I was working at the large American Standard factory in Chicago that made parts for plumbing fixtures. Initially I was working the 3:00 p.m. to 11:00 p.m. shift in the foundry. A job opening came up in the turret lathe department on the day shift, so I applied for that, and my bid was accepted. I started on the day shift the next week. I was surprised to learn that everyone in the new department spoke Spanish. There were about 40 workers with Mexican heritage, one Puerto Rican guy, and one Italian guy who also spoke good Spanish. So, it was a good opportunity for me to improve what little Spanish I had learned in two semesters of community college.
The Mexican workers usually sat at two large tables in the cafeteria at lunch time. Sometimes I would join one table or the other and try to follow along, but my Spanish just wasn’t good enough at the time. I found it easier to speak one-on-one in Spanish and I spoke often to Carlos, a fellow from Mexico who worked at a station adjacent to mine. He told me that he was interested in improving his English, so we arranged to get together once a week for two hours at my apartment to help him with his written English and to help me with my spoken Spanish. We became pretty good friends and eventually his wife and my girlfriend became friendly, and we would sometimes go out to eat together.
Christmas was approaching and the factory had a two-week shutdown each year over Christmas and New Year’s. My girlfriend and I had made plans to visit a friend who lived in San Antonio, Texas, and I learned that Carlos and his wife were also going to San Antonio to visit his cousins and then on to Monterrey, Mexico, where his parents lived. Carlos invited us to travel with him and his wife to Monterrey to meet his parents and to stay overnight at their house.
We jumped at the chance to see an authentic view of Mexico off the tourist track. After our third night in San Antonio, we took a bus to Laredo, Texas, and met up with Carlos and his wife. Carlos had gotten us reservations on a passenger van that made daily trips between Laredo and Monterrey. The trip across the border was uneventful but as we headed south, the traffic got heavy, and we were stopped a few times by traffic police who would ask the driver for various papers. It soon became clear that our planned three-hour trip to Monterrey was going to take six hours or longer and we were anxious to get to Monterrey before dark.
At this point two traffic police stopped the van and we sat there at the side of the road for a while, not knowing what was going on. The driver walked around to the back of the van and told Carlos through the open window that normally he would pay a bribe of about $8 each time they were stopped by the police. But this time, the cops saw two gringos on board and wanted to charge an additional $40 for the two of us. My immediate reaction was to just pay the $40 so we could be on our way. But Carlos pulled a business card from his shirt pocket and handed it to the driver. “Tell the cops that this man is my uncle,” Carlos said, pointing to the business card. A few minutes later the police pulled their squad car in front of the van, turned on their revolving lights, and led us towards Monterrey.
Along the way, traffic pulled over to let us through, and we drove by two more traffic police roadblocks without even slowing down. The van with its police escort arrived in Monterrey at the bus station just before dark and we took a taxi to the home of Carlos’s parents. I asked Carlos what the hell had been on that business card that had been given to the police. As it turned out, while Carlos was just an ordinary working-class Mexican worker in Chicago, his uncle, also of humble origins, was a high-ranking member of the Freemasons fraternal organization in Mexico. The Freemasons had extraordinary sway in government in that part of Mexico. Only the narcotics traffickers held greater power. When the traffic cop called in to his superiors with the information about the name on the business card, he was told to provide safe passage for the van to anyplace in the region the van driver wanted to go. And that is exactly what they did! We had a great stay in Monterrey and took a bus back to San Antonio the following day.
