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

by Daniel Hernandez

  To that end, at some point in the last couple of years, it didn’t matter what city you lived in. What mattered was that you were plugged in, turned on, and had all the right tastes. When it all comes down to being fashionable, fashion becomes important. In Mexico City, that remained a relatively renegade obsession. An element of risk is central to life here, with the specter of holdups and kidnappings, with epic traffic jams, pollution, and arbitrary pauses in the water and electricity supplies. In Mexico City, living with risks translates beautifully to street fashion. The trend-conscious urban adventurers think nothing of risking a look that might register as too bold or outrageous in other places. The city’s young fashion designers take this conceit to its maximum reaches, then detonate it. New currents in clothes by young designers are

  bold, aggressive, and distinctly androgynous. Clothes meant for partying.

  But there are stark differences between hipster iterations north and south of the border. In Mexico, young people may follow through close and constant Internet analysis the street-fashion trends in Los Angeles, London, Paris, and New York. But unlike many of their American counterparts, the hipsters of Mexico City make no pretense of being “poor” or “D.I.Y.” Most Mexican hipsters do not dream of living in run-down lofts in far-off, frightening reaches of the city, but prefer orderly upper-middle-class districts such as Del Valle and Coyoacán, or the established chic hoods. There is no Mexico City version of a “trailblazing” Bush-wick or South Central. In Mexico City, hipsterdom is essentially an expression of middle-class comfort.

  I begin thinking hard about this, after some months of hitting up scenester parties, night after night of free access and free drinks. I am burning out. I am seeing the same people over and over, and having the same sort of night with them, each time. In Mexico City, the coolest of the cool were still congregating and partying for the most part in one neighborhood, Condesa. Many remained proud of it. And those who weren’t had made themselves a miniculture of saying so—without ever leaving, of course. “Condesa was at its best four years ago,” Arellano tells me the day we sit down for lunch. “I’m about to leave this neighborhood. It’s too commercial, way too commercial. All these people from Coapa, Satélite, coming over to Condesa. It’s over. It’s time to look for a new place.”

  It is easy to say so, but far less easy to put the thought into practice, as he and others of us know. There is still a party around

  the corner that night, and another one around the next corner, and another one after that. Night after night, like it or not. We keep going.

  “The onda right now,” a scenester bellows into my ear one night at Malva, a club, at another party, “is that there is no onda, and there is all the ondas.”

  5 | The Warriors

  Welcoming the emos to El Chopo, kinda. (Photo by the author.)

  Erik is sixteen and lives in Ecatepec.

  —Why emos?

  —Well, I don’t know, it’s the style of dress that we like, the way of thinking, too.

  —How is that?

  —Well, I don’t know, sometimes we have to take our emotions higher and make them more dramatic.

  —And what is that for?

  —Well, I don’t know, that’s each person’s thing, it’s like one day you want to be happier, and be sadder another.

  —How do you make things more dramatic?

  —It’s when you feel anxious, without knowing what to do, and you start going to other things.

  —Like what?

  —Well, cutting your skin, I don’t know, it’s about looking different than the rest.

  —Where on your body do you cut yourself?

  —On my wrists, my chest, my legs.

  —What do you cut yourself with?

  —Razor blades.

  —Why do you cut yourself in these ways? (In zigzags, crosses, words, and hearts.)

  —Because I started getting bored with the normal cuts and so I gave them forms and figures.

  —And this is what you do when you feel depressed?

  —Yes, or mad.

  —What makes you mad?

  —Well, I don’t know, sometimes when they don’t listen to me, or they don’t try to understand me.

  —When are you depressed?

  —Well, most of the time, well, I don’t know, there might not be that much motivation.

  (From Sergay.com, “Special Coverage on the Attacks Against Emos and Gays at the Glorieta de Insurgentes,” filed March 16, 2008, under “News.”)

  At the risk of sounding clichéd, the building in Tacubaya where I live is like something out of a magical-realism novel. Right on Avenida Revolución, a frenetic southbound artery on the city’s west side, it looks a little dilapidated on the outside but offers clues of a previous golden era, ribbons of delicate tiling, spurts of florid interior detailing, a lingering sense of harmonious geometry and interior grace. Through a large, rounded metal door and down a cool tunnel, a series of row houses face a garden with trees. Everything about my building—the ancient plants, the sagging wooden floors, the rounded doors and interior corners, the chipping paint—makes me feel transported to a different time, an imagined place. My bedroom in our house is on the second floor, with a window facing a square interior patio that opens onto the kitchen and always smells like wet garden dirt.

  My roommates share the building’s history with me. Officially called Edificio Isabel, it was built in 1920. Juan Segura, one of the era’s most revered architects, designed it back when Tacubaya was a western “vacation town” for people from the capital. In the 1970s and 1980s, Tacubaya was made famous as the territory of one of the city’s most feared street gangs, Los Panchos. Long since engulfed by the marching blob of urbanism, the neighborhood today is just . . . here, hanging on, nothing more than a metro station to most people.

  One bright Saturday morning in the spring, my roommate Diego pokes his head out of the kitchen window below me and calls up to get my attention. “You have to look at this,” he says. I peer down. It is a story Diego has just clipped from La Jornada, the daily newspaper that caters primarily to students and bookish liberals. We open the paper flat on the kitchen table to a far-inside page with regional news. The headline reads like a joke: “Members of Urban Tribes Attack Young Emos in Querétaro.” The article describes the scene:

  March 8, 2008. Querétaro, Qro.—Some 800 youth belonging to “urban tribes,” like punk, metaleros, darks and skateros, attacked young people from the emo movement—identified by their philosophy of acting according to their emotions and feelings—with the objective of preventing them from gathering at a plaza in the historic center of Querétaro’s capital.

  A mass emo hunt? The story says mobs chased emos through the streets, beat up the few they could catch, and overwhelmed the police and authorities. The story continues, “Cherry, an adolescent belonging to the emo movement, said that the aforementioned groups are opposed to their musical style, which is a mixture of trends from other groupings. ‘This whole generation of darks and punks are angry at the emos because they say we’re a copy,’ she said.”

  We chuckle and then head separately to our rooms to work. I can’t shake the thought that this story is screaming for a follow-up. I peek around the Internet. The primary social-networking sites used by young people in Mexico—hi5 and MySpace—are teeming with chatter about the “emo riot in Querétaro” from the night before. It is already all over YouTube, too. Querétaro is the capital city of the state of the same name. A friend is from there. Three hours north of the D.F. in the lush highlands of the Bajío region, Querétaro is a quintessential “provincial capital.” Clean and conservative, very normal. I remember the cult film The Warriors, where gangs in almost cartoonish costumes battle for control of the streets of a dying seventies-era New York. Querétaro is not the sort of place I imagine a real-life version of this story could play out. In Mexico, in real life, the banda are supposed to be fighting a common enemy—authority—not one another.

  Who are
the emos anyway? The following Monday I call my friends in Querétaro and pack a bag. I ride the metro in the rush-hour slog to the North bus terminal, where Volvo-made passenger buses heave in and out every few minutes to the great northward expanse of the republic, back and forth, around the clock.

  Glorieta de Insurgentes, I write in a notebook wedged between my window and a blaring bus-cabin television set. The rolling green countryside races past me. The sky is bright gray and cloudy, moisture hanging low and lazy on the horizon. I am happy to get out of town. One of the great things about living in Mexico City is when chances present themselves for you to leave it. Though I am leaving the city, I keep returning in my brain to the glorieta, or roundabout, back in the heart of the D.F. It binds together a major intersection—Insurgentes and Chapultepec Avenues—with a metro station, a dedicated-lane bus line, and a circular pedestrian plaza sunken below street level. I should have made the connection earlier. Circular, bulging a bit at ground level, as though the station below were pressing upward against the concrete, the Glorieta de Insurgentes plaza conjures the linear, muscular, and functional design so idealized during the height of the PRI era. Walls are painted orange and pink. High-rises and massive blinking advertisements loom above, and traffic swoops continuously in the out-of-view lanes overhead. A sustained buzz in the air at the Glorieta de Insurgentes is generated by two kinds of people: those passing through, on business, transferring from this line to that; and those sitting around doing nothing but watching them, and each other.

  In cities and towns large and small in Mexico no social tradition is stronger than watching the world go by at the local plaza. Plazas are where brass bands play on Sundays and where people gather to chant and give speeches when they are discontented. Plazas are still the places where things start. At the plaza of the Glorieta de Insurgentes, a remarkable shift happened in late 2007. The emos began showing up. Sitting against the walls of the metro station, huddling in packs, they claimed the glorieta as their unofficial meeting place. Little by little, the emo crowds grew, until by springtime the plaza was overrun by emo youth on Friday and Saturday nights and sometimes on random afternoons, the after-school jam.

  Hurrying through one day, I thought, I gotta come back and talk to these kids.

  Average harried city dwellers find it difficult to tell the emos apart from any other teenagers wearing disaffection on their sleeves. Before 2007, the term emo had never achieved common usage in Mexico. In the United States, emo had been more or less forgotten with the era that saw it popularized, the 1990s. Here, however, they look different. These are not the suburban teens in heavy-rimmed eyeglasses who listen to Weezer and Dashboard Confessional in Middle America. The Mexican emo supersedes any global stereotype—the lackluster outward demeanor, the profound full-bodied melancholy, the habit of cutting oneself to enhance sensations of fury, emotional pain, or hopelessness. These characteristics might have been found among a minority of the emos who emerged in Mexico, but most of them, in passing, seem pretty happy. For self-identification purposes, emo in Mexico really comes down to one essential characteristic: a chosen look.

  The emos at the glorieta wear elaborate, meticulously crafted hairdos. Bangs slicing dramatically down over an eye, fake bed-head stylized to look like a peacock fan sprouting up from the back of an emo’s head. Hairdos are cut with streaks or stripes of radiant purple, red, pink, or blue, sometimes punctuated with pristine baseball caps or sparkly plastic tiaras. Makeup is indispensable. Boys and girls alike wear theatrical levels of dark eye shadow and eyeliner, often purposefully smudged down their cheeks, suggesting an exhausting sobbing session that never actually took place. (Sometimes the smudges are hot pink.) Clothes, too, are crucial: Skinny, too tight jeans tapering rigidly down the ankles are sometimes fixed with crudely sewn patches or rows of safety pins or chains. Falling-apart Converse or skater sneakers are the footwear of choice. The bolder ones have stud or ring piercings on their lips. There are lots of plaids, skulls, stars, and, inexplicably, the cartoon character SpongeBob SquarePants hanging from key chains. For emos in Mexico, black is the dominant color of choice for any garment or accessory. Black goes really well with spurts and streaks of purple, red, pink, or blue.

  This new subculture practices an unfamiliar mix of goth and punk, with a sprinkling of metal, skate, indie, and even anime and candied pop. In abstract terms, it descended from somewhere between the pristine shopping centers of Southern California and the landscapes of suburban tracts in the hillsides of the Valley of Mexico. My first impression: This is like satire, only when it isn’t self-aware.

  The emos get together at the glorieta and smoke cigarettes, joke, play, touch up their makeup or hair or that of their friends, and flirt with new arrivals. It turns out that this is happening not just at the Glorieta de Insurgentes but in plazas large and small, new and old, all over Mexico, including in Querétaro. At some point, their arrival transforms into a nuisance for some young people who do not identify as emo. And by the twisted logic of collective identity, some members of Mexico’s established urban tribes decide that the nuisance has to be eliminated.

  Querétaro is the sort of place where cloaked nuns still live in seventeenth-century cloisters and sell pan dulce from a window in a wall to the street, like medieval drive-throughs. A church is on practically every other corner in the historic center. Unlike Mexico City, where downtown churches feel more like museums nowadays than houses of worship, Catholic chapels here maintain actual congregations. On my first day in Querétaro, around lunchtime, I go for a coffee at the Plaza de las Armas, a slanting square directly before the central state-government building, the site of the emo riot the previous Friday. Everything appears normal. The benches are packed and lunching couples sit at tables at cafés tucked behind the surrounding buildings’ arching columns. Live easygoing marimba is playing from somewhere.

  I see some young people who look vaguely emo, and I approach them to strike up a conversation. Four of them are sitting together on a bench and on the floor in front of the bench, under a dense tree. Yes, they say, they had been here on Friday night. They seem relieved someone is asking them about it. I kneel down.

  “They’ve been saying it was the punks and skateros,” I say.

  “No, no, they were anti-emos, chakas,” kids from poor suburbs, says a girl, Vanessa. She looks only slightly emo, but close enough. One girl and three boys, two of them puffing on cigarettes. They must be fifteen or sixteen.

  “It started with a Metroflog,” says Arturo, cutting in.

  “What’s Metroflog?”

  “It’s an Internet page,” three of them answer in unison. “Where you can put pictures up,” Ángel finishes. “So they made a Metro’ that said, ‘We’re going to get you, be careful.’ ”

  The riot had been premeditated and publicized online. “They were saying that we were supposedly taking over the plaza,” Ángel says.

  “Because the emos hang out here?” I ask helpfully. Heads shake no.

  “This is just like a meeting point,” Ángel explains, a little annoyed. The others nod: “Aha.” Arturo and Ángel and Vanessa speak, the other boy stays quiet.

  “To get together, before a show, a party,” Vanessa says.

  “Like a social space,” I offer.

  “Ahaaaaa,” all of them say in unison.

  “Like the Glorieta de Insurgentes—”

  “—in México,” the kids finish, brightening up with recognition. Being emos in Mexico, they know it is their new epicenter, in México, the capital. I ask the kids if it got ugly. Ángel admits that he had been chased. The mood briefly becomes grim.

  “What were they saying?” I ask.

  “ ‘Death to the emos,’ ” Ángel says.

  “ ‘Fucking emos,’ ” Vanessa says.

  “ ‘If you don’t jump, you’re emo!’ ” Arturo adds, to all-around laughter.

  “What idiots,” the boy who has remained quiet suddenly says to himself, to my surprise. It’s a classic slang phra
se in Mexico usually used in football hooligan sections—If you don’t jump up and down, you’re from the other team! So everyone starts jumping like crazy. I am momentarily struck by how these four kids manage to see humor in the phrase being used against them. A profile of the attackers is coming into focus: a mixture of young sports fans, and anti-emo chakas, as Vanessa describes them. Chaka is a more polite way of saying naco, the most obscene slur there is in Mexico. Naco is so bad people refer to its use as “racist,” even though its connotations have nothing to do with someone’s race and everything to do with someone’s class, social status, and tastes. Think of what a well-off urbanite in the United States might consider “hick” or “white trash”—that’s naco. Vanessa in fact uses naco at one point to describe the emo-bashers.

  “They had been bothering us for weeks, sending their little messages,” she sneers. “We didn’t give it much thought, ‘Well, nothing will happen,’ because of all the security, you know? There’s always police here.”

  “But they paid the police,” Arturo says.

  “Ahhhhaaaaa,” they all reply. An unverifiable but—to the teenage mind—completely plausible rumor: The police allowed the emo-bashing to happen. They stood back on purpose.

  “Yes, the police didn’t do anything,” Vanessa says.

  I gradually put together the pieces of what happened that night, from talking to these kids, from the clips on YouTube, and from press reports. The emo kids of Querétaro had been gathering at the Plaza de las Armas for several months. Like the Glorieta de Insurgentes, the plaza became a meeting point organically, a space where emos could get together, look at each other, then take off to a party or to see a band play. But these gatherings became bothersome to other teens in Querétaro who did not identify themselves as emo. The annoyance transformed into rage.