Se habla Espanol — Corroon hosts a fun-filled 'fiesta'

Whatever else you think of Peter Corroon, you've got to give him points for being game.

The Salt Lake County mayor's mastery of Spanish is, well, not masterful. He's fairly competent, but he hesitates and stumbles and gives articles the wrong gender and has a long way to go in correct use of the subjunctive tense, but that doesn't stop him from plowing right in.

Corroon hosted a Hispanic open house at his office Wednesday afternoon, inviting one and all from Salt Lake's Latino community to come in and drink punch and eat cookies and chat with the mayor about whatever they wanted.

And they came.

Corroon's first open-door session last month, to which anyone was invited, was a fairly sedate affair — people sitting in chairs waiting to talk to him in his office, speaking little with each other. No offense, but the gringos just don't know how to have fun. The Hispanic version of the open house was a well-attended event with lots of laughter and loud conversation (in Spanish and English and mixtures of the two) and cookies and punch and people sticking around just to mingle.

"It wound up being more of a party than a one on one," Corroon said.

The mayor, instead of being cooped up in his inner office holding serious conferences with attendees, frequently was in the outer office making the rounds, often speaking Spanish but admittedly — since most of the attendees were bilingual — switching to English when the going got tough.

"I'm very proud that you are reaching out to the Latino community," Midvale community developer Mauricio Agramont told the mayor in Spanish.

Agramont himself understands and speaks English well, but during his long conversation with Corroon, he made a point of speaking only Spanish and listening patiently to Corroon push his way through the thicket of Spanish verbs and prepositional phrases and vocabulary.

"To have someone who speaks Spanish (as mayor) is very important," Agramont said.

(Lest anyone get the wrong idea, while Corroon's Spanish speaking isn't perfect, his understanding is excellent. He facilely comprehended most of what people were saying to him.)