Wednesday, August 23, 2006

Mexican mother, German father

Or maybe it's "Mexican father, German mother"? Either way, in this blog posting I offer rumination (there's that word again!) upon why it may be that San Antonio is what she is, specifically, a city whose middle name is "PARTY".

Because the main train depot at Fiesta Texas is in the German theme area of the amusement park, called Spassburg or "Fun Town", I've been doing a little investigation of the Deutsch language and German culture. Years ago, I must confess, I was prejudiced against Germans and all things German. They were the people who had sparked two world wars with their aggressive militarism, had put the despicable Nazis in power and exterminated millions of humans simply for being Jewish, Slavic, gypsy or whatever. But in the past decade or so the prejudice has been eroded by various factors. Perhaps most significant was that there was a native German lady at my church in Clarksville, Tennessee, who was a cherished sister in Christ. There wasn't anything about her to not appreciate, so why should I hang onto any remaining bias against the Deutsche, their language or culture/history?

More currently, a couple of my fellow train crew members on the Fiesta Texas RR were of German heritage. In fact, one related to me that he didn't learn English until he began school because everyone in the small town of his raising spoke either German or Spanish or both. (An interesting side note: in the mid-1800s the one bridge over the San Antonio River had a sign giving brief instructions for walking horses across it in Spanish, German and English -- a trilingual sign, reference to which always causes me to think of history's most infamous trilingual sign, the one Pontius Pilate ordered nailed atop the cross of Jesus.)

So-o-o-o. . . I've done a little reading this summer. Just a little, since I spent so much time either at work or going to and from work on the VÍA bus system. One of the books I read had a brief introduction by a sort of American ex-patriate living in Deutschland. His most interesting point, for me, was that next to the Spaniards the Deutsche are the most partying people in Europe.

Oh??? Hm-m-m-m!!! Well, then, perhaps THIS explains San Antonio's partying nature! Join the original settlers of this city, that is, the Spaniards and the Spanish-indigenous (that is, mestizo) Mexicans in union with the Deutsche who arrived from their Fatherland in the mid-1800s, and one might just ahve a very strong foundation for the party nature of this eighth largest US city! Or to metaphor it: join a Mexican mother to a German father in cultural marriage and the resulting entity (the city of San Antonio) will be born, crying "¡Hagamos fiesta!" ("Let's have a party!" or "Let's make merry!")

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