You Know I Don’t Speak Spanish, Right?

There’s this lady who comes to take out the trash in my office. Now if I were brave and/or cultured, I could venture a guess and say she’s from Mexico, Puerto Rico or maybe El Salvador, but I’m not brave or cultured so I’ll just say she was of “Latin descent” (That’s how white people talk when they aren’t sure who’s listening but know they REALLY don’t want to get beat up today).

 

As an aside, I’ve been trying to decide whether it feels more racist to take a bad guess at where somebody’s from and be completely wrong or to be too afraid to speculate at all.

 

“I don’t know where he’s from, I don’t care, wherever it is, I’m sure they’ve got knives…”

 

Why do people bother saying “completely wrong” anyway? Are there degrees of wrong here? Will I get racial partial credit? Only half an ass whipping? This whole line of discussion is wrong, that’s why I don’t talk about race more; even when you’re good at it it’s hard not to sound like an ass, and as you can see here I don’t know what the hell I’m doing. Moving on…

 

So anyway, there’s this lady of Latin descent, she comes by my office every day around 5 to change out the trash bags at everyone’s desk. Every day, she goes through this song-and-dance with my white coworkers

 

“Hola!”

“Uh, um hola, como esta?”

 

And then she launches into a paragraph-long response in Spanish that they can’t possibly understand, just nod along to. They know they don’t understand her, she knows they don’t understand her. I guess they must feel obligated by “white guilt” to play along, and she seems to delight in sticking it to em.

 

“Yeah I may be changing trash bags, but you people are my linguistic biatches… never forget that, sucka!”

 

The whole display is very passive aggressive and she repeats this routine for every single employee, every single day. That is, until she gets to my desk, where I politely make a point of cheerily beating her to the punch.

 

“Hello!”

“Uh, um hi.”

“How are you?”

“Fine.”

“Good.”

 

And that’s it. That’s our conversation, every day, every single f-ing day, word for word, a childish struggle on an epic scale. It was a little tense at first (I know she has to have thought about taking a mop handle to my skull), but I think we’re developing a healthy respect for each other.

 

“Wow, this guy is a some kind of Black Angus, Rancher’s Reserve-grade tool bag, he must be really unimportant to be that petty, I’d better leave him alone, at least until my new mop handle comes in…”

 

She can’t be really mad anyway; she knows she’s wrong. She’s playing on people’s desire not to feel like a bigot so she can punk them into speaking half-assed Spanish against their will. She miscalculated with me though, because I’m not going to feel like a bigot, at least not for that. With slavery and the civil rights struggle, my people have a lot of racial brownie points in the bank, so it takes a lot for me and mine to feel racist, even for stuff that probably is racist.

 

I’m disgusted with how much moral victories like this please me, but please me they do. And no, I don’t feel like she has to speak English just because she’s in America. On the other hand I don’t feel like I should have to speak Spanish either, and certainly not just because she’s wants me to. I don’t want to speak Spanish right now lady. I have no intention of learning Spanish either, not unless I happen to be dating some beautiful Latina girl, the kind of girl you see in old Jon Secada videos, who makes you forget you’re driving an automobile and that cars can’t go through trees, regardless of what you saw on cartoons. If I ever get to date one of those girls, then I will pick up some Rosetta Stone like it’s an organ ready for transplant; the way your boy is going to be sounding stuff out is going to be downright inspirational.

 

“Vas aqui senorita, da me tu leche. Mmmm, es bueno, pero queiro mas. Quieres mas tambien? Si, mas… mas mas, Menos, menos!… arghhh, ooh, no, ah, eh, ah Ay-Yi-Yi! Ehh, whew. Fue fantasticamente, no? Gracias mi amor, me gustas mucho, creo que tienes mi corazon, necissito una siesta… Que? Estas embarazada? Tan pronto? Pero… Umm, lo siento, tengo ir... si ahora… Que? Hah! Solomente si tus hermanos puedan encontrar-me, hasta luego!”

 

Pretty sure both the grammar and the content in that last paragraph is messed up like Chinese civil liberties. My apologies to anyone who actually speaks Spanish or took the time to translate that dreck; your frustration is justified. My name is Mike and nobody asked my opinion in the first place.