By Juan Montoya
It was summer in Saginaw, Michigan and our afternoon newspaper deadline had been met at 11:30 a.m. when I emerged from the Saginaw News and headed for a Mexican restaurant nearby across the street from the old Chevrolet Grey Iron Foundry.
It was the only Mexican eatery on the east side of town across the Saginaw River where the majority of the population were mostly blacks and Hispanics. A permanent gray soot covered the old abandoned foundry and nearby warehouses and buildings from the long-abandoned iron casting works.
I was walking around the block from the newspaper when I came across a pickup truck with Texas license plates and as I approached, a middle-age Mexican man stepped out of of the truck and asked me if I spoke Spanish. There were two kids in the back of the pickup truck under the camper shell, indicating they may have been agricultural migrants from Texas.
"Si," I told him. "En que le puedo ayudar?"
"We're looking for the Social Security office," he replied in Spanish. I pointed out the entrance to the building about halfway down the block and across the street and he thanked me.
"Where are you from in Texas," I asked him.
"De San Benito," he replied. "Y usted?," he asked.
"De Brownsville."
"Que hace por ests rumbos," he asked me. ("What are you doing out this way?")
"I work for the newspaper, but I live about 50 miles from here with my native american wife," I told him in Spanish.
He looked at me and smiled knowingly.
"Oh, esas estiran mas que dos locomotoras." (Oh, yes. They pull more than two locomotives.")
3 comments:
Your Native American woman was a force to be reckoned with. She provided you with a strong daughter too.
You are a brave man to post a rainbow 🌈 painted train with the words "Love Train."
Hey, I saw that train on owens rd. on ambulance tires and all the doctores were waving at the queer train... MARICONES!
I married a native american lady and I ran to the courthouse to get one of those quickie divorces ONLY after two hours...
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