Word: tins
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...formed around a dirty Mexico City music hall called the Folies Bergere. Even at ii o'clock, when the second show began, they stormed the doors and raced up to the gallery. They were there to see Mexico City's popular clown-zoot-suited, 27-year-old Tin Tan (real name: German Valdes), billed as "The Only Authentic Pachuco...
...Tin Tan can plummet his voice from coloratura soprano to Chaliapin bass. But-it is not his voice that enthralls his fans, it is his lingo. For Tin Tan is a master of pocho, and pocho, a bilingual bastardy of anglicized Mexican,† is as funny to Mexican ears as the English of a stage Englishman is to Americans. Pocho, which literally means something that has lost its color, has come to stand for the thousands of Mexicans near or across the border who have ruined their Spanish without ever quite learning English. To aficionados Tin Tan is high satire...
...Tin Tan's clowning act is performed with a guitar-strumming stooge against a shiny backdrop that looks like the cover of a Pocket Books mystery. Tin Tan himself wears a cock's tail in his flat black homburg, a knee-length purple velvet jacket, a steel watch chain hanging below the knees of his balloon trousers which narrow at the ankles. He is forever fondling and fussing over his mike, always starts off by jabbering such gibberish as Viriviriviri-virividee, V por Victori. At intervals he tosses in his own crazy versions of mariachi tunes, Russian melodies...
Comic to Cult. It took Mexico City to turn Tin Tan from a comic into a, cult. A year ago Tin Tan was a little-known radio actor in Juarez, where he had picked up his lingo in border cantinas. Actually he speaks excellent Spanish but very poor English. He got his first spot in a live show last summer, at the time of the Los Angeles zoot-suit riots, adopted the zoot-suit as a satiric badge. His act was a flop till he went to Mexico City, where he became the rage overnight...
...detractors. Mexico City's stiff-necked, nationalist Old Guard, who do not or will not see the satire in his act, loathe him as the leader of "the barbarian invasion from the North." Nevertheless, Tin Tan today is not only the wonder boy of the Folies Bergere, but a headliner at the swanky, touristy El Patio, a regular over Mexico's powerful radio station XEW, and has contracts in his pocket to tour Latin America and star in three cinemusicals...