You can’t go to Taco Loco anymore. But I often do. If only in my mind. I remember it well. On the corner of the public parking lot at the northeast corner of Wabash and Balbo, in the shadow of the Conrad Hilton Hotel. Sacrificed to expand the parking lot and Chicago’s dwindling parking availability with four more parking spaces. I should post a picture to show you where it used to be. In the 1960s, we often drove past it.
We, as Mexicans, always wondered who would name a Mexican restaurant Taco Loco. We never ate there because Mexicans didn’t eat at Mexican restaurants in the 1960s. They only worked there. In fact, I never even heard of any Mexicans ever eating in a restaurant. If we ate outside of the house it was at someone else’s home or we brought our own tortillas, bolillos, carnitas, peppers, and salsa. When my parents divorced, my father would pick us up for visitation in his fluorescent-avocado-green 1971 Ford Maverick. Sometimes we would drive southbound on Wabash past Taco Loco. I was always curious about Taco Loco, a small, white brick building that didn’t look very well-maintained. In fact, it always looked like it was about to fall over until they actually knocked it down.
As an adult, when I could finally do everything that was prohibited by my parents, I finally went to Taco Loco. I loved their food. Let’s just say that forbidden fruit tastes the best! No one who worked there was a native English speaker, if you know what I mean. Luckily, I spoke Spanish. I ate there whenever I was downtown. The food was really cheap, too, especially if considered that this was a downtown restaurant. In 1992, during the World Cup semifinals, I was eating, sitting near the window. I saw some drunken soccer fans across the street, waving German flags and singing German songs. Suddenly, they ran out of songs to sing and they started shouting, “Baseball sucks!” They were scaring me. Luckily, they didn’t see me and their bus came right away.
When I taught Spanish at Columbia College Chicago, I often ate there after class. Then one day, the Spanish coordinator told me that I had to take my Spanish classes on a field trip. I wasn’t sure where to take them. When I tried to arrange a trip, we couldn’t agree on a time because every student was a full-time student. And many of them also worked. Talk about complications. So I’m sitting in Taco Loco eating enchiladas when it occurred to me that I could take them to Taco Loco! We were only a block away from our classroom and we could meet in Taco Loco instead of going to class. This actually worked out well for everyone. Since Taco Loco was open 24 hours, we met there for our 9:00 a.m. class. Everyone ordered their food in Spanish from the non-English-speaking waitress and they spoke Spanish as much as possible. Even the Spanish coordinator liked our destination for the field trip. No one else had ever thought of going to Taco Loco. I guess I’m just a trailblazer. I can’t help it. 🙂
My father is a very unique person who has his own way of doing things. He was a factory mechanic who could work wonders with duct tape. No matter where we were, he always had some tools in his pocket. He was proud of being mechanic. If someone had some sort of mechanical problem, my father would volunteer to fix whatever needed fixing. No problem was too small for him. A squeaky door? He carried a little oil can with him. Door knob keeps falling off? My father would attach it with his tools and extra screws that he always carried with him just in case.
I should write a novel about him: My Father, the Super Fix-It Handyman. Or maybe make him into a comic book superhero who can fix any problem no matter how small. My father was always fixing bicycles, skates, skateboards, and automobiles for everyone on the block. He had just enough mechanical aptitude, talent, and expertise to keep him trapped in the middle class the rest of his life. And, it turns out that I’m not much different than him, although I’ll never be able to make repairs just like my father.
When I was a boy, my father often embarrassed me. He always liked to attract attention to himself by telling jokes in his broken English. I was afraid to bring home friends when my father was home because then he would want to get in on the conversation with them and he didn’t speak English very well. So most of the conversation would involve a lot of repetition because he didn’t understand everything that was said, but he wanted to show that he was eager to learn English. It’s now forty years later and he still does this. He has never stopped trying to learn English. If I talk to him in Spanish, he still insists that I speak to him in English so he can learn English. In fact, if I talk to him in Spanish, he doesn’t understand a word I say.
Another thing about my father was that he was always so Mexican. He could just stand there silently and everyone would know that he was Mexican because he always stood there looking so Mexican. He was about 5’6″, thin, with black hair slicked back with vaselina, brown eyes, and a Cantinflas mustache. Plus, you could see the tools bulging from his pants pockets, along with a small jar of salsa or peppers, just in case.
Whenever we did something together, he would always preface it by saying that he used to do that activity in Mexico when he was a boy. When we played basketball in our backyard at 4405 S. Wood Street in Back of the yards, he told us that he always played basketball with his brothers in Celaya, Guanajuato, Mexico. When I was eight, I actually thought that basketball was a Mexican sport. While playing, my father told me that once I stopped dribbling the ball, I couldn’t dribble it again. I had never heard of such a rule. I told him, “I don’t want to play the Mexican way.” Of course, I didn’t know any better at the time even though there is a rule against double dribbling.
For breakfast, my father would prepare this concoction that he learned to make from his father in, you guessed it, Mexico. He would pour some Mogen David grape wine into a glass, put in a raw egg, and mix it up together. He would drink the first glass to show me how it was done. Then, he would hand me a glass and I would force myself to drink it. At first I didn’t like it and I told him that I didn’t want a Mexican breakfast, but I eventually learned to like it. I also learned to eat raw eggs right out of the eggshell by poking to holes at either end of the egg. I learned this from my father because this is how he ate breakfast in Mexico. This was long before I had ever heard of salmonella. I guess God does protect children and idiotas. 🙂
Peoples Theater, Back of the Yards, Chicago, Illinois
Growing up in the Back of the Yards neighborhood had many advantages. One of them was the Peoples Theater at 1620 W. 47th Street where we went almost every weekend to see movies. I was really impressed by the theater because it seemed so classy to me. There were marble floors, marble walls, and even the restroom looked elegant with its marble floor and walls. The incongruous thing about the restroom was the fact that the rolls of toilet paper were securely bolted in place. Otherwise, people would either steal the whole roll of toilet paper or dump it into the toilet. I could never understand why anyone would dump a perfectly good roll of toilet paper into the toilet, but other public restrooms in the neighborhood that didn’t take such precautions actually had rolls of toilet paper in their toilets.
However, in my circle of young friends, there was an unwritten rule that you never used the sit-down toilets of a public restroom. Never! Never ever! Under no circumstances. You were supposed to hold your number two in and run home to the comfort of your own bathroom, hopefully in the nick of time.
In the auditorium of the theater, there were a lot of terra-cotta decorations. I used to stare at them while waiting for the movie to start. I was always fascinated by the ceiling way over my head. There was a giant oval recess that was always lighted. I would imagine different things while looking at it. But what I usually saw was the underside of a giant turtle. I imagined that it was in a huge overhead aquarium and I was always afraid that it break open from the weight of the giant turtle and that we would all drown under the huge waterfall. As you may have already divined, I now tell this story because no such disaster ever befell upon me!
For Christmas, Holy Cross School would have a special day for us to go to Peoples Theater to see a Christmas movie. We would get out of school for this special field trip a whole two blocks away from the school. We loved any event that allowed us to miss class!
When I was a little older, I started going to the movies with just my brothers and no parents. As the oldest, I was in charge of taking care of them. When my brothers were older, we all went to the theater separately with our own friends. I went a lot with Adam Mendez or Patrick McDonnell. One day, Patrick invited me to go with him during the week. I told him I couldn’t go because I couldn’t afford the full price of the ticket. He told me that he had free passes for the theater. His father had told him where to get them. There was an insurance sales office near the theater that gave free passes to customers. Patrick, who was wise beyond his years, showed me where to go to get the free tickets. He made small talk with one of the insurance agents who asked how Patrick’s father was and he gave us two free passes to Peoples Theater. After that, we went to a show once a week during the week when the tickets cost full price and sometimes, we were able to sneak in to see some adult movies. However, they caught us when we tried to see Bonnie and Clyde with Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway, and they made us leave.
One day when we went to the insurance office, the manager told us that they were going out of business, so he gave Patrick the whole packet of movie passes. If we liked a movie a lot, we would see it at least twice, oftentimes, more. When Patrick moved away, I inherited the packet of passes from him. Then, I used to go Peoples Theater with my brothers and my friend Adam. I remember that Adam and I really loved the movie The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly so much that we saw it everyday for two weeks. And we never got tired of it. I saw many of my favorite movies there: The St. Valentine’s Day Massacre, Born Losers (a biker movie), Flipper, and others that I can’t recall now.
I just had to buy the DVD!
When I was older, my mother sent me to see Irma Serrano at the Peoples Theater. My mother went to Mexico when Irma Serrano came to Chicago. She told me to tell Irma I was Carmen Rodriguez’s son. When I did, Irma invited me backstage, and I took pictures of her. I never did learn how my mother got to know Irma Serrano
Alas! Peoples Theater is no more! There is a Walgreen’s on the site now. But I will always remember Peoples Theater for all its terra-cotta decorations and marble walls and floors, even in the restroom! It was kind of like going to church every week.
Patrick McDonnell was my best friend in the second, third, and fourth grades at Holy Cross School. He was the smartest kid I ever knew. He had moved to Back of the Yards in Chicago from Ireland with his father, his brothers James, Leon, and Michael, and his sisters Cora and Margaret. His mother had died in Ireland before they came to Chicago. They lived next door to the firehouse on the corner of 45th Street and Marshfield.
I loved going to his house after school because we had fun visiting the firemen. Since he was a year behind in school because of his move from Ireland, he was older and wiser than me. Whenever I needed the mysteries of the universe explained to me, Patrick was there to explain them to me so that even I understood them.
Once, we were standing in the crosswalk on the corner of 46th Street and Paulina. I was about to cross the street when he stretched his arm across my chest to prevent me from crossing. Much to my surprise, a car drove right in front of our path. I was so amazed that he knew the car was coming our way. “How did you know the car was turning?” I asked him. “I saw his turn signal,” he said. “What’s a turn signal?” I asked. And he explained the Rules of the Road to me, edifying me about another one of the mysteries of the world, as only Patrick could. He performed a visual reenactment of our incident with him as the car and his eyes as the turn signals. He said he knew the car was turning left because he saw a left turn signal. He then winked his left eye repeatedly to represent the car’s left turn signal. For some reason, I always remember Patrick’s freckled face reenacting the left turn signal.
When his family finally moved to the suburbs—I don’t remember which one—he came to my house to say good-bye. In retrospect, I should have gotten his new address and phone number. On the other hand, he didn’t ask me for mine, either.
Mexicanas are incredibly unique women in this world. However, I don’t want to lump them all into one group as there are different kinds of Mexicanas. Sure, they all have the common denominator of Mexico somewhere in their background and that’s enough to differentiate them from women of other ethnicities. So in an effort to educate you, gentle reader, I will over-analyze Mexicanas for you. Yes, there are different kinds of Mexicanas that I like to divide into three groups: 1. Mexicanas, 2. Mexicanas, and 3. Mexicanas. As you can see, UIC didn’t give me my Ph.D. for nuthin’! I learned to categorize just about everything while studying for my graduate degrees. Anyway, if you examine my groups of Mexicanas, you will clearly see that there are three different kinds of Mexicanas: 1, 2, and 3. Is that clear?
First, there are Mexicanas like my abuelita, born and raised in Mexico, destined never to live anywhere else. And they don’t want to leave Mexico either. Their names are usually MarĂa or Guadalupe. Or even Guadalupe MarĂa or MarĂa Guadalupe. No exceptions. My abuelita MarĂa Guadalupe ValdivĂa came to Chicago only because my mother insisted. Abuelita didn’t like Chicago at all because it wasn’t Mexico. She hated the winters here and she hated the fact that she would have to learn English. She stayed just long enough to have her eye surgery and then she returned to Mexico. And she never came back. And she never missed Chicago at all. My mother would visit abuelita at least once a year in Mexico. And even though she was blind, abuelita lived by herself in Mexico. She was an extraordinarily strong Mexicana.
Second, there are Mexicanas like my strong-willed mother who were also born and raised in Mexico, but not firmly rooted there. They come to America for a while, then go back to Mexico. But return to America even though they always complained about America in Mexico. They just keep going back and forth, never entirely happy in either place. In general, nothing seems to please them. My mother always complained about everything, to everyone in America and Mexico. When her Mexicana friends would visit, they would all sit around complaining about America. And then, to change the subject just a little, they would complain about Mexico. Nothing ever seemed to please these Mexicanas as they sat around complaining and breast-feeding their babies.
Third, there are Mexicanas like my sister or ex-wives, born in America, but unmistakably Mexicana by their accent. I once had a Mexicana girlfriend who had the Mexicana accent but couldn’t speak a word of Spanish! She used to get so mad when people automatically spoke Spanish to her and she would have to admit that she only knew English, albeit the Mexicana kind of English. These Mexicanas love everything about Mexico, the music, the food, the culture, but they wouldn’t want to live there. It’s okay to visit once in a while to catch up with family events, but that’s about it. America is their home, even if they are Mexicanas, and they never hesitate to let the gringos know it.
I’ve known Mexicanas all my life, beginning with my mother, then my abuelita, and finally, my significant others. The more I get to know them, the less I seem to understand them. I do know they are sexual beings from observing them and from my very own personal hands-on experience. I don’t know much about my abuelita’s sex life, but let me say this. She never married my abuelito and they rarely lived together. Yet they managed to have six children together. My parents were always fighting, and I never ever heard them having a normal, civilized conversation. My father was always affectionate with my mother, but she would repel all his amorous overtures, at least that I could see. Occasionally, when my father didn’t work the midnight shift, I could hear him trying to seduce my mother in their bedroom, right next to mine. My father always saying something affectionate and my mother always telling him to leave her alone. Apparently, he didn’t give up and she didn’t resist enough because they had six children together. My youngest brother was born soon after my parents separated.
The Mexicanas that came into my life were certainly very affectionate, if you know what I mean. That’s the thing about Mexicanas: They immediately know if they like you or not, if they will love you or not. I met my first wife Linda when my friend invited me to go with him to a wedding in Merrill, Michigan. We barely spoke and I didn’t see her again for another month–and we spoke even less then. Next thing I knew she moved to Chicago just to be with me–not that I minded, of course.
My second wife Anna chased after me, too. She kept hinting for me to ask her out. I really wasn’t interested in her, but she was persistent. She gave me her phone number and I threw it away. Her friend gave me Anna’s phone number and I threw it away again. She was so persistent that I finally gave in. If a Mexicana is that interested in me, I know we will be happy together. If Mexicanas don’t love you, or at least like you, you better back off because you don’t have a chance and you’re just wasting your time.
From what I’ve seen, the odds are against you if you think you can win a Mexicana over. However, once she yours, you better show her that you need her, and she’ll be yours for as long as she wants you. But that may or may not be till death do you part. One of the fringe benefits of having a Mexicana is having an active sex life. I mean there’s no begging at all. In fact, I was dragged into the bedroom many times, although I must admit that I didn’t put up much of a fight. And the fun doesn’t stop just because it’s that time of month, either. In fact, a Mexicana wants you even more right then. This happened to me many times. And just because you have all these intense arguments during the day, doesn’t mean that you’ll be ignored at night. In fact, that’s usually some of the best lovemaking. And the next morning? She continues being mad at you from the day before. That is, until night falls again.
Well, that’s about all I’m willing to say for my over-analysis of Mexicanas for now. But someday, I’ll truly delve into Mexicanas to try to understand them! Maybe, I’ll discover that there are many more than just three groups of Mexicanas.
Chicago USA 