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Corner-Store Dreams and
the 2008 Financial Crisis
Peter Wogan
tudies
ve S in
ra
g
Pal
y
p olog
ry A nthro
Litera
Pal
g
ra
ve S in
tudies
Palgrave Studies in Literary Anthropology
Series Editors
Deborah Reed-Danahay
Department of Anthropology
The State University of New York at Buffalo
Buffalo, New York, USA
Helena Wulff
Department of Social Anthropology
Stockholm University
Stockholm, Sweden
This book series aims to publish explorations of new ethnographic objects
and emerging genres of writing at the intersection of literary and anthro-
pological studies. Books in this series will be grounded in ethnographic
perspectives and the broader cross-cultural lens that anthropology brings
to the study of reading and writing. The series will explore the ethnogra-
phy of fiction, ethnographic fiction, narrative ethnography, creative non-
fiction, memoir, auto ethnography, and the connections between travel
literature and ethnographic writing.
Corner-Store Dreams
and the 2008
Financial Crisis
A True Story about Risk, Entrepreneurship,
Immigration, and Latino-Anglo Friendship
Peter Wogan
Willamette University
Salem, Oregon, USA
vii
viii Editors’ Preface
to foster writing skills in different genres, there are now courses on ethno-
graphic writing, anthropological writing genres, experimental writing, and
even creative writing taught by anthropologists. And increasingly, literary
and reading communities are attracting anthropological attention, includ-
ing an engagement with issues of how to reach a wider audience.
Palgrave Studies in Literary Anthropology publishes scholarship on
the ethnography of fiction and other writing genres, the connections
between travel literature and ethnographic writing, and internet writing.
It also publishes creative work such as ethnographic fiction, narrative eth-
nography, creative non-fiction, memoir, and autoethnography. Books in
the series include monographs and edited collections, as well as shorter
works that appear as Palgrave Pivots. This series aims to reach a broad
audience among scholars, students and a general readership.
Advisory Board
Ruth Behar, University of Michigan
Don Brenneis, University of California, Santa Cruz
Regina Bendix, University of Göttingen
Mary Gallagher, University College Dublin
Kirin Narayan, Australian National University
Nigel Rapport, University of St Andrews
Ato Quayson, University of Toronto
Julia Watson, Ohio State University
A True Story
ix
Contents
2 Invitation 5
3 Teaming Up 9
5 Car Crash 25
6 Trip to Mexico 31
9 A Moon Shot 65
10 Visit to Campus 75
xi
xii Contents
12 Mysteries of Money 99
13 Garbage Dream 109
14 Crash Warning 125
15 Stopping Time 137
17 Plan B 157
19 Financial Crisis 171
20 Wrecking Ball 179
Acknowledgments207
Bibliography217
Index225
CHAPTER 1
If the senior citizens at the Dairy Queen in Salem, Oregon, had walked
across the street, they would have found a small corner store with a hand-
painted sign in Spanish that read El Palmar. The door below that sign
offered a portal into another world.
I didn’t want to presume that anyone at the corner store would speak
Spanish with me, a middle-aged Anglo, so when I walked through the door
one morning in September, 2005, I spoke in a combination of English and
Spanish, explaining that I was returning a film I’d rented the day before.
It was a comedy about a poor guy who sells tacos on the streets in Mexico
and gets snubbed by a high-class woman—apparently a classic, but, like a
ten-year-old who just watched his first Shakespeare play, I didn’t get most
of the jokes or why everyone kept breaking out in song.
The man behind the cash register, wearing a baseball cap, long-sleeved
shirt, and jeans, immediately responded in Spanish. “Ah, so did you like
the movie? It was great, wasn’t it?” Unlike other Latinos I’d met in town,
he spoke with informal Spanish, the tú form used among equals.
We discussed the movie for so long that I had to step aside to make
room for other customers, women buying soap for the laundromat next
door and candy for their little kids. While the man rang up his custom-
ers, I walked up and down the aisles and marveled at my surroundings.
The store was about the size of a large living room, and every inch was
crammed with merchandise: tortillas, guava and mango juice, candles
with pictures of saints, leather boots, Budweiser and Tecate beer, sew-
ing kits, rain jackets, Mexican cowboy movies, even a stone mortar and
pestle tucked in the corner. I had entered a Mexican sanctuary in suburban
America.
Back at the counter, the cashier introduced himself as Ranulfo, and,
after I told him my name was Peter, he said, “OK, I’ll call you Pete.”
“You’re one of the only Americanos who has ever rented a movie in
here,” he noted with a smile. I liked his directness. Other Latinos in town
had just tiptoed around my obvious outsider status.
Continuing in Spanish, I asked, “So are you the owner?”
“Yes, along with the man you met yesterday, my younger brother,
Pablo.1 Before this, we used to work in the fields, growing plants. Getting
this store was a giant step, the step of a dinosaur, you know what I mean?”
I chuckled in agreement, and Ranulfo continued, “This is a beautiful
country. This is a place where you can climb to the top of the mountain
and nobody tells you, ‘Hey, get down off that mountain.’”
I agreed again, resisting the urge to point out how many Americans
end up groveling in the dirt at the bottom of the mountain. It had been
so long since I’d heard someone express such pure love for the United
States that I wasn’t sure what to say, but luckily Ranulfo followed up with
a little joke.
Pointing to his belly, pressing against his untucked shirt, he said, “But
this is the worst thing that’s happened to me since I came to this country.”
Ranulfo laughed at himself, so I joined in, though hesitantly, afraid to
seem critical. He wasn’t exactly overweight, but he was one of the most
spherical people I’d ever met. An artist would have sketched his underly-
ing geometric form with a series of circles. Chubby cheeks, round face,
that little belly—all circles.
Turning the conversation back to me, he asked, “No work today?”
“Believe it or not,” I said, “this is my work.”
Pointing in the direction of downtown, about two miles away, I said,
“I’m a professor at the university, and I’m studying Mexican-American
culture.”
I couldn’t think of a simple way to explain that I used to do research
with a small indigenous group in Ecuador, but once my young sons dis-
covered baseball, I couldn’t bear to keep leaving them every summer
for the Andes.2 Baseball tapped us into something transcendental, and I
didn’t want to miss any of it. I was starting all over with a culture I hardly
knew anything about.
CUTTING THE CLOTH 3
Introductory Note
To prevent this endnotes section from ballooning out of control, I only
include essential sources directly related to the main text. Also, sometimes
I break with narrative chronology, citing sources that I had not read at the
time of the events described in the main text.
4 P. WOGAN
Notes
1. Pablo is legally the owner of the store.
2. Wogan (2004a).
3. Melville (1851), Chapter 36, “The Quarter-Deck.” To encourage
more reading of Moby-Dick, all my citations of it come from the
annotated first American edition, available in its entirety at http://
www.powermobydick.com/, a website with excellent margin anno-
tations by Margaret Guroff. To make it easier for readers who want
to use other editions, I cite by chapter number and title, rather than
page number. As noted in Chap. 4, “Saints of the Casino,” and
Appendix A, “Ranulfo’s Reactions to this Book,” Ranulfo agreed
with my comparison between him and Captain Ahab. In fact, he
read, commented on, and approved multiple drafts of every chapter
in this book. Throughout the text, I try to make it clear where his
voice leaves off and mine begins, and Appendix A adds further clari-
fication about the writing process and his reactions to this book.
4. If by this point you’re craving the type of introductory chapter
found in most non-narrative, social-science books, please know that
the theoretical justifications for this book emerge in the endnotes
for later chapters. My hope, though, is that eventually the analysis,
theoretical framework, ethnography, and narrative will become so
thoroughly intertwined in the text that it will be hard to separate
them.
CHAPTER 2
Invitation
September, 2005
The next morning back at the store, Ranulfo told me to come behind the
counter, so I could look at his movie database in the computer sitting a
few feet away from the main register. With those simple steps, my perspec-
tive changed completely. Suddenly I wasn’t just a passing customer or
gringo interloper. I was standing in the Inner Sanctum. Everything felt
better behind the counter, standing side by side with the owner and taking
in the entire store, from the tamarind snacks in front of the register to the
juice and beer coolers at the far end of the packed aisles.
Ranulfo’s spirits were also riding high. When I asked how business
was, he stretched out his arms and said, “Ah, it’s so good I feel like the
Incredible Hulk. Yesterday I said to my wife, ‘Look at me, I’m busting the
buttons right off my shirt.’”
“Really?” I asked, playing along. “And what did your wife say?”
“Oh,” he said with a sheepish smile, “she just said, ‘Sí, sí. You’re a
monster. A little monster.’”
We both laughed at the rapid rise and fall of his fantasy, but as the day
wore on and I observed Ranulfo more closely, I realized that the com-
parison made sense. Ranulfo had both the mild-mannered reserve of Dr.
Banner and the burning intensity of his alter ego, the Incredible Hulk.
Outwardly, Ranulfo was perfectly calm. He rested his hands lightly on the
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