Down and Delirious in Mexico City (22 page)

“A lot of reporters come,” Reyes says as we ride the train, “and they want to write about us, about the punk movement. But they only care about what's happening in the moment. They don't get
into the roots. Some of us have been twenty years with the movement, some even up to thirty. Me, I think I've been punk for maybe twenty-six years.”

I listen as we race eastward under the capital, deciding it best not to ask Reyes about his age. People move in and out of our car at each stop, the everyday movement of the subterranean city. “We're older now,” Reyes says. “The
chavas
are now
señoras
. Their husbands died or were killed. They have their own kids now.”

He shows me the tattoos that decorate his thick arms. One of them is marked with the letters
P.N.D.,
the name, he says, of his punk group in Santa Fe, where he grew up. He tells me others often mistake the acronym to mean Punk Never Dies, but Reyes explains, “It's Plan Nacional de Desarrollo.” The name—National Development Plan—expresses the idea that liberation from government repression, that a radical state of total autonomy, the core tenet of punk, is a project not just for his neighborhood in Santa Fe but for the entire nation. “And that's what it still is, Plan Nacional de Desarrollo,” Reyes says seriously, looking straight at me. “We still believe it.”

Reyes grew up in the slums that rose unchecked around the vast garbage dump in Santa Fe, a long canyon-dotted region on the west side of the Federal District. For decades, the Santa Fe dump epitomized the disarray of a megacity growing beyond its capacity. The city in that period was widely recognized as the world's largest, and at the Sante Fe dump, extreme poverty mirrored an extreme environmental crisis. The Associated Press reported on the area in 1988:

The foul-smelling dump, spread over about 150 acres on the western edge of Mexico City, was one of the largest in Latin America. . . . The garbage
was estimated to be 230 feet deep in some places, forming enormous cliffs from the refuse deposited there for more than four decades. . . . Spontaneous fires broke out, sending noxious fumes into the air. There was also concern the wastes were seeping into aquifers and contaminating the city's already scarce water supply.

Today much of Santa Fe is an overdeveloped business district of high-rises and exclusive business complexes, a place of impersonal living. Some call it Mexico's mini-Dubai. Despite its veneer of hyperdevelopment, Santa Fe is to this day still surrounded by many of its original slums. In this radical transformation, Reyes explains, Santa Fe's history of massive displacement has completely been erased.

In the early 1980s, the federal government decided that Santa Fe would eventually be developed into a first-world-styled “central business district”—as far from the city center as possible. For that to happen, the garbage dump and the people who lived off it had to be relocated. Little by little, the trash pickers and residents of the Santa Fe slums were pushed out, making room for hotels, a massive shopping center, and the campus of the Universidad Iberoamericana. The small barrio in the slums where Reyes grew up was Tlayapaca, one of the last holdouts. The government wanted it to be the new home of the Mexico City campus of the Tecnológica de Monterrey, one of the country's most prestigious universities. The neighborhood had to be razed. Residents were offered money but many families did not want to leave. The people of Tlayapaca resisted as much as they could, but on December 28, 1998, a date Reyes invokes gravely, police swept through the barrio and forcibly removed its residents. The December 30 edition of
La Jornada
reported that six hundred people were removed that night by authorities who operated with “the luxury of arrogance and violence.” Reyes's family was among them.

For years the most ardent families of Tlayapaca battled the government—“at war,” as the victims still say—over their land. For much of that time they lived sit-in style in front of government buildings or wandered the urban geography as refugees, homeless. The university eventually settled with the people of Tlayapaca by offering to relocate them to new houses, some in Chicoloapan, far off in the eastern reaches of the city, far from Santa Fe.

Reyes sees the dislocation as central to his punk identity, the basis for his stance of resistance and self-determination. Santa Fe was teeming with punks in that period, he says. The whole city
was, from north to south, east to west. In testimonies and video footage that survive from the era, punks explain themselves in a manner that is conscious and politically aware. To most of the city, however, the marginalized youth of Santa Fe were known as
chavos banda,
the media-coined term that essentially criminalized young people, casting them as thugs and thieves. After the government sweeps, the people of Santa Fe spread out. They emigrated to Ciudad Nezahualcóyotl and to the borough of Iztapalapa, or even farther away. Reyes's sister La Flexi—a leader in the Tlayapaca resistance movement—was among those offered new homes in Chicoloapan. Exhausted with the struggle, the families moved.

Time passes, and the dislocation corresponds with a physical transformation. Reyes tells me that the last true remaining punks of Mexico City, the ones who didn't die an early or violent death, might no longer wear cascades of chains and buckles or mold their hair in spikes. A lot of them have children now, jobs—or at least a source of income. Nonetheless, punk in Mexico City remains one of the most enduring and complex subcultures to emerge after
1968. Mexican punks in many cases maintain close ties with their counterparts in Spain, Germany, and the United States. Years later, original D.F. punks still see resistance not merely as a stance or a costume but as a way of life.

Reyes and I get off at metro Boulevard Puerto Aéreo, near the airport. In the underground tunnel leaving the Puerto Aéreo station, he explains that he makes some of his living by selling mesh shirts knitted in colored cotton, stitched by hand by his sister Flexi. The shirts are popular with punks wherever punks live. He stops in the flow of people in the passageway and pulls a red garment out of his backpack. It looks like cotton chain-mail soaked in blood.

“Put it on,” Reyes says. “Wear it.” I hesitate, stumbling to make up an excuse. “No! Put it on.”

No point in arguing. If an original punk in Mexico City tells you you should do something, you just have to do it. I don the cotton chain-mail and immediately feel goofy. The thing hangs unflatteringly over my bony shoulders. “Looks good!” Reyes laughs in approval.

We pile into a
combi,
one of the low-roofed minivans converted into stop-and-go public transit units that are as common to the long-range commuter experience in Mexico City as the metro. Most people who live in the city's faraway reaches use both,
combis
and the metro, to go about their everyday lives. The insides of the vans are hollowed out and fitted with small, carpeted seats. Reyes and I squish into the van's back corner. We are going to ride shoulder to shoulder, knee to knee, in an airless minivan packed with strangers, for at least an hour in traffic.

“I want to show you something,” Reyes says, pulling a new item
out of his backpack, a worn manila folder. Reyes holds it with both hands as though it were a holy book. He passes the folder to me and I open it delicately on my lap. Inside, page after page of old-school punk testimony. Drawings, crudely typed or scrawled personal histories, photocopied flyers and photographs. “I want to make a book,” Reyes says, pressing his fingers against the papers inside. “The true history.”

He begins telling me stories, about the fascist punks he's had contact with, the confrontations, the brawls, about fellow punks who hide their identity while working in the police or the army, and—more astounding—about Nazi-sympathizing punks. The fascination among some Mexicans with violent national socialism from a different place and a different era lies beyond the realm of comprehension for me. Reyes says he once found himself inside a Mexican cop's domestic space, where he saw Nazi flags on the walls.

“I've tried to talk to them,” Reyes tells me as we ride along. He sighs. “You have to let everyone believe what they want to believe.”

Through the window, the landscape is a blur of broken structures, lonesome figures, wide treacherous expanses of traffic. Right next to me, skin to skin, sits a stout brown woman whose body mass is so packed with maize and earthen living I feel as if I am a pesky bag of twigs disturbing her personal space with my sharp edges. We are nearing Chicoloapan. The road has turned ruddy and brown, and traffic moves inch by inch. Light
ranchera
music plays from the radio up front. Cars and trucks and the smell of exhaust push in from all sides. Reyes turns and asks me, “And you, what drew you to punk?”

The various simultaneous strains of thought racing in my head come to a screeching halt.
What drew me to punk?
Reyes has small eyes and a steady gaze. He is waiting for an answer. “Well . . . ,”
I start. “I don't know. I think . . . I think punk is something that . . . you just carry.”

Reyes nods.

“I like a lot of movements,” I go on. “I feel like . . . like you can draw some things from this and some things from that . . . but deep down . . .”

I trail off. Reyes seems satisfied with my response. I look down at myself. I am now wearing one of his mesh cotton punk tops, over a T-shirt with an image of a skeleton playing a guitar and the logo of the L.A. punk band the Screamers. I had been at a
toquίn
out at El Clandestino and had moshed to Síndrome. I understand what Reyes means when he explains Plan Nacional de Desarrollo, and I understand what he means when he talks about resisting the government, and the need for histories to be told. To Reyes I am
banda
. To Reyes I am punk.

In Chicoloapan, this flat, eastward-spreading section of the metropolitan region, greater Mexico City looks more like a forgotten war zone than a collection of interconnected suburbs. Cinder-block buildings sit unfinished out in the fields, and dogs and the most destitute people carve out their living spaces along the black muddy roadside. By the time Reyes calls up to the driver to ask to get off, I am relieved to unglue myself from the lady next to me. This could be any other desolate street in the reaches of the valley where the urban rubs uncomfortably up against the rural. Nothing to speak of, nothing to note, just buildings and fences and dogs and the big cloudy sky above us. We walk down an empty side street, past closet-size paper stores, Internet shops, and cleaners. No one is around. The street is quiet enough to hear my own breathing.
Reyes does not live here; he stayed in the orbit of Santa Fe after Tlayacapa was swept off the map. But he moves around Chicoloapan with the assuredness of a local. We are headed to his sister Flexi's house, to see who is home.

“Tell me what happened when they kicked you out of Santa Fe,” I say to Reyes. “How did your family end up here?”

It happened in the middle of the night, Reyes says. There were mounted police, police from all the boroughs, police right outside his door. Old people, women, children, all woken up and forced from their homes. It sounds violent and traumatic. After the initial dislocation battle, Reyes and his community formed a resistance movement. They camped out in their territory. They camped out before government buildings. “Every night, at two or four in the morning, the riot police would come and push us out of where we were, like at the Zócalo,” Reyes says. “Even with our kids, with our old people, who got sick. Those who resisted were beaten, beaten bad. We lived for four years in struggle and resistance.”

We pass a dirt soccer field that is still wet from rain the day before. After four years of fighting, the Tec, as the school is known, offered new homes to the displaced families of Tlayapaca. “We were tired of living on the streets like nomads,” Reyes says. “We were one of the original seven hundred families. By the end of it, there were thirty families.”

Flexi's house is near the back of a dead-end street, along a row of brightly painted block homes, the kind that tend to spring up on the outskirts of developing megacities. Driveways in each home are made of the same concrete as the street, white and cracked. Reyes rattles a rusty white gate. “Open up!” We wait. Flexi and one of her daughters emerge. Flexi seems happy to see a new person in one of her chain-mail punk tops. We have handshakes and hugs and
kisses as we enter the darkened living room. The floor is smooth gray cement.

Inside, I meet Reyes's nephews and his father, an old man hunched over a carpenter's workbench. Flexi, in short, curly hair and a camo fleece, immediately begins referring to me as
manito,
shorthand for little brother. She is preparing an early supper of
consomé
, a chicken soup. Flexi's eldest son, a kid in his early twenties, pops in a DVD of old punk footage. The cover has a skull-and-bones on front and the title
The Lost Decade: 1985–1995
.

“It was tremendous, the situation,” Flexi says, sitting on an armchair next to me as the
consomé
comes out in heavy bowls. “It was tough,
manito.
” We watch grainy footage of boyish punks in mohawks, talking about their ideas of resistance, what being punk means to them. Images of angry moshing mobs, hundreds and hundreds of Mexico City punks pounding their way through the lost decade. Who knows where most of those kids are now, but right here before me I have a family of survivors, originals of punk. One of those moshing punks on the screen, Flexi points out, is her dead husband. He died in a fight, she says.

“They would tell us,” Flexi is saying, “that we had to get out of there, because it was no longer ours. But we would say, ‘No, the land belongs to those who work it.' We would say, ‘They'll have to take us out of here dead.' In that moment,
manito,
we were ready to give our lives for that land.”