The Daily G.I.F.T. from The GratiDude

MY favorite Mexicans are the ones that speak ENGLISH! What about you? #christian

www.grateful4.org

Gratitude

Intention

First

Things

The G.I.F.T. Today

Grateful: for the feeling of tears of joy just thinking about friends in my life this morning

Intention-flow between your two days in one today

First-call Ritz

Things-Check in with Shay

Morning Meditation from The GratiDude

The United States and its demographics have changed so much in the last 30 years. It is amazing.  

When I moved to California 1988, I had no clue how much Mexico a part of American history from the very beginning was.  The Public schools simply didn’t teach that history or the history of the Catholic missions in California and all the intermixing and intermingling of European Spanish and Indigenous cultures that have been happening since the 16th century.

I remember the second or third day of being around San Jose, California upon arriving, and just being struck and blown away by the number of Mexican people that lived in California.  The amount of Spanish that was being spoken in stores and on the streets and I just wasn’t prepared for it, and nobody gave me any advance notice there is nothing about it that prepared me for it from media news and TV.

I could remember the realization within that first year of living there that it was obvious I was going to have to learn Spanish.  I can remember myself telling myself and putting myself on notice. “Hey man, it goes without saying that your job here is to love everyone and that’s going to be very difficult to do if you don’t have a language to express your feelings with. So, get with it and start learning some verbs and nouns, bro.”

My language learning experience really got accelerated when my brother Sean made one of his big brother calls that we were going to go on a Latin American adventure and that I needed to take a semester of school off to accompany him on his Meso-American boondoggle.

It was on this trip that I spoke my first sentence in Spanish, and I also decided to change my major at the University of California to be Latin American studies, and that I was going to take advantage of the passing of the NAFTA agreement in my career.

The golf industry gave me a left turn, and my focus on international business took a backseat, However, I’ve kept my language skills up through regular conversations, listening to Spanish music and making sure that I don’t let that muscle grow too weak.

I can tell you definitively without a shadow of a doubt is that the immigrants that are coming here to the United States from Mexico are coming to work.  They are also coming here because many businesses in areas controlled by the narco government alliance have demanded exorbitant “mordidas” or bribes to guarantee safety and security, and it is become untenable to run businesses for many entrepreneurs in parts of Mexico.

Interestingly, enough in the last handful of years, thousands of businesses have relocated from the border areas back down into the heart of Mexico and Mexico City because Mexico City is not strategic from a drug trafficking standpoint and has far less violence than the border areas.

Can you imagine if we had to move in the United States away from Florida, California, or New York because they were too close to the borders and move into places like Chicago or Cleveland just to be safe?  Crazy stuff, but that’s the nature of the informal economy and drug trafficking when you have governments that refused to legalize these items and tax them and instead prefer to profit off the security apparatus and enforcement side of the equation.

It’s OK that this server is impatient and doesn’t know her history and the fact that the first non-native language spoken here in the United States was actually Spanish.