Down and Delirious in Mexico City (12 page)

“I felt impotent,” Andrés says, looking directly into my eyes. Asking more, I make a reference to his being emo. “I am not an emo,” he interrupts. “I am me.”

Andrés's declaration stops me. I wonder if the media has been grouping emos together too hastily, negating each young person's individuality. I wonder if am I profiling the emo look irresponsibly.

The following afternoon I return to the
glorieta
. Reporters and cameramen are prowling around for quickie interviews. They've become as much a part of the landscape now as the emos themselves. I sit down among a group of emos and wait. Next to me sits Pablo, a seventeen-year-old guy with long bangs, stretch-tight jeans, and purple eye shadow. He wears skater sneakers and a skater cap, but I don't see a skateboard on him.

“Just yesterday my mom told me to leave the house,” Pablo says, whistling through his teeth. “Well, she told me to come back at nine p.m., because some friends of hers were coming over.”

He is listening to My Chemical Romance on his iPod, smoking, and waiting for a friend. “She asked you to leave because you embarrass her?” I ask.

“Yeah,” Pablo says a little sadly. “Sucks, huh?”

Nearby, I notice one of the flamboyant gay emos I had met the previous Sunday, with Aldo. The emo is sitting against the station wall. He had been at the gay-emo march, too, but I hadn't asked for his name. I crane my neck to see if he'll notice me, to see if he'll say hello. Instead he avoids making eye contact. Still dressed emo, the kid looks genuinely depressed. From afar I could see an enormous
black scab dominating the crown of his nose, as if he was hit across his face with something heavy and blunt.

Poor guy,
I think.
The wound looks painful.

News of the emo riots in Mexico ricochets across the globe. Kids are talking about Mexican emos in the United States, Germany, Vietnam, Australia, on every continent, in dozens of languages. Comparisons are drawn to similar youth movements that are also just emerging, the
fotologers
in Argentina and
pokemones
in Chile. MTV and
Rolling Stone
cover the story in the United States. In Mexico, analysts of every stripe and sector are attempting to apply some level of reliable logic on the outbreak of youth tribal warfare.
La Jornada
quotes a battery of specialists to help readers figure out the wave of emo-bashings. The paper surmises its roots are in “violent conservatism,” and that young people are reacting to “a lack of opportunities for work and education.”

“What I see is a deeply conservative connotation, the object being to divide [young people], because they cannot offer them expectations for the future,” Ignacio Pineda, coordinator of the Multiforo Alicia, an alternative-oriented music venue in Roma, tells the paper. In a separate report,
La Jornada
quotes a specialist who argues emos do not constitute a “classic” urban subculture because they do not have a political or social platform as the punks, goths, or skinheads do. Emo is “pure fashion,” says “youth expert” Héctor Castillo Berthier, a response to the forces of the market.

Among the emo buzz online, one amateur commentator catches my eye. Harry24, a user on the music site Last.fm who identifies himself as a resident of Mexico City, offers readers a meticulous sociocultural explanation of the anti-emo violence, in a learner's
English, blaming the phenomenon on five basic points. First, Family: “A lot of Mexican families are disfunctional.” Second, Music: “90 percent of the bands from that wave are totally crap.” Then Harry24 sets blame on Media: “The main TV companies here in Mexico are full of crap artist[s], fake bands and stupid shows, and anti-cultural shows.” He also lists Culture: “Fact: Mexico is full of ignorant people.” Finally, he places some blame on Government: “Emo boys are the perfect target to turn them into stupid and ignorant adults, to be manipulated.”

It is true, in general terms and as Cristal had explained at the hipster party at Pasagüero, that the family structure in Mexico is under duress, resulting in part in armies of isolated teens. It is true that many mainstream bands labeled emo are amateurish. And, yes, the media that promote such bands are partly to blame for their staying power. So crappy bands and crappy shows produce a crappy movement. But Harry24 loses me with “Culture” and “Government.”

I am just not sure. The anti-emo wave generates its own self-referential satire—emos as the subject of intense discussion on the Internet, emos appearing on the covers of tabloid newspapers and glossy magazines, emos and punks in “debates” on the radio. One fact becomes lost in the chatter. Emos are
new,
and anything new is a potential threat to the existing order, the equilibrium of the subcultural landscape in Mexico. Freshly arrived, emos bewildered everyone. No one knew where to place them, so the question of whether they should be incorporated into the geography of the city's subcultural symbolic bodies is answered with the hurried fist of violence. In that sense, the anti-emo movement had to have emerged organically. If there is a media-authoritarian conspiracy behind the anti-emo attacks, as Harry24 suggests, no one apparently told Kristoff.

Kristoff—he goes by one name—is a popular host on afternoon cable TV, on
Telehit,
one of those programs with loud music and graphics and crude jokes arbitrarily thrown into each segment, like a quota. Kristoff talks about stars, sex, and music and movies that he likes and dislikes. As the anti-emo movement began rumbling on the Internet, before the first altercation in Querétaro, one video clip was posted and reposted on the social-networking platforms most frequented by young people in Mexico. It is of Kristoff, in a live broadcast in January, leaning into the camera, his dusty blond hair styled dramatically upward, his fair-toned face rippled and colored red in fury. Kristoff, a Mexican of eastern European descent, wears leather cuffs on his formidably thick wrists. He is unloading about a new trend, the emos.

“Emo is bullshit,” he starts. “What is
emo
? It's something for girls who are fifteen, because they've just gotten hair you know where. They've just become
emo-tion-al,
because they like the singer in the band, not because they like the music. . . . Is it necessary to create a new genre that says, ‘Dude, all the rest are emotionally incorrect, they don't satisfy us'?”

And then in English:
“Fucking bullshit, kids!”

And back to Spanish: “There is no movement, there is no way of thinking, there are no musicians. You guys confuse punk, hard core, you confuse screamo, you combine all the currents, just to give meaning to your stupid and idiotic movement.”

He is practically spitting his words.
“There. Is. No. Movement.”

Watching the clip for the first time made me squirm. Whether his points were valid or not, Kristoff's on-screen persona is cocky and self-important. Which is to say, I need to meet him. I want to look plainly into the eyes of emo hatred and extract if possible
what makes that hate burn. I contact Kristoff and he agrees to an interview at the Televisa studios where he works, near downtown. Television studios are never as glamorous as a television fan might expect, and Televisa Chapultepec is no exception. I walk in through a long metal gate and over a field of asphalt where various trucks and crates and unused light booms lie about. Inside the plain office building on the lot where Kristoff shoots
Telehit,
we sit down on a red velvet couch abandoned in the middle of a hallway. A thin and busty blond woman named Daniela, Kristoff's girlfriend, sits with us as we talk. Daniela remains cheery, with a flat smile plastered upon her face. It is early afternoon, and Kristoff is preparing for that day's show, giving instructions to editors and assistants who are rushing past.

Sitting next to me, chatting casually, Kristoff is significantly less, well, douchey offscreen. It turns out Kristoff is less a tool in a conspiracy against the emos than an unwitting spark that the emo hatred needed to ignite itself. “I
always
express myself that way on television. It's nothing personal,” he explains. The anti-emo rant had been taken out of context—the context of performance anger that he peddles on
Telehit.
“I express myself that way about everything.”

As soon as the anti-emo violence struck, many emos and commentators openly blamed Kristoff's rant for the confrontations. The clip of Kristoff berating the emo culture was most reproduced on blogs and MySpace profiles that called openly for violence. Emos mention his name in interviews and call him out with signs at marches. Before me, Kristoff does his best to appear at ease, as though he is bemused by his unexpected brush with worldwide infamy, but I could sense a good week's worth of stress and fatigue flaking off him.

“It's that minute on YouTube . . . ,” Kristoff complains ruefully.
On cable programs such as
Telehit,
shock is what grabs viewers' attention: “This is cable. This is not open television.”

Kristoff was born in Russia to Polish parents. His family emigrated to Mexico City when he was eight years old. Raised in the capital most of his life, Kristoff considers himself fully Mexican. He worked in radio for a while, he says, then found his place on television. The target audience for
Telehit
is the wide bracket of thirteen to thirty-four. Kristoff tells me his most popular weekday slot is Mondays, when he takes callers' questions about sexuality and dating. Despite the uproar over his comments on the emos, Kristoff is not publicly reprimanded by his show's parent company, the media juggernaut Televisa. Kristoff himself responds to the first anti-emo riot in Querétaro with a characteristically fiery challenge to the initiators of the violence.

“Leave them alone, assholes!” Kristoff screams in the clip about the Querétaro rumble. “What's the fucking problem? What kind of balls do you have? If you're such badasses, why don't you go after the
reggaetoneros
? Because the
reggaetoneros
will rip your faces apart!”

But it doesn't help. In the days and weeks following Querétaro, Kristoff is still labeled the king of emo hate. I ask him if he still believes what he said about the emos in general. He basically says yes. “I repeat, when you hear them, when they say, ‘Nirvana is emo,' I have to say, ‘No, you're confused. You just like certain kinds of melancholic music, and you like dressing a certain way because it's the clothes that they sell, right?' ”

“Or putting on eyeliner,” I offer sneakily.

“Eyeliner,” Kristoff repeats. “And black with pink,” he went on, switching to English, “because it's cute, you know. Because pink is the new black. But it's okay. I don't care about that.”

Surely,
I think to myself. Yes, the emos are products of the rising consumer class in Mexico. But Kristoff—working for Televisa, the country's de facto state media company, in his designer jeans and
leather jacket and gelled hair—would be just as much a product of Mexico's new media-saturated consumer culture as the average mopey emo kid. Or maybe even more so.

“Do you really think this is a passing trend?” I ask.

“No, I think it's going to stay, especially now after what has happened. Little by little, they're defining themselves, looking for their bands, looking for their ideology, but they haven't achieved it.” He pauses, baffled by his own train of thought. “Maybe they're not even looking to do that.”

I watch Kristoff record a show inside his studio the day I visit. It doesn't seem necessary to take many notes. Daniela sits next to me, still smiling. The routine is mostly crass, forgettable stuff. But something that Kristoff tells me in passing near the end of our interview stays with me.

“They said somewhere on television—I don't know if it's true,” he begins, sort of smirking, “but, that there are gay groups putting themselves in there, because you know, they accept boys kissing boys, girls kissing girls, without being gay.” Kristoff is speaking conspiratorially, as if sharing a deep and disturbing secret, although it is well-known to anyone who has been following the emo-violence story that gay rights groups have called for tolerance. “So there are a lot of gay groups getting involved. I mean . . . I don't know. It's what I heard the other day.”

He seems bemused by the thought, and I am partly awaiting a Kristoff-like punch line, mocking the emos once more, mocking their tangential gayness.

The emos of Mexico are here to stay, and that is the problem. They are not just a new “urban tribe,” they are an entirely new breed of it, genetically different from punks or goths because they are
not formed in reaction to a repressive state but born in reaction to MySpace and the mall. This threatens tribal equilibrium and inflames the sensibilities of self-respecting alternative-leaning young people. Acknowledging the transformation of the subcultural landscape has, for some, meant turning to violence—pure, raw brawling—against the new kids on the block. It is the emos' welcoming ceremony, their swearing in. In the battle over the public and social spaces shared by the subcultures, the emos' rapidly advancing numbers would eventually guarantee them a place at the table. But not without a fight. Throughout popular-subcultural history, young people have demonstrated a gleeful willingness to indulge in a primal human lust for blood and bruising when tribal allegiances call for it.