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YEAR SIX BEGINS |
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WITH US FROM YEAR TWO |
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CANTINFLAS, TIN TAN & FRANKENSTEIN
escape from a dusty town
By ELIAS CASTILLO
of TheColumnists.com
I grew up during the 1940s and 1950s in the border towns of Mexicali and Calexico. Both are hot, dusty cities on the California-Mexico border. Outside the city limits, beyond the farms and fields of both cities is an infernal, inhospitable, miserable desert.
I didn't like either town.
My step-grandfather published El Regional, a weekly newspaper in Mexicali. He was continually exposing corruption within the government and, in turn, the government was always seeking ways to shut down the newspaper. He survived two assassination attempts, spaced over a period of 20 years. In the end, he never recovered fully from the second attempt. He nearly died after two hired would-be killers slammed a typewriter on his head, pounded him with a claw hammer and left him for dead.
In 1943, for security reasons, we moved to Calexico on the U.S. side of the border.
The year before the attack on my step-grandfather,
we had spent the summer in Santa Barbara, renting a wonderful
apartment two blocks from the beach, where a boy didn't have
to worry about going barefoot in the sand and stepping on scorpions.
And, it was to that scenic California city, with its cool, ocean
breezes, that we finally moved after my step-grandfather retired,
still weakened by the assault.
I was 13. I didn't look back.
Once, when I was old enough to ride a bicycle, I decided to see the sights of Calexico. It took me all of 10 minutes. After I returned and had carefully put my bicycle away, I sat down on the back steps of our house and gloomily despaired of having to grow up in such a dismal place.
My only escapes from that hellish place were the movies and the library, with its wonderfully cool interior, scented with the aroma of hundreds of books.
I spent many summer afternoons sitting on a library oak chair, poring over Life, Popular Mechanics, Popular Science, Boys Life. I read all the "Oz" books, most of the "twin" adventure books, featuring twins who were continually embroiled in complex conflicts. ( Those I found boring.) Then I moved on to "Black Beauty," "Lassie," "Rin Tin Tin," "Guadalcanal Diary," " They Were Expendable," "30 Seconds over Tokyo," and eventually discovered the writing of Ernest Hemingway, John Steinbeck, William Saroyan, and other great authors.
My other escape was the movies. In Calexico, the Fox and the Azteca provided the visual nourishment needed to escape the dreariness of both cities. Mexicali had Cinema Curto, a wonderful new theater built by an equally wonderful family of Spaniards, who were close friends of my step-grandfather and grandmother.
I first saw a Cantinflas film there and howled with laughter at the great Mexican comic's twisted malapropisms and syntax, spewed as he sought to free himself from whatever conflict had entangled him. His character was a well-meaning Mexican bum who, usually through no fault of his own, suddenly found himself mired amongst crooks, corrupt government officials, arrogant wealthy elitists and even bullfighters.
Ranked next to him were Tin Tan y Su Carnal Marcelo. (Tin Tan and his Pal Marcelo.) Tin Tan's character was a Mexican worker who had just returned from Los Angeles, where he had picked up U.S. slang. He spoke in such a garbled mixture of Spanish and English that no one could understand what he was saying in either language and he would end up having to translate himself. Being fully bilingual, I understood exactly what he said, and what came forth from his mouth was hilarious.
Tin Tan's sidekick was a well bred, lovable, business gentleman who had shunned his wealth to see how the other side lived and would try to keep Tin Tan out of trouble.
Tin Tan's character dressed in an outlandish zoot suit with a ridiculously wide-brimmed hat that sported a large feather. Like Cantinflas, he was continually getting entangled in situations involving shady characters, the corrupt, the arrogant and the elitist. Both comics lampooned the worst of Mexico and got away with it.
The Curto also showed Luis Buñuel's surrealistic productions, including the gloomy "Los Olvidados," which exposed the grim life of Mexico City's street children. The theater also featured foreign films and it was there that I sat enthralled with "The Bicycle Thief," that wonderful Italian film set in postwar Italy that depicted the tragedy that befalls a small boy when he loses his father's bicycle.
That exposure led me to shun the Saturday matinees at the Fox and the Azteca. I was bored with Abbott and Costello's slapstick and silly bantering and also Roy Rogers, Lash La Rue, Gene Autry and Hopalong Cassidy. They were akin to the Mexican charro films. Both featured singing cowboys and vapid, banal plots.
Instead, I was drawn to "Black Narcissus," "The Hasty Heart," "The Four Feathers," "Drums," Mexico's "Papa Lebonar," "Treasure of the Sierra Madre," "The Snake Pit," "Twelve O'Clock High," "Johnny Belinda," "The Lost Weekend," "Fort Apache," any film about World War II--and any Frankenstein, Dracula or werewolf film.
In most towns, the kids had baseball. I had the movies.
©2000 by Elias Castillo. The photo
of Cantinflas in "Pepe" is courtesy of Columbia Pictures.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Elias Castillo followed
his step-grandfather's tradition and began his own distinguished
career in the newspaper business. He won 14 awards and earned
three Pulitzer Prize nominations during a 26-year career in daily
journalism that included stints with the Associated Press and
the San Jose Mercury News. He's now a San Francisco Bay Area
public relations consultant, specializing in American corporations
seeking entry to Mexico's markets and Mexican firms attempting
to enter the U.S. market. He's a regular contributor to the op-ed
page of the San Francisco Chronicle with his analyses of Mexican
economics and politics. Castillo has lectured on Mexico at the
San Francisco Commonwealth Club, San Jose State University and
Menlo College. He also has briefed California's Bureaus of Investigation
and Narcotics Enforcement on the impact of Mexican drug syndicates
on California.
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