FOR OUR XMAS VACATION VISITORS FROM UP NAWTH

By Juan Montoya
I ran into Felipe in a honky-tonk bar in Brownsville by chance.
I had not seen him for a while, although I had heard that he had gone up north to work, as do many people of South Texas who can’t find work. Where he had gone, or how long he was away, I did not know until I ran into him.

I walked into Whitey’s Bar on Highway 48 on a whim. It was a hot day in December, not an unusual occurrence in this part of the country. It was only about 4 in the afternoon and I was met by the syncopation of an accordion, a 12-string bajo sexto and a guitar as the group (or conjunto) we knew as Los Prietos, belted out a popular song. We called them Los Prietos because besides the fact that the three brothers were musicians, they shared the same skin hue – a leathery, deep-brown tan.

Los Prietos were playing Jacinto Treviño, a nationalistic Tejano corrido, or border ballad. The tune talks of a regional folk hero who stood up to the rinches, or Texas Rangers. Several stanzas in the song deal with the question of the Rangers’ manhood, with Treviño daring them to fight with his pistol in his hand. It’s the stuff of bravado and daring celebrated in local folklore.
This song is usually played after the alcohol has sufficiently lubricated the emotions of local Hispanics, but to tell you the truth, Whitey’s Bar is not one of the bars where this tune is heard often.

Filled with longshoremen from the port, it is also one of the few working-class Anglo bars patronized by southerners (from Louisiana, usually) who worked on the docks or as fishing boat hands.

The conjunto had finished playing the song as I eased myself into a stool at the bar and asked Ofi for a beer.
“The usual?,” she asked.
“As long as it’s cold,” I answered.
“Está muerta,” she said, and fished a cold brown bottle from the inner depths of the cooler. Bits of ice clung to the label as she placed a round cardboard coaster on the Formica counter and wrapped the bottle with a napkin.

I turned around to look at Luis, the accordion player with Los Prietos.
“Where’s the client you’re playing for?” I asked since there was no one sitting at the table, only a half-empty bottle and a small puddle of water from the melted ice on the table top.
“He’s making room for more in the pisser,” Luis said.

I shook hands all around and someone tapped me on the shoulder as I was sitting down on the stool.
“You’re not trying to steal my musicos, are you?” asked familiar voice.
I turned around quickly because it is not unheard of that some drunk dock hand will pick a fight with a stranger over some imagined slight.

“Felipe,” I said. “Where the hell have you been, you old bandido?"
We shook hands and gave each other the traditional abrazo, or embrace, more of a backslap greeting than a hug perfunctory among men who know each other.
“I was in South Dakota working in a meat processing plant, a matanza, where they kill hogs,” Felipe replied. “It kicks your butt, but the pay’s decent. I’m down for Christmas and New Year. I got two weeks vacation.”

Felipe settled with Los Prietos - $21 for seven songs, and threw in the extra four dollars as a tip.
“Gracias, carnal,” Luis said and waved goodbye as the brothers walked out the door. They would make their way down 14th Street and stop at all the honky-tonk bars in between. Although it was still early for daily business, the chance holiday visitor like Felipe drew out the three or four conjuntos still doing business on the strip.
“You know, $3 is a bargain for songs like that where I was at, if you can even get someone to play them,” said Felipe. “Heck, you can’t even get decent group up there. Once in a while a group comes through town and plays at a dance, but it’s far and in between. When I get a chance to hear some of the god stuff I jump at the chance.”

“Yeah, I noticed,” I told him. “You probably played every corrido you knew.”
“I’m stocking up for when I leave in 10 days,” he said. “Then it’s back to the knife and the production line. It’s a drag, but it pays.”
“How cold is it up there right now?” I asked Felipe.
“I don’t even ask anymore,” he said. “All I need to know is that it’s below freezing. From there on, it’s pretty much the same. Cold is cold no matter how you slice it.”

Over the next beer, Felipe told me he had been out of work two years ago when an employment office worker told him that a meat processing company was hiring workers to go to its plant at Sioux Falls, S.D. With no job prospects in sight and a promised $10 an hour with plenty of overtime at time-and-a-half, the proposal was enticing. The company also threw in two months of housing allowance and two meal tickets daily in its plant cafeteria.

“All I had to do was pass a piss test and I waited for a week without doing anything. So it was a breeze,” he said. “After I took the interview and went to a local clinic for the test, I left in a chartered bus for the trip up north. It’s been almost two years since I last saw you, so it’s been about that long since I left. Matter of fact it was about this time, after the holidays, that I took the bus.”

For the next few months, as the workers qualified for the different tasks on the line, Felipe told me he learned the ins and outs of laboring in the hog-killing floor of the plant. Most of the positions on the loading docks were filled, as were the positions where the pigs were received from hog farmers and off-loaded from the large semi-trailers. Most of the men and women who left the Rio Grande Valley filled positions on the production line where they sliced and gleaned different parts from the carcasses of butchered hogs.

“My job after we had received two weeks of training on the use of the gloves and armor was to cut the ears and cheeks from the pig heads after the rest of the pig had been butchered,” Felipe said. “It looked and sounded easy, but if you repeat the same motions wearing those heavy gloves 100s of times in an hour, you’d be surprised how painful it can be. Even now, after two years, I still can’t fully make a fist with my right hand,” he said clenching his hand to illustrate his point. “A lot of people quit after the first two or three months. Es una chinga.”

As Felipe reached into his shirt pocket to fish out a wadded bill, a yellow folded paper fell on the table.
“What’d you do? Get a ticket over there?” I asked him.
“You’re not going to believe this,” he said as he called Ofi for two more. I could see this was going to take time and walked to the men’s room to take a pee. Properly relieved, I sat down to a fresh beer as Felipe leaned back and started his story.

“About three weeks ago, a few of us Mexicans who hadn’t left for vacations were getting homesick in the cold and snow,” he said. “It was frigid outside. Some of us lived in the same apartment complex. It has about 200 or more apartments and is by Interstate 290. Some of us were from the Rio Grande Valley. Others were from northern Mexico and a few were from the interior.”
The group often visited to keep in touch with the news from home and to watch soccer games on Spanish-language television, he said. When they were off work, they often got together to socialize and drink a few beers while the wives and girlfriends prepared something to eat, usually fajitas or some other Mexican dish.

“It was Genaro, from Valle Hermoso, in Tamaulipas, who first suggested we make some carnitas,” Felipe said. “He told us how his father and uncles would get together and slaughter a nice-sized pig. After they killed it, they would clean the hide with boiling water to remove the hair, and later cook the meat in boiling lard to make chicharrones and carnitas.”
The group of friends threw around the idea and decided to find out where they could get a pig that was just right, not too big and not too little. Genaro said he would ask a friend at receiving if he could get them in touch with a hog farmer who could get them a small pig. They left it at that and agreed to butcher the pig the next weekend.

Genaro got in touch with Felipe on Wednesday and told him he had found a farmer who would sell them the pig for only $50 if they would pick it up the next Saturday morning. They told the women they found a pig and the ladies set about finding large pans to boil the water and make the chicharrones.

“The next Saturday everything was set,” said Felipe wiping his mouth with the wet napkin he took off the bottle. “We took my pickup and got the pig from a farmer in southwest Minnesota, only a few miles from the South Dakota border.”

With everything ready, the friends decided to butcher the pig in the large Laundromat in the basement of the apartment complex. There were large sinks available for the tenants to rinse their hand washables and dump their mop water. If they worked it right, they could easily butcher the animal over one of the sinks and keep the blood from splattering on the floor and making a mess.

Since Genaro seemed the most knowledgeable of the group when it came to hog butchering, he was chosen to actually kill the pig. All of them worked at the plant, so there was no shortage of sharp knives available. Virtually, every plant worker had a few they took home for use in their kitchens.

“You’ve got to help me and hold him down while I stick the knife in its heart and bleed him so we can use the blood to make chorizo,” Genaro told them. With a good selection of knives laid out on one side of the sink, the men set about to butcher the pig before noon while the ladies started boiling the water and making preparations.

“We can make tamales from the head,” said Antonio, a Salvadoran who had lived in southern Mexico for many years before making his way to the Midwest. “My wife knows how to make them with banana leaves Central American style. We went to a Guatemalan store the other day and got some. You’re going to love them.”

Genaro and Felipe hauled the pig from his pickup and brought him down into the basement washroom. It was squealing and kicking as they struggled with its squirming body.
“It was perfect size,” Felipe told me. “Nice and plump and full. A lot of meat on that little pig.”
Genaro handed the back legs to Antonio as he prepared the knife, a pointed vicious-looking piece of cutlery used to remove the meat from the crevices of the pig skulls after the ears, tongue, and cheek meat had been removed by workers up the line.

“I held on to the head and front legs of the pig and Antonio held on to the rear legs while Genaro got ready to stab it in the heart,” Felipe said. “Just as he was ready to plunge in the knife, the pig kicked out and Antonio lost hold of one of its legs. That made me move the pig to try to hold him still and Genaro missed.”

The sudden pain of the knife in its chest made the pig struggle even harder and Felipe told me he lost hold of it and the pig squealed off in pain across the basement leaving a trail of blood on the tile floor.
The rest of the group grabbed knives and ran off to try to catch it as it scurried across the floor and darted under washers and between dryers.

“You should have seen the mess,” Felipe said, signaling Ofi for another round. “There was blood smeared all over the floor and on me and Genaro. On top of that, the poor pig had shit out of fright and that was also mixed in with the blood. We had him cornered several times but each time we got near him, he scampered away squealing. There we were, all smeared with blood and shit running around the basement with those butcher knives. It was a sight from hell.”

That’s probably what an elderly non-Hispanic tenant thought when she walked down the steps to the basement with her laundry and caught sight of six bloody Mexicans chasing each other across the basement screaming and hollering at each other in Spanish with sharp butcher knives in hand, Felipe said.

“She dropped her laundry basket and ran screaming up the steps,” Felipe said. “Before you knew it, about 20 cops came into the basement with their guns pointed at us screaming for us to drop the knives. Since I was the only one who spoke English and could explain what had happened, they took me aside as they held the others at bay.”
Felipe said he finally explained to the police that they all worked at the meat processing plant and that they were just trying to butcher a pig to make chicharrones. The police officers were incredulous when they saw their blood-smeared clothes and the mess on the floor of the Laundromat and asked them where the pig was.

“We finally found him wedged under the motor of one of the washing machines,” Felipe said. “When they pulled him out, the poor animal had a superficial wound on the right side of the chest and he stunk from his shit. The cops just looked at each other and shook their heads. By then, a crowd had gathered at the complex and wondered how many Mexicans had been killed.

“We took the cops upstairs and showed them the boiling water the women were preparing for the chicharrones,” Felipe said. “But they were pissed that it had turned out to be the killing of a pig and not a gang in a knife fight. They got pretty mad.”
As a result, the police issued citations to the six friends for animal cruelty, an offense carrying a $250 fine. At a total of $1,500, the cost of the enterprise cost more than it was worth, Felipe said.

“I was going to have Los Prietos play for a few hours,” he said. “But I had to pay the fine before I left, so that threw a damper on that. I hope I don’t see a chicharron or a carnita for as long as I live, mano. That turned out to be an expensive pig.”