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Comments (0) Best Local YouTube Performance - 2009

"Sweet Home Hialeah" by Enrique Santos and Joe Ferrero

We could explain why this video is so funny, but it's better to just let local poet and Hialeah native Yaddyra Peralta guide you through the entire thing: "Okay, when it starts, the guy's wearing a fat gold chain and hanging out with chongas — the gangsta-looking girls with tight clothes and loads of gold. Singer shakes hands with guy wearing a straw hat. These guys walk through traffic around 49th/103rd Street, selling water, flowers, churros, etc., and any reference to the canal is supposed to be funny because (a) they are ubiquitous in Hialeah and (b) you're not supposed to go near them because they are dirty, gross, and full of crocodiles (according to your mother, of course). When you catch guys swimming or fishing in them, it's supposed to be the most disgusting, ghetto thing in the world... 'The canals are not the beaches of Holguín, but I'll go for a swim.' Holguín is one of Cuba's most beautiful beaches and historically where Christopher Columbus first set foot. The singer inserts the English word swim, pronounced sween, which rhymes with Holguín. Of course, you know about the famed Hialeah Cuban Spanglish... More references to water, mud, and factories. There's a myth that it rains more in Hialeah than in any other part of Miami, probably because any amount of rainfall causes severe flooding... double-entendre food items... Chicharrones are more meaty and fatty than your standard pork rind and really good but eat too much and they'll kill you... Chancleta is flip-flop. A chancletera is a woman who always wears flip-flops no matter what the occasion... 'I give them the finger and say f*%$ you!' You'll see this happen anywhere: the mall, outside at school between parents, in traffic, the bus stop, dentist's office... The one thing I haven't referenced, because it might be obvious, is that the whole backdrop with the tires and the cars has to do with the popular Hialeah pastime of pimping out your car. There are loads of mechanics and body shops in Hialeah. Oh, and I never want to hear this song again. You owe me a beer."

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