Yet a concurrent revolution was also brewing. Rock-n-roll from the United States, Latin America, and Europe had been trickling into Mexico and infecting a receptive youth population with the potent ideal of liberation through music. Through television, film, foreign magazines, and foreigners traveling to Mexico to hunt for native psychotropic plants, young people in Mexico became acquainted with the rocky tide of the global counterculture, as Eric Zolov chronicles in his book Refried Elvis. In Mexico it came to be known as La Onda, the Wave. La Onda encapsulated the counterculture’s many faces: protest rock, folk rock, psychedelic rock, and a phenomenon Zolov refers to as La Onda Chicana, a reference to the infusion of a Mexican sensibility into the U.S. American rock idiom—think Carlos Santana.
On September 11, 1971, La Onda reached its climax at the Avándaro music festival, also known to this day as Mexico’s Woodstock. An estimated two hundred thousand people overwhelmed the woodsy resort area in the state of México, west of the Federal District, where the concert was held. The event was messy, disorganized, and didn’t end till the next night. Bands with such names as Los Tequila, Peace and Love, Los Dug Dug’s, and Three Souls in My Mind (who eventually became the legendary rockers El Tri) played while soldiers ominously stood guard on the outskirts. It was a watershed moment. There were no confrontations with authorities at Avándaro, but in the days that followed the one-party state swiftly condemned the festival. Photos emerged showing nudity, Mexican flags modified with the peace sign, and members of the banda happily dancing around with an American flag. “While the U.S. flag stood for imperialism at protests in 1968, at Avándaro in 1971 it symbolized solidarity with youth abroad and especially the Chicano fusion at the heart of the Mexican rock counterculture,” Zolov writes. Yet, predictably, the images scandalized the regime, the press, and leftist intellectuals who saw Avándaro as a sign of looming cultural imperialism from the United States. From then on, rock concerts were severely repressed in Mexico. The PRI routinely refused permission for foreign bands to play on Mexican soil for years thereafter.
Young Mexican rockers retreated into hoyos fonquis—“funky holes,” purposefully misspelled as it would be in graffiti—for underground gigs. The “holes” were held in dead urban spaces in mostly neglected barrios in the sprawling megalopolis. Police often raided the concerts, violently dispersing the youth. But La Onda persisted. “Several hoyos fonquis became famous,” the Chopo history book recounts. “The Maya, the Salón Chicago, the Siempre lo Mismo, the Herradero, the gymnasium of Nueva Atzacoalco, and the 5 de Mayo.” In spite of the state, Mexico City became a rock-n-roll kind of town. By the start of the 1980s, sunlight beckoned. More and more new rockers were seemingly sprouting from the cracks in the Mexico City concrete. New movements such as punk and heavy metal had arrived. The banda had to keep making rock-n-roll. El Chopo gave La Onda a site, a place to focus its energies.
Even as El Chopo struggled to survive against threats of displacement and repression, challenges arose internally as well. Debates were had over how to organize the tianguis, or whether to give it any organizational structure at all. Questions arose on how to incorporate new vendors, whether to negotiate with the borough government, whether to allow the sale of pirated discs. The changing times brought more women into the chopero fold. The arrival of CDs and DVDs, and the arrival of new subcultures—ravers, skaters, hip-hop heads, goths—also altered the market’s landscape. But with each cultural transition happening around it, El Chopo learned to adapt. The market is functionally not retro at all. On the contrary, it has consistently managed to evolve and remain fresh.
Purists will claim El Chopo is not what it used to be. But a few holdouts are still keeping the old Chopo flame alive, through trading. They gather in the back, by the anarco-punks. They barter old Jimi Hendrix LPs for obscure Italian psychedelic rock, or a good anarchist book for a newer album by the Cure. They are men with graying hair or long, ratty ponytails, leather vests, and faded jeans—the kind that must also have been worn at the most mythical concerts in Mexico City’s “periphery.” One Saturday, as I browse a stack of records lying on the greasy concrete, I ask an old-timer named Jesùs what he thinks about the new kids on the block.
“It just feels superficial,” Jesùs says, in a rolling old-school D.F. twang, where the Spanish takes on a tone that is both tough and soft. “Back then—the hippies, the punks—they stood for something. Now it’s just fashion.”
A guy over his shoulder named Miguel chimes in. “The principal concept behind all this is bartering. That’s how it was born. That’s the central concept.”
“Pure bartering,” Jesùs says wistfully.
The hot pre-rain sun burns directly overhead.
“The circle is much smaller,” Miguel says. “But the banda has adapted to each crisis that has come. They keep buying. I keep buying.”
“This,” he adds, patting his stack of records, “is an addiction.”
Week after week, I wander through the tianguis, eyeing pirated concert videos of shows in Mexico City by Metallica and the Strokes, old books, old records. I find myself wondering if I could pull off wearing a fake-zebra-skin belt. I look at rows of cheaply made, mass-manufactured checkered cotton wristbands and wonder about the people who’ll buy each one and wear it on their street or in their house with a misplaced bravado. I pick up flyers for concerts and shows featuring names of bands I’ve never heard of in genres that don’t always fit my understanding of rock music’s logic. The Cavernarios, Los Calambres, Adicción Fatal, La Julia. Psychobilly, ska punk, Latin metal, indie pop.
I start taking home chopero stuff: old punk magazines, a book on the anarchist legend Ricardo Flores Magón, a vintage golf
jacket, a first-edition Morrissey CD, that fake-zebra-skin belt, skater sneakers—even though I don’t skate. I buy more books about the history of La Onda, charting for myself all the myths and mythmakers of the rock-n-roll underground in Mexico. I pick up flyers, sit against a curb with a cigarette, and try my hardest to integrate myself into one of the cervecerίas when the market begins to shut down.
At El Chopo, I’m finding, rock and resistance isn’t just for sale, it’s in the air. It lives with trepidation. In its three decades of existence, it has survived books’ worth of relocations and repression in a city well accustomed to both. The PRI regime was dismantled in the elections of 2000. Leftists now govern Mexico City. Instead of state repression El Chopo must now defend itself against the ever-encroaching forces of commercialization and globalization. Less clearly defined as an enemy to the counterculture than the PRI, the Internet makes it presence known at El Chopo despite its guardians’ best efforts to keep the market purely “punk.” Through MySpace, YouTube, and an endless stream of blogs, foreign bands and movements that would be obscure in previous decades are now at anyone’s fingertips.
It is felt on Aldama Street, especially among those who know their history.
“Look, the kids aren’t back here hauling cables, setting up the stage. It’s the old-timers,” Hernández, the Chopo journalist, tells me ruefully. “This is the generation of the button. Everything is button and finger.”
That may be true, I think, but they still come back here every Saturday, keeping El Chopo constantly evolving. There’s a working geography to the place, late in this decade. The anarco-punks and the old-time informal vendors clearly dominate the market’s rear. Reggae fans, emos, and modern hipsters inhabit the stalls in the middle. Goths, straight-edge skinheads, and hard-core punks keep watch at the front. Here and there they stand around smoking cigarettes, weed, or sometimes the poorer few inhale a harsh and addictive paint solvent known as mona. They pass out and receive flyers and revolutionary newspapers. All throughout the market, groups of choperos socialize in huddles that remind me of a high school quad. Across the main lateral drag, Mosqueta, the hip-hop heads and graffiti writers keep their own mini tianguis called Plaza Peyote, selling national and foreign hip-hop discs, baseball caps, and sneakers.
A few cervecerίas are around there, too.
One spring day at El Chopo an afternoon rain sweeps across the valley, and the choperos seek refuge again in their beer joints. I wander down a side street, following the sound of rock music from a jukebox. A hunched-over old lady claps quesadillas between the palms of her hand, so I knew there is beer for sale inside the archway behind her. I enter a humid, little concrete room with a couple tables and some mismatched chairs, an industrial refrigerator chilling caguamas, a jukebox, and older rockers stammering and stumbling about, happy. It’s hard to tell, even after many months and visits, how the crowd in an uncharted cervecerίa will respond to a new visitor. Apprehensively, I ask if I can use the toilet. Then I sit down and order a beer and start listening.
There are only free chairs, no tables, so I take a seat and hover near a group of friends. One of them, a baby-faced guy maybe in his mid-thirties, with a black patch over his left eye, smiles and raises his beer at me in salutation. He is wearing a black leather vest and jeans and dusty black biker boots. His hair is jet-black, long, dangling directly down the sides of his head. He introduces himself as Julio. His openness makes him stand out merrily among the rockers around us. We quickly fall into conversation and ritual beer-chugging. I never ask Julio why he wears an eye patch. He welcomes me. We drink, we toast. He is a rocker, all the way, Julio says. He cheerily greets a woman sitting at another table in a corner, then casually mentions to me she is his ex-wife. I don’t remember how we start talking about politics, but I do recall that somewhere along the way Julio begins going on about the ways the Mexican government keeps young people down. This is always a fruitful discussion in the orbit of El Chopo.
I ask if I can turn on my recorder.
“Record it! Record it!” Julio hollers. “All right banda, all right,” he says, leaning in, adding some authoritative heft to his voice. “Here comes a course in sociology, history, and music.”
A friend of his laughs and hoots behind him.
“Speaking to you is Julio Ayala,” he continues. “Musician with twenty years in rock-n-roll, güey. No bullshit. Ask anyone who knows.”
Twenty years. I’m impressed. Being banda for twenty years means he is a true survivor. What hoyos fonquis did he know? What acts of state violence did he see? What movements did he dabble in? What bands? But Julio at the moment isn’t taking questions. He is in the middle of delivering a lesson.
“Well, what is the pedo with our country?”
I pause. Pedo is the Mexican Spanish word for “fart,” but it’s more decorative street-level meaning is “crisis,” “problem,” or “fight.” Julio adjusts himself in his seat. “Our country is used to giving its ass to foreign politics. There are treaties, like Bucareli, that say the role of our country is to be the maquiladora”—the sweatshop—“to big capital.
“So, the government gives its ass to remain the dominant class. They give themselves, to be the big dogs, but make no mistake, they still wear leashes.”
We are pleasantly drunk, and it is loud inside the bar. Julio’s train of thought wanders a bit. “The Chinese. The Chinese have survived Mao, and we Mexicans have survived the PRI, the PAN, and the PRD,” Julio continues, listing the acronyms for Mexico’s other major political parties.
“The people know how to survive the political parties, and you all know it,” he adds, referring to no one in particular. “But the people put on costumes, you know it. Because we know what is happening, we put on costumes.”
“One time, I was here at this very spot, and I was talking to a partner about just this. We were talking about how a party like the Green Ecologist party could rise here,” Julio went on. “Could it be possible that people need a party to be green ecologists? The party is you, the patria”—the homeland—“is you. The patria is in your heart. Everyone chooses their own patria.”
With this, Julio Ayala decides his impromptu course is done. He leans back in his seat, finishes off his beer bottoms-up, then catches himself and leans again toward me, back toward the mic. “My good-bye now to the banda, to not bore you. . . . Here at the tianguis . . . I’m here, I’ll be here, we’ll be here next week—despite you.” He stands up to go, but he’s really just heading to the next table.
“Good-bye,” Julio says into the mic. Click. Very rock-n-roll.
We say we would keep in touch. I am “banda,” he says, patting my shoulder, then making me stand up for a deep hug. Julio ducks out, back onto the streets. I say good-bye to the people in the room, and they all say good-bye in return, nodding, toasting.
I make my way back to the metro in the steady gray drizzle, then decide I’ll just walk, see how far I can go. Microbus peseros roar down the wide avenues, and people pour out of the main chapel in the neighboring Colonia Guerrero, a spiky Gothic tower. I am pleased. I can be banda at El Chopo. And therefore, I have found my patria. But there is a catch. Its exact name, official language, and culture will not reveal themselves to me until much later.
Part II | TENSIONS
4 | Fashion & Facsimile
Zemmoa, queen of the night. (Photo by César Arellano.)
The fashion show is held on a Wednesday in early November, at the old Casino Metropolitano downtown. According to lore, the ghostly former game hall first belonged to a socialite romantically linked to President Porfirio Díaz, the former general whose corrupt rule over the country eventually sparked the Mexican Revolution. Today it is again a scene of decadence, but in a way tied not so much to extreme wealth and power but to a more discriminating kind of privilege: fashion.
The casino’s downstairs is a long hall with poor lighting and paint peeling off the walls like skin on a banana. The runway consists of metal folding chairs laid out on the faded tile floor, facing each other. Waiters walk around serving shots of tequila in teensy plastic cups. Camera flash punctuates the air. Friends greet each other, posing and floating air kisses. People lustily stare at one another. The show is already two hours late, and a palpable sense of expectation and drama fills the room, a feeling that we are there to witness something spectacular and important—not the fashion show, but one another.
The lights dim and a spotlight catches the rear of the runway. Red lighting from behind an opaque screen illuminates a logo in jagged punk-rock letters, MARÍA PELIGRO, and the show begins. The audience watches the models with determined severity. The line of clothing—subdued large-print flannels in large, angular cuts—is by a young designer named Paola Arriola, who is pretty, has orange hair, and is from Argentina. When she walks down the runway to take her bow, camera flashes sizzle at her from all sides. It isn’t Fashion Week, and no major foreign headliner is sweeping into town. Not a single celebrity is in sight, in fact. But no bona fide celebrity is necessary at the María Peligro show because in this world, everyone is a celebrity or behaves like one. It is an independent fashion show in Mexico City, and that means it is—to a certain set, to the fashion-party bloggers—the most important thing happening tonight.
Earlier in the day I stop at Clinica, a small boutique showcasing young, independent fashion designers from Mexico, in the Colonia Condesa. The partners there, Enrique González Rangel and Denise Marchebout, designers from Guadalajara, tell me about the show. I tag along, taking pictures and taking notes. We stop for sushi in the Roma and meet up with more people heading out for the night. I imagine us as the cast of a droll art-house movie: the gay disco promoter, the strikingly beautiful kabbalist, the German graphic designer, the film-studio executive from Los Angeles and his young Mexican boyfriend. More than enough sexy sceney energy is here to go around already, and the sashimi hasn’t even arrived.
We pile into a row of cars waiting outside and head downtown. At the Casino Metropolitana, the clothes by Arriola are interesting, yes. But what really gets the crowd going is the majestic ascent up a glistening marble staircase to the after-party. The dazzling neo-baroque ballroom has lush plants and gilded surfaces and red velvet beckoning from every corner. The city’s young and fashi
onable elite dance into the room, toward the pounding beats of an electro DJ, and to the bars, where men and women in crisp black-and-white uniforms eagerly dispense free cocktails. Every few seconds a new camera is thrust into a random face or group of people. Everywhere you look, instantaneous modeling.
I have never seen posing like this in Los Angeles, and people in Los Angeles carry posing in their DNA. Here, they pose in the gilded sitting rooms, they pose on velvet couches, they pose with their mouths agape and pose grabbing one another inappropriately. The energy keeps rising as the music does, as if there might be no other place in the world worth being at than this fashion party in the Centro Histórico of Mexico City with hundreds of familiar strangers—some Mexican, some British, some American, some a mixture of Mexican, and others of Latin American polyglot heritage. It feels as if a dam has broken, and it is only a Wednesday.
The artist Miguel Calderón, whom I befriended a year earlier, keeps a stash of canned beer near a speaker and scours the room to find me a date. Vicky Fox, a towering transwoman with yellow hair and brown skin, hurls herself dramatically onto the floor and begins contorting about on the weathered tile when I ask to take her picture. For the entire night, a small pixielike character with a bowl haircut and an all-white elfin outfit trails behind me, posing nonchalantly for photographs at any moment and rarely saying a word.
Down and Delirious in Mexico City: The Aztec Metropolis in the Twenty-First Century Page 5
