By Juan Montoya
Call it Spanglish, bastardized English, or even South Texas patois, but the language spoken here is unique and particularly creative.
Sometimes it's funny. Other times it's downright crude. And sometimes it has nothing to do with the words spoken by other people. Consider, for example, when Ted Kennedy got into hot water (or was it cold) and a woman drowned in a creek.
Chappaquiddick. Remember? It is now being promoted as a new movie that will be featured in one of those cable channels.
In that one-car accident on Friday, July 18, 1969 Sen. Kennedy's reputation was forever tarnished and resulted in the death of his 28-year-old companion Mary Jo Kopechne. It was determined that Kennedy had been negligent and he pleaded guilty to a charge of leaving the scene of a crash causing personal injury. He later received a two-month suspended jail sentence.
Well, at about that time when the news was hitting the airwaves, we had a friend who was working at a Great Society social service agency in Mercedes who considered himself quite the galan. There wasn't a clerk or new employee at the agency who had not been targeted by the guy whose name was Marcos Chapa.
One day he invited a new hire for dinner and the girl – feeling somewhat obligated to Marcos for her job – accepted. After a nice dinner and drinks, Marcos drove out to one of the irrigation and flood control ditches by the levees in the area and after a while tried to put the make on her.
As the action got a bit too heavy for the girl, she stepped out of the car and yelled: "Chapa quit it. Chapa quit it."
And that's how Chappaquiddick came to be identified with the ditches in Mercedes.