Ariel

I've been thinking about laundry detergent. If you drive any of the streets of central Los Angeles you're bound to come across a Mexican or Central American market with a sign for Ariel, with its atomic symbol logo. The signs have nothing to do with the Shakespeare character or Jose Enrique Rodo's century-old essay of the same name. Ariel is a Mexican laundry detergent. Think about moving to China for a job, walking down the street from your new apartment to the corner market and finding Tide on the shelves next to local brands of laundry detergent. Wouldn't that bring back memories of mom doing your laundry, folding it, and stacking it on the corner of your bed? And the smell. Can you remember the smell of your clean clothes when you were growing up?

That's what Ariel, Roma, Foca and lots of other detergents are to hundreds of thousands of immigrants here. Not all of them buy their hometown detergents, of course. I walked into a laundromat near Figueroa and Slauson and found lots of liquid detergents with American names. Whether that's a sign of assimilation or practical home economics, I don't know. These homeland detergents are small vessels of culture. Take a look at the Roma bag. It's made in a suburb of Mexico City partly for American export and its packaging is translated into English. The only image on the bag is of a youthful, slender woman with trenzas, on a stool, hunched over a washboard scrubbing laundry. If you're from Jerez, Romita, or La Sauceda that's what your mother, aunts or sisters spent a lot of time doing. A hundred years ago if your hometown was Catanzaro, Lubeck, or Cork you could sure as hell also relate.

I still remember ads on Tijuana television 30 years ago that urged those hunched over señoras to use Ariel and turn their steel buckets into washing machines.

Ariel gave that bucket, according to the genius ad minds, and your washing machine if you could afford it, the "chaca-chaca" to clean all those clothes.

Maybe there's something to the Rodo connection. The Uruguayan writer was a man who, according to Wikipedia, "called for the youth of Latin America to reject materialism, to revert back to Greco-Roman habits of free thought and self enrichment, and to develop and concentrate on their culture." That culture's in every little bag that whitens and softens.