The streets of Mexico have become a dangerous place for los emos, where riots have started over boys wearing makeup and skinny jeans. How did shy, alienated kids become this country’s most hated subculture?
But for every heartfelt emo devotee, there’s another kid who can’t
stand it. Mexican Web sites teem with loathing, like the blog
Movimiento Anti-Emosexual, or the popular YouTube clip “75 Reasons to
Hate
Los Emos.” (No. 59: “All
their clothes are size 14 kids.” No. 25: “Everything affects them.”) In
December, a VJ named Kristoff delivered an on-air rant slamming emo and
the kids who listen to it. “Emo is for 15-year-old girls who are just
getting hair you-know-where,” he said. “It has no ideas, no musicians.
It’s … a stupid, dumb-ass trend.”
In March, the hate turned
violent. It started in Querétaro, an industrial hub two hours north of
Mexico City. For weeks, word had been circulating via e-mails and
message boards that a group of students were plotting to reclaim the
city’s Plaza de Armas from the emos who congregated there. On Friday,
March 7, they struck. Around 7 p.m., what police later described as “a
massive concentration of juveniles” (as many as 800) descended on the
plaza, pounding their fists and shouting, “Kill the emos!” By the time
authorities dispersed the crowd three hours later, 28 people had been
arrested and three emos were beaten so badly they had to be
hospitalized.
As grainy camera-phone footage of the attacks
made its way around the Web, the violence began to ripple outward.
Similar clashes occurred in Puebla and Tijuana. Demonstrators took to
the streets in the capital. The media weighed in with screaming
headlines (“Emo Wars!”) and breathless op-eds. Most of the articles
condemned the attacks, but others seemed to blame the victims. Several
stories included textbookish descriptions of the emos, for the benefit
of concerned but clueless parents:
Emos
are children between the ages of 15 and 18 whose philosophy is above
all emotional ... Their style is androgynous: tight black pants, pink
or purple sweaters two sizes too small, sneakers of the brand Converse
or Vans, as many as two belts ... They listen to bands like My Chemical
Romance and Evanescence and have a special appreciation for the films
of Tim Burton ... They wear long bangs covering their forehead and at
least one eye ... They cut themselves with razors and say they’re
misunderstood.“It’s kind of like watching the adults in
Footloose
try to figure out why the kids are dancing,” says Pete Wentz, the
bassist and lyricist for Fall Out Boy. Some of the media’s claims
seemed patently ridiculous: Emos worship Satan; they’re all bisexuals.
One prominent psychologist estimated that 40 percent were suicidal.
Grandmothers were calling mothers, neighbors were calling friends:
Is your daughter an emo? Is she dangerous? Is she evil? “It’s the textbook definition of a moral panic,” says Jon Savage, author of
Teenage: The Creation of Youth Culture.
“All it takes is one mention in the press and the public goes crazy:
‘delinquency of youth,’ ‘country going to the dogs.’ The typical
stuff.”
The media portrayed the riots as a battle between
opposing youth cultures, like L.A.’s Zoot Suit Riots of 1943 or the
mod-rocker showdowns in 1960s England. But those were clashes between
two distinct groups: drunken sailors vs. Hispanic dandies; bikers vs.
fashion plates. The emos were being attacked by
everyone—an
ad hoc coalition of punks, skaters, gangsters, metalheads and goths.
Viewed from the outside, through blurry YouTube clips and snarky posts
on Perezhilton.com, the whole thing seemed bizarre: a cultural civil
war being waged by groups that, to American eyes, were essentially
indistinguishable. “It’s like watching Pakistan fight India,” Wentz
says. “I mean, dudes—you’re all 14; you’re all miserable; you all think
the world doesn’t understand you, and it’s quite possible that the
world
doesn’t understand you. Shouldn’t you be on the same team?”
To
Mexican youth, however, the distinctions are clear. Mafer Olvera is a
sociologist at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México and a
longtime rock-scene vet who wrote a book,
Sonidos Urbanos,
about Mexico City’s musical subcultures. “In Mexico,” she says, “the
tribe you belong to is everything.” In addition to the emos, Olvera
says, there are dozens of other so-called
tribus urbanas: los punks, los skaters, los metaleros, los reggaetoneros, los rockabillies, los darketos (literally “the darks,” also called
los góticos),
los fresas (preps, a.k.a. “strawberries,” named for their short-sleeve pink Polos),
los hippies, los skas.