Homies

Outside the US I don't know how familiar people are with Homies, or outside the state of California, for that matter. There was a time when you couldn't get away from them. These plastic figurines called Homies appeared in grocery vending machines in the mid-nineties and collectors were immediately hooked. They represent the variety of Southern California's Latino community, from a guy sitting with his boombox to a high school grad to a man in a wheelchair, and they each had a cool name, like "Hootchie" or "Vato Grande." They even had dogs, including the Rottweiler picture above. I obsessively collected for awhile, then forgot about them in a drawer. It wasn't until the other day that I was given a reason to remember Homies, when I ran across a Jeep dashboard covered with them. Actually, seeing that dashboard provided me a sense of relief: I was wild about collecting these figures, but not this wild: