I moved to San Antonio from Amarillo, or actually, to a little town named Marion about thirty miles East of San Antonio. Even though both of these cities are in Texas; culture wise, it was like moving from Fargo to Guadalajara.
I missed the initial culture shock due to circumstances I won't go into here. The first thing I did when I got there was sleep for three days straight.
I woke up at noon on the third day with a blinding headache, and when I walked out of the house in my whitie tighties, I saw a swarthy little guy with giant white teeth wearing bib overalls and cop style mirror shades looking at me from the other side of the fence. I was just noticing his shades had multi-colored pot leafs on the lenses when I heard this weird whistling noise that got louder and louder until the pecan that was making it hit me so hard on the exact top of my head that I thought I'd been shot.
I stumbled over in Hector's direction while shouting the entire obscenity section of my vocabulary into the ground. When I looked up at Hector, he was still just smiling at me. As stunned as I was, I was also thinking he had the biggest teeth I'd ever seen on anything that wasn't a horse, and at the same time, I was still trying to figure out what had happened to my head. I rubbed it and said, "what the &#@* was that?" I wasn't really asking Hector, but he stopped smiling and made an unnatural looking serious-face, peered over the top of his shades and said, "Oh hey like, that was the sky's falling Chicken Little. Jew better run!" and went back to smiling even bigger and bobbing his head in a self congratulatory way that somehow had the same thick accent. This turned out to be a stock and store Hector Sanchez routine that I would come to know well over the next year. At the time, I only understood what he said by virtue of having listened to Cheech and Chong's Big Bamboo album about a million times. Hector sounded a lot like a Texas twangy version of Cheech.
I probably would have smiled back because the Chicken Little thing was a really funny thing to say, but meanwhile, the tree-missle had spun up the pain in my head into a dimension I didn't even know existed, and when I pulled back a blood covered hand from my head, I just turned to go back in the house instead. I was hating San Antonio and life itself while grimacing up into a very very tall pecan tree and zig-zagging my way back across the yard. I knew one more pecan strike would put me down for good. Behind me, Hector was saying, "Hey dude, hey it's like 'Hector' dude, like, you know? My name is like Hector anderrthingiht, hey like, what's your name anderrthingite." I turned around and showed him my bloody palm and said, "It's uhm... Andy dude, I ... I gotta go man."
I saw him working on his beater Chevy later that day when I came back out, and he asked me if I could come over and help him get a thermostat working, or at least that's what I thought he said. He asked me something, and since he held up a thermostat and pointed at the car, I was able to work out the translation.
He was frustrated because he had been trying to put the thermostat housing on facing the wrong way. When I turned it around the right way, it slipped into place, and Hector told me I was smart in a way that made it sound like a problem. He went on to say he was a just a "dumb Westsider anderrthingite." I started thinking maybe he was right because he kept calling his car a Camero in spite of it being a Nova.
He said he had just moved to Marion. I told him I just moved there too, but I was a Southsider, at which point Hector looked at me like I just said I was a roll of aluminum foil. We worked this out as we started to come up with a process for translation. The larger problem wasn't so much Spanish-to-English, as it was Spanglish-to-hick, but the problem at hand was that I didn't know Hector was talking about the West side San Antonio, and Hector thought I was talking about the South side of San Antonio. We eventually came to understand each other well enough, but it was rough going at first.
I put it together when he said he didn't know there were any white dudes on the South side of San Antonio, and when I explained to him that I meant the South side of Amarillo, I got my second dose of classic Hector humor. He just turned, started wrenching down the thermostat, and said, "Shi-man, I din-un-e-nun know Amarillo was like even big enough to even like HAVE any sides anderrthingite."
n.b., That last word parses out to "and everything right?" in English, but it has zero meaning. Hector always used it as a kind of verbal period to end a sentence. At first I thought it was Spanish, but it turned out to just be Hectorish, a sub set of mixed Spanish and English with it's own set of rules, i.e., the phrases "like even" and "even like" must alternate if used in the same sentence.
The only Hispanic I had ever known in Amarillo was Tim Perez who made a point of telling everybody he wasn't "Mexican"---that he was Spanish. I went to his house for lunch one day and his mom made us hot dogs with cheese which I said were kind of like Tacos. This prompted Tim's mom to tell me the family wasn't Mexican---that they were Spanish. Looking back, Tim was probably the whitest not-a-Mexican Spanish person I've ever met. Conversely, Hector never missed a chance to tell people he was a Mexican like he was answering a "Mexicans Wanted" classified ad or something, and his Mexicanity was a secret specialty he had worked hard to cultivate.
The whole time I knew Hector and his family I felt like I was in a National Geographic special about infiltrating some mysterious primate culture. Don't get me wrong; I'm still not sure who was playing chimp and who was playing Goodall; I think it was probably him.
(See, that right there was me trying to use Hector humor---adding a nuanced conclusion to an already confusing statement with enough sarcasm to be insulting and really funny if you took it one way, and yet enough ambiguity to maintain plausible deniability by saying it should be taken some other way if you got caught. Truth told, we were both such abnormal specimens that standard anthropological notions probably wouldn't apply anyway.)
After we got the radiator hose on, we went into his house to wash up and I met his mom who was just as funny as Hector. She introduced herself as "Hector's mom," and said I could call her something Spanish I didn't understand. When I tried to repeat whatever she had said, she put her hand on my mouth and said, "Mira look, no. You can just call me 'Hector's mom, OK?"
Hector told her I was a Southsider and that's what the entire Sanchez family called me from that day on---Southsider. Considering it was "Chicken Little" up to that point, I was pretty happy with Southsider.
When Hector's Mom turned her attention to him, he was still wearing the stupid pot-leaf sunglasses and she let out a torrent of Spanish that included all of the colorful Spanish words I had ever heard before she slapped the glasses off of him so fast that Hector didn't even see it coming. It was like lightning. After she calmed down she told him something in Spanish, and when she noticed the puzzled dog tilt of my head, she translated, "'You're not right Hector.' I told him he's not right." then she repeated it to Hector in both languages one more time before she gave us what she called "Pollock-os." These were Polish sausages wrapped up in what I first thought were grilled pancakes, but turned out to be thick home-made flour tortillas! This was also a pattern that I would come to know and love; Introduction, correction, mild violence, and interpretation, followed by the best food I had ever had in my life. Suddenly, I was starting to cozy up to San Antonio life. I didn't even mind later on when Hector's mom started slapping me around a little---in fact, it actually made my mouth water.
Stay tuned for Hector Pt. 2 when Hector gets me a job making "Walboardings" and Hector's mom feeds me delicious fried cactuses... anderrthingite?
I missed the initial culture shock due to circumstances I won't go into here. The first thing I did when I got there was sleep for three days straight.
I woke up at noon on the third day with a blinding headache, and when I walked out of the house in my whitie tighties, I saw a swarthy little guy with giant white teeth wearing bib overalls and cop style mirror shades looking at me from the other side of the fence. I was just noticing his shades had multi-colored pot leafs on the lenses when I heard this weird whistling noise that got louder and louder until the pecan that was making it hit me so hard on the exact top of my head that I thought I'd been shot.
I stumbled over in Hector's direction while shouting the entire obscenity section of my vocabulary into the ground. When I looked up at Hector, he was still just smiling at me. As stunned as I was, I was also thinking he had the biggest teeth I'd ever seen on anything that wasn't a horse, and at the same time, I was still trying to figure out what had happened to my head. I rubbed it and said, "what the &#@* was that?" I wasn't really asking Hector, but he stopped smiling and made an unnatural looking serious-face, peered over the top of his shades and said, "Oh hey like, that was the sky's falling Chicken Little. Jew better run!" and went back to smiling even bigger and bobbing his head in a self congratulatory way that somehow had the same thick accent. This turned out to be a stock and store Hector Sanchez routine that I would come to know well over the next year. At the time, I only understood what he said by virtue of having listened to Cheech and Chong's Big Bamboo album about a million times. Hector sounded a lot like a Texas twangy version of Cheech.
I probably would have smiled back because the Chicken Little thing was a really funny thing to say, but meanwhile, the tree-missle had spun up the pain in my head into a dimension I didn't even know existed, and when I pulled back a blood covered hand from my head, I just turned to go back in the house instead. I was hating San Antonio and life itself while grimacing up into a very very tall pecan tree and zig-zagging my way back across the yard. I knew one more pecan strike would put me down for good. Behind me, Hector was saying, "Hey dude, hey it's like 'Hector' dude, like, you know? My name is like Hector anderrthingiht, hey like, what's your name anderrthingite." I turned around and showed him my bloody palm and said, "It's uhm... Andy dude, I ... I gotta go man."
I saw him working on his beater Chevy later that day when I came back out, and he asked me if I could come over and help him get a thermostat working, or at least that's what I thought he said. He asked me something, and since he held up a thermostat and pointed at the car, I was able to work out the translation.
He was frustrated because he had been trying to put the thermostat housing on facing the wrong way. When I turned it around the right way, it slipped into place, and Hector told me I was smart in a way that made it sound like a problem. He went on to say he was a just a "dumb Westsider anderrthingite." I started thinking maybe he was right because he kept calling his car a Camero in spite of it being a Nova.
He said he had just moved to Marion. I told him I just moved there too, but I was a Southsider, at which point Hector looked at me like I just said I was a roll of aluminum foil. We worked this out as we started to come up with a process for translation. The larger problem wasn't so much Spanish-to-English, as it was Spanglish-to-hick, but the problem at hand was that I didn't know Hector was talking about the West side San Antonio, and Hector thought I was talking about the South side of San Antonio. We eventually came to understand each other well enough, but it was rough going at first.
I put it together when he said he didn't know there were any white dudes on the South side of San Antonio, and when I explained to him that I meant the South side of Amarillo, I got my second dose of classic Hector humor. He just turned, started wrenching down the thermostat, and said, "Shi-man, I din-un-e-nun know Amarillo was like even big enough to even like HAVE any sides anderrthingite."
n.b., That last word parses out to "and everything right?" in English, but it has zero meaning. Hector always used it as a kind of verbal period to end a sentence. At first I thought it was Spanish, but it turned out to just be Hectorish, a sub set of mixed Spanish and English with it's own set of rules, i.e., the phrases "like even" and "even like" must alternate if used in the same sentence.
The only Hispanic I had ever known in Amarillo was Tim Perez who made a point of telling everybody he wasn't "Mexican"---that he was Spanish. I went to his house for lunch one day and his mom made us hot dogs with cheese which I said were kind of like Tacos. This prompted Tim's mom to tell me the family wasn't Mexican---that they were Spanish. Looking back, Tim was probably the whitest not-a-Mexican Spanish person I've ever met. Conversely, Hector never missed a chance to tell people he was a Mexican like he was answering a "Mexicans Wanted" classified ad or something, and his Mexicanity was a secret specialty he had worked hard to cultivate.
The whole time I knew Hector and his family I felt like I was in a National Geographic special about infiltrating some mysterious primate culture. Don't get me wrong; I'm still not sure who was playing chimp and who was playing Goodall; I think it was probably him.
(See, that right there was me trying to use Hector humor---adding a nuanced conclusion to an already confusing statement with enough sarcasm to be insulting and really funny if you took it one way, and yet enough ambiguity to maintain plausible deniability by saying it should be taken some other way if you got caught. Truth told, we were both such abnormal specimens that standard anthropological notions probably wouldn't apply anyway.)
After we got the radiator hose on, we went into his house to wash up and I met his mom who was just as funny as Hector. She introduced herself as "Hector's mom," and said I could call her something Spanish I didn't understand. When I tried to repeat whatever she had said, she put her hand on my mouth and said, "Mira look, no. You can just call me 'Hector's mom, OK?"
Hector told her I was a Southsider and that's what the entire Sanchez family called me from that day on---Southsider. Considering it was "Chicken Little" up to that point, I was pretty happy with Southsider.
When Hector's Mom turned her attention to him, he was still wearing the stupid pot-leaf sunglasses and she let out a torrent of Spanish that included all of the colorful Spanish words I had ever heard before she slapped the glasses off of him so fast that Hector didn't even see it coming. It was like lightning. After she calmed down she told him something in Spanish, and when she noticed the puzzled dog tilt of my head, she translated, "'You're not right Hector.' I told him he's not right." then she repeated it to Hector in both languages one more time before she gave us what she called "Pollock-os." These were Polish sausages wrapped up in what I first thought were grilled pancakes, but turned out to be thick home-made flour tortillas! This was also a pattern that I would come to know and love; Introduction, correction, mild violence, and interpretation, followed by the best food I had ever had in my life. Suddenly, I was starting to cozy up to San Antonio life. I didn't even mind later on when Hector's mom started slapping me around a little---in fact, it actually made my mouth water.
Spanglish Phrase of The Day - "Mira look"
---Mira is a real Spanish word that means "look," but in Spanglish, it's always immediately followed by the English word "look"; the weird thing is that it doesn't mean look; it doesn't even mean look look; it means listen, or maybe more like "listen dammit."
Stay tuned for Hector Pt. 2 when Hector gets me a job making "Walboardings" and Hector's mom feeds me delicious fried cactuses... anderrthingite?