| Notes on the Chapters
As I wrote Down and Delirious in Mexico City I practiced what might be called incidental research. I looked at sources sent to me, books or films recommended, stuff passed my way, and in many cases I picked up books or magazines from markets or temporary stalls on the street. The following is a selective and subjective compilation of notes on sources and inspirations.
1 | Guadalupe’s Test
The primary source for the historical references here is Mongrels, Bastards, Orphans, and Vagabonds: Mexican Immigration and the Future of Race in America, by Gregory Rodriguez (Vintage Books, 2007). In Chapter 2, Rodriguez examines the central role played by the Virgen de Guadalupe in the formation of mestizo mixed-race identity in the land that would become Mexico. Rodriguez emphasizes that the Tepeyac hill had served as a sacred space for Tonantzin, where sacrifices and feasts were held in honor of the feminine deity, and also that the “origins of the holy image . . . are contested.” But in any case, the image’s power was undeniable from the very beginning. She “became a symbol of an emerging mestizo nation.”
“The private flag of Mexicans” is a quote from Richard Rodriguez, in his 1973 collection of essays Days of Obligation, as cited in Mexico in Mind: An Anthology (Vintage Departures, 2006).
“La Morenita” is Spanish for “The Little Dark One,” in feminine form; one of many nicknames for the Virgen de Guadalupe.
“Órale” is such a great slang word. It is used to mean “Right on” or as an especially affirmative “Yes.”
Mota is slang for marijuana, weed.
As for pocho, I cite the current definition on UrbanDictionary.com: “It is a derogatory term that can be someone who’s trying to ‘act white’ but it has been largely embraced by Chicanos with a sense of defeatist humor—We’re pochos, y qué?—so that it’s actually becoming more playful than bitter.”
2 | Points of Arrival
I’d like to cite two texts that helped influence my move to Mexico City. First, a pulpy short novel titled Nada que ver, by Jorge Dorantes (Era, 2001), about the exploits of a crew of hard-partying, apocalyptic chilangos, and, second, The Other Side: Notes from the New L.A., Mexico City, and Beyond, by Ruben Martinez (Vintage, 1993). Other sources that capture the gritty allure of Mexico City in the early part of the decade and century include the films Sexo, Pudor, y Lágrimas (1999), directed by Antonio Serrano; Amores Perros (2000), directed by Alejandro González Iñárritu; and Y Tu Mamá También (2001), directed by Alfonso Cuarón.
Later, I found great insights in First Stop in the New World, by David Lida (Riverhead Books, 2008), and El Monstruo: Dread and Redemption in Mexico City, by John Ross (Nation Books, 2009). For looking at D.F. through the lens of texts on architecture, urbanism, and visual culture, I enjoyed consulting Citámbulos: Guía de asombros de la Ciudad de México (Oceano, 2006), by Ana Álvarez Velasco, Valentina Rojas Loa Salazar, and Christian von Wissel; as well as the book ZMVM, by Fernando Romero (LCM Laboratorio de la Ciudad de México, 2000).
From Lida: “Despite her role in the Conquest, for much of Mexican history La Malinche was a highly revered figure, nearly as exalted as the Virgen de Guadalupe.”
The term mexica is the Náhuatl word for Aztecs.
Regarding the reference to the Central de Abastos as the “largest in the world,” I turn to the blog Edible Geography (“The Axis of Food,” June 28, 2010), by Nicola Twilley, who writes that the market “sprawls across a 327-hectare site on the eastern edge of the D.F., dwarfing fellow wholesale food markets such as Hunt’s Point (24 hectares), Tsukiji, or even the massive Rungis, outside Paris (232 hectares).”
The Sad Night, Noche Triste, occurred on June 30, 1520. Cortés’s forces were nearly vanquished by the Aztecs, who ambushed the invading army from canoes under the cover of night as the conquistadors were moving across Tenochtitlan’s western causeway to Tacuba. Hundreds of Spaniards and their Indian allies were killed. For Cortés, it was a sad night.
Mexico City’s population is difficult to measure with precision because, like other megacities, its functional boundary is open to interpretation. I’ve seen Internet and official sources with population estimates ranging from 17 million to 23 million. Nearly 9 million people live in the Federal District and some 14 million live in the state of Mexico, but not all commute to or interact with the city core. Twenty million is a comfortable median between 17 million and 23 million, and it is the figure many journalists have used since the start of the 2000s. The Valley of Mexico, which includes the Federal District and portions of the states of Mexico and Hidalgo, is now generally said to have a population of 20 million, making metropolitan Mexico City the second or third largest in the world.
Mexico City sinks at different speeds in different parts. During a talk at Postopolis, a week of talks and presentations related to urbanism, at the Museo Experimental el Eco, on June 10, 2010, water expert Jorge Legorreta said D.F. sinks about seven centimeters a year.
Regarding boxing, everything I know is oral history, provided by my father, Sergio Hernandez, and my maternal biological grandfather, Abel “El Tiburón” Rojas. One source that I read for an introductory history is Pasión por los guantes: Historia del box mexicano I, 1895–1960.
3 | La Banda
My primary sources for the history of the Chopo market and alternative youth subcultures in Mexico City include: the independently published history cited in the chapter text Tianguis Cultural del Chopo: Una larga jornada, by Abraham Ríos Manzano (Ediciones AB, 1999); ¡Qué Onda Ése . . . ! De contracultura y otros rollos, by Merced Belén Valdés Cruz (independently published, 2008); Rock Mexicano, also by Valdés Cruz (independently published, 2002); ¿Qué transa con las bandas?, by Jorge García-Robles (Editorial Posada, 1985); relevent sections of Los rituales de caos (Era, 1995) and Amor perdido, both by Carlos Monsiváis (Era, 1977); relevant chapters in Refried Elvis: The Rise of the Mexican Counterculture, by Eric Zolov (University of California Press, 1999); and small magazine articles, news stories, and video clips too numerous to mention. I found ¿Qué transa con las bandas? most illuminating. The book is a collection of oral histories of members of the early chavos banda gangs.
For the history of the 1968 Tlatelolco massacre, the 1971 Jueves de Corpus massacre, and the Avándaro festival, I consulted the sources listed above as well as La Noche de Tlatelolco, by Elena Poniatowska (Era, 1971); El 68: La tradición de la resistencia, by Monsiváis (Era, 2008); Tragicomedia Mexicana 1, by José Agustín (Espejo de México, 1990); the archival exhibit on 1968 at the Centro Cultural Universitario at Tlatelolco; and the fictionalized film version of the night of October 2, 1968, Rojo Amanecer, directed by Jorge Fons and released in 1989. I also read the essays and consulted images and text in The Age of Discrepancies: Art and Visual Culture in Mexico, 1968–1997 (Turner, 2007), the catalog for the UNAM exhibit of the same name, edited by curators Cuauhtémoc Medina and Olivier Debroise. I collected many flyers, magazines, brochures, and other prized print ephemera in my frequent visits to El Chopo.
“Perfect dictatorship” is the phrase coined by Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa, who, in 1990, accepted an invitation from Octavio Paz to visit Mexico and discuss “liberty” in eastern Europe. Live on Televisa, according to the next-day story in El Paίs, Vargas Llosa drifted off-script during the discussion and said: “México es la dictadura perfecta. La dictadura perfecta no es el comunismo. No es la URSS. No es Fidel Castro. La dictadura perfecta es México.” (“Mexico is the perfect dictatorship. The perfect dictatorship is not Communism. It is not the U.S.S.R. It is not Fidel Castro. The perfect dictatorship is Mexico.”)
A crucial recent text on the “Dirty War” is México armado, by Laura Castellanos (Era, 2007). Castellanos charts the history of all armed rebel movements in Mexico in the period of 1943–1981, and lays out the still murky events of urban warfare and targeted repression that characterized the “Dirty War” years in Mexico.
Foreign bands barred from playing in Mexico at the height of the
PRI is mentioned in Zolov, in his conclusions in Refried Elvis: “At a 1980 Johnny Winter performance in Pachuca, for instance, the concert ‘ended in police repression against the audience.’ Two years later, at a Mexico City opening of Ladies and Gentlemen, the Rolling Stones, police entered the theater and prevented the screening. These were among scores of similar incidents that affected foreign rock performance in Mexico and characterized to an even greater degree native rock.”
4 | Fashion & Facsimile
This chapter appeared in Spanish translation in the March 2010 issue of Gatopardo magazine, which is produced in Mexico City and distributed across Latin America. Gratitude is due to the editors and staff there.
There is a robust fashion blog community in Mexico City and a burgeoning local fashion press and several other outlets online. In addition, major style chain publications have Mexican editions, including Elle, Harper’s Bazaar, Vogue, Nylon, GQ, Playboy, Maxim, and Vice. Plenty of people labor in the fomenting of a fashion consciousness in Mexico, which, despite my critique of the scene at large, is an encouraging recent development in Mexico City culture.
On the gentrification of the Condesa, I consulted two primary text sources. First, the chapter on the Condesa in Lida, First Stop in the New World, offers a neat summary of the neighborhood’s transformation between 2004 and 2007. Second, I looked at a tangential document of the early formation of the “scene” in the Condesa through activities at the independent art space La Panadería, in the art book La Panadería: 1994–2002 (Turner, 2005), edited by Alex Dorfsman and Yoshua Okon, who cofounded La Panadería with Miguel Calderón. An interview Dorfsman conducts with Calderón for the book is telling. Dorfsman asks Calderón to contrast the international scene, which they had just absorbed while studying abroad, and Mexico City in 1994, when La Panadería was founded in the Condesa. Calderón responds: “Even though Mexico City is one of the biggest metropolitan areas in the world, in 1994 it was full of limitations: you had to wait for days to go to a party; there were hardly any concerts; bars were really hard to get into, if you weren’t there with a date or if you were wearing sneakers they wouldn’t let you in; cantinas always closed early, drinks were really expensive and the music was always the same top 40 crap.”
5 | The Warriors
“The Warriors” is based primarily on first-person accounts in interviews; news reports in print, radio, and online; and on loads of Web chatter, as cited throughout the chapter itself. I also consulted other sources for general overviews of the anti-emo violence in Mexico and the emo culture at large. The book Nothing Feels Good: Punk Rock, Teenagers, and Emo, by Andy Greenwald (St. Martin’s Griffin, 2003), is the best study of this wide subcultural genre as it grew in the United States. A strange book, Emos, darketos, rockeros: ¿Cuál de ellos es su hijo?, by Argentine writer Constana Caffarelli (Lumen Mexico, 2008), is worth looking at purely to see how such cultures are superficially distilled for worried parents of teenagers. On this note, Chilango magazine published an entertaining cover story on parents and their emo kids in June 2008 (“Mi hijo es emo,” by Caroline Vera). I actively reported on the anti-emo violence as it developed on my personal blog.
A version of this chapter appeared in the May 2008 issue of Gatopardo in Spanish (“La flower sin el power”), and another version, with added material, appeared in English in issue 95 of Flaunt (“The Emo Wars: Dispatch from Mexico City”). I also commented on the anti-emo violence for a radio piece for NPR by Michael Scott O’Boyle (“The Mexican Emo Wars,” April 16, 2008) and for a video piece for Current TV by Ioan Grillo (“Mexico City Emos,” July 18, 2008).
I’d also like to acknowledge the work done by the Federal District Human Rights Commission on the violence among youth groups, particularly the November 2008 issue of DFensor, the commission’s magazine.
Regarding the use of naco by one of the teens I interviewed in Querétaro, a wonderful essay on the term and its sociocultural implications by Claudio Lomnitz, “Fissures in Contemporary Mexican Nationalism,” was published in Deep Mexico, Silent Mexico: An Anthropology of Nationalism (University of Minnesota Press, 2001).
Sergay.com.mx extensively covered the anti-emo riots, signaling early on an alliance of gay activists with emo youth.
The Multiforo Alicia on Cuauhtémoc Avenue, headed by Ignacio Pineda, is an essential meeting place for the many subgroups that constitute the “urban tribes” of Mexico City. I’ve attended many concerts and events there in the course of my work. Héctor Castillo Berthier, a researcher at the UNAM, is the go-to voice for youth-related issues for most mainstream news outlets in Mexico City. He is chief organizer behind Circo Volador, a youth-oriented alternative arts and music space in the Jamaica area of the Venustiano Carranza borough.
In the May 2008 issue of Eres, a Televisa pop culture magazine, Kristoff explains his heritage as such: “I was born in Poland and I arrived here in ’82, when I was eight years old. . . . My father is my hero because at 43 years old and without speaking Spanish he decided to take his wife and kids and move to a place that had nothing in common with Poland. It was either that or starving to death.”
Emo, despite what its detractors say, emerged in Mexico as a defined subculture with defined characteristics. It might not ever have an ideological or “tribal” foundation but it does imply a specific sound in rock, a specific look, and adherents who are transient, of a specific age, and self-define as “hard-core.” Most of the emo teens I interviewed for this chapter have since moved on from emo, adopting even less defined markers of any specific group, but still making rock. For insight into this, and insight into how emo is relentlessly marketed at teens, I looked at a couple of issues of Mundo Emo magazine, a sort of generic cultural fanzine published by a company called Mina Editores.
6 | The Lake of Fire
There is no greater influence on my conception of the cosmic violence of the Valley of Mexico than the major archaeological sites that stand as living historical emblems amid the urban density: the Templo Mayor, Teotihuacán, Tlatelolco, and Cuicuilco. The sites’ related museums offer illuminating examples of how native groups lived, helping me understand the centrality of ritual human sacrifice in cosmologies and sociopolitical orders in Mesoamerica, which can make the imagination run wild. I was also inspired in this chapter by Rodrigo Betancourt and conversations with Mariana Botey, whose knowledge of, first, the cultures of violence in Mesoamerica and, second, Georges Bataille, gave me unmatched insights into intersections over distant philosophies. Then I read Queer by William S. Burroughs, and it rattled those pathways even more.
Historical review of the Conquest crucial to my understanding: Mongrels, Bastards, Orphans, and Vagabonds, by Gregory Rodriguez (where I drew the “die like brutes” reference); a standard textbook history The Course of Mexican History, by Michael C. Meyer and William L. Sherman (Oxford University Press, 1979; fifth edition); and Death and the Idea of Mexico, by Claudio Lomnitz (Zone Books, 2005), a thought-provoking guide to understanding the ways in which death and structures of violence have helped shape Mexico’s identity since the point of contact between Mesoamerica and Europe. The quote “foundational holocaust” is from Death and the Idea of Mexico (Chapter 1).
Thanks to the D.F. natives who shared with me personal stories about the 1985 earthquake.
It’s important to note that air quality has improved steadily in Mexico City since the 1990s and start of the 2000s. It has probably improved even more since this chapter was written. The chapter’s narrative basis is two higher-than-normal smoggy periods I experienced early after moving here. The Washington Post and Agence France Presse reported in 2010 that Mexico City no longer belongs to the list of the ten most polluted cities on the planet, thanks in large part to systematic efforts to reduce pollutants in vehicle emissions, manufacturing, and by building more public transit, which includes shared public bike programs (“Mexico City drastically reduced air pollutants since 1990s,” by Anne-Marie O’Connor, Thursday, April 1, 2010, and “Clean-up efforts pay
off in Mexico City,” by Sofia Miselem, March 17, 2010).
Other sources guided and inspired me here. First, the photography of newspaperman Enrique Metinides, whom I interviewed in Mexico City in October 2006 and October 2010. His work basically functions as a decades-long catalog of the most gory and grisly crime and accident scenes in Mexico City. The interview appears in edited form in Los Angeles–based Journal of Aesthetics & Protest, No. 5.
Mexico compares favorably to other countries in homicide rates per 100,000 inhabitants, according to a 2009 study by the Centro de Investigación para el Desarollo (CIDAC) entitled “Índice de Incidencia Delictiva y Violencia.” El Salvador tops that list, followed by fourteen other countries including Venezuela, Colombia, Belize, Jamaica, Ecuador, Brazil, the Dominican Republic, and Paraguay before reaching Mexico at number sixteen.
The painting that is mentioned at the end of the chapter is Erupción del Volcán Xitle, Destrucción de Cuicuilco, by Jorge González Camarena, 1962.
7 | Kidnapped
This chapter was based almost entirely on media reports that I clipped and consulted daily on the Silvia Vargas and Fernando Martí kidnappings in the following sources: La Jornada, Excelsior, La Prensa, Reforma, Crónica, Milenio, and El Universal.
Data differs on kidnapping statistics in Mexico because a uniform definition of what constitutes kidnapping does not exist and because a vast majority of such cases are said to go unreported. Additionally, according to a 2010 study by the Instituto Ciudadano de Estudios Sobre la Inseguridad (ICESI), states report different kidnapping data than the federal government. Another degree of ambiguity is added with the question of whether the kidnappings of migrants traveling through Mexico should be counted as opposed to merely those of Mexican citizens. In a 2008 study by the Netherlands-based organization IKV Pax Christi (“Kidnapping Is Booming Business”), in 2006 Mexico was the worldwide leader in the “estimate of the absolute number of kidnappings,” followed by Iraq. Citing ICESI, the report estimates that only 29 percent of kidnappings in Mexico are not reported to authorities.
Down and Delirious in Mexico City: The Aztec Metropolis in the Twenty-First Century Page 23