Mexican Americans example essay topic

Mexican Americans By Brent Olson It took me a while to figure out what I was going to go and do for my project. I went up to Safeway in West Linn Wednesday after school to get something to eat. There was a janitor there that was cleaning up. I had seen him there before. I decided to sit down and talk to him. He was wearing his blue Safeway apron and a old white dress shirt underneath that went with his black tie.

His black pants were dirty with something that looked like soda. His name was Gilberto. He told me his last name but I couldn t pronounce it. He didn t speak the best English and I didn t speak that much Spanish so it was a little bit harder to understand some of the things he was telling me about. He has been working at Safeway since it opened in two summers ago. He does all the janitorial work for the company.

His duties include; Washing the floors, taking out the garbage, cleaning spills, and moves anything around that needs to be moved. He grew up twenty minutes away from Mexico City, Mexico. He is now 42 years old and lives in Beaverton, Oregon. He moved up two years ago and that was when he got his job working for Safeway. I asked him why he works so far away.

I m not quite sure that he understood me, but he said, two hours from here to my home. I asked him why it took him so long to get home and it is cause he doesn t have a car. He rides the bus from Allen Blvd... in Beaverton to West Linn everyday except for Mondays and Tuesdays and it takes two hours to commute. I asked him if he knew about what was happening on the news with the two World Trade Center buildings and the Pentagon being hit by terrorist planes that were high jacked.

He was not as very informed about what had happened and I was hop in to talk to him more about it. All he said was that he saw it on the news and that it was not good. He didn t know very many words about what had happened so we moved to a new subject. I could see that he spoke some English and I questioned how he learned it and he pulled out this book and said, PCC. I asked if he went to Portland Community College and he started to shake his head and said, Yeah. So I talked with him a little more about that, he is going to PCC during the night to take English classes.

He had with him a LA Laker bag with him. Then he pointed to his bag and said, Lakers, Number 1. Inside the bag he had a CD player and about 5 CDs. I looked through them and he had some Spanish band that I did not know but the rest of the CDs where the same that most Americans would listen to. He had Queen, Pink Floyd, and Van Halen. Those artists may not be Americans but they are very popular here in the USA.

I joked with him about being a Mexican American and he started laughing. I told him about the song that Cheech made up in Cheech and Chong's Next Movie. It goes something like, Mexican Americans... don t like to wake up early... but they have to... so they do it really slow... I cant sing the whole song but he laughed and told me that he had seen that movie before and then he started singing the song. Gilberto may not know the most English, but he is still one of the funniest guys I have ever talked to. I asked if he Had a Wife and he told me about how he had one back in Mexico City, but he divorced her and has a girlfriend here in Oregon.

He showed me a picture of her and she looked like she was about 15 to me but he claims she is 37. Gilberto bus was about to come so I left the store, I m sure that I will see Gilberto some other time because he is always in there. He is a good example of a Mexican that came to live in America because it is a land of opportunity and I am glad that I had the time to sit down and talk to him.