My dad didn't need much English to do his job

Gustavo Arellano, Tribune News Service

When Donald Trump signed an executive order last week cracking down on truckers who don’t speak the best English, there was one industry expert I needed to call: my dad. Lorenzo Arellano drove big rigs across Southern California for 30 years before retiring in 2019. His six-day workweeks kept us well-fed and clothed and allowed him to afford a three-bedroom Anaheim home with a swimming pool, where he and my youngest brother still live today.

“Why does that crazy man want to do this?” he asked me over the phone in Spanish before answering his own question. “It’s because (Trump has) always had a lack of respect for the immigrant. We truckers don’t deserve this. He’s just trying to harm people. He wants to humiliate the whole world.”

Federal regulations punishing immigrant truckers for their limited English dates back to the 1930s. Trump’s order calls for the enforcement of an existing requirement that truckers be proficient in English, overturning a 2016 policy that inspectors shouldn’t cite or suspend troqueros as long as they could communicate sufficiently, including through an interpreter or smartphone app.

Conservatives have long tied that Obama-era action and the rise of immigrant truckers — they now make up 18% of the profession, according to census figures — to a marked increase in fatal accidents over the last decade, which Trump alluded to when he insisted that “America’s roadways have become less safe.”

Trump’s move is the latest dog whistle aimed at people who don’t like that the United States ain’t as white as it used to be. It follows similarly xenophobic actions, like declaring English the official language, severely curtailing birthright citizenship and renaming the Gulf of Mexico “Gulf of America.” The English-for-truckers push has particularly angered me, though.

Presuming that a more-diverse trucking industry is the main culprit behind the increase in fatal truck crashes ignores the fact that there are more trucks on the road, driving more miles, than ever before. According to the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration, the rate of fatal crashes is three times less than in the late 1970s, when cultural touchstones like “Smokey and the Bandit” and “Convoy” seared the image of the good ol’ white boy trucker into the American psyche.

It’s also an insult against people like my 73-year-old dad. When I was in junior high, Papi took me with him on weekends to teach me the value of hard work. He’d wake me up at 2 in the morning so I could strap down cargo on flatbeds during chilly mornings or drag a pallet jack around warehouses at lunchtime.

I don’t remember hearing him speak anything other than Spanish, the language we’ve always communicated in. But he succeeded enough that all four of his children are college-educated and have full-time jobs. His dream was for the two of us to eventually open our own father-son trucking company. That never happened because I was too much of a nerd, but I always took pride in my dad’s career. He achieved the American dream despite coming into this country in the trunk of a Chevy with a fourth-grade education and only picking up what I’ve always described as a rudimentary understanding of English.

I visited my papi the day after our phone call, to see the only two mementos he could dig up from his trucking career. One was a bent, blurry photo of him from the early 1990s with his first rig, a faded red GMC cabover that he parked behind my Tía Licha’s store so he wouldn’t have to pay a private lot. Papi, younger than I am today, stands to the side of the troca at the Placentia Home Depot, waiting for workers to unload it. He’s not smiling, because old-school Mexicans never smile for the camera. But you can tell by his pose that he’s proud. The other memento Papi showed me was a plaque dated 1991 from a trucking trade group. It congratulated him for being a “credit to your profession” and “the very best your industry has to offer.”

“They would only give it to the drivers who were safest,” he explained while I held it. We sat in his living room, where photos of my late mom and us kids decorated the bookshelves. He cracked a smile. “I earned a lot of them.” I asked how he learned the English he did know. Papi replied — in Spanish — that his first lessons were at his first job in the US, a carpet-cutting factory in Los Angeles.

The owners taught the Latino workers how to run the machines but also enough phrases so immigration authorities would leave them alone whenever there was a raid. Otherwise, my dad lived in a world of español, my first language. When he married my mami and moved to Anaheim, she convinced him that they should take English classes at night to better their prospects. He only stuck with it for two years, “because I was working a lot.”

When he was training to be a truck driver in the mid-1980s, the instructor spoke Spanish but told everyone they needed to learn enough English to understand traffic signs and pass the DMV test. “And that makes sense, because this is the United States,” Papi told me. “But this is also Southern California. Everyone knows a little bit of English, but a lot of people also know a little bit of Spanish, too.”

I asked how much English he used on the job. “50%, maybe,” he answered. “Why am I going to say ‘A lot’ when that’s not true?”

He recited the sentences that dispatchers and security guards peppered him with in English at every stop: What are you coming for? What company do you work for? Who’s the broker? What’s the address? Do you have a driver’s licence?

He repeated each question — and its corresponding answer — slowly, as if to conjure up a time when he was younger and happy about finally finding his professional groove. “They listened to me and understood, even though I spoke chueco y mocho,” he said — crooked and broken.

Saying that out loud, my dad became uncharacteristically self-conscious. I asked if anyone ever made fun of his English. “No,” he said, suddenly happy. “Because truckers, we’re a brotherhood.” Papi rattled off all the immigrants he worked alongside in his trucking days. Russians. Armenians. Arabs. Italians. “They didn’t know Spanish. I didn’t know their language. So we had to speak English to become friends. Everyone knew a little.” In fact, he remembered how the immigrant truckers looked down on people who spoke perfect English. “The person who doesn’t speak English works harder. He doesn’t run away from work. The ones who spoke good English, they worked less because they thought knowing English made them so powerful. When the boss said, ‘Who wants more shifts?’ the English speaker would say, ‘Why do I want to work late?’ and run off to their homes.”

I asked Papi if he regretted not knowing more English. “Nope. What’s done is done.” Then he took a moment to think. “Look, studying is for people who like it, like you. But not me. Maybe I could’ve had a better life.” He gestured around our family home. “But we had a good life. I did what I had to do.” My father wasn’t the most responsible man in his personal life, but trucking grounded him. I thought of how he and so many other truckers sacrificed self-improvement — things like English classes — in the name of getting ahead at work. I remember all the inspections my dad’s rig had to go through — he never failed one — and how he still reprimands me to this day if I rely on my rearview mirror instead of my side mirrors when I’m backing up. How nearly every time we see each other, he reminds me to check the oil and the air pressure in my tyres.