This excerpt from a court statement made on 1928/1/11 is taken from Paco Villar’s Historia y Leyenda del Barrio Chino (1997):
On the night of the 13th to the 14th of April, 1927, by virtue of information held by the police implicating the individuals Rafael “Little Madrid” García Serra and Mario “Dove” Guallart García in cocaine dealing, as they found them together in Calle Mediodía, they proceeded to search them, confiscating a tube containing powder which, according to the report of the Legal Medical Laboratory, contained 30 centigrams of cocaine chlorhydrate which is damaging to one’s health, revealing the said detainees to have acquired it from Alfonso “Carmen Flores” Valero Duarte.
Barcelona gangsters were often given feminine nicknames back then, something I can’t recall having come across before, not even in the often bizarre world of tsotsitaal. (It’s interesting that Ethnologue says that tsotsitaal is “nearly extinct”. I have the impression that that is not what most people think, possibly because what it actually is is so poorly defined in the popular imagination that there is no way of telling if it has died out. The same may apply to fanakalo, whose demise has been mourned a dozen times by academics but which term is still widely used in places like Joburg to refer to a hotchpotch of the eleven official languages.)
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