“So our one new friend said, ‘Thanks for trusting me and letting me into your home.’ That’s odd, don’t you think? I’ve never had someone say *that* to me.”
“I just told him it was our pleasure,” says Smith. “Plus, it’s a reasonable attitude. We’re all strangers. We don’t know him. He doesn’t know us.”
“It justs make me think about some conceptions of Gringos. That we don’t trust anyone.”
“Fact is, you *can’t* trust everyone. You know that. You don’t know which ones you *can* trust, so you have to keep an open eye. After our first meeting in the restaurant, I felt we could trust him. So did you.”
“Well there’s a prejudiced thing out there about Mexicans being lazy. Which isn’t what *I’ve* seen.”
“And one of the cliches is Mexican cars up on four blocks, without any tires. I’ve seen maybe seven as we’ve walked the streets. But how many working cars have we seen?”
“There’s cars don’t work in Cleveland.”
“Anywhere there’s poor, there’s cars don’t work.”
* * *
“Do you want to talk about our other new friend?”
“What about her?”
“Well, she believes the Nancy Davies book is all propaganda. And she told us about the students and the police shooting at the University yesterday. Did you understand that?” (We were talking in Spanish.)
“I guess so. I guess maybe students took five buses and had a shootout with the police.”
“They were protesting over a peso a ride raise. So I said to our friend, ‘I’m amazed at how people are protective of their rights here.’ And she said, ‘They probably weren’t even students. Probably agitators.’ And she told us to be careful if we saw demonstrations or things like that, to go back to our apartment and hide. Anyways, she said Nancy Davies lied about most of the deaths. But I tend to believe Davies would have no reason to do that.”
“Davies said that’s the number of deaths APPO reported.”
“Anyways, I thought our friend had a conservative attitude.”
“Well, she’s invested. She’s lost work and money because of the protesters. Her boss had to close down his business for three months because the loss of customers and tourists. And she gets her news from the government controlled news channel. She’s looking at it a whole different way.”