In the early 1980s, the federal government decided that Santa Fe would eventually be developed into a first-world-styled “central business district”—as far from the city center as possible. For that to happen, the garbage dump and the people who lived off it had to be relocated. Little by little, the trash pickers and residents of the Santa Fe slums were pushed out, making room for hotels, a massive shopping center, and the campus of the Universidad Iberoamericana. The small barrio in the slums where Reyes grew up was Tlayapaca, one of the last holdouts. The government wanted it to be the new home of the Mexico City campus of the Tecnológica de Monterrey, one of the country’s most prestigious universities. The neighborhood had to be razed. Residents were offered money but many families did not want to leave. The people of Tlayapaca resisted as much as they could, but on December 28, 1998, a date Reyes invokes gravely, police swept through the barrio and forcibly removed its residents. The December 30 edition of La Jornada reported that six hundred people were removed that night by authorities who operated with “the luxury of arrogance and violence.” Reyes’s family was among them.
For years the most ardent families of Tlayapaca battled the government—“at war,” as the victims still say—over their land. For much of that time they lived sit-in style in front of government buildings or wandered the urban geography as refugees, homeless. The university eventually settled with the people of Tlayapaca by offering to relocate them to new houses, some in Chicoloapan, far off in the eastern reaches of the city, far from Santa Fe.
Reyes sees the dislocation as central to his punk identity, the basis for his stance of resistance and self-determination. Santa Fe was teeming with punks in that period, he says. The whole city
was, from north to south, east to west. In testimonies and video footage that survive from the era, punks explain themselves in a manner that is conscious and politically aware. To most of the city, however, the marginalized youth of Santa Fe were known as chavos banda, the media-coined term that essentially criminalized young people, casting them as thugs and thieves. After the government sweeps, the people of Santa Fe spread out. They emigrated to Ciudad Nezahualcóyotl and to the borough of Iztapalapa, or even farther away. Reyes’s sister La Flexi—a leader in the Tlayapaca resistance movement—was among those offered new homes in Chicoloapan. Exhausted with the struggle, the families moved.
Time passes, and the dislocation corresponds with a physical transformation. Reyes tells me that the last true remaining punks of Mexico City, the ones who didn’t die an early or violent death, might no longer wear cascades of chains and buckles or mold their hair in spikes. A lot of them have children now, jobs—or at least a source of income. Nonetheless, punk in Mexico City remains one of the most enduring and complex subcultures to emerge after 1968. Mexican punks in many cases maintain close ties with their counterparts in Spain, Germany, and the United States. Years later, original D.F. punks still see resistance not merely as a stance or a costume but as a way of life.
Reyes and I get off at metro Boulevard Puerto Aéreo, near the airport. In the underground tunnel leaving the Puerto Aéreo station, he explains that he makes some of his living by selling mesh shirts knitted in colored cotton, stitched by hand by his sister Flexi. The shirts are popular with punks wherever punks live. He stops in the flow of people in the passageway and pulls a red garment out of his backpack. It looks like cotton chain-mail soaked in blood.
“Put it on,” Reyes says. “Wear it.” I hesitate, stumbling to make up an excuse. “No! Put it on.”
No point in arguing. If an original punk in Mexico City tells you you should do something, you just have to do it. I don the cotton chain-mail and immediately feel goofy. The thing hangs unflatteringly over my bony shoulders. “Looks good!” Reyes laughs in approval.
We pile into a combi, one of the low-roofed minivans converted into stop-and-go public transit units that are as common to the long-range commuter experience in Mexico City as the metro. Most people who live in the city’s faraway reaches use both, combis and the metro, to go about their everyday lives. The insides of the vans are hollowed out and fitted with small, carpeted seats. Reyes and I squish into the van’s back corner. We are going to ride shoulder to shoulder, knee to knee, in an airless minivan packed with strangers, for at least an hour in traffic.
“I want to show you something,” Reyes says, pulling a new item out of his backpack, a worn manila folder. Reyes holds it with both hands as though it were a holy book. He passes the folder to me and I open it delicately on my lap. Inside, page after page of old-school punk testimony. Drawings, crudely typed or scrawled personal histories, photocopied flyers and photographs. “I want to make a book,” Reyes says, pressing his fingers against the papers inside. “The true history.”
He begins telling me stories, about the fascist punks he’s had contact with, the confrontations, the brawls, about fellow punks who hide their identity while working in the police or the army, and—more astounding—about Nazi-sympathizing punks. The fascination among some Mexicans with violent national socialism from a different place and a different era lies beyond the realm of comprehension for me. Reyes says he once found himself inside a Mexican cop’s domestic space, where he saw Nazi flags on the walls.
“I’ve tried to talk to them,” Reyes tells me as we ride along. He sighs. “You have to let everyone believe what they want to believe.”
Through the window, the landscape is a blur of broken structures, lonesome figures, wide treacherous expanses of traffic. Right next to me, skin to skin, sits a stout brown woman whose body mass is so packed with maize and earthen living I feel as if I am a pesky bag of twigs disturbing her personal space with my sharp edges. We are nearing Chicoloapan. The road has turned ruddy and brown, and traffic moves inch by inch. Light ranchera music plays from the radio up front. Cars and trucks and the smell of exhaust push in from all sides. Reyes turns and asks me, “And you, what drew you to punk?”
The various simultaneous strains of thought racing in my head come to a screeching halt. What drew me to punk? Reyes has small eyes and a steady gaze. He is waiting for an answer. “Well . . . ,” I start. “I don’t know. I think . . . I think punk is something that . . . you just carry.”
Reyes nods.
“I like a lot of movements,” I go on. “I feel like . . . like you can draw some things from this and some things from that . . . but deep down . . .”
I trail off. Reyes seems satisfied with my response. I look down at myself. I am now wearing one of his mesh cotton punk tops, over a T-shirt with an image of a skeleton playing a guitar and the logo of the L.A. punk band the Screamers. I had been at a toquίn out at El Clandestino and had moshed to Síndrome. I understand what Reyes means when he explains Plan Nacional de Desarrollo, and I understand what he means when he talks about resisting the government, and the need for histories to be told. To Reyes I am banda. To Reyes I am punk.
In Chicoloapan, this flat, eastward-spreading section of the metropolitan region, greater Mexico City looks more like a forgotten war zone than a collection of interconnected suburbs. Cinder-block buildings sit unfinished out in the fields, and dogs and the most destitute people carve out their living spaces along the black muddy roadside. By the time Reyes calls up to the driver to ask to get off, I am relieved to unglue myself from the lady next to me. This could be any other desolate street in the reaches of the valley where the urban rubs uncomfortably up against the rural. Nothing to speak of, nothing to note, just buildings and fences and dogs and the big cloudy sky above us. We walk down an empty side street, past closet-size paper stores, Internet shops, and cleaners. No one is around. The street is quiet enough to hear my own breathing. Reyes does not live here; he stayed in the orbit of Santa Fe after Tlayacapa was swept off the map. But he moves around Chicoloapan with the assuredness of a local. We are headed to his sister Flexi’s house, to see who is home.
“Tell me what happened when they kicked you out of Santa Fe,” I say to Reyes. “How did your fa
mily end up here?”
It happened in the middle of the night, Reyes says. There were mounted police, police from all the boroughs, police right outside his door. Old people, women, children, all woken up and forced from their homes. It sounds violent and traumatic. After the initial dislocation battle, Reyes and his community formed a resistance movement. They camped out in their territory. They camped out before government buildings. “Every night, at two or four in the morning, the riot police would come and push us out of where we were, like at the Zócalo,” Reyes says. “Even with our kids, with our old people, who got sick. Those who resisted were beaten, beaten bad. We lived for four years in struggle and resistance.”
We pass a dirt soccer field that is still wet from rain the day before. After four years of fighting, the Tec, as the school is known, offered new homes to the displaced families of Tlayapaca. “We were tired of living on the streets like nomads,” Reyes says. “We were one of the original seven hundred families. By the end of it, there were thirty families.”
Flexi’s house is near the back of a dead-end street, along a row of brightly painted block homes, the kind that tend to spring up on the outskirts of developing megacities. Driveways in each home are made of the same concrete as the street, white and cracked. Reyes rattles a rusty white gate. “Open up!” We wait. Flexi and one of her daughters emerge. Flexi seems happy to see a new person in one of her chain-mail punk tops. We have handshakes and hugs and kisses as we enter the darkened living room. The floor is smooth gray cement.
Inside, I meet Reyes’s nephews and his father, an old man hunched over a carpenter’s workbench. Flexi, in short, curly hair and a camo fleece, immediately begins referring to me as manito, shorthand for little brother. She is preparing an early supper of consomé, a chicken soup. Flexi’s eldest son, a kid in his early twenties, pops in a DVD of old punk footage. The cover has a skull-and-bones on front and the title The Lost Decade: 1985–1995.
“It was tremendous, the situation,” Flexi says, sitting on an armchair next to me as the consomé comes out in heavy bowls. “It was tough, manito.” We watch grainy footage of boyish punks in mohawks, talking about their ideas of resistance, what being punk means to them. Images of angry moshing mobs, hundreds and hundreds of Mexico City punks pounding their way through the lost decade. Who knows where most of those kids are now, but right here before me I have a family of survivors, originals of punk. One of those moshing punks on the screen, Flexi points out, is her dead husband. He died in a fight, she says.
“They would tell us,” Flexi is saying, “that we had to get out of there, because it was no longer ours. But we would say, ‘No, the land belongs to those who work it.’ We would say, ‘They’ll have to take us out of here dead.’ In that moment, manito, we were ready to give our lives for that land.”
As tortillas and beer round out the meal, Flexi tells me about an especially terrifying night of battle in Santa Fe with the riot police, two months into the war. Again, she says, the state came in the middle of the night. “We strapped ourselves to gas tanks and said, ‘If they come in here, we’ll kill ourselves.’ We didn’t want to lose, so we brawled with those cabrones,” those motherfuckers.
Hours pass. Reyes seems happy to be at home. He lives on the exact opposite side of the city, making any visit to see his sister a feat of endurance. He jokes with his nephews and hugs his father. Finally he suggests that we go back to his area, to the remaining slums of Santa Fe, for a daylong toquίn. He refers to the street concert as a ruido. Literally, a “noise.” Flexi shows me some of her embroidery work while a baby boy I assume is her nephew or grandchild walks carefully in my direction to hold on to the top of my knees.
“Now I show up at El Chopo, and apparently there are nationalist pelones.” Flexi shrugs, perplexed. “They are nationalists and they sing the national anthem.”
After filling up on beer and consomé, we say our good-byes. I remember to ask for a group photo. I capture the happy day out on Flexi’s street, the entire family standing in a row, arm in arm, smiling.
Reyes doesn’t say specifically where the concert will be, just that it is in an hoyo fonqui, just as in the old days of the Mexican counterculture. This hoyo fonqui, Reyes says, is happening at a place known as El Garcy, way up in the slum hillsides from the Tacubaya transit hub, in the Santa Fe neighborhoods that were not cleared to make way for the “new Santa Fe” of corporate office buildings and heavily guarded condo complexes. Bands will play, El Reyes says, and we’ll meet more original punks.
At this point, around 6:00 p.m. on a Sunday, we have been to the far eastern fringes of the city and are now heading to the city’s outskirts on the opposite end, entirely by foot and public transit. Metro Tacubaya is the cavernous westside transfer station that connects three lines. After arriving, we climb aboveground, where Tacubaya is also the hectic and confusing terminus for many bus routes that serve the rising hills of the far west. Taco-stand men call, and where anyone can find space, vendors sells snacks to help ease long commutes. Chocolate-covered marshmallows, peanuts, sugar-coated gumdrops. “I used to live around here,” I tell Reyes, who is happy to hear it.
We hop on a microbus. The musky sweat of a damp afternoon in the city lingers on every sidewalk and on every moving body. Reyes briefly chats up the bus driver and scores the tiny navigator seat up front on the dashboard, the barrio way of riding a micro, while I hang on to a greasy standing pole. He keeps glancing back toward me, smiling reassuringly. We ride up, up, up, into the dense, graffiti-scarred streets, past shops and stores of every kind, into territory as unfamiliar to me as any I have ever seen in Mexico. By the time we land on pavement, I immediately sense a heightening of the dangers involved in the outsider-insider dynamic that comes with walking the streets of a neighborhood that isn’t yours.
This urban rule governs the backways of any dense city, analogous to how I imagine the streets operating in the slums of Bombay or the favelas of Brazil. Yet the gleaming towers of the modern Santa Fe are just a few blocks over the hills to the north of us. We cross a street, and a band of no-good-looking guys standing on a corner whistle at us menacingly. Reyes ignores them and stops before a poster for the tocada—yet another term for an underground concert—taped to a public telephone. Security is all of us, the flyer says, listing the bands, then reminding rockers, No violence. No weapons. No glass bottles and no drugs. Reyes yanks it off and hands it to me as we walk up a steep alley, where more bands of youth are standing around eyeing us.
After greeting a few old-timers he recognizes, Reyes turns to me, steely-eyed. “If someone asks you to go with them, if someone talks to you that I don’t talk to, you don’t go nowhere,” he warns under his breath. “You’re with me. Machίn. Machίn.” The word sends me echoing back in time to the streets of Tijuana and inner-city San Diego. Machίn means to be tough, ready for anything. The threat of violence is a form of mediation or negotiation in the hood, anywhere in the world. It’s the only way things are kept cool, if everyone displays equal and balancing levels of Machίn.
At a crest in the hill, a breathtaking urban canyon with a dank reservoir at the bottom opens up before us. Cinder-block houses slouch down the steep hillsides, as if piled atop one another, and still more and more houses pile up on the canyon’s opposite side. These meager homes were built during the chaotic expansion of the city in the 1970s and ’80s. Many now appear refined with time, painted, neat, as relatively stable as the economic position of their inhabitants. People stare at us from windows and stoops. The streets before Reyes and me now turn into steep cement staircases, diving down into the canyon. From far below, drumbeats and guitar riffs echo upward.
“An hoyo fonqui,” Reyes says, grinning. “Just what we wanted.”
The “hole” is an asphalt basketball court at the very bottom of the hillside, surrounded by trees. It is late dusk now, chilly, the sky inked in brilliant purple. The ruido at El Garcy had officially started at 10:00 a.m. and was supposed to have ended at 6:00 p.m.
We arrive at seven. A dark-core band called Cicatriz has yet to play. People are hanging out, drinking, holding on to one another. A few mangy dogs keep watch from the edges of the scene. Reyes and I stroll down the steep asphalt road to the basketball court and clearly draw attention to ourselves. Indirect but not indiscreet whistles rise from a row of guys sitting on logs and drinking against a sagging metal fence. Without minding them, Reyes leads me directly to the back of the stage, just a yellow tarp hung over a few elevated wooden planks where the drum set, microphones, and amplifiers stand. “What a miracle!” Reyes’s friends holler, throwing their arms around him. “Reyes! Reyes!” There are Mary, Alfredo, La Mouse, Rebeko, Robo, and D’Mon, a graying punk who had put the ruido together. They are drinking, smoking, jamming along to the music. They are Reyes’s other family, his band of punks. He identifies them all as Santa Fe originals.
They don’t look it, I think. No chains, no spikes. Now in their mid-thirties, this banda is mellow, pleased with defending their punkness by their actions and not their dress. Someone offers me a cigarette and I decline, a nervous reaction. It is hard getting your bearings in a new place, among new people, trying to figure out who’s who and what’s what. No one seems to wear punk out here, I think. The younger kids out in the crowd appear more influenced by the downtown San Judas aesthetic—white T’s, white baseball caps, jeans, and white sneakers. The culture of Santa Fe has, it appears, shifted since the days of Reyes and his crew.
A few guys are stumbling around glassy-eyed, beyond drugged. The smell of marijuana and paint solvent hangs in the crisp air before us. One guy does look like a Santa Fe throwback, lost in 1983. He wears Top Gun–style aviator sunglasses, a bright blue bandanna knotted into a headband, and mesh cloth gloves with the fingers cut out. I feel as if he should be break dancing. The guy strolls around the basketball court like a mute, concentrating on something invisible to the rest of us, then suddenly—POW!—he is pumping his fists into the air before him or jumping up and down to the music. “Don’t mind him,” Rebeko says, noticing my mixture of fear and fascination. “He’s just crazy.”
Down and Delirious in Mexico City: The Aztec Metropolis in the Twenty-First Century Page 16