ABSTRACT
We are sitting around the dinner table eating a savory meatball and rice plate (albóndigas) prepared by my host’s wife. Eduardo and his wife are hard-working, middle-aged, and stocky; their oldest daughter is going to a private university, their second daughter works with them while she waits for her turn to study tourism. Their youngest child is a teenager in high school who practices soccer in the afternoons or kicks the ball around with the pre-school children in the courtyard of their vecindad (housing complex). Small children from neighboring apartments come in and out and one small red-headed girl is invited to stay for dinner, which the boy tenderly feeds to her. The apartment is comfortable and solidly middle-class, the furniture is sensible and sturdy. In sum, this looks like a solid and loving middle-class family, the kind of family that politicians would be proud to claim as the “salt of the earth,” with children who happily help their parents at their work and seem to be immune from rebellious drug use that consumes so many young teenagers. However, every few minutes Eduardo gets up and goes to the closet under the stairs to replace 15 hot CDs from his “burners” with 15 blank CDs. Outside the vecindad the bustle of the largest illegal market of counterfeit goods in Mexico is just ending for the day, and under my chair are stacks of CD cases we have just prepared. After dinner the cases will be filled with bootleg copies of popular Mexican and American albums, and tomorrow they will take them to their stall on the street and start another day as criminals.
