Cinco de Mayo comes around and the taquerias on Garth Road put a banner out, and the grocery stores stack the avocados into a pyramid by the door, and somebody at a school does a lesson about a battle. The lesson is the honest part. The Fifth of May is not Mexican Independence Day; that is the sixteenth of September, and this town knows the difference, because the sixteenth is the one it actually turns out for, with about fifty-five hundred people on Texas Avenue for Grito Fest. Cinco de Mayo is the Battle of Puebla, 1862, when a Mexican army under Ignacio Zaragoza beat a larger and better-equipped French one that had no business being there. Zaragoza, as it happens, was born at Goliad, in what was then Mexican Texas, which makes the Fifth of May a little more local than the banner lets on. It is a bigger holiday north of the border than south of it. Here it is mostly an excuse, and excuses are fine. A town that works in shifts takes its parties where it can get them.
But the day is a door into something the town lives inside every other day of the year, and that is the sound of it.
About half the households in Baytown speak Spanish at home. That is the census, not a projection or anybody's talking point, and it is what you hear: at the H-E-B, at the ballfields, in the waiting room at the hospital on Garth Road, and at the plant gates at the end of a day shift, when a few hundred people are going one way and a few hundred are going the other and the parking lot sounds like both languages at once, plus a third one made of numbers and unit names that belongs to neither.
The plant does not care which one you speak. The plant speaks pressure and temperature and flow. A gauge reads the same in Spanish and English; a pipe is hot in both. Out on the units the language is mostly hand signals and radio, and on the radio it is short, because long sentences get people hurt. What a person says at the gate to the person taking the next shift is a different matter. That is where the town's real voice is: the joke about somebody's truck, the question about somebody's mother, the reminder to pick up the kid. Half of it in one language, half in the other, some of it in both in the same sentence, the way a family talks when it has been here long enough to stop noticing which word came from where.
That is not a problem to be solved. It is what a port sounds like. It is what a place sounds like when the work draws people, and the work here has been drawing people for a hundred years.
Listen at the ballfields on a Saturday and you will hear the same thing with a different rhythm. The coach calls the play in one language and the parents in the bleachers argue about it in the other, and the kid at the plate hears both and swings anyway. Listen in the waiting room at the hospital, where a daughter translates for her mother at the desk and then, ten minutes later, translates the other way for the nurse. Nobody in any of these rooms is performing anything. They are getting through the day with the words they have, which are more words than most towns have.
The Spanish was here first, in any case. Before Texas was a state or a republic it was a province of Spain and then a state of Mexico, and the names on the map are the proof. The bay is named for Bernardo de Gálvez, the Spanish governor of Louisiana, whose name a Spanish surveyor wrote on the chart in 1785. The battleground across the channel is San Jacinto, a saint's name given to a river long before the eighteen minutes that made Texas in 1836. The word "Texas" itself is usually traced to a Caddo word for friends, carried into Spanish first and English after. And the cry the town shouts on Texas Avenue in September, the Grito, is the one a parish priest named Hidalgo raised in the town of Dolores in 1810. It was a cry against Spain, shouted in Spanish, which tells you the language had already stopped belonging to the crown. A town that speaks Spanish at the plant gate is doing something older than the plant.
Then the oil came, and the refinery, and the work, and the work has never stopped drawing people, from Louisiana and from the ranch states of Mexico and from the cotton towns up the road that emptied out when the cotton went. The town's population has grown because there is something here to do. The people who came did what people do when they arrive somewhere for work: they kept their language at the kitchen table and learned the other one at the gate. Their children did the reverse. Their grandchildren are the ones who switch in the middle of a sentence without hearing the switch. How many came from where, and when, nobody has counted well enough to say; the census asks about language, not about the road that got you here.
Language is a technology. It is the first one. Before a person could refine anything, they had to be able to say "hot" to another person and have that person step back. Consider what that costs and what it buys. A shouted word is a pressure wave in the air, and the whole sound of it, measured as power, comes to about a thousandth of a watt. It could not warm a cup of coffee. But it moves a hundred and eighty pounds of person a step and a half backward, and it does it faster than a hand on a shoulder could. That is the best exchange rate any machine on the channel gets: almost nothing in, a body saved out. Everything the plants do is built on top of that trade. The procedures, the permits, the shift handover, the training manual, the safety meeting where a supervisor says the same thing in two languages because it matters that everybody heard it. What sits in the barrel is only the start of energy. The rest is what gets done with it, and nothing gets done by one person alone. Work, on a unit, is a group of people who understand each other well enough not to get killed, and the chemistry does not happen until the understanding does.
And the chemistry has its own language, which is the third one at the gate. Ethylene is etileno; propylene is propileno; the periodic table is the same table in Monterrey and in Baytown, and a chemical engineer trained in either place could walk into the other's control room and read the screens. This is the strangest and best thing about the science layer of the town: it is the one language that nobody here grew up speaking, and everybody who works inside the fence has had to learn, and it is the same everywhere on earth. Carbon has six protons in every country. Water boils at the same temperature on every coast at sea level, and a cracker furnace runs at something like eight hundred and fifty degrees whether the person reading the thermocouple learned her numbers in Baytown or in Tampico. When the town says it fuels the world, part of what it means is that the world already shares a vocabulary for what the town makes, and the town's people have had to learn that vocabulary on top of their own two.
The bay has watched all of it. It does not have a language, but it has a memory, and the memory is of a lot of different people arriving with a lot of different words for the same water. Karankawa, Spanish, French for a season on the coast, English, German through the port at Galveston, Vietnamese in the shrimp fleet, and Spanish again, always Spanish, the way a tide keeps coming back to the same line on the piling. The water did not mind. The water still does not mind.
So on the Fifth of May the town takes its excuse and eats well and plays music loud in a parking lot somewhere off Garth Road, and that is exactly right. It is not the big one. The big one is in September, when Texas Avenue fills and the cry that started Mexican independence gets shouted downtown, a few miles from the ground where Texas got its own. Two independence days a year, two languages at one gate, and a third one on the gauges. A visitor might find that complicated. From inside it is just Tuesday, and Tuesday is loud.
The day shift lets out toward evening in the warm months. The sun is going down behind the units and the light is coming off the bay in long flat sheets, orange and then gray. The trucks pull out slow because there are a lot of them. At the gate, somebody is telling somebody else about the game, and the sentence starts in one language and ends in the other, and both of them laugh, and neither of them noticed.