Santa Fe--more livable than Denver

Playing Lotería with Juan

My wife and I took in award-winning artist John Picacio's Lotería reception at the Jean Cocteau Cinema in Santa Fe, Thursday night. Owner G.R.R. Martin showed up to support him and treat his guests as guests of his own digs. We all played Lotería, with prizes galore, except for me, but I suspect the game was rigged.

Prints of Picacio's re-interpetation of the classic Mexican game cards and sets of cards were the prizes. Luckily, everyone had a chance to sample a local favorite, George R.R. Martin's own ale. It was good enough to have more than a couple, but that wouldn't have increased my chances of winning a prize. My Lotería tabla sucked.

One guy in the back must have held the twin of my tabla because he'd periodically yell, "Bullshit!" after Juan announced the next card. I take that back; that guy couldn't have had a shittier tabla than mine. One round finished, and there was a single bean on my tabla. Did I mention it was cursed?

Juan's event alone was worth the trip, but we'd also come down for a little vacay, and in the next days, I at least discovered more about what we've lost living in Denver than about what Santa Fe still has to offer. Not that it's paradise.

Other ways Denver sucks

A Denver Post headline this morning: "Denver building implosion to bring closures." It's about a high-rise being demolished, but it could also describe well the damage being done to Denver's communities by so-called gentrification.

Starbucks signs push out Chicano murals, "bistros" push out affordable family restaurants. The process resembles someone cutting their own throat in order to have their say. Actually, more accurately, cutting the throats of long-time residents who have roots in the community. Investors buying houses to flip them for a profit. So, "American."

Arguments for "gentrification" commonly center around economics. But the community suffers from those economics--higher property taxes for the aged and less prosperous, less parking, more traffic, young professional drunks on the streets, outrageous prices for food and drink, among many other financial burdens.

It's hard for me to understand how the young, supposedly educated, professional "gentry" allow themselves to be exploited, crammed into multi-storied apartments, overcharged for what the old residents know was once less costly. And much more livable.

Then in contrast, there's the city of Santa Fe where my wife and I are spending a few days. New Mexico itself is not wide open to developers. Although it's not perfect, all around is evidence of the community preserving itself, culturally, architecturally, liveably.

We entered a place called Tiny's, to hear Chris Abeyta's 4-man band of keyboard, congas, and guitars. And no cover charge. I ask the bartender what's on tap. "Jägermeister," she says, not kidding, and I know I'm in a real bar, not some preppy Denver brewery. I order a glass of Santa Fe Nut Brown Ale that costs $3.50, almost half of what Denverites allow themselves to be charged. Down here, I could afford to become a bar-n-grill lover.

Sometimes it's the little things that indicate what you've lost. A small Native American woman approaches us. "You wanna buy some nice earrings?" We pass on it, and she continues down the bar offering her hand-made jewelry. A while later, a Chicano offers to sell us red chile at a reasonable price. It wasn't hot enough for me, so, it's another pass.

Denver's now-gentrified bars don't allow people to enter and sell their wares. The community-feel and openness to supporting local residents went out the window when the IPhones and espressos entered. Plus, the bargains are gone.

We do a short stop at Omira's to hear Brian's acappella, sax and clarinet [no cover charge, again]. The Belgian draws are $4.50, but they're 8 and 9% potent. Then we head over to 2nd Street Brewery, where Tiffany Christopher's blues/folk is rocking the place [no cover charge]. Beers were $3.50 to $4.50. People are listening to her music and not texting like Denver's gentry addicts.

Santa Fe has gentry, gentrification, Starbucks, etc. But you can find parking. Free, not the $30 you might pay in Denver's LoDo. Traffic gets heavy, like everywhere, but the concentration of urban professionals is less per square block. You can drive to get to several locations without much difficulty. Controlled growth and controlled new construction. Not the spread-our-legs exercise that Denver's city government offers nearly any developer who's got the cash.

Perhaps what the Denver "gentry" have lost on most, besides the enjoyment of music with tickets costing $40 and more, are the other arts. Galleries, shops, gardens, museums, cultural events fill the pages and calendars of Santa Fe. Bistros are here, but not as if to preempt culture. Culturally deprived Denver "gentry" are the norm up north, and the poorer for it.

There are many more contrasts that speak to what I'll call the intelligence of nuevomexicanos who maintained enough control of their communities to not become a developer-raped Denver. Add your own to the list. Lament the loss. Or maybe try educating the "gentry" about how it used to be. If they don't believe any other kind of life is possible, point out Santa Fe on the map.

Commemorating 45 years ago

On August 29, 1970, the National Chicano Moratorium march and protest was held in East Los Angeles, with over 25,000, mostly Chicano people demanding an end to the war in Vietnam. As Jimmy Franco Sr. on Latinopov.com says, "The experiences of an older generation need to be shared with the younger generation."

Read his article to hear some of those experiences. In Denver, though we had fewer protestors, we often marched with the Anglo anti-war movement activists. The streets aren't so often filled with protesters, as before. But the lessons are still there for handing down to younger people. Today would be a good day to share that.

Es todo, hoy, because I'm on vacation. Heading down to Albu to interview Victor Milán about his just-released book The Dinosaur Lords. Details, later.

RudyG, a.k.a. Rudy Ch. Garcia, fantasy author and travelogue cynic

A Northside of people OR developers' gentry Highlands

In John Carpenter's ancient 1981 film Escape from New York, convicted bank robber Snake Plissken (Kurt Russell) is sent into futuristic 1997 to rescue the US President from Manhattan, which by 1997 is a gigantic max-security prison. The film was called sci-fi, but today's gentrified Manhattan or San Francisco or Denver makes the film alternate history, a future not based in reality.

Two recent news and developments in Denver's gentrification made we wonder about my Northside neighborhood, which I and Bloguista Manuel Ramos have often written about, realistically, facetiously, or soberly, as Ramos wrote:

"One of the regrettable things that has happened to Denver’s Northside, where I've lived for more than thirty years, is the rise and victory of the 'suburban aesthetic': boxy, boring housing lined up in rows; a uniform 'non-conformist' style from clothes to music; restaurants that are destinations rather than good places to grab a bite to eat; an obsession about 'making it,' a flaccid, common denominator cultural perspective. A great neighborhood has to be more than that."

A Highlands developer's dream

Gentrification is defined as: "revitalizing neighborhoods, the movement of young, often single, professionals into low-income, heavily minority, neighborhoods near urban employment centers. Low-income and minority residents are pushed out by gentrification as the local culture and consumption patterns are taken over by upwardly mobile professionals."

Progress is defined as a gradual betterment; the process of improving or developing something over a period of time; the act or process of growing or causing something to grow or become larger or more advanced."

Bolded words above took on different meanings as I sat on my front patio this week, wondering how gentrification had "revitalized, improved" or made the neighborhood "more advanced." It is "larger" in terms of population density, with condo and apartment complexes going up like Peyton Manning's touchdown-record.

Gazing down the street, from house to house, this is what I know. When people moved into these houses that were built in the 1940s, they were looking for homes to start families, places to raise their kids, within walking distance of neighborhood schools [3 within 5 blocks], and maybe not far from their jobs.

A home the developers didn't raze

In both of those two houses (imagine following my finger) live steelworkers, in that one a factory worker and his grocery clerk wife, in that one a retired railroad worker, in the corner one a postal worker, in that one lived a president of her union, and next door, a federal government worker, Until recently, I was a teacher. All of those people belonged/belong to unions--there's more I don't know about--which were part of the community culture. Finding a gentry-neighbor who's part of a union or who would support a union picket is as hard as finding cheap houses around here.

Next door to me lived a Chicano who I went to college with and was part of the Chicano student movement. Across the street, a woman who was one of its poets. The three of us, at least, had that in common. Student radicalism, Chicano pride, nonviolent protest. None of the gentry on my block come from such backgrounds.

A home, not an investment

Across the street lived two girls who went to the Northside middle and high school with my two kids, one of whom lives five blocks away. Next door and two houses down, and in others sprinkled down the block, live/lived other kids who went to the same schools. They called themselves Northsiders, Vikings and attended North High School. Many stayed together at the same schools until they graduated or went on to college. With charter and split or hybrid schools all around us, the few gentry kids won't have neighborhood schools in common.

I can see the house where the Italian old lady [her son still lives there] use to drink on her porch. She was the same woman who would take care of neighborhood Mexican kids when their mother was late getting home. Or would feed Chicano children who she knew didn't have enough to eat when they got home from school. A steelworker from another house would regularly mow the two lawns of old ladies who couldn't push a mower or afford to pay anyone. A welder who lives over there and the guy who live there will weld something for you for free or run his snow-blower down other people's sidewalks. Another guy helped me with my fire-pit and another has fixed my car for me and neither would accept money. Of course, sometimes neighbors paid for work or bartered. I wonder whether today's gentry neighbors, with some exceptions, would act so neighborly for kids who might have lice in their hair, or let their gentry kids play with them, or even imagine that hungry neighborhood kids might be part of their responsibilities.

Really--you'd want to live in this?

South of me lived a Chicano, then a Mexican family, then another Mexican family that had migrated without papers from the same region of Mexico. Next door to them, another family from that region. North of me lived a paperless Mexican family, and I can count five others on the block that are still homes to Mexicanos. Counting us, there's six Chicano families still around. Decades ago, I had no doubts about why my family moved here. Because there were Chicanos, working class, Mexicanos who spoke Spanish. Good decent-priced restaurants with a chorizo breakfast, or bars with affordable shots or a variety of tequilas, or clubs with live music and no cover and cheap beer, or Catholic church bazaars where you ate good, danced in the street and saw and talked with your raza neighbors. With the gentry here, most of that is disappearing. I know that in a lot of cases, the gentry see that as Progress.

Kurt can't save us from Highlands

Our Chafee Park pocket of ranch house bungalows is zoned for families and no apartments. The developer-gentry may try to change that. (Over mi cuerpo muerto.) The old Northsiders moved here to find homes. Yes, they expected the house's value to rise, at least from inflation. But they moved here to stay, except for Mexicanos and Chicanos who got trapped by balloon payments, ARMs and under-qualifying loans. The four families I know about who lost homes had to move east to Aurora where ethnics can more afford to live or rent.

Architecture: Highlands-ugly

The developers have created another circle of Dante's Hell. Apartment buildings are going up, yes, like a Broncos' score. Monthly rents average $1,145. "Over 9,000 new apartments were built in 2013, 8,700 more are expected this year, and another 8,700 in 2015. 55,000 people will migrate here next year. "People are definitely looking at Colorado as the place to be. We have become an area where young professionals are moving. Entrepreneurs can start their businesses anywhere in the country, and so they are choosing areas where the lifestyle matches their preferences."

You buy this, you breathe the chems

I think of the new Northside--the developers renamed us Highlands, without our input--as Legoland. Like Ramos described above, apartment and condo boxes are slapped together with OSB instead of plywood like the old homes. It's 2/3 cheaper and the gentry will only see the outside. It doesn't matter that California wants to require special warnings for these "chemicals known to cause cancer and birth defects or other reproductive harm, wood dust known to cause cancer." The median price for these boxes is $263,000. It's about money, investment, flipping houses and moving on. Not about neighbors and community.

This month in the Denver Post, Fine Arts Critic Ray Mark Rinaldi published "Did diversity miss the train in Union Station's architecture?" (The place is only ten minutes from my house.) The whole article is worth reading, but here's a sample:

Not Union Station; just big Lego

"The urban playground at Union Station isn't drawing people of color and it may be the building's fault. Walking through the station, it doesn't look at all like Denver in 2014. More like Denver in 1950, Boise, Idaho, or Billings, Mont. If, that is, you are white and not paying attention. Or if you think diversity doesn't matter. If you do, you can't help but feel like something is off amidst all the clinking of martini glasses. If you are a tourist, you might get the idea that Denver doesn't have people of color. Or worse, you might think it's one of the most segregated cities in the U.S. That's not the case.

"The architecture's roots are in the glory days of France, England, Greece and Rome, empires that were nearly absent of ethnic minorities and who felt fully at ease invading, exploiting and actually enslaving the people of Africa, Asia and South America.

"Yes, that's all in the past; things have changed. But the $54 million renovation of Union Station doesn't take that into account. It restores the symbols of an old world with no updates. The gilded chandeliers have been rewired, the marble polished, but there's no nod to the present. Is Union Station Ready for the Next 100 years, as its marketing proclaims?"

Rinaldi received over 316 comments. I won't't be surprised if the paper's conservative owners demoted or restricted him to articles about Bronco Stadium architecture. Here's a sample of the comments:

"So writing a racist article is OK if it is against white people?"

"White guilt is a large part of any college education now."

"We should just blow up all beautiful old buildings so that nobody is ever made uncomfortable by being reminded of what their ancestors didn't accomplish."

I don't know how many comments came from developers or gentry. But none of this sounds like the old Northside's neighborly ways of Italians, Chicanos, Mexicanos and others living next to each other. It certainly doesn't sound like tolerance.

Highlands next improvement?

If you missed it, check Bobby Lefebre's La Bloga post from last week, Vanishing Chicano Culture and the Gentrification of Denver’s Northside. "He is the driving force behind the We Are North Denver movement that has shined a bright spotlight on the massive changes happening to the Northside - good and bad. When racist flyers recently appeared in the neighborhood, Bobby responded with action that focused on unity in the community. He wrote the following article originally for his website, which you can find at this link." Like Ramos said there, "As a resident of the Northside for more than thirty years, I agree with much of what Bobby says in this piece. Both Bobby and I would be interested in your reactions."

The Northside that's become the developers' and gentry's Highlands is a great candidate for a new Darwin Award for City Suicide. Already the signs of super-congestion, unflavored architecture and an unaffordable lifestyle and life have settled over my neighborhood like a new Brown Cloud. It didn't and doesn't have to be that way. Richer, whiter neighborhoods were inoculated from turning into Legoland. For instance, there's the Bonnie Brae Neighborhood Association whose zoning committee reviews all zoning requests. It's one of the most charming, coveted, million-dollar-homes areas in the West. Take note developers--of million-dollar-homes. Not made of cheap, toxic OSB or intended to look like Legos. And how about some solar?

Old Northside home, family-friendly

Except for the Lefebre and Rinaldi articles, I don't know why I wrote this. I'm not lamenting so much as remembering. Why we came here. What here is. And was. What it shouldn't become. What it shouldn't lose. Its ethnicity. Its multi-national neighborhood quality. Its sense of community. It's the Northside.

Es todo, hoy,

RudyG, a.k.a. a Northside who's not quitting. Or moving.

9 benefits of gentrification for your barrio

by RudyG

gentry - the qualities appropriate to a person of gentle birth; upper or ruling class.

gentrification - the process of renewal and rebuilding accompanying the influx of middle class or affluent people into deteriorating areas that often replaces earlier usually poorer residents.  [definitions: Webster's Dictionary]

So, some gentry "of gentle birth" are renewing, rebuilding and replacing all over your barrio. Should you let the coraje get to you and start making bilingual picket signs and petitions?

One common belief is--Simón, ese! The price of local pizza will go up, tamales-by-the-dozen will become rarer than a Chicano jogger, your favorite cantina will be remodeled into a vegiburger or starbucked bistro where one item can cost more than a dozen tamales, and your neighborhood school will be turned into a more exclusive charter factory that features maybe a dozen chicanitos. But that's such a shortsighted, narrow and "poorer" view, it might be better to take a longer, broader and "richer" perspective on the phenomena.

Based on decades of scattered, sometimes sober, observations of Northside Denver's gentrification, as well as hundreds of hours drinking Negras on Friday afternoons out in my front yard with my untrained perro Manchas, I've discovered undiscovered value to these invasions. It's not all floating caca under the bridge, but our "usually poorer residents" can benefit from this "influx of middle class or affluent people" and even climb the economic-advantage ladder to almost becoming "upper or ruling class." Here's how I see it:

Signs when a barrio gets gentrified	Benefits for barrio gente
1. When the forecast calls for "surf's up" on the beach or mountain snow, gentry's trash & recycle bins hit the curbside days before scheduled pick-up, encouraging burglaries.	Since gentry obviously aren't home, this gives you time to search their bins for aluminum cans and junk to sell at your biannual yard sale, if you simultaneously watch your casa.
2. Yards that never had gardens are suddenly filled with lush plants, tall green trees and expert landscaping, making yours look like a monte with a barber-college haircut.	You won't have to nag your esposa to cut the lawn or weed the garden anymore because there's no way yours can ever look as suave or verde as theirs.
3. On the other hand, that deceased viejita's rosebeds are pulled up and replaced by formulaic gentry-landscapes that produce a few small flowers with little maintenance.	Your d-i-y landscaping is the most unique around, and scrawny roses you transplanted when everybody was at the viejita's funeral make gentry think you got a green thumb.
4. Newspapers on gentry's front yards pile up because they all have wireless IPods & IPads and don't read print--or went skiing--but have too much disposable income and don't cancel their subscriptions.	You don't waste money anymore on subscriptions; you just take your dog on his customary, new, morning walk, nonchalantly pick up your free copy and your esposa compliments you for getting up off your fat nalgas.
5. The viejitos who struggled along with their walkers don't come by anymore to help improve your pocho Spanish, and the young, fit güera/güero joggers never stop, unless they need a translator.	Young, fit, güeras (or güeros, if that's how you jog), jogging--paint your own picture and also see #6.
6. New, monolingual neighbors have replaced the fluent Spanish-speakers who stopped by on Fridays to chat and help you improve your pocho bilingualism, so now you always converse in English-only.	Your status rises when your pocho Spanish makes you El Primo Translator of the block, and you now translate for landscaping, drywall and roofing vatos redoing the barrio, and they envy your English fluency.
7. Your neighbors' pure-breds are fully trained, bark less and live inside more than your mongrel, targeting you for nuisance-dog complaints.	When robbers check out your block, they stay away from your casita and its unsocialized, barking mongrel, making you look smart to la esposa.
8. New, shining, MPG & GPS-equipped silver cars sit in gentry driveways, increasing local car thefts and making your old troca look like it belongs to one of the roofers.	There's more neighbors with working cars who you can ask to boost your worthless troca's battery on sub-zero mornings, if they're not skiing. Plus, see #7 above.
9. Gentry breweries and cafes have replaced your dive bars and cheap taco joints, forcing you to drive miles on Fridays for tus traguitos and some refritos con green chile picoso.	You save chingos by buying six-packs and bags of chicharrones, while spending more time training your mongrel out in your front yard, waiting for translation requests and Benefit #5.

Of course, this list is incomplete and La Bloga readers are encouraged to add to it. There could be thousands and thousands of ways for our "usually poorer residents" to benefit from the "upper or ruling class" takeovers of their neighborhoods. Qué no, gente?

Es todo, hoy,

por RudyG

aka Rudy Ch. Garcia, author of the not-yet-notorious Chicano fantasy, The Closet of Discarded Dreams.

I Ask(ed) a Mexican y respondió

by Rudy Ch. Garcia

Since every Tomás, dick and harried--mexicanos, gabachos, racistas, pochos, and quién-sabe-qué--are always asking Gustavo Arellano questions that he answers in his distinguished column Ask a Mexican, I decided to try one. And, qué milagro!--he answered mine this past Thursday.

Pero había un problema--something I didn't anticipate. Seems that written words can be a fickle thing. Or maybe it's that writers are fickle things. Or maybe it was just that my question-writing was somewhat vague. In any event, The Mexican Arellano addressed his response to me with a, "Dear Gabacho." Last time I looked--right after I showered--I was nowhere near being gabacho, but that's how he addressed me.

So, to determine how sorry the text of my question actually was, I also sent it to a few Chicanos I know to see how their answers compared to Arellano's. I told them it was a challenge, and three took the bait. First below is my question and then Gustavo's answer. That's followed by three others who answered the challenge. Hopefully Arellano won't turn a deaf ear to my next one after he reads this, something I'm already thinking about.

This appeared in the OC Weekly on Thursday and is reprinted with Arellano's permission:
DEAR MEXICAN, Cada día, my perro Manchas and I go for an afternoon walk in this North Denver parque. We often pass the gringo gentry who are temporarily "improving" the neighborhood, as an investment. You know how the gentry are—they move into the barrio, but send their precious güeritos to the charter schools so they won't get piojos from our kids or wind up pregnant with half-brown babies.

Anyway, I swear, every time Manchas and I pass one of these purebred, hyper-trained gentry dogs, the owners pull their pinches perros away from mine so they can't sniff cola or . . . you know. I guess my question is: How can the gentry know that Manchas is Spanish-surnamed, bilingual and mestizo, since they've never even talked to us? And is there anything I can do so Manchas doesn't grow up with a pocho complex and think he's inferior to a gringo's dog?
Yankee Hipsters Go home! [not my original closing--swear!]

DEAR GABACHO:
Gotta pay our respect to our veteranos—they can ramble as awesomely as any gabacho at a retirement home! I think what you're complaining about is the gentrification of historically Mexican neighborhoods by hipsters, a phenomenon happening everywhere from Denver to Los Angeles, SanTana to Chicago and beyond. It's important to fight the encroachment of pendejos with no ties to the area who start demanding changes—get rid of quinceañera shops, crowing roosters, cars parked on lawns, or corn grown in the back yard and nopales in the front.

At the mismo time, though, raza really angry with gentrification should practice gente-fication, the process of young locals getting over their pocho complex and opening their own businesses to pump enough money back into the area so city bureaucrats don't have any excuse to use the ruse of redevelopment on raza. Think of that strategy as our economic Mexican-American War—and if there are hipsters who are respectful of the old guard, such as the San Patricios that joined our side against the invading Yankees so long ago, then I say embrace their ranks, pound a PBR with them and teach them the secrets of scaring insufferable hipsters away from the barrio by blasting Banda El Recodo at all hours of the noche.
The Mexican

Okay, so Arellano thought I was not so bronze and a rambling old fart; I can live with that. He might have guessed that from my La Bloga pic, a self-portrait, one of those attempts at art attempting to mimic life, and maybe I don't mimic so well. 'Tá bien.

Next, Michael Sedano, La Bloga's Tuesday contributor answered my same question. "Ask a Chicano" contestó:
"Orale, carnal. First off you have to drop the language of the oppressor. "Gentry"? Híjole, as if your worldview buys into their class systems. "Gentry," so what are your gente, chopped liver? Another thing, oh my droog--why do you want them to talk to you? If it's their women who ignore you, la cultura has the ways and the means: work on your piropos. "As for the question of your dog, it's not the amount of pocho in the dog but the dog in the pocho.
michael sedano

Then comes Ernest Hogan, Wednesday's La Bloga contributor and sci-fi author:
"Okay, here's for the AskAMexican Challenge:
We used to have a lot of poodles and such in my neighborhood. They seem to be moving out, along with their “traditional” Arizona owners. Their grandmothers are afraid to walk the streets after dark, which is muy raro, because it's one of the quietest places I've ever lived. Yeah, there's this vato who wears a Santo T-shirt when he walks his pit bull. Man and beast strut with pride. I recommend that. Maybe sing or whistle an old ranchera, but no narcocorridos. I would stop short of a program of intimidation. I'm careful where I wear my ¡VIVA MÉXICO, CABRÓNES! shirt.

"Besides the canine mestizos--we adopted one who was abandoned by someone who felt they had to move out fast--it's mostly either pit bulls or Chihuahuas around here. And the Chihuahuas are taking over. The City of Glendale is even offering a deal on the license fees for the perrititos. This Chihuahua encouragement makes me nervous. I sense a diabolical ethnic-cleansing plot. But, then maybe I've lived in Arizona too long.
Ay, ay, ay,
'N [aka Ernesto Hogan]

Last comes an answer from a Houston Chicano, entitled, Gentle with the Gentry:
"Well, it didn't help things that you gave your perro a Spanish name, Manchas. That's a dead giveaway. The Gentry are always suspicious and full of trickery--they wrote the book. Your history tells you that it started with Columbus, the other immigrants, and has never stopped. They came, made new rules and took the land. Urban gentry is just a smaller scale of it.

"Had you named you're dog Fido or Pluto or Snoopy or some other distinctly white dog name, perhaps you would have been received with half-open arms in your own barrio. The whole idea with being white is money related. Move into a poor neighborhood, fix up the old house, declare it historic and increase its value to sell it for a profit. But the Gentry have more elaborate tricks like hold on to the house, live there for two years and move on, getting a great tax break and thus more profit.

"Anyway, back to Manchas. Dogs don't know more than what you teach them, but they do have instinct. A dog is already bilingual. They speak "dog" and then they speak the basic language the owner teaches them. This all goes way back before civil rights and equality stuff. And the dogs don't care. When a dog is chasing a burglar, the burglar does care what language the dog speaks or understands. And dogs have a more effective way of communicating, thus the saying, "His bite is much more worse than his bark." So, a gentry person can sit there and talk to your dog but no matter if they speak in English or Spanish, the dog only obeys you and the words that come from your mouth.

"When the gentry sees a Chicano with a pure-bred, they are in cultural shock, wondering, "Why don't this vato have a Chihuahua?" Now you are imitating them, meaning you're keeping up with or outdoing the Jones. You've assimilated too well in their eyes. Besides, their dogs don't even like them. A dog is nothing but an extension of their insecurity. It's a status symbol, meaning they care, but then there's the dog side. Imagine being left at home indoors alone all day, not being able to go do your dog do-do, not having children around, having to bathe and smell like a human That's a lot of dog stress.

"So dogs will snarl, and bark and chase each other. That's natural among all species. And they either will or will not get along. But they don't plot and connive like Gringos or Gentry. The exception to this is if the owner specifically teaches the dog to hate and attack. But this is a whole 'nother area of dog psychiatry and therapy.
Rafa

I did like Arellano's answer, as far as he elaborated on Gente-fication, the only problem being that our combined Gente financial base gets drowned under the development money that builds Gentry bars, eateries and mota shops.

Anyway, after these four different takes on my question, I doubt there's any great lessons to be learned, other than maybe I shouldn't ask strange questions in my strange way. However, I will be more careful on how I phrase whatever future questions I do have. And, I know I won't get a Chihuahua, except maybe to vary my dog's diet. But if any readers out there have better takes on what transpired above, please leave comments.