Additional Notes on the Subject of La Perrada

I ask my cousin Karen about this expression, la perrada. I want to know how much it’s used by people, if it’s considered offensive. Its meaning: People – Gente – The Masses – The Herd – Common Folks – The Rabble – and more literally -- Dogs.

Despite it's being potentially offensive, i latch onto the word. The movie Amores Perros comes to mind, the opening dog-fight amidst an expanding urban existence. We get what we can take, even if its the scraps.

Guadalajara has been expanding dramatically in the last 30 years. The city where my father met my father, once the city of roses, is now over-crowded with people from the country. How many of these recent arrivals contemplated heading al norte, and how many have relatives in Los Angeles, or Idaho, or Virginia? My cousin Tako talks about the city's over-crowding as we pass through a neighborhood that's cropped up in the past 10 years. "Aqui es pura perrada." Families walk the streets, take their dinners at taco stands. Women sit outside their doors. The houses are close together, many of them joined.

I can't process this herd of people sometimes, the urban organization of people into struggling consumers. I'm greatful to be at the heights of Tonalá.

!Estoy en la Chamba!

We're driving through the streets of Guadalajara, Mexico with my cousin Taquin. Men and women approach the car selling fruit, water, candy. Ricardo takes a picture of a man selling large calculators. Later, also with Taquin, we get a card with a girl on it wearing a bathing suit, a phone number. We turn our heads to a performer walking on his hands. Check it out, Cardo says. Tako was tired and grouchy. “Pues asi lo hacen aca,” he says, “para el dinero.”

The slang for "hustle," we learn soon enough, is "chamba." It's not exactly a verb, though one can say, "estoy chambiando." I prefer using it as if it were an all-enveloping mode of existence--"estoy en la chamba" (literally: i'm in work).

Making money in Mexico seems more honest, somehow.

Mexicanos Unidos

Mexicans: tall, short, lanky, bearded, dark, blond, squat, skinny, wavy, pudgy, fit. How many times have i gotten the "you're Mexican?" Mostly it comes from people who have a notion of what Mexicans look like from the Mexicans they encounter--in New York, they're from Puebla, so they have a certain set of characteristics they've maintained from their indigenous ancestors. Yet the Homies, a Northern California pop-cultural creation based on Mexican stereotypes (or should i say archetypes?) , look generally pretty different than the people of Puebla.

Class divisions are strong in Mexico. In the US we have the luxury of forgetting this, realizing it's a much more powerful tool to unite with all Mexicanos--and Central and Latin Americans, and the oppressed black populations, and the Hmong people of Northern California, and hell, why not even some disenfranchised white folks while we're at it? But in Mexico, it's back to that old racist shit: the lighter one is, the more likely it is you're simply not living in poverty. Just look at the soap operas.

Dia de la Revolucion, o la Perrada

Of all places to go on November 20th, I end up at Zapo-Poom, a "carnival" organized, seemingly, by a group of investors, corporations, or both. The whole experience is marked by the crisp white tents housing "exhibits," markets, restaurants, small dance venues: a showroom for new Dodge trucks, a room containing miniature models of Mexico's biggest tourist sites, a Chivas exhibit showcasing the new stadium still in the works, a "flea-market". A schedule of the nightly performers tells me i just missed Maria Daniela y su Sonido Laser the night before! It's Mexican culture enveloped, masked, by whiteness, and with the undeniable sense of making you want things. It's the whiteness of corporations: New!ness, Stability, Safety, Control.

When deciding where to eat, we have basically a couple of options--a row of tents down the carnival's main drag, featuring restaurants with outdoor seating, menus, waitstaff, etc, and a single large pavilion where you have a bunch of taco stands to order from. We choose the larger tent with various food stalls. “Vamonos aca, con la Perrada,” says my cousin Taquin.