Thinking it over ...

© 2008 Félix Alfonso Peña
All rights reserved
4 September 2008

My newly discovered blokehood stirs uneasily within my skin.

Had I known from the beginning that it would be my burden to carry, I would long ago have accommodated myself to it, but I grew up being called “chamaco,” “muchacho,” “vato” and even “esé.” I was a “tipo,” a “ruco,” a “chavo,” so "bloke" never besmirched my linguistic or cultural horizon, not even in my dreams.

It was not until recently, over 58 years after I first saw light, that my blokehood and I formally met. Oh, that we had been properly introduced from the beginning. We would be having a grand old time, like two old chums.

Instead, like the two shipwrecked Englishmen marooned on a desert island in W.S. Gilbert’s poem, “Etiquette,”we are doomed to stare past each other for lack of a proper introduction.

It was a 1900 U.S. Census document, indifferent to my sensitivity, that exposed the English blood coursing through my veins like a renegade buccaneer of old. The photocopied form, sent to my mother by a cousin’s daughter who has been investigating her roots, spells it out very clearly: My great-grandfather, William Henry Tays, was born in Germany, which we knew, but on the document he listed his mother as being German and his father as English.

Blimey! That hit me like a sucker punch. My family had always assumed that William Henry was actually Wilhelm Heinrich and that the Tays was a transliteration of a German name — Theiss or something along those lines. And we assumed that a genius for language explained William Henry’s ability to speak English when he showed up on the U.S.-Mexican border circa the 1870s.

Now it seems he likely learned the King’s English from his pater, although we can still credit William Henry with becoming fluent enough in Spanish to live in a town — Laredo, Texas — that was primarily Spanish-speaking, to marry and have children with a woman of Mexican origin, Josefa Treviño, and later to move to Monterrey, Nuevo León, México, where he worked as a bookkeeper and accountant until he passed away at a fairly young age.

Some readers, especially those who know a bit about me, may wonder why this discovery should be stressful. After all, my great-grandfather on my father’s side was José Dodier, an Alsatian who made his way to South Texas via St. Louis, Missouri. José married Virginia Henry, the great-grandaughter of Patrick Henry, the famous Virginian of Revolutionary War fame. The Henrys trace their heritage back to England as well, Patrick’s rebelliousness notwithstanding.

But Alsatia does not resonate like England. I’m sure they have some patriotic songs, but I doubt they sing “Alsatia Rules the Waves” after consuming too many pints of Pecheur. And part of the Dodier clan has staked out a life for itself in Mexico, most notably in the northern state of Sinaloa, thus anchoring itself in the Hispanic world. Add to that the Latin roots of French and the Gallic propensity for blending into the local population through intermarriage, and the Dodiers seem not too unlike those around whom I was raised.

As for the Henrys, the 17th century lies at a comfortable remove, well away from the tejano millieu in which I was raised, and any trace of English or gringo blood was overwhelmed, in my chromosomal cosomogeny, by that of the Peñas and del Barrios, families rooted in northern Spain’s Cantabrian region.

The German was an interloper of course, but a likable, adventurous one, not one of those who swarmed into the Texas Hill Country swaddled in the comfort of his kinfolk. My grandmother always told me that he had trouble getting along in Germany because he disliked the culture’s regimentation. So he was an un-German Deuthschlander. It was easy to accept him.

But an Englishman? During my boyhood, I had always felt resentment nudging my chest whenever the superiority of the English, topped only by that of Americans, was preached in history class. My partisanship even made it impossible for me to enjoy the corny swashbuckling movies, where the hero was inevitably some Englishman who had a point to make, and the Spaniard the guy with the evil laugh who would inevitably get the point in the form of cold steel. In my boyhood fantasies I was the young man who came up with the secret weapon that sent the English vessels gurgling and frothing to the bottom of the ocean when they faced the Spanish Armada. Francis Drake and the Buccaneers? Nothing more than an afternoon of target practice and a hold stuffed with captives to be ransomed for a tidy sum — payable in gold of course.

But that was fantasy. The reality is that the bloke, Wilhelm Heinrich’s genetic jack-in-the-box, has popped up and is grinning diabolically, wordlessly at the vato. He’s probably remembering how for years now I’ve consumed plum pudding along with tamales come Christmas. Surely he realizes that was purely coincidental and owing to my wife’s father’s English heritage. There’s nothing wrong with gnawing on a piece of plum pudding for a snack. You can’t always have tamales, you know.

And he had better not call me “bloke.”