Down and Delirious in Mexico City (2 page)

Welcome to La Rebel. Welcome to Mexico City. What fun.

Two things stand out here, I'm thinking, almost three years later. Life in Mexico City is a contact sport. It might be scary at first, unforgiving, violent, but to really grasp it, you gotta get in, release all inhibitions, all cultural blinders. You have to get down and play.

Since relocating to Mexico's capital city, I've attended parties, rallies, marches, meetings, sporting events, and spiritual rites. I've checked out markets, festivals, cantinas, and all-day outdoor concerts.
I've read and collected what must be thousands of articles, clippings, and flyers. I've gone wherever the city—and chance—took me.

Mexico City is young. Within the Federal District (known as the D.F., for Distrito Federal), one in three residents is between the ages of fifteen and twenty-nine. The average age overall is twenty-seven. I fit right into the category, moving here days before my twenty-seventh birthday. These young people were Mexico's future. Eager to better understand where the country might be headed, and where I might fit in it all, I began researching Mexico City's youth movements and subcultures. I consulted academic sources, magazines, self-published histories, and vintage media. I interviewed dozens upon dozens of people. I took hundreds of photographs, recorded hours of audio, and wrote hundreds of pages of notes.

The result is this book, a collection of reported essays, personal and subjective, covering roughly the period between 2007 and 2010. It is not meant as a definitive “portrait” or “guide” to the Mexican capital. It is also not meant as a proper catalog of the young “urban tribes” of Mexico City. Some tribes are discussed at length, some barely. My documentary approach consisted of observing, listening, and participating wherever possible, wherever an invitation occurred naturally.

The stories narrated in these chapters are all true. It is a truth as far as I noted, recorded, recalled, and photographed it. In a few instances, the names of some of the people who appear in these pages have been changed, where circumstances warranted privacy. The Internet, print journalism, and the work of other writers was central to putting the tales together. The book contains occasional quotations from Web pages and social media sources, and echoes of entries from my personal blog, Intersections.

Finally, I should note that while I use the term
urban tribe
and
its subcategories, in general young people in Mexico City reject identifying themselves in such terminologies—
goth, rasta,
etc.—even if they otherwise appear fully immersed in a specific subculture. I made every effort then to distinguish subjects in the book by noting their unique characteristics. Yet I also allowed myself to make generalizing references to
emos, hipsters,
and so on when the text calls for it. Though these terms may rarely be used for self-identification in Mexico City or anywhere else, they are widely imposed by young people upon one another. My usage of them here reflects the social reality.

Throughout this process, I also had to consider my own place in the cultural and geographic landscape of the D.F. This book is ultimately the story of how I found it.

—D.H., Mexico City, July 2010

 

 

 

El apocalipsis no es una metáfora es un lugar lleno de belleza y llevamos años ahi. La publicidad nos engaña.

—P
ONCE

The apocalypse is not a metaphor, it is a place full of beauty and we have been there for years. The media mislead us.

—P
ONCE

A crowd of candles at La Villa. (Photo by the author.)

A
t 10:00 p.m. on December 11, 2007, we enter the procession at the Zócalo, the vast public square and thumping heart of historic downtown Mexico City. The towers of the cathedral rise over the square like baroque apparitions. Beneath them, thousands of people are gathering before they set off for the basilica to the north by foot or by bicycle. Fleets of bike taxis cluster under Christmas lights draped upon the walls of the brown buildings that border the square. The bikes are fitted for a party, decorated with balloons
and strings of lights, boom boxes held aloft, playing reggaeton and holiday songs. Nearly everyone is carrying a portrait-size replica of the holy image of the Virgen de Guadalupe. The image is heavy
on their backs, a burden carried with an apparently absolute clarity of faith. Bundled into a sweater and scarf, I circle the square to take in the surroundings, feeling both excitement and intimidation
for the hike ahead. It is a carnival of a scene, but clearly serious business.

Since her miraculous appearance before an indigenous peasant in 1531, the Empress of Mexico, as Guadalupe is sometimes known, has drawn pilgrims to a holy hill in the north of the Federal District, and so we are going. There, at the place they call La Villa, the sacred image hangs on permanent display in a large and modern basilica built in the early 1970s—the original viceregal basilica having sunk unevenly over the centuries into the soft former lake bed below. The pilgrims arrive from all corners of the republic and beyond for the midnight dawn of her feast day, December 12, to bow and pray before the “private flag of Mexicans.” As they have for years, pilgrims travel—some for days—to La Villa, entirely on foot. Some are true believers but most are only nominally so. For many, the attraction of the ritual of December 12 is its sheer spectacle. The most ardent believers are easy to spot because they enter La Villa inching along on their knees.

The trek is a minor sacrifice relative to the occasion: the anniversary of the olive-skinned Virgen's appearance before the converted native man Juan Diego, ten years after the fall of the Aztecs to the Spanish conquistadors. Never mind the credible doubt cast on the authenticity of the Guadalupe miracle by the rigors of modern science, or that she appeared on a hill that had been sacred ground where the Aztecs had venerated Tonantzin, the mother goddess. The annual observance of this event is a rite unlike any other in
Mexico or in the entire Americas. La Villa feels in some ways like the Mecca of the Western Hemisphere. The shimmering garment is these pilgrims' Black Stone, a talisman that demands from its faithful, one night a year, a total disregard for the health of their feet and knees and for the general boundaries of personal space.

I decide to check out the pilgrimage with a group of adventurous American and European expats and friends. Some of us might be here for the aspect of amateur anthropology, but I felt a desire—secret, personal—to deliver myself to Mexico and Mexico City's patroness, La Morenita, as they affectionately say. Participating in this rite so soon after moving here would, I think, ensure without question my admission into the ranks of true countrymen. This is my first real test, my welcoming. Not as a Catholic, but as a
paisano.

“Cafecito, cafecito,”
the voices call from the sidewalks.
“Pan, tortas.”

We march north on Calle Repùblica de Brasil, from the Zócalo. Families from the street's crumbling brown buildings stand on the crowd's edge handing out food and drinks in the chilly night to the passing pedestrians and cyclists. Coffee, bottled water, fresh unpeeled oranges, tacos,
tortas.
Children dart in and out of the parade.
“Aguas, aguas, aguas!”
There are fruit juices and Guadalupe rearview-mirror ornaments and CDs with Guadalupe-themed tracks. It is a storied custom, far more wanton gift-giving and random acts of Christian charity than in a whole month of manufactured Christmas cheer. After a few blocks, I begin to politely decline more gifts, as my backpack can fit no more. Police stand by their cruisers, with their flashing and whirling siren signals. Everyone is talking and singing and playing music and laughing and eating, huddling close in the chill. We cross Paseo de la Reforma. The crowds continue to swell. More food and drink rain upon us from the sidewalks. My crew of expatriates begins
to break apart in the flow. Then from behind I hear a voice:
“Hey, güero! ¿De donde son?”

I stop and turn, a natural response when you are brown-skinned and someone calls you “white boy.” I guess he smells foreignness on me.

He is a smiling guy who introduces himself as Christian. He wears a wavy amber Afro and carries a long, sturdy branch he uses as a walking stick, like some kind of rebel highlands shaman. I tell him I am from the United States, and before I know it, Christian pulls me toward his group and places before my face a ceramic pipe filled with marijuana, asking with another smile,
“¿Fumas?”

I have lost my foreigner friends in the surge of people.
Might as well.

My exhaled smoke dissolves into the cold air. As we walk onward, Christian introduces me to his friends: Ulises (“But they call me Gozu”), Porku, and a shaggy-haired guy who seems old enough to be their father, who went by El Cochinito, or Little Pig. The others are no older than twenty or twenty-one. They carry backpacks filled with basic provisions, and a tent. They smile a lot. They are walking to La Villa from their pueblo at the edge of the Distrito Federal, “near the toll-booth” on the road to Cuernavaca. That's twelve hours to the south by foot.

“We're going to see the Virgen and then we're going to camp out, a little farther away from the people, and stay all night smoking and drinking,” Christian announces proudly. The rest of the crew nods and smiles. It goes without saying that I am invited.

“Órale,”
I say.

The flow of pilgrims has now completely taken over the wide avenue Calzada de Guadalupe, on a direct angle toward La Villa. It is crowded yet weirdly orderly—everyone focused on the destination, upon Guadalupe. My new friends cluster around me. One of
them passes me a bottle of processed juice mixed with tequila, “to warm you up,” and we trudge on, passing long streams of backed-up traffic, hotels, and an illuminated Walmart—like some intruder from another civilization. Our movements on the march up the Calzada de Guadalupe become slower and slower as the ranks of the pilgrims multiply.

“Once we get closer to the basilica,” Gozu warns with a gleeful smile, “we'll barely be able to move.” So sincere and forthright is his enthusiasm for the prospect of potential death by crushing, so earnest is his determination to march by my side, I don't know how to respond. I feel suddenly that I have found a band of brothers. No standoffish getting-to-know-you interval, no competitive head-to-toe scanning. They are like expressions of a Mexican stereotype that has almost zero self-consciousness: the free and happy young person. But a task is at hand, and I must concentrate. I puff on their pipe again, and the drug's mind-altering properties crawl into my bloodstream and piggyback upon my brain waves. My heart begins to race. I begin sharing in my friends' determined jubilation. I add my laughter to theirs. I begin to think that maybe a faint trickle of something new is rising from my pit, something unfamiliar. Faith.

“Why are you doing this?” I ask Porku.

The Virgen de Guadalupe, upon a bandanna, is wrapped over his forehead. “We have to,” he says with a wide grin. “It's faith. You don't question it.”

I try to understand. The faith we're talking about here is not Roman Catholic, it is in one another, in brotherhood, in the ritual. And in intoxication.

I pass the pipe back to Christian and Porku but they resist,
their faces displaying scorn at the idea of my taking only two hits. “More,” they say. “Smoke more. You smoke.” So I smoke. More and more, which pleases the band tremendously, until I say I can puff no more, and they look into my glassy eyes and agree, laughing and smiling.
Anything for la Virgencita,
I think to myself.

I ask them why people along the pilgrimage path become so generous.

“It comes from their heart,” Porku responds immediately.

“They see these dudes walking,” adds Gozu excitedly, his skin the color of dark wood, his hair tucked under a backward cap, “and they go, ‘Look, here they come walking. We must give them something.' ”

It is such a simple and logical idea, but I can't help laughing. “We're almost there!” Gozu squeals. “Careful, because they'll steal from your pockets.”

“Even at La Villa?” I ask.

He only shrugs. Doubt your faith in fellow man but never in La Virgen.

It is almost midnight, and we are now within a kilometer or two of the Basílica de Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe. I know this because up ahead I see the bright double arches of a McDonald's restaurant, a sure signpost in many places in the developing world that you're approaching a significant cultural or historic site. By now the pilgrimage has gridlocked. People are packed so tightly that instead of walking we shuffle our feet ahead a few paces, wait for a minute or so, still and silent, then shuffle ahead a bit more when space permits. Everyone is concentrating.