After the bars, we cobble together a spontaneous group and find our way to some stylish art deco building in the Condesa, across from the Roma. Both neighborhoods are still in the early stages of their eventual gentrification. We stumble up several landings of stairs and into someone’s apartment, where we indulge on a sumptuous spread of canned beer, cigarettes, and coke. I want to please Leti. I want to fit in. She coos to me in raspy Spanish. This is how it goes until the glare of sunrise catches the silhouette of the fifty-five-story Torre Mayor, then under construction, its unfinished top exposed in shredded angles of steel.
Late at night, or sometimes in the morning, my head pounding, I return to the Colonia Zapata Vela, just a few miles to the east of Condesa and Roma but a world away from the scenes of organized hedonism. After a month or so with the family who first welcomed me to Mexico, I make a few connections and move into an triangle-shaped closet in a bachelor pad on loud and crowded Avenida Cuauhtémoc, between the Roma and Doctores neighborhoods, a few corners away from metro Hospital General. The roommates are two Scots and a model and musician from the city of Torreón, in the northeast near Monterrey. I am closer to the News, and also closer to achieving my chilango-fication.
I never pause to take notes about these first nights out in Mexico City. That would be uncool, and Leti and her friends seem to me in 2002 to be the epitome of cool. Their tastes and values are radically different from what I have just left. At Berkeley, the accepted standards at the time consisted of musical acts such as the Counting Crows, maybe some Mos Def, and anything popular in the imagination of an idealized Berkeley of the late 1960s. In Mexico City the youth sound that I encounter is mostly electronic, a mashed-up, bass-heavy, dirty disco beat that I have never before heard. It sounds cooler than cool. My friends navigate the city effortlessly. I envy their confidence and sophistication. They hustle, they bargain, they drink, smoke, and do drugs. They wear mullets and fauxhawks back when mullets and fauxhawks are only just cutting-edge. Sexuality is fluid, negotiable, and often utilized as trap or trick on partners or potential mates. I am running with a band of true modern hipsters before the term enters the lexicon and the market, before the self-eating self-awareness of global cool fully kicks in. They engage life with a surrender, a sustained vitality. I am entranced and intimidated in equal measure.
I lose track of Leti eventually. I spend my last three weeks in Mexico that summer backpacking across the south, from Cancùn to Oaxaca and Veracruz and Chiapas and back. By September, it becomes time to return to the “real world” and start a career. I return to California a different person from the one who had
left.
Mexico City is a site of essential rediscovery. For the first time I begin to consider the possibility that living with a cultural bipolarity could be okay, on balance. It is the city’s underlying lesson. My identity can remain unresolved. And if so, the possibility exists for me to walk in two worlds at once. And if I can walk in two worlds at once, I could walk in three, four, or forty. The journey, the searching, is itself the point of arrival. Mestizaje became a material truth operating inside me, inside all of us. So Mexico City, teeming with millions and millions, as surreal as Los Angeles, as majestic as New York, a mighty city all its own, became both my crossroads and my destination.
Before long, it beckons me back. Early on the morning of November 1, 2007, my parents drive me from San Diego across the border to Tijuana’s international airport. I take it as a welcome omen that it is the start of the Days of the Dead. A few hours later I am riding in an airport taxi along choked Viaducto to a house in Tacubaya, one of the oldest colonias in Mexico City. Mario, a blogger I know—raised in Mexico City, based in Barcelona—puts me in touch with two guys who have an extra room in a large, old art deco house on a private courtyard. One is a musician, the other a researcher and writer. It sounds perfect.
I know I am part of a wider movement. For a period in the middle of the ’00s—around the time when the trendy L.A. clothing company American Apparel decides to launch not only a store in Mexico City but a magazine about it—twentysomethings of certain means from all over the world fall under the spell of the Mexican megacity. We leave jobs, college campuses, and home addresses where unemployment checks would still be sent. For the most part, it is not an exodus of much significance. We move to Mexico simply to breathe and live the culture, to pursue our writing, art, or photography, to capitalize on its cool.
I ready my survival arsenal. In a flurry of bureaucratic maneuvering and with the help of relatives in Tijuana, I leave California armed with a Mexican birth certificate and a Mexican identification card. My parents are Mexican. In accordance with the current binational diplomatic relations, I could be as well. “Mexican born on foreign soil.” It sounds absurd, which is just the sort of tone I’m after.
The new roommates in Tacubaya, Diego and Pablo, greet me at the doorstep and lead me upstairs for a tour and a glass of tequila poured in a new way for me, just a quarter way up. A guitar and an upright piano are in the living room. Plants are perched territorially in corners. They show me my bedroom, tell me I can use its creaky wooden desk. The sensation—the feeling of temporary weightlessness that comes with moving, making a fresh start—reminds me of my arrival five years earlier at the Uruzquietas’ home. This time, my stay doesn’t have an end date.
3 | La Banda
They’re D.F. kids, they’re banda, and they’re into the Ramones. (Photo by the author.)
When it is time for the weekly Chopo street market to shut down, the rains come. It is Saturday afternoon, 5:00 p.m., Aldama Street, around from the Buenavista rail station and above the Buenavista metro, northwest of downtown. During rainy season a shower strikes in the afternoon at roughly the same time, in more or the less the same way, every day. First it is a sprinkle, then a steady pattering, then a violent downpour so ruthless it seems almost self-aware. El Chopo, the historic street market that caters to Mexico City’s alternative “urban tribes,” is a village of pirates beneath the rainfall. It is one of those places in the world that creates its own set of unspoken rules and collective behavior, invisible to the casual eye. For thirty years, on Saturdays when there isn’t much else to do, kids in Mexico City have been getting together here to buy and sell music and rock T-shirts. Mostly they just hang out. Do whatever you want to do, the mood seems to say, but respect the flow.
When the rain comes, the stalls shut down and the punk rockers scurry into the cervecerίas, the neighborhood beer joints that dot the streets near the Chopo market. Most of them are cramped single rooms open wide to the street. They’re already packed. All you can find in the beer joints are just a few chairs and a couple of refrigerators brimming with frosty caguama liters of Corona, Indio, and Victoria. The bottles are wide enough to fill a whole hand. Old women sit out front offering quesadillas, making the beer joint a “restaurant,” but everyone in the room knows the place is really there for the purpose of being drunk in. It’s standing room only.
Inside the cervecerίa there are couples making out, fingers strumming a guitar, a voice singing, mohawks twinned in earnest discussion, play and sound, muggy lighting. I am here alone again, trying to be inconspicuous, avoiding the aggressive gazes that regulars reserve for any newcomer. I bum a cigarette from a guy in a green military jacket. He flags me immediately as a nonlocal, by my accent.
“There are few Mexican people who keep a respect for others, for people from other countries,” the guy tells me. “I suggest to you that if you do not have a Mexican tour guide, you get yourself a hotel room, maybe by around eight at night, and you stay there till morning.”
My lecturer is a twentysomething Chopo regular in shades. I can tell that he’s smart, and probably a little drunk. He is assuming that I am a tourist. “If you want to hang out until tomorrow, that’s cool . . . but . . . your accent.”
“Indicates that I’m not—?” I start asking.
“You just have to say, ‘Cerveza, cerveza,’ ” the guy says, mocki
ng a gringo Spanish accent. “If a sharp person sees you talking in some other accent, they’ll say, ‘This pendejo I’ll make him a pendejo.’ ”
An idiot.
“But my accent is—”
“Your accent is foreign,” he interrupts.
“But I’m from California,” I protest.
“Even if you’re from Monterrey, I recognize the accent, dude.” Monterrey is the big industrial city in the north, and it’s also not anywhere near California. “Even if you’re from Monterrey, I recognize that accent, and I’ll go, ‘This güey, charge him triple, güey!’ ”
I can’t help but laugh. We laugh together.
“Mexicans don’t trust other Mexicans,” the guy sighs.
During my first stay in Mexico City with the Uruzquietas, Don Alfredo’s nephew Sebastián guides me on excursions to the city center. Sebastián’s usual look is baggy jeans and hemp jewelry. With dark brown skin and intensely curly and shiny black hair, he is a Mexico City native whose genetic code leans heavily toward afromestizo, the African-dominant racial mixture. He is walking ahead of me, moving like a cool and calm explorer of the urban obstacle course, a tropical gangster. He takes me for the first time to El Chopo.
“You can get good jeans there” is all he says by way of explanation.
Then as now in 2008, my initial fascination with the market is superficial. Mohawks, dreadlocks, all the outward sincere displays of “true music fans”—didn’t all of this go out of style with the start of the new millennium? Don’t irony and cynicism reign now? El Chopo is on its face a retro throwback. Just a few blocks long, one street wide, the once-a-week Tianguis Cultural del Chopo—tianguis is a Náhuatl word that survives in usage today, meaning “market”—is the permanent citadel of the Mexican counterculture. Or what’s left of it. This is where a small band of romantic souls keep their idea of utopia or anarchy on perpetual repeat. The choperos, as the writer Carlos Monsiváis once put it, “find a provision of energy in the obsessions that so many others have retired.” The landscape is jarring, definitely, coming across hordes of punks and rastas and skinheads, dressed almost too perfectly so, week after week. This quality of persistence is precisely what makes so many others dismiss El Chopo as a parody of itself, a thing of quaintness.
But something about the attitude of the regulars intrigues me. Ritual attendants at Chopo are usually suspicious of outsiders. They treat their market like it is an intangible jewel to be protected—as if they were hiding a secret they don’t want you to know about. The day I meet the guy who tags me as a tourist and instructs me to get to a hotel and not emerge till morning, I hobble back to Tacubaya feeling both chastened and hopeful. At least someone talked to me this time. I have been going to El Chopo about a couple times a month since I moved here, trying to figure it out. Most times I
am alone. I wander the stalls, browsing the tour T-shirts, pipes, jeans, hoodies, and vintage jackets. I look at HELLO MY NAME IS stickers, leather and hemp jewelry, skateboards, old rocker magazines, CDs, concert DVDs, Doc Martens boots, hip-hop mix-tapes, beanies, spray-can caps, studded wristbands—whatever a young Mexican kid needs to visually present himself as an “alternative” individual. It’s all sold here. The punk, goth, skinhead, rockabilly, skater, hip-hop head, tagger, emo, or rasta, or any mix-and-match combination of the above, is at home. Carrying an item bought at El Chopo implies its own kind of currency. The tianguis has a value beyond its obvious function of commerce.
One afternoon I meet a woman in plain motherly clothing standing at the back of the market resting against a chain-link fence, behind the area where bands play and hard-core “anarco-punks” sell patches and vegan tacos. The woman’s little son is nearby. A conversation bubbles up between us. “I met my husband here,” she tells me, “way back in 1982.”
I don’t know this at the time, but the woman is referring to a different physical location. For its first several years after starting in fall 1980, I’d later find out, El Chopo took place at the Museo Universitario El Chopo, a museum affiliated with the UNAM, the national university, which is how the tianguis got its name. But El Chopo is El Chopo wherever it’s held, and over the years it’s been held at many places before finding its home here on Aldama Street. It is not just a street market, it is a happening.
The woman and I watch a group of kids in lucha libre wrestling masks mosh incoherently to the sounds of an indie band playing before us, in the shadows of a few nondescript apartment towers and a huge electrical generator plant. The moshing kids can’t be more than fifteen or sixteen years old. They wear masks, they tell me later, because their favorite band, Los Elásticos, wear masks.
The Chopo mom is silent. She sighs. “It used to be a lot more punk.”
The first iteration of the Tianguis Cultural del Chopo happened on October 4, 1980. That’s a month before I was born—or in rock-n-roll terms, aeons ago. It did not have a name at first. The tianguis came together in response to a call from the director of the Chopo museum at the time, the author Ángeles Mastretta, for a “space for musicians, collectors, producers, and all the banda interested in rock, jazz, and related sounds to exchange, distribute, and sell records and everything related to music,” according to a small volume on the history of the market, Tianguis Cultural del Chopo: Una larga jornada.
“Bartering was El Chopo’s blood,” writes the author of the history, an original chopero named Abraham Ríos. “Esoteric records appeared: the European progressives, the Mexican productions by Focus, the psychedelic H. P. Lovecrafts and Ultimate Spinach; the first Zappas, the Happy Trails of Quicksilver Messenger Service, Grape Jam, or Fever Tree.”
A nerve had been struck. The spontaneous market grew and grew. It outgrew the museum and spilled out onto the streets. The local borough government and neighborhood toughs seeking to extort the rockers constantly threatened to kill the market, sometimes through direct violence. It moved several times, conjuring images of a chosen tribe of rockers wandering the desert of the unforgiving city. But El Chopo could not be contained. The chavos, the banda, had spoken.
“There was no place for chavos to get together at the time,” says Javier Hernández Chelico, another Chopo OG. Hernández, gray-haired and wearing jeans and a vest, writes a weekly column on the market in the daily La Jornada. We meet one day near the anarco-punks. “They took control of a thing that was not theirs. There was no directive, no order. The chavos generated El Chopo.”
The term banda pops up often in discussion on the Chopo community. Its meaning is simple yet elusive. Evoking youth, rock-n-roll, and resistance, la banda is the umbrella under which all subcultures are accepted. To be banda is to be part of the crew, the tribe. Banda is the ultimate compliment. But back then, forming part of the banda functioned also as a survival mechanism for the young people of Mexico. In the period when the foundations of El Chopo were being laid, the government didn’t just frown upon alternative types, it killed them. The Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, had ruled Mexico as a quasi-authoritarian state since the end of the Revolution, the so-called “perfect dictatorship.” The PRI dominated all segments of government and society at large and regarded state violence as a fundamental tool of order and control. Three critical events, in 1968 and in 1971, laid the groundwork for a banda revolution to which El Chopo owes its existence. The bartering rockers who founded and still guard El Chopo were doing nothing short of standing up to a history stacked mightily against them.
In late July 1968, a series of innocent-looking brawls between rival street gangs and so-called porro student groups sparked an unprecedented popular movement for government reform—a movement that was ultimately defeated by the government with fatal force. The student brawls had violently been repressed by state riot police, who entered campuses and caused wider mayhem on the streets. The repression generated an indignant response from the university communities. Marches were staged. Manifestos were drafted. Far-left political groups, unions, and professionals of many kinds joined the movem
ent. The PRI began feeling the heat.
The PRI—and its partner in paranoia and repression, the U.S. intelligence community—feared that if left unchecked, the movement that emerged in summer 1968 would grow and embarrass the country hosting the first Olympics staged in the developing world or, worse, could possibly herald a Cuban-style upheaval in Mexico, which was what some in the movement at the time actually wanted. It had to be stopped. Days before the opening of the 1968 Olympic Games in Mexico City, on October 2, government forces opened fire on hundreds of unarmed protesters who had gathered for another rally at the Plaza de las Tres Culturas in Tlatelolco. Shots rang out across the city that rainy night as the PRI, its police and its paramilitaries, sought to squelch once and for all a peaceful student movement that clamored for reform, accountability, and transparency in the government. The number killed at Tlatelolco may never be fully known. The government initiated a blackout campaign on the massacre that to this day is only beginning to be unmasked.
Tlatelolco was a turning point. It left a permanent scar on those who survived it and provided a key reference point of collective trauma for generations to come. The one-party state had declared open war on its sons and daughters. It was only the beginning of an epic struggle. From then on, as was happening in other Latin American pseudo-democracies, Mexico initiated a so-called Dirty War against dissidents. From university students in the cities to land-rights leaders in the countryside, activists of every stripe were arrested, persecuted, or simply “disappeared.” Journalists were silenced or put on the PRI payroll. People from those generations still tell stories of being profiled, rounded up, roughed up, harassed, and intimidated as they raised their voices in protest against the regime.
A second mass attack on unarmed demonstrators followed on June 10, 1971. Demonstrators in D.F. attempted to march to the Zócalo from a collection of technical colleges in a northeast area of the city known as Casco de Santo Tomás, near metro San Cosme. A paramilitary group known as Los Halcones, or the Falcons, surrounded the students with clubs and guns. Many died in the violence that followed. Once again, we’ll never know how many for sure. The news media by then operated as a complicit arm of the PRI, the party’s willing censors and stenographers. The dailies reported the next day that a “conflict between students” had occurred at the Casco de Santo Tomás. President Luis Echeverría, who had been interior minister during Tlatelolco and therefore instrumental in its execution, once more succeeded in violently squelching dissent. The Jueves de Corpus massacre, as it was named because it occurred on the Corpus Christi feast day, would largely be forgotten.
Down and Delirious in Mexico City: The Aztec Metropolis in the Twenty-First Century Page 4