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Latino Mental Health

Obed Manuel remembers the best taco he ever had: the ones his parents sold, walking door-to-door in their Dallas neighborhood. With long drives, some sorrow, lots of joy and a little smoked meat, those memories shaped him into the father he is now.

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Host and producer: May Ortega Mixed by: Luis Antonio Perez Editors: Erin Jones, Andrew Villegas Project Manager: Rebekah Romberg Additional editorial support: Jo Erickson, Kibwe Cooper, Emily Williams Theme music by Pedro Lumbrano; additional music courtesy Universal Production Music Cover art: Mia Rincón Executive producers: Brad Turner, Kevin Dale

Thanks also to Hart van Denburg, Jodi Gersh, Clara Shelton, Matt Herz, Kim Nguyen, Brittany Werges and CPR's members and staff.

<a href="http://quienarewe.org/">QuienAreWe.org</a>

This episode contains profanity.

Obed Manuel: I would say I owe my life to the flour tortilla. When my parents came to the U.S., my dad was working in a shipping warehouse type thing. And my mom, who never – really has never been a stay-at-home parent, she just didn't really know what to do with herself. And then one day she was just like, “I need to start making some money.”&nbsp;

May Ortega: What is one of your earliest, significant memories? For Obed Manuel, it’s all about food.

Obed: This is the story she always tells. She made 20 tacos, like bean cheese and picadillo and egg tacos in flour tortillas. And she left with 20 tacos and she came back with $20 and she was like, okay, there's something here. So the next day she went out with more, and the next day she went out with more.&nbsp;

Obed: And then she would just walk up and down Jefferson, which is the main street of Oak Cliff to all of these pawn shops and even some restaurants. And she would just sell 'em, like “dollar taco, dollar taco, dollar taco.”

May: Oak Cliff is a neighborhood in Dallas, by the way. The best neighborhood, if you ask Obed. When baby Obed tried his mom’s dollar tacos for himself, that set the bar for truly delicious food.

Obed: So she would leave a bowl of picadillo. That would cool. She would take the flour tortillas that were leftover, heat up two of them for me, and then she would just make the taco with the cold picadillo. It was a perfect temperature type situation where nothing was too hot. And it was just right for me to bite it and eat it. And so that's the best I, that's still to date, I think that that's the best thing I've ever eaten.

May: Today, we’ll hear a story about food, family and fatherhood. From Colorado Public Radio, This is “¿Quién Are We?” exploring what it means to be Mexican, Cuban, brown, or however you identify, and diving into the beautiful things that make us who we are.

I'm May Ortega. Obed knows good food. No, he’s not a chef or a food critic. But man, does he love to smoke meat and talk tacos. And another thing he’s really big on: familia.&nbsp;

Obed: I always tell people I was very fortunate. I had a very good dad, just equally as a great mom, but I always felt like he and I had – we were both very quiet, I feel like. He was very, very reserved. He was a listener and I was too. My brother's like my mom. Very social, very, very outgoing. But my dad and I were both very reserved. We were definitely the more quiet ones. I like to listen and I like to – I assess, I think. And I think that's what my dad did. So my family is a very tight unit. It remains that way. It was four of us. It was my dad, my mom, my older brother, Carlos, and myself. My parents were immigrants from Mexico. We moved to the United States, all of us in 1996.&nbsp;

May: How old were you when you came here?

Obed: I was four. My brother was eight, my parents were – my dad was not even 40 yet, I don’t think. May: And Obed was not even five years old when he had his first taste of his mamá’s dollar tacos. And it seems a lot of other people around Dallas agreed with little Obed, because business was booming.

Obed: My dad was like, yeah, you're making way more money doing this than me working over there. So he quit, and then he started selling food as well. My dad didn't really cook. He was the driver. One did the cooking, the other one handled the delivering the going out and selling, finding new customers, new clients. And she handled the food and the business side of things. So he did the shopping. Just basically they were a two person team. My parents would wake up together at 3:30, 4 o'clock and they would just prepare food until 6:30, 6:45, and then we would bolt out the door, and these are hundreds of tacos, dozens of tortas, dozens and dozens of tamales. In the winter, they would sell hot chocolate, the Abuelita hot chocolate.

Obed: So it was like this van full of just all this food, ready to go to work sites around Dallas to sell food. And it's like, that doesn't come easy. He would put together the tortas. I would see my dad get home in the middle of the day, and he would pass out on the couch. And he would fall asleep for an hour and a half. My mom wouldn't bother him, but if he went over two hours, she'd be like, “José, José, ¡despiértate!” Because he had to go. He had to go to the store. Hey, we got to stock up for tomorrow.

May: Yeah, the grind doesn’t stop.

Obed: “¡Yo quisiera dormirme!” Like, I want to take a nap.

Obed: … Damn. It's profound. It's profound. It is like – soundest sleep that you could possibly get. I long for that day. Yeah [laughter].

May: Slinging tacos around the city was exhausting work, obviously. But even then, Obed’s dad had a second job, as a preacher. And this was a far bigger part of all their lives … even bigger than food.

Obed: The thing that defined us was that we were a church family. We were an example. We were the example for the other kids at church. My parents were the example for the other couples at church. That's just the role you take when you are a minister, when you're a preacher, when you’re leading a group of people like that. Most of my memories come from being in the car with my dad.

May: You're in the backseat or the passenger?

Obed: Both. Both. I remember him driving us places. I remember us driving out to small Texas towns early in the morning, late at night. Because my mom, she doesn't drive to this day. He would drive us there in the morning. He would be the one to preach and do all this stuff, which is very tiresome. And then he would drive us back. Then there was a few times when I went with him on trips by myself. And so I have a lot of memories of just being in the car with him. We could sit there in silence and we were just together, and it was great.&nbsp;

One time when I was, maybe I was 10. Churches would put together retreats for men and women separately. And so he signed up to go to one. I believe we were going to Sulfur Springs. Once you get to that area of east Texas or eastern-ish Texas, it starts to get very rural. And so the roads get smaller and they get smaller and they get smaller. And this was pre-GPS, not that my dad ever used GPS, but we were driving out, we're driving out, and we crossed the three hour mark. It’s 10 o'clock, and we do not know where we're going. So we're lost. My dad just pulls over and pulls out the map and he's like, “I don't know where we are, man.”

May: And just 10-year-old you looking up at him like, “Same.”

Obed: Yeah. [Laughter] And I was like okay that’s fine, man. We’re just here. And I was like, I really have to pee. So he was like, “me too.” So just this van that they also used for work, it just pulled over the side of the road. He's at the front of the car and I'm in the back and we're just peeing on the side of the road in unison. And we got back in the car and he was like, “let's go home.” And so we drove back to Dallas and we got to our little apartment around maybe two or three in the morning, and we were like, go to sleep. And here's the reason why that story sticks to me is because we didn't know where we were when we pulled over to the side of the road to pee. We got back home somehow. I do – I do not know. I don't know if it was like old man stubbornness or what, but he got us back home.

May: The dad GPS can always take you home.&nbsp;

Obed: Took a left over here, yeah yeah.&nbsp;

May: This is one of Obed’s favorite memories with his father. It was just the two of them, sitting in comfortable silence for hours, and finding levity in a less-than-ideal situation. Jose Manuel was always there for his family, be it bringing in money, or supporting them however he could. Even when strangers needed a helping hand, he’d rise to the occasion.

Obed: It was a hurricane that hit Houston in the early two thousands. One day we were driving around our neighborhood and we drove around a park and we saw this parking lot full of vans and trucks that were jammed full of people and blankets and all this stuff. He pulled in and it turned out it was all these people who had evacuated from Houston, the surrounding areas. And without hesitation, he was like, hold on, y'all stay here. The church that we were members of at that time was maybe a mile away from where these people were. So he called the church leaders. He was like, “Hey, we have to open the building because there's like 20 people out here.” He drove them to the church. He had them go into the parking lot. They went into the church and within three or four hours, my dad had called several of the members and some of them who owned small businesses and stuff. They had brought food, they brought blankets, they brought mattresses, some of them for the kids at least to sleep on. But for these people it was better. It was about to start raining.

Obed: The storm system was –&nbsp; the weakening storm was about to move over Dallas too. So he basically let these people in and just took care of them. The church organized a little food thing for them, and my parents spent a lot of time there until pretty much until all those people left.

So that was Obed’s childhood: Church, school, the best taco you’ve ever had. As Obed got older, he became less religious. By the time he was in college, he stopped going to church altogether because he had work and school. And his faith was evolving in a way that pulled him from the teachings he grew up with. During college, he met his future wife, April. And once he got his journalism degree, he hopped around a couple of news jobs, until he became a reporter at the very newspaper he grew up reading: the Dallas Morning News.

Obed: There was a point where&nbsp; everybody became COVID reporters in 2020.

Obed: My job was to cover the Latino, Latinx Hispanic community in Dallas. I was very well aware. I was hearing everything. The immigration rights groups who dealt with DACA renewals and all this other citizenship workshops, they became de facto COVID organizations. They were helping people find food. They were helping people find tests. That's how it was.

May: When COViD hit, it affected just about everybody’s life. How could Obed have known that his family would be changed forever? That’s after the break.&nbsp;

When the pandemic began in 2020, Obed Manuel’s job as a reporter made him intimately aware of how the virus was affecting his community.&nbsp;

Obed: And I remember looking at the numbers and this is a stat that will never escape me. Dallas is about 40% Hispanic. 60% of the COVID cases in that spring were Hispanic people. So we were overrepresented by 20% of our population. So that told you who was out there working. That told you who was out there sacrificing themselves, and many of those people did not come home.

May: And that pissed him off. It made Obed so angry … to see his people essentially gambling their lives to keep things running for everybody else. Not everyone had the option to stay home. But Obed’s parents did. They locked themselves in their house for months. While Obed was incredibly frustrated with the state of the world, he was also thankful that his loved ones were safe, and healthy. Obed dealt with all these emotions partly with the help of some coals and a grill. He began to channel his spare time and everything he was feeling into smoking meats, like brisket. This was a new hobby for him. And it sort of developed out of nowhere.

Obed: My dad would grill a lot of meat. He never smoked meat. He actually didn't really like smoked meats. May:

So a lot of carne asadas on the grill. Obed: … He’d do carne asadas, fajitas chicken, but he wasn't a big meat smoking guy. He was like a grill-it-fast-and-then-serve-it. I do all the grilling things. I had always wanted to live in a place – in an apartment or a townhome or whatever where we could potentially have a grill.

Obed: It feels like a growing up moment. So we moved into a little town home. The back part of the house had this little concrete patio. So I was like, I'm going to get a grill. So I got a grill, and then I just started. The first time I grilled, I dropped the whole burger right into the coals, and I was like gosh. It fell through the grates. And I was like, damnit. But it feels like that's the kind of shit that has to happen when you’re …

Obed: Yeah. So you have to be more careful when you're doing stuff. But as his hobby was heating up, his work was, too. And soon, Obed realized his job reporting on immigration, poverty, and COVID was taking a real toll on his mental health. Come August 2020, he knew he needed to quit.

Obed: My head had exploded at that point. I had covered 2020 protests and all that stuff. I was done. I was burnt. I was cut to the bone.&nbsp;

Obed: So I called them and it was a very tense moment for me. I had to tell my Mexican parents, I was like, “Hey, I'm going to stop working and my wife is going to support me.”

May: Oh no. A Mexican parents’ nightmare.&nbsp;

Obed: So I called them and I was like, I made this food and I need to tell you guys something.

Obed spent hours smoking some pork. He used every skill he had. He really pulled out all the stops for his parents. It was going to be the first time they had his smoked meat! And hopefully, they’d focus more on that, than on his news that he was quitting his job.&nbsp;

May: So they came over and you told them?&nbsp;

Obed: They came over, I served them the pork butt, and then they were … I told them, and I don't think they were happy about it. But ultimately they were like, again, they were religious. They were like, but you should pray about this and you should think about this and we're going to do the same. And so it was like a rip-off-the bandaid moment. I was not physically well. I was not emotionally, mentally well enough to keep doing it.

May: They didn’t comment on the food. The news of their son’s plan to become unemployed kind of eclipsed the rest. Around this same time, Obed’s parents said they were going to resume selling their tacos around the city. From the moment they announced their plan, Obed had a bad feeling about it. And it was for good reason.

Obed: People that my parents sold food to were the people who were considered essential, like trade work, other Mexican people in Dallas for the most part. But there was a while for a bit there that everything was shut down. So unless they were city crews or cops or hospital workers. Frontline workers. My parents stayed home. They did stay home.

And did they want to or were they like, ugh we gotta work, we have to do something?

Obed: I mean, they were frustrated because they weren't making any money. April and I made enough money that we could send them a thousand bucks each month. And my brother was also sending them. So it's like, between that they could cover their mortgage and all the other bills, and we were supporting them that way. And they stayed home for a few months. They definitely did. Then in May is when I think Greg Abbott reopened Texas.

A few weeks after that is when my dad was like, we got to push. We got to go back to work too. And I kept telling him, no, just stay home. Since we read the symptoms and most at risk and that kind of thing, we were mostly worried about my mom because my mom has a heart condition.

Obed: She has diabetes. I believe she has some kind of slight respiratory thing that might be tied into that. So we were terrified that she would be the one to get sick. As the year wore on, my parents decided that it was time to go back to work.

Obed: 2020. Yeah. I thought maybe it would be okay because he mostly interacted with people outside and a lot of people then people were pretty aggressively masking still. So you would think that I was like, okay, fine. Maybe he'll be okay. And it went on and on and on. They went back to work until November of 2020. So they were at it for a while.

His parents resumed selling their goods that fall of 2020. Obed decided to begin job hunting around that same time. For a couple of months, things were going well for the family.&nbsp;

Obed: And then early in November, my dad called me. And the first thing he said was [voice breaking, speaking emotionally], he said, “I don't want you to worry.” He said, “no quiero que te preocupes.” I don't want you to worry. He said, we just got back from the doctor and we did a test and we're both sick. They were sick for about a week. Then that next week, the second full week of November is when my mom started telling me, it's like, “Hey, your dad's really sick. He's coughing a lot.” He's doing this, he's doing that.

My mom called me a little bit after the middle of the night and she was like, you have to come get your dad and you have to take him. She said that he had gone to the bathroom and he came back. He sat, and that he just fell back because he didn't have the energy. He didn't have the oxygen in his system to stay upright. My mom would send me photos of him and he didn't smile a lot, but he was trying to force a smile.

We drove him to the hospital. They checked him out there at the entrance. They saw the state that he was in. They were like, sir, sit. And they immediately put oxygen on him. He didn't leave.&nbsp; He didn't walk out. He wasn't able to ever again.&nbsp;

As they were wheeling him away, I was like, I don't know what told me that this was it [crying]. And I said, “pa te quiero mucho.” Because I thought, if this is the last time I'm going to see you like this [shaking breaths, crying], that's going to be the last thing I say to you. And then they opened the door, they took him in and that was it. That was the last time I saw him conscious in person.

It was cold outside, and I felt colder than it had ever felt. That is burned into my memory. I try not to be angry, and I try not to be really sad about this because I always try to remind myself that I was very fortunate that I had him. And I think about us, and I think about the pain that we felt for the next three months, and I think about how many more people had to do the same thing. I think about that because I think that that's the kind of person that my dad was. He would think about everyone else. And so we had an opportunity in this pandemic to like, all of us, to care about each other. And we didn't.

Jose Manuel was in the hospital for three months before he died in February 2021. While his father was in the hospital, Obed had a few job interviews. And one of them was with Colorado Public Radio. Just a few days before his dad passed, he got an offer. So while he was still reeling from this tremendous loss, he and his wife moved to Denver.

Obed: Obviously as painful as it was, for lack of a better term, that weight wasn't there anymore. There was a little bit of a release where I was like, fuck, this is the worst thing that's ever happened to us as a family, as a collective unit. And to me personally. But ultimately I just kind of need to get back to work. I think that they both wanted me to resume my career at some point. So I definitely felt that backing even from the beyond, so to speak. So we moved here. We had already kind of made up our minds that we were going to start a family. April, we believe, got pregnant around May of 2021.

May: I'm sure a lot of things ran through your mind. One, you guys are going to have a child, and two, it's going to be a son. What came into your mind at that moment when you knew the sex of the child?

Obed: It was one of those things where I just kind of knew we're going to have a son. We're going to have a son, and he's going to have – be a namesake for my dad. I just kind of knew that. We had decided a few months before that his middle name was going to be Jose. So his name is Lucas Jose Manuel. And he does carry my last name. That was something that April and I discussed, and she said, I think it means a lot for you to keep your family name going. I was like, it does. It does mean a lot to me.

Obed: Lucas is the first person in my family who is a U.S. citizen and does not have to worry about being undocumented because that is how I grew up. I was undocumented …

Obed: … And in Texas. So there's a lot of things that are wrapped up with him that just like: you've made it. From the village in La Huasteca, where they don't even speak Spanish, that my father is from, you are here and we're here.

I just feel this strong desire just to make sure he's okay. And however that – it looks different. It's like he needs more water, he needs more milk. He's kind of upset and we're not sure why. And so it's a never-ending sometimes thing of finding what he needs. And I mean, if that's not love, I don't really know what is, just trying to make sure that somebody's okay until you can't. Because the day will come, like it came for my parents. He’ll be out of the house. It’s pretty much all we can do for him.

May: Now that Obed is learning how to be a father himself, the patience he inherited from his own dad has come in handy.

Obed: What I've learned from smoking and grilling and stuff is that it takes a lot of patience. There's knowing when the coals are ready, when the smoke is quote, unquote, clean. There's knowing when the coals are going to go out and when you need to move 'em around. I just think that it's a labor of practice. And so I just think anything that will teach him to do something right. I think that that's why I would want him to learn that. I hope he appreciates food the same way.

May: And speaking of his family appreciating food. Do you remember that pork butt Obed served his parents when he announced he was quitting his job?

Obed: My mom would tell me months later after he passed away, he really enjoyed that pork butt. He really liked it, and he didn't like smoked meat.

Obed: That was a nice thing that I take. Yeah.

May: And are there ever times that you wish you could talk to your dad about parenting? Some frustrations or some advice maybe that you're like, oh, I wish he was here to answer this. Or just to vent, right, to a dad because you are a dad.

Obed: Yeah. I always think that, like, yes. I mean 100% most of the time. I spent a lot of time thinking how he would be with him, because I saw him interact with so many babies at church. Every time a family at church had a baby, it was a big deal for them to bring him because my dad was a good person. My dad was a very kind, community-oriented person. And so he knew some kids from the time that they were born until they graduated from high school and they would be like they loved him. So he would've been a spectacular grandfather. I know that in my core. And that is because he was a spectacular father.

So I like to channel that as much as I can because I don't have him now. But in becoming a father, I feel like I'm getting to know him better because I understand that my feelings towards Lucas come from there. That's where they come from. I'm able to connect with him through Lucas because the fatherly love that I felt – like I have a place to put it. And in a way, it feels a lot like every time I pick him up, my dad's picking him up too. It's really funny. I was telling April this a few nights ago. This is very personal.

Obed: I've been staring at my thumbs a lot because as I've gotten a little bit older, not that old, I'm 31. But as I've gotten older over the past few years, my thumbs have started to get a little wider.

Obed: Wider. And my dad had these huge fucking thumbs. And so it's gotten more like that since Lucas came around. So now I look at my thumbs and my hands, my – everyday, my hands start to look, and they start to feel a lot like my dad's hands.

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¿Quién Are We? is a podcast from Colorado Public Radio exploring what it means to be Latino, Hispanic or Chicana ... or however you identify. Host and journalist May Ortega shares stories about our wide-ranging identities and the beautiful things that make us who we are.

¿Quién Are We?

Obed Manuel remembers the best taco he ever had: the ones his parents sold.

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