First, a primer in Mexican advertising: there are no classifieds, no Penny Savers, and no fliers delivered to your door. Instead, you pay someone who has a speaker on their car to drive around town announcing your amazing iguana meat for sale, or your wonderful Tlyudas from Oaxaca, or the date and time of your spouse's funeral. If you live in a really small town, they don't bother driving around, they just put a speaker up on a pole and make announcements all day long(often 4 times, once in each direction). The announcers don't read in boring monotone voices, but dramatize, like sport's announcers.
Until recently I've thought of this as an unusual and loud but a reasonable solution for advertising in this society. That was until I experienced a stationary announcement . . . a single announcement . . . repeatedly . . loudly . . . with speakers directed at my house . . . at 9 pm . . . when my children were suppose to go to sleep . . . for more than 20 minutes. My Canadian ways of thinking began to surface. "This is crazy!" "How can they be allowed to do this?" "In Canada we would call the police for disturbing the peace!" After fuming to myself, I decided I would take action and tell them to turn it down, as we had already heard their announcement to remember it till we die and maybe even later.
The problem with my plan was that I don't know how to politely (or rudely) tell someone to turn it down in Spanish. So I asked my friend who works in the cafe next door about my problem. I asked her if it was permitted to leave the announcements pouring on a few unfortunate houses. Her sympathetic reply with a smile was, "In Mexico, yes." But, being a good friend, she went and asked them to turn it down. The dial was turned down a millimeter and I returned home to marvel at the differences between life in Mexico and Canada. Eventually they turned it off or left to bother someone else.
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