In the seventies, when the Cowboys, having won two Super Bowls under legendary coach Tom Landry, marketed themselves heavily and became known as “America’s Team,” the commercials reached Mexican Americans, too. The first set of reasons why Mexican Americans love the Cowboys is historical, I learned. Blanca Lamar Gonzalez, 48, places other cowboys articles alongside the candle on her Dallas Cowboys altar at her home in La Joya, Texas, January 9, 2017. “My daughters asked me, ‘Why do you call him ‘The Cookie,’ Ma?’ ‘Because every time he falls, he breaks!” She let out a delighted laugh. I nicknamed him ‘ la galleta,’ ‘the cookie.’ “We like them a lot because this year se aventaron”-they kicked butt-she said in Spanish. Next to her, a woman in her seventies nodded her head and grinned widely. “All of Brownsville likes the Cowboys!” a woman in her fifties said to the camera. ![]() I messaged my uncle to do a little reporting for me and ask the people around him why they loved the Cowboys. Next to him, a boy in a large blue foam cowboy hat banging clumsily on some tri-toms and a base drum. A white double cab Chevy with Santa Claus in a Dak Prescott jersey waving at people as though on a float. A small black hatchback with blue Christmas lights strung along its outline. A green Ford pickup that was tricked out like a low-rider, its scissor doors opened up to the sky. It was a public performance involving mutual validation-the people on the sidewalks used their smart phones to record the ones in the cars, and the ones in the cars videotaped them back, each making victory signs at the other. “I was on the red bike with the luchador mask with the Cowboys logo, lol,” he texted.) A man in a white SUV parked on the corner where my uncle was and set off four bubble machines he’d strung together on the roof of his car, and kids jumped delightedly and swatted at them. ![]() (Later, my 27-year-old cousin Daniel Ballí would tell me he had been one of them. A pack of young men on motorbikes roared by. The noise-from bullhorns, from high-pitched female “wooos!”, from Mexican matracas-never stopped. Young women, children and grown men, all in the requisite blue jersey, popped out of sunroofs, hung halfway out of windows, and crowded the beds of pickups, waving Cowboys flags and blankets. Drivers never let up on their horns, and their passengers performed for the masses on the sidewalks, who cheered them on. It was a riot! Traffic along the main artery in the neighborhood slowed to about 15 miles per hour. I sat down with a glass of wine and watched the spectacle unfold. “To pitada or not to pitada?” another friend who was home for Christmas pondered on Facebook. I panicked a little-this might be my only chance to see the pitada-but I fired up my laptop and, lo and behold, one of my uncles was live-streaming from a street corner on Southmost. This was taking place not in Dallas, the Cowboy’s own city, but 550 miles south, in the predominantly Mexican and Mexican American neighborhood where I grew up, a place populated by families whose high schools have “killer state-winning soccer programs-but they live and die by an American football team’s fate each week.” ![]() It’s like a championship parade after every win.” Pito means horn-so, a gathering of horns? An event where you honk your horn? “It’s not just a few trucks honking and cheering,” my friend wrote, “but hundreds, probably a couple thousand people who line the sidewalks as well. What is a pitada? I didn’t know either, but I used my Spanish to venture a guess. An old high school friend recommended I try to check out something called the Southmost Pitada, which he’d been following on Facebook videos from California. The fans in Brownsville were going crazy. The Dallas Cowboys have been playing their best season in quite a while they might even get to the Super Bowl for the first time since 1995. NFL footage © NFL Productions LLC.Last month, before I went home to Brownsville for the holidays, I was told there was something I needed to see while I was there. All other NFL-related trademarks are trademarks of the National Football League. NFL and the NFL shield design are registered trademarks of the National Football League.The team names, logos and uniform designs are registered trademarks of the teams indicated.
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