Rodeo / Jaripeo

Whenever folks ask how to spell the name of my town I tell them Marlboro you know like the cigarette. Remember the Marlboro Man? He was that great white cowboy who peddled cigarettes for Philip Morris and then died of lung cancer. He wasn’t from my town though. We have a few cowboys, for sure, but mostly it’s fruit. Mostly we’re white. I’m not, but most folks are. So when the local stable got creative after the Great Recession and brought in a Mexican rodeo a couple of times a summer, people didn’t like it so much. The ranchera music that wafted over the orchards was loud, the pickup trucks clogged up town and folks didn’t understand anything they were saying. No se habla español aquí. Ni una palabra. La gente vino de todas partes–de Nueva York, de Nueva Jersey–vinieron de muy lejos para recuperar un pedacito de su cultura, de su tierra, de su comida. Para estar juntos: mexicanos, guatemaltecos, hondureños, colombianos, nicaragüenses, hombres, mujeres, niños vestidos de botas fabulosas y sombreros de caballero. Pagaron $40 cada entrada además del viaje, de la comida y de la bebida…perdón, ¿no hablas español? Pues no me importa un bledo porque estoy con mi gente, con mi Raza. No me comprendes ni quieres comprender que soy humano que soy americano que vivo aquí que hablo inglés perfectamente es sólo que sé que te molesta muchísimo entonces insisto. Y aún más, amo; amo inclusive la parte de América que no me quiere. A propósito, como no me quieres, ¿para qué compraría mi petróleo, mi cafecito, entre Uds. para la vuelta a casa? ¿Para qué? No one from town ever bothered to come to the rodeo. Well one time there was this petite blonde journalist–great writer too and she even spoke pretty good Spanish–she went and did a story for the local paper. But nobody read it. And sure as shit nobody came to the rodeo. So one night when someone left the rodeo drunk and drove the wrong way down a one-way street, hit a lady and ran–left his car right in the middle of the road too–it got personal. Well, if you can call retaliation against a thousand strangers for the actions of a single dumbass criminal personal. The next time the rodeo came around, the cops set up a couple of checkpoints. They put up two–far enough away that you couldn’t see them from the rodeo exit, but close enough so that there was no way out without passing through them. I left the rodeo early, before they set up so I didn’t see them. Later, though, my husband went out quick to the Stewart’s to grab some soda and got waved right through no problem. He’s white and wasn’t wearing his cowboy hat, so I guess they could tell right away from a distance that he hadn’t been drinking. I guess they got what they wanted because that was the last rodeo in Marlboro. The cars don’t come buy gas anymore, or cafecitos for the drive home. The whole stable had to close down in the end. The rancheros waft over someone else’s hills, and the money goes into someone else’s pockets–the pockets of those adventurous risk-takers who tried new foods when they were little and who lied to their parents on occasion to cross the border because the drinking age was a loosely-observed 18. But it’s ok, don’t worry. The white folks still come up to pick apples in the fall. The cops don’t bother them. We’re all right, all white, now. No te preocupes.