NOTE: Wrote this column in January, 2007, right after Pizza Patrón in Dallas announced that it would accept Mexican pesos as payment for their food at their outlets. The marketing move worked. Photo from Getty Images.
A pizza chain’s marketing ploy seems to be bringing its spinners more than what they had in mind from some irate folks who sense that America is becoming too much like Mexico. On the other hand, there’s a good possibility that those that came up with the “Aceptamos Pesos” promotion at Pizza Patrón just struck a mother lode.
Or the mother of all fast food promotions.
Pizza Patrón – a Dallas-based chain of pizza parlors that caters to the tastes and budgets of Latinos and serves its adapted, ethnically correct culinary delight in locations close to what some of us call el barrio – recently announced that it would accept Mexican pesos as payment for its pizza.
Pesos? Here, in the heart of north Texas? Here, where the immigrant-bashing Farmers Branch city council passed a measure to deny rental housing to undocumented Latinos? In a corner of America that has shown its true anti-immigrant identity and where cops from several of its municipalities are acting as de facto border patrol officers?
Pesos?
Talk about upsetting the racist vestiges that still linger in many flag-draped corners of America, places that in the 21st Century are still the home to Minutemen-like masses that have nothing else to do but to wait for a moment like this.
So, as expected, the collateral backlash reared its ugly head.
“Quit catering to the damn illegal Mexicans,” read one e-mail sent to Pizza Patrón. “This is the United States of America, not the United States of Mexico,” said another.
Pesos? For pizza? Forget the Alamo. Pesos for pizza are the newest fighting words in this part of the world.
Ah, but the things we do in the name of doing business. And for Pizza Patrón what the spinners did to drive sales seems to have worked. During its first week, close to fifteen percent of pizzas ordered were paid with pesos at five company-owned stores in this area.
That’s how it is in America, by the way, where business is the business of this country. A nation of bottom lines and market shares.
A place, too, where the Spanish language bashers of two decades ago failed to gain consensus to name English as the official language. Why? Because businesses, hungry for the mighty dollar, even if it came from those who some uninformed Americans often call “illegal” or even “criminal,” joined the newest and in vogue marketing bandwagon and were by then already asking everyone who called them: “For Spanish press one, for English press two.”
Leave it to them – the corporate folks – and forget about hate-filled propositions like that ill-fated Prop 187, inspired by Latino bashers and hate mongers like former Golden State governor Pete Wilson.
Corporate America 1, Mexican haters 0.
So now that the Mexican style pizzas with jalapeños and nopalitos instead of anchovies and black olives are out of the box in some places across Mex-America, what should we tell the nuts attracted to the politically driven, hatred-filled movements bent on harassing Latinos?
Give up. The fight’s over. Just like the cliché that tells us to forget about fighting city hall, trying to diminish the value of the Latino masses – and their culture and language – is a losing battle. Corporate America will make your attacks moot.
It’s all about market numbers, baby. And about money.
Even if it is in pesos.