An Honorary Spanish Diva, I am

Howdy folks!


So, for the longest time, I have been talking (to my fellow Mexican acquaintances that is) about this one song that I remember from my childhood. A "norteña" that speaks of an illegal immigrant raising his family in the states only to live in fear and his children dissataching themselves from their roots. I talked about it because I remember the middle interlude being hilariously cheesy with some little beaner boy saying "I don't wanna go back to Mexico! No wey dad!". Me and my brother used to always laugh and say that to my parents.


So it turns out, the song is called "La Jaula De Oro" by Los Tigres Del Norte. Apart from the unintentional humour of the song, it is pretty much a figment of our Mexican-American history and a timeline of the times. And it's so funny how the times have changed. I vividly remember up until shit maybe 1993, it was still uncool for Mexican-Americans to embrace their roots. If you were educated you distanced yourself from anything ethnic and if you were ghetto, you had your own hoodrat existence and the Mexican culture was seen as being ironically "trash". Nowadays I think its much more common for people to take on Mexican peasant culture even if you were born in the States as it is now marketable to Latinos in the USA. Why is it? I think because like African-Americans, Latinos feel that it is their identity and do not want to be a common, culture-less American so embrace the ethnicity of their motherlands. Like I said a thousand times, at the time when I was called "brazer", I was never going to please anyone so I was going to be as beaner as I wanted to be and as Americanized as I wanted to..because I'm only a Mexican to the others and a gringo pocho to the Mexicans. So it is interesting the evolution.

Either way, I have to give a shoutout to a fellow Chicagoan who made a hilarious home video and uploaded it to Youtube. It's dated but very cute!

Enjoy!!




And of course..

SPANISH WORD FOOD FOR THOUGHT

Today's word is "ATAJAR (ott a HARR)"
And it means "to take a shortcut"

"por este rumbo se puede atajar al sitio"="You can shortcut this way to the place"