12/21/2025
🍹🌎 EL PASO BAR STORYTIME: HOW SPANISH, TEXAS, MEXICO & A FREE SHOT COLLIDED 🌎🍹
So I’m sitting at the bar at the Great American Steakhouse in El Paso 🥩🍺 and something immediately hits me:
👂 The whole bar is buzzing in Spanish.
Bartenders talking to staff.
Customers talking to each other.
Orders flying back and forth.
And I’m just sitting there like…
🧠 “Well damn, this is actually helping me learn Spanish.” 😂🇪🇸
I mention that out loud, and the guy next to me laughs. That’s how it starts.
I ask him, casually:
👉 “So… how many people in El Paso speak Spanish?”
He doesn’t even think about it.
💬 “About 75%.”
And that’s when the conversation really takes off 🚀
He tells me he was born in Juárez 🇲🇽, now has a home in El Paso 🇺🇸, and has traveled all over Europe ✈️🌍. Smart, successful, worldly. Just a good human story.
I tell him something I genuinely believe:
🔥 When people insult Mexico, they’re insulting Texas too.
🌮🎶🗣️ Texas culture is Mexican culture.
The food. The language. The music. The history.
You don’t get to erase one without erasing the other.
I tell him about flying into Miami 🌴✈️ once — I’m a white dude, and a white lady at the airport just starts talking to me in Spanish like it’s the most normal thing in the world 😂
And honestly?
❤️ I love that kind of place.
I love cultures that blend so naturally nobody stops to question it. That feels like the real America 🇺🇸✨
That’s why the anti-Mexico nonsense that sometimes shows up on the Texas Reporter page makes my eye twitch 😤
Disrespecting Mexico isn’t patriotism.
It’s ignorance — and it disrespects the culture that built huge parts of this state.
At this point, the bartender has been listening 🍸👀
She leans over and says:
💬 “I like what you’re saying.”
👉 Buys me a shot.
I don’t normally do shots 😅
But when El Paso culture offers one?
🥃 You don’t refuse.
Now I’ve got about 20 steps to walk back to my hotel 🚶♂️🏨, a warm buzz, and a reminder:
✨ The best conversations still happen the old-fashioned way —
at a bar, with strangers, across cultures,
no algorithm required. 🍻🌎