Down and Delirious in Mexico City: The Aztec Metropolis in the Twenty-First Century

by Daniel Hernandez

  A circle quickly forms and we decide it is time to go. I have lost Enrique and Denise in the drinking and dancing spree. A group of us glide down the stairs to the open street. We gallop over to the plaza in front of the Museo Nacional de Arte, brilliantly lit in the 3:00 a.m. chill. We—it is impossible to say whom with precision—pile into a cab and speed forward, destination uncertain. Crammed in the backseat with Vicky Fox, the pixie in white, Miguel Calderón, and a few others, I am so drunk and happy I become inexplicably furious at the driver. I demand he not drive us around in circles, running up the fare, as cabdrivers in Mexico City often do. In my delirium, I accuse him of cheating us even before we move a few blocks. I curse him and curse all cabdrivers everywhere in the world and on other planets. The driver wisely ignores me.

  We arrive at a cramped cantina in the lower Condesa, and I feel transported to, of all places, Paris, circa 2003. Echoes of a visit there. A dance floor, dim lighting, nothing to drink but beer, cigarette smoke, magically liberated young women who appear to inhabit other time zones and cultural genres—1990s rock, 1990s hip-hop, 1990s electro. The pixie trails along with us the entire time, saying barely a word. I do not learn his name until the morning after, Quetzalcóatl Rangel Sánchez, a fashion designer and half of the creative force behind the up-and-coming label Marvin y Quetzal. As the sun begins rising, Quetzal and I wind up navigating Avenida Revolución in Tacubaya, inviting ourselves into a new friend’s apartment at the iconic Ermita building, an art deco landmark. We watch daybreak from the high windows and marvel at the morning traffic roaring below us. The following day, we manage to make it back to our respective houses. I had somehow lost a couple of prized homemade necklaces. Quetzal says we’d find ourselves online and be in touch.

  We talk that very night. We come to a solid conclusion: “We should go out again.”

  For a period in the mid to late 2000s, fashion is in, in Mexico City, and I feel compelled to cover every aspect and every minute of it. Mostly, this involves socializing and drinking every night of the week at sponsored parties. The Paola Arriola show is reportedly sponsored by a young party impresario named Rodrigo Peñafiel, a surname seen on millions of bottles and cans of mineral water across Mexico. I quickly learn how the parties work. A good amount of money is always behind the best parties in D.F., the ones where there’s no hassle to get in and no hassle for drinks. You just . . . arrive. The tricky part is knowing where and when, and with whom. For the next six months or so, as if it is my holy duty, I attend every fashion-scenester-hipster event in Mexico City that I can get into. I network with promoters, DJs, organizers, and producers. I get myself on e-mail lists and then at-the-door lists. I kiss lots of cheeks and shake lots of hands. I watch all the relevant event updates on Facebook feeds. Little by little, doors open, lists expand, access becomes an assumption. If I am not guaranteed access, I learn that with the right attitude and approach, a true Mexico City fashionista can talk his way into virtually anywhere.

  I had learned how to network in Los Angeles after living in neighborhoods such as Echo Park and Silver Lake. I was already a dedicated scenester. In Mexico City, I begin gaining access not only to hipster parties and fashion shows, but to the burgeoning stream of film festivals, high-society art openings, mega-concerts, and brand-sponsored cocktail hours. To the movers of the scene in Mexico City, I was “from Los Angeles,” and in this moment both cities gave the other equal levels of cool cachet. But I didn’t confuse one for the other. The Mexico City scene felt like one sustained climactic moment, night after night, week after week, driven by the sense that in this town more than anywhere else, the party is it. In Mexico for as long as anyone can remember, nothing has been more important than to deliver oneself to the rite of the fiesta whenever the opportunity presents itself. And no one in Mexico City at the moment is partying harder and more exuberantly than its fashionable hipsters.

  By its very nature the formula is tricky. Devotion to such partying can do wonders for the vitality of someone’s professional profile, but without the proper precautions, it can also cause a professional downfall, or worse. This is the world that I fell into right away in Mexico City, a world that is exceedingly welcoming to foreigners. These are the people for whom partying is synonymous with work—and with risk. For me, like them, it becomes an obsession.

  “I was supershy at the beginning,” the fashion blogger César Arellano tells me over lunch one day in the Condesa. It is January 2008, a year after he launched his blog, Diario de Fiestas. Our conversation takes place in English, characteristic of the first-world leanings within the Mexico City scenester community. César has a lean face, darty eyes—good for quickly scanning a room—and a sneaky grin. He wears neckties and bow ties and shiny wing tips, stuff like that.

  The first post on the blog is titled “En el Cultural Roots,” referring to an underground downtown club that caters to the Mexico City reggae scene. César had gone to a “weird” art-rock show there. He posted just two images of the night: a shot of the backside of a girl in a pink vintage-looking dress dancing wildly, holding a microphone, and a shot of a person holding a microphone, wearing an absurd sumo-wrestler costume, a silver eye mask, and a silver metallic wig.

  “I took these photos in November,” Arellano writes on his first post. “They introduce perfectly the tone that I’d like to frequent on this blog. . . . I don’t remember the band, but to me they were brilliant.”

  Photos follow of parties at an underground club called El Patio de Mi Casa, then shots at an opening party for the Kurimanzutto gallery, then one of César’s outfits hanging on a door waiting for the night to begin (“Vintage Yale University sports coat, T-shirt by María Peligro, JBrand skinny jeans, and plaid SB Jordan sneakers,” he writes). More posts followed, like candids from debauched living-room birthday parties. March came around, and with it, a barrage of posts from Fashion Week. In a short time, Arellano added links, mixing little blogs and big houses: I’ll Be Your Mirror, Givenchy, Diary of a Third World Fashionista, Balenciaga, Love Naomi, Mexican Flamboyant, Prada. People started looking.

  “I used to go to a party and take ten pictures and that was it,” César says at lunch. “But they were my friends, and it was easy to take pictures of them. It was me and it was my close friends and that was it. Then three months later, everyone was looking at it. I don’t know, one hundred people were looking at it. The same people who were going out every weekend.”

  The need to document was apparent. After spending some time apprenticing with a photographer in San Miguel de Allende,

  and freelancing for an established Mexico City fashion designer, Arellano began meeting young fashionistas who were resettling in the capital and putting on parties. So many had spent time abroad, while many were foreigners themselves: Argentines, Venezuelans, and the Mexican-born but U.S.-raised. In a loose phenomenon, many young Mexicans had soaked up Paris, London, Montreal, New York, Los Angeles, Barcelona, and other world capitals in the early part of the 2000s. They returned to Mexico City around 2005 and 2006 with a refined global sensibility. All were hungry to party—and to prove themselves.

  “I felt there was a scene, you know, there was something happening,” Arellano explains. “I felt it at Patio. I remember I was at a Zombies party, more than a year ago, and there were at least twenty people dressed amazingly, and the music was great, and the outfits were great.” He pauses, as though it sounds so self-evident. “And the night was amazing.”

  Arellano kept posting. Viewers of Diario de Fiestas rapidly doubled many times over. By late 2007, it seemed every scenester in the city was logging on to the site, looking for shots of themselves from the night before, ogling strangers, critiquing looks, looking for hints for the next spate of parties. From afar, fashion-conscious bloggers in other world capitals started taking notice, adding Diario de Fiestas to their link bars, to peek in and see what the cool kids of Mexico City were wearing on any given night.

  Partying, it turned out, is work. For his entry documenti
ng the María Peligro runway show and after-party, César expresses some exhaustion with the world he is so faithfully recording. He writes, “At one moment in the night I got tired of the scene and the alcohol and eternally carrying around my camera. After a week, I’m recuperating from it. It must have been the overdose of runway shows and after-parties in October.”

  “God,” he adds in English. “I’m so glad it is over.”

  It is late spring now, and there is another party at the club called Pasagüero.

  “Another party” is how it is described to me and how I describe it to others. Another party, after some other parties, and before a few others to come. I don’t know why I am here again. Maybe it is Fashion Week. Maybe it is some other foreign brand in town to penetrate the market: Bacardi, Absolut, Nike, Adidas. Maybe it is someone’s magazine-issue release party. I had been to Pasagüero before for one of those. It is in Centro, on a pedestrian street, and the music always bounces loudly up the ditches made by the old buildings facing one another. Back in the early 2000s, which is to say, a million years ago, Pasagüero was the place to be in Centro for Mexico City’s scenesters. There and at El Patio de Mi Casa, which was more “underground,” but anyway that was well before Pasaje America came around, also in Centro, when that club turned into the place to be for—oh—about two months.

  What are we doing here again? Last time I was at Pasagüero, Mark “the Cobra Snake” Hunter and Steve Aoki were DJing. The leading scenesters in Los Angeles, down in Mexico to throw a party. People were desperate to get in. Now, another party at Pasagüero. My friend Cristal, a dedicated Mexico City scenester, is having a vodka. Cool kids are everywhere around us, talking, drinking, laughing, posing for photos.

  “Isn’t this, kinda, you know, fake?” I suddenly ask Cristal.

  “Nothing that we have is ours,” she admits blankly. “We follow the current.”

  Cristal and I remain concerned with the particulars. Who’s taking photos? Where is Diario de Fiestas? Where is Domestic Fine Arts? Who will go home with whom? What’s happening later? What am I wearing?

  “It’s malinchismo,” Cristal says. I ponder this for a moment. Could the surge in this distinctly new subculture—“hipster,” “scenester,” “cool kid,” whichever you prefer—be yet another expression of the storied Mexican tradition of unduly overvaluing anything foreign and First World? The party is for Nike, we determine. Nike is throwing a party at Pasagüero and we are here even though we aren’t sure exactly why. Yet we see no other option but to be here.

  “Look,” Cristal says, hollering over the noise. “We’re here celebrating a transnational brand, not a brand of huaraches.”

  I nod and take a swig of my beer. It tastes flat and stale, even though the bartender had just popped it open. Cristal is right, I think. Nike would never sponsor a brand of Mexican-made, handcrafted leather footwear, as traditional and old as our precolonial ancestors. That wouldn’t be “cool.” Transnational, globalization cool, I mean, which is what companies like Nike vigorously sell to young Mexicans.

  A camera’s flash comes careening into my personal space, ready to capture a moment mindlessly, and I duck. “Us, those of us who are just under thirty, we’re growing up without the blanket of our parents,” Cristal continues. “But those who are twenty, I feel for them. We got a bit of it, but they completely missed it.”

  By “blanket of parents” Cristal means the old social order, the way fathers and mothers in Mexico once ruled the household and the entire social structure of a young person’s life. Now it is not the same. Hierarchies have flattened. The domestic social structure has disintegrated. Old rites of passage have calcified. Kids come out as gay when they’re still in middle school. Everyone has MTV or some form of it on cable at home. Eighteen-year-olds lose their virginity in hotels de paso with hourly rates and court one another on hi5 or MySpace. The truly restless and economically desperate become men by surviving the trek to the North. Now every young person in Mexico is an agent of his or her own destiny. The result is that just about every liberated, moderately middle-class young person in Mexico has, it seems, gravitated toward fashion and hipsterdom.

  We look around the club. Lights and sounds and flashy faces bombard us on all sides. Yet nothing seems worth a second glance. Another party at Pasagüero. Lines at the bathroom. Lip gloss. Flashy cheap jewelry. Cristal is wearing a bandanna around her neck and glossy sneakers herself. We watch as a friend alleviates her boredom by sitting on a large speaker—she has just discovered she likes the way the sound vibrations feel on her privates. Cristal chugs at her drink and hollers once more: “They’re the children of radio and television.”

  I had first met Cristal on the street one night in Condesa, maybe in December, everyone diving into their last overdose of pre-Christmas partying. Neither of us remembers the details. She must have been getting into a car and I must have been crossing the street. In an instant, we turned around, looked at each other head to toe, and decided with one shared glance, Oh, we’re supposed to be friends. We exchanged a few words, were heading to different parties, but promised to hang out. In a neighborhood festering with posing, sucking up, and competition, Cristal to me seemed like one person who never hesitated to say exactly what she was thinking, at any moment. That usually involved critiquing someone on their vanity, hypocrisy, or poor fashion choices. The Condesa neighborhood proved to be a fertile territory for this activity.

  Although many of the scenester parties happen in Centro, Centro is not where most scenesters hang out or live. The Condesa, a few neighborhoods over to the southwest from downtown, remains ground zero for style consciousness in Mexico City. Correspondingly, it is the neighborhood where most foreigners try to integrate themselves. It is easily the most gentrified colonia in all of D.F., if not the entire country. Beset with exorbitant rents, severe parking issues, and, at last count, three Starbucks locations, Condesa is a hub of trendy boutiques, trendy cafés, trendy restaurants, and trendy-looking people. On weekend nights, cocaine dealers in discreet automobiles prowl the neighborhood’s leafy streets delivering drugs to thumping apartment parties. No one pretends to be risking anything. This isn’t the sort of neighborhood where Mexico City police raid homes looking for narcotics. It is populated by armies of designers, television personalities, artists, politicians, academics, musicians, journalists, marketers, producers, architects, the nouveau riche, and people who work in fashion—the privileged classes, in a few words, and therefore the sort of people who see recreational cocaine use as a matter of social entitlement. Not everyone does it, of course, but it is everywhere. Nearly all the restaurants and bars post signs in restrooms warning customers that if they are caught “consuming drugs,” they’ll be turned over to the authorities. They never say so, but the messages are clearly directed at cocaine users. How can one neighborhood’s party barometer be so intertwined with a single drug?

  Cristal, who by day trains marathon runners, grew up in the Condesa, as unbelievable as that sounds to many of her recently arrived neighbors. In fact, so did her father and her grandmother, who moved to the colonia when she was twelve, Cristal tells me one night. “For starters, there used to be just one torterίa” in her dad’s day, she says. One storefront that sold torta sandwiches—in the whole neighborhood. “Café la Gloria used to be, like, a lunch counter. They used to have the only TV in the colonia and they charged two pesos to come in and watch it. My dad used to go.”

  Cristal bemoans the new Condesa, but as a dedicated scenester she also enjoys its spoils. She can walk into four or five clubs within a few blocks of her house, and she hits them all, several nights a week. She enjoys whiskey on the rocks and the olive plate at Barney’s, a darkened, New York–style bar with low leather couches. She eats as much savory, if pricey, Mexican seafood at La Ostra as her palate desires and nods her head or throws verbal darts at the DJs who play electronica near the bar, as if the restaurant wishes it were a nightclub. Cristal walks to the 7–Eleven in her pajamas—and gets st
ared at. “Me vale madre!” Cristal swears. (I thought for a while about how this phrase might be translated and came up with the satisfactory option of “I could give a fuck.”)

  Cristal suffers from the classic syndrome, native-gentrifier paralysis. She is from where she is—the Condesa—and the hipster-fashionista invasion is one she must learn to adopt, willingly or not. “From being a place to live in,” Cristal tells me, Condesa has “turned into a place to go to.”

  The neighborhood’s transformation speaks to a wider shift in young people’s relationship to popular culture. When the “hipster” happened around 2000, it was the birth of the first global cultural movement predicated on the basic goal of being fashionable. There was no other value as dominant. It was about knowing what to listen to, knowing what to eat, knowing what to read, and knowing what to wear. Genre boundaries were obliterated. You could dress like a sixties hippie while listening to Run-D.M.C. and reading Ayn Rand. That was sort of the ideal, being as eclectic and obscure with your tastes as possible, and being an expert in everything deemed “good,” and in everything deemed not good as well, just to be safe. Punks or goths use fashion to identify themselves as part of a group, but hipsters in the abstract sense use fashion for the sake of using it. To stand out, not blend in.

  A decade into the phenomenon, hipsterdom expanded into the mainstream at an alarming pace. The “hip” dominates pop media, from movies to marketing. It penetrates the consciousness yet remains a cipher. Hipsterdom’s cultural borders are constantly shifting, or potentially nonexistent. For ten years it has largely maintained a heavy load of internal baggage. There is a strong element of self-loathing: Nothing is worse than being called a hipster, even if you are one—and at the same time, hipsters tell themselves, everyone wants to be one. It is the price of successful penetration: Hipsterdom cannibalizes itself, an internally built mechanism. Its death is announced every day. Hip is so mainstream it’s not even hip anymore. But don’t ever forget the important corollary: Some people still manage to be really, really hip.