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?
It’s a crowded landscape, and resources are scarce. Mexico has nearly
twice the population density of the U.S. but only a fraction of the
cultural bandwidth. Tribes have to compete for space both ideological
and geographical. “We live in a city of 21 million people,” Olvera
says. “There are only a few radio stations, only a few newspapers, only
a few magazines, only a few playgrounds at which to congregate. It’s
very difficult to gain a space of one’s own.”
You can watch this
struggle play out every week at a long-running Mexico City flea market
called El Chopo. For the past 28 years, the Chopo has been the city’s
headquarters for all things countercultural, with scores of vendors
hawking everything from hand-blown hash pipes to pirated CD-Rs.
Yellowing fliers promote upcoming shows, a rickety wooden stage hosts
bands and misfit kids flock from all over the city to swap music and
gossip. It’s MySpace before MySpace existed.
Gogo, 18, comes to
El Chopo every weekend. He’s loitering in the back in Dr. Martens and
frayed black Levis, a red bandanna tied around his neck like a
Zapatista. Asked how he’d classify himself—skater, punk,
metalero—he
shakes his head: “
Nada más basura.” Just trash. Gogo claims to have
thrown bottles and rocks at emo kids, and he says they deserve it.
“They’re copycats, plain and simple,” he says. “They have no
originality. They have nothing of their own. All they do is steal our
style.”
It’s a common sentiment among emo’s opponents: The emos
are inauthentic, they’re posers, they steal from the real punks. (Never
mind that most of these real punks were born circa 1990.) Others say
they hate the emos because their music is so terrible, an argument that
presents its own problems: “They think reggaeton is terrible, too,”
says Uriel Waizel, a Mexico City music journalist. “But they don’t go
around picking fights with reggaeton fans, because reggaeton fans are
big.”
In reality, there are deeper issues at work. One of them
is class. “The emos are typically from the middle class,” Mafer Olvera
says. “They have the money to buy the sneakers and nail polish and
fashionable haircuts. They have time to spend all night on their
computers. They have computers, period. They’re simply better off, and
a lot of the other tribes resent it.” (Reason to Hate
Los Emos No. 66:
“They all have at least one iPod.”)
Then there’s the matter of
homophobia (Reason No. 37: “They’ve all kissed boys”). “Mexico is a
very conservative, right-wing country,” says Dr. Hector Castillo
Berthier, director of UNAM’s Institute of Social Research. “In the
areas where the attacks started—Querétaro, Jalisco, Guanajuato—the
Catholic church is still very powerful and very intolerant. It’s
similar to America’s Bible Belt. Their basic message is,
We don’t like
you because you’re homosexual.”
Not that all the emos are
gay—in fact, most of the ones we meet say they aren’t. But the mere
sight of a boy in pink barrettes and eyeliner is an affront both to the
church and to Mexico’s deeply entrenched code of machismo. Most of the
epithets hurled at the emos—
puto, joto, maricón—are
anti-gay slurs, and several kids recall their dads telling them to
“quit crying” and “be a man.” For the country’s dominant pro-family
right, a Mexican boy dressing effeminately and talking about his
feelings isn’t just subversive—it’s a deliberate act of provocation.
“Even to other subcultures,” says Castillo, “these kids are a threat.”
On
the last weekend in March, the soundtrack to the emo wars is the noisy
drone of a police helicopter. It’s a hot, bright Saturday, and hundreds
of emos are assembling for a protest march from the Glorieta de
Insurgentes to El Chopo. As kids start to trickle in to the bowl-shaped
plaza, they greet one another with hugs and cheek-pecks, and unfurl
banners proclaiming,
I'M EMO AND I DEMAND RESPECT! and
KRISTOFF, FUCK YOUR MOTHER! Hair product is sprayed; reflections are checked. Makeup
is applied, sweated off and reapplied.
Michel, 15, arrives at
the Glorieta wearing a silver lip ring and skinny white jeans—“to
symbolize peace,” he says. An aspiring computer engineer, he’ll
probably quit the scene by about age 20: “When you grow up, you have to
start thinking for yourself. You can’t care so much about image.” Being
an
emo has gotten him pushed, spat at and branded gay (“But I’m not,”
he adds quickly), and he says he hasn’t been to El Chopo since a punk
stuck bubblegum in his hair there a few months back. “I don’t think
they’re going to attack us today, though. Too many cameras.”