ry cooder

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seems to me that a trio man is, over all, an observer: 

a witness of the night and its inhabitants, with all its shadows and misplaced stories. 

it is in the night that the strangest wishes are accepted, the only time they are allowed to wander freely in the streets. the same avenues that on the morning will be walked by at a fast pace by respectable people in respectable businesses, are in the night washed out by a different population, out loud mourning, sitting on the pavement grasping a tequila bottle and shouting words of desperation, slurry claims or pleas or laughter. the excesses of the man, only allowed to be uncovered in the shelter of the concealing night.

But i am digressing.  

we encounter a clear distinction: a trio man is not a mariachi. the latter won't 'read the staff, know the ostinato, crescendo, obbligato'. there is an assumption of a higher class education in a daylight temporality, a learning of the complexities of the language of music.

he is a black cat. surfs the dangers of strangers, smokes the night away, a creature of this jungle, ry cooder.

(paréntesis: on what tuberculosis means to the Mexican population in LA. 

as he says: "the Anglo doctors believed all Mexicans were born physically and morally tubercular, it explained all their problems". 

As post colonialist theory -and, to some extent, also queer theory- explains, this puts the illness, in an ostracized space. 

It makes it adequate only for doctors to treat it, it is only in their power to handle it, it has to be imprisoned and isolated, and so are the sub-population that is more likely to have it. 

I can't help but see a resonance with the latter AIDS treatment in the 80s. By encompassing the illness under medical terminology only, it not only stigmatizes the sick, but also the potential sick: all mexicans, in this case. all latin american immigrants, by extension. It is on regards of the safety (of the health, but also of the safety) of the dominant white class -flagged as the majority of the population even though it may not have been so-) that this empowerment of medicine is taken as excuse for yet another means of immigrant population control.)

hay que darse cuenta

que todo es mentira, que nada es verdad

hay que vivir el momento feliz, 

hay que gozar lo que puedas gozar,

porque sacando la cuelna en total, 

(en fin….) la vida es un sueño, y los sueños, sueños son.