“Pounce” aka Frederico Fernando Martinez had his roots in Juarez. As a very young boy pounce found himself on the streets when his parents were killed in a cartel war between rival cartels. As the streets swelled with orphans – and the numbers reached as high as 14,000, children were scrambling to find safety, shelter, and food to survive. Living on what he could scrounge off the steers he eventually befriended a family of pixie bobs, a breed of cat that has believed to have descended from the mountain bobcat. FF thought to himself, “ It never hurts to have a big, tough streetfighter on your side”, and FF stuck close. Soon he had taken up a number of cat traits including the pounce. As every street rat needs a moniker, Pounce stuck. As a street kid, pounce became very adept at pickpocketing, hustling, and surviving. Eventually, he along with a number of the pixie bobs and other street cats, formed their own street gang called the “underbobs” to join in the other 900 street gangs that make up the Juarez, El Paso turf protectors. All went well enough until things started to get out of hand in 2008 when the ‘war on crime’, and a US recession tore Juarez apart and became the murder capital of the world. 90,000 jobs were lost in 2008 and by 2011 a quarter of a million Mexicans had fled the city. A sidebar to this was that the street dog population increase by 10 fold and went from 20,000 to 200,000. It was no longer a safe place for the street cat population, nor for any resident lizards. The Mexican army moved in to bring some semblance of law and order, and gang life became very dangerous. The option of finding a respectable job in the 300 Maquiladas (assembly line plants) was almost nil and was harder to find than a leftover taco in a garbage bag. Pounce decided to pack up and head to the coast somewhere where it would be safer and cooler. The average daily high in a Juarez summer is over 35 degrees (96F), sometimes even reaching (120F) – even too hot for any respectable green lizard. He ended up in Bucerias and soon became friends with Coco and the Banderas Bay gang and decided to leave a life of crime behind. He can be found from time to time, speaking to gringos and teaching them about life in a gang, or how to deal with the cartel. Sometimes you will see him pouncing on a taco or other delicacy on the street.
