Un Buen Carnicero

Saw this documentary about Tolo, a butcher at Cliff's Meat Market, at the Southern Documentary Fund event in Durham last Sunday.  It's a good video, worth the 15 minutes or so it takes to watch it. Or at least half of it.

What's interesting is that, though it's "about" Tolo, the theme that jumped out at me was that Tolo and Cliff are basically just embodiments of a Platonic ideal of the butcher -- or anyone in customer service, for that matter.  Which isn't surprising, since Tolo was trained by and works for Cliff.

On the one hand, it's nice to see a cross-section of Carrboro's legacy African-American and newer hispanic populations.  On the other, there are almost no hipster white people in this doc, which seems a little out of keeping with the reality of Carrboro today.  It is a sentimental casting of a "real" or "authentic" Carrboro which does, as we see, still exist.  But it's not all there is, not by a long shot.