The Wild Dogs of Mexico

I really thought that after the discussions of heroin, body piercings, c-sections and Jamaican pre-operative transvestite prostitutes, there was nothing my students could say to surprise me.

Ha.

Last night after a lengthy lecture on grammar and a depressing discussion of MLA style, I turned the conversation to considering the source.  I told them my father always said to make sure I knew who sponsored the study before I spouted the statistics.  I know from working at Large Corporate Tax Prep that the glass is half-empty or half-full at fifty percent - it just depends on whose budget it's coming out of.  To drive home the fact that we're all good liars, we played "Two Truths and a Lie."

Usually this is a drinking game, but since I could tell some of my students were minutes away from a drink anyway, I decided we should abstain.  One of them is about to have a baby, after all.  It turned out that we actually knew a lot about each other from the random class conversations we'd already had.  One student, a girl that I knew was originally from Mexico, gave as her list she was a) twenty years old b) a native of Chihuahua, Mexico and c) the owner of a Chihuahua dog.

She is only eighteen. I knew that, so I won this round.  However, I went ahead to ask where Chihuahua is in Mexico.  Feeling ignorant as usual when confronted by an at-least-bilingual immigrant to this country (I used to work with a whole lot of them, me, paltry monolingual idiot that I am), I mentioned I didn't know there was a city named Chihuahua.  Probably not, because apparently it's a state. Oops.  Then L. went on to say that Chihuahuas are from there.  Makes sense, right?

Then she told me there are wild packs of Chihuahuas that live in the hills in caves.

I pondered this. In my mind's eye, I was visualizing wild packs of rat dogs terrorizing old Mexican ladies wearing black lace veils over their gray hair.  Old men waving specially-shaped guitars in anger at town hall meetings held near a church with an adobe steeple and belfry repenting the day some idiot decided the feral Chihuahuas should be a protected species.  Osama Bin Ladin sharing a meager crust of bread with his only cave-dwelling friend, a wild Chihuahua named Jose Ricardo Gonzalez III.

I think she might've been yanking my chain.  L. knows I don't know Jack about Mexico.  I actually just tried to play it cool, considering I would do frantic Internet research later.

I spent about ten minutes today Googling Chihuahuas in the hopes of finding pictures of cave-dwelling ankle-biters to post here for you, but I came up really dry. There is a school of thought that they descended from the fox, though, just so you know.

Woof.