{"id":15370,"date":"2014-09-28T02:49:05","date_gmt":"2014-09-28T02:49:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/early-in-my-freshman-year-my-dad-asked-me-if\/"},"modified":"2014-09-28T02:49:05","modified_gmt":"2014-09-28T02:49:05","slug":"early-in-my-freshman-year-my-dad-asked-me-if","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/early-in-my-freshman-year-my-dad-asked-me-if\/","title":{"rendered":""},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

Early in my freshman year, my dad asked me if there were lots of Latinos at school. I wanted to say, \u201cPa, I\u2019m one of the only Latinos in most of my classes. The other brown faces I see mostly are the landscapers\u2019. I think of you when I see them sweating in the morning sun. I remember you were a landscaper when you first came to Illinois in the 1950s. And look, Pa! Now I\u2019m in college!\u201d<\/p>\n

But I didn\u2019t.<\/p>\n

I just said, \u201cNo, Pa. There\u2019s a few Latinos, mostly Puerto Rican, few Mexicans. But all the landscapers are Mexican.\u201d<\/p>\n

My dad responded, \u201c\u00a1Sal\u00fadelos, m\u2019ijo!\u201d<\/p>\n

So when I walked by the Mexican men landscaping each morning, I said, \u201cBuenos d\u00edas.\u201d<\/p>\n

Recently, I realized what my dad really meant. I remembered learning the Mexican, or Latin American, tradition of greeting people when one enters a room. In my Mexican family, my parents taught me to be \u201cbien educado\u201d by greeting people who were in a room already when I entered. The tradition puts the responsibility of the person who arrives to greet those already there. If I didn\u2019t follow the rule as a kid, my parents admonished me with a back handed slap on my back and the not-so-subtle hint: \u201c\u00a1Saluda!\u201d<\/p>\n

I caught myself tapping my 8-year-old son\u2019s back the other day when he didn\u2019t greet one of our friends: \u201cAdrian! \u00a1Saluda!\u201d<\/p>\n

However, many of my white colleagues over the years followed a different tradition of ignorance. \u201cMaleducados,\u201d ol\u2019 school Mexican grandmothers would call them.<\/p>\n

But this Mexican tradition is not about the greeting\u2014it\u2019s about the acknowledgment. Greeting people when you enter a room is about acknowledging other people\u2019s presence and showing them that you don\u2019t consider yourself superior to them.<\/p>\n

When I thought back to the conversation between my dad and me in 1990, I realized that my dad was not ordering me to greet the Mexican landscapers with a \u201cGood morning.\u201d<\/p>\n

Instead, my father wanted me to acknowledge them, to always acknowledge people who work with their hands like he had done as a farm worker, a landscaper, a mechanic. My father with a 3rd grade education wanted me to work with my mind but never wanted me to think myself superior because I earned a college degree and others didn\u2019t.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\n

Ray Salazar, Mexican etiquette some white people need to learn on dad\u2019s 77th birthday<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Saluden Muchachxs, saluden.<\/p>\n

(via frijoliz<\/a>) Thank you frijoliz<\/a> for blogging my essay and evelynthedesigner<\/a> for letting me know. And unending gracias for 17k notes! Muchos saludos a todos. (via whiterhinoray<\/a>)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Early in my freshman year, my dad asked me if there were lots of Latinos at school. I wanted to say, \u201cPa, I\u2019m one of the only Latinos in most of my classes. The other brown faces I see mostly are the landscapers\u2019. I think of you when I see them sweating in the morning […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"quote","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-15370","post","type-post","status-publish","format-quote","hentry","category-words","post_format-post-format-quote"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6PWot-3ZU","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15370","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15370"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15370\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15370"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15370"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15370"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}