Do you know the Taco Man?

A student and street vendor savor tacos, conversation and a relationship forged on the side of the road

By Nathan Gill

Thursday, November 15th, 2007

I didn’t spend my last night in Mexico with my host family. I didn’t spend it out partying with friends. I spent it with an unlikely acquaintance, a roadside vender: the taco man.

It was dark, past midnight, and the air smelled of cool mountain rain. The taco man and I had talked for hours, drinking cinnamon tea he brewed over the remains of mesquite coals used to sear the meat for his small tortilla treats. We finished our tea, and began to clear plastic furniture, a folding table holding condiments, his small grill… I knew the drill. We’d done this before.

We stored his equipment in a trailer parked behind his street stand; a small, open tent parked alongside the city’s main drag. We stored leftover guacamole, onions, peppers, salsas, meats and tortillas in his cluttered, compact car. Some of it went to his sister’s house a block away; we unlocked the gate to her property quietly, feeding food scraps to the dogs so they would chew rather than bark. It was late, past 2 a.m., and we didn’t want to wake her up.

After our task was done—chores the taco man did most every night alone—he drove me home.

We hugged, said goodbye—he cried—and I promised I’d write. I left for Kansas the next morning.

Manuel Garcia, the taco man, was and is my friend. A 40-something father, husband and part-time bus salesman, Manuel spoke some English and claimed to have attended law school. He seemed educated, and I didn’t doubt him.

I met Manuel in a Lawrence-sized town, Cholula, during a six-week summer study abroad program in 2006. Every day I’d walk the 30 minutes from my host family’s home to the small university I attended. If I walked back home an hour or two before dusk, as I often did, I’d usually run into Manuel cooking under his tent.

Our interchanges, sometimes during a brief, polite passing, sometimes over food, sometimes lasting hours, were always warm. During those six weeks he taught me about himself, Mexico, myself and life. I cared for him in a way that reminds the heart that no man is an island.

And yet, we were strangers—a fact that only added to the openness of our conversations. His tent, located opposite a Baskin Robbins, had the anonymity and security of a therapist’s room. There existed a candid trust between two people with different lives and the assurance that our intersection would be short-lived and controlled. I was a temporary visitor, and it was unlikely we would meet in any place but on my passes to the stand.

We shared our stories. Manuel had seen better days, and had made mistakes in his life. Among these was a woman in another town who had a young son. Their household was not his destination after work. Manuel, saying that he saw himself in me, implored me not to repeat this vice, to stay in school, to work hard and make something of myself. He said that he never dreamed he would be selling roadside tacos 20 years ago, and he did not recommend it. But it was what it was—a way to live, to send his children to a good school that taught English. This was a priority.

Though no topic was taboo with Manuel, our conversations were more often casual than serious. Though his English was passable, I expanded his repertoire of dirty words, as he did mine. This lexicon was useful in understanding his occasional dirty joke, double entendre or profanity; for example, work “sucks” (está cabrón), and a bothersome person is effectively repelled by suggesting he fiercely mate with his mother (chinga tú madre). There are as many words for intercourse in Spanish as there are in English. Probably more. They are delightfully useful.

I couldn’t learn these valuable lessons in proper Spanish classes. But more than any other lesson, Manuel was my Mexican microcosm who broke stereotypes, but was also a victim of them.

Manuel’s car was, like many college students’, a mess. However, he never let any paper scraps or other debris fall out of his car and onto the street. He would search the ground under his tent for trash, pick it up, and put it in a trash bag. Manuel was not a “dirty Mexican,” and he was not lazy. He told me that people who littered were pigs.

He also was not particularly fond of spicy food. I learned this when, on one of my bolder taco-eating days, I decided to forgo a milder salsa for a concoction that included strips of neon orange pepper and dark, unassuming little seeds. I ate the taco, and my face fell off. A nest of bees stung my mouth. All the soft tissue in my nasal cavity, throat, mouth, and a million unseen pores and openings were experiencing exposure to the vegetal version of Agent Orange.

“¡Mi boca es un fuego!” was my clearest expression to Manuel that my mouth was aflame. I immediately purchased and downed two bottles of fruit drink that he sold out of a cooler, but it didn’t help. My eyes were wet and in pain, and things were beginning to swell. I bid him a hasty farewell. The following day he laughed at me, told the other taco-patrons my act of gringo-ism, and explained that only crazy people ate the orange peppers.

My Mexican host family did not share my enthusiasm for Manuel. They were surprised that I had not spent my last night getting drunk in a club, like their past exchange students. My host brother asked where I’d been when I came home after helping Manuel. I told him, and he told his mother that I’d been hanging out with the naco.

Naco is a pejorative word for uneducated, low-class Mexicans who lack cultural refinement and whose ancestors were probably more indigenous (brown) than European. Think “white trash” but with more sting and a racist twist. My host-brother’s insult was uneducated. At least one of Manuel’s parents was a direct immigrant from Spain. He had an interest and knowledge in world events. He would give free tacos to the elderly policeman who sometimes walked by. He was, to my estimation, a gentleman. But, he sold tacos in a tent on the side of the road, a career unrefined, uncool, and decidedly naco.

When I last saw Manuel, I promised I’d write. I still have the address; Guadalajara Street, house eleven…. I can find the house on Google Maps. But I’ve never written, and I do not know if I will.

Relationships like mother, cousin, acquaintance are easy to define. They have boundaries formed by place and time. But the relationship between the taco man and me seems to exist best where I left it—in a tent near a road in the evenings where the heat of coals and smell of cooking meat take the chill away from the setting sun or the brisk, frequent rain of the central Mexican highland.

I do wonder if he is well. If I ever went back to Cholula, I would look for him and am sure we would pick up right where we left off. But, it seems, a part of travel is that it is an experience of visitation that is inevitably left. Some things, like relationships or a chance conversation with a person passed on a street, live only for a time and in the place where they occurred. Like a passing smile and nod to a stranger, friendships can be short-lived, but no less warm, than one with the intensity of years.

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