Mexican Payasos
The streets and plazas of Mexico are the place to make a buck, or a peso in this case. Car washers, street vendors, beggars and everything in between fill most public places in this country. Among this pavement panorama, street performers are in abundance; from mariachi and ranchero groups to dancers, jugglers and even clowns. They are collectivley know as Callejeros.
Payasos (clowns) Eric Pozos Perez and Emilio Lopez Felix (in the photo above) are both professional street performers. In some ways they represent the intersection between officially sanctioned art and Mexico´s ubiquitous street theater. I met them in Morelia where they were teaching a clown class to kids through the Instituto Nacional Bellas Artes.
Morelia´s Central Plaza Where Callejeros Often Perform
They spend much of the year following local festivals and fares around the country. But you might be surprised by their back grounds. Both are university trained performers. They work the streets instead of in theaters for several reasons: there are few jobs with theater companies and street performing gives them more freedom. And most years, they make enough of a living on the streets to supports their families. As they point out, if they wanted jobs that were about making a lot of money they wouldn´t be clowns.
There have been other barriers to their profession other than money. “If you came here six or seven years back we couldn’t walk the streets,” said Lopez Felix. Either the cops would take what you earned or they would run them off the streets or both. The government didn´t want “rabble” filling the streets, they said.
But in the last five or six years their lives have become much easier since the government has removed many of the road blocks that formerly made street performing in Mexico a difficult and often frustrating profession. Now, getting the permits needed to work, which are many, has become a much easier task. There is even a database which lists performers as well as fairs and events that need their services.
But these changes haven´t stopped local performers, who think they have some kind of monopoly, from trying their hardest to keep outsiders off their turf. The competition, it seems, never stops.
