Down and Delirious in Mexico City (19 page)

“I always make references, but take them to a more global level, and not so obvious,” Quetzal adds. “Otherwise it's just kitsch.” You can see it in other young designers here as well. They are merging the global with the local, applying the austere lines and geometries
of international couture with the playfulness and surreal qualities of everyday life in Mexico. They are also disciples of the power of androgyny. Among independent young labels, garments are offered as unisex, expressing in a simple article of clothing a belief in the idea that the male and the female exist equally within the self. The self speaks in what it decides to put on when it rolls out of the bed in the morning. Or when the self is preparing to go out at night, to a party in Mexico City. The fangs of the party monster, of this generation's newfound sexual liberation, is the garment, the look.

“Why did you decide to do fashion?” I ask Quetzal as we walk the crowded sidewalks. His reply is assured. “Love.”

The sky is now purple, the air is barely there. In this valley high in the mountains, I think, just too many people are breathing at once.

“I was living in Montreal,” Quetzal continues, “and I went through this huge depression, because I was drinking too much and doing a lot of drugs, and it was during the winter, so I got, you know . . .”

Soon after moving to Mexico City, Quetzal tells me, he met Marvin at a party during Fashion Week. Quetzal, raised in Tabasco, and Marvin, raised in Venezuela, formed an instant bond. They became partners. Quickly the pair became a fixture of the growing D.F. fashion scene. They began appearing together in magazines. They showed up on the Diario de Fiestas blog. They became a
thing
.

Quetzal and I decide we need to celebrate our surviving Mercado Sonora. We head toward the Zócalo. In the center, the plaza is bathed in Christmas cheer. Massive arrays of twinkling lights hang from the buildings surrounding the square and over the streets feeding into the Zócalo's traffic ring. There are people everywhere, cotton candy, clowns, women dressed as angels in blue wigs and
plastic wings. We take photos and wander around while Quetzal gabs on his cell phone endlessly and with absolute seriousness.

The night comes upon us and adventure beckons, so Quetzal decides we should check out the gay cantinas that furtively ring the Alameda Central.

We enter a place that calls itself Cineclub, near the Diego Rivera Mural Museum. The indistinct entrance has a rainbow flag hanging over its door, and that's about it. Quetzal leads me into the
cuarto oscuro,
the dark room where men watch porn and feel each other up or have sex. “Be careful in here,” he warns. “People steal.”

We have two beers each, and then, a little creeped out by the place, but still looking for trouble, Quetzal and I go around the corner to El Internet, a
cervecerίa
hidden behind a bodega. Passing cramped rows of synthetic snacks and coolers of sugary Coca-Cola products in the shop, we walk through a passageway and up a narrow flight of circular metal stairs to a room John Waters could have conjured—only slightly more threatening. Small, dank, drenched in glowing blue light, the room is painted like the skin of a zebra. A few tiny circular tables and knocked-over chairs are scattered about the sticky black linoleum floor. Scratchy music is playing from somewhere. The ceiling is hardly higher than the top of my head. Quetzal and I sit down, order a
caguama,
and start making friends.

It is loud. There are vaqueros, construction workers, transsexuals and transvestites, their male suitors, round Mexican black women, guys who are probably packing guns somewhere under their leather jackets. In the blur, we strike up a conversation with a tall transwoman seated at a table next to ours. She has pale brown skin and poorly treated yellow hair. Everyone is friendly and jolly.
At this point Quetzal loses his cell phone somehow. His BlackBerry has disappeared from under his eyes. Somehow. Because right then the transwoman gets up and goes downstairs without saying a word, clearly expecting us not to notice in the hollering and laughter.

Quetzal becomes frantic. “Wait,” I tell him. “Look carefully.” He searches through his bag and all the pockets of his jacket and jeans. Nothing. Near tears, Quetzal wails in English again. “That cell phone costs nine hundred dollars!” he cries, maybe embellishing a little.

“Come on,” I urge. “It has to be somewhere.”

Tension. The people around us lift their legs and look below their seats. Hadn't he been holding on to the phone, on the table? “The trannie!” Quetzal screams.

“Where did she go?” I ask.

Upset, Quetzal gets up and begins marching to the stairs. “I want to leave this fucking place.” I follow him down as I keep calling Quetzal's number on my own phone, searching with my ears for its ring.
“¿Dónde está?”
I ask the plainclothes guard at the bodega downstairs. “Where is she?”

The guard asks us what happened and I explain that someone, possibly the girl with the bad yellow hair, has stolen my friend's phone.

“Well, if you saw the
acción,
why didn't you say anything?” he challenges.

“I did!” I say.
I mean, I am
. “She stole my friend's phone! Where is she?”

“Let me go get her,” the guard says, and he goes back up to the bar.

Quetzal is nearby, pounding his feet in frustration, cursing her. I am still calling the cell phone, ears up, scanning the bodega's rear
storage room, below the joint upstairs. A huge bald man sits with a beer at a table pretending to be sending a text message on his phone, but I can see a curious bulge in his front pocket, and it is not his anatomy.
Did the evil trans girl pass the phone over to this guy? Was he the getaway crook? Was that the system? Was I making up the scenario in the loose logic of intense anger?

I am a split second away from approaching the man, thinking about what I might say, when the girl with the bad yellow hair appears, pulled by the arm by the guard. And I am preparing for a confrontation because he places her right in front of me and says in between us, “He says you stole his friend's phone.”

The girl is absolutely shocked, absolutely scandalized by the accusation. She speaks in rapid-fire, defensive
chilango
Spanish. “I don't know what you're talking about. . . . I came here to drink with my friends. . . . I don't know who you are . . . I don't need to steal!”

Her aggressively defensive attitude feeds my suspicions. “You took it,” I say slowly. “I saw you.” This was potentially going to get ugly. It is the start of the dance of violence, our faces only inches apart. Am I really about to get into a physical altercation with a trans girl at an illegal gay cantina in the Centro of D.F. over a friend's lost “$900” BlackBerry? “You took it! You grabbed it, then brought it downstairs and gave it to someone!”

The guard steps in. “Then you should have said something.”

“I did,” I protest a bit unrealistically.

It is useless. The bald fat man in the back has disappeared. Quetzal's cell phone is gone. The guard shrugs and looks at me as though we both know it would be pointless to make much more fuss. The girl keeps gabbing away, defending herself to no one in particular as we turn our backs and walk off.

Quetzal is drunk not with alcohol but with rage. I'm pretty much beside myself, too. Tired? Drunk? Mad as hell? Not sure what,
exactly. In the span of a day Quetzal has gone from an intrepid guide and urban adventurer to a hapless victim in the risky games of the Mexico City streets. We play with the night, and this time, the night wins.

At El Internet, people inside and outside the bodega are watching us. Quetzal and I tumble out onto the street, walking down the middle of Doctor Mora. A couple of D.F. transit cops observe us with halfhearted attention. Quetzal is screaming,
“Fucking trannie! Motherfucking trannie bitch! My phone!”

We begin walking away.

“She needs the money more than I do,”
Quetzal bellows.
“Whatever! IT'S MEXICO!”

Absorbing the beat at a
sonidero
in Tepito. (Photo by Livia Radwanski.)

I
t is an overcast Sunday afternoon in the bleak D.F. suburb of Tultitlán, where a few dozen people are gathered for the one-month anniversary rosary for Jonathan Legaria Vargas, the man they called El Padrino and El Pantera—or the Panther—now deceased. In the yard of Legaria's unofficial outdoor church on a desolate industrial avenue next to a used-car lot, families with grandmothers and infants stand alongside tables offering tamales, fresh juices, and beef stew. With flowers, a mariachi band, and the recitation of the rosary, the ceremony has all the trappings of a traditional Mexican Catholic mourning ritual. Two elements, however, stand out: the
altar before them, enclosed with a miniature skeleton dressed in a gleaming white robe and a tiara, bony jaw agape, eyes hollow; and an enormous seventy-two-foot-tall statue made of plywood and fiberglass that Legaria had erected to his chosen spiritual mother, the Santa Muerte. Death is in a black robe, her face shrouded by a hood, her skeletal arms outstretched, like something out of a theme-park ride, crazed and nightmarish. Glancing up at it every few seconds, I half expect the structure's robe to mechanically split open and reveal the entrance to a hall of mirrors.

“O Most Divine and Most Precious Holy Death,” the mourners chant in unison, kneeling before the Santa Muerte altar. “Cure the jealous . . . guard the moribund . . . bless El Padrino . . .”

The prayer is led by Legaria's widow, Constantine, a young woman with pale, freckled skin and furiously curly, lemon-colored hair. She wears jeans and a small, stylish jacket and holds a microphone. “O Most Holy Death . . . ,” she chants, curving the tone of her words from down to up, as if conducting a hypnosis. And the people repeat each line.

“In silence I remain here . . .”
“In silence I remain here . . .”

“Waiting for the moment . . .”
“Waiting for the moment . . .”

“That will take me to you . . .”
“That will take me to you . . .”

After a while, I am mouthing the chants myself, letting them roll through my brain. I am treated cordially and warmly by the attending women, Constantine's assistants. I have tamales, and when the prayers are over, after the mariachi sing “Amor Eterno,” the traditional ballad of farewell, each person places a white carnation before another large Santa Muerte figure dressed in a crimson gown, crossing himself or herself. Constantine then leads a procession of her dead husband's followers along the avenue out front. They carry flowers and candles and banners and march behind a limousine that El Pantera had custom-painted with images of the
Santa Muerte and the call letters of his Santa Muerte radio show. Throughout the afternoon, the mariachis play, the food and drink flow, and the children run happily around the huge Death statue and a small field of humanlike skulls spread out on patches of grass, in grids.

A month earlier, on the night of July 31, 2008, Jonathan Legaria had been shot more than a hundred times by high-powered assault weapons after a car-to-car chase on a busy boulevard in the neighboring suburb of Ecatepec. Police say the killing, spectacular and saturated in press coverage, had all the markings of a coordinated assassination, far from the peaceful passage befitting a revered spiritual leader. Legaria, just twenty-seven years old, was not an unknown figure in the red-note tabloids. He had verbally clashed in the press with the proprietor of another Santa Muerte sanctuary, in the central Colonia Morelos, and with the archbishop of Ecatepec, who labeled him a “charlatan.” He fought with the municipal authorities of Tultitlán when they attempted to prevent him from building his massive Santa Muerte statue. In life, the tabloids note, El Pantera had plenty of enemies.

With his piercing eyes, his eloquent and hypnotic manner of speaking, his neck and wrists covered in Santa Muerte scapulars and Santería-like beads, the self-anointed priest had developed an enthusiastic following in the northern suburbs of the city. Hundreds of people, including a fearsome biker gang, attend Legaria's funeral.

After the Panther's murder, his mother, Enriqueta Vargas Ortiz, determined to defend her son's honor, announced a quarter-million-peso reward for any information leading to his killers. The local authorities declared themselves “incompetent” to lead the investigation and handed the case over to federal authorities. This was read as an automatic defeat. Given the “spiritual” ramifications
of the case and the nature of Mexican law enforcement, Legaria's murder will be forgotten and piled away with mountains of other unsolved killings, both high profile and not. From one day to the next, the press stopped visiting.

It occurs to me that the Panther's towering Santa Muerte statue is perhaps the largest personification of Death any mortal has ever built. At Legaria's “afterlife” party, we stand below it in a ritual of mourning, not minding the irony. I wander around the yard listening to people who swear that the Holy Death image and El Padrino have saved them and given their lives new meaning.