Dancing Dog's street, the widest in Pátzcuaro, has been besieged by a traveling carnival. My neighbors call it la feria, which translates as “the fair,” but to D.D., it's a typical carnival with a variety of rides and carnie games, and, of course, people, people, people. The rides are set up along one side of the street, creating a kind of midway. Vehicle traffic is constrained to a single lane, and D.D. has had to defend his turf in front of his garage door to keep from being permanently blocked in. On weekend evenings, the street is impassable with the throngs of locals and visitors from the outlying villages gawking at the bright lights, and eating street food and drinking ponche (a fruit based “punch”).
The roustabouts look, well, mean. D.D. can tell immediately they are not from around here. Today, in the late afternoon, as D.D. traversed the outer precincts of the Basilica immediately across from the long row of carnival rides, a dozen or so of these young toughs tumbled through the side gate in pursuit of another who was indistinguishable from the pursuers. A confrontation began to unfold, involving a rather large crescent wrench wielded as a weapon, and complete with angry words and threats, feints and retreats, and more pursuit. A tense time for the participants and bystanders alike. The weapon was not used, as it turns out, and D.D. later learned that the rogue being pursued had tried to steal monetary proceeds from one of the rides.
The feria doesn't get going until 6:00 p.m. when the twin 15,000-watt diesel generators mounted in a truck trailer are cranked up to power the rides. Electrical cables snake along the street behind the rides next to the sidewalk, and even through the trees for electricity pirated from the overhead lines of the Comisión Federal de Electricidad, the CFE, Mexico’s national power company. The noise from the generators, combined with the rhythmic squeals of the young people on the rides is...well, distracting. Fortunately, things begin to wind down by 10 p.m., and all is quiet an hour later.
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