Mi Amigo de Guadalajara

   On the bus coming back from Seattle, I was sitting next to this migrant worker who had just returned from Eugene, Oregon.  It took us a couple of hours to try and strike up any kind of conversation.  I’m generally kind of quiet with the people I ride with, but the language barrier didn’t help either.
    We were almost at the bottom of Oregon when he asked me in this really broken English where we were.  I knew he spoke Spanish so I answered him in Spanish.  “Aqui?” I said.  I think he was relieved and just started speaking totally in Spanish, much faster than anything that I could understand.
   I told him that my Spanish was really terrible and he assured me that his English was just as bad.  We smiled and started an attempt at Bilingual dialogue.
    I knew my Spanish was horrible and I was kicking myself for not keeping up with it after I left Texas, but we still got along and kept up the oddest conversation for about three hours.  We were limited in what we could talk about because for everything I thought of saying I had to think of how to say it in a foreign language.  It reminded me of when I first moved to Texas. 
Most of my friends were Tejanos and their families usually spoke Tex-Mex Spanish, which is a Tejano hybrid of English and Spanish.  I usually spoke Spanish when I went to their houses and watched K-Uno, the local Spanish language TV channel.  It helped a little, but the best thing was an attempt at dialogue.  Two people struggling to understand each other is a frustrating thing, but can be beautiful and amazing, too.  Talking to this guy reminded me of that.
    Turns out he was a migrant worker form Guadalajara who went up to Oregon each year for a few months to slave away on some rich guys farm.  I was riding with him a few weeks before Christmas so I assume that this was to help out at home.  He said he had a few children and showed me their pictures.
    He told me a lot about traveling in Mexico and the troubles with the police and “Federales.”  He said that when they get a couple of hours past the border, local police come on board the bus and tell everyone “Ochenta”, which is eighty in Spanish, which means that everyone on board has to fork over an 80 dollar bribe to go any further.  I don’t know what they do if they don’t have it, he said that it was just common knowledge so I guess everyone just prepares for it.  He said riding in the states was good because that doesn’t happen as much. Sadly, he said that in Mexico I wouldn’t have any problems like that though. 
“Para norteamericanos, no problemas.” 
He said that where he was from in Guadalajara is a nice place and the people there are really friendly to foreigners, not like up here. I told him that I’d love to go, but I wouldn’t feel comfortable there unless I could speak Spanish better than I did. Most Americans don’t care about those things, but I thought it was important not to push English anymore around the world than it is already.
He laughed and then we started talking about the Zapatistas. That’s when I saw a real smile come to his face.  He told me, I think, that the government tells people that the Zapatistas aren’t really Mexicans after all, but are from Guatamala but he didn’t seem to care where they were from.  I asked him if they were really popular in Mexico and he said that they were.  Very, very popular, especially with the people that hated the government, which was most people. I thought was the case but it was still good to hear coming from someone who actually lives in the country, as opposed to reading it in a book. We continued to talk about the Zapatistas for a while, maybe half way through California. Then, in my broken Spanish, I told him that since most of my friends are poor and hated the government, too that most of them wished that we had some Zapatistas up here, too. “Queremos Zapatistas en Alabama, Florida, Tejas…”  He laughed and nodded his head. 
“They are very popular where you live?”
“Yes, where I live.  Very popular. At least in my house. Muy popular.”
“Perhaps one day they will be everywhere,” he said in Spanish. “Even in your house.”
We both laughed.
    My new friend and I stuck together until the bus pulled into Los Angeles. There we changed buses.  He hopped onto a much nicer, less crowded Mexican bus out of L.A. and traveled, from what I gathered, for another day until he got home to Guadalajara and to his family.
    Me, I got on the Eastbound bus headed for heading for New Mexico, Texas, Louisiana, Alabama, and eventually Pensacola. No one else on the bus seemed as interesting as my friend from Guadalajara, so I didn’t talk to another person for 28 hours.

<< BACK