Overview

• Short videos show youths in white, red, blue and black clown makeup walking solemnly through working‑class streets as the song “Ojitos mentirosos” plays.
• Creators and viewers widely connect the look to Gael García Bernal’s 2019 film Chicuarotes, using its masked‑suffering motif as visual shorthand.
• Coverage describes the clips as a form of silent protest that foregrounds precarity, frustration and pushback against gentrification in urban neighborhoods.
• The track used is a cumbia composed by Coré Cuestas Chacón and popularized in Mexico by Tropicalísimo Apache in the early 1990s, now surging again on social media.
• What began in Mexico has been replicated by users in countries including Colombia, Peru and Argentina, intensifying debate over visibility versus the aestheticization of poverty.