A Trip Through the Mind of a Crazy Mexican is the story of El Crazy Mex, the founder of the Royal Mexican Players and the consummate “brown man.” In an interview with a reporter, El Crazy Mex remembers stories from his childhood, which he performs with his troupe. These four plays-within-the-play tell of his first kiss, his meeting God and, eventually, his true Mexican name: Alvaro Saar Rios, the real-life Houston founder of the real-life Royal Mexican Players.
Confused? Rios concedes that his “fictional” play is actually a “semiautobiographical” account of his own journey to discover his Mexican heritage. El Crazy Mex’s all-Mex-all-the-time attitude proceeds from Rios’s own shame of being a once-assimilated “coconut.” “It’s like the African-American term of Oreo,” Rios says, “dark on the outside, white on the inside. I didn’t even know I was a Mexican until I was nine or ten. I spoke English at home, and my birth certificate said ‘white.'”
Though Rios promises “there’s no pointed allusions or an ending tied up with a bow,” this tale of tolerance is worth the trip.
April 20-29
This article appears in Apr 20-26, 2006.