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

by Daniel Hernandez

  “Emo is bullshit,” he starts. “What is emo? It’s something for girls who are fifteen, because they’ve just gotten hair you know where. They’ve just become emo-tion-al, because they like the singer in the band, not because they like the music. . . . Is it necessary to create a new genre that says, ‘Dude, all the rest are emotionally incorrect, they don’t satisfy us’?”

  And then in English: “Fucking bullshit, kids!”

  And back to Spanish: “There is no movement, there is no way of thinking, there are no musicians. You guys confuse punk, hard core, you confuse screamo, you combine all the currents, just to give meaning to your stupid and idiotic movement.”

  He is practically spitting his words. “There. Is. No. Movement.”

  Watching the clip for the first time made me squirm. Whether his points were valid or not, Kristoff’s on-screen persona is cocky and self-important. Which is to say, I need to meet him. I want to look plainly into the eyes of emo hatred and extract if possible what makes that hate burn. I contact Kristoff and he agrees to an interview at the Televisa studios where he works, near downtown. Television studios are never as glamorous as a television fan might expect, and Televisa Chapultepec is no exception. I walk in through a long metal gate and over a field of asphalt where various trucks and crates and unused light booms lie about. Inside the plain office building on the lot where Kristoff shoots Telehit, we sit down on a red velvet couch abandoned in the middle of a hallway. A thin and busty blond woman named Daniela, Kristoff’s girlfriend, sits with us as we talk. Daniela remains cheery, with a flat smile plastered upon her face. It is early afternoon, and Kristoff is preparing for that day’s show, giving instructions to editors and assistants who are rushing past.

  Sitting next to me, chatting casually, Kristoff is significantly less, well, douchey offscreen. It turns out Kristoff is less a tool in a conspiracy against the emos than an unwitting spark that the emo hatred needed to ignite itself. “I always express myself that way on television. It’s nothing personal,” he explains. The anti-emo rant had been taken out of context—the context of performance anger that he peddles on Telehit. “I express myself that way about everything.”

  As soon as the anti-emo violence struck, many emos and commentators openly blamed Kristoff’s rant for the confrontations. The clip of Kristoff berating the emo culture was most reproduced on blogs and MySpace profiles that called openly for violence. Emos mention his name in interviews and call him out with signs at marches. Before me, Kristoff does his best to appear at ease, as though he is bemused by his unexpected brush with worldwide infamy, but I could sense a good week’s worth of stress and fatigue flaking off him.

  “It’s that minute on YouTube . . . ,” Kristoff complains ruefully. On cable programs such as Telehit, shock is what grabs viewers’ attention: “This is cable. This is not open television.”

  Kristoff was born in Russia to Polish parents. His family emigrated to Mexico City when he was eight years old. Raised in the capital most of his life, Kristoff considers himself fully Mexican. He worked in radio for a while, he says, then found his place on television. The target audience for Telehit is the wide bracket of thirteen to thirty-four. Kristoff tells me his most popular weekday slot is Mondays, when he takes callers’ questions about sexuality and dating. Despite the uproar over his comments on the emos, Kristoff is not publicly reprimanded by his show’s parent company, the media juggernaut Televisa. Kristoff himself responds to the first anti-emo riot in Querétaro with a characteristically fiery challenge to the initiators of the violence.

  “Leave them alone, assholes!” Kristoff screams in the clip about the Querétaro rumble. “What’s the fucking problem? What kind of balls do you have? If you’re such badasses, why don’t you go after the reggaetoneros? Because the reggaetoneros will rip your faces apart!”

  But it doesn’t help. In the days and weeks following Querétaro, Kristoff is still labeled the king of emo hate. I ask him if he still believes what he said about the emos in general. He basically says yes. “I repeat, when you hear them, when they say, ‘Nirvana is emo,’ I have to say, ‘No, you’re confused. You just like certain kinds of melancholic music, and you like dressing a certain way because it’s the clothes that they sell, right?’ ”

  “Or putting on eyeliner,” I offer sneakily.

  “Eyeliner,” Kristoff repeats. “And black with pink,” he went on, switching to English, “because it’s cute, you know. Because pink is the new black. But it’s okay. I don’t care about that.”

  Surely, I think to myself. Yes, the emos are products of the rising consumer class in Mexico. But Kristoff—working for Televisa, the country’s de facto state media company, in his designer jeans and leather jacket and gelled hair—would be just as much a product of Mexico’s new media-saturated consumer culture as the average mopey emo kid. Or maybe even more so.

  “Do you really think this is a passing trend?” I ask.

  “No, I think it’s going to stay, especially now after what has happened. Little by little, they’re defining themselves, looking for their bands, looking for their ideology, but they haven’t achieved it.” He pauses, baffled by his own train of thought. “Maybe they’re not even looking to do that.”

  I watch Kristoff record a show inside his studio the day I visit. It doesn’t seem necessary to take many notes. Daniela sits next to me, still smiling. The routine is mostly crass, forgettable stuff. But something that Kristoff tells me in passing near the end of our interview stays with me.

  “They said somewhere on television—I don’t know if it’s true,” he begins, sort of smirking, “but, that there are gay groups putting themselves in there, because you know, they accept boys kissing boys, girls kissing girls, without being gay.” Kristoff is speaking conspiratorially, as if sharing a deep and disturbing secret, although it is well-known to anyone who has been following the emo-violence story that gay rights groups have called for tolerance. “So there are a lot of gay groups getting involved. I mean . . . I don’t know. It’s what I heard the other day.”

  He seems bemused by the thought, and I am partly awaiting a Kristoff-like punch line, mocking the emos once more, mocking their tangential gayness.

  The emos of Mexico are here to stay, and that is the problem. They are not just a new “urban tribe,” they are an entirely new breed of it, genetically different from punks or goths because they are not formed in reaction to a repressive state but born in reaction to MySpace and the mall. This threatens tribal equilibrium and inflames the sensibilities of self-respecting alternative-leaning young people. Acknowledging the transformation of the subcultural landscape has, for some, meant turning to violence—pure, raw brawling—against the new kids on the block. It is the emos’ welcoming ceremony, their swearing in. In the battle over the public and social spaces shared by the subcultures, the emos’ rapidly advancing numbers would eventually guarantee them a place at the table. But not without a fight. Throughout popular-subcultural history, young people have demonstrated a gleeful willingness to indulge in a primal human lust for blood and bruising when tribal allegiances call for it.

  I see this firsthand one Saturday, three weeks after the Plaza de las Armas popped in Querétaro. A surge of sympathy and goodwill for Mexico’s emos has poured in from blogs and Web sites all over the world. Day after day, I am doing my best to explain or at least help illuminate the phenomenon over the telephone with journalists in Germany, New Zealand, and the United States. By now, I can no longer ignore my emo-fatigue.

  It is a hot and overcast Saturday. Emos—by then enjoying the aid and support of the leftist establishment in the D.F. government, who considered them the victims of reactionary forces from the right—announce they will march from the Glorieta de Insurgentes to El Chopo, to demand inclusion and tolerance at the place where inclusion and tolerance among tribus urbanas is supposedly sacred. This time I don’t want to miss any of the action. I know the emos will be heavily guarded and heavily watched by reporters and photogr
aphers. So I come in on the event through the rear. I go directly to the market, earlier than the emos’ expected arrival, to wait with the choperos.

  The scene is a typical Buenavista station Saturday, crews of punks, skinheads, rockabillies, indies, skateros, rastas, cholos, darketos, and even a few straggling emos, everyone just hanging out. Large cloth signs slung between poles near the market’s entrance welcome the emos and remind everyone that El Chopo is dedicated to tolerance for all. The signs feel a little out of place, as if hung there begrudgingly. I sit down on the ledge of a sidewalk, next to a pair of friends, and wait for a few minutes to pass before I turn and ask if they are waiting for the emo march.

  Paulina, an eighteen-year-old who says she lives in the northern Aragón region of the city, says she is. “I wanna see what happens. Is it gonna get rough or what the fuck?” She has dyed-black hair, wears black eyeliner smudged down to her cheeks, and has a mean-looking stud in her nose. Paulina looks tough and mischievous. I like her immediately.

  “Are you darky or something?” I ask.

  “I’m punk rock.” Paulina makes a fist. Her friend is somewhat overweight and doesn’t say a word. He looks a little emo, I think.

  “So are you going to Christian Death tonight?” I ask.

  “Yes. Are you? No way!”

  Old-school punk friends of mine had mentioned that the legendary dark metal band from L.A. is in town. We have tickets to see them. This coincidence makes Paulina open up a bit. Glancing at her timid emo-like friend beside her, I ask her if she is anti-emo. “Whatever . . . ,” she responds, without much conviction.

  “What’s gonna happen? What’s it gonna be?” Paulina says, rubbing her hands together. She adds, unable to hide her delight, that at the glorieta “everyone was pounding on everyone, even the girls, they looked like perras.” Bitches.

  At about 4:00 p.m., as rain clouds grow darker overhead, a large contingent of police cruisers rolls on to the scene. “The pigs just got here,” Paulina sneers. The air is tense. A Chopo organizer speaks into a microphone plugged into a large set of speakers, reminding everyone, conspicuously, that “all types of people” are welcome at El Chopo. But no one I see looks pleased with the idea of a police-led march by little emos heading their way. When the emos arrive, rows of them, arm in arm, holding up signs, marching and cheering, they are outnumbered by a ring of police and reporters. Punks and goths and skinheads and rockabillies gather up, as if the Chopo has suddenly become a tub of gasoline, ready to be lit. No friendly handshakes, no warm hellos, are offered. As soon as the march comes up Mosqueta to the entrance of the market at Calle Aldama, the Chopo crowds form a line along the edge of the sidewalk. The street erupts in human noise. Punks and goths and others throw their middle fingers into the air and chant, “Death to the emos! Death to the emos!”

  The emos throw their middle fingers back in reply. Only the presence of police with shields and batons prevents a riot. Behind me, behind the punk line, I see a spiky-haired kid grab a slab of loose sidewalk, slam it onto the ground to make small rocks, grab two of the biggest chunks, and prepare to hurl them into the opposite crowd. In a moment when the police seem poised to lose control of the situation, they allow traffic through on Mosqueta, and a sudden gush of vehicles separate the tribes. Rejected, the emos retreat, pull back, and leave, not once coming into direct contact with the market or with those waiting for them. The emos march onward, to rally for peace at the monument to Benito Juárez—Mexico’s Abraham Lincoln. The confrontation lasts only a few minutes.

  The anti-emo forces rejoice. They are incensed that the emos dared to come as a group to El Chopo—with police, no less. “Fucking emo pigs! Fucking emo pigs!” they chant. A spontaneous mosh pit gets started. Bodies pounding against one another, elbows flying, knees hopping.

  In the crowds I lose Paulina. But in a few moments I see her squeezing out of the moshing punks. “Where’s your friend?” I ask.

  “He got scared!” Paulina laughs. The friend has run off.

  “It was a shitload of police,” Paulina says, panting, her voice shaking with adrenaline. “Let them come alone, fine, but with police? Come on!” We walk together into the market. Paulina’s eyes are ablaze. She wants more. As she speaks, Paulina is pounding one fist into her other palm.

  6 | The Lake of Fire

  (Illustration by Rodrigo Betancourt.)

  You can’t really appreciate the enormity of Mexico City until you leave it on the ground. Merely landing at or departing from Benito Juárez International Airport belies the city’s physical contours, the ranges of mountains that ring its basin. Flying in or out conceals what you’re really dealing with. You must experience Mexico City’s hugeness as a journey of distance, inch by inch, mile by mile, traffic allowing. On a late afternoon, nearing sunset, during the smoggiest season of the year, winter, your bus or car is climbing the mountains to the east. The road curves and pitches. You can feel the air outside get colder and colder. The mountains in every direction are suddenly covered in brilliant green trees. To the west the sun disappears behind a dark cloud hanging over the enormous valley. It is not a rain cloud. It is a blanket of pollution permanently fixed over the city. A nasty thick black cloud, so dark in the shrinking light of dusk that you cannot see anything underneath it. The only way you can tell the city exists below is because from miles away you can still feel its hum. It’s almost impossible to believe, like a vision of some futuristic hell.

  People live there?

  I survive my first smoggy winter in Mexico City by applying a gee-whiz sort of awe to it. I hack up alien-looking green phlegm in the mornings for weeks at a time, but I can’t really comprehend just how toxic the city gets around Christmas and the New Year. In my second winter, I have moved to the Centro, to a second-floor apartment facing a street choked constantly in the daytime with traffic. It is a Saturday in late January when I wake up with a violent cough. Throughout the day the air feels as if it is sagging on my back. By Sunday I have a nagging headache. It is cold at night, but it still feels hot out somehow. Something on the skin, a stickiness, a barely perceptible unnatural film.

  The news bears out my suspicions. It is a thermal inversion, an unkind weather phenomenon that afflicts places dense with people and pollutants. In the mountain bowl of Mexico City, a thermal inversion can be acute and dangerous when it strikes during the dry season. Warm air that gathers in daylight is trapped on the valley floor by cold air that moves in at night. The warm air mixes with what’s already there, all the pollutants of everyday urban activity. It has been an especially polluted weekend in the capital. Toxicity levels spike to a point that prompts the D.F. government to activate its environmental contingency plan, calling for limited outdoor activity, temporary restrictions on the manufacturing sector, and circulation restrictions on certain vehicles such as older models and cars from neighboring states. I scribble in a journal, My throat feels like a cat pissed in it and my head feels like it’s spent four hours listening to the same Daddy Yankee song on full volume, on loop.

  A few merciful breezes visit the city. By that afternoon, the government lifts the contingency alert. All activity returns to normal, but the following day the air still feels outrageously toxic. This makes me a little nervous. Mexico City’s current official slogan is Capital in Movement, so by necessity we can have it no other way. A Mexico City with fewer cars and trucks on the streets, with less commercial and manufacturing activity, less movimiento, is a Mexico City that loses money by the hour. Can’t have that. So eyes are puffy and dry, coughs are chronic, and just a few flights of stairs leave you winded. That pinched sensation of nastiness lingers on the skin. In the schools, recess is held indoors. TV Azteca reports that scores of city children show up at doctors’ offices complaining of bronchitis. They say the chief pollutant that weekend is ozone. But . . . whatever. No one really knows what to call the cocktail we breathe in Mexico City. It is a mixture of ozone with nitrogen oxide, sulfur dioxide, carbon monoxide, and hydrocarbons—in
haled and exhaled in a continuous cycle by some 20 million people, day in and day out. What can you call that, really?

  In the dryness of winter, the form and effects of the pollution are strongest. But winter or not, it is always there, hanging invisibly over your head, even when the summer rains come and clear away the sitting atmosphere for a few hours a day. At seventy-three hundred feet, the valley’s altitude, the air pressure is dramatically lower than on coastlines, which heightens the pollution’s least favorable effects on the human body. People get sick chronically. The Mexico City smog affects your entire person, body and mind. Knowing you are inhaling an atmosphere once famously described as being equivalent to a habit of daily chain-smoking (which plenty of capitalinos do anyway) is enough to make you question your and your neighbor’s sanity.

  On the worst days, the cocky cigarette-sucking of so many proud Mexico City natives grows exponentially. What else can you do but gather friends and hunker inside, to booze up, suck in the nicotine—“Might as well”—and to think fondly of the days before the birth of the world’s first Smog City, a capital internationally known for being caked in pollution. It was just the way the story went, when Mexico shifted from a largely rural society of communal farmland and the slow lifestyle of the hacienda to a rapidly urbanizing one of crowded highways and factories coughing purple fumes. Starting in the late 1950s, people came to the big city in the valley from the provinces, near and far. They kept coming, and kept coming. Urban immigrants came looking for work because in Mexico City, they were told, it did not matter how poor or marginalized you were, you could find a hustle and provide for yourself. The city was irresistible. Slums sprang up around the outskirts, unplanned and all but ignored. The same phenomenon would eventually change cities in East Asia, in other parts of North and South America, and in Africa and Europe, but for much of the twentieth century it did not happen at the scale and velocity anywhere else that it happened in high central Mexico. A lack of proper infrastructure in an accelerating grid of humans and industry soon bred the first poisonous clouds over Mexico City, never to leave. Environmental misery followed.