Have we found Joey Vento’s Mexican soulmate? Not really, because Advertising Age columnist Laura Martinez (a Mexican citizen) regretted her fit of Mexi-chauvinism when visiting the Anglo retiree-dominated port town of Puerto Vallarta:
The last straw came one morning at a local food joint. Hoping to get my favorite Mexican breakfast of molletes or huevos rancheros, I was told by a young attendant that breakfast consisted only of bagels. That did it. “Bagels? What the hell are bagels?” I found myself asking in a very loud voice. “I don’t know what a bagel is,” I told him with a straight face. “We are in Mexico. I am Mexican. I want a Mexican breakfast!” As soon as these words came out of my mouth I realized how stupid I must have sounded. It was pretty clear I looked like a silly, arrogant and ignorant (let alone crazy) person. But it was almost as if the words came out involuntarily, a knee-jerk type of reaction resulting from days of built in frustration and what I thought was a very unfair treatment of people. I guess my feelings were not very different from those of many Americans in places such as Texas, Florida or New York, who keep complaining about the increasing number of Spanish-language signs or non-American food.
But given that, up in New York, an increasing minority of bagelmakers are Mexican… we’re gonna venture a guess and say those bagels might have been pretty decent. But still, not that much different from Geno’s English-only signs, we suppose.
Battling Bagels and Xenophobia in My Home Country? [Advertising Age]
[Image via Advertising Age]
