Los Matadoritos

What wonders are conjured, what rough magic promised by the phrase "Mexican Midget Rodeo"? Let us pause to savor that more slowly: Mexican . . . Midget . . . Rodeo. That is to say, a touring troupe of little people, renowned in their native land but unheralded in our own, who face off against their equally diminutive bovine counterparts to ensuing mayhem.

At one such micro-spectacle staged several years ago at the Pico Rivera Sports Arena, deep in the sequined heart of southeastern Los Angeles, these genial ambassadors of human pathology, just by showing up for work in the morning, accomplished nothing short of a secular miracle. In one brief cultural elision, they managed to bring together an audience of Latino locals inured to that special strain of humor found on Spanish-language cable--men in bee costumes, baby diapers and so on--and drunken Anglos who saw the afternoon as something akin to dwarf tossing with a spicy flavor. And who's to say they were wrong? In the simple act of attending an ecumenical carnival, our warring tribes were reunited, the neural clash of our Meltingpotamian origins quelled and the lurking schizophrenia of cultural miscegenation momentarily tamed--all through our common fear of and fascination with "the Other."

Now, that very troupe is said to be planning its triumphal return to Pico Rivera this summer. For anyone who thinks of Los Angeles as a video mash-up of "The Day of the Locust" and "Freaks," look no further: Here is empirical proof.

I first got wind of this dust-choked pageant from a poster in the Ranch Market, the meat emporium at Sunset and Western where they sell hamburger for $1.85 a pound and I try not to ask questions. Above a giant photo of an escaramuza team, recalling the distaff equestrian display in the film "Y tu Mama Tambien," was a notice for the 3rd Festival Charro de Independencia, a Mexican Independence Day rodeo. Amid a long afternoon of singers, mariachis and comedians, there would appear the legendary Enanitos Toreros--the midget bullfighters of Mexico--like Sasquatch or Nessie, long-rumored in these parts, yet unsubstantiated. "La Entrada es Gratis! Gratis!" the poster gushed.

Bursting with intrepid zeal, I set out on the hourlong drive through East L.A. Yet arriving at Pico Rivera, off the 605 just west of Whittier, I was distressed to learn that entrada to the sports arena required a special ticket--and was certainly not "Gratis! Gratis!" by any stretch of the imagination. As I was kept waiting for 45 minutes in the pitiless Southern California sun, giant humorless gentlemen with walkie-talkies amply demonstrated the folly of attempting subterfuge in a second language, even as they allowed large families all the entrada they wanted.