Down and Delirious in Mexico City (13 page)

I see this firsthand one Saturday, three weeks after the Plaza de las Armas popped in Querétaro. A surge of sympathy and goodwill for Mexico's emos has poured in from blogs and Web sites all over the world. Day after day, I am doing my best to explain or at least help illuminate the phenomenon over the telephone with journalists in Germany, New Zealand, and the United States. By now, I can no longer ignore my emo-fatigue.

It is a hot and overcast Saturday. Emos—by then enjoying the aid and support of the leftist establishment in the D.F. government, who considered them the victims of reactionary forces from the right—announce they will march from the Glorieta de Insurgentes to El Chopo, to demand inclusion and tolerance at the place where inclusion and tolerance among
tribus urbanas
is supposedly sacred. This time I don't want to miss any of the action. I know the emos will be heavily guarded and heavily watched by reporters and photographers. So I come in on the event through the rear. I go directly to the market, earlier than the emos' expected arrival, to wait with the
choperos.

The scene is a typical Buenavista station Saturday, crews of punks, skinheads, rockabillies, indies,
skateros,
rastas, cholos,
darketos,
and even a few straggling emos, everyone just hanging out. Large cloth signs slung between poles near the market's entrance welcome the emos and remind everyone that El Chopo is dedicated to tolerance for all. The signs feel a little out of place, as if hung there begrudgingly. I sit down on the ledge of a sidewalk, next to a pair of friends, and wait for a few minutes to pass before I turn and ask if they are waiting for the emo march.

Paulina, an eighteen-year-old who says she lives in the northern Aragón region of the city, says she is. “I wanna see what happens. Is it gonna get rough or what the fuck?” She has dyed-black hair, wears black eyeliner smudged down to her cheeks, and has a mean-looking stud in her nose. Paulina looks tough and mischievous. I like her immediately.

“Are you
darky
or something?” I ask.

“I'm punk rock.” Paulina makes a fist. Her friend is somewhat overweight and doesn't say a word. He looks a little emo, I think.

“So are you going to Christian Death tonight?” I ask.

“Yes. Are you? No way!”

Old-school punk friends of mine had mentioned that the legendary dark metal band from L.A. is in town. We have tickets to see them. This coincidence makes Paulina open up a bit. Glancing at her timid emo-like friend beside her, I ask her if she is anti-emo. “Whatever . . . ,” she responds, without much conviction.

“What's gonna happen? What's it gonna be?” Paulina says, rubbing her hands together. She adds, unable to hide her delight, that at the
glorieta
“everyone was pounding on everyone, even the girls, they looked like
perras.
” Bitches.

At about 4:00 p.m., as rain clouds grow darker overhead, a large contingent of police cruisers rolls on to the scene. “The pigs just got here,”
Paulina sneers. The air is tense. A Chopo organizer speaks into a microphone plugged into a large set of speakers, reminding everyone, conspicuously, that “all types of people” are welcome at El Chopo. But no one I see looks pleased with the idea of a police-led march by little emos heading their way. When the emos arrive, rows of them, arm in arm, holding up signs, marching and cheering, they are outnumbered by a ring of police and reporters. Punks and goths and skinheads and rockabillies gather up, as if the Chopo has suddenly become a tub of gasoline, ready to be lit. No friendly handshakes, no warm hellos, are offered. As soon as the march comes up Mosqueta to the entrance of the market at Calle Aldama, the Chopo crowds form a line along the edge of the sidewalk. The street erupts in human noise. Punks and goths and others throw their middle fingers into the air and chant,
“Death to the emos! Death to the emos!”

The emos throw their middle fingers back in reply. Only the presence of police with shields and batons prevents a riot. Behind me, behind the punk line, I see a spiky-haired kid grab a slab of loose sidewalk, slam it onto the ground to make small rocks, grab two of the biggest chunks, and prepare to hurl them into the opposite crowd. In a moment when the police seem poised to lose control of the situation, they allow traffic through on Mosqueta, and a sudden gush of vehicles separate the tribes. Rejected, the emos retreat, pull back, and leave, not once coming into direct contact with the market or with those waiting for them. The emos march onward, to rally for peace at the monument to Benito Juárez—Mexico's Abraham Lincoln. The confrontation lasts only a few minutes.

The anti-emo forces rejoice. They are incensed that the emos dared to come as a group to El Chopo—with police, no less.
“Fucking emo pigs! Fucking emo pigs!”
they chant. A spontaneous mosh
pit gets started. Bodies pounding against one another, elbows flying, knees hopping.

In the crowds I lose Paulina. But in a few moments I see her squeezing out of the moshing punks. “Where's your friend?” I ask.

“He got scared!” Paulina laughs. The friend has run off.

“It was a shitload of police,” Paulina says, panting, her voice shaking with adrenaline. “Let them come alone, fine, but with police? Come on!” We walk together into the market. Paulina's eyes are ablaze. She wants more. As she speaks, Paulina is pounding one fist into her other palm.

(Illustration by Rodrigo Betancourt.)

Y
ou can't really appreciate the enormity of Mexico City until you leave it on the ground. Merely landing at or departing from Benito Juárez International Airport belies the city's physical contours, the ranges of mountains that ring its basin. Flying in or out conceals what you're really dealing with. You must experience Mexico City's hugeness as a journey of distance, inch by inch, mile by mile, traffic allowing. On a late afternoon, nearing sunset, during the smoggiest season of the year, winter, your bus or car is
climbing the mountains to the east. The road curves and pitches. You can feel the air outside get colder and colder. The mountains in every direction are suddenly covered in brilliant green trees. To the west the sun disappears behind a dark cloud hanging over the enormous valley. It is not a rain cloud. It is a blanket of pollution permanently fixed over the city. A nasty thick black cloud, so dark in the shrinking light of dusk that you cannot see anything underneath it. The only way you can tell the city exists below is because from miles away you can still feel its hum. It's almost impossible to believe, like a vision of some futuristic hell.

People live there?

I survive my first smoggy winter in Mexico City by applying a gee-whiz sort of awe to it. I hack up alien-looking green phlegm in the mornings for weeks at a time, but I can't really comprehend just how toxic the city gets around Christmas and the New Year. In my second winter, I have moved to the Centro, to a second-floor apartment facing a street choked constantly in the daytime with traffic. It is a Saturday in late January when I wake up with a violent cough. Throughout the day the air feels as if it is sagging on my back. By Sunday I have a nagging headache. It is cold at night, but it still feels hot out somehow. Something on the skin, a stickiness, a barely perceptible unnatural film.

The news bears out my suspicions. It is a thermal inversion, an unkind weather phenomenon that afflicts places dense with people and pollutants. In the mountain bowl of Mexico City, a thermal inversion can be acute and dangerous when it strikes during the dry season. Warm air that gathers in daylight is trapped on the valley floor by cold air that moves in at night. The warm air mixes with what's already there, all the pollutants of everyday urban activity. It has been an especially polluted weekend in the capital. Toxicity levels spike to a point that prompts the D.F. government to activate its
environmental contingency plan, calling for limited outdoor activity, temporary restrictions on the manufacturing sector, and circulation restrictions on certain vehicles such as older models and cars from neighboring states. I scribble in a journal,
My throat feels like a cat pissed in it and my head feels like it's spent four hours listening to the same Daddy Yankee song on full volume, on loop.

A few merciful breezes visit the city. By that afternoon, the government lifts the contingency alert. All activity returns to normal, but the following day the air still feels outrageously toxic. This makes me a little nervous. Mexico City's current official slogan is Capital in Movement, so by necessity we can have it no other way. A Mexico City with fewer cars and trucks on the streets, with less commercial and manufacturing activity, less
movimiento,
is a Mexico City that loses money by the hour. Can't have that. So eyes are puffy and dry, coughs are chronic, and just a few flights of stairs leave you winded. That pinched sensation of nastiness lingers on the skin. In the schools, recess is held indoors. TV Azteca reports that scores of city children show up at doctors' offices complaining of bronchitis. They say the chief pollutant that weekend is ozone. But . . . whatever. No one really knows what to call the cocktail we breathe in Mexico City. It is a mixture of ozone with nitrogen oxide, sulfur dioxide, carbon monoxide, and hydrocarbons—inhaled and exhaled in a continuous cycle by some 20 million people, day in and day out. What can you call that, really?

In the dryness of winter, the form and effects of the pollution are strongest. But winter or not, it is always there, hanging invisibly over your head, even when the summer rains come and clear away the sitting atmosphere for a few hours a day. At seventy-three hundred feet, the valley's altitude, the air pressure is dramatically lower than on coastlines, which heightens the pollution's least favorable effects on the human body. People get sick chronically. The Mexico
City smog affects your entire person, body and mind. Knowing you are inhaling an atmosphere once famously described as being equivalent to a habit of daily chain-smoking (which plenty of
capitalinos
do anyway) is enough to make you question your and your neighbor's sanity.

On the worst days, the cocky cigarette-sucking of so many proud Mexico City natives grows exponentially. What else can you do but gather friends and hunker inside, to booze up, suck in the nicotine—“Might as well”—and to think fondly of the days before the birth of the world's first Smog City, a capital internationally known for being caked in pollution. It was just the way the story went, when Mexico shifted from a largely rural society of communal farmland and the slow lifestyle of the hacienda to a rapidly urbanizing one of crowded highways and factories coughing purple fumes. Starting in the late 1950s, people came to the big city in the valley from the provinces, near and far. They kept coming, and kept coming. Urban immigrants came looking for work because in Mexico City, they were told, it did not matter how poor or marginalized you were, you could find a hustle and provide for yourself. The city was irresistible. Slums sprang up around the outskirts, unplanned and all but ignored. The same phenomenon would eventually change cities in East Asia, in other parts of North and South America, and in Africa and Europe, but for much of the twentieth century it did not happen at the scale and velocity anywhere else that it happened in high central Mexico. A lack of proper infrastructure in an accelerating grid of humans and industry soon bred the first poisonous clouds over Mexico City, never to leave. Environmental misery followed.

Planners and regulators would dub it uncontainable, a city whose apparent destiny of failure was rooted in its ability to attract endless streams of new residents. The city grew, by the thousands a day,
by some accounts, and its situation worsened. During a memorably bad period of thermal inversion in 1991, when the city's smog was at what is now considered its historical peak, the
New York Times
quoted a local expert: “If the meteorological conditions remain the same, then we could have a thermal inversion that could equal the killing smog of London in the winter of 1950–51.”

There is no such panic today, even on bad days. The city has grown accustomed to itself. In the bowl, no one seems to notice the poison. The sky above you is some shade of blue, right? Why complain? The locals say it is normal. They don't seem to mind. They look at you with pity. During this extra-smoggy weekend in January, residents in my building make an effort to go outside as little as possible. We open beers and talk. In the darkened interior of an apartment upstairs, my neighbor Ponce, a cartoonist and illustrator born and raised in the capital, calmly explains the air of normalcy while smoking a few singles. “We're mutants,” Ponce says.

I down my can of beer, ask for an extra smoke, and retreat back to my apartment. What Ponce says makes my eyes pop in recognition. To be raised in Mexico City, or to willingly assimilate yourself to it, is to relinquish control over your natural state. The environment
physically alters you.
Because we've physically altered it. Ponce has uttered a cosmic truth. The Mexico City mutation is real.