Down and Delirious in Mexico City

More advance praise for

Down & Delirious in Mexico City

“This guy can really write!”

—A
LMA
G
UILLERMOPRIETO
, author of
Dancing with Cuba

“In Mexico City, trends, fashions, youth lifestyles—punks, emos, and hipsters, like hippies and Beats long before—arrive from the U.S. and are adopted and mutate until they are as Mexican as anything. Unlike in the U.S., they never really go away. Daniel Hernandez is our guide into this labyrinth of urban tribes, this vast twenty-first-century urban survival laboratory. He writes about his experience as he lived it, with daring curiosity, bursts of stunning poetry, charming earnestness, penetrating intelligence, always without clichés. The reader witnesses Hernandez's transformation, too, from down-and-delirious gringo outsider into totally down-and-delirious
chilango
.”

—F
RANCISCO
G
OLDMAN
, author of
The Art of Political Murder

“Daniel Hernandez writes with forthright generosity of spirit and intelligent acuity. Told from the perspective of a fascinated outsider gradually becoming a knowing insider,
Down and Delirious in Mexico City
takes us into a teeming, complex, vast, dark city of wonders, its people and places, cultures and rituals, food and drink, history and present. Concise, pithy, honest, and clear-eyed, Hernandez is a trustworthy, infallible guide through one of the most amazing cities on earth.”

—K
ATE
C
HRISTENSEN
, author of
The Great Man
and
Trouble

“Daniel Hernandez takes on Mexico City, and the results are simply brilliant. A reader couldn't ask for a more compassionate, more daring, or more honest guide to the world's most maddening megacity. The beauty and terror, the dynamism and precariousness of life in
El Defectuoso
is vividly portrayed on every page of this important book.”

—D
ANIEL
A
LARCóN
, author of
Lost City Radio

“Guided by his passions, Daniel Hernandez let himself become engulfed by Mexico City's complexity and contradictions. He got very deeply into el D.F. very quickly. His marvelous
Down and Delirious in Mexico City
is essential reading for anyone who cares about this confusing and misunderstood megalopolis, and particularly what it means to be young here.”

—D
AVID
L
IDA
, author of
First Stop in the New World: Mexico
City, the Capital of the 21st Century
                                     

“Daniel Hernandez navigates the beautiful chaos of Mexico City with a reporter's tenacity, an adventurer's daring, and an open heart that allows him to discover the history that lives inside him. His lush, eyewitness portrayals take you inside the crush of crowds that pop up all over Mexico City—at soccer stadiums, religious pilgrimages, art happenings and always the dance floor. A gorgeously done book.”

—L
AURIE
O
CHOA
, co-founder and editor of
Slake: Los Angeles

“This is Mexico City as seen from its quaking mosh pit, a ferocious ancient-modern swirl of passion, bodies, style, and release. Hernandez is a Mexican gringo on an urban pilgrim's quest, pulled between fearlessness and introspection, the street and the keyboard, the North and the South.
Let's Go Mexico City
this isn't, and we're all the better for it.”

—J
OSH
K
UN
, University of Southern California

“Pitch-perfect and incandescent. Hernandez's shape-shifting abilities take us from emo to punk to neo-Aztec; from new age to old school to trans-
everything,
then back again only to find ourselves transmuted into something else. If Hernandez started off as a visitor, as many great writers who have written about Mexico did—from Artaud, Kerouac and Burroughs to Bolaño—he adopts and is adopted by this city and is now truly a
chilango
insider. His narrative of grit, glitter, and glory is not only a must
re
-read, it is an invitation to live.”

—G
ABRIELA
J
AUREGUI
, author of
Controlled Decay

“Legions of writers have made the pilgrimage to the Aztec capital—from Breton to Lowry, from Lawrence to Burroughs—but few stayed long enough or wandered far enough from the expat-friendly circuit in this most iconic capital of the Global South. Daniel Hernandez crisscrosses
la capital
and transcends borders that have held others back—from the coruscating decadence of the party city to the outlying barrios where people survive by their wits amid the bewildering violence of Mexico in the age of the narco. As a young Mexican-American author, Hernandez is both on intimate terms with and alienated from the city, a kinetic point of view that reveals to us a post-postmodern place that is melancholy and loving, frightening, and inspiring—this most indispensable city of ghosts and the forever young.”

—Rubén martínez, Fletcher Jones Chair in Literature and Writing,
Loyola Marymount University, and author of
Crossing Over:
A Mexican Family on the Migrant Trail
                             

Scribner
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Copyright © 2011 by Daniel Hernandez

All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or
portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information address
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the Americas, New York, NY 10020.

First Scribner trade paperback edition February 2011

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Manufactured in the United States of America

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Library of Congress Control Number: 2010044455

ISBN 978-1-4165-7703-4
ISBN 978-1-4516-1018-5 (ebook)

 

 

 

For my brothers and sisters

A Note to the Reader: Getting Down

Part I
| ASSIMILATIONS

1
Guadalupe's Test

2
Points of Arrival

3
La Banda

Part II
| TENSIONS

4
Fashion & Facsimile

5
The Warriors

6
The Lake of Fire

7
Kidnapped

8
The Delinquent Is Us

Part III
| TAKING CHANCES

9
A Feathered Serpent in Burberry Shades

10
Negotiating Saints

11
Originals of Punk

12
Attack of the Sweat Lodge

13
Death by Decadence

Part IV
| MUTATIONS

14
At Home

15
The Seven Muses of Mexico City

Notes on the Chapters

Acknowledgments

Postscript

What are you? Consumer or participant?

                      —Epigram for the day, November 16, in the 2008
                         calendar of the Mexico City goth club El Under

W
hen the Pumas scored the day's first goal on a Sunday in late fall 2007, we had just arrived at the Estadio Olímpico to take a standing position in the student section. It was a clear, gorgeous afternoon. I had been in Mexico City for only a few weeks. Behind the stadium's swooping southern rim you could see the green mountains to the south, each covered in a carpet of pine trees, and above the range, the gleaming blue sky. The Pumas, the professional football team at the national university, were playing the Jaguares from Chiapas, and Naomi, my guide that day, had warned me that the Jaguares were a formidable foe. I was told to prepare myself for a long, hard-fought game. What I didn't understand was that
hard-fought
was more a reference to the fans than the action on the field.

We didn't actually see the first goal happen. You might say we
felt
it happen. I was standing with Karen, Naomi's sister, when a shattering roar echoed throughout the stadium, and in an instant I felt a half dozen people falling on top of me. Diving, ferociously, first into the air and then down upon anyone who might be in the rows below. The Pumas had scored, and members of La Rebel, as the student section of fans is called, responded by doing what they've done for years anytime their team scores. They rioted. I ducked and leaned to the left and tried to grab Karen's shoulders. But she had slipped under the weight of the people on top of her, and some guy's elbow was jammed into her cheek. I could see her complaining desperately to an ear nearest her mouth, but I couldn't make out what she was saying. The roar was deafening. Arms, heads, rear ends, legs, clamoring in every direction. When the tangle of bodies cleared up, I half-expected Karen to be weeping and ready to leave. Instead, she bounced to her feet, let out a wild
“Woo-hoo!!!”
and squeezed through her neighbors to rejoin her friend Happy, who was standing on the concrete passageway before us. Where was Noami? Somehow she'd wound up in the section below, several rows down. Naomi turned and waved brightly. It was still too loud to talk but we all made reassuring eye contact with each other.