Sunday, May 16, 2004

Traders Village, TX


I usually wear my shirts for two days when I’m away, to cut down on washing (unless it’s been a particularly hot and sweaty day). So this morning, after my shower, I put on yesterday’s shirt, and it still stank of rodeo. It went straight into dirty laundry. Incidentally, you can find out all about the Mesquite Rodeo at www.mesquiterodeo.com.

Mesquite Rodeo
Tim asked me this morning if it was all for real, or staged (like the wrestling). Looked pretty real to me. Certainly quite a few of the riders finished up hobbling off, and the bulls and broncos look pretty mean – I don’t think you can train them to fake it. One of the sections was simply called “Jack Daniels Cowboy Poker” – I had no idea what to expect. They put a table and four chairs in the middle of the arena. Four cowboys sat in the chairs, and the rules are simply that the last one to leave his chair is the winner. Sounds easy enough, until they let a very large, and very mean, bull into the arena. The bull was not at all amused, and was definitely in attack mode. Its horns were “rounded off”, so that it could do no permanent damage, but it had no problem tossing the cowboys, complete with furniture, into the air. So, yes, I think it’s real. But, if I were to go again, and I would, it would be outdoors, where the unmistakable smell has a chance to dissipate.

Today I thought I’d stay a little closer to the hotel, since I didn’t get back until after 11 last night. I went to “Traders Village” – a large local flea market. Most of the stuff was fairly uninteresting: cheap socks, t-shirts, knock-off perfumes, lots of eateries. But I found a bookstall (of course), and on the periphery were more of the kind of stalls that we associate with car-boot sales. I didn’t buy anything (well, ok … just one book – but it’s not for me!), but I did find a couple of interesting stalls.

Graffiti Artist
One was fairly makeshift, and featured a (presumably) reformed graffiti artist. A large crowd had gathered around to watch him layer spray paint onto a cardboard canvas, and then use a variety of tools, from carefully shaped pieces of cardboard to plastic knives to scrunched up pages from a glossy magazine to coax amazing textures from what looked initially like a plain-colored surface. The secret, I suppose, is in the layering of color and the etching technique.

The other stall was selling fresh fruit and vegetables – always interesting in different parts of the world, because you realize just how diverse (and often unknown) is the plethora of edible stuff. This one had cactus leaves, so, of course, I had to ask. They’re common in Mexico, where they’re called “nopalito”. You clean off the spiky bits, boil them as you would potatoes, and slice them thinly, after which you can incorporate them into salads, or rice, or whatever. They taste, apparently, a little like okra or green beans.

And this brings me to a final bit of social commentary, which you can ignore if you wish – it is, after all, personal opinion. We always hear so much about the black culture, both in the US and England, but if you look at the statistics (which are very different in the two countries), Hispanics slightly outnumber blacks in the US (and are gaining ground). Yet there is very much less “noise” from the Hispanic culture. At the market today (where most of the signs were either in Spanish only, or in Spanish and English), I sat under a shade tree, and “people-watched” for a while. The Hispanics are very family-oriented, despite the “gang-culture” that the media exploits. The people that I spoke to were friendly; the children, for the most part, obedient and outgoing. My personal feeling is that Hispanics (or Latinos, as they seem to prefer currently) may very well eventually dominate. And this may be no bad thing.

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