When Donald Trump signed a decree last week last week on truckers who do not speak the best English, there was an industry expert whom I had to call: my father.
Lorenzo Arellano led large platforms in southern California for 30 years before retiring in 2019. His six-day work weeks kept us well fed and dressed in 2019 and allowed him to afford a three-bedroom anheim house with a swimming pool, where he and my younger brother still live today.
“Why does this crazy man want to do this?” He asked me by phone in Spanish before answering his own question. “It is because (Trump A) always had a lack of respect for immigrants. We, the truckers, do not deserve it. He just tries to harm people. He wants to humiliate the whole world. “
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The Times columnist, Gustavo Arellano, speaks with his father – a longtime truck driver – about a decree by President Trump who applies a requirement that the truckers are competent in English.
The federal regulations punishing immigrant truckers for their limited English go back to the 1930s. The order of Trump calls for the application of an existing requirement according to which the truckers are competent in English, overthrowing a policy of 2016 that the inspectors should not cite or suspend puff As long as they could communicate enough, including via an interpreter or a smartphone application.
The conservatives have long linked to the action of the Obama era and the rise of immigrant truckers – they now represent 18% of the profession, according to census figures – a marked increase in fatal accidents in the last decade, to which Trump alluded when he insisted that “the roads of America have become less safe”.
Trump’s decision is the last whistle for dogs for people who don’t like the United States is not as white as before. He follows xenophobic actions in a similar way, such as declaring English the official language, severely restricts citizenship of the dawn and awarding the Gulf of Mexico “Gulf of America”.
The Englishman for the thrust of trucks particularly angry me. Assuming that a more diverse truck industry is the main culprit behind the increase in fatal truck accidents ignores the fact that there are more trucks on the road, driving more kilometers than ever. According to the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration, the rate of fatal accidents is three times less than in the late 1970s, when cultural touch stones like “Smokey and the Bandit” and “Convoy” seized the image of the good old white trucker in the American psyche.
It is also an insult against people like my 73 -year -old father.
When I was in the first secondary of secondary school, Papi took me with him on weekends to teach me the value of hard work. He woke me up at 2 a.m. so that I could tie the cargo on the platforms during the cold mornings or drag a jack of pallets around warehouses at lunchtime. I do not remember having heard something other than Spanish, the language in which we have always communicated. But he has succeeded enough for his four children to be educated by the university and have full -time jobs.
His dream was for us to finally open our own father-son truck company. It never happened because I was too nerd, but I have always been proud of my father’s career. He realized the American dream despite his arrival in this country in the trunk of a chevy with a fourth year education and that I only resume what I have always described as a rudimentary understanding of English.
I visited my grandpa the day after our phone call, to see the only two memories he could unearthed from his trucking career.
Gustavo and Lorenzo Arellano talk about the executive decree of President Trump who cracks against truckers who do not speak the best English.
(Albert Brave Tiger Lee / Los Angeles Times)
One was a curved and blurred photo of him from the beginning of the 1990s with his first platform, a faded red GMC Cabover that he parked behind my Tía Licha store so that he did not have to pay private land. Papi, younger than me today, stands on the side of troca In Placentia Home Depot, waiting for the workers to unload it. He does not smile, because the Mexicans of the old school never smile for the camera. But you can say by his pose that he is proud.
The other Memento Papi showed me was a plaque dated 1991 from a truck trade group. This congratulated him to be a “credit to your profession” and “the best that your industry has to offer”.
“They would only give it to the drivers who were the safest,” he said while I was holding it. We sat in her living room, where photos of my late mom and us, the children, decorated the shelves. He cracked a smile. “I won a lot.”
I asked how he learned the English he knew. Papi replied – in Spanish – that his first lessons was in his first job in the United States, a carpet cup factory in Los Angeles. The owners taught Latin workers how to manage the machines but also enough sentences so that the immigration authorities leave them quiet whenever there was a raid.
Otherwise, my father lived in a world of EspañolMy first language. When he married my Mami and moved to Anaheim, she convinced him that they should take English lessons at night to improve their perspectives. He only stuck it for two years, “because I worked a lot.”
When he trained to be a truck driver in the mid -1980s, the instructor spoke Spanish but told everyone that they needed to learn enough English to understand the traffic panels and pass the DMV test.
“And that makes sense because it is the United States,” said Papi. “But it is also southern California. Everyone knows a little English, but many people also know a little Spanish.”
I asked how much English he used at work.
“50%, maybe,” he replied. “Why am I going to say” a lot “when it is not true?”
He recited the sentences whose distributors and security agents dotted him in English with each stop:
Why are you coming?
What company do you work for?
Who is the broker?
What is the address?
Do you have a driving license?
He repeated each question – and his corresponding answer – slowly, as if to evoke a moment when he was younger and happy to finally find his professional groove.
“They listened to me and understood, even if I spoke chueco Y MOCHO,“He said – twisted and broken. By saying aloud, my father became unusually embarrassed.
I asked if someone made fun of his English.
“No,” he said, suddenly, happy. “Because the truckers, we are a brotherhood.”
Papi has shook all the immigrants he worked alongside his trucking days. Russians. Armenians. Arab. Italians. “They did not know Spanish. I did not know their language. So we had to speak English to become friends. Everyone knew it a bit. ”
In fact, he remembered what the immigrant truckers looked like down On people who spoke perfect English.
“The person who does not speak English works harder. They do not flee the work. Those who spoke well English, they worked less because they thought that knowing English returned them so powerful. When the boss said:” Who wants more changes? “The English speaker would say:” Why do I want to work late? And run away from them. “
I asked Papi if he regretted not knowing more English.
“No. What is done is done.”
Then he took a moment to think. “Listen, study is for people who love it, like you. But not me. Maybe I could have had a better life. ”
He made a gesture around our family home. “But we had a good life. I did what I had to do. ”
My father was not the most responsible man in his personal life, but trucking anchored him. I thought of how he and so many other truckers have sacrificed self -improvement – things like English lessons – in the name of taking front of work. I remember all the inspections that my father had to go through – he has never failed – and how he reprimands me to this day if I count on my mirror instead of my lateral mirrors when I step back. How much every time we see each other, it reminds me of checking the oil and the air pressure in my tires.
Trucks are among the most cautious people you meet, because they know how dangerous their profession is. So, for the Secretary of Transport, Sean P. Duffy, in Huff in a press release that his department “will always put the drivers of American trucks first” – as if people like Papi do not in a way belong to this group – is hateful and ignoring what truck is in this country. Or what this country is really.
My father and I waited for a Times video editor to record us to talk about his truck days. Towards the end, I threw an idea: what would you say to address Trump on behalf of immigrant truck drivers … in English?
Dressed in an elegant black stetson, a leather vest and its most beautiful boots, there was no way that Papi was going to pass. He looked directly at the camera.
“Mr. Trump,” he said. “Here is Lorenzo Arellano, 100% Mexican. Please be respect with truck drivers. We are always working hard.… It doesn’t matter that they don’t speak English. They must be good workers. I guarantee you! “
His heavy accent did not embark how confident he looked, without an excuse – even polished – despite his hated towards the president.
“They speak a bit English,” Papi said about his trucking compadres. “I don’t need a lot of English. I hope you listen to this conversation. Thank you, Trump. Do something for us. “
I joked the camera that it was my father, who did not speak English.
“”TODO MOCHO. TODO CHUECO“He said again.
In other words, perfect.
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