Portrait of America

October 08, 2009

Portrait of America

In an effort to ready our house for the market, we had a new roof put on. Several guys stomped around above our heads and two days later we had a shiny new housetop. The men were mostly from Mexico, a couple from Honduras.

I talked to them, as you might guess. I practiced speaking Spanish and I watched them work. I watched them play a little too, and I took their pictures. These guys were working. I mean real work. Hard work. Putting on a new roof in the middle of Texas Summer hardly tops the list of lazy pass-times.

I teach English as a second language once a week to adults, mostly Mexican immigrants. I volunteer for an organization called El Buen Samaritano, an Episcopal Mission, and I am fortunate to do it because it has given me a beautiful window into a world that I would not otherwise know. It has in many ways, I suppose, made my vision of America more romantic.

I am regularly witness to my students, who came here how they could, who work two and three jobs, who take care of their children, who go to school at the end of the day. They take English classes and citizenship classes and computer classes. They work. And I don't know if I'd be able to do what they do. I admire them. I learn from them.

I observe these workers with the same idyllic affection. Up at 5 or 6 o'clock in the morning, I have seen them at the gas station, 7 to a truck. These trucks carry landscape equipment and shingles, tools and workboots. I've seem them before the sun comes up buying coffee and hot dogs, Topo Chico, and Red Bull.