Dancing Dog

El perro bailarín—“the dancing dog”—is a fixture of Spanish proverbs and sayings where it serves as a dark metaphor for “doing whatever one needs to do to survive.”

Relatively benign examples include: Por dinero canta el ciego y baila el perro (“For money, the blind man sings and the dog dances”), and Con dinero baila el perro y sin dinero bailamos como perros (“With money, the dog dances, and without money, we dance like dogs”).

But there are other examples of a blacker sort, as a perro bailarín is thought of as the hapless victim of a cruel task master training the dog to dance, an “unnatural act” (for a dog), and is doing so by beating, starving or otherwise abusing the poor animal.

¡Te voy a poner una chinga de perro bailarín! (“I’ll give you a beating like a dancing dog!”), or Tengo hambre de perro bailarín (“I’m as hungry as a dancing dog”).

Here in Mexico, Con dinero, baila el perro is a common expression and is basically the equivalent of “Money talks.” In fact, this phrase has become a kind of accepted code used by bureaucrats and inspectors of all sorts to solicit bribes. The implication is that nothing will happen until the person with the power sees the color of your money.

This Dancing Dog is a perro vagabundo, an itinerant techno-nomad whose peripatetic wanderings over the years have taken him to many edges of this rock we find ourselves riding on like, well...fleas on a dog.

He has, with inexplicable good fortune, not had to dance too often to earn his daily bread, and prefers to imagine El Perro Bailarín as a dog wandering free, dancing whenever the mood overtakes him, simply for the joy of it...