Cinco de Mayo commemorates Mexico’s dramatic victory over the Second French Empire at the Battle of Puebla in 1862—dramatic in that the Mexican army was highly outnumbered and had fewer weapons. The triumph was a huge morale boost, which was badly needed at the time. So, good for them.
Not knowing or caring about this bit of history, on this Cinco de Mayo David and I have a hankering for Tex-Mex. It’s been a while since I had a chili relleno.
There are several Tex-Mex restaurants in the area. The very best is Alfredo’s in Kingsland, but we don’t want to drive forty minutes, so we stay local, deciding on Jardin Corona on Main Street. We make plans to leave the house at five-thirty—and yes, this seems early, but we get hungry.
“Hey,” David says at around four-thirty. “A Mexican restaurant might be crowded on Cinco de Mayo. Maybe we should go earlier.”
I guess he thinks the entire Latino population is going to take over the Mexican restaurants at five.
“Five-thirty’s already embarrassingly early,” I tell him. “And now you want to go earlier? Also, who eats out on Thursday?”
Boy did I call it wrong. When we get to the downtown area both sides of Main Street are lined with cars. We have to park two blocks away. At the restaurant the outside tables are all full, with the margueritas at a level to suggest the occupants have been there for a while. And the interior is packed.
A Latino child leads us to one of the last two remaining tables. I’m seated facing the door, which would ordinarily be fine, but the ferocious sun is blazing through the front glass, burning my retinas and making it impossible for me to lift my eyes from the table. David offers to switch places, but hey, it’s the seat I was dealt and why should he suffer?
We get settled and order our drinks. The staff is bustling and there are more servers and hosts than usual. And the girl who led us to our table isn’t the only child who’s working. Obviously the management prepared for the crowd—but how did they know they’d be so busy at five-thirty in the middle of the week? It must be that I know nothing about the local customs.
Curious, I rise a bit from the booth and observe the other diners, anticipating that I’ll see partying Hispanics at every table. But to my amazement it turns out that the majority of the customers are Anglos. It’s as if we, the old pink-faced people of Marble Falls, are celebrating the Latinos’ holiday by allowing the Latinos to feed us. Or did the date itself cause us, in a communally subliminal way, to lay claim to another culture’s tradition by eating massive amounts of Mexican food?
And here’s something else that’s only peripherally relevant:
About three months ago I went to get take-out at the Chicken Express. At the time it was drive-through only and the employees were goofy high schoolers who had to confirm my order three times because they were having so much raucous fun back in the kitchen—and when I got home I found that they’d screwed up the order. And who doesn’t hate that?
But then two weeks ago, when I went to the Chicken Express (dining room open now) I found that the moronic teenagers had (thankfully) been replaced by a group of Latino women who were sharp and efficient, frying up and handing out food as though they were a well-trained arm of the military. An impressive turnaround indeed; although the incongruity of Mexican women serving fried chicken instead of enchiladas disturbed on a visceral level.
“It’s not often that I notice efficiency and intelligence in the people behind the counter at a chicken place,” I later told David. “But those women were on top of it.”
When I was a child, my father, a union bricklayer, said that Latinos were shiftless and lazy. But he was in the union and they weren’t, which meant that, as far as he was concerned, they stole union jobs. So that was likely the basis for his prejudice. Another issue might have been the siesta, their habit of taking a break from labor during the hottest part of the day, which is sensible; but would’ve been viewed with a chary eye by Caucasians like my father, who just sweated through it. Be all that as it may, the fact is that Mexicans are the most diligent and dedicated workers in the world.
And we apparently share in their victory over the French a hundred and sixty years ago by watching them do what they do best—work hard and earn money.
See? White skin, light hair.
Blinding light of the Central Texas sun. This is the little girl who was acting as hostess.
