The New Face of the 'Carny': Mexicans from Veracruz Increasingly Run US Carnivals Joshua Partlow - The Washington Post
go to original January 9, 2014

A view of Tlapacoyan, the town where many Mexicans who now earn their livings at America’s carnivals, circuses and fairs come from. (Joshua Partlow/The Washington Post)

What does the word “carny” bring to mind? Barbed-wire tattoos and Marlboro reds? That culture is fading away. The new face of the American carnival worker is Mexican — more specifically, Tlapacoyan.

Each year, about 3,000 people from this small town and the surrounding villages decamp to the United States to man America’s Tilt-a-Whirls and fry up carnival-goers’ elephant ears. These seasonal migrants, who have found the jobs through word of mouth or family connections, make up a third to a half of the nation’s carnival workforce. Many were recruited by Judkins’s JKJ Workforce Agency.

Without them, said Monica Dowis, a manager at Paradise Amusements of Post Falls, Idaho, “we’d be out of business.”

“It would destroy the carnival industry,” said Betty Gillette, a carnival entrepreneur in Pittsfield, Maine, who has a sign on her office wall that reads “Powered by Mexicans.”

Read the rest at The Washington Post

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