Travesia

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Tin Tan: The pachuco

Carlos Monsivis

To cite this article: Carlos Monsivis (1994) Tin Tan: The pachuco , Travesia, 3:1-2, 179-198,
DOI: 10.1080/13569329409361830

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13569329409361830

Published online: 27 Feb 2009.

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Download by: [Professor Daniel O. Mosquera] Date: 21 February 2016, At: 10:58
 Tin Tan: The Pachuco*
Carlos Monsivis
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In my view, the secret of Tin Tan's continued appeal lies in

an extremely effective combination of language and atti-
tude. More specifically, in the way he condenses an attitude
into language. With Tin Tan, anarchism and disorder do
give way to solemnity, but only so as to immediately make
way for more chaos. Dressed to the nines when his first
films came out, he represented, then, a faint transcultural
glimmer of modernity. Today, to those for whom Tin Tan
is mainly a television experience, he represents the uncon-
trollable laughter of an otherwise grey epoch, when jokes
circulated like memorial plaques, and respect had become
society's death mask.
Tin Tan: the great comic actor that a tamed film industry
was loath to accept, hardly understood, and ruthlessly
exploited. Nothing foreshadowed his explosive appear-
ance in 1943, the year of his debut. Whilst Cantinflas,
dominating a film comedy that was more verbal than
visual, remained trapped in the prison of his one great
disovery, and the rest were mere variations on themes
adapted from the Frivolous Theatre, Tin Tan was a leap in
the dark: he had not escaped from the circus, nor was he the
standard crook softened by the insignificance of his crimes;
he was, simply, a young man who walked, talked and loved
as if he carried a sinfonola brimming over with boogie-
woogies and boleros in his head.

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 Monsivais

The Comedians

In Mexican cinema established comedians stick to a few

variants on few themes. The following is a list of their main
duties:

- they must belong to the popular classes, expressing them

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in word and in movement (not to speak of appearance). The

comic must be both sympathetic and obedient, lascivious
and controllable, a scoundrel but honest. (An upper class
comic or ladies' man is inconceivable);

- they must shy away from any idea of class conflict so as

to rather represent the limitations of the dispossessed: their
timidity, their false arrogance and mythomania. The func-
tion of such comedy is to make of social resentment a
folklore of gratitude, and of humour, a means of stifling all
signs of rebellion;

- they must foreground the 'essence of comedy' (especially

in love stories) purely in the industry's terms - as the
prolongation of sentimentalism: when it comes down to it,
laughter and tears are the same thing. Jokes, meanwhile,
mould and temper the emotions. You laugh so as not to cry,
and you cry because it hasn't occurred yet to anyone at this
funeral to put an end to the wailing with a few good jokes;

- the comic actor must maintain his original cultural capi-

tal, that is, the personality that took him onto the screen in
the first place. If, for whatever reason, they change and lose
their well-worn tics and techniques, spectators cry foul. In
a medium in which what counts is tame verbal jokiness and
an appreciation of the most simple of gags (the visual joke)
the comics' initial resources (expressions, voice, gestures)
tend to be their final ones;

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 Tin Tan

- they must remain located, no matter what, within the

popular domain: the comic character may experience unex-
pected success, wander through bourgeois mansions, travel,
and even become famous, but in the last roll he will return,
vanquished but victorious, to the wealth of poverty;

- comedians must put up with the most abject use of their

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talents. The function of even the most famous and gifted

comic is to provide humorous relief in melodramas, to be
the foil of successive Perfect Couples. Even if it had wanted
to, the Mexican film industry could never have produced a
Groucho Marx, or even a Bob Hope. This is because hu-
mour was a degraded form in the 1940s and film (an
instrument that can actualize and change its spectators) a
magic with eyes for melodrama alone - considered signifi-
cant at the time because it was the place where the resources
of the industry and the public coincided;

- they must accept becoming the vehicle of puerile, mainly

idiomatic, gags that legitimize a culture of submission
through inversion (the reproduction of Indian, peasant
and, most often, urban popular speech as the expression of
a child-adult);

- they must respect the dogma that the joke - memorized

and finely tuned - is the only redoubt of prestige in popular
entertainment. Verbal wit, on the other hand, the spontane-
ous spark of light that opens out onto entirely new situa-
tions, is considered to be non-transcendent, just fun ('relajo').
Such a devaluation of inventiveness actually enthrones the
joke - laughter at something which declares itself to be
funny in itself, because it has always been there: the same
words, occupying the same time;

- they must resign themselves to the stasis in comic roles

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 Monsivais

imposed by trade belief: throughout his career a comic

develops one character, and one character alone;

- they have to accept 'natural' limits: Hollywood levels of

production and the myth of Cantinflas. A successful come-
dian may become an idol, but he will rise no further in the
identification stakes. It is not for him to represent the People
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- with a capital p - only examples of the 'popular'. This is

because Cantinflas has monopolized the emblematization
of the People to such an extent that audiences now amuse
themselves in recognising what they see and what they
already know of the idol's 'proverbial ingenuity', laughing
at the jokes they hear or, alternatively, at those they just
imagine - all of which they will then ecstatically repeat for
their friends the following day. The weight of the legend is
such that, in the memory of the spectator, even the most
pitiful of films becomes enshrined as yet another example
of the 'national sense of humour'.

What sumara con la baisa?

Es el pachuco un sujeto singular

pero que nunca debiera camellar
y que a las jainas las debe dominar
para que se sientan veri fain para bailar.

Toda carnala que quiere ser feliz

con un padrino que tenga su desliz
vaya a su chante y agarre su veliz
y luego a camellar pa'mantener al infeliz.

Tin Tan's Song, written by Marcelo Chavez

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 Tin Tan

Tin Tan (German Genaro Cipriano Gomez Valdes Castillo)

was born on September 15,1915 in Mexico City. In 1927 the
family moved to Cuidad Juarez where his father was a
customs officer and his mother a housewife. He was brought
up in a neighbourhood that was later to become a pachuco
bastion, did odd jobs and - something he often forgot -
became a tourist guide. According to his brother Manuel,
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German's biggest influence was the city of Los Angeles, but

the neighbourhoods of Cuidad Juarez and El Paso (full of
with-it 'cool cats' with quiffs, their hands buried in deep
pockets and shoulders slouched as they rhythmically
strolled the streets) were also important.
'My first job', says Tin Tan in an interview, 'was to stick
labels on the entire record collection of a radio station. To
save spit, I found a street dog and taught it to stick its tongue
out sol could wet the labels manually. Then I was an errand
boy and later a sweep. But I owe my first real opportunity
to a broken microphone. This is how it happened: I always
liked playing jokes, and at the radio station I enjoyed
imitating my friends and the bosses. Agustin Lara was
fashionable at the time - I'm talking about the end of the
1930s - and I also imitated him. One day the microphone
broke. When it was mended, Mr. Meneses asked for some-
one to test it. They asked me. So I started imitating Lara. Mr.
Meneses thought someone had put one of Lara's records
on, but it was me, fooling around! One week later I was
starring in a show called Tin Tan Larara, scripted by Mr.
Meneses... Then, I wanted to be a singer, but I ended up
becoming an announcer and impersonator. I impersonated
everyone, and did it quite well. Then I was given my first
stage name - Topillo Tapas - and I toured with it.' Not long
afterwards he became a comedian (and singer) in Paco
Miller's company - which toured Mexico and the Southern
U.S.A.. Another comic, Donato, also worked with Paco
Miller. His sidekick - the one who represents high serious-

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Monsivais
 Tin Tan

ness amidst the custard pies - was Marcelo Chavez, who

became Tin Tan's Ijuddy' ('carnal') for more than 20 years.
'One day we just started rehearsing, out of the blue. We
went on stage that night, and it went down very well. We
decided to stay together, write songs, and rehearse.'
The stories about Tin Tan usually leave out one impor-
tant detail: his bewilderment at events in Los Angeles.
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Between approximately 1938 and 1942, in the Mexican-

American neighbourhoods of Texas and, especially, Cali-
fornia, the pachuco emerges as the first important aesthetic
product of migration, the bearer of a new and extremist
concept of elegance - he is a dandy living on the outskirts
of fashion - that in the eyes of the Anglos (and the fathers
of the pachucos) is an outright provocation. The pachucos'
audacity in clothing and in gesture permits them to mark
out their new territory with mobile signs and, like their
model, the Harlem dude, challenge discrimination too. The
pachuco is thus affiliated to the American Way of Life only
eccentrically, and becomes a part of Mexican culture by
confronting racism. Pachucos eventually become (not very
voluntary) symbols of cultural resistance, and end up cor-
nered and persecuted in the segregation campaigns that
culminate in the Los Angeles Zoot Suit Riots.
By the time Tin Tan acquires his name, pachucos had
disappeared from the scene in the US, whilst in Mexico they
had become synonymous with the idea of a vagabond with
radical taste and, what is more, associated with the subur-
ban pimp, or even the embodiment of a new neighbour-
hood masculinity - as it is played, for example, by Victor
Parra in El Suavecito (Fernando Mendez, 1950) and Rodolfo
Acosta in Emilio 'el Indio' Fernandez's films Salon Mexico
(1945) and Victimas del pecado (1950). In El Suavecito the
father scorns his son, the pachuco, and eventually expels
him from the family and society with the words: 'That's not
a man but a hairdresser's dummy'. A traditional society -

185
 Monsivais

the only one that existed in Mexico at the time - can only see
such an unrestrained wardrobe -jacket down to the knees,
tails, incredibly wide lapels, a watch chain that hangs
dangerously close to the ground, fantasy braces, a feath-
ered hat, flowery shirts whose sleeves are long enough to
cover the hands, and a sense of combination that sets the
memory of decent clothes ablaze - as an inflammatory
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provocation.
Ever since the Porfiriato, Mexicans who became
'gringified' have been the object of disdain and fun. From
the point of view of this dimension of popular culture,
whoever so renounces the 'national condition' (dressing
and behaving like grandads) is amusingly found lacking.
In his well-known novel Al filo del agua set in 1909, just
before the outbreak of the Revolution, Agustin Yanez lists
villager reactions to such 'Northerners' - those who had
gone to North America, and returned:

'Poor people, poor country/ 'The're the cleverest, the

bravest; just because of a handful of words they can
mouth in a Christian tongue - even tho' they don't
know how to read, like when they left.' 'And just
because they've got those gold teeth they pick all the
time.' 'Because they wear those big, thick boots, felt
hats, wide trousers and cuffed shirts and shiny
cufflinks.' ...'And what about the way you talk? You've
even forgotten the language your fathers taught you.'

With marvellous impudence Tin Tan undoes, without ap-

pearing to know it, such a lack of understanding and
rejection. His dress and style announce, for the first time, a
popular modernity.

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 Tin Tan

Guilty Conscience

In Mexico City during the 1940s, Tin Tan triumphantly

became the archetypical 'pocho', a category that was
demonized both linguistically and socially. 'Pocho': a per-
son who has lost caste ('descastado'), who has forgotten
their Roots, and exchanged the vigour of idiosyncrasy for
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the plate of beans of superficial Americanization. In his

column of 20 June, 1944, Salvador Novo remembers an
article of his on "The Purity of Language':

It is a good article, really. I was inspired by all that talk

about Tin Tan, who stands accused of corrupting the
language with 'pochismos' which the young repeat.
Of course, I did not have the space to develop the
whole theory as I should have, but essentially, and the
intelligent reader would have understood, it rests on
making of Cantinflas the representative of the Mexi-
can unconscious, whilst recognizing that Tin Tan,
when he bothers us, does so because he embodies the
guilty conscience of our own voluntary or passive
loss of caste ('descastamiento').

Tin Tan elaborates to perfection the linguistic collage in

which all those Anglo-Saxon words imposed by the neces-
sity to name the new, a rural Spanish full to the brim with
archaisms, and sayings and expressions from the whole
country, participate. Tin Tan asks Marcelo, for example,
about 'the "jale" that you got as "guachador"', and 'do your
"relativos" still "forgetean" you?' One has to immediately
translate: 'jale' is job and 'guachador' is 'velador' (watch-
man), and the 'relativos' that 'forgetean' are parents that
forget. Nevertheless, Tin Tan does not emblematize loss of
caste ('descastamiento'), as will become obvious in the
years that follow, he only interprets the synchcretism that

187
 Monsivais

marks the second half of the century. Many a reprimand

still awaits the 'pocho', and will appear later in films, plays,
radio programmes, sermons and editorials. The steady
increase in migration, however, will eventually 'normalize'
them: there are so many 'pochos' that the use of the pejora-
tive collapses.
Tin Tan articulates a script opposed to known conven-
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tion. He is the pachuco: a word that in Mexico City oscillates

between friendly irony and insult. There is a considerable
leap from the riots in Los Angeles to the dance halls of
Mexico City, and the pachucos of the capital - who do not
offend the 'other', the North American, but rather the
'other', the man of respect -bet everything they have on this
character that makes an adventure of dressing and an
urban fantasy of the migrant's challenge.
'Turirura tunda tunda tunda'. But even this is too much.
A classicism that feigns concern for correct syntax rejects
innovations in the name of linguistic purity. And if
Cantinflas is accepted in the name of an incoherence proper
to the crowd, Tin Tan is rejected for his offence against
immutable speech, the ideal property of the elites. Tin Tan
is denounced by journalists and academicians of the Lan-
guage who lay siege to his prefigurative attitude. More or
less by force, however, producers and scriptwriters begin
to incorporate the comic, the pachuco, into their big-city
neighbourhood scenes; and although they do not surpress
the 'Americanisms' in his style entirely, they do lighten his
linguistic experimentation.
Tin Tan's career was not as linear as it is usually pre-
sented. In fact, just as he was inspired by the Los Angeles
pachucos, his most recognisable influence was Cab
Calloway, singer and director of the Harlem Orchestra and
a huge star in the 1930s. Tin Tan takes his gestures of
optimistic ecstasy from Calloway, his dress, a sense of
movement on stage, and a syncopated malice that distorts,

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 Tin Tan

elevates and magnifies his songs. Stormy Weather, for exam-

ple, reveals Cab Calloway definitely to be Tin Tan's model,
with his circus humour, the labial exaggeration that 'swal-
lows' and ironically recreates his songs, and the architectonic
suit that makes all preambles unnecessary ('Let my clothes
introduce me so that I can just get on with it.') To this Tin
Tan adds his experience of the circus and music hall, his use
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of the cinematographic scene (the sketch), his ability to

improvise and his enormous confidence: apart from the
spectators, no one else is looking.
On November 5,1943 Tin Tan makes his debut in the Iris
Theatre in Mexico City with a salary of 40 pesos. Cantinflas
was the star of the show; and Tin Tan was only moderately
successful. Which is not surprising: only gradually would
the dynamism, the fun and the offensiveness associated
with Tin Tanbe understood. His side-kick ('carnal') Marcelo,
was an old-fashioned comic, the interlocutor who takes all
the jokes or who offers his physique up for ritual derision
(in his case, fatness and baldness; whilst in the complemen-
tary case of the dwarf Jose Rene Ruiz Tun Tun, closeness to
the ground). Whilst acknowledging the real differences,
Marcelo is to Tin Tan what Margaret Dumont is to Groucho
Marx: the ideal victim of jokes and humorous situations.
The receiver of blows aimed originally at the comic, he
represented offended respectability, his face swollen by the
surprise of either gratuitous verbal or physical abuse.
Tin Tan and Marcelo are contracted to work in the Follies
Theatre, The Patio - a fashionable night club - and to do a
weekly radio programme on XEW. Tin Tan is also given a
part in Rene Cardona's film Hotel de verano: "They paid me
350 pesos for a number, which was nothing, but what the
hell, I was still very green as far as film was concerned!' In
fact, Tin Tan's first films were not very good. He is not a
humourist either, although he resorts to North American
vaudeville humour when on the offensive and improvis-

189
 Monsivais

ing. He has no hierarchical repertoire of jokes, nor has he

timed the rhythm of his punch lines, but he does have other
allies: ferocity of gesture, verbal aggression, an enthusiasm
for chaos, sentimentalism dissolved by irony, and a lack of
respect for solemnity and its sense of propriety (property).
From such a balancing act, and the continuous sense of
impending catastrophe that accompanies it, he mocks de-
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corum without demolishing everything that surrounds

him, unlike the Marx Brothers, because of a hatred for
institutions - nor does he call for universal ruin, like Buster
Keaton. The results are, nevertheless, equally apocalyptic.
Tin Tan passes by and nothing remains standing, no one
escapes the chaos.
From the series of films made by Humberto Gomez
Landero - El hijo desobediente (1945), Hay muertos que no
hacen ruido (1946), Con la musica por dentro (1946), El nino
perdido (1947) and Musico, poeta y loco (1947) - Tin Tan's
character already possesses the characteristics that he will
then go on to endlessly hone (despite the director's lack of
imagination): impudence, cynicism, amorous frivolity, and
an ineptitude balanced by destructive efficiency. Tin Tan's
verve leaves an immediate impression: he acts as if he had
transported the audience itself right into the screen.

jQue mene, carnalita, que mene!

Tin Tan leaves no word in peace, he twists them, stretches

them, discovering their sonorous interrelations. He eman-
cipates urban speech. In Gomez Landeros's films the story
and dialogue credits go to Guz Aguila (Guzman Aguilera).
But Guz Aguila, an able scriptwriter in the Frivolous Thea-
tre for two decades, is inadequate when it comes to the
linguistic vitality of Tin Tan. In a dialogue in Musico, poeta
y loco, Tin Tan, working in a shop that sells windows, says

190
 Tin Tan

to a client:

Orejas, sabe que estaba chompeta (ear) me falla un

poquetin... Y su guaifo (husband) ^como esta por ahf?
... (Looking at his suit) Usa muy buena garra. Fijon.
jQue mene, carnalita, que mene! (Fantastic!)... No, no,
no, jainita (honey)...
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And Marcelo responds: 'Se me hace que le pusiste de a feo

a la yesca y te anda girando la chompeta.' And so on. Tin
Tan 'jazzes' up speech, he improvises, contriving neolo-
gisms on the move.
In 1948 Tin Tan begins his collaboration with Gilberto
Martinez Solares (director) and Juan Garcia 'el Peralvillo'
(scriptwriter). In an interview published in Cuadernos de la
Cineteca (4), Martinez Solares says, somewhat contemptu-
ously:

Tin Tan was an extraordinary comedian. At first, I

didn't have much confidence in him. I didn't feel like
working with him either. He was a bit common, both
in the characters he portrayed and in the places he
worked, right? Tents, theatres... I wrote stories, al-
though I've never been good at street talk, especially
neighbourhood talk, which was my collaborator Juan
Garcia's strength.

Calabacitas tiernas, the film that begins the collaboration

between Tin Tan, Martinez Solares and Juan Garcia is
enjoyable today for its energy, despite breakdowns in plot.
Tin Tan sings, dances, seduces, pretends to be what he isn't,
doubts being who he is, and confronts himself in the mirror
like Harpo Marx in Duck Soup- audaciously performing on
the tightrope that separates theatre from film, he walks to
the rhythm of the city suburbs, from danzon to swing. In

191
 Monsivais

Calabacitas tiernas the modern urban comic appears, largely

emancipated from sentimentalism, installing the logic of
survival into the domain of fun ('relajo') whilst acknowl-
edging that he is condemned to fail. Without his pachuco
clothing, and that touch of contemporaneity provided by
Anglo words, Tin Tan is as irreverently up to date as times
permit. He improvises, entrances the camera, speaks to the
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audience ('the Lord of A Thousand Brains'),gets obviously

bored with old-fashioned dignity, refuses to protect his
honour, pays no tribute whatsoever to linguistic serfdom
and, furthermore, does not care if he offends the audience.

Listen Marcelino, play one that makes me cry from here

to the next song

Inevitably, Tin Tan's real environment is the picaresque -

which I define here quickly as the gift to take advantage of
all circumstances except for the really advantageous ones.
He is a good-for-nothing who has no room for either justice
or injustice, he is no one's fool and everybody's fool. His
character perfectly combines extremes: adulation and lech-
ery, sentimentalism and daylight robbery, solidarity and
plunder. And in this coming and going from heroism to
anti-heroism (from radical failure to fleeting victory), Tin
Tan displays a modernity which - loyal to the circular
resignation of the circus - Cantinflas, Palillo, Monolin and
Shilinsky, Polo Ortin, El Chaflan, el Chicote and even
Resortes (who is only modern when he dances) never
knew.
The Tin Tan who matters, and who speaks to us now, is
the product of fifteen years of filming and recording be-
tween 1945 and 1959. What follows this period is almost
unbearable: the sadness that comes from watching a great
but wasted comic actor, a comic who is misunderstood and

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 Tin Tan

abandoned by an industry that exploited him without

recognizing his brilliance. But from El hijo desobediente to El
violetero (1959), Tin Tan is that extraordinary figure who
marks a generation (in ways that were only understood
much later), transcends the lamentable scripts, redeems
through improvisation the badly planned scenes, democ-
ratizes relations with the public, and opens the door to a
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modern humour that will influence not only a whole gen-

eration of television comedians (Hector Suarez, The
Polivoces, Alejandro Suarez and, of course, the Loco Valdes)
but also, through the mythical evocation of his figure in the
trade, recent ones like Andres Bustamente, Ausencio Cruz
and Victor Trujillo.
Tin Tan never completely distances himself from the
Frivolous Theatre. He is a film comedian -no doubt -! with
a gift for speedy repartee and a facility for acrobatics, dance,
extreme facial plasticity, and the insult as a form of relation-
ship. He is also a creature of the sketch (to which he resorts
whenever he feels lost). In his terrific hullabaloos, amidst
the destruction of a house or a shop, it suddenly appears:

'Now, yes, Marcelino, you're going to have to work with

UNESCO.'
'With UNESCO?'
'Yes, with a broom.'1

For years Cantinflas's strategy of appearing in only one

film a year was praised. During the 1950s, on the other
hand, Tin Tan limited himself by filming every two or three
months. Now, however, the majority of Cantinflas's films
are almost unwatchable (except, in my view, Aguila o sol, El
signo de la muerte, Ahi estd el detalle, El gendarme desconocido,
and Ni sangre ni arena). But even the worst of Tin Tan's films
contain memorable scenes, songs, and jokes. His vitality
enables him to overcome the limitations imposed by the

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 Monsivais

industry on his character, the mediocrity of the screenplays

(when they exist), the idea that film is defined by speed and
forgetfulness, and the alarming ineptitude of the young
'starlets' (with one exception: Sylvia Pinal in El rey del
barrio). If the scorn of the critics hardly matters, the partial
incomprehension of the public that celebrates him, without
knowing the contemporaneity of his lack of inhibition, is
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overwhelming - an inhibition, moreover, that enjoys very

little support: the freedom to improvise from Martinez
Solares (who on seeing him, according to Wolf Ruvinskis,
laughed and just carried on filming), his popular register
provided by Juan Garcia 'el Peravillo', and the discretion
and efficiency of his sidekick Marcelo.
And his successes are not meagre. In the 'Golden Age of
Mexican Cinema', only one other actor breaks down the
rigid barriers of convention: Joaquin Pardave, who pre-
serves and transmits the accumulated knowledge of actors
in the tradition of Frivolous Theatre - whose ceremonial
and measured diction acts as the architecture of irony, and
whose voices are, almost literally, decorated with the ep-
och. On saying this I am not forgetting the contributions of
Resortes, Mantequilla, El Chaflan, El Chicote, Oscar Pulido,
Amelia Wilhelmy and Delia Magafia, but none of these
managed to satisfactorily transcend the inertia of
screenwriters and the haste of directors. Whilst Pardave
achieves his success thanks to his complete understanding
of traditional sensibility, Tin Tan does so through his lack
of inhibitions - German does not bow before the film
camera, he rather makes it his accomplice, his witness, his
immediate applause, part of his own environment.

Tus besos se llegaron a recrear/aqui en mi boca

I believe that El rey del barrio (1949) is Tin Tan's best film. On

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 Tin Tan

saying this I amnot forgetting Simbad elMareado, El Revoltoso,

El Ceniciento, Ay amor...como me has puesto, El sultan descalzo;
but in El rey del barrio, Tin Tan reaches his apogee: he is
flexible, ironic, sentimental and destructive, and his char-
acter, fruit of both the astuteness of the industry and his
own biography, is perfect, as defenceless as a catastrophe,
and with the eloquence of someone with nothing to lose.
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Tin Tan is the most joyous product of urban neighbour-

hoods, someone who explains himself in the light of the
devastation he disseminates. He is, at one and the same
time, contemporary in attitude and as anachronistic as the
neighbourhoods that will soon be demolished, as the pool
hall crooks, and as the methods used for injecting the past
with actuality and a night at the movies with dance hall
rhythm. El rey del barrio contains some of Tin Tan's best
sequences: the humiliation of detective Marcelo in the
house they are painting, the fabulous duet with Vitola (in a
'cirivirivi' that pursues the grotesque by celebrating the
ridiculous), and the bolero 'Contigo' that Tin Tan, drunk
and in love, sings whilst taking charge of the block he lives
in and in doing so transforming it into a set from Romeo and
Juliet.
Singing - be it rancheras or boleros - Tin Tan's humour
is extremely effective. His style is naturally exaggerated.
Nevertheless, he successfully manages to neither distort
the meaning of the joke nor the virtues of romance. Danc-
ing, Tin Tan is the pachuco who adds spice to the choreo-
graphic fun. He is the neighbourhood dandy, and when it
comes to the bolero, he celebrates the 'pick-up', and falls
'madly in love' - which is the invasion of machismo by
lyricism - without a hint of vocal pretension. His style thus
provides an alternative outlet for the transcultural tang that
censorship pursued in his speech. Tin Tan is the crooner
and the bolero singer, impregnated with the onomatopoeia
of boogie-woogie. He sings with his whole mouth ('my

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drooling snout'). And if he cannot be solemn like Juan

Arvizu or Emilio Tuero, nor sensual like Frank Sinatra, Tin
Tan does manage to both parody a variety of styles and
unify them into his own ironic and openly affected ('cursi')
one. As a singer, Tin Tan is, unusually, parodic and ortho-
dox at the same time.
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Chaos within chaos

How do you put a Tin Tan film together? For the most part,
they are dismal distortions of classics or of contemporary
successes. Their names bear the mark of the immediacy of
the joke: The Mark of the Fox ('La marca del zorrillo'), The
3V2 Musketeers ('Los tres mosqueteros y medio'), Cindarello
('El Ceniciento'), Seasick Sinbad ('Simbad el Mareado'),
Sleeping Beau ('El Bello Durmiente'), The Viscount of Monte
Cristo ('El Vizconde de Montecristo'), The Blue Beard ('El
Barba Azul'), Look What Happened to Samson! ('Lo que le
paso a Sanson'), Rebel Without a Home ('Rebelde sin casa'),
Puss-without-Boots ('El gato sin botas'), The Phantom of the
Operetta ('El fantasma de la opereta'). Even El violetero is, in
part, a caricature of Maria Candelaria, a humorous bow on
Tin Tan's part, happy to imitate the Tndio' Femandezque
way of speaking Castillian in Xochimilco (and to then
immediately move on to Spanglish).
To the weakness of the plots and the irresponsibility of
the producers, convinced that cinema is the art of the
immediate recovery of their investments, Tin Tan opposes
his obsession for parody and hatred of boredom. From this
point of view, improvisation is the only way to escape
memorising the script - the film industry's equivalent to
the prisonhouse of boredom. The task of 'nationalizing' the
delirium then falls to folklore, and there is plenty of it;
whilst reality becomes whatever happens before or after

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each comic scene. In such a cinema, parody involves much

more than the transformation of situations that are already
in themsleves grotesque or ridiculous. Parody is the con-
tinuous, knockabout invention of the world just as it should
be, where satire is the mistress of ceremonies for historical
times-gone-by, melodrama, passionate affairs, incompre-
hensible plots. Nothing is serious, except for death -but that
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only occurs in the film showing next door.

Tin Tan is, in the main, the product of his youthful
energy dramatized in dance, leaps in the air, irreverence,
and frenetic escapes. Tin Tan sings mambo and cha-cha-
cha, shouts, knocks over and destroys whatever is in reach,
sings serenades, fails as if his life depended on it and sets
everything around him going. With the passing of years, he
concentrates on verbal humour. But without a competent
team in his later films, and impotent and disenchanted
when it came to routine (although there are always mag-
nificent moments: see El Quelito, for example), Tin Tan
looks as if he has had enough. People admire his charm, he
is honoured and always working, but no one thinks he will
last. He is like he is, and best not dedicate another minute
to the matter: he is, or was, a pachuco embattled by linguis-
tic censorship; he is, or was, a product of neighbourhood
and small-town vaudeville; he is, or was, a comic who
refused to allow himself to be intimidated by the cinema.
From our own privileged perspective today, there is no real
point in quarrelling with the stupidity of the Mexican film
industry, which also wasted Resortes and Mantequilla, and
buried Pardave, Pedro Armendariz, Fernando and Andres
Soler, David Silva, Tito Junco, Roberto Canedo and other
excellent actors in abominable melodramas. Tin Tan was
used and abused by a booming industry, but thanks to this
very situation Tin Tan was also able to work free from the
intimidation suffered by the established and 'sacred' stars.
He did what he wanted as often as he could, and became,

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for the generations that followed, the emblem of a kind of

urban vitality which still, when it's time for fun ('relajo'),
moves us today.

Translated by John Kraniauskas

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*First published as 'Es el pachuco un sujeto singular: Tin Tan', in

Intermedios, No. 4, October, 1992.

Notes

1 'Un esco' + 'ba' = 'un escoba' = a broom! (Translator's note)

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