Down and Delirious in Mexico City (32 page)

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The primary source for the historical references here is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 Panader
í
a
:
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.”