It had rained a bit the night before. There were still clouds covering the sun, though none was releasing its rain. The city streets shined like oil on a face, but the highway was dry from the trucks and cars always keeping the concrete active with their tires. The blacktop bike path didn’t shine but it was wet and when Heliodoro Hernandez’s foot happened to hit the ground on one of the many cracks in the path a splash of mud and water came up onto his pants and dampened his sock. His walk lasted twenty-five minutes from his house on Second Avenue in the northeast quarter of Rochester, MN to where he worked, the restaurant in the strip mall along South Broadway in the southwest quarter. He used to ride a bicycle along the bike path until a group of black children stole first the seat and then the front wheel. Then after seeing the body of the bike locked to the lamppost of the parking lot of the strip mall for three days, they came with an older kid who brought a bolt cutter and took the rest of Heliodoro’s bicycle.
Oxxxxxx’s Pizza Pub required Heliodoro to arrive five minutes before he was scheduled in order to change into his dishwasher’s shirt and clean his hands. Upon his first day at the restaurant Sxxxxxx Oxxxxxx explained to him in plain English how to wash his hands. He watched her wash under her nails and between her fingers and all the way up to her elbows, not rinsing until everything was covered in fresh suds and popping with soap bubbles. He mimicked her and nodded to her as she watched him.
“Good,” she said to him.
“Gracias,” he said and looked to her face. “A thank a you.” He said in English and smiled under his thin bigote.
“You’re welcome,” she replied slowly and emphasizing each sound. “Ted, this is America. You need to speak English to work here. No more Spanish.”
“Yes,” he said.
Save for the other Mexicans, everyone at work called him Ted. On Heliodoro’s first day Sxxxxxx had seen his name written out and decided that it looked enough like Theodore to call him Ted for short. She took him around and introduced him as the new dishwasher Ted. Ted said hello to the cooks, and to them his name was Ted; and Ted said hello to the bartenders and to the hosts and to Exxx & Bxxxx Oxxxxxx. Only the Mexican’s and the Oxxxxxxs themselves knew that the name Heliodoro existed.
Theodore comes from Greek, as does Heliodoro. Doron is the Greek pronunciation of gift. Theos is for God and Helio is for Sun. Thus, respectively Theodore and Heliodoro originally mean “gift from God” and “gift from the sun.” Yet in Olmsted County, Minnesota, Sxxxxxx Oxxxxxx was explaining to one of the cooks, “His name is Mexican for Theodore, so we’re just going to call him Ted. Ted’s a nice American name for him.”
“What’s his Mexican name?” the cook asked.
“Heliodoro,” she said in plain English pronouncing the H and giving the vowels a similar sound to helicopter.
“That doesn’t sound much like Theodore.”
“Well you have to see it written out,” she said. “It doesn’t matter. His name is Ted. Just call him Ted.”
Oxxxxxx’s Pizza Pub had an open kitchen. The kitchen was at the front of the restaurant against the storefront windows and enclosed in Plexiglas like a hockey rink, so that the customers as well as passersby could hang around and watch the art of flattening dough and placing pepperonis. The dish room was behind the kitchen and had no windows. There used to be a radio for the dishwashers to hear music as they pushed the racks of plates into the dishwashing machine and then out of the machine. That was back when the restaurant was still in the old bank building downtown, before moving there to the strip mall.
Downtown there was only one Mexican working called Hilario. He knew enough English to work on the pizza line in the kitchen. He could read the words: small, medium, large, XL, cheese, pep, sausage, G.P., black olive, green olive, well-done, thick and thin. He, like Heliodoro later, worked without legal identity.
“I need to go home,” he told the Oxxxxxxs one day during December.
“To Mexico?” Sxxxxxx asked.
He nodded, and she asked why.
“I need to go home to see my wife and my family,” he said slowly but correctly. “I am going to come back mayo.”
“In May, you will come back?” Exxx Oxxxxxx asked. She had studied Spanish and Russian at the College of Saint Catherine a catholic college for women in the Twin Cities. Sxxxxxx explained once that her sister attended St. Kate’s back before the whole lesbian thing. Exxx had studied Russian there because of the Cold War, but she was speaking in Spanish to Hilario at the pizza pub.
“¿Por qué tu familia no está contigo aquí?” she asked.
“My family is in Mexico because there is no money for to come here,” he said back to her in English.
“¿Y a tu familia vas a darle tu dinero? ¿A ellos, está enviandoles tu dinero actualmente?”
“I am giving my money to my family with the Oestern Union.”
“The Western Union? And, ¿Va a venir contigo tu familia?”
“No, my family is staying in Mexico.”
Helario left, and a kid from the high school took his spot on the pizza line, until he came late too many days in a row. An ex-con named Don out on the work release program replaced him, and in February Hilario returned. The Oxxxxxxs gave him back his job along the pizza line.
“Welcome back to America,” the employees of Oxxxxxx’s shouted at the small party that had been thrown after work on his first night back. There was an American Flag birthday cake and a baseball hat with a ribbon on it for Hilario. He said thank you and looked at the hat, which had an embroidered on it a bald eagle clutching an American Flag in its talons. On the back in gold floss, there read “U.S.A. United We Stand!”
“Thank you very much,” he said.
Hilario explained later to Exxx in very quick Spanish that he had come back early because his wife had left him before he arrived in his pueblo outside of Mexico City. She took all of the money he had been sending home and drove to Guatemala with another man leaving the three children alone in the small house. They all had no money now so he left them with an amigo in another pueblo and returned to Olmsted County to work making pizzas again.
When the restaurant moved to the strip mall, Hilario helped to move the ovens and equipment. He worked at the new location for a few months before saying the same thing to Exxx about returning to Mexico and to his family to give them his money. He would be back he said to her.
While he was gone, Heliodoro a roommate of Hilario’s at their house on Second Avenue NE, Rochester, MN came to the Oxxxxxxs and asked for a job with Hilario’s name as recommendation. All of the other Mexican dishwashers had come on the behalf of Hilario. There were Paco, Santos, and Juan Carlos.
Paco only lasted two nights. He was always sad-faced and saying to himself, “Qué lástima.” Exxx told Sxxxxxx that this was Spanish for “What hurts?” Paco kept saying it all the time, and Sxxxxxx kept asking him in English, “ ‘What hurts?’ What you are talking about Paco? Tell me what you are talking about in English. Hilario, tell me what Paco is saying all the time. What is Qué lástima?”
“It means that Paco is sad,” Hilario said.
“Paco is sad to be working here?” Sxxxxxx asked. She turned to Paco, who was caring a brown tub of dirty dishes past the sink into the dish room. “Are you sad to be working here in America, Paco?”
“¿Qué?” he asked and looked at Hilario. “Hilario, ¿Qué me dijo la jefe?”
“She asked if you are sad to be in America as a worker,” Hilario said to him in Spanish.
“What did you say to him Hilario?” she asked. “Don’t speak Spanish to each other in front of me. This is America. We speak English here. What did you say to Paco, Hilario?”
“I said that what you said to him about if he is sad to be in America.”
“And what does he have to say?” she asked and turned to Paco. “Are you Qué lástima to be in America?”
“No, Señora,” Paco said and said something else to Hilario. “¿Por qué está enojada conmigo? Y ¿Qué me dijo ahora?”
“What did he say, Hilario? Tell me what he said in English.”
“He said, ‘Why is she mad with me?’”
“Well, you can tell him that I won’t have slimy Mexicans working for me who don’t even want to be in America. If he is so sad to be here, then he should go straight back to Mexico because there are plenty of people who would be glad to have a job here. Tell him that, Hilario, and then tell him to take off that Oxxxxxx’s shirt because he doesn’t work here anymore,” she took a quick breath. “You run home now, Paco. Now who’s so sad?”
Hilario and Paco stood in front of the dish room while Sxxxxxx turned around and walked to the back of the restaurant. Hilario told Paco what had happened. Paco removed his Oxxxxxx’s t-shirt and left. Hilario explained to Juan Carlos what had happened in Spanish and then he explained it in English to one of the cooks, who then explained it in English to the rest of the staff.
Juan Carlos told Heliodoro not to speak Spanish around the female bosses, but that it was okay to speak it when in front of el jefe, the male boss, and any time when no boss was around to hear it.
Jay Fox, the only white dishwasher hated to hear the Mexicans speak in Spanish, but he was always outnumbered by them in the dish room, and the Oxxxxxx’s did not take his complaints or anything about him seriously.
Heliodoro and Juan Carlos sang and joked in Spanish while they worked in the dish room. They spoke to each other in Spanish during their dinner break. Sometimes, they spoke in Spanish to one of the cooks, Andrew, a high school student, who was taking second-year Spanish.
“¿Cómo están amigos?” he said to Juan Carlos and Heliodoro.
They each said they were well, and Heliodoro asked, “¿Tú sabes mucho español?”
Andrew said in Spanish that he was only in Spanish Level Two at the high school and he knew very little Spanish.
“No, hablas español muy bien,” Juan Carlos said. “Es muy bueño hablar dos idiomas. Sabes dos.” Juan Carlos said that he was sad that he only knew Spanish and that he wished that he knew English.
Sxxxxxx walked past everyone on dinner break and looked at the three of them speaking Spanish. They looked up at her. She looked away.
After the dinner break was over and the plates were all cleared, everyone had to scrub their hands. Sxxxxxx stood by the kitchen and watched the two Mexican dishwashers return to the dish room without washing their hands. At the moment that Juan Carlos seized a tray of dishes, Sxxxxxx yelled to them.
“Juan Carlos get over here,” she said. “Put down those plates. Those are all dirty now. You came in there with your filthy hands after you stuffed your face and touched the clean plates with them.”
Juan Carlos apologized and started to explain in Spanish that the dishes were dirty and he was trying to put them into the machine.
“Boogadee boogadee boo,” she said. “Speak English. Andrew, get over here. You think it’s so funny to sit there and speak their language with them, so until they work perfectly you going to be in there doing dishes with them. You can tell them how to do it right. And if you don’t know how to do it right then you better ask somebody because otherwise all three of you are going to out of here. That means you, too, Ted. I’ve seen you putting the pots into the sanitizer without letting them soak in the rinse water. I know that I explained this all to you before. You both are lazy and if you think that I’m going to keep you around you’re wrong. Get to work, and Juan Carlos, put those dishes in the machine.”
Andrew quit before the next weekend. The cooks later talked about how he had a job making $10 an hour working for the city repainting fire hydrants orange.
Juan Carlos and Heliodoro worked in mostly silence for weeks after Andrew left. There was no Spanish in the dish room for a while. Soon things fell into routine again, and the Spanish songs and jokes returned. Jay complained to Sxxxxxx that the Mexicans were speaking Mexican again.
“They’re working right now, Jay,” she said to him. “That’s something you’re not doing when you’re whining to me. Let us worry about the Mexicans, and you worry about getting the silverware cleaned before we run out of forks out here again.”
Hilario returned from Mexico a couple weeks later. He told Heliodoro that his wife had come and taken his three children away with her to Guatemala while he was in America. He had spent all his money trying to find where they were in Guatemala. Only he found out that they hadn’t gone to Guatemala at all. They had gone to a place called Birmingham, but he was broke so he returned to Olmsted County to work making pizzas. The Oxxxxxxs told him that there was nothing good in Mexico for him and he should stop trying to go back there and that he should bring his family to America. They hired him back, and he walked along the bike path with Heliodoro from their house to work until Heliodoro bought a five-year-old Mazda. Then each day Heliodoro drove two other Mexicans to their jobs at the car wash before taking Hilario and himself to work at the restaurant.
