On or about 05 October 2016, I took Paul and Julie to Juarez.
Paul and Julie were ballroom dancers. Like The Sound of Music.
Okay maybe not exactly like Christopher Plummer and Mary Poppins, but you get the idea.
When Paul had called to arrange the tour, he had asked me if I knew of any dance halls in Juarez. Dance halls that would be open the afternoon they would be in town.
“Yeah. But things change pretty fast in Juarez. I can’t promise that it will by open when you get here.”
But it was.
I took them to El Cuartrero, a joint with a live band even in the afternoons.
The Cuartrero is downtown, south of the cathedral, across Calle Mina, one of the seedier streets in downtown Juarez. (In 2012 when the Policìa Municipal shut down 40 or 50 bars in one weekend because none of them had liquor licenses, the bulk of those bars were on Calle Mina. The rest were on Calle de la Paz.)
El Cuartrero is either a bar with a dance floor or a dance hall that sells drinks.
Inside, as soon as our eyes adjusted, Paul and Julie hit the dance floor and I grabbed a table and a Carta and a shot of Jimador. They danced and after a couple of songs came and sat down to catch their breath.
The dance floor at the Cuartrero is square, surrounded by a counter, drinkers on stools on the outside, dancers inside gyrating and gliding in a generally counterclockwise flow. A ranchera band plays on the far edge of the dance floor on a stage that’s four feet high. The band has four or five pieces, and sometimes a sax player sits in, but the music is generally musica ranchera.
Women sit in chairs against the back wall and they’ll dance with you for eight pesos.
On the day Paul and Julie and I were there, two gentlemen were standing at the edge of the dance floor. They wore tailored vaquero suits, one in baby blue and the other charcoal grey, and boots, and expensive tejanas. It was mid-afternoon on a weekday, and there weren’t many people in the bar. A few men wore Wranglers and ball caps. The two girls chatting in the back had put in efforts to look fashionable.
Paul asked me, “Can the band play a chacha?”
I walked across the dance floor to the stage and asked the guy in front.
He swiveled on his bench in front of the keys. “Chacha?” he asked.
“Sì. Pueden tocar una chacha?”
“Chacha?”
He didn’t know what I meant.
“Sì. Una chacha.”
We went through it a couple of times before comprehension came to his face like the sun coming up.
“Ah,” he said. “El chachachá.”
“Eso.”
The band played a chachachá, and Paul and Julie chachaed, and I edged over to where to two dandies were standing.
“Are they relatives of yours?” the guy in the baby blue suit asked me in Spanish.
No, I said, and I explained that I gave tours in Juárez, and Paul and Julie were clients.
“You will never have any trouble here.”
Here? Here in the bar, or here in the neighborhood? Or here in Juárez? Who were these guys?
Of course I didn’t really ask any of those questions. I just said thank you.
I was still pondering the answers to those questions as Paul and Julie and I stepped out into the afternoon sun and walked back towards the bridge.
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