Clandestino

by Peter Culshaw

  Manu went back to Colombia on his own to film the videos with the ever-faithful director François Bergeron. The song “Senor Matanza”, with its lyrics about the power of corrupt Mafia types, hit a nerve in South America and eventually became one of Mano Negra’s best-loved tracks. Amazingly, Manu tracked down one of the kids who had danced on the train in Colombia and persuaded him to star in the video.

  Almost everywhere he went, Manu collected the names and numbers of friends, musicians and fans he had met on the road, and he received many offers to stay, to play in bars, to disappear under the radar. But he soon moved on to Mexico, where he spent much of the next few months off his head on hallucinogens.

  MEXICO CITY 19.1°N 99.4°W

  When Manu hit the vast, sprawling, chaotic and vibrant metropolis of Mexico City, he mitigated his pain with peyote. It became his drug of choice and he claims ‘opened me up in a certain way. It’s an interesting drug, a professor. And it’s not like a dictatorship that you depend on. You can still experience what you learned on peyote, without having to use it.’ He had been introduced to the drug by Tom Darnal. ‘The ancients say you should experience it in nature,’ Manu says, ‘as part of a ritual reconnection with nature. But I was brought up in the big city and, for me, the city is nature.’

  Manu based himself in the barrio of Tepito, a neighbourhood where most European tourists would be in a state of constant paranoia. But he never had any problems. ‘Every day I would take peyote down town in the rough barrios of Mexico City, places it was usually very hard to go. Peyote was a good protector for me. It may be stupid but it’s true. Peyote put me in a good harmony with the old guys of the neighbourhood. Everyone smiled at me. I don’t know how, but it worked like a kind of magic passport.’

  Señor Matanza – Manu’s last video for Mano Negra, with one of the streetkids (left) who had been on the train tour.

  The Tepito neighbourhood is well known for its open-air market, which is Mexico’s central exchange for counterfeit goods, or fayuca in the local slang. If you want branded alcohol complete with packaging, often from China, you go to Tepito, and the barrio is notorious for selling everything from drugs to pirate videos and weapons. Hijacked trucks and their entire cargo have been known to simply disappear in Tepito in minutes, dismantled by experts. Robbers will observe what you are buying and then hold you up. But there’s also a pride in the neighbourhood. Many of Mexico most famous boxers and wrestlers, such as the legendary Místico, came from there. As the saying goes, ‘Everything is for sale in Tepito, everything except for dignity.’

  The peyote passport also had other effects. ‘It opens up your sensitivity for the present moment. For example, you get a feeling whether something good or bad will come in the door. You sense the energy before it happens. You are totally in the present, rather than part of a schedule or planning your week or your life. It helps you position yourself in life and reach the right place at the right moment.’

  Above all, peyote opened up Manu’s imagination. ‘I began to write songs again.’ The first notable tune to emerge from this period was “El Hoyo” (The Hole), which eventually appeared on La Radiolina in 2007 and remains an essential part of his live set. The opportunities for football-type chanting afforded by the song’s title – EL HOYO YO-YO – helped its consolidation into the live set. The refrain ‘yo vengo del hoyo’ (‘I come from the hole’) makes reference to ‘Tepito Fayuca’ and describes his favourite barrio as a ‘hirvinete caldera’ (‘boiling kettle’) but also as his ‘bandera’ (‘flag’).

  Another song that emerged from Manu’s time in Tepito is the Oedipal ditty “La Marea” (The Tide): ‘Hoy tuve miedo de mi sombrita / So me tumb bajo el sol / Mamala marea va subiendo / Mama … va subiendo hay que marea / Nada es para siempre’ (I was scared of my shadow / So I fell down under the sun / Mama the tide is rising / Mama … it’s rising, oh what a tide / Nothing is forever). Again, he recorded it several years later, for his second solo album, Próxima Estación: Esperanza.

  The fact that some of Manu’s songs often emerged years, sometimes even decades, after Manu wrote them is indicative of his working methods. Manu really felt more and more like an “Out Of Time Man”, as the Mano Negra song goes: ‘Time don’t fool me no more / I throw my watch to the floor’. He had indeed thrown away his watch, as though time itself was one of the conventions he was trying to give up.

  In Mexico City, with its Aztec echoes and hints of the future, Manu had the impression that all continents were flowing together, all centuries colliding. The peyote helped, but Mexico was a place where the globalised world really was shrinking distances and the past and future seemed to intermingle promiscuously.

  TIJUANA 32.5°N 117°W

  On the road again, Manu investigated a city that was to play an even more crucial part in the creation of Clandestino: Tijuana, up on the border with the great Satan itself. ‘Tijuana is a central point in the planet’s fever,’ Manu says. It’s a place where thousands of workers who cannot legally cross the border pursue crushingly low-paid menial labour in so-called maquiladoras or sweatshop factories, owned by Americans, to make goods for export to the States. According to Manu ‘Tijuana is the best and the worst.’

  Along with Juarez, the city is ground zero for drug trafficking and ruthless gang warfare. In the 1980s and 1990s, before the extreme violence of recent years, it was also a party destination for North Americans who come over the border in search of hedonistic fun. For Manu, it became an emblematic place where desperation, corrupt politics, violence and wild fiestas collide – both in reality and in his music. ‘The problems are concentrated there. From the North they came to party, for the cheap beer and girls and drugs, and from the South it’s the end of the line. It can be hell.’

  In some ways, things hadn’t much changed since 1939 when Graham Greene, in The Lawless Roads, described the excitement of the gringo crossing over the border to an illicit playground, where everything is permitted and death is to be scorned. ‘The border means more than a customs house, a passport office, a man with a gun … Life is never going to be quite the same again after your passport is stamped and you find yourself speechless among the money changers.’ The tourist, however, ‘lived in a different world’ according to Greene. ‘They were impervious to Mexico.’

  Manu is perhaps the first artist to have been in a position to really report on Tijuana from both sides of the great divide, as a privileged gringo who also knew the harsh realities behind the flashing neon and the souvenir shops selling sombreros to the yanquis. Tijuana was a ‘fever point’, a place that illustrated various sicknesses. It was full of extreme if often humorous inauthenticity (all those sombrero shops), a place where the cruelty and absurdity of immigration laws were in stark evidence. ‘They are totally hypocritical,’ Manu asserts. ‘The businesses in the States need workers with no papers, because they have no rights and can be hired and fired at will and paid poverty wages.’

  But the border has a particular energy, a kind of suspended existence. For a local writer like Rafa Saavadra, the city, not-Mexico but still Mexico, was a laboratory of postmodernism ‘too real to be a simulacrum … it moves and is moving, that is why it is difficult to label her’. It was perfect for Manu.

  The Clandestino album begins with the title track, in which Manu crosses the border as lawless mojado, or ‘wetback’ (as the migrants who get wet trying to cross the Rio Grande are known). He feels like a paperless outlaw, ‘lost in the heart of the great Babylon’. At the end of the album, on “El Viento” (The Wind), he morphs into the wind and crosses the border unseen. Midway through is “Welcome To Tijuana”, with its refrain of ‘tequila, sexo y marijuana’, a song that is more fun than deep, but offers hints of the dark side of the migration in lines like ‘con el coyote no hay aduana’ (‘with the coyotes there is no customs’), the ‘coyotes’ being the slang for the traffickers who transport Mexicans illegally across the border.

  Manu had already visited Tijuana with Mano Negra, going ove
r the border during their first American tour of 1990. The band played at Iguana’s, a club which was basically only for an American audience. There they were rescued by Luis Güereña, one of the singers of the band Tijuana No!, who was, according to Manu, ‘quite angry we were playing that place, so he showed us something of the real Tijuana’.

  Tijuana No! were a rock/punk/ska band, who were originally known by the simple and nihilist name of No! They were one of the many bands in South America who were inspired by Mano Negra, and Manu became friends with Luis. When he returned to the city, he stayed with him in La Coahuila, the main avenue that runs through the Zona Norte, the drag where many of the most notorious strip shows are to be found. ‘I’m never gonna forget living with Luis; it’s an important little part of my life,’ Manu remembers.

  Luis Güereña – welcome to Tijuana No!

  Luis played a key role in Tijuana’s music scene, promoting bands like The Dead Kennedys and Black Flag to a punk-deprived Tijuana youth. His own first band was called Solucion Mortal, and, as his bassist had no papers, they had to smuggle him across the border to play gigs in San Diego or Los Angeles. Luis would show people the scars on his belly and claim they were inflicted by a knife-wielding border guard.

  Luis’s flat, where he lived for twenty years and housed Manu, was an underground one-bedroom box at the rear of a chain-link-fenced parking lot. He bootlegged his water and electricity from the neighbouring water plant. The decor included posters of The Clash and a photo collage of friends captioned ‘Fuck Authority’. He was a provocateur and clown, goose-stepping onstage, wearing an Uncle Sam hat and a Hitler moustache, haranguing the audience, bawling that Mexicans were ugly and that he didn’t want them in his country. If audiences reacted angrily, and they did, then so much the better.

  Luis was one of a trio of singers in Tijuana No! The others were the warmer-voiced Teca García and the more melodic Cecilia Bastida. The band ended up, like The Clash and Mano Negra, signing to a multinational, BMG, but remained stridently independent. Their song “La Migra” included samples of helicopters and the conversations of US Border Guards and ends with the slogan ‘Fuck The USA!’ Another song, “Travel Trouble”, could almost have been penned by Manu: ‘Travel, travel like money does / Travel, travel, like narcotics do / Travel, travel like pollution does / Travel, travel like corporations do … Know the countries, know the world / Cross the oceans, cross the roads / Jump the fences, break the gates …’

  Besides the Mexican politics and references to national heroes like Zapata and Pancho Villa, the group did songs about Soweto and the Mothers of the Disappeared in Buenos Aires, and lent support to the Peruvian revolutionary group Tupac Amaru Revolutionary Movement (MRTA), leftist insurgents who opposed the Shining Path and were strongly rooted in the indigenous population.

  Mano Negra had operated as what Josh Kun calls a ‘galvanising node in a dissenting globalist circuit of musical activists’ that included Tijuana No!, Bad Brains in Washington DC, Todo Los Muertos in Argentina (with Felix Nadal, who had performed on Casa Babylon) and the Basque separatists Negu Gorriak, whose singer Fermin Muguruza, an old Manu pal, ended up producing an album by Tijuana No! in San Sebastian in the Basque country. That record, Transgresores De La Ley, includes guest appearances by members of several of the above bands and was dedicated to the Zapatistas, the EZLN ‘and no one else’. It featured a stirring version of The Clash’s “Spanish Bombs” and used samples of speeches by Subcomandante Marcos, something Manu was to use on Clandestino. Manu himself contributed a skanking track called “Borregos Kamikazes” (Kamikaze Rabbits) about the flatterers encircling a corrupt nameless president known as ‘el gran ladrón’ (the big thief).

  Tijuana left its marks all over Clandestino, not least in the repetitive sound of a plastic whistle that sounds like a falling bomb and comes from a keychain popular with the city’s street vendors, which Manu recorded on his portable recorder. As for Luis Güereña, he died of a heart attack in his underground bunker in 2004. Whilst Manu was on marijuana and experimenting with peyote, Luis had picked crystal meth and heroin – the wrong drugs. Someone put a microphone and the first demo tape of Tijuana No! in his coffin.

  Tijuana embodies a possible future, which, when he’s feeling pessimistic, Manu thinks could take hold of the rest of the world. When he was in Tijuana in 1995, the big guys were the Narco Juniors, who would swagger around town with a girl or two on their arm. But they had some remnants of a kind of macho morality; it was not the done thing to kill women or children, for example. The newer narcomafia groups have no such restraint and go in for ever more vicious and frequent slayings and gruesome mutilation. Most of these killings happen along la frontera and Tijuana and Juarez have become the most dangerous cities of the Western world. The days of Mexico’s frontier towns being the destination of choice for carefree gringos are finished.

  CHIAPAS 16.4°N 92.4°W

  In Mexico there was also a more positive ‘fever point’, which suggested another future: the Zapatistas. In 1995 the group had retreated into the mountains of the Lacandona jungle and renounced offensive violence. There, they issued proclamations of a ‘fourth world war’, the third being the Cold War and the fourth the assault of unrestrained capitalism, which would drop ‘financial bombs’ and destroy the livelihoods of minorities. Their prediction that the gap between rich and poor would grow ever wider, and their warnings about the dangers of unfettered globalised money markets, have proven all too accurate. Their struggle for land rights and their critique of the new economic world order captivated (and still inspires) Manu. Their analysis that the real power is in the hands of the multinationals, and that elected politicians have limited room for manoeuvre, chimed in harmony with his own thoughts.

  What also appealed to Manu was the anti-hierarchical structures of the Zapatistas, with Subcomandante Marcos, the self-styled Delegate Zero (imagine a punk band with a singer with a name like that), the frontman and mouthpiece, a postmodern Che Guevara with the media savvy of a Malcolm McLaren. In his mask, smoking a pipe, with his parrot, Marcos had mystique to burn, and having abandoned the armed struggle, words had become his weapons. For someone like Manu, who had been brought up on Don Quixote and Gabriel García Márquez, Marcos’s communiqués were full of poetry and fascinating stories, as well as political analysis.

  Marcos was a shape-shifter, difficult to pin down. Once a guerrillero, he was the author of stories and had invented a character called ‘Marcos’ in stories written by Marcos. The fact that the Mexican authorities have announced that Marcos is really Rafael Sebastián Guillén Vicente, born 19 June, 1957 in Tampico, Tamaulipas, to Spanish immigrants, may or may not be true. Manu was attracted by this blurring of factual and fictional personas. When his level of fame jumped a league after the release of Clandestino and the media tried to pin various labels on him – anarchist, socialist, terrorist, punk, hippy – he too tried to keep a bit of distance between himself and the character ‘Mano Chao’, to keep some mystique and keep them guessing.

  Back in 1994, Marcos had written to a ten-year-old girl in Mexico City, who had sent him a drawing. In his response, he conjured up a fable introducing a beetle and knight-errant called Don Durito de la Lacandona. The ensuing ‘Durito’ communiqués and tales told the story of the Zapatistas’ struggle, revealing their organisational history, their critique of traditional politics, and the reasons for their opposition to neoliberalism. Marcos’s most clear critiques of the capitalist system are told through his beetle.

  Tom Darnal, who had been even keener on Marcos and the Zapatistas than Manu, had already spent a couple of weeks guarding a school in Chiapas, watching out for planes. ‘Actually, it was the most boring two weeks of my life,’ he remembers. Manu also paid a visit and played songs to the kids in the village in Chiapas. ‘It was strange, it was in the dark, in a hut. A man picked us up and we met Marcos. We looked at the other Zapatista commanders. “I’m terrible at the guitar,” Marcos said to me, “but you are going to compete wi
th Tacho.” And we launched into an all-night duel of songs …’

  Subcomandante Marcos (left) with Manu’s guitar-duel partner Comandante Tacho in La Realidad, Chiapas, 1999.

  Inspired by the indigenous Indian tradition of respect for Mother Earth goddess Pacha Mama, Manu wrote a key song on Clandestino, “Por El Suelo” (Dirt Cheap) in Chiapas. ‘Pachamama te veo tan triste / Pachamama me pongo a llorar / Esperando la ultima ola’ (Pacha Mama I see you so sad / Pachamama I’m going to cry / Waiting for the last wave).

  Manu also sampled Marcos’s own words on Clandestino. In the song “Sol Y Luna” (Sun And Moon) there’s one of the few palely hopeful lyrics on the album: ‘Looking for an ideal / When will it be? / When will the sun come through?’ It is followed by a recording of the Fourth Declaration of the Lacandon Jungle, read by Subcomandante Marcos, which translates as:

  We were born of the night

  In her we live

  And in her we will die

  But in time the light of truth will

  Be for the many

  For all those who the night brings to tears

  For those to whom the light of day is denied

  For everyone the light

  For everyone everything

  Manu also liked Marcos’s subversive humour. When a footballer from Inter Milan, Javier Zanetti, expressed his support for the Zapatistas, he received a letter in return from Marcos: ‘I challenge you to a match against a team from the Zapatista National Liberation Army,’ it read, ‘at a time and a place to be determined. Given the affection we have for you, we’re not planning to submerge you in goals. As we wait for your reply, we’ll continue with our rigorous training regime.’ Marcos also proposed a match in Cuba and one against a Mexican transsexual team.