Viva Zapata

This weekend I am down on the border with Mexico in Zapata, Texas. We have been doing a research project here for four years on the impact of broadband Internet in several rural counties in the U.S. Right now, we are recruiting and training interviewers to help us conduct a survey of people here in Zapata. We are working with the Chamber of Commerce, which you can see in the photo, and the local schools.

It turns out we arrived just in time for the annual county fair and parade. I have always got an enormous kick out of small town parades, both in the USA and Brazil. Sandy and I have taken our kids to see Utah beef princesses and small town carnival parades in Brazil. Great stuff for telling you about the nitty gritty of popular culture out where the real folks live.

I have even participated in cheesy small town parades. I got asked to be Christopher Columbus on a float about 1492 in a Provo, Utah 4th of July parade because I had the right Renaissance outfit. I almost refused because of very mixed feelings about the events of 1492, but it was too interesting to watch from the inside, so I impersonated Columbus for a day. Sandy and I also marched with a band of Vikings from a club we belonged to in the Washington D.C. St. Patricks' Day parade in 1981, in our wild and misspent youth. (Sandy was a pregnant Valkyrie in a chain mail shirt, while I turned out as a more conventional Viking warrior type.) Not to mention several years of being in parades in marching bands back in high school in Idaho, where they always seemed to put us and our white shoes right in back of the horses.

One of the features of the Zapata parade, like many in small towns, is that people on the parade floats throw candy out for kids to chase, which is fun for them, but also results in a bunch of kids ducking out into the street a lot, as you can see in the second photo.

One of the goofiest aspects of the Zapata parade, at least for an Anglo like me from up north, is all the low-rider and other customized hot rods that cruise around among the floats, marching bands, etc. They roared their exhausts and squealed their tires, and seemed to be having a great time.

Zapata is an interesting place. Almost everyone is a native Spanish speaker and prefers to speak that. But many cannot read and write in Spanish, but can read and write in English, since that is what they have been educated in. So they code switch like crazy, going back and forth between the languages, depending on what they are talking about and who they are talking to.

That might be the future for many people. I saw a much more upscale version of a very similar thing last year in Denmark, where almost everyone under fifty is bilingual in Danish and English, one of several things that helps keep them on top of economic globalization.

It might even occur as a good idea to more of the rest of the U.S. one of these days.