The American Dream…

The American Dream…

Is just that, a dream

by Paco Prado

Sometimes you have a dream and then the dream turns into a nightmare. Too often I have had that dream and then I have awakened and that dream or nightmare is but an indelible memory.

In South Philadelphia, patrons can order one of owner Joe Vento's cheese steaks any way they like it, provided they order it in English. KYW's Brandy Bell reports.

Fifty years ago almost to the day I arrived in this country with my mother as a fourteen year old awkward kid not knowing the language and totally mesmerized by a culture I did not understand. My father was already in exile in Miami and had been a dishwasher at various restaurants and hotels in Miami Beach. Somebody sold him a bill of goods; and somebody sold me the American dream. I was told that if I work hard and put myself into constructive enterprises I would succeed and prosper in America.

My father was given the opportunity to have his own little business from a second cousin who had lived in the states for over thirty years. He arrived at the beginning of WWII and opened a small cafeteria on Flagler Street in downtown Miami. His name was Chago and he had what was then the uncontested only Cuban restaurant in Miami. “Los Panchos” was located on Flagler Street, on the north side of the street between N.W. 3^rd and 4^th where it languished and then prospered for almost 20 years.

Chago was getting up there in years and in his early seventies was no longer able to work with the same enthusiasm or vigor. He had my father come in and help him. That was a step up for my dad who had been a dishwasher, now he was cooking and managing the restaurant. But Chago had a stroke and told my father to carry on; he could have the restaurant for nearly nothing. Just to pay him for the equipment the best way he could. The building was not his property and the only thing worth anything in there was the location and the clientele which was very loyal.

My father bought new chairs and tables, pots and pans and a new cash register. He painted the place and put these red and white checkerboard café curtains. The place soon became the center of the Cuban exile community. There was no other place where you could get Cuban coffee or a medianoche sandwich. The exile community started to swell in numbers as Castro became more intolerant of the middle class and they would make our restaurant the meeting place, the center and the heart of the exile community.

For a while there we thought that we were going to “make it” We had profits for a change. We also had fucking inspectors and code enforcement assholes visiting almost on a weekly basis. There were permits and taxes. They were squeezing the shit out of the meager business. And there was then the coup de grace: We received a letter in the mail from the Department of Transportation that we had 30 days to vacate the premises because Interstate 95 was going to begin construction in a month and the building was to be torn down. There was no compensation, no other alternative than to just pick up and go. We closed within a week and were on our way to California to try our luck there.

I was kind of glad to leave Miami. After all, when I first arrived they gave me this test at the School Board in order to place me (I had already finished the 8^th grade in Cuba) but they determined that because I could not pass a simple seventh grade level that I must have been retarded. I was placed in a special class with these retards that had their mouths open and saliva oozing out. I could not understand the reason of my misfortune.

When we arrived in California, my parents enrolled me in a bilingual program and I did learn enough English that I started to get straight A’s when school started in September. Then my records arrived to my high school from Miami. There was a parent teacher meeting. They could not understand why a retarded kid was making straight A’s in their school. They realized that the schools in Miami were way more backwards then than in California, and that there were no accommodations for students who spoke anything other than Southern Cracker English,

But in California I was feeling the sting of xenophobia and discrimination. Mexicans were the lowest in the pecking order. I was considered one and therefore a subhuman.

I was diligent and started to work hard to rid myself of the accent. I figured that if I spoke like everyone else that I would not be discriminated and I could actually have a chance at the American dream. I would read the newspaper for hours, aloud, into a tape recorder. I would play it back, correcting and repeating, hours and hours of this until I was satisfied that I could speak flawlessly.

Curiously, I was losing the accent and I had also gained an excellent command of the language. I knew the grammatical rules, I could actually spell and that was more than could be said for my native
English speaker peers. But this raised all kinds of jealous feelings from them because a little beaner like me could not succeed at their expense. When graduation time came around, I got an A in the English final and by all accounts I was poised to be the Valedictorian of my class. I was even working on the speech I was to deliver at our graduation. Then the final grades came and I was knocked down into fourth place because my English teacher gave me a B grade for the class. His reasoning: “I have never given an A to any student with an accent”.

Even if I had a remarkable SAT score and graduated fourth in my class, I applied to 19 different colleges and universities in California. I did not even receive one single reply, not even a letter of rejection. At the time California only had 3% of Latinos among the college population even if Latinos consisted of more than 28% of the population.

In the years since my arrival in this country I had a lot of hurtful things happen to me. While in high school, I was dating this girl I was so crazy for. She came to tell me that her mother had forbidden her from seeing me again because she did not want her daughter to go out with a “wetback”. I don’t know about you, I have two daughters and I would much rather either one of them dated the Valedictorian of his class than the redneck captain of the football team. The later would drag her behind the bleachers and would get her pregnant.

Then I had to work to save money for college. My parents could not help me out because they were working for minimum wage. I got a job in one of the branches of Columbia Studios and worked there for a while doing audience studies. It was located on Sunset Blvd. and I would take the bus to work and to go home. While I was waiting for the bus on the bus bench right across from work, a squad car comes screeching to a halt in front of me and two butch cops get out, pushed me to the ground and one of them puts his foot on my neck forcing me to eat the dirt. The cop says: “what are you doing in this side of town at this hour? Don’t you know that your kind can’t be here after dark?” I could barely speak and I told him I worked across the street and was waiting for the bus to return to East LA to my ghetto. That was not good enough. The other cop said: “well, I saw you spit on the ground” That was my infraction? Certainly not. I was a beaner, a wetback, an undesirable that was not welcomed in that society at that particular time of day and that particular time in history.

I put myself through college; often working at either part time jobs or full time jobs no other person wanted or was willing to do. I waited on tables, I cleaned floors, I even worked at a hospital cleaning the bed pans. I picked up dead bodies for a funeral home. I did everything but I got through college. You would think that after all that hard work I would be able to reap some of the benefits. Not….I still kept meeting those glass ceilings, those impenetrable barriers that existed and to some degree still exist in this country. You say that has disappeared? Not really…Just ask Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor.

You see, even those who call themselves progressive and liberals have no objections or problems with certain minorities, as long as we clean the floors and wait on their tables. But when we become somebody, when we are actually competing for the same jobs, the income and the prestige, they show their true colors and betray their philosophy. I found this to be true with Democrats and Republicans alike although I must admit that the more brazen xenophobes are found in the lofty lap of the Republican Party.

While in college, I not only cleaned floors and waited on tables. Because I was an excellent typist (85wpm. At that time) and my spelling was impeccable (there was no spell check then) I was typing term papers for some of the students. Then enter this privileged rich kid. He drove a nice sports car, lived in a swanky apartment and dedicated his life entirely in the pursuit of women and beer. He asked me to type a paper for him but it was so bad that I told him so. He said: “why don’t you write it for me, I will pay you .50 cent per word” (I normally employ 50 cent words in my regular speech anyhow) And that started a whole series of term paper writing that brought me a handsome income. My term papers were getting A’s and they were well written. This guy that got me started reminds me so much of George W. he was from a wealthy Texas family and he had no concept of academic excellence nor did he have intellectual curiosity.

One would think that if I wrote all these term papers and they were for different classes Philosophy, History, Political Science and others and still was able to get a good grade for them, then I would leave college well equipped to face the challenges of the real world. But the real world out there is not dependent on how well you know the language, how good your spelling is or even how imaginative or creative your writing can be. It is based on who you know and where you were born.

I was born 90 miles too far south to satisfy these xenophobes. I never understood why being on one or the other side of a river or body of water made any particular group of people inferior to the other. By the same token I have to this day failed to understand why it is that what you do in bed should define you. What is it that makes these mother fuckers think they are better than gay people because they stick their peckers into a dirty vagina?.

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