Playing With Boys

ALEXIS There were times that made me s'dang proud to be a Mexican I wept 'til my mascara meltedsay, when Vincente Fernandez sang "Cielito Lindo" for the Republican National Convention in 2000. But darlin', this wasn't one of those times. I stood alone in a black-tie crowd, at a private cocktail party, at L.A.'s Getty Museum, faking interest in a cube of raw tuna on a silver tray. It was like a wobbly, wet, red diceor was it die? Correction: Was it dead? I jabbed it with my designer toothpick, just to be sure. "It's only Jell-O, sugar," I whispered as I closed my eyes and shoved it into my mouth. But it was nothing like Jell-O, unless they'd come out with a "slippery acrid" flavor I hadn't seen yet. What I needed was a steak, well-done. Fat chance. Suddenly, the chatting dimmed and all eyes turned toward a doorway as I held my breath and prayed for patience. One by one, the members of Los Chimpances del Nortethe norteÑo band I had stumbled, dear God please tell me how, into managingstrutted single-file onto the terrace in perfectly matching toucan-vomit-meets-cowboy outfits. I'd asked them to wear Armani. Black Armani. As usual, they'd ignored me. I instinctively fingered the little pink pearls around my neck, and smoothed my hands along the sides of the size 14 Ann Taylor cocktail dress I liked to think of as my "little black," but which was, by L.A. standards, more like a massive, flapping black. A woman behind me gasped. "What are they wearing?" A man comforted her by saying, "I believe they're going for post-modern kitch." No, I wanted to say. They think they look good, and there is a large percentage of an entire nationmy ancestral nation of originthat agrees. I was not among that percentage, but then, I was raised in Texas, not Mexico. Lime-green fringed blazers aren't for everyone. Neither are banana-yellow Wrangler pants worn tight as skin on a sausage. White ten-gallon Stetsons look good enough on Toby Keith. But twelve of 'em, all in a row, stuffed over waxy Mexican mullets in the middle of a modern museum? Lordy. And who knew twenty-four maroon snakeskin boots could look quite that bad, all lined up together like the keys of Satan's own little player piano? We were here this evening, enjoying the gardens of this curvy, white modernist masterpiece of a museum perched in the gently smoggy hills above the twinkling lights of Los Angeles, for an exclusive private party. A celebration. What were we celebrating? This: The fact that Los Chimpances del Norte (the Chimpanzees of the North) had just donated $5 million to UCLA's Center for Chicano Studies, for the study of previously neglected U.S.-Mexico border music of the oom-pah type they themselves had inflicted upon the public for the past twenty years. I was a Dallas girl, born and raised, armed with an arsenal of acronymsBA and MBA from SMU, darlin'but I was trying to become a California girl, with mixed results. I came to Hell-eh because I thought it was shameful that in a city where the top-three FM radio station now played Mexican music, the big PR companies were oblivious to the talent and riches in Spanish-speaking America. I was the first to offer these artists American-style publicity, complete with professional press releases, follow-up calls, lunchesas opposed to Mexican-style publicity, which usually meant buying reporters off with things like cocaine, or island vacations. My clients at Tower Entertainment, the Whittier-based firm I worked for, had been on the Tonight Show, Sixty Minutes, and in the New York Times, which impressed me but rarely impressed my clients. As I often had to tell reporters, America was changing, fast. Tortillas now outsold bagels. Famously, Americans now ate more salsa than ketchup. Wal-Mart cValdes-Rodriguez, Alisa is the author of 'Playing With Boys', published 2004 under ISBN 9780312332341 and ISBN 0312332343.