A Global Breakfast

Sunday morning I took my brother, Eduardo, to work early in the morning. I am staying with him these couple of weeks. He is a chef at a country club here in West Palm Beach. He was preparing breakfast for some of the staff in the club house, and asked me to stay and have breakfast with them. Our breakfast in the “snack bar” in the club house at this very exclusive country club was a tableau of globalization and immigration. Around the table were the golf pro—originally from Pennsylvania—and his assistant—who moved to FL a year ago from Buffalo, NY—one of the waitresses—from Connecticut—and my brother and I both from Guatemala. Elsewhere in the building was a woman who the dish washer who helps with other aspects of the kitchen and shares custodial work with another woman, both of them from Haiti. Our breakfast was a great egg sandwich with fruit. My brother jokingly pointed out that the cantaloupe was from a small town in Guatemala near where my father grew up, the pineapple from Costa Rica, and the blue berries from Argentina. We weren’t sure where the eggs, bacon, bread, olive oil, and other parts of the sandwich may have come from… all this before any of the members—most of them from “up north” showed up to play on the manicured greens kept up by a crew of workers mostly from Guatemala…