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?
Yahir lives in Mexico City, in a modest apartment he shares with his mom and his sister. A baby-faced 15-year-old with dimpled cheeks and kohl-ringed eyes, he wears his hair in a carefully choreographed ballet of spikes and swirls and paints his fingernails in florid Technicolor—cherry red for the right hand, tulip pink for the left. “Sometimes I like to not match,” he says. He enjoys movies and shopping, and his best subject in school is math. Asked to describe himself, he uses the Spanish word
sensible—sensitive. In the evenings, after he’s finished his homework, his favorite thing to do is to sit in his room and listen to music. And, because he’s 15 and sensitive, what he usually listens to is emo.
Two months ago, Yahir was on his way home from school when he was accosted in the subway by a group of older, bigger boys. “There were seven of them,” Yahir says, and they surrounded him and started calling him names: “faggot,” “queer,” “little bitch.” It was 5 o’clock, the height of rush hour, and the station was packed, but no one intervened. Yahir saw two policemen nearby and called to them. They didn’t come.
One of the boys grabbed Yahir, pinning him against the concrete wall. He pulled out a pair of scissors. “Your haircut is gay,” he said, gripping Yahir’s black bangs. “Let me fix it.” As the others held Yahir down, the bigger boy started cutting off his bangs, one violent
snip at a time. Yahir was terrified. “¡
Ayúdame!” he yelled—“Help me!” The police, he says, just stood there laughing.
In America, being an emo fan—one of those dark, anguished teens who listen to Dashboard Confessional and whose MySpace moods are set permanently to “sad”—might make you the butt of jokes or, worse, totally normal. In Mexico, it makes you a target. In the past few months, waves of anti-emo violence have erupted in cities from the capital to the border.
Los emos have been kicked, beaten, spat on, slapped; observers have called it a witch hunt, a crusade and, most frequently,
un linchamiento—a lynching.
“I walk around afraid a lot,” Yahir says. It’s a cloudy afternoon in late March, and he’s sitting on the steps of the Glorieta de Insurgentes, a vast red-brick plaza where Mexico City’s emos like to congregate. Yahir comes to the Glorieta most weekends, to catch up with friends and talk about bands (AFI is a new favorite). “It’s safe here,” he says. “We’re free to express ourselves.”
We’ve been talking for a few minutes when a fearsome-looking
cholo—early 20s, shirtless, with skull tattoos and a shaved head—walks up and, for no apparent reason, thrusts his middle finger in Yahir’s face. Yahir ignores him. Sneering, the guy mutters something, flicks his lit cigarette into the boy’s face and walks away.
Stunned, we ask Yahir if he’s all right. “
Sí, sí,” he nods, rubbing his cheek. “I’m OK. It only burned me a little.”
Why would he do that? we ask in disbelief.
Yahir’s voice is sad, but matter-of-fact: “Because he hates us.”
Though it probably peaked in the U.S. a couple of years ago, in Mexico, emo is still a growth industry. According to Camilo Lara, the head of EMI Music Mexico, the genre accounts for as much as 25 percent of Mexico’s mushrooming rock market. The biggest acts are American bands like Fall Out Boy and My Chemical Romance, but there are also homegrown stars like Panda, a My Chem clone whose 2006 breakthrough,
Para Ti Con Desprecio (For You With Contempt), has sold more than 200,000 copies—double-platinum in Mexico, on par with the country’s biggest pop groups.
Mexican fans have long embraced the darker side of rock, from mopey ’80s groups like Depeche Mode and Morrissey to contemporary gloom magnates like Interpol. “We’re a very melodramatic country,” says Lara, sitting in his office in Mexico City’s chic Zona Rosa district. “
Telenovelas, bullfights—we love the spectacle.” Add to this Mexico’s endless infatuation with mortality—what the poet Octavio Paz once called its “cult of death”—and the fact that 40 percent of Mexicans are under age 18, and emo’s popularity is no surprise. Adolescent disaffection, like love, knows no borders.