My dad was a really smart guy. I mean super smart. As I recently mentioned, he worked at the Lawrence Nuclear lab… not the Livermore lab where they were doing atom bomb stuff, the one in the hills above the U.C. Berkeley campus. He was an electrical safety engineer. He understood string theory, that is how smart he was.

Back in the 50’s, while still waiting for kids to be born or adopted, my parents decided to take a romantic trip to Mexico. My dad, being the practical person that he was, decided to get a Spanish phrase book. So he went to the used book store and found one. I have it sitting beside me right now. I found it when I was helping my mom organize the book shelves.

The book is called; A Practical Spanish Grammar For Border Patrol Officers… which doesn’t even sound like good English grammar to me, but what do I know? I guess the selection was limited. This book was put out by the U. S. Department of Justice, Immigration and Naturalization Service, and printed by the U. S. Government Printing Office, Washington, in 1946.

If you live in this country, this was your grandparent’s tax dollars at work.

I am not going to type the actual Spanish translations, because this post would be too long, and I don’t know how to put the accent marks above the letters, but here is a selection of things I can tell you how to say in Spanish, if your curiosity gets the better of you, or you are planning a romantic vacation south of the border…

(The words inside the parenthesis are my observations)

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The English have constructed many ships.

President Lincoln traveled a great deal.

I earn two pesos a day!

He was arrested by the officer.

I cannot imagine that John did it.

Henry does not deny that he did it.

I am sorry that John is sick.

You ought to iron the shirt before putting it on… (good advice, you must admit)…

Crawl like a cat… (?)…

What is the matter with you?

I didn’t have a chance to do it.

He set the house on fire.

I am going to fine you $10.00.

I sold it for twenty pesos.

You are mistaken.

I think that it is your fault.

However bad he is, he is honest.

I have a headache.

Do you believe in polygamy?… (Mr. Romney)…

Do you now have or have you ever had a venereal disease?

Have you ever been crazy or in an insane asylum?

Have you ever been convicted of a crime involving moral turpitude?

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The following selections are from the section where they transcribe interviews with people who are detained. I don’t know if these are real transcripts or made up ones, but that hardly seems to matter…

(Where the question and the answer work well together, I will put a Q before the question, and an A before the answer, just like in the book)

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Are you or have you ever been a member of a society that advocates the overthrow by force of the United States government?… (Let me think about that)…

Q. Do you know that it is a violation of the law to move without notifying the immigration office in Washington?

A. How am I to know those things? I cannot read and I seldom go to town.

Q. Why didn’t you want the officers to search your house?

A. Because I was afraid that they would find the five gallons of whiskey that I had smuggled into the United States the night before… (That seems awfully specific)…

If you had known that you were going to be arrested, would you have entered the United States illegally?… (Does that really require an answer?)…

When you saw the officers coming, why didn’t you hide behind a large tree?… (This is one of my personal favorites)…

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The rest of these are just plain handy to know if you work at the border patrol, for obvious reasons…

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I am afraid that the smuggler has escaped.

I’ll give two pesos to the boy who shows me the smuggler’s house… (Two pesos, a whole days wage!)…

We have to be there before the smuggler arrives.

Hands up… (Followed by)…

Give me that pistol… (And in case that still isn’t enough)…

Relax your hand.

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Since we live about 50 minutes from the border, I keep this book around and pull it out at parties. It never hurts to learn a foreign language.

But I do sort of wonder what sort of vacation my parents had in Mexico all those years ago.