Texas, 1961. El Paso, the last week of April. A man named Ruben Saledo is being evicted from the small building on South El Paso Street, where he has run a translation and document service for immigrants processing papers at the border for 11 years. He owes $620 on the building. He served as a military translator in the Pacific and in Korea and has never applied for a veterans benefit in his life because nobody told him he was entitled to one.
His son is finishing his first year at the University of Texas. Reuben does not know how he is going to pay the second. Here is the story. Ruben Saledo was born in 1914 in El Paso, Texas, the son of a man who had crossed from Sodad Huarez in 1908 and found work at a smelter on the east side of town and stayed.
His mother was from El Paso herself, the daughter of a family that had been on the Texas side of the river since before the river was a border. Reuben grew up speaking Spanish at home and English at school and the border dialect that lives between the two, the language that has no name, but that everyone who grows up on the seam between two countries learns to navigate without thinking about it.
He was 28 years old when the army drafted him in 1942. The induction officer at Fort Bliss noticed the Spanish on his intake form and sent him to an interview with a major who needed interpreters and translators for the Pacific theater. The army needed men who could turn captured documents from Filipino collaborators into usable intelligence, who could question prisoners of mixed Spanish and indigenous background, who could make themselves understood in the particular chaos of an occupied archipelago where Spanish had been the colonial language for 300 years and the army had been there for 40. Ruben went to Lei and then to Luzon and then in the final months of the war to the occupation administration on Mindanao. He was good at the work. He was home by November of 1945. He was 31 years old and had spent 3 years turning other people’s words into information that other people used to make decisions whose consequences he sometimes saw and
sometimes did not. Nobody at Fort Bliss told him about the GI bill when he processed out. He had a piece of paper that said honorably discharged and a bus ticket back to El Paso and a handshake from a sergeant he had never met before that morning. He went back to El Paso and looked for work.
He found it the same way he had found everything in his life, by being useful to people who needed what he had and showing up on time and not overcharging for it. He helped a family from Huarez fill out immigration papers in 1946. Then another family. Then a man who needed a lease translated. Then a woman who needed a letter from her landlord explained.
By 1949, he was doing it full-time. And by 1950, he had taken a short-term lease on a small building on South El Paso Street, a single room with a desk and two chairs and a shelf of reference books, and put a handlettered sign in the window. Cervvic Dradukion translation services Notary public. He served as a reserve translator for the army again during Korea attached to an administrative unit in Japan for 14 months in 1951 and 1952 processing prisoner correspondents and captured documents. He came home in 1952 and went back to the desk on South El Paso Street and the families who needed forms explained. He charged what people could pay. On the days when the family in the chair across from him had nothing, he charged nothing. This happened more often than the arithmetic could sustain. Which was why in the spring of 1961, after 11 years of paying the building’s
lease in full, some months and short other months, and making it up the month after, the building’s owner had lost patience and filed for eviction. The notice gave 30 days. The amount owed was $620 accumulated over the previous eight months in partial payments and one month of nothing at all when the wife of a man from Chihuahua had sat across from Reuben’s desk for 3 hours while he helped her draft a letter to the immigration court and he could not bring himself to ask her for money at the end of it. His son Marco was 19 years old and finishing his first year in the civil engineering program at the University of Texas at El Paso on a partial academic scholarship. The scholarship covered tuition. Reuben paid the housing from the translation service. He had not told Marco about the eviction because Marco had a final examination in structural analysis on Thursday. And Ruben had decided the boy should go into that exam without the weight of it on him. He would tell him
after Thursday. He was at the El Paso Customs and Border Protection field office on a Tuesday afternoon in late April waiting to speak with an officer about a document discrepancy in a client’s import permit when John Wayne came in and sat down in the chair beside him. Wayne was 54 years old.
He was in El Paso for a meeting with the customs office about the importation of film equipment from a production partner in Mexico. He had a folder of permits and invoices and a name he had been told to ask for. And the officer he had been told to ask for was unavailable, and the officer’s assistant had told him to wait.
He sat down in the plastic chair beside the man with the stack of papers on his knee and put his own folder on his knee and settled in. He looked at the stack of papers on the man’s knee, not deliberately, the way a man in a waiting room looks at the objects in his peripheral vision.
He noticed the letter head on the top sheet. He noticed the word eviction. He looked at the man’s face. 47 years old, dark-haired, going gray at the temples. The particular stillness of a man who has been sitting with a problem long enough that the problem has become familiar. He was looking at the papers in a way that suggested he had read them many times and was not learning anything new from reading them again.
Wayne asked if he was all right. Ruben looked at him. He placed the face. He said he was fine. He said it the way a man says he is fine when he is not fine and does not intend to discuss it. Wayne looked at the waiting room. It was a small room with plastic chairs along two walls and a counter at the far end with a frosted glass window.
A ceiling fan turned overhead without making the room noticeably cooler. A clock on the wall read 20 3. He said, “I have been in this chair for 40 minutes and I expect to be here another 20.” He said, “You do not have to tell me anything, but if you want to talk, I have the time.” Ruben looked at the papers.
He said, “It is a building.” He said he owed $620 on a lease and did not have it. And the owner wanted him out. He said it the way a man states a problem he has already accepted the answer to. Wayne asked what he did in the building. Ruben told him. He told him about the families from Huarez, the immigration forms, the lease agreements, the medical releases, the letters to landlords and employers and courts.
He said there were families who had been in El Paso for 3 or 4 years and had signed documents they did not fully understand and agreed to terms they could not read and lost wages because a form had been filled out wrong. He said this was a condition that had consequences for the families and for the city and that he had been trying in one small room on one street to address it. Wayne listened.
He asked how much he charged. Ruben said it depended on what the family had. He said some people paid $5 and some people paid one and some people paid nothing and that this was partly why he owed $620. Wayne was quiet for a moment. Then he asked whether Ruben had served. Reuben said yes. He said the Pacific 1942 to 1945.
He said Korea administrative work in Japan 1951 and 1952. He said he had been a translator both times, documents and prisoners and correspondence and that the army had needed him and used him and he had done the work. Wayne asked if he had applied for benefits under the GI Bill. Ruben said no. He said nobody had told him he was entitled to anything when he processed out and he had not thought to ask.
He said this without bitterness. He said it the way a man states an administrative fact. Wayne looked at the ceiling fan. He said the GI bill is still accessible to veterans who did not claim it at discharge. He said there were also ongoing VA benefits Ruben would be entitled to as a two service veteran.
He said he knew a veteran services officer at Fort Bliss who could walk him through the applications in an afternoon. He said he would call him that evening. Reuben looked at him. He said, “I appreciate that.” He said, “It does not solve the $620 before Thursday.” Wayne opened the folder on his knee.
He took out the long brown leather wallet from his jacket. He counted $620 onto the plastic chair arm between them. He counted it in the open the way he always counted it. Ruben looked at the money. He said, “I will not accept that.” Wayne said, “You spent 3 years in the Pacific and 14 months in Japan doing work that required a skill the army needed and could not replace.
” He paused. “The country has owed you a debt since 1945. This is a partial payment on it.” Ruben looked at the money. He said, “You do not owe me anything.” Wayne said, “No, but the country does, and I am part of the country.” He said, “Take the money, keep the building open, and call the Fort Bliss office when I leave you the number.
The GI Bill and the VA benefits will do the rest.” Where are you watching from? Drop your state in the comments. I want to see how far this story reaches. Reuben picked up the bills. He held them. He said, “My son is at UT studying engineering.” He said it the way a man says the thing he is most proud of in his life. Wayne said, “Good.
” He said, “Engineers build bridges. There’s not a city on this border that does not need more bridges.” The customs officer’s assistant came out and called Wayne’s name. Wayne picked up his folder. He took a card from his wallet and wrote a name and number on the back of it and gave it to Ruben. Fort Bliss Veteran Services, he said.
Ask for Corporal Dietrich. Tell him I called. He stood and put his hat on and went to the counter. Ruben sat in the plastic chair for a while after Wayne went in. The ceiling fan turned. The clock read 20 to 4. He looked at the bills in his hand and then at the card and then at the window where the afternoon light was coming through at a flat angle over the El Paso rooftops and the mountains visible to the north across the river.
He paid the $620 to the building’s owner. The following morning, he received a written receipt in a new lease agreement for one year at a fixed monthly rate. He put both in the lock box in the bottom drawer of his desk alongside his discharge papers from 1945 and the reserve discharge from 1952. He called the Fort Bliss number that afternoon. Corporal Dietrich answered.
Ruben went to Fort Bliss on a Thursday and spent three hours with Dietrich filling out the GI bill application and the VA benefits paperwork. The forms required his discharge papers, his service record, and his social security number. He had all three. Dietrich told him the GI Bill retroactive education benefit would not apply since his son was already enrolled, but the monthly VA disability and service compensation benefit, which Reuben qualified for as a veteran of two theaters of operation, would begin within 60 days. The first check arrived in the third week of June. It was enough to cover Marco’s housing for the semester and leave a margin for the months when the translation service ran short. Ruben did not cash the first check immediately. He held it for a day, sitting at his desk in the building on South El Paso Street, with the check on the blotter in front of him and the family’s ledger in the bottom drawer and the afternoon light coming through the window.
He had been in El Paso his whole life and had been useful to his country twice and had not known for 16 years that the country had anything for him in return. Marco Saledo graduated from the University of Texas at El Paso in June of 1964 with a degree in civil engineering.
He went to work for the El Paso City Engineers Office and spent 30 years designing and overseeing infrastructure projects along the border. He worked on four international bridge expansion projects across the Rio Grand between 1971 and 1998. He retired in 2001. Grub Ben ran the translation service on South El Paso Street until 1979.
He was 65 years old when he closed the door for the last time. He counted the families he had helped the same way Dicks Carver had counted the Cowboys in a ledger he kept in the bottom drawer beside the discharge papers. The final count, when Marco tallied it after Reuben died in 1984, was over 900 families.
Marco donated four items to the El Paso Museum of History on Mills Avenue in 1986. Ruben’s discharge papers from 1945. The first VA benefit check unccashed mounted in a frame. The lease receipt from April 1961, $620 paid in full. And the ledger with the count of families, the last entry dated October 1979.
The final number written in the same careful hand as the first. The display is in the border history gallery on the second floor. The placard reads Ruben Aurelio Saledo 1914 to 1984. Military translator Pacific theater 1942 to 1945 Korea 1951 to 1952. Translation and document services, El Paso, 1950 to 1979. He spent three years explaining the war to the army.
He spent 30 years explaining the country to the people who needed to live in it. These items were donated by his son, Marco, who builds bridges. If this story reached you, pass it on. Share it with a veteran in your life. Hit that subscribe button if you haven’t already. There are more stories coming and unfortunately they don’t make men like John Wayne anymore.
