New Years at my house ( I say house, but really I mean a little shitty studio) usually consisted of drunk adults urging their poor young NAIVE children to use their creativity to find ways to further amuse their twisted inebriated sperm and ovary donors. But because poor child tend to be a little harder to fool than rich children (by this I mean: that better be candy that weird man in that child molester van is offering and not a puppy. Poor kids know their parents would NEVER allow them to have a puppy), parents would disguise such ridicule as tradition to ring in the New Year. And by tradition I mean Latino rituals/superstitions that parents disguised as hope for the future...but were really ploys to have children clean the house and make jackasses out of themselves as they dragged their barbie doll collection neatly packed in trash bags around the block dodging bullets just for shits and giggles.
Growing up in a Latino household, which in my case was Mexican and Salvadoran, and in which money was lacking, meaning there was no french fries to distract parents from making their children miserable with future childhood memories of how they danced around all New Year's Eve with yellow ruffly chonies on their head, meant you spent the whole day doing foolish and labor intensive tasks to amuse your evil loving parents.
And because the end of the world is coming, Mayans don't lie, my mother has summoned her five children to once again re-live childhood traumas in order to save the world. In other words she started drinking again, no longer gets her kicks by just chancla slapping me every once in a while, and wants me to do the following just as I did as a 8 year old poor child in Echo Park:
1. Clean the House. This is the moment every Latina Mom that has had to kiss Mrs. Smith's ass to feed their snot nosed kids lives for. Tradition goes you're suppose to clean your house from top to bottom, and then reserve the dirty mop water to to throw out at midnight. The hope is the bad poor energy will leave with the water. For me and every poor kid in Echo Park, however, this meant having to clean your huge ass house ( because I don't care how small I told you this studio was before...it suddenly expanded to 20 acres), and then dump the dirty water over your father....who by the way was just as unaware of this tradition as you were, and has decided to ring in the New Year by belting you.
2. Wear Yellow Chonies Apparently wearing Yellow Chonies into the New Year brings luck and fortune. What my sperm and ovary donors forgot to mention is that they are suppose to go underneath your clothes and not on top of your head the whole night as you dance to the year's best cumbia hits
3.Stuff Money in MyTraining Bra Ritual goes stuffing money into corners of your house or chonies brings money to you in the coming year. However being poor, your parents figured stuffing monoply houses and food stamp booklets would suffice to bring us millions in the New Year.
4.Pack My Belongings Into a Suitcase and Travel the Block This ritual symbolizes many safe travels. And for 8yr old kids who never left their hood and needed to find a way to leave their home before their moms found out they shoved all the dirty clothes in the closet while completing task #1, this was perhaps the most important. So yes every year I would pack my barbies into 99 cent trash bags and circle my block dodging bullets, unaware my yellow ruffly chonies were being confused for a bandanna.
On behalf of the Food Stamp Mafia I hope this New Year brings you an extra book of food stamps.
