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

by Daniel Hernandez

  A bulletin circulated on Metroflog, then on MySpace, and on hi5, calling for a “rescue” of the Plaza de las Armas from the loitering emos. On the night of Friday, March 7, about eight hundred anti-emo youth poured into the square, hunting for emo blood. A mob developed. The crowds began taunting the emo kids, who had gathered for their usual Friday night out. The taunting turned into pushing, the pushing turned into blows. One emo boy was videotaped being pummeled repeatedly as he sought refuge against a stone wall. Later identified by his nickname Ácido, the boy was seen helplessly holding on to two girls, his lower lip quivering in humiliation.

  “He wants to cry! He wants to cry! He wants to cry!” the mob chanted.

  The police, reportedly caught off guard, arrived in force long after the incident had started. By then at least a dozen emos had been left roughed up, and the rest of them scattered away from Querétaro’s Centro Histórico, chased through the streets by the mobs. The media arrived, allowing the anti-emo youth to explain their grievances. “The emos don’t bother me, what bothers me is that they take a place as if it were theirs,” one young man told a local television newscast from the plaza that night. He talked as though he was pleased with himself about what had just occurred. He was clean-cut and otherwise plain. Just a kid. “It also bothers me a bit,” he added, rolling his eyes, “that they look more like girls than boys.”

  This became a common point of spite against emo boys, repeated over and over in the digital dialogue that exploded across Mexico after March 7, 2008, that emo boys look “gay.” From day one, the wave of anti-emo violence had an antigay undercurrent.

  It must have been a weird night, adrenaline pumping through mobs of teenagers, confusion and excitement fueling the violence. The kids I meet on the Plaza de las Armas say they heard that injured emos were left lying on the sidewalks. Ángel’s father caught up with him that night in the Centro. Like a scene out of an action flick, Dad pushed his son into the safety of a doorway and told him to hide. On the Monday after the country’s first emo riot, the kids on the plaza revealed that they were dressing “less emo” because they were afraid a rogue basher might still be prowling Querétaro’s streets. They were dressing down, essentially in disguise, for their own safety.

  “What’s the emo culture about anyway?” I ask.

  “Thing is, well, I say, it doesn’t have words to define it,” Ángel says. “I think you just decide you’re emo. It’s a way of life, it’s not a style.”

  “The problem is people think they cut themselves,” Arturo says.

  “That they’re bad,” Vanessa adds.

  “I have some scratches, but . . . it’s something else,” Arturo says, trailing off.

  “People made a mistake with the definition of emo, because they say they’re loners, and they like being depressed, but that’s not true,” says Vanessa.

  What do you listen to? I ask. They list subgenres of music I hadn’t heard referenced before: “Hard core, screamo.” I jot

  down more notes. “The Devil Wears Prada . . . Alessana . . . The Horrors . . .”

  “It’s not new,” Ángel insists. “It’s just, now, it’s more visible.”

  The kids are getting ready to get up and do whatever teenagers end up doing on a Monday afternoon downtown. “You should talk to Ácido,” Vanessa suggests.

  I’d look for him, I say, and we give our good-byes.

  More clues about the emos’ general profile emerge over two days in Querétaro. I talk to several kids, to a sociologist, and to the local human rights commissioner, a bland middle-aged man who speaks about the incident in impenetrable officialese. I find Ácido on MySpace and contact him, asking to meet. His profile online is drowning in emo imagery. In one of his photos, Ácido is dramatically smooching his own reflection in a mirror. His hair drapes over the entire top half of his face, and a studded bull-ring is embedded in the bridge of his nose. We speak briefly on the phone. Ácido sounds scared. Overnight he had become the poster boy of emo victimization. He doesn’t want to draw any more attention to himself. But I press him, and he says we could meet at a mall the next day. Aha, I think. The emos, I’d come to find out, also constitute in their core a recognizable type in the era of globalization: middle-class mall kids.

  Ácido doesn’t show up. He stops responding to calls and text messages. The mood in provincial Querétaro seems calm and peaceful early in the week, and so I return to Mexico City that Wednesday. In the strict geography of the city’s tribus urbanas, it has already become a different place.

  Gay and human rights groups in Querétaro call a march for peace and tolerance for the following Saturday, March 15, but elsewhere in Mexico the clashes are just heating up. Something in the universe of young people has caught a spark. The anti-emo wave spreads virally across the country. In the hot Pacific coast state of Colima, five schools cancel classes after a message circulated on the Internet urging local teenagers to “join forces” with their “compatriots” in Querétaro to “clean up Mexico, clean up Colima, and make a better place for everyone.” It is signed, “Association: Death to the emos.” That same night in Durango, in Mexico’s north, police detain eighty anti-emo activists who gather in the state capital city with the intent of hunting down emos. The next afternoon, while people march for peace in Querétaro, emos in Mexico City gather at the Glorieta de Insurgentes to face off against their enemies in an all-out rumble.

  Miscalculating my day, I spend the afternoon at El Chopo, expecting the glorieta to ignite in the evening. News footage of the afternoon confrontation shows squads of young people arriving at the plaza in waves, eager for trouble. The aggressors include punks, goths, rockabillies, and skinheads, kids beating each other up simply for how they are dressed. The emos hunker together and fight back, chanting, “Emos! Emos! Emos!” The youth strike one another with studded belts. Girls behave particularly ferociously against one another, yanking, pushing, and cursing.

  “We’re against the emos! They’re copying our style!” one long-haired youth in dark attire says to the cameras.

  Riot police from the nearby police headquarters are called to disperse the crowds, but confrontations reportedly spill into the neighboring streets. Only a band of peace-loving Hare Krishnas, who paraded and chanted through the plaza, are able to quell the tensions, “as if it were a joke or scene from a surrealist film,” a newscaster remarks.

  No serious injuries are reported in any of the confrontations, yet the violence seems to bring on a kind of collective ecstatic release. The Internet swells with messages about the brawls in Querétaro and Mexico City. Older adults are bewildered. Younger adults—people who see themselves as truer rockers from preceding generations—look upon the anti-emo phenomenon with embarrassment and disdain. These “kids,” rockers of older generations are saying, have no idea what they’re doing. Since their arrival, emos have widely been seen among other subcultures as being superficial copycats. And—their worst crime of all—as being new on the scene, with no history, no apparent values.

  The anti-emo wave spreads further. Emos start appearing on daytime talk shows, decrying the violence. Newspaper editorials weigh in. Members of the international press send dispatches back home. Some Mexicans begin to view the whole affair as one long and embarrassing punch line. “They’re beating up the emos,” I report in a text to Cristal one of those nights. “Good,” she responded curtly. “They want to cry anyway.” The emo riots and the emos in general are seen as indicative of a larger fault in modern Mexican youth. It raises an anxiety about the free-market free-for-all culture invading from the North: that limitless appetite of consumerism, that middle-class malaise personified by a fifteen-year-old, bone-skinny boy in purple stripes and sneakers. On one offensively crass (and therefore hugely popular) blog called Hazme el Chingado Favor—roughly, Give Me a Fucking Break—one contributor summed up the emo disdain in an exasperated comment: “I don’t know if I should shit myself with laughter or start crying to see that my country is going down the drain.�
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  Sunday, March 16, the day after the riot at the Glorieta de Insurgentes. It’s a cool, calm night. I’m standing here, lounging against the walls of the metro station, looking for more emos to interview. Clusters of kids are mingling in the plaza’s shadows. In a corner, I spot a group standing around, laughing, hollering at one another, and playing music on their cell phones. A quick attire scan—jeans narrow as tubes and hairstyles of the slash-and-spike variety—confirms I should approach. They are boys, but most of them are chattering like young girls, their voices pitched and nasal, their mannerisms effeminate. I can hear them refer playfully to one another as chica and hermana—“girl” and “sister.” They are gay teenage emos.

  I strike up a chat. The boys are well versed in the mainstream talking points of what is happening. It is “discrimination,” they say, because lots of emo boys are “bi, gay, whatever you want.”

  “You know the movie The Warriors?” asks one of the boys, José Luis. “That’s the best way to describe this.”

  They all nod and laugh and chatter away. Capital police cruise around the plaza, elevated on Segways like motorized puppets. With the gay district Zona Rosa nearby, I am not too surprised to observe a muscular older American with blond hair and blue eyes hovering around the boys, making his best effort to just “hang out.” The boys tell me they were at the confrontation between the emos and their adversaries on Saturday. They are back at the plaza now in defiance. And because there really isn’t anything better to do on a Sunday than hang out and shoplift from the glorieta’s tiny pharmacy.

  “Yesterday you saw who was really an emo emo, who showed up,” says Aldo, a wispy-haired sixteen-year-old. “Because a lot of them are poseurs.”

  “And how long have you been an emo?” I ask innocently.

  “Since November,” Aldo says.

  It doesn’t dawn on Aldo that his answer provides exactly the kind of fodder that makes the emos of Mexico so many passionate enemies. The idea that poseurs could infect a scene has always been considered a threat to the most serious adherents of the established tribus urbanas in Mexico. But now an entirely new current is emerging seemingly built on the very idea of posing. So could a young man like Aldo and his friends in this sense be considered authentically emo? Of course he could, I think, and the realization leaves me a bit stupefied. You cannot authenticate “emo” because emos are by definition authentically inauthentic.

  “So how do you define emo?” I ask Aldo.

  “How do we define ourselves?” Aldo looks puzzled. “What do you mean?”

  I try to rephrase the question. One of Aldo’s friends insults him from across the group, and Aldo snaps, “I do know, idiota,” and turns to me, admitting, “Well, more than anything, I like the style.”

  Aldo and his friends tell me that they heard a demonstration is planned at the municipal justice department, where gay rights groups would be urging better protection for emo youth. I tell them I’ll be there. The next Wednesday, only a few dozen teens show up at the protest, and barely any of them dress in identifiable emo style. They hold up signs calling for tolerance and more security, along with an enormous rainbow flag. A few photographers show up. I am the only person I see holding a notebook. Aldo and José Luis and other kids from the plaza on Sunday are there, but we don’t have much time to talk. The protesters decide to march to nearby metro Balderas and return to their territory, the Glorieta de Insurgentes. They descend into the metro station as a moving clump, chanting, “Emos! Emos! Emos!” the entire way, kissing and holding hands. Police escort them.

  Theatrical and disorganized, the gay-emo march may be politically ineffectual, but it does prove that some young people are exploring emerging sexualities behind their emo fashions, taking refuge in the look’s androgynous codes. Still, some of the young protesters did not want to be publicly acknowledged as emos, much less as gay. That week Sergay.com, a popular gay Internet portal, collects explanations as to why some marchers refuse to be interviewed on record at the demonstration: “My mom thinks I’m at Mundo E,” responds one, referring to a major suburban mall.

  “I live here nearby in the Colonia Juárez,” says another.

  “My friends don’t know that I am emo.”

  These kids are already conscious of the risks involved in joining the emo wave. At the gay-emo demonstration, one young protester stands out. His head is entirely shaved. Andrés wears thin-framed glasses and says he is twenty years old. He tells me that after the big brawl on Saturday at the Glorieta de Insurgentes, he was walking home along the streets of nearby Roma when a group of young men jumped him, held him down, and chopped off chunks of his long emo haircut. He went home and finished the job himself.

  “I felt impotent,” Andrés says, looking directly into my eyes. Asking more, I make a reference to his being emo. “I am not an emo,” he interrupts. “I am me.”

  Andrés’s declaration stops me. I wonder if the media has been grouping emos together too hastily, negating each young person’s individuality. I wonder if am I profiling the emo look irresponsibly.

  The following afternoon I return to the glorieta. Reporters and cameramen are prowling around for quickie interviews. They’ve become as much a part of the landscape now as the emos themselves. I sit down among a group of emos and wait. Next to me sits Pablo, a seventeen-year-old guy with long bangs, stretch-tight jeans, and purple eye shadow. He wears skater sneakers and a skater cap, but I don’t see a skateboard on him.

  “Just yesterday my mom told me to leave the house,” Pablo says, whistling through his teeth. “Well, she told me to come back at nine p.m., because some friends of hers were coming over.”

  He is listening to My Chemical Romance on his iPod, smoking, and waiting for a friend. “She asked you to leave because you embarrass her?” I ask.

  “Yeah,” Pablo says a little sadly. “Sucks, huh?”

  Nearby, I notice one of the flamboyant gay emos I had met the previous Sunday, with Aldo. The emo is sitting against the station wall. He had been at the gay-emo march, too, but I hadn’t asked for his name. I crane my neck to see if he’ll notice me, to see if he’ll say hello. Instead he avoids making eye contact. Still dressed emo, the kid looks genuinely depressed. From afar I could see an enormous black scab dominating the crown of his nose, as if he was hit across his face with something heavy and blunt.

  Poor guy, I think. The wound looks painful.

  News of the emo riots in Mexico ricochets across the globe. Kids are talking about Mexican emos in the United States, Germany, Vietnam, Australia, on every continent, in dozens of languages. Comparisons are drawn to similar youth movements that are also just emerging, the fotologers in Argentina and pokemones in Chile. MTV and Rolling Stone cover the story in the United States. In Mexico, analysts of every stripe and sector are attempting to apply some level of reliable logic on the outbreak of youth tribal warfare. La Jornada quotes a battery of specialists to help readers figure out the wave of emo-bashings. The paper surmises its roots are in “violent conservatism,” and that young people are reacting to “a lack of opportunities for work and education.”

  “What I see is a deeply conservative connotation, the object being to divide [young people], because they cannot offer them expectations for the future,” Ignacio Pineda, coordinator of the Multiforo Alicia, an alternative-oriented music venue in Roma, tells the paper. In a separate report, La Jornada quotes a specialist who argues emos do not constitute a “classic” urban subculture because they do not have a political or social platform as the punks, goths, or skinheads do. Emo is “pure fashion,” says “youth expert” Héctor Castillo Berthier, a response to the forces of the market.

  Among the emo buzz online, one amateur commentator catches my eye. Harry24, a user on the music site Last.fm who identifies himself as a resident of Mexico City, offers readers a meticulous sociocultural explanation of the anti-emo violence, in a learner’s English, blaming the phenomenon on five basic points. First, Family: “A lot of Mexican families
are disfunctional.” Second, Music: “90 percent of the bands from that wave are totally crap.” Then Harry24 sets blame on Media: “The main TV companies here in Mexico are full of crap artist[s], fake bands and stupid shows, and anti-cultural shows.” He also lists Culture: “Fact: Mexico is full of ignorant people.” Finally, he places some blame on Government: “Emo boys are the perfect target to turn them into stupid and ignorant adults, to be manipulated.”

  It is true, in general terms and as Cristal had explained at the hipster party at Pasagüero, that the family structure in Mexico is under duress, resulting in part in armies of isolated teens. It is true that many mainstream bands labeled emo are amateurish. And, yes, the media that promote such bands are partly to blame for their staying power. So crappy bands and crappy shows produce a crappy movement. But Harry24 loses me with “Culture” and “Government.”

  I am just not sure. The anti-emo wave generates its own self-referential satire—emos as the subject of intense discussion on the Internet, emos appearing on the covers of tabloid newspapers and glossy magazines, emos and punks in “debates” on the radio. One fact becomes lost in the chatter. Emos are new, and anything new is a potential threat to the existing order, the equilibrium of the subcultural landscape in Mexico. Freshly arrived, emos bewildered everyone. No one knew where to place them, so the question of whether they should be incorporated into the geography of the city’s subcultural symbolic bodies is answered with the hurried fist of violence. In that sense, the anti-emo movement had to have emerged organically. If there is a media-authoritarian conspiracy behind the anti-emo attacks, as Harry24 suggests, no one apparently told Kristoff.

  Kristoff—he goes by one name—is a popular host on afternoon cable TV, on Telehit, one of those programs with loud music and graphics and crude jokes arbitrarily thrown into each segment, like a quota. Kristoff talks about stars, sex, and music and movies that he likes and dislikes. As the anti-emo movement began rumbling on the Internet, before the first altercation in Querétaro, one video clip was posted and reposted on the social-networking platforms most frequented by young people in Mexico. It is of Kristoff, in a live broadcast in January, leaning into the camera, his dusty blond hair styled dramatically upward, his fair-toned face rippled and colored red in fury. Kristoff, a Mexican of eastern European descent, wears leather cuffs on his formidably thick wrists. He is unloading about a new trend, the emos.