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

by Daniel Hernandez

  Jonathan Legaria’s Santa Muerte sanctuary up in Tultitlán is a distant and unknown place for Doña Queta and the people who worship the Death figure on her doorstep. Weeks after Legaria’s funeral, I visit Doña Queta in the daytime, hoping to clear up some questions. She is sitting on a stool before the altar. People approach to deliver flowers and fruit to the skeletal figure in the glass case. “We all respect one another here, each person to his own,” Doña Queta explains. “No one would attack you here.”

  Doña Queta regards the image with an almost childlike affection, talking about the manner in which she dresses her, keeps her “pretty.” I ask her why the cult has grown so much. “It is the faith of the people, my child.”

  I ask again, “But why now?”

  “I already told you. Before, there were no altars on the street. I put this altar, and people came.”

  So, if you build it, they will come, I think to myself.

  A shock of white races through the old woman’s black hair from the top of her forehead, like a crown. Doña Queta’s eyes are fierce, intense, yet she exudes tranquillity. Doña Queta is at peace with her life, her office. The Santa Muerte’s caretaker. “Does the Santa Muerte protect you from death?” I ask.

  Doña Queta is momentarily annoyed. What a foolish question, her expression says.

  “You are born with a destiny, from the day you are born. This is separate. This is for asking that she protect you, that she accompany you.” Doña Queta shrugs, coming up with suitable examples. “That she might get a son out of jail, that she might find you a job, that she might stop you from losing your house. But your destiny is marked, my child.”

  I have more questions. I bring up the allegation that cartel men pray to the Santa Muerte for help in the wars against their enemies. The papers always say that the Santita watches over assassins, I tell Doña Queta.

  “And do you know a narco who has told you that?” she shoots back. “Well? That is just talk. I don’t go there.”

  People continue to stream past the altar. Some hold small children by the hand or carry babies in their arms. Some touch the front panel of the glass case so that the Santa Muerte’s blessings might channel through at the touch. Doña Queta insists to me that nothing is too otherworldly about the Santa Muerte.

  “She is inside of you just as she is inside of me,” Doña Queta says, lifting a pinch of skin on her forearm, her eyes ablaze. “Once you peel this . . . you are the Muerte. You already have her . . . in you.”

  My pen stops. I feel myself pitch slightly backward. I feel Doña Queta’s words sear right through my skin and envelop my skeleton. The idea is so powerful. The Santa Muerte, living inside of us all. The veracity of the image, my journalist’s brain thinks, is now “provably true.” There isn’t much more to discuss.

  Doña Queta offers to walk me to the nearest big street to hail a cab. Tepito is thick with noise, smells, human energy. “You have to be careful around here,” she warns me, holding the back of my arm.

  I make small talk. “Do you have children?”

  “Oh, yes, but they’re cabrones”—little shits—“just like you.”

  I admire Doña Queta’s arts of perception. “Do they go out around here at night?” I ask.

  Yes, Doña Queta replies, but she says that her motherly advice is always the same: “ ‘Only whores, thieves, and cops go out at night. Which one are you, asshole?’ ”

  Every twenty-eighth day of the month is another day of chaotic pilgrimage in Mexico City. Beginning early in the morning, the pilgrims crowd into the metro, huddles of young people carrying their statues of San Judas Tadeo, or St. Jude, the one they called Thaddeus, an apostle to Christ. The pilgrims travel from the city’s far outskirts to the church of San Hipólito, above metro Hidalgo in the city’s center, taking part in a specific act of ritual passion. The streets around the church—including a section of Reforma—must be shut down to traffic to accommodate the masses. The young pilgrims are partying even before they arrive. They are laughing and holding on to one another, and some are preparing their doses of mona to inhale.

  They press in toward the church’s doors and crowd to the point of human gridlock, much like at the basilica every December 12. Thousands, tens of thousands, are crowding the surrounding streets, selling San Judas beads, garments, key chains, and lots of food and drinks. For those to whom San Judas has delivered a miracle, handing out prayer sheets or flowers to strangers becomes a spiritual duty. The church is their beacon. They want blessings, they want guidance, they want love. Couples caress, children are carried upon shoulders, mona is consumed. Religiously, I guess.

  San Hipólito, baroque in style, built partially with volcanic stone, was erected in the early 1700s. It was designated a chapel in honor of the saint whose feast day falls on August 13, the day Tenochtitlan fell to Cortés—but most of the kids here could probably not care less. They gather at San Hipólito because a shimmering San Judas statue is on the main altar inside, and San Judas is the patron of lost and desperate causes. By the size of the crowds, it appears Mexico City has plenty of those at the moment.

  Like the Santa Muerte, the cult of San Judas Tadeo is experiencing a surge of new adherents in D.F. in the first decade of the new millennium. The saint’s annual feast day, October 28, is the biggest religious party in Centro by a wide margin. The believers adorn their San Judas statues with beads and threaded necklaces, colored lace, scapulars, and roses. The saint is traditionally depicted wearing a green robe, but his adherents generally prefer white. On October 28, 2008, I head to San Hipólito with Uriel, my partner in many ventures into the cultural soul of Mexico City. We are in attendance partly out of curiosity and partly out of a quiet suspicion. What’s this about, really?

  We arrive late at night to the San Judas carnival, walking a handful of blocks from my apartment and diagonally across the Alameda Central. Uriel and I find the streets around San Hipólito, first and foremost, to be drowning in trash. Sidewalks and curbs are almost entirely submerged. The San Judas image—bearded, a flame of holy glory alight atop his head—is still bobbing above the people by the dozens. Most of those holding him are just teenagers. Kids are crowding around old men and women who are giving away long-stemmed roses as a San Judas–inspired charity. Clamoring, actually, while whistling, laughing nervously, and chatting and calling for “one more.”

  Up against a metal riot barrier placed by police to control the masses, we meet an older gentleman who is about to be overwhelmed by kids desperate for a rose. Jesùs Enrique Hernández wears eyeglasses and has that timeless air of a devout Roman Catholic, upright and serene. He says October 28 is the most important day for his faith.

  “He is our miraculous patron, San Juditas Tadeo, so on this day we venerate him,” Hernández manages to say to me. He is about to be knocked over as kids push their way past us, clamoring for more free roses.

  “He is not pagan, not pagan,” the old man hastily adds, making what I figure is a veiled reference to the cult of the Santa Muerte.

  I try interviewing some kids about their faith in “San Juditas,” but none that I approach have anything coherent to say. They stammer and shrug. “It’s just faith.” We watch as police officers snatch up teens smoking marijuana too brazenly on the stoops at metro Hidalgo. We watch small children and teens line up to take photos with a fully costumed clown who is roaming the grounds. Even clowns must seek spiritual protection in their most desperate hour, I think. Standing on a curb, resting, Uriel and I are approached by a young San Juditas adherent who starts chatting us up. He wears sunglasses in the dark, talks excitedly, then tells us he has ecstasy and acid for sale. At a good price for other “cuates”—homies—in the faith, he says. We consider this. An “incredible” rave is coming up, the guy tells us, out in the forests in the state of Hidalgo. He gives us a flyer and his cell phone number.

  As we walk away, Uriel sums up our suspicion: “This is trendy.”

  In Mexico City, San Judas Tadeo demands not onl
y pilgrimage to San Hipólito every twenty-eighth day of the month from his faithful, but apparently also the donning of specific garments. It is a deeply urban costume worn religiously by youth in the Centro, and always shifting. Right now it consists of white San Judas T-shirts or white tank tops, white sneakers, and white baseball caps. Jeans are rolled up and cuffed at the ankle. The boys wear their hair cropped short and tight, sometimes with gelled tips, or with intricate patterns cut in by skilled barbers. The girls put blond streaks in their hair, and both boys and girls are fond of necklaces, bracelets, and piercings. The look makes reference to the cultures of hip-hop, reggae, cumbia, drum-n-bass, California cholo, and Cuban Santería. They get together at sonideros, deep-barrio street parties that include a unique transnational element. Shout-outs and messages on signs are transmitted to the MC, who reads them back. The entire sonidero is recorded and then turns up on the streets as a bootleg disc. The discs make it across the border, and the shout-outs reach their destination. Through sonideros—at least those I’ve attended—Tepito and all its subcultural styles become an export product of sound.

  It all feels familiar, like a piece of home. Who cares if this is “trendy”? Is trendiness not in its own way authentic, as the emos prove? Over time, almost without noticing it, I begin wearing San Judas Tadeo myself. I begin burning candles in his honor inside my house, if only out of a sense of solidarity with my neighbors. I live in downtown now, and in D.F. his cult is strongest here. It is the most pragmatic and elastic of those available to the young people of the Centro, I realize, a happy refuge halfway between the Virgen de Guadalupe and the Santa Muerte. The Holy Death feels true, in that sense that there could be no doubting the reach of her power. In a sense she is in competition with her inverse, the Virgen de Guadalupe. Santa Muerte as the custodian of death, the black and skeletal reflection of Guadalupe, source of mercy and light. One requires a resignation to the totality of death, while the other requires a resignation to the totality of the Church and the Conquest.

  Neither, however, is as useful to tending to the challenges of everyday life as is San Judas Tadeo, or as adept at making it look so big-city cool. These streets are San Judas’s streets. These obstacles—making money, commuting from here to there, evading police—are his to mediate. There’s no use questioning it. “Why do the kids of Centro like San Judas so much?” I sometimes ask my tepiteño friends. The answer is usually the same: “We just do.”

  I decide to leave it at that. Every twenty-eighth—every veintiocho—I am there at San Hipólito, working my way through the crowds, among the statues and woven and airbrushed images of the patron saint of lost causes. I am one myself. Life in Mexico City is tough. Every day is a series of trials. Survival is always in doubt. I’m hungry. I’m broke. When the tests take me to the breaking point, I look to St. Jude and beseech him. Just one more day, I pray. Just one more chance.

  11 | Originals of Punk

  On the outskirts. (Photo by William Dunleavy.)

  Reymundo, known by his punk name, El Reyes, is in his mid-thirties, a large and burly guy. His belly is formidably composed, not by fat or muscle exactly, but by the stuff of strength. His head is shaved. That makes him a punk pelón, he explains to me on the day I meet him. Being a shaved-head punk means he is often mistook for a skinhead, or worse, a fascist skinhead. That sometimes leads to trouble with strangers.

  I meet Reyes in late summer 2009 at a music space known as El Clandestino, out in Ecatepec, the suburb to the north reachable on Line B of the metro, the one colored green and gray. It is another Sunday-afternoon toquίn. Bands of spiky-haired, patch-covered punks, guys and girls, gather outside on a busy avenue under the blazing sun, the smell of car exhaust and stagnant channel waters bouncing against the traffic and the raw rock sounds from inside. Some kids are inhaling mona. Reyes is working the door. His job is to make sure the punks lingering outside won’t rush in without paying the steep hundred-peso cover, payable at a makeshift box office: the passenger-side window of a small white car parked near the door. A shirtless guy sits inside, drinking, smoking, and collecting cash.

  Several bands are scheduled to play on a bill described as the Festival Katártiko Punk de Aniversario, with a tagline of “Because Catharsis Is Still Valid, Liberating It Is Our Way of Life.” I tell Reyes I am a journalist from Los Angeles here to cover the event. He asks me to wait about an hour, then introduces me to El Clandestino’s manager, who welcomes me in along with a friend visiting from California. The space—nothing more than a large box with a dirt floor—is filled with guys covered in tattoos and girls with studded dog collars around their necks and their hair in tall, pink spikes. Murals on the black walls depict skulls, silhouettes with their fists raised, the Addicts. Although we are obviously outsiders and not full-fledged punks, no one regards us with suspicion or hostility. I settle in, buying from the concessions stand a large cold caguama and a plain torta of ham, cheese, mayonnaise, and chili.

  Síndrome plays, one of the oldest and most well known punk bands in Mexico. Everyone moshes wildly. A little guy who looks about sixteen or seventeen but is deeply afflicted by dwarfism is hoisted upon someone’s shoulders in the slam pit. Rising above everyone’s heads, the little guy makes it to the stage, where the Síndrome singer Amaya—who at forty-seven years old is still going strong—lifts him up, and they both go into a rage, raising their fists to punk glory. I move closer to the stage. I lift my boots up and down to pound upon the dirt beneath me. I holler in nonsense. I push and shove my way about. People are bouncing around, elbowing strangers. The whole action feels very communal.

  When I leave El Clandestino, I thank Reyes at the gate. He shakes my hand energetically. “I’ll show you the real roots of punk in Mexico. The chavos,” he adds, the young people, “need to know.” Something about Reyes’s demeanor makes me trust him immediately. Six days later, I call him.

  Reyes tells me to meet him on the platform at metro Salto del Agua, at 1:00 p.m. It is the following Sunday. I arrive in time, and after a half hour of watching trains go by, people heading in and out, I finally spot him walking toward me from down the platform. Reyes’s stance is wide and his strides long. He wears camouflage trousers and laced-up boots and a worn black T-shirt with the sleeves cut off, the phrase REBEL: PUNK AND SKIN PRIDE, ANTI-FASCISTS on front. After we greet each other, Reyes makes a lightning movement without warning. He sticks his hands against the closing doors of a metro car before us and yanks them back open, prompting an automatic siren. Riders dutifully open up space as we enter. Reyes wants us to get on right there, so that’s where we get on. He smiles widely. He is excited by the start of our journey. We are going to a suburb called Chicoloapan, he tells me, to meet his family.

  “A lot of reporters come,” Reyes says as we ride the train, “and they want to write about us, about the punk movement. But they only care about what’s happening in the moment. They don’t get into the roots. Some of us have been twenty years with the movement, some even up to thirty. Me, I think I’ve been punk for maybe twenty-six years.”

  I listen as we race eastward under the capital, deciding it best not to ask Reyes about his age. People move in and out of our car at each stop, the everyday movement of the subterranean city. “We’re older now,” Reyes says. “The chavas are now señoras. Their husbands died or were killed. They have their own kids now.”

  He shows me the tattoos that decorate his thick arms. One of them is marked with the letters P.N.D., the name, he says, of his punk group in Santa Fe, where he grew up. He tells me others often mistake the acronym to mean Punk Never Dies, but Reyes explains, “It’s Plan Nacional de Desarrollo.” The name—National Development Plan—expresses the idea that liberation from government repression, that a radical state of total autonomy, the core tenet of punk, is a project not just for his neighborhood in Santa Fe but for the entire nation. “And that’s what it still is, Plan Nacional de Desarrollo,” Reyes says seriously, looking straight at me. “We still believe it.”


  Reyes grew up in the slums that rose unchecked around the vast garbage dump in Santa Fe, a long canyon-dotted region on the west side of the Federal District. For decades, the Santa Fe dump epitomized the disarray of a megacity growing beyond its capacity. The city in that period was widely recognized as the world’s largest, and at the Sante Fe dump, extreme poverty mirrored an extreme environmental crisis. The Associated Press reported on the area in 1988:

  The foul-smelling dump, spread over about 150 acres on the western edge of Mexico City, was one of the largest in Latin America. . . . The garbage was estimated to be 230 feet deep in some places, forming enormous cliffs from the refuse deposited there for more than four decades. . . . Spontaneous fires broke out, sending noxious fumes into the air. There was also concern the wastes were seeping into aquifers and contaminating the city’s already scarce water supply.

  Today much of Santa Fe is an overdeveloped business district of high-rises and exclusive business complexes, a place of impersonal living. Some call it Mexico’s mini-Dubai. Despite its veneer of hyperdevelopment, Santa Fe is to this day still surrounded by many of its original slums. In this radical transformation, Reyes explains, Santa Fe’s history of massive displacement has completely been erased.