A visit to a statue-in-progress

I dropped by the Stephen F. Austin statue-in-progress yesterday to see if they've attacked the Father of Texas' head to his body yet. They hadn't.

They're waiting for a big enough crane to take care of that importance stage of the building process, I was told by Chuey, one of the workers.

Chuey and Cesar were working on the outside of the statue, mixing cement and putting it in a bucket that would be hoisted up to someone located inside the structure. So what they're doing is patching cement on the inside of the thing. I didn't catch the name of the guy who was toiling in Stephen F. Austin's innards.

The worker named Cesar asked me in Spanish if I spoke espanol.

Poquito, I said.

Then, I asked him what his name was and where he was from -- in espanol. I was quite pleased that I remembered how to ask those questions in espanol ("Como se llama?" and "De donde es?)

He told me his name, Cesar, and that he was from San Luis Potosi.

Aha, I thought, now I can tell him that I once rode a train through San Luis Potosi, but I couldn't remember the Spanish word for train.

"What's the Spanish word for train," I asked Chuey.

"Train," he said.

Then I realized I didn't know the proper Spanish word for "rode" and gave up.

"Tell him I once rode the train through San Luis Potosi," I told Chuey, and he did.

Cesar, wearing a backwards-turned ballcap and wraparound sunglasses, pointed out in Spanish that Austin's "pistola" was there on the ground, a few yards me, resting on an old mattress.

I remembered what pistola means, and took a photo of Austin's long rifle, telling myself that those years of Spanish class in high school and college indeed were not wasted.

I took a few more photos and then left.

Later that night I realized the irony of it all. Here were two young Hispanic men, one of whom apparently didn't speak English and likely was an illegal immigrant, toiling to erect a statue commemmorating Stephen F. Austin, the "Father of Texas," who organized the first Anglo colony in a land that once belonged to Mexico before it was taken away by white men (and some Hispanic men) armed with pistolas.

Wonder what Austin would think of that. Wish I could ask him.

Later, I went over to the Varner-Hogg plantation, the state park that was once a sugar plantation worked by slaves in pre-Civil War days. The sad story of what's happened to that place might interest you, but that will have to wait for another day.
[photos on banjopics]