Parallel lives

Silvia and Carlos Hernandez spent a week in March with me and then a week in Villa Vera. We became fast friends. We live parallel lives! Asimilados!
All of us are children of immigrants: Silvia's father was from Mexico, Carlos's parents Salvadorans who sent him ahead to the US to avoid the war that claimed four Catholic lay workers from Cleveland as collateral damage.
Carlos is an autoworker about to lose his job with Toyota; his plant had the misfortune of being in a partnership with GM, Chevrolet. So, half of it was tooled for GM and well, there is no going back.
We found it amusing that Silivia, who speaks virtually no Spanish, was relying on Carlos, or me, an immigrant, for translations! We drank our Charro Negros and thought about that. Diet coke and tequila.
The one thing we kept going back to in our heads was the US experience of growing up as children of immigrants and assimilating. The irony of me working on assimilating here, in a Latino culture, was not lost on any of us. We just had a grand old time with that and Mexican time!