[ilbegone]

I worked with some French a few years ago, nose in the air types. I eventually got around the snubbing.

There was a French Canadian with them I got along with well. I asked him about the problems and dislike between the French of Quebec and the English of the rest of Canada, he simply replied that it wasn't between himself and I and moved on to another conversation. He did like a lot of Mexicans will do, started teaching me the French names for tools and such. I'd have liked to stay around them, but the superintendent found I had a certification for something he needed elsewhere so I was moved.

Some time ago I made a statement in a group (who had all been doing some drinkin') about people who worked for nothing and who shouldn't be here to start with. A gentleman whose parents were a Mexican national and an Arizona Indian (he identifies as Indian, claims to be Yaqui) angrily objected and got loud, yelling that I was a racist or something similar (but not quite those words, I don't remember exactly what they were). A white Mexican national from southern Mexico (who had French ancestry and was married to an Indian looking Honduran woman), maybe not catching all the English, launched on the Indian, yelling at him that I (the white American) was married to a Mexican woman (born in America to born in Mexico parents, she's been asked a number of times over the years if she belongs to one of the local Indian tribes) and that if the Indian didn't like it he (the white Mexican), himself a Mexican, was going to kick the Indian's American ass. The Indian was wide eyed, open mouth dumbfounded and I was thinking "???what just happened???"

That was surreal.