Juan of Words

El Cínico y El Niño

Despicable Me - Universal Pictures

Somos un par, yo y él.  Me with my cynicism.  He with the sweet and gentle innocence.  Just walking.  Together.  Before we leave, he argues with me about taking his scooter.  We bought it for him because it looked fun.  Only one big gift he gets every Christmas.  I wanted the basketball court.  His mother the scooter.  It is electric and can go pretty fast, ponle a good eight to ten miles an hour, but most days the poor kid can’t ride it except in our backyard.  There, In between the driveway of cars – some old, some new, some still decent, and way too many for our little household of three, but some of them don’t run – and the fallen tree limbs in the yard, the spurting weeds in the cracks of cement – we once thought we actually had a backyard before we started removing the sand and ended up with double the slab and half the grass – that’s where he’s left to conquer this ruby red engine on wheels.  Most days I just feel bad for him circling around over and over again, but he genuinely seems to enjoy it.

Tonight we’ve decided to go for a walk.  Well really I have, for two reasons: the first because there comes a point when you look at your own self captured in the permanency of a picture and realize all of the lies you’ve been telling yourself are exactly just that, lies – in my case, that the larger waistband and kilitos de más were not really a big deal (in this particular picture ni me conosco yo mismo… ahora entindo porque some people actually cry about their weight… pero me aguanto); and two because Edgar is resorting to jumping around in front of me making funny faces and noises, just to get my attention.  When that doesn’t work, he resorts to the collection of all the same movies in his room that he’s already watched about a dozen times each.  The one he’ll watch is the one with the least amount of scratches on it… that his play station will still play.

Me:        Put on your shoes… vamonos.

Him:       Can I take my scooter?

Silence while we both put on our shoes…

Him:       Can I?  Can I?  Can I take my scooter, huh?  Can I?  Huh?

Normally I’d say no, there are too many streets and driveways along the way, but the thing has been sitting in the back yard for days and Edgar won’t touch it in the dead heat of our recent and consecutive 100+ degree days lately.  It’s now just past eight o’clock.  I know this because the novela we like to watch has just finished (Teresa), and the next one, which is not all that great, has already started.  The theme song and intro have just finished and one of the actresses is already in tears on our television screen.  I just nod and he runs outside to get it.

I want to joke, he wants to talk life.  The more he tells me about the parent-teacher meeting we apparently just missed – it ended at eight according to Edgar – the more I make up cheesy stories and what I can only assume are really bad jokes because he doesn’t actually laugh at any of them, only smirks and smiles occasionally.  He zooms off ahead of me.  I walk behind.  He stops, steps off the scooter, and waits for me to catch up, before zooming off again.  We take a few steps together.  He zooms off again.  I yell.  He turns and waits for me.  Our walk is a good forty minutes tonight and like usual by the time we make it back home we’re walking closer together.  He’s still riding and I’m still walking, but somehow we’ve managed to meet somewhere in the middle.

He didn’t even ask for anything when we stopped at the Latino Food Mart to buy the eight pound bag of ice to carry home.

Road Trip Rules From Los Metiches & Happy Travels

Hit the Road Jack... and Jane + the kiddos!

Before we left, Anjelica was in a whirlwind making lists and checking them twice, stocking up our house with bottles of water and other assorted drinks, dusting off our luggage from months of not having been used, and doing all sorts of other things that I didn’t really understand.  I, on the other hand, was rushing to meet certain deadlines, writing like crazy, and when everything had been turned in, sitting around the house, watching mindless TV, just trying to relax for the long drive ahead.  In between her meticulous organizing, every once in a while she’d come in and ask me when I was going to pack, to which I’d just shrug my shoulders and say al rato… we still have time.

Finally, when it was almost midnight, the night before we were set to leave, I decided it was time for me to start packing, and just as quickly as I decided to do so, it hit me just how much there still was to do.  Till about three in the morning we stayed up putting together my things and getting them ready for the two week road trip we were set to take off on at 7:00 a.m.  Obvio, we didn’t make that departure time, but by the time we did hit the road, at about 9:00 a.m., we were already feeling exhausted.  The rest of the trip wasn’t nearly as chaotic, but just so that you won’t make some of the same mistakes on your road trips here are a few of our Road Trip Rules (recomendaciones):

1. Plan ahead – I can’t reiterate this enough.  From the very beginning, we made the mistake of packing way too much clothes for our trip.  Instead of just taking a couple of changes of clothing for each day, we packed like we were moving to the Virginia area for two weeks.  There were like two bags worth of shoes in the trunk of the car.  ¡Par de Locos, ya sé! You’ll also want to have at least a rough outline of your stops along the way.  We did pretty well with this portion of our planning.  Before we even started to pack we had already agreed on which cities we each wanted to see on the way to the DC area.
2. Go with the Flow – Despite all of the planning, however, there will always be the unexpected that throws you of course.  En ratos, I’m not going to lie, there were moments when we all wanted to pull out each other’s hair, including the kids, because something was not going according to plan.  For some reason, todavía no lo entiendo yo mismo, my plan was always to stop only at city or state line crossings for restroom and gas breaks.  This didn’t work out too well because one of the three kids would always yell out “I need to go to the restroom!” just as we were less than 25 miles from the next border line.  I’d yell at them to wait, they’d insist, and finally we’d pull over at the nearest rest stop or gas station.  That’s how we decided to stop at every state’s Welcome Center to rest and let the kids out of the car.  They loved it.  Our unplanned stops at these centers turned out to be a very memorable part of our trip.
3. Pack your Lonche – Depending on where you stop, feeding a car full of people can get real expensive real quick.  Our goal was to save as much money while on the road so that we could have more to spend once we got to wherever our next stop was.  That’s when all of the water bottles in our house before the road trip began to make sense.  Anjelica had been buying them since weeks earlier to make sure we’d have enough to keep us all hydrated on the drive from Texas to DC.  She also used the cooler with all of the chorizo to pack all of the fixings for a quick picnic in Birmingham, Alabama.  It was a simple lunch really: roasted chicken sandwiches with chips, but it certainly did hit the spot after a couple hundred miles on the road.  The other cool perk was that it allowed us to splurge a little more whenever we did get to a destination city along our road trip route.
4. Dry Ice is your Friend – De no haber sido for the dry ice, our very important shipment of enough-chorizo-for-one-year would not have survived the trip.  We barely made it in time to the Dry Ice store in Louisiana to purchase two 10 pound packs of dry ice for our standard sized cooler full of chorizo.  I actually had to convince the vendor to open the door and sell me the ice.  After that, we only added bags of ice as a precaution.  Three days later when we finally made it to Virginia, the dry ice was still intact and had frozen the chorizo inside.  To get it out we had to use a knife to pick it out.  The next morning, and every morning after that, the chorizo was delicious… in huevo, con papas, con tortillas, YUM!!
5. Never underestimate the power of Printed Maps – If you only take one thing away from this post it should most definitely be this one.  Time after time, after time, especially in the mountains, our data service on our phones kept coming in and out whenever it felt like it.  We’d be just about to get to our next exit and the GPS service would announce “GPS signal lost!”  In every direction we’d point our phones trying to get them to reconnect so that they could tell us what to do.  Most of the time they didn’t, and we’d have to resort to the US Almanac we’d bought in Houston before leaving.  This was probably my single most important contribution to our road trip.  I’d asked Anjelica to get the almanac at Walmart just before we took off.
6. If you don’t know, ask – We did a lot of walking at every stop of our trip!  And we also quickly realized that if we made a wrong turn we could easily end up taking dozens of extra and unnecessary steps, not to mention drive a whole lot of extra miles if we didn’t pay attention to where we were going.  In the excitement of heading to New York, for example, we were so busy talking that we ended up missing our stop and driving 20 miles in the wrong direction.  We ended up somewhere in the middle of nowhere before pulling over to ask an attendant at a gas station for directions.  He was no help, but in that little span of time our GPS came back for a couple of seconds to confirm we were going the wrong way.  Con razon llegamos tan tarde a la Gran Manzana!
   
7. Electronics for the kids are Golden! – Another Golden tip, DO NOT underestimate the power of games and other electronics for kids.  Before leaving we had gathered enough earphones to go around también. There were only a handful of times when the kids kept insisting with the question “are we there yet?” over and over again.  The rest of the time they were busy playing alone or against each other on their PSP and DSIs, or watching movies on the portable DVD player, ever so often breaking into an argument, but not nearly as often as had they not had anything back there to keep them busy.  When we got home and unpacked all of their electronics and ours it was kind of ridiculous how much we’d taken with us.
8. Know the place your booking – In New Jersey we made the mistake of booking a hotel on Priceline a lo loco. Everywhere else we had coerced my brother in law to book a hotel room for us from Houston, wherever it was we had decided to stop by mid afternoon.  This was a huge mistake because as soon as we drove by the motel we had gotten in New Jersey we knew we weren’t comfortable staying there.  We canceled the reservation and looked for another hotel in New Jersey, even if it was a wee bit more expensive.  So make sure and know where you’re booking your stay.  Very, very important!
9. Research, Research, Research – Nothing will make your road trip more enjoyable than researching where it is you are going and what there is there that you will want to do.  Anjelica is definitely way better at this than me.  Typically I’m the type that likes to go with the flow and discover things as they present themselves to me, but given our multiple stops and limited amount of time at each, it was great to just be able to turn to Anjelica and ask, what is there to do here? The cherry on top of the pastel in this instance was Great Falls Park in Virginia.  It was a beautiful place and something completely different from all of the tourist destinations in DC.
10. Have Fun!! – Whatever you do, despite all of the desmadre, make sure you have fun!  This is a road trip after all, and that should be your number one priority.  When it was all said and done, that was the one thing we were most grateful for, just how much fun we’d actually had together.  So many memories are now a part of our hearts and minds.

Happy travels!

The Irish Soldiers Of Mexico: August Book Review

By Michael Hogan

In truth, there may never be an actual consensus on what exactly should be included in history textbooks, much less on what stories should be left out and which ones should always be passed down from generation to generation in our classrooms.  This debate has been the center of controversy for years and likely will continue to be so in the foreseeable future.  In a lot of ways it’s a question of who you ask.  I won’t pretend to have the answers here today – my background and personal perspectives don’t really garner a full fledged op-ed on the subject, though I will say it would have made my public education a whole lot more interesting to learn and read about more people like me, of my same ethnicity and heritage.

Por eso it was a true pleasure reviewing this month’s featured book The Irish Soldiers of Mexico by Michael Hogan, published May of this year by Fondo Editorial Universitario in cooperation with Intercambio Press and Createspace.  This treasure of a book, really a pleasure to read with all of the vivid imagery created by Hogan’s craft for the written word, tells the story of the Irishmen who immigrated to the New World during the Great Famine in the 1840’s, first to enlist in the US army and later to join forces with Mexico to protect that country from American invasion, when they found out Mexico was a Catholic country like their own.  These brave men formed los San Patricios Battalion and adopted Mexico as their new country, fighting courageously alongside Mexican nationals, ultimately being captured and hung by American forces in what Hogan describes as a “shameful episode in U.S. history.”  The author of 18 books and Ph.D. in Latin American Studies, Dr. Hogan spent six years researching the story of los San Patricios to bring their stories to life in this book.

Their story is one of courage and tragedy that very fittingly brings to light the importance of sharing the histories of all people.  Whatever your opinion of los San Patricios after reading The Irish Soldiers of Mexico the one thing you can be certain of is that you won’t want to put this book down.  For me, it was a story I wish would have been brought into my life much earlier.

About the Book

The Irish Soldiers of Mexico sold out four editions in English and two editions in Spanish from 1997 to 2001. It has been the basis of an MGM feature film and two documentaries; it has also been used in many history classes both in the United States and abroad. Includes new historical material such as the location of what purported to be a death certificate for John Riley located in a church in Veracruz. The edition includes updated “After the War” and “Commemorations” sections. Many positive changes in public perception of the San Patricios have taken place since the first publication of this book in 1997. In addition, there have been a number of new vehicles for dissemination of the history, not the least of which was the production of “One Man’s Hero,” starring Tom Berenger, three novels on the San Patricios, a new sculpture in Mexico City of John Riley donated by the people of Ireland, and the Chieftains new CD with songs commemorating the Irish battalion.

About the Author

The Author

Michael Hogan lives in Colonia Providencia, Guadalajara, México, with his wife Lucinda Mayo, the internationally known fabric artist. Born in Newport, Rhode Island in 1943, he is the author of sixteen books, including a collection of short stories, six books of poetry, collected essays on teaching in Latin America, a novel, and a history of the Irish battalion in Mexico which formed the basis for an MGM movie starring Tom Berenger. His work has appeared in many journals such as the Paris Review, the Harvard Review, Z-Magazine, Political Affairs and the Monthly Review. He is a consultant to the U.S. Department of State’s Office of Overseas Schools in Latin America. As an author he has received wide recognition for his work, including a PEN Award, two Pushcart Prizes, an NEA fellowship, the Benjamin Franklin Award, the gold medal of the Mexican Geographical Society. Dr. Hogan received his B.A. and MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Arizona. He holds a Ph.D. in Latin American Studies from the University of Guadalajara and the Institute of Advanced Studies. For many years he worked as an international educator and is currently a consultant for the College Board’s programs overseas. He has given workshops and presentations at over sixty conferences in 36 countries.

About the Book Tour

Book Tour Schedule

Mon Aug 22 Condor Musings (Author Guest Post)

Tues Aug 23 Latino Book Examiner (Author Q&A)

Wed Aug 24 Dulce Bread &Book Shop (Review)

Thurs Aug 25 Juan of Words ( Review)

Fri Aug 26 New Latina (Author Q&A)

Mon Aug 29 Vida de Oro (Author Interview)

Tues Aug 30 La Bloga (Author Guest Post)

Wed Aug 31 Franky Benitez (Review)

Thurs Sep 1 Latina Book Club (Review)

Fri Sep 2 Chica Writer (Review)

This post is an official tour stop of The Irish Soldiers of Mexico Condor Book Tour

FTC Disclosure: Juan of Words received a free copy of the book from the author as part of a Condor Book Tour. Juan of Words was not required to write a positive review. The opinions expressed are our own.

Tejanos En La Gran Manzana (Yeah… The Big Apple)

In the words of Carrie Bradshaw, or Sarah Jessica Parker as her character in the megahit series Sex in the City – this is coming completely from my subconscious, unbeknownst to me – “New York is fabulous!”  Never thought I’d utter those words… and actually mean them.  I bet my father is so proud of me right about now, jajaja!  But in all seriousness now, okay maybe not exactly complete seriousness, of all the cities we visited during our summer road trip, which you know ended just a couple of days ago, New York was the most impressive and beautiful for me.

The Big Apple!

From the moment we walked off the local bus we’d taken from New Jersey to New York ($2.50 per person for the 20 minute ride) and walked directly onto Times Square from our bus terminal, the pace of life was completely different from what we are used to.  I know what y’all are thinking, those Pace picante sauce commercials where the cowboys are sitting around a camp fire saying “he must be from New York City!” with a Texas twang of course, but I promise it wasn’t all like that.  Immediately our eyes were drawn upwards toward all the shiny lights and digital billboards on the streets, people were zooming by and around us in every direction, a lot of them looking annoyed by us as we just stood there for a couple of seconds, trying to take in all of our surroundings, like an infant trying to adjust to new legs.  Everything we’d heard and seen about the Big Apple was now before us and we didn’t know what to do first.

As opposed to New Orleans, Nashville, Birmingham, and Texas, where we knew we could navigate at our own pace in our own vehicle, exploring only what we wanted to, in New York we were just like three little worker ants moving along with the pack, and at one point getting yelled at by a female New Yorker for “not going at the right pace.”  Normally that would have made us mad and we would have had something smart to say to her, but in our quest to experience the “real” New York City it just made us giggle, and we were actually grateful for her attitude, that and she zoomed by so fast we were barely able to look at her backside for a half second before she got lost in the crowd again.  After being yelled at, we decided it was time to get a cab, which in it of itself was a whole other experience.

Happy even after being yelled at

We picked up our pace, clutching Edgar by the hand and literally dragging him along at moments, walking as fast as we could, like we were power walking or something just one notch away from jogging, and proceeded to try to flag down a cab from the sea of yellow vehicles on the streets.  It felt silly for me at first to stretch out my arm and just leave it there in the air, waving my hand at times, trying to get taxi cabdrivers’ attention, but that seemed the norm here and it looked like that was the only way we were going to be able to “catch” a cab.  This was one of the most fun parts of our visit to the city for me – I think Anjelica liked Chinatown the best.  In Texas we just call a taxi and tell them where to pick us up.  Finally, after several failed attempts, we managed to corner an empty cabbie at a red light and jumped in before he changed his mind in a “New York minute,” I just had to throw that in, was dying to use it.  He drove us to Chinatown, overcharged us, and took off with another group of dazed looking tourists.

Chinatown

In Chinatown I wasn’t very good at making friends.  If you know me you know I am very cheap, all of the time, and apparently in Chinatown only certain vendors are willing to partake in haggling.  A 40-ish Asian lady in one of the shops made that perfectly clear to me after I offered her $3 for the watch she was selling me for $5.  “I cannot believe you say that! Three dollars for a five dollar watch, that’s insulting…”  Even as we were walking down the street we could still hear her telling us off.  We kept shopping and eventually found another vendor who was willing to take $3 for the same watch.  In the meantime though, the Italian gelato vendor charged us $6 a pop for two tiny cups of frozen gelato (a rip off I’m sure), which I guess in the end balanced everything out.  We stopped shopping and left Chinatown on another cab to Central Park before we kept spending money like crazy.  The park was nice and we sat there listening to live music for a couple of minutes before heading back to Times Square by foot to see all of the lights and action at night.

Our friends the Naked Cowboy and Cowgirl were there, along with a couple hundred other people who were all there for the same reason as us, to experience Times Square after dark.  We were mesmerized and just walked and walked around until we literally couldn’t take it anymore.  At Walgreens we paid $25 for a banana, a Monster, a bottle of water and a pack of my cigarettes, before heading back to the bus station.  I wasn’t leaving without trying out the food from the street vendors so greedily ordered an Italian sausage hot dog with the works and a barbecued chicken skewer sandwich for myself.  There wasn’t anywhere to sit.  I just stood there in the middle of the street devouring my Italian sausage dog first, then my chicken skewer sandwich, then Edgar’s, with mustard and sauerkraut running through my fingers, soaked into the three napkins the vendor had given me.

They were delicious.  I was satisfied.  And we were all ready to head back to the hotel in New Jersey to crash out for the night.  Yes, New York City was fabulous!

Score!

Let’s Win Some Free Gas!!

Un doble honor it is for me to have been asked to represent the city of Houston and the Great State of Texas, as well as the Latino community – I’m the only Latino blogger in this competition – this month, in the Ford Motor Company’s F-150 EcoBoost Challenge! In a nutshell, Ford will be delivering a brand new F-150 EcoBoost to me and seven others across the United States on Sunday, August 21, 2011, so that we can participate in a nationwide challenge that will measure how each one of us bloggers maximize our miles per gallon on the trucks from the 22nd until the 26th.

The competition

What’s at stake you ask?  FREE Nitrogen Enriched Gasoline, not only for me, but for all of you in the city of Houston at two select Shell locations, on September 2, 2011 (Labor Day Weekend), if we can pull off being the # 1 City in this competition.

I won’t bore you with the details of how exactly Ford will select one of us bloggers as the overall winner, but it does involve a community event which I’ll be putting together over the course of the next week, and, most importantly, your VOTES!!!  Yes, part of the measurement will be your votes.  So please vote for me and vote often (if that’s allowed).  As far as the miles per gallon, I think I’ve got that covered (soy mexicano after all, we’re used to stretching things out to get the most out of them), but if you have tips I’m all ears!

Here's the ride I'll be using for the challenge. Sweet, huh?

Stay tuned and I’ll let you know how else you can help secure that free gas for Houston.  In the meantime, VOTE!!

Crashing Into Glass Walls And The New Baby

Asi se escucho en mi cabeza

After our two weeks of traveling the country I knew there would be a few stories to tell, what I didn’t honestly expect was for one of them to be this one.  So one day before we were preparing to hit the road back to Texas, kind of disappointed that my sister still hadn’t gone into labor with her first born before we left, what we’d been hoping for happened!  She started having pains and we knew we would get to meet the new baby before we’d leave.

My sister lives in another state and we don’t get to see her and her family as often as we’d like.  Now with the new baby on the way we wanted to be the first to meet her and had planned our vacation around the idea that maybe, just maybe, she’d go into labor while we were visiting.  Ironically, when it all started happening it all seemed a little surreal, to me at least.

Immediately I became central command for the rest of my family in Texas, sending them constant updates and answering questions about just how close she might have been to having the baby.  Ahora les confieso that I was just guessing about everything because, well, what the hell do I know about childbirth??  Anyhow, when baby Sofia finally made her grand entrance into this world, my excitement overwhelmed me!  That’s the simplest way to put it.

My mother was flying in that evening and we had to go and pick her up from the airport to bring her back to the hospital to meet her new granddaughter – mind you we were visiting the area as well and were dealing with a very moody GPS system on our phones that came in and out of range whenever it felt like it, and a car full of kids that were pretty fed up with sitting in the car by this point.   In between yelling at the kids, holding a conversation with Anjelica, and wondering how I was going to get to the airport in time, there I was walking towards the parking garage with my cell phone in my hand as I answered a text message from my brother.  The hospital has a sky bridge that connected us to the parking garage without having to go out onto the street.  As I was typing my text, right before looking up to yell at the kids to slow down, SMACK!!!, dead into the glass wall separating the parking garage from the elevator area I crashed!  It was a painful reality check that I was doing too much at the same time.

The only thing that saved me from smacking my entire face into the glass wall was the new cap I’d bought in Nashville, Tennessee, and had been wearing religiously for days now.  As I tried to play it off like nothing had happened and desperately looked around to make sure no one had seen me, Anjelica turned around in disbelief and just started cracking up.  She proceeded to ask me if I was okay and then to tell the kids what had just happened.  I said I wasn’t in pain and laughed it off, but more than anything I was embarrassed that I was so despistado to crash into an entire wall.  Even now, just thinking about it makes me crack up.

Needless to say I didn’t text and walk the rest of the time we were on vacation.

My new niece, by the way, is beautiful and perfect!