Down and Delirious in Mexico City (7 page)

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.

Zemmoa, queen of the night. (Photo by César Arellano.)

T
he 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.