When Donald Trump signed an executive order last week to take energetic measures against truckers who do not speak the best English, there was an expert in the industry I needed to call: my dad.
Lorenzo Arellano led large platforms for southern California for 30 years before retiring in 2019. His six -day work weeks kept us well fed and dresses and allowed him to pay a three -bedroom Anaheim house with a swimming pool.
“Why is that madman to do this?” Hello by phone in Spanish before answering your own question. “It’s because [Trump has] He always had disrespect for the immigrant. The truckers do not deserve this. He is just trying to harm people. Hey to humiliate the entire world. “
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Times’s columnist, Gustavo Arellano, talks to his father, a truck driver for a long time, about an executive order of President Trump who enforces a requirement that truckers are competent in English.
Federal regulations that punish immigrant truckers for their limited data in English until the 1930s. Trump’s order demands the application of an existing requirement that truck drivers are competent in English, canceling a 2016 policy that inspectors do not cite or suspend Troachers While they could communicate enough, even through an interpreter or smartphone application.
The conservatives have tied for a long time that the action of the era of Obama and the emergence of immigrant truck drivers, now represent 18% of the professional, according to the figures of the census of a marked increase in fatal accidents in the last decade, which Trump alluded to Safar.
Trump’s movement is the last dog whistle to the people who do not like the United States not as white as it used to be. Similarly follow xenophobic actions, such as declare the official language English, severely reduce citizenship and renewal of the “Gulf of America” of the Gulf of Mexico.
The thrust of the English for the tricks has partially angry me, he thought. Assuming that a more diverse truck industry is the main culprit behind the increase in fatal truck accidents ignores the fact that they are more trucks on the road, driving more miles than ever. According to the Federal Motor Safety Administration, the fatal shock rate is three times less than at the end of the 1970s, when cultural touch stones such as “smokey and the bandit” and “convoy” gave the image of the good olche.
It is also an insult against people like my 73 -year -old father.
When I was on top of Junior, Daddy put me with him on weekends to teach me the value of hard work. I woke up at 2 in the morning to be able to tie the load in flat beds duration of cold mornings or drag a cat of palette around the warehouses at lunchtime. I do not remember having heard him speak anything other than Spanish, the language we have always communicated. But he succeeded enough for the four children to have work at the university and have full -time jobs.
His dream was that we both opened to our Father-Son Transport Transport Company. That never happened because I was too nerd, but I was always proud of my father’s career. He achieved the American dream despite reaching this country in the trunk of a Chevy with a fourth grade education and only collecting what I have always described as a rudimentary understanding of English.
I visited my dad the day after our call, to see the only two memories that could be in his truck career.
Gustavo and Lorenzo Arellano talk about the executive order of President Trump for taking energetic measures against truckers who do not speak the best English.
(Albert Lee / Los Angeles Times)
One was a folded and blurred photo of him since the beginning of the 1990s with his first platform, a red Cape of Decolored GMC that parked my body aunt to pay a private lot. Daddy, younger than I am today, is next to troca In the Plancentia home deposit, waiting for workers to download it. He is not smiling, because the Mexicans of the old school never smile for the camera. But it can be said for its pose that is proud.
The other Papi Memento showed me that it was a plaque dated 1991 of a commercial truck group. He congratulated him for being a “credit for his professional” and “the best that his industry has to sacrifice.”
“They would only give it to the drivers who were safer,” he explained while hero. We sit in your living room, where the photos of my late mother and we children decorate the shelves. He broke a smile. “I won many of them.”
I asked him how the English learned, hey, they know. Papi responded in Spanish, that his first lessons were in his first job in the United States, a carpet logging factory in Los Angeles. The owners taught Latin workers how to administer the machines, but also enough phrases for the immigration authorities to leave them alone when there was a raid.
Otherwise, my dad lived in a world of SpanishMy first language. When she married my mom and moved to Anaheim, she convinced him that they should go to English classes at night to improve her perspectives. He only stayed with him for two years, “because he was working hard.”
When I was training to be a truck driver in the mid -1980s, the instructor spoke, but told everyone that they needed to learn enough English to understand the traffic signals and pass the test.
“And that makes sense, because this is the United States,” Daddy told me. “But this is also the south of California. Everyone knows a little English, but many people also know a little Spanish.”
I asked him how much English used at work.
“50%, maybe,” he replied. “Why am I going to say” much “when it’s not true?”
He recited the sentences with which the dispatators and security guards papted him in English at each stop:
What are you going to come for?
What company does it work for?
Who is the corridor?
What’s your address?
Do you have a driver’s license??
He repeated each question, and his corresponding answer, slowly, as if to conjure a moment when he was younger and happy to finally find his professional rhythm.
“They listed and understood me, just although I spoke Chueco And Mocho,“He said crunch and broken. That said, my father became inadequately aware of himself.
I asked him if someone ever made fun of his English.
No, “he said, suddenly. “Because truckers, we are a brotherhood.”
Papi took out all the immigrants with whom he worked in his transport days. Russians Armenians Arabs Italians “They didn’t know Spanish. I didn’t know their language. So we had to speak English to be friends. They all knew a little.”
In fact, he recalled how immigrant truckers looked below In people who spoke perfect English.
“The person who does not speak English works harder. He does not flee from work. Those who spoke well English, worked less because they made them so powerful. When they said:” Who wants? “The English speaker would say:” Why do I want to work late? “And flee to their homes.”
I asked Daddy if I regretted not knowing more English.
“No. What is done is done.”
Then he took a moment to think. “Look, the study is for people they like, like you. But not me. Maybe I could have had a better life.”
Hello, stored in our family’s house. “But we had a good life. I did what I had to do.”
My father was the most response man in his personal life, but transport of transportation was founded. I thought or how he and so many other truckers sacrificed personal improvement, such as English classes, in the name of advancing at work. I remember all the inspections for which my dad’s platform had to pass, one never failed, and how I still reprimand me to this day if I trust my insemination of reflection of rearvision or my side mirrors when I am going back. How almost every time we see each other, it reminds me of checking the oil and air pressure in my tires.
Truckers are some of the most careful people who will know, because they know how dangerous their professional is. So for transportation secretary are P. Duffy to hff in a press release that department Trucking in This Trucking in This Trucking in This Trucking in This Trucking in This Trucking in This Trucking in This Trucking in This Truckingking in This Trucking in This Traveling in this transport in this transport in this shirt in this transport in this transport in this. Or what this country really is about.
My dad and I wait for a video editor from the Times to record us talking about their transport days. Towards the end, I threw an idea: how about Trump on behalf of immigrant truck drivers … in English?
Dress with an elegant black Estetson, leather vest and his best boots, there was no way to spend dad. He looked directly at the camera.
“Mr. Trump,” he said. “This is Lorenzo Arellano, 100% Mexican. Please be respect with truck drivers. We always work hard … You can’t talk to English.
His strong accent did not get in the way of trust and without apologies, even courteous, he sounded, despite his hatred of the president.
“They speak a little English,” Daddy said about his truck Compression address. “I don’t need much English. I hope you listen to this conversation. Thank you, Trump. Do something for us.”
I joked in the camera that this was my father, who supposedly did not speak English.
“All Mocho. All chueco“He said again.
In other words, perfect.
