Hey, everybody, if you're listening on our podcast or at the internet, there are words in this episode that we have unbeeped. If you prefer a beeped version of the show, you can find that on our website, thisamericanlife.org. I grew up in Baltimore, and I remember in the 1970s at a very low moment, the city commissioned a slogan and a song and an ad campaign called Charm City, USA. And at the time, Baltimore was grimy and run down and still recovering from the riots in white flight in the 1960s.
I have never met a single person who took this slogan seriously. And I always thought that that's how it goes, right? My wife has told me how pathetic Detroit slogan, say nice things about Detroit, seem to her even as a kid, that's where she's from. This kind of forced boosterism arrives precisely when things are at their worst in the city.
So I wondered if there are actually cities where these campaigns work, and somebody told me that Calgary, Canada was placed like that, and we looked for a born and bred calgarian to tell us whether or not it was true, and that is how we found Ken Lee McQuillow. And he said, yes, he said back in the 80s, they had a feel-good song. At the time, he says, then we had three TV channels, and it was on two of them. So I probably heard it.
I'm not even exaggerating a thousand times. Everybody knew it. Everybody knew it. And there was this kind of weird pride around the song.
And I actually remember that. We used to sing this with our friends and, you know, my mom used to talk about this song. Wait, you would sing this song with your friends? Oh, yeah, absolutely.
And somebody would start, and we would sing it, and we'd all laugh. I loved it. I loved it. And I kind of loved it now.
Just when you hear that bling, those first little strains of mel- I'm right back there. There's a feeling in the air that you can't get anywhere except in Calgary. I taste a thousand yesterday's, and I love the magic waves of Calgary. From the mountains most in hand, I get a little- Of course there was a video, which at the time seemed very fresh and new.
Kind of a prairie scene, and there's this beautiful sunset. The guy throws a football at McMan Stadium, which is our big football stadium. And the guy who's supposed to catch it get bonked on the head. It's really cheesy.
Do you have a favorite part of the song? Oh, yeah. Right here. Huh?
Jesus, give it up. Did the song seem cheesy at the time? No. The song seemed very genuine at the time.
Early on our interview, I asked him if he knew any of the words, and he sang me the entire song from memory perfectly. He says, now and then one of his friends will post the song to Facebook. It was a really big deal back then. He says, because before then, Calgary didn't have much pride at all.
The city wasn't doing great. They're nearby archrival, Edmonton, which was smaller, in which he'd been raised to think of as a poor cousin. It seemed to get all the glory. You have to remember, at the time, Edmonton was it.
They had the Edmonton Oilers, the most famous hockey team on the planet, Wayne Gratsky. They won four Stanley Cups, and then here comes this song that oozes pride, and it sort of captured the spirit of, hey, we are the best hometown, we know, darn it. So, Ken, now I want to play you something else, and I think you've never heard this. There's a feeling in the air that you can't get anywhere except Milwaukee.
I tasted a thousand yesterday, he's in all of the magic ways I'm Milwaukee. Milwaukee! This is the original song that the Calgary song is based on. Wait, really?
Yeah, it was Milwaukee first, and then we're told by the songwriter. He can't remember if it Utah was second, or Calgary was second. Makes no difference. Whoa, whoa, whoa.
How can there be two best hometowns I know? That can't be right! I'm glad they didn't use the same woman, that would have been really bad. Let me play you, I'm something else now.
Hello, thanks man! Can I dig while? Oh, my God! Oh!
I don't know what to say. Hello, Atlanta! How many versions are there? There are over a hundred.
There's a feeling in the air that you can't get anywhere except in Oxford. Ken said that he was like two thirds of the music by all this, and one third actually sort of mad. He had really thought of it as Calgary song. For me, this is like finding out that your childhood teddy bear was owned by three other people on the weekends when you weren't there.
I don't know. Even what would really get me? There isn't a hello Edmonton, is there? No, there isn't.
And Ken does not begrudge the song's composer his success at selling the song in all these different cities. He just felt dirty and betrayed by the song that claims that each city is unique and special, but then by telling a hundred other cities the same thing, proves that the opposite is true. When we track down the song's greater, I've done it Frank Gary, no relation to the architect. I was surprised when he described the customization that he said he gave to each city's version of hello.
Listening to a few dozen of the songs, the only changes that I found were that he would change the name of the city. And then usually he would just change one geographic detail. So from the mountains close at hand would become from the golden countryside or from the bayfront shore in places where there were mountains. Though he described his process this way.
I would fly to the city. I would meet with the people, study the area, location, the lay of the land, the people. And that would inspire me to write the lyric, the new lyric, the new customization. It was really a geography history class.
I learned a tremendous lot about this country. Gary said that actually they usually would not change the lyrics that much because the feelings in the song were so universal. He said feeling pride about Calgary is not so different from feeling pride about Baltimore or feeling pride about Detroit. It's the same.
It's the same. It may be snowing in one area. It might be 80 degrees in another. But people are people and they're going through the same, absolutely.
And that's the same thing with keeping certain parts of the song. I mean it's funny. I think the fact that this works, that you could have a song and have all these local places attached and have people really like it and all these local places. I feel like it really shows that people want to connect to a song like that.
Well, there's no question about that. I mean people want to attach to a positive vibe about the place where they live. Absolutely. Absolutely.
That's what helped. That's what we tried to incorporate. Lots of people of course have very strong feelings about where they live and lots of people will of course do all kinds of things to hold onto that feeling of place. And today on our program we have three stories of people doing some very unusual things including for example staging an exit from their own country, though all in pretend as a way to stay in their country and their hometown.
From WBC Chicago to this American life, I'm Eric Glass. Stay with us. Check one. Flight simulation.
Lots of small towns in Mexico. So many people leave that leaving because one of the defining parts of being from there, even the people have you know, strong ties to home and family members who stayed behind. James Spring went to a town like that recently in Mexico for an event organized by the people who stayed behind. A lot of people are going to yell at me tonight.
One of them is this guy, Mateo. He's 19 and he's rolling past me in a pickup truck with blue and red flashing lights. How can I do it? Can I do it?
Can I do it? There's a US Border Patrol emblem on the door of the pickup. But it's fake. Just like Mateo's Border Patrol uniform, where hundreds of miles from the actual US border in a tiny Mexican village.
It's called El Alberto, and it's known for a really specific kind of tourist attraction. A simulated illegal nighttime border crossing. They call it the coming out to nocturna, the night hike. I'm the first one here, so I'm just standing around with 40 or 50 locals, all of them dressed up in their costumes.
Fake border agents wearing Vietnam, era camo, blinged out drug cartel thugs and migrants and human smugglers. A few years ago in the US, there were some news reports about the coming out to right-wing blogs, jumped all over it. They accused the organizers here of running a training camp for illegal migrants. But most of the people who go on the coming out to are middle-class Mexicans and university students.
People who can afford the 200 peso ticket, about 16 bucks. People who would probably never need to actually sneak into the US. For instance, tonight, we're waiting for a group of salespeople from Mexico City that's coming to do the coming out to, as a desaroyare, a people, a corporate team-building exercise. The people in costume are joking around with each other, and I speak Spanish, but I don't get any of the jokes.
Because they're not speaking Spanish. These are the Nyonyu, an ancient tribe, here since long before the Aztecs. They run the coming out to on their land, which is a federal territory grant, almost like an Indian reservation in the United States. The land isn't much good for farming or cattle, and there are almost no paying jobs in El Alberto.
So at some point, the Nyonyu became experts at crossing the border into the US. Pretty much everyone around me now, they've done the real crossing, many of them multiple times, and it's been killing the village. There are only about 2,500 of the El Alberto Nyonyu left in the world. And 80% of them now live in the US, in Vegas, around Arizona and Utah.
The coming out to nocturna is part of the Nyonyu Elders' plan to turn the villagers' expertise, leaving into a money-maker so that the villagers will stay. Hello, hello, hello. A guy named Berhelio is one of the Nyonyu who's playing a migrant. He's 33, lanky, with a wisp of a mustache.
He's going to be my own personal crossing buddy tonight. I'm wearing these clothes, are these clothes going to work all the way? Nyonyu looks good. During his four border crossings through the desert into Arizona, Berhelio's been robbed at gunpoint and had a knife held to his gut.
He showed me the scar. Other people that he's crossed with have faced worse. One of my friends, her hands come say same. Broken nose.
Sprained. Get paralyzed. Oh. Was it from the cold?
Yeah. Frostbite. He was in a pick-up that was chased by the Border Patrol. The truck rolled over and his cousin died.
Berhelio says there's no way to plan for every danger on a border crossing. When the cartels come, we don't know what's going to happen or when the gangsters come to us. Sometimes, you know, see a beautiful girl or woman, sometimes violate this woman. Or sometimes, you know, undress, come see some undress, undress the girls, you know, in front of the group.
So touch, touch her. That'll happen to my kids. One of my kids. Is she okay now?
She's okay. Berhelio told me he never wants to do the crossing again. I believe him. He looks exhausted just talking about it.
But he says he doesn't mind faking it for the Cominata. Berhelio asks me in Spanish if we're going to turn off his mic. I tell him, we're just going to leave it on. Because the salespeople are going to arrive any minute, right?
He's been getting updates on a VHF radio. Yes, he says they'll be here in a few minutes. The salespeople are a few minutes away for more than two hours. It's just past 10-30 at night when their bus arrives.
The sales team disembarks. The sales team disembarks, men and women, about 50 of them, bearing zero apologies. Just to see if polo shirts embroidered with the name of a big international corporation. Most of the Nyonyu actors have long since taken their positions out on the trail.
The lead Coyote, a short wiry guy, doesn't waste any time. Do any of you know what the Cominata is? He asks. The salespeople do not.
They make stupid guesses. I hate them. The Coyote is all business. He explains our objective.
It tells us all that he and his pals will be leading us across the border this very night. But crossing the line is not the hard part. No, that's just the first step. After that, the trek will be tough, fraught with danger.
The salespeople look more like they've prepared to trek to the lobby bar of the Radisson. One of the saleswomen asks if we're going to have to negotiate any stairs along the way, because stairs might present a problem for her. I look to Brahelio to see if he hates these people as much as I do, but he gives me nothing. The Coyote tries to impress upon all of us the gravity of the situation.
Crossing the border is only for the most desperate of souls. He asks us if we're desperate. The salespeople don't get it. The Coyote says, we can stay here all night then.
It takes asking them three times, but the group finally agrees to be desperate. This is my house. The Coyote's introduce themselves. The salespeople clap after each one, like they're being introduced to Bob in accounting.
And then, in an instant, everything changes. The Coyote starts yelling for us to get down low. It's time to move. We all run willy-nilly, like lunatics rushing the asylum gate.
Brahelio and I are pretty fast. We pass a dozen of the saleswomen. Chicky-lean, the lead Coyote signals for us to follow him behind a bluff where we all hide. Our Coyote's know the schedule of the border patrols.
One truck passes us, flashing lights and sirens. We all sprint to an abandoned building. A Coyote hisses at us to hide, and we try. The two of the fake U.S.
border patrol trucks are racing toward us, and then the agents are out of the trucks, and chasing us. And then they're honest, and we're trapped. There's only one way out, and it's right through the middle of the border patrol. Our Coyote's run, or he run, five or six border patrol agents are grabbing the wrestling salespeople right in front of me.
One agent gets a hand on me, but I make it past him. There's gunfire. Like, I'm sure they're shooting blankets loud, and it feels real. We all race away from the border patrol and lose them in a thicket of spiny plants.
All I can think is, what the fuck? The salespeople are dead silent. Brahelio and I find each other, and I follow him up a narrow, rocky trail about mid-pack in the sales team. We walk a long way.
It gives me time to recognize that the real U.S. border patrol would probably not have lasted their sirens when they snuck up on us. And they probably wouldn't shoot into a proud of migrants. This is the Mexican telenovela version of a border crossing, a dramatic reenactment.
This is what sells tickets. That said, the salespeople have fully suspended their disc leaf. They look totally freaked out. There's a barbed wire fence in front of us.
We all scamper beneath it and circle around the eroded edge of a cliff. And then, the coyote start going crazy, motioning for us to get down. Before us, there's a dying campfire, like a shack, like a little log house. And then there's this.
It's an old Indian man, not like a bianu Indian, like an American Indian. Like in the year 1823, an old western, with a feathered headdress and a loincloth. He's carrying a rifle, an old red rider looking thing. And he is not happy.
He lights a torch. Chicken lean tries to tell him that we're just passing through, trying to get north. The Indian fires back with an angry bunch of words. And then this small Indian woman comes out of the log house.
There's just a lot of arguing, and I'm not understanding a word of it. The Indian shoots the old rider into the air. And two more shirt was Indian show up on the scene. Like warriors.
One's carrying a spear. This feels really fun to me. Like John Wayne's going to come over the hill next. The warriors grab one of our choreotes.
El Tigre, I think. They tie him up to a cactus, and maybe it's a post that's dark. One Indian holds a gun to his head, and the other holds a spear. A saleswoman beside me is clearly into it.
She pleads our case saying that we are Mexicans, and we're lost. We just want to pass North. Mexican makes the old Indian says, like it was the magic word he'd been waiting for all along. He tells us to prove it, by singing the Mexican national anthem.
Before the weirdness of that can sink in, she leans, starts us out, and the salespeople warm to it. The old Indian decides to let us pass, with a little more gunfire to help she was off. We're running again. We run for a long time.
Like I don't even know why we're running now. Faster, James. Faster. I asked for Helio if he ever went through an Indian reservation when he crossed the real border.
Once he said, in Arizona, they didn't care. They just waved him through. When we stop running, we walk. We walk for a long time.
The walking is the opposite of exciting. It is monotonous. It's drudgery. The salespeople are showing wear, shuffling their feet like prisoners and leg irons.
One of the women appears to have twisted an ankle. She's leaning on another one of the salespeople for support. I'm not sure that this was the kind of team building they signed up for. There's a mountain up ahead.
I asked for Helio if that's our destination. He says, yeah, and I say I'm happy because it looks close. Helio tells me he remembers having that exact same feeling looking at mountains when he crossed the border for real. You see?
Oh, yeah. He's close. He's not close. I asked him if seeing the border patrol brought back any memories for him.
He says no, but the walking does. We climb more hills, more rocky ledges, more dust and trails, more mud. All the jostling makes my recorder switch itself on and off, and it makes me lose a pretty good chunk of important stuff. For example, I don't capture the sounds of the five guys who stop us on the trail.
Tattoo gang members like from the streets with the baggy jeans and tank tops. When they can't find our money, they steal food from our coyotes backpack. I also failed to record the encounter with the 20 members of a powerful drug cartel that surrounded us. These guys had everything, big gestures, really angry voices, automatic weapons that looked really real.
The cartel boss wore gold chains and he had this great aura of evil. They even took one of the women from our group and shot her in the head. The salespeople were really traumatized by this one. She was one of the actors and the cartel guys fake through her body off a cliff.
Then after we ran some more and got ourselves clear of the murderous cartel, my recorder started working again. Almost woke up. It was nearly the end of the night. We reached a bluff that overlooks the highway.
Our transportation, our ride, is scheduled to meet us here and deliver us to fake Phoenix. Where Helio tells me that this is a hot corridor, heavily patrolled by border agents. Chicky lean whispers that when the coast is clear will go in groups of 10. The first group of salespeople scurries down the hill and is just about to jump in the back of the truck when trouble appears.
Two border patrol trucks box them in. An agent speaks through the PA, tells the other agents to search them all. He asks where the coyote is and if there are any more of us, nobody raps us out. They're all loaded into the border patrol truck and taken away.
We are all of us in disbelief. We've been walking for three hours. Everyone is silent. For Helio signals that were in the next group, it strikes me that I really want to make it.
That I don't want to be one of the ones who gets caught. Three white pickups appear in the distance. Our ride. 30 of us run down the hill.
I'm waiting to hear the siren. For Helio and I jump into the bed of the third truck. We force ourselves as flat as we can and then I feel the truck shift into gear and we're driving. We're going to make it.
We arrive at the safe house blindfolded. That's how coyotes protect the location of the safe house. For Helio says that at a real safe house, we'd all be jammed into a room with a bunch of other migrants who forced to wait until our relatives paid off the final balance of the coyotes. And of course, that would be after two days and nights of walking through the desert, not just three hours.
But we're led down a path to what feels like a grassy field. It sounds like we're next to a river. Chiquilin tells everybody to keep their blindfold in place and he says, tonight we gave you just a small sample of the dangers of crossing the border, maybe 5% of what the real experience is like. He delivers this rousing speech, this message, it's like a patriotic stay-in-school kind of thing, that Mexicans have a moral obligation to stay here in Mexico, to not cross the border and give all of their energies to another country.
Give your energies to your own community, he says. Make this country great. He tells everybody that he's going to count to three and then we're all going to remove our blindfolds. Across the river in front of us is a tall bluff, maybe 200 feet high.
It's covered top to bottom with hundreds of flaming torches, maybe thousands. The fire light dances on the surface of the river. It's surreal. Chiquilin asks if we know what the torches represent.
One of the salespeople guesses correctly. Yes, Chiquilin says, we do it to honor our brothers and sisters who've lost their lives crossing the border. The salespeople are really moved by all of this. Some look sort of misty-eyed.
These stories are a big part of their national heritage, even though the reality of it so far removed from their own lives. Chiquilin calls all of the salespeople to huddle in a big circle and hold hands. For the second time tonight, they sing Mexico's national anthem. The other message from tonight is not about the future of Mexico, or the dangers of a real border crossing.
It's just about the reality of the coming out to itself and the fact that it even has to exist, the whole elaborate thing with all of its actors and costumes and staging and props, the endless reenactment of something that none of them wanted to do in the first place. Chiquilin said to the tourists, we started doing the coming out to because we were becoming a village of ghosts. This is all we've got. We have no professions, no education, no industry.
This is what we have to do to survive here. But it's an experiment that hasn't paid off yet. They advertise these coming out to us, but sometimes they go for weeks without enough tourists to run one. And when there are enough tourists, like tonight, none of the actors get paid by the village.
This is not a job for anyone yet. Things here are still desperate. People go hungry. And the village still depends on money sent from 80% of the Nyonya who are living in the United States.
Some of the actors from the coming out to tell me that very soon they're heading north to try to cross the real border again. So now we have a story about people moving the other way across the border, from the US to Mexico. You're running for homes here in the US, not there in Mexico. We deport from the United States about 300,000 people every year, to Mexico.
Over 100,000 more leave on their own. And there's an entire industry that has grown up around the fact that there are now tons of people living in Mexico who speak perfect American English. And that industry is call centers. Over the last decade, American companies like Best Buy, Dish Network, Time Warner have been outsourcing the call center jobs to Mexico, and at first these call centers just handled Spanish language calls from the United States.
But then everybody realized, oh, they've got lots of really good English speakers there and that became a big part of what those call centers now do. Seth B. Westler has talked to dozens of people in these jobs, though. And he says, it can be a little weird for the people who work at the call centers.
These are pretty good jobs, except for one thing. They make you homesick. Lots of people who work at these call centers have just moved to Mexico and they miss the United States. They miss their old lives.
And at work, they spend hour after hour, call after call, talking to people who still have those lives. Marra Ponce left New York for Mexico when she graduated from college with a business degree and couldn't get a job because she didn't have papers. She got hired in Mexico, taking calls for AT&T. One guy who called and he's like, oh, yeah, you know, we're going ice skating and then we're going to dinner at Olive Garden or something.
And I was like, oh, I used to do that with friends. So I would feel like this, I guess like, churning. And sometimes I would like stop listening to what they were saying because I would just, in my head, I'd be like, this memory and that memory. When I used to go out with my friends.
And I'd be like, hello, hello, are you still there? When Marra would work the evening shift over the phone, she could hear customers doing the same things her family used to do back in Queens. Like watching boxing matches. In the back, you hear the TV like really loud.
And I just remember thinking like, oh, I wonder if my dad is watching it right now. Like, I remember him laying down on the couch and he'd be like, oh, you know, like, get me some soda or get me something to eat. And like, it would be very clear in my head, like seeing this family in this room that like brought me back to the apartment that we used to live in in a story at Queens. You're like, oh man, you know, like these people are calling from over there and I just wish I could just go through this phone and be over there, you know.
It's an overwhelming feeling of sadness. This is Lewis Roldon. He drew up in Orange County, California, got into some gang-related trouble, missed a court date, and got deported. And he says what makes these calls hard is that people call when they're out doing stuff.
American stuff, running errands, driving, shopping. Sometimes they're waiting in line at fast food drive-throughs, ordering hamburgers, or whatever. Like this lady. She called about her in right now, working.
I'm just sitting here in the drive-through. I talk about like, man, are you kidding me? I have no talk about her here. It's just a talk about her.
There's no bell. It's just a talk about her. What is it about Taco Bell? I don't know.
American food itself, jack in the box, in and out, Burger King, Carl's Jr. I mean, how many times I remember going through drive-throughs, you know. Lewis isn't kidding. This came up again when I went up with him and his call center friends.
We were eating at the best taco rehab ever been to my life. And this guy from North Carolina said, yeah, he also really misses Taco Bell. Actually, I do. I'm gonna be honest.
I do. I don't know. It has like, it's just a different flavor, you know. It's the state's flavor.
You know, you're in the states. Lewis says sometimes it messes with his head, hanging out with people who remind him of his friends in the States, and then speaking English all day to customers in an office that looks like a cheesy American startup. There's a ping pong table outside the cafeteria, walls are painted in the young green. I don't know.
I'm like, taking a call and I'm just thinking, oh, I'm gonna go home, you know. And I look out the window and the Mexican flag's right in front of me. Psh. Reality just melts.
And I can't believe I'm Mexico City. I haven't seen it. I'm like doing it here. I can't believe I'm Mexico City.
Angel Perez came to Texas when he was two years old, lived in a small rural town called Greyford, Texas, population 600. He spent his whole life there, graduated from high school, had a couple of kids. But then he got into some trouble, and eight months ago, got deported. Angel ended up in Mexico City, working for one of the biggest call centers, TeleTech.
Lots of people told me they're supposed to keep conversations short, two around eight minutes. But Angel keeps his calls to two, because he's saving up his minutes. That way, he says, he can drag out calls with customers who remind him of home, mostly people who live in the country, like this guy named Jim from Alabama. He kept calling me Bubba, and that's one of my words that I used to, because I was raised with them redneck boys, so they used Bubba a lot.
So what did he call in for? Well, he called in just saying, hey, listen here, Bubba, my bill's up. I don't even know why, and this and that, man, I'm a country boy. I don't know none of this technology.
I said, I know I feel you. I said, I'm in Mexico City right now, and I was in Texas and I'm in the country. And he goes, oh, Bubba, man, you need to go back and hurry up and come back to Texas. I said, I know I am.
I'm trying. So, yeah, we talked, I'm going to say at least 25 to 30 minutes, we go on that call. Just talking about hunting, fishing, out in the river, swimming, I used to just lay back on a roof, on a car, and you just sit there and just look up there and see shooting stars, because it's so black and everything's so clear. And here you don't see nothing.
I still haven't seen, I don't even bother looking up at the sky at night no more. Right now, there's a $6 billion-year industry in Mexico that does customer service calls billing in IT for people who don't live in Mexico. At the rate it's growing, the industry will double in the next five years, and it's benefiting from the hundreds of thousands of people who get deported from the U.S. each year.
One of the companies told me that the Mexican government sometimes gives out job information at the border about call centers to deportees. And the outsourcing companies, they're keeping track of the cities where people are settling, and then opening up new facilities there. When Angel arrived, he found odd jobs, like moving furniture for 15 bucks a day, which is typical. Other deportees told me about working at a car wash or soap factory at a restaurant or hauling fish off a boat.
All those jobs pay $10 to $20 a day. Call center jobs start around 40 bucks a day. That's a good middle-class wage in Mexico. These jobs are desirable.
Mexican kids come out of college and try to get them. But for the most part, these call centers are like little islands of expats in Mexico. The agents who work there, they hang out with each other. They date each other.
Sometimes they even marry each other. Angel's group of friends are all guys from Texas, just like him. Only most of them aren't from the country, like Angel. They're from cities, Dallas and Houston.
A lot we're in gangs. Now that they hang out all the time, Angel's been trying out their shtick. Like he's thinking about becoming a rapper. One Tuesday night, they go out with Angel and his friends, Guabara.
It looks like an American diner. They sit in a booth getting wasted off 40s. We put music on, we smoke, we drink, we rap. I'm a Texas boy.
I wasn't born, but I was a Mexican man. I was deported from the TX. They go on like this for about half an hour, getting louder. Almost all their lyrics are about Texas.
Then some preppy Mexican guys, the table next to them, start getting annoyed and shush them. Eventually the bartender gets fed off too and goes to the music system. Here in Mexico, some of these call center workers still make a turkey every year for Thanksgiving. Remember, these are people who couldn't even get driver's licenses when they lived in the U.S.
Other Mexicans notice they're not from here. They stick out. They dress differently. They walk differently.
Their arms are covered in tattoos. And they go around in big groups speaking English. That can make locals mad. This happened to Lewis the other day when he was on the subway.
His girlfriend, who's also from the States, called him on his cell. I answered the phone column, hello. And this guy notices my accent right away. I noticed him from my periphery.
He just turned around and he starts staring at me. So I keep talking, oh, I'm going to be home in the next ten minutes, whatever. And he told me, you're in Mexico. You need to be speaking in Spanish.
He reused a word, which is a word that they use towards Mexican American. It's a derogatory term. Locals look down at people who have come back. They see them as screw-ups who got kicked out of the U.S.
and can't speak proper Spanish. But it's complicated because they also resent the advantages these returnees have. They're English and these jobs that pay so well. People see them as uppity.
They're too American. But actual Americans also give them attitude. They get flack all the time from collars in the States who are annoyed to find themselves talking to someone in Mexico. In fact, I had a call.
I was a customer. He's like, well, you have an accent. And I was like, well, I'll do the best I can. And he said, where am I calling to?
Mexico City, sir. Very pleasant. Tom. He said, well, you fucking went back here and I took off my earpiece.
I mean, no. I talked to over 50 calls center workers and the ones who've been here the longest said it gets easier after a while. The job becomes just what it is. Short transactions are the phone with strangers.
Eventually, you don't get so homesick. Maro says that's how it worked for her. She's been here for eight years now and no longer wishes she lived in the U.S. And it's also like this thing where it's like, there's this country that didn't want me.
Why do I want to go back to somebody or to something that didn't want me and accept me? Like if it was a relationship, it's like, why go back to my ex when, you know, there's so many better things than there's a world out there. Angel has only been living in Mexico for eight months and every day at the call center is still a struggle for him. I hate this job.
I hate it. I hate it with the passion. But that's the only thing that helps me make money here. I mean, do you think about going back to the U.S.?
No, I think about going back every minute. Every time I take that call first call, I want to go back. I don't care if I have to carry a big old bag of drugs. I don't care what I have to do.
If they gave me the opportunity to go back, I'll go back. But I know I can't. It's a thing telling me you don't. And don't go back.
How long do you think you live in Mexico? Well, probably the rest of my life. That's another thing that bugs me when I take calls. Knowing that this is probably, this is it.
This is as far as you're getting this, you're going to be here for the rest of your life and makes you go take calls. Lately, Angel has been missing a lot of work. But he doesn't care if he gets fired. He says he'll just find another job at another call center.
There's more of them all the time. Seth Reed, Weser. Coming up in Tippity Square and made of carbohydrates. That's a minute from Chicago Public Radio when our program continues.
This is American Live from Our Glass. Each other program, of course, which is a theme bringing different kinds of stories on that theme. Today's program, there's no place like home. Stories of people doing unusual things to create or preserve or hold on to a home for themselves.
We've arrived at our program at three. The hostess with the toastess. Couple years back, John Gravelow moved with his wife and daughters across the country to San Francisco. And he's been very aware of the ways that San Francisco seems different from the rest of the country.
About a year ago, he noticed something new happening around the Bay Area, which turned out not to be what he thought at all. Here's John. A few months ago, I was standing in line at the coffee shop on my way to work, and I couldn't stop staring at this guy behind the counter. He was cutting inch thick slices of bread, putting them in a toaster, and spreading stuff on them.
But he was the way he did it that caught my attention. He had the solemn intensity of a ping pong player, who keeps his game very close to the table. Knee's slightly bent, wrist flicking the butter knife back and forth, his eyes suggesting a kind of flow state. In front of him, laid out in a neat row where a few long Pullman loaves, that boxy wonder bread shape, but recognizably handmade and freshly baked.
On the menu, toast, stood all on its own as an option, at $3 per slice. So I ordered some. It was good. It tasted like toast.
Only better. A couple of weeks later, I stumbled across another place with a self-described toast bar. Then another. This third place I went to was like a temple to hot sliced bread.
It was called the mill, a big light-filled cafe and bakery with exposed rafters and polished concrete floors, like a rustic apple store, with a small chalkboard listing the day's toast menu. I asked the manager at one of these places what was going on. Why all the toast? Tip of the hipster spear, he said.
And then I realized with his mint. Toast, like the cupcake and the dill pickle before it, had been elevated to the artisanal plane. I had two reactions to this. First, of course, I rolled my eyes.
How silly. How precious. How perfectly San Francisco. Artisanal toast.
And second, despite myself, I felt a little thrill of discovery. As a 35-year-old guy with a wife and two kids, I'm usually the last to find out about a trend. But here I was, apparently standing up on the artisanal toast way way before it crashed into Brooklyn, Chicago and Los Angeles, before the inevitable article in Slate telling people that they're making toast all wrong, before the even more inevitable backlash by angry bloggers. I decided to go looking for the origins of the fancy toast trend.
How does such a thing get started? What determines how far it goes? Maybe I thought it would help me understand the rise of all the seemingly trivial things that start in San Francisco and then go supernova across the country. And just as I began searching, the backlash arrived.
The local media started running articles with headlines like $4 toast, why the tech industry is ruining San Francisco. And almost all of the blaming fingers pointed at the mill. So I figured, bingo. That's ground zero.
Wow. It's really crowded. But one of the owners there, Josie Baker. Yes, he's a baker.
Yes, that's his name. Told me he was not the originator of this craze. Yeah, I mean, there was one other place here in the city, and they mostly do cinnamon sugar toast. No, Josie wasn't the Chuck Berry or fancy toast.
He was more like the Elvis or fancy toast. A guy who got the trend when it was already on an upswing. The place he first saw it four or five years ago is out in one of San Francisco's windiest, foggiest, farthest long areas. The outer sunset.
Other toast professionals sent me to the same cafe. It's completely different from any of the other places serving toast. For one thing, it's about ten times smaller. In fact, it's nothing like what I expected.
And the story behind it, the story of the person who started this trend, made the trend itself feel like an embarrassingly tiny thing to focus on. So I'm going to tell you that story, but first I should tell you the name of the place. It's called the Trouble Coffee and Coconut Club, otherwise known simply as Trouble. Trouble is really popular.
It always seems to have a line going out the door. And because the shop is the size of a single car garage is cramped and crowded with artifacts and wall handles like a very personal museum. I got two toast on the bar. On the menu are four main items, coffee, cinnamon toast, coconuts, and shots of grapefruit juice named after Yoko Ono.
One toast for David. The founder of Trouble is Julieta Corelli, and every one of those menu items has a defined significance to her. As does her never-changing wardrobe. She's always in a sleeveless crop top, ripped jeans, and a head scarf.
She's covered in tattoos, including her cheeks, which are tattooed with freckles and always flushed. Like a viker, pippy long-stocking. What can I have to move that? And yes, she confirms it.
She says it took a long time for the rest of San Francisco to copy her toast idea. Trouble is the kind of place where you might walk in and feel excluded. Like, I guess I'm not hipster enough for all this. That's kind of the way I felt at first.
But then Julieta told me something that made Trouble and the purpose of it snap into focus. Trouble isn't just the name of Julieta's coffee shop. Trouble is her word for a psychotic episode, the kind she's had since she was 16 growing up in Cleveland. Her official diagnosis is get-so-effective disorder, but she only learned that recently, and back when the episodes first started in high school, she had no idea what was wrong with her.
I started having these things where I thought people were putting LSD in my beer. I was hallucinating. And so when things were get weird, I just thought that's what was happening, that people put acid or that I drank mushroom tea. And I was hanging out with people who partied pretty hard, so I thought that's what was happening.
I would try to be in class. Let's say it's an English class or something. But I was outside of my body watching myself be in the class, and that's what happens to me a lot. And all the voices were very, very, very loud.
And if you could hear people crumbling the paper, and it was just so uncomfortable. This is where I was just yesterday. Sitting outside, not being able to even go to trouble. I was in that state of mind yesterday.
During an episode, sometimes she hears voices, or gets the sense that she doesn't actually exist. Also, eating is difficult. She can't stand the sound of her own chewing. After ruling out her LSD theory, she thought maybe she was just having lots of nervous breakdowns.
Then came the theory that she was bipolar. She was even medicated for bipolar disorder. Then I just thought, this is me, and everything's my fault. I just destroy relationships.
I can't hold an apartment. I can't hold a job. I'm nice enough. That's how I want about it.
She somehow managed to put herself through college, three different colleges, and different corners of the country, by booking shows for underground bands and working at record stores and coffee shops. But Juliette's illness was a kind of time bomb that eventually leveled any structure in her life. Roommates kicked her out. Roommates fell apart.
Her boss had to fight her, or quietly stop scheduling her for shifts. A lot of the time, she was pretty much homeless. She slept in her car on lots of couches. For a little while, she slept in a tree.
By the time she had 30, she had lived in nine different cities. She first came here to the Bay Area as a student at Berkeley. And she remembers this one episode, a long delusional walk through San Francisco, during which she called the police to let them know a tree had fallen on top of her, which it hadn't. And finally, Juliette found herself at China Beach in the northwest part of town.
On the sun deck was an elderly man, sitting on a towel, wearing a speedo, sunbathing on a cloudy day that suggested anything but. This would be the beginning of the beginning for Juliette and for trouble coffee. The moment she met Glenn. A little man, really petite, white hair.
His socks always matched his sweater. No matter what, I was always amazed by that. But he was mostly in a speedo. Tanny.
No tanning lotion. Like no SPF for Glenn. Glenn, whose real name is Gunter Neustat, was a Holocaust survivor who escaped Germany as a boy. Anybody who went to China Beach regularly back then will tell you he was a fixture there.
But more than Glenn that first day, Juliette was struck by a pair of Russian men, climbing out of the ocean after a swim. I should mention here that almost year round the water at China Beach is cold enough to make you hypothermic after a few minutes. He's strong men just coming out of the ocean. And I was so weak.
I was the walking dead. I wanted to be that strong and they came up onto that sun deck and they were so alive. So I started asking Glenn about these men. And he told me that people swam there regularly.
All these people. And I was like, this is what I want to do. But anyways, I didn't last in San Francisco. I went on to all my little stints.
First to South Carolina, then Georgia, and then New York. Where she hit upon the first in a series of coping mechanisms that she still uses. Coconuts. For some reason, coconuts are the one food that doesn't feel like poison when Juliette is in an episode.
And the chewing sound isn't as bad. And not to sound like an informal for coconuts. They're really nutritious. Juliette says you can survive on them provided you have a source of vitamin C.
Hence the grapefruit juice on the troubles menu. Another great thing about coconuts. People talk to you when you're holding one. Juliette has studies to prove it.
Studies she performed herself. Standing on a sidewalk. Noting down how many strangers engage with her when she's holding a sandwich versus when she was holding a coconut. It wasn't even close.
All of a sudden I found something that would keep me alive. It didn't bother me chewing. I felt great. And people talked to me.
I was like, this is working. Still, she was barely sleeping. And self-medicating a lot with pills. Mostly Vicodin.
And whiskey. She was away from San Francisco for four or five years. Then one day, I was at a party and I thought about that old man. And those old Russian men at China Beach.
And the next day, because my roommate was pretty much done with me. I rented a car and went straight to China Beach. And then when you got there? Glenn was there.
And he told me that it took me a long time to come back. He's like, where have you been? So actually, this is Glenn's corner. Juliette took me to China Beach.
The spot on the sundeck where she started hanging out with Glenn after she came back. Talking with him every day, the routine of it was the next thing she found that really helped her. At the end of every visit, he'd say the same thing. See you tomorrow.
Soon, she started joining the other swimmers at China Beach. She swims every day now at about the same time. When she's having an episode, the cold water can shock her out of hallucinating. It's for a man of cold.
Juliette got the idea for trouble in 2005. But it wasn't so much an idea as a whirlwind of coconuts and strangers meeting each other and cinnamon toast, all swirling around in her mind. She was working in a coffee shop at the time, always buttonholing customers and co-workers about her plans. She did the same with Glenn, who brought the idea down to earth, telling her point blank to open a checking account, go to City Hall, and ask them about starting a small business.
And her boss at the coffee shop found her sleeping there once or twice. And rather than say, you're fired, he said, I think it's time for you to open your own place. And he told me he was like, just get some cups. Brew some coffee when you run out of cups.
Close the door and go get more cups. And that was my business advice. With barely any money, she landed a five-year lease in the outer sunset. In a former doggy day spot, it seemed to have been a front for some kind of crystal meth operation.
So here was a shop that sells coconuts and toast in a crummy part of town that nobody went to. Run by a person with a significant mental illness. But I never, ever, ever thought that it was like going to fail. Everything that works for me, I put in one little spot.
And I thought, well, if it works for me, it'll work for other people. She put coconuts on the menu because of the times she relied on them for easy sustenance. And because they did help her strike up conversations. What about toast?
My mom used to make me toast. And so when I was first opening up trouble, I wanted to feel safe. Toast was that for me. And I also knew it was going to be that for a lot of people.
Nobody can be mad at toast. I mean, it's toast, it's cinnamon toast. Everybody stoked. In 2012, so just two years ago, Julieta finally got the definitive diagnosis of schizo-effective disorder, and medication that genuinely helps keep the episodes at bay.
She stopped drinking and taking drugs a long time ago. But the major way she's managed to cope with her episodes when they happen is by creating a network of people and turning herself into a local institution, which is what she's been doing bit by bit ever since she came back to San Francisco from New York. At first, it was just the people she saw in her daily bike route to and from China Beach. And I would talk to the city workers who were building things.