The Eyeliner Wars

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.”