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

by Daniel Hernandez

  Now we are entering a twilight zone. It is suddenly chilly and brisk, in the shade. The deadline for certain forms of business at the embassy, 10:30 a.m., has passed. Every few minutes the front row is allowed to go to the supergate, a window that looks bombproof, where some kind of attendant studies your face and forms and gives you a visitor pass to enter the embassy building. Every time the front row goes in, the row directly behind it has to get up and move one row forward, a cruel game of musical chairs.

  The inspections so far have been conducted in Spanish, by Mexicans, and most of the people seeking to enter the embassy appear to be Mexican as well. Besides the young American ladies darting inside without a stop, I haven’t seen a single “all-American” type around. Except for the man sitting next to me. He is as American as you could possibly get, wearing a crisp shirt and tie, tan trousers, and brown dress shoes. His facial complexion is unnaturally red. When I sit down next to the American, we look at one other with expressions that say, What are you in for?

  “I just need to notarize something,” the American says. “Not a good time to be refinancing your house.”

  The American is a midlevel manager for a multinational telecommunications company. Mindful of whatever looming financial catastrophe is brewing in the United States at the moment, he says he is attempting to refinance his home in a suburb of Dallas. His mother is living there now, the American says. Casual conversation between Americans in recent years, anywhere in the world, must include the question that follows: “You looking to buy?”

  “Oh, no,” I tell him.

  “Where are you from?”

  “San Diego.”

  “Nice place,” the American replies. “If I could pick a place to live, it’d be San Diego.”

  I nod. San Diego seems about three continents and four or five dimensions of sanity away. For a few seconds I fantasize about its glimmering waterfront skyline, that auburn Pacific sunset that bounces golden and lazy off the cool dark waters of the San Diego Bay, up past the rolling hills of inner San Diego, past its bungalows and palm trees, into the barrios of my childhood. I sigh and ask the American, “So what do you think about Mexico?”

  “Interesting place. A lot of classism. Even in the business world.”

  “Oh, yeah?”

  The man is pleased to have his opinion solicited on the topic. “Oh, yeah. Certain jobs here are done by certain classes.” He uses himself as an example. Here he is, a manager for a big telecom company, living with his wife and kids in a company-paid mansion in Lomas Altas. If he were born Mexican, he says, this would not be his reality. In the States, his mother was a waitress and his father “worked for a railroad.”

  The American says, “I would have never made management. The only exception I see are women who are gorgeous and beautiful, who can date above their class.”

  I like this all-American American. He knows what he’s talking about, and he talks about it in that Southwestern U.S. horizontal swang that I know how to turn on and utilize just like him. The American asks me what I do for a living, and I say, speciously, that I write about art, mostly younger artists. The American has an opinion about that, too. He’s been to some art events, he says, and he and his wife had come upon some amazing “Mexican folk art” during a weekend out to Taxco, “something authentic.” But overall he isn’t too impressed with what he has seen by young artists in Mexico. “They’re all just trying to be American or European. People here try too hard.”

  The American goes on, “A lot of what I see is really derivative, which doesn’t make sense. They have a huge culture here to work out of. It’s a very interesting place. Lots of potential. Think we’ll get in there before noon?”

  The embassy security apparatus appears to have passed its rush hour. No musical-chairs rows were being replaced behind us as we trudged forward. “We’re going to get in right when they go to lunch,” the American says fatalistically. “You should see the cafés around here. By twelve thirty, they’re packed with all the Americans. And then they empty out by one thirty. And at two, they fill up again with all the Mexicans.”

  Our turn is coming up, causing a new anxiety to rise in my throat. When it’s my turn to approach the security window, the final barrier between me and my country’s bureaucrats, I have to decide, will I speak to the pretty receptionist lady in Spanish or in English? This is the American embassy, but I am in Mexico. Our row is called up. Panic sets it. The receptionist, who appears to be Mexican, calmly and politely deals with the people in line ahead of me in clean Spanish, a reassuring sign. A series of possible sentences in both languages scroll quickly through my head. I want to appear as cool and collected as possible before this first-responding emissary of the United States of America.

  And under that, of course, I feel a wave of self-loathing. As Americans, have we grown accustomed to fearing our own government? Even with nothing to hide, we cower before our bureaucrats, our own employees. The thoughts roll through my head as I try suppressing a darker sort of fear. It is that feeling I get in the moments before I approach the United States as a pedestrian at the border between Tijuana and San Ysidro. The wild, pitted fear that just this time, out of so many hundreds throughout my life, something could go inexplicably wrong, and a pack of men in black will silently march at me and I will be disappeared forever into the monster-machine of the U.S. government.

  My turn. Behind the heavy glass, the receptionist smiles at me brightly and asks what sort of business I hope to attend to at the U.S. embassy. It is all happening so fast. I hand over my expiring passport and blurt nervously, “Es que tengo que hacer renew mi pasaporte.”

  It rolls down my brain and off my tongue without warning, as Spanglish as me, as California as me, perfectly incorrect on multiple levels: Es que tengo que hacer renew mi pasaporte.

  The graffiti writer in Colonia del Valle has a few central interests: tagging, dogs, hip-hop, and maintaining anonymity. He is suspicious of any phone call and prefers that his name—even his tag—not be used in public. His insistence makes him a bona fide graffiti fundamentalist, those who see tagging as vandalism and vandalism as a form of anarchic resistance, those who move about the city like phantoms, leaving their markings furtively in the night.

  The graffiti writer kicks back in his living room overlooking a busy lateral avenue, night after night with his homies, listening to Mexican and U.S. MCs on his two-turntable sound system, admiring the easygoing strength of his potbellied Rottweiler. A West African wooden mask hangs near the door, and in a corner a large fish tank houses two large turtles. Sometimes the graffiti writer brings the turtles out of the fish tank so they can get some exercise on the carpet. When his friends drop in and gather, they flip through magazines—about dogs, about weed, porn catalogs—and talk about music, skating, and the North. The Rottweiler lies about, inhaling a cloud of sweet marijuana smoke. The guys’ girlfriends sit around the place, at ease, enjoying the company.

  Andrew, one of the graffiti writer’s friends, has lived in Santa Ana, in California’s Orange County, working for six months. He made money at various odd jobs and at a Japanese restaurant. He also went North to skate. “The skating over there!” he exclaims.

  Andrew, wearing a 2005 Dodgers opening-day T-shirt (bought at a tianguis in Mexico City, not in Los Angeles), said he liked it up there all right, but he didn’t love it. He’s glad to be back in Mexico. One time, Andrew says, he bought a pack of weed from someone on the street and a black dude in the neighborhood noticed. The guy wanted to know what Andrew was doing in his neighborhood, saying he would shoot him. Andrew says he handled the situation all right. He just took off. The graffiti writer, citing other examples in his head, brazenly declares, “Black dudes are scared of Mexican dudes. A black dude will talk and talk, and a Mexican dude will just start shooting.”

  I laugh nervously. The boys at the graffiti writer’s house don’t hear much from me on this night. Like the other nights that I am over, I mostly listen. Yet each time they include me i
n the conversation, they refer to me as vato or loco or ese, terms used among Mexican Americans or their acculturated counterparts up and down California, both North and Baja.

  “No, vato, it’s crazy over there!” . . . “Loco, you like Sublime, loco?” (At this question, I admit that I do.)

  These are cholo diminutives, terms of endearment and respect in California’s barrios. Obviously, I think to myself, I am not a cholo. But I am a Mexican American. My heritage is something people can almost smell on me here in Mexico City. It is a skin I cannot shed.

  There’s a guy I run into a lot in the Centro, for example, who says he was in the gang Florencia 13, in L.A. He used to live in Compton, specifically. He spent six years locked up, up in Chino. He lost his girl and his kids. His jefita lives in the state of México. He lives over here, “in la Guerrero.” He lives there with his “lady.” He doesn’t want to “fuck it up again.” Some “fools” who get deported after serving time in California, as he did, get here and just get right back into it. They start “banging” in Mexico, becoming transnationalized gangsters.

  Let’s call him Joe. He has a single teardrop tattoo below his right eye, signaling in some barrio symbologies that he has killed someone in his days banging. For a few months I see Joe work the entrance at a cantina where I often meet Susana. He holds the doors open for people entering and leaving, making sure no one takes off without paying. He breaks up fights when necessary. Joe doesn’t want to get back into the gang culture, even south of the border, so he goes looking for work. Everywhere he goes, he tells me, he is turned away. He walks into businesses in the Centro, asking to speak with the owner or manager, and workers respond with fear upon their faces, asking, “What do you want?” Life in Mexico City is hard for Joe. People are afraid of him. Because of his shaved head and tattoos. Because he looks like a Southwestern U.S. cholo.

  Talking with Joe outside the door of the cantina, the one place that does offer to hire him, I tell him I had lived in L.A., and that I know his area, Compton, Inglewood, Long Beach. “Cool, cool,” Joe says. He wears a long, gray sweatshirt with a fat blue LA on his chest. I tell him I am going back inside to my table with Susana. We do the handshake. Two hands clap, knuckles lock, one arm grabs the opposite elbow, opposite shoulders meet in a friendly bump.

  I run into guys like Joe all the time. They wear close fade haircuts and baggy jeans and LA caps and sweatshirts. Tattoos are often visible. They are güeros found suddenly in Mexico City because they’ve been booted from their native country—the United States—into Mexico, a place where they might have been born but which has become entirely foreign to them. Deportations from U.S. prisons have risen sharply in recent years. The repatriated and “rehabilitated” often wind up here because Mexico City is a big place. There is money, and hustle, and maybe they can find some kind of work—if people are willing to give them a chance. Joe’s case indicates that’s probably rare. Sometimes these guys end up selling candy on the metro.

  Their presence in D.F. is not exactly new. The photography and essay book Cholos a la Neza: Another Identity of Migration, by Pablo Hernández Sánchez and Federico Gama, says the source of the cholo look in Mexico City predates the present wave of U.S. prison deportations. Beginning in the 1980s, young guys in the outskirts of the city were drawn to the styles and cultures represented in popular U.S. movies about pachucos, gangsters, and life in the barrio: Zoot Suit, Colors, American Me, Mi Vida Loca, Blood In Blood Out. The cholo subculture then flourished in Ciudad Nezahualcóyotl in the 1990s, when migrants began returning home after time spent in California, bringing that influence directly to the streets of Mexico City. They formed Mexican copycat versions of some of the most fearsome pandillas from the North: Barrio Logan, the Mara Salvatrucha, Sur 13, the Latin Kings, and Florencia 13.

  Federico Gama’s images in Cholos a la Neza show a self-contained world populated by guys who look exactly like guys in California barrios—gang tattoos, Dickies slacks, tough poses, flashing gang signs—in settings that appear completely transplanted from north of the border—Chicano murals, like the one on Adonai’s wall, lowriders, tricked-out bikes. “These guys are responding to the binationality we are living in Mexico,” Gama tells me one day. “The border is no longer Chihuahua, Tijuana, Reynosa, the border is now all of Mexico. The border arrived to Mexico City, the heart of the country, and now from there is a strong relationship with Los Angeles, with New York, with Chicago.”

  Cholos in Mexico, Gama says, are living a U.S. achievement narrative that is sharply different from most.

  “For them the American dream is not the same as you guys understand the American dream to be. The American dream is coming back with Nikes, Dickies pants, jerseys, with caps, with tattoos. When they see someone like that, they go, ‘Órale, that’s a real gringo.’ ”

  In Mexico City, I am a real gringo, too. After three years of living here, I am still referred to as güero—white boy—by strangers on the street. To capitalinos who know enough about what a U.S. upbringing produces—our manner of walking, for one, quick and exasperated, our tentative Spanish, that starting pocho accent—I am a gringo regardless of how dark my skin might be. I am a Mexican gringo, if you will.

  We are still regarded with some level of suspicion in Mexico City. Native capitalinos might see pochos as cultural bastards. In the city of swindlers, people might also presume pochos pose an easy opportunity to squeeze some extra pesos out of the day. But mostly people in Mexico City these days just want to make connections.

  “What part of the U.S. are you from?” a girl asks me plaintively one night.

  She is making a deep and accurate assumption; not a word has yet been shared. I am with Susana, at our bar on the downtown alley near the mound of garbage. Again. I tell the girl where I am from, and she just starts crying on me, there in the middle of the cantina, by the jukebox. She cries about how she misses her man on the other side. She holds on to me tight, clutching my shoulders, feeling for my California skin.

  “There, there,” I say, holding her. For a moment, I am her transmitter, connecting her to her migrant husband, the man who left her behind.

  A drunk guy on López Street comes up to me as I’m walking home one night. He is stumbling, lost and intoxicated on a Sunday evening. Without thinking it through, he starts talking to me in a slurring English.

  “Hey, man, do you know where this bar is, man?”

  I tell him.

  “All right, cool,” he says, in that California drawl.

  It happens all the time, a reading of my pocho exterior at first glance, a presumption comfortable enough for the strangers who skip the questions and just dive right into English when addressing me.

  “Where are you from?” they ask up front, sizing me up and down at scenester parties. “You have this onda Chicana all over you . . .”

  “Hey, man.” A guy at Cultural Roots, a reggae club downtown, leans in to me, indicating my instinctive pose of toughness, Machίn, as my punk friend Reyes would say. “What are you so mad at?”

  For those of us who are back-and-forth in our cultural stance and worldview, we can feel each other when our paths cross on the streets of D.F. No words are necessary. We move about Neza, Iztapalapa, Tepito. We sense and spot each other at a market, on the metro. We share a mutual regard, less amicable than respectful, vaguely competitive. Anywhere in Mexico, I know another barrio guy from the U.S. Southwest when I see one, even from behind. This is how Mexico City is making me more instinctively aware of my Californianess.

  At African Star one night, a reggae club in Neza, dancing, free, I’m thinking about my aural influences, the sounds I was raised on. In other words, what my older siblings fed me. My older sisters, Lisa and Sandra, were cholas back in the day. In the eighties we were surrounded by Latin freestyle and early hip-hop, electro, and R&B. From San Francisco, the Central Valley, and New Orleans, Ernesto brought us ska, postpunk, and new funk. From Tijuana and the barrios of San Diego, Luis Gaston introduced us to Chicano hi
p-hop and the most quality subterranean reggae. Through Sergio I absorbed classic rock—Santana, Jimi Hendrix, the Doors—and pure nineties’ hip-hop—Dr. Dre, Too Short, Snoop, Ice Cube, Notorious B.I.G., Wu-Tang Clan, the Fugees, De La Soul, Rakim, Nas.

  This was my true cultural formation, the sounds in the car on the way to school, in the driveway, in our rooms, BET on blast every afternoon after school. In Mexico City, in certain worlds, the beats come back to me. They echo through the clubs, parties, toquines, through the haze of Oaxacan weed. They belong to the archaeology of the moment, the fluidity that exists between North and South, the unifying thump. I reside in those in-between spaces, the ripples, the intersections.

  One day I go to Calle Repùblica de Argentina deep in the back of Centro, Tepito territory. I come upon a stretch of the street that is lined primarily with stores that sell baseball caps. I find a spot with a stand outside lined with straight-billed caps that are in plain colors, from black to pink, with the elaborate skull-and-flower Ed Hardy–esque designs that are in style right now among some of the tepiteños, and knockoff caps for certain American teams: NY, LA, AZ, and SD, the insignia used by the San Diego Padres. It is block letters, the S placed slightly above the D, both symbols knitted in heavy white.

  Does this mean a critical mass of San Diego barrio exiles is in Mexico City? What about Arizonans? Nah, I decide, these must just be popular pairings of letters. I ponder the SD cap. This is not a piece of attire I would ever feel comfortable wearing in actual San Diego, but here, the insignia calls to me. I go for the straight-bill SD cap, in dark brown. I pay my fifty pesos for it, slap it on, cock it to the right, and walk back into the energy and noise of the street.

  Shortly after I move into my apartment in the Centro, I go next door to meet the neighbor, Osvaldo, an architect. I knock on Osvaldo’s door and see the inside of his house, a cozy, Catholic apartment. With a simple hello he walks past me and heads to my apartment, just to check it out. It is empty except for my bed and desk. I ask Osvaldo, “How do you deal with the noise, from the ambulantes?”