The story opens in Chihuahua North Mexico with a chance meeting with a group of itinerant Mexican street performers. Entranced by their stories & free-roaming lifestyle author Catriona Rainsford decides to go with them on what becomes a two-year h&-to-mouth journey across Mexico learning to live off nothing more than a few performance skills initiative & the kindness of strangers. Compelling humorous sometimes violent & full of wonderful descriptions of life on the road this is also a discussion of the morality of h&-to-mouth travel. Packed with stories of the characters she meets on the Mexican streets the book offers an insight into the day-to-day experiences of Mexico's urban poor. Above all it is a tale of the struggle of Mexico's youth to transcend the country's current climate of corruption & violence & create a new identity for themselves inspired by aspects of Mexico's surviving indigenous cultures & the desire to make people smile in the most unprepossessing of places. ' They were travelling malabaristas
- itinerant circus performers who wandered the streets of Mexico hitchhiking from town to town & surviving by whatever means they could. They saw themselves as a modern take on the ancient tradition of the wandering entertainer taking their art to the people & taking whatever the people were prepared to give them to help them on their way'.