Cultural Mecca
As a waitress on the west coast of the United States of America, one also must become accustomed to the great cultural slap in the face difference between the tables and the kitchen. The kitchen is no doubt filled with half-legal immigrants from Mexico, Guatemala, El Salvador, and a number of other Spanish-speaking countries. This introduces not only a language barrier, but a very different sense of humor, different physical boundaries, not to mention different music. Starting out as a waitress, I spoke only French. Now I may be just as proficient, after less than a year speaking kitchen-Spanish, than I am after having spent five years in the classroom chasing my fluency in French. Maybe that’s a little bit of an exaggeration, but the concept remains. With no formal training, languages don’t have to be barriers. There don’t need to be books or pens or oral exams.
The different sense of humor is a difficult one to pair with the different language-as the occasional explosion of laughter cannot be explained adequately by the direct translation of the joke. They must, therefore, be laughing at you. And the physical boundaries may or may not be so very different from here-I think they just like to push it in a no means yes kind of way to see what they can get away with. Which is fine as long as it’s play.
These differences come into reality when you realize that they leave their job at the restaurant to go to their job as a janitor, or simply to their other restaurant job, to complete their 5:30AM-11:30PM day of work. This is a fact that is hard to believe. So many of us simply don’t believe it. I’m not even awake for that many hours in the day, let alone working that many hours of the day! But it’s true and functioning perfectly in many places in the USA. How do we know? Because if we’ve ever had a job in food, agriculture, horticulture, hospitality, etc., we’ve seen it. Because everything continues to get done. Do you honestly think the only people washing dishes and hosing down trash cans to earn an honest dollar are young Americans? Absolutely not. Men from Central and South America, young and old are the ones with the jobs that keep the USA running on time, the ones in the back room with hair nets that you (as the general public) never see and, quite honestly, you aren’t supposed to see. If you saw them, you might have to interact with them, and they don’t speak English very well because they spend all (and I mean ALL) their time working somewhere where they only need to speak Spanish anyways. They have no time and almost no need to go to school if they can continue to send money back home through the backbreakingly essential and semi-underground labor that fuels this new Roman Empire we call the United States.
The different sense of humor is a difficult one to pair with the different language-as the occasional explosion of laughter cannot be explained adequately by the direct translation of the joke. They must, therefore, be laughing at you. And the physical boundaries may or may not be so very different from here-I think they just like to push it in a no means yes kind of way to see what they can get away with. Which is fine as long as it’s play.
These differences come into reality when you realize that they leave their job at the restaurant to go to their job as a janitor, or simply to their other restaurant job, to complete their 5:30AM-11:30PM day of work. This is a fact that is hard to believe. So many of us simply don’t believe it. I’m not even awake for that many hours in the day, let alone working that many hours of the day! But it’s true and functioning perfectly in many places in the USA. How do we know? Because if we’ve ever had a job in food, agriculture, horticulture, hospitality, etc., we’ve seen it. Because everything continues to get done. Do you honestly think the only people washing dishes and hosing down trash cans to earn an honest dollar are young Americans? Absolutely not. Men from Central and South America, young and old are the ones with the jobs that keep the USA running on time, the ones in the back room with hair nets that you (as the general public) never see and, quite honestly, you aren’t supposed to see. If you saw them, you might have to interact with them, and they don’t speak English very well because they spend all (and I mean ALL) their time working somewhere where they only need to speak Spanish anyways. They have no time and almost no need to go to school if they can continue to send money back home through the backbreakingly essential and semi-underground labor that fuels this new Roman Empire we call the United States.