The next
afternoon I had a one day conference at a campus just south of downtown that I
biked to, and then since it was a weekend and a nice day, I took a long
bikeride on major streets through the (poor black) neighborhood west of
downtown, to get a sense of what bars were there, and maybe stop through some
if it seemed safe.
On this
one major street, there was exactly *one* bar, on all the miles of road all the
way to city limits.
(That’s
true for a lot of [black] neighborhoods; they’re just liquor stores, all the
bars were owned by older people who closed them up because of the bullshit, or
are just hanging on for their few friends who still go there, but the
gangbangers aren’t let in.)
Anyway, this
one bar was a cinder block bar south of some overheard train tracks and across
from an industrial yard full of stacked pallets, and the bar turned out to be
Mexican (!). As the (Mexican-American)
bartender (“Crystal”) said, it was on the edge of city limits and drew from the
(Mexican) population beyond that, though occasionally a few (black) people came
in, usually 2-3 at a time, and were quiet and just stayed for one beer and
left.
“I say I
work here,” she was like, “And people say, ‘You work there?’, and I’m like,
‘No, it’s not like that!’”.
As I sat
and drank like 4:30pm on a Sunday afternoon, this one older (Mexican) guy who
had been drinking heavily with his friend down at the other end of the bar sent
down a beer to me, which I interpreted as a gesture of hospitality since I was
obviously new to the bar.
“Gracias
por la cerveza” (“Thanks for the beer”) I called out amicably to him, and at
that he gravely nodded and gave me a thumbs up, which I interpreted he did
because of my use of Spanish.
Overall,
I find that Mexicans are esp. gracious and appreciative when you try to speak
even a little bit of Spanish; I think it might be because so many of them are
monolingual or just speak a little bit of English, and they not only empathize
with the attempt to learn another language, but appreciate the effort, since I
don’t have to do that, since I could only use English if I wanted to. They get that.
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