forget that!

We attended school on Good Friday until it was time to go next door to church for the Good Friday service at 3:00 p.m. sharp. All the students sat with their classmates and nuns who were their teachers. We would get to church early so we could pray until the service began. We were supposed to recall all the events of Jesus Christ’s life and how he died for our sins.

I remember when I was about eight years old, the nun told us in school that Jesus Christ died at three p.m. and that every Good Friday it rains at that time for Jesus Christ. I was just a boy and I believed absolutely everything I was taught. During the Good Friday service, the bright sunny church interior suddenly dimmed and then darkened. Just as the priest told of how the Romans were nailing Jesus Christ to the cross, the church became as dark as night. Someone turned some lights on. Then, we saw lightning flashes and a moment later we heard deafening thunder. The church trembled and the lights flickered. The thunderstorm, lightning, and thunder continued for several minutes. The priest stopped to genuflect and bless himself. That was a defining moment in my development as a young Catholic. I became a true believer at that precise moment. From then on, I always believed everything that the priests and nuns told me.

DDR

Hildago


I can't believe my mother let me grow my hair this long!
I can’t believe my mother let me grow my hair this long!

Everyone called him Hildago and he never corrected anyone. Years later, I discovered that his surname was actually Hidalgo, which is derived from the Spanish hijo de algo meaning someone with wealth.

I first met Hildago when I had my paper route. Later, when I was promoted to branch captain (Sounds impressive, doesn’t it?), I was his boss. He was Mexican, but he didn’t speak Spanish. Now that I think of it, he only kind of looked Mexican.

Hildago is one of those persons whom I often meet when I least expect to. I knew him as a paper boy. Then I didn’t seem him for years until I went to Tilden Technical High School. We were in an English class together where the teacher really didn’t teach anything and we talked the whole period or read comic books in class. That’s when I learned his real name. He was the one kid my mother told me to avoid. She just didn’t like him, for whatever reason I never found out. The more she tried to break up our friendship, the closer we got.

When we moved out of Back of the Yards to Marquette Park, I didn’t see Hildago for a couple of years. Once I started working and got a car, I started visiting him again. I guess he was a bad influence on me, but he made life much more fun. Because of him, I met my first wife Linda who was his cousin. When we were nineteen, Illinois lowered the drinking age to nineteen, so we used to drink wine and/or Southern Comfort together. I went to my first concert with him and two other friends. We used to go to discos together a lot. I can now see why mother was against our friendship. He really was a bad influence on me.

Hildago was quite unusual in that he made a lousy first impression, but he was very well liked by many people in the neighborhood. He was socially inept, but he always managed to impress people who needed to be impressed despite his various faux pas. When we were young men, he no longer looked Mexican. I mean, he had black hair, brown eyes, and perpetually tanned skinned, but he looked Filipino! Whenever we went out, a lot of Filipinas were attracted to him. He dated quite a few. I remember he dated one nurse whose husband was back in the Philippines. She was saving up enough money to go back to the Philippines, but she was lonely here in Chicago. So she dated my friend.

He eventually married a Filipina and when they had a daughter, they asked me to be the godfather. At first, I tried to turn down this great honor because I didn’t think I could fulfill the responsibilities of being a godfather. He told me that I would just have to show up for a few birthday parties and Christmas parties and then I could disappear. He insisted and then his wife insisted, so I agreed.

Then, they introduced me to the godmother with the hopes of starting a serious relationship between us. Well, the godmother was a Filipina named Lalin. We talked on the phone a few times before the baptism. Since she had just come from the Philippines, she didn’t speak English that well. We eventually spoke Spanish since she had studied it more than English. We seemed to get along fine. We never actually dated, though. After the baptism we never talked again. Hildago kept asking me what happened between us, but I told him that there wasn’t much chemistry between us. I was probably more interested in her than she was in me.

I lost track of Hildago again. Later, I invited him to my son’s birthday party and he came with his daughter, my god-daughter, whom I had not seen since she was very little. Then I didn’t see him again for years. But then I saw him at a K-Mart by my house. Just when I never expected to see him again. He told me it was my god-daughter’s eighteenth birthday, so he invited me to her party. I went and my god-daughter was happy to see me. Now that I think of it, I haven’t seen her since. But I warned Hildago in the first place that I wouldn’t be a good godfather.

DDR

Rudy


South Side, Chicago, Illinois

Rudy was the consummate pitchman. The last time I met him was at his mother’s funeral when we were both adults. He was telling about his job as a brake pad salesman, and I was thoroughly impressed by his knowledge of brake pads.

However, I shall always remember how he tried out as pitcher for the Chicago White Sox every spring. He was a Southsider, after all. The coaches always told him to keep working out. In the traditional Chicago fashion, Rudy always reassured us with the words, “Wait till next year!” One of the main reasons he never made the team was because he focused more on spending time with his drinking buddies.

He was a great storyteller who always attracted the attention of everyone within hearing range. He was a very likeable guy who was fun to have around. We spent much more time in bars than on the baseball field. Although he lost interest in his workout plan for much of the year, he never lost the hope of making the team. Come springtime, he would get all worked up again for the open tryouts. After a few years we lost touch, but I always kept watching baseball with the hope that I would see him on the mound someday.

When I saw him again at his mother’s funeral. He still had not lost the hope of playing in the pros even though he was well past the age of a rookie pitcher. He had planned to try out with one of the Texas teams where he was now living. He was a great brake shoe salesman due to his outgoing personality and doing quite well working on commission. After explaining the virtues of his brake shoes in comparison to the competition, I was sold on his. Then I recalled why I always believed he would one day become a Major League Baseball pitcher. He could make you believe in whatever he was pitching.

DDR

Rubén


 

 

Would you believe I never took guitar lessons?
He sure plays a mean guitar. Guitar Hero, that is!

When I lived in Back of the Yards, I met a wide variety of Mexicans. Rubén Martínez was an unusual acquaintance of mine in that he was more the friend of a friend rather than a direct friend. He always seemed so full of energy for someone who was always high. He looked like your typical drug burnout with shoulder length hair that he parted down the middle.

In the seventies, no one wanted to part their hair in the middle lest anyone think that they smoked pot. Rubén, however, always parted his hair down the middle to flaunt the fact that he was a burnout and smoked pot. And he wore a miniature coke spoon around his neck just in case the occasion to get high on cocaine presented itself. Because of the thousands of people like Rubén, McDonald’s had to change their coffee stirrer from a little spoon on a long stem because people like Rubén used it to snort coke, to a flat paddle and later a small straw. Needless to say, he was always high and always looking to get higher. Sometimes he wouldn’t even respond to his own name. I once had to explain to him that he was Rubén and that’s why people who wanted to talk to him called his name. He was too high to understand me, though.

Anyway, thanks to Rubén, I attended my first rock concert. Led Zeppelin came to Chicago in January of 1975 and word was out that all the tickets would sell out immediately. We went to old Chicago Stadium box office about two hours before it opened at 10:00 a.m. We didn’t want to oversleep the time of the first ticket sales, so we stayed up all night drinking wine. We also contemplated doing immoral and illegal deeds, but we decided against that in order to buy the Led Zeppelin tickets without incident.

When we arrived at the ticket office at 8:00 a.m., we were tired, but determined to obtain tickets. I drove my 1975 Pontiac Firebird as close to the box office as the police permitted me. Rubén collected our ticket money and ran toward the Stadium like a deranged lunatic. Several policemen tried to stop him, but he dodged them, jumped onto the hood of their unmarked police car, then to the car roof, before leaping to the front of the ticket line. When he dissolved into the crowd, the police stop chasing him. We waited patiently for him in my Firebird that was parked a block away, but within view of the ticket office. An elderly woman, perhaps the grandmother of one of the expectant concertgoers, passed out hot chocolate from a thermos into Styrofoam cups. About four hours later, Rubén emerged from the ticket office with six concert tickets! We were going to see Led Zeppelin in concert!

When we went to the concert, I was shocked that everyone was smoking pot. I had never smoked pot in my life, but I got high just breathing in the concert air. I’ll never forget my first concert!

The last time I saw Rubén was at that Led Zeppelin concert, partying, getting high, and bouncing his head to the music. Years later, I heard that he was arrested several times for drug sales. He finally made the big time and was arrested for a million dollar drug bust. For me, he just vanished into the crowd of drug dealers and addicts, never to emerge again.

Alva


Laredo, Texas

I don’t even remember his first name. But I always think of him whenever I play chess and/or drink a beer.

I met Alva when we were in the Marines stationed at Camp Pendleton, California. He was your typical Mexican from Texas. A true Texican. His first name was Rodolfo, but everyone called him by his surname. Alva was short and stocky, what would be called husky in the boy’s department. He was particularly handsome. In fact, he had one eye a little bigger than the other, his teeth were crooked, and he always had a bad haircut. What he lacked in looks, he made up for in personality. He was always the joker and he always had everyone in the shop laughing.

He retained the rank of private because he was always getting into trouble and so he would never get promoted. Drinking was at the root of all his problems. I never saw him sober even once. He was always drunk or suffering from a hangover. When we stood in formation, he would always teeter during inspection. I’m surprised that he never fell over at roll call because a few times he was leaning more than the Leaning Tower of Pisa. Despite all his flaws, he had a girlfriend whom he had met near the base. That is, until he got into a fight at the club and wasn’t allowed to leave the base for months. So he would drink at the club everyday, only leaving to check in with the sergeant.

Our superiors really came down hard on Alva. They controlled every aspect of his duty hours. We all thought they went beyond the call of duty. Finally, he told our commanding officer that he was tired of being harassed and he wanted everyone to leave him alone. He wanted to everything to go back to the way it was. He even told the CO that he had written his congressman. Why did Alva feel harassed? He would have to check in with the sergeant every hour just to make sure he was still on base.

One day, he went to the club to watch Monday Night Football and later returned emotionally distraught. He told us that the game was interrupted for a special announcement: John Lennon had been shot! None of us could believe it. But Alva was the one who was the most depressed by Lennon’s death. Alva seemed to drink less after that shocking assassination.

It was during this time that I learned about his special talent. He could play chess. That was surprising because he wasn’t the type of person who exuded intelligence of any sort. One day, he challenged all comers. He walked into the radio shop where we worked and announced, “Who’s the best chess player here? I challenge you to a chess match!”

Somehow he had heard that I used to play chess. It might have been from me because I used to like to tell people I used to like to play chess. I might have said that I used to play when I first arrived at Camp Pendleton and Alva remembered. He had a good memory. At first, I didn’t want to play because I hadn’t played since high school and I was afraid that if I started playing again I would get addicted to play chess again. But I couldn’t control myself and I accepted Alva’s challenge. Anyway, Alva won every game easily.

Eventually, I played chess with Alva regularly and he always beat me easily. To add insult to injury, he was always very drunk when we played. Okay, I was hooked. I wanted to beat Alva at chess. We played chess everyday in the shop. Whenever he made a particularly good move, he would say, “Don’t mess with Texas!”

I never beat him until I finally figured out his strategy! He had no strategy! He was always so drunk that he would only play the best move for the position. With each game we played, I improved my game. Finally, I figured out that if I planned my strategy at least five moves ahead, his best move for the position wouldn’t help him. Eventually, I was beating him on a regular basis. He wasn’t used to losing even though he never studied or practiced chess formally. He was truly amazed that anyone could beat him. And I was surprised that anyone so drunk could play chess so well. Oh, yes, and Alva’s congressman called up our commanding officer and Alva was no longer on restriction.

DDR