so you wanna cockfight?

Julio and I wanted to use the Culture section for all kinds of posts and photoblogs about interesting things worldwide. I’ve been living in México for about a year and this is my first time writing on cause=time, enjoy
cheers

This year I went to the Internaciónal Fería de Caballo in Texcoco, México… a huge 25 day long party that gets something like 700,000 visitors. It’s a giant, mutant combination of amusement park, stock show, pop concert and dance club- with bars around every corner, huge groups of mariachi bands fighting it out, and two big arenas where you can watch a bullfight- or bet thousands of pesos on which cock will survive the next few seconds.

I took lots of photos.

To get to Texcoco from DF we had to go to Indios Verdes station, where you can get 5 tacos for 10 pesos while you check out a shrine to Santa Muerte. Saint Death has been getting some bad press recently cause of people saying she’s the patron saint of criminals and narcos, but this kind of icon has a long history in México, and anything that’s popular in Tepito has a lot of cred. The Catholic Church doesn’t recognize her as an offical saint, but  who are the Catholics to say anything bad about a “death cult”?

We got to the Feria after a couple of hours on the bus, and when we walked in first impression was that the place was tiny- just a few restaurants and bars, with the bullfight and cockfight arenas off to the left, and only a few hundred people walking around.

We started out right with a michelada gigante each; they do ’em proper in the estado de méxico, with chile pequin and salt around the rim, and 40oz of cerveza mixed in with a special blend of soy sauce, lime, and whatever else the cantinero thinks is appropriate.

Had to down our beers as fast as possible, we couldn’t bring them in the bullfight arena and we wanted to get our free shots of tequila before we went inside. Tough choice tho, which free sample girls do we go for?

Sitting in the sun, with a cigar, a beer, some snacks, two rows up from a bullfight is not a bad way to spend a few hours.  The crowd was enthusiastic- “¡olé!”, we figured out what made a good matador pretty quickly, and the band would play classic tunes whenever it got exciting. I think we saw 5 bull-kills in 3 or 4 hours, and most of them put up a good fight.

The guy next to us was an expert on the toreros, and got a real kick out of two white guys being there. He and his wife kept buying us beers, and he had fun answering our questions. The best part was he would yell “musica!” at the band to get them to play whenever they were being lazy and just watching the fight.

This first bull was the best, set an impossibly high bar for the others. Not only did he snatch the flag out of the matador’s hands, he gored a horse and scared the shit out of everybody in the arena. It took about 10 guys to distract him from taking the horse’s guts and crushing the picador riding it, and just as many to get it back on its feet while every matador in the place ran out to distract him.

If you clicked thru all those pics, you pretty much get the idea. The next 4 were about the same, depending on how good the matador was. We knew because the crowd would get disgusted if he missed that last sword stroke. It’s supposed to go all the way in, first try, but a lot of them bounced it off his back and had to try 2 or 3 more times. I think if he misses, the bull should get a free charge.

Our seats were right above where the bulls came charging out, so the first few seconds were the best.

That’s about enough bullfight I think, the arena emptied out fast after the last fight and we joined the crowd which had grown x10 since we’d arrived.

We hurried through the plaza with a dozen mariachi bands all playing at once, but didn’t feel much like dancing at this point.

Wandered through several food courts, but we couldn’t decide which gigantic hamburger place would be the best. Actually nothing really made us want to stop; we’d asked the taxi driver in Texcoco what we should try, and he told us to get barbacoa, sheep barbecue. We missed our chance at that though by staying at the bullfights too long, all the good restaurant places were closed up and there was nothing left but carnival food- potato chips on a stick, banderillas (corn dogs)…. oh and lots to drink…! Everywhere sold beers by the 40oz at minimum, you could buy a goofy plastic beer bottle that held 80oz.

We ordered a couple caguama (40oz) micheladas at a bar next to the temple of coke, and sat and watched the fería get more out of control.

Maybe it’s an acquired taste, most of my friends that aren’t from México don’t really care for micheladas, and even I don’t drink more than a couple in a sitting. I like to believe that all the chile and salt and… whatever else helps with the hangover the next day, at the least the lime juice has some important vitamins. I admit that pic probably isn’t selling anybody on them.

I can’t overemphasize how fucking loud it was at this place. We were sitting in front of a stage with live music and backup dancers bouncing around, on either side of us were mariachi bands playing, and the crowd was getting huge.

Our friends had the tickets to the cockfights, which had already started. They were stuck in traffic for who knows how long so we decided to mob off and try strange sounding cocktails, talk to cute girls and… they have a zipline?? We had to try the tirolesa.

By the time we waited in line, climbed the tower, and zipped across, our friends had arrived and we went into the palenque for the highlight of the nite.

I somehow got inside with my camera, but apparently we weren’t allowed to take photos so I didn’t. Just kidding.

They’re not great tho since we were pretty far away, it wasn’t very bright, and the fights ended before I realized what was going on. I hear there are cockfights where they don’t put razor blades on their ankles, and that sometimes the gallos walk away from those to fight again.
Not here.
The two cock-masters hold their cocks, then once they let em go there are about a second of feather flurrying and one of em drops.

The only way you can tell what’s going on is if you walk all the way down, so you can see the tags on their ankles. It seems crazy to bet tho, my homeboy almost got talked into putting $500MXP on the favorite, and it died instantly.

To give you an idea of how far away we were and how full of people it was:

After that they had a concert there! We didn’t stay for that, and mobbed back into the fair to wreak drunken havoc. The rest of the nite is a blur of people in fake mustaches, hot girls trying to get us to pay cover at bars, random girls coming up to take pictures with us, (and vice versa) and all culminating in finding a lights-out all ages dance party that was still raging when we left at 4am or so.

The whole party had a great vibe,  and I can’t believe it was only the first night of a month long event. We were amazed that during the whole nite we didn’t see a single fight, or even anyone too sloppy drunk. I loved that there were kids, old people and everyone inbetween hanging out and finding stuff to do, and, like everywhere in México I’ve visited, you’re never very far from someplace to get decent food and a lot to drink.

¡¡Salud!!