Down and Delirious in Mexico City (6 page)

“There are few Mexican people who keep a respect for others, for people from other countries,” the guy tells me. “I suggest to you that if you do not have a Mexican tour guide, you get yourself a hotel room, maybe by around eight at night, and you stay there till morning.”

My lecturer is a twentysomething Chopo regular in shades. I can tell that he's smart, and probably a little drunk. He is assuming that I am a tourist. “If you want to hang out until tomorrow, that's cool . . . but . . . your accent.”

“Indicates that I'm not—?” I start asking.

“You just have to say,
‘Cerveza, cerveza,' ”
the guy says, mocking a gringo Spanish accent. “If a sharp person sees you talking in some other accent, they'll say, ‘This
pendejo
I'll make him a
pendejo.
' ”

An idiot.

“But my accent is—”

“Your accent is foreign,” he interrupts.

“But I'm from California,” I protest.

“Even if you're from Monterrey, I recognize the accent, dude.” Monterrey is the big industrial city in the north, and it's also not anywhere near California. “Even if you're from Monterrey, I recognize that accent, and I'll go, ‘This
güey,
charge him triple,
güey
!' ”

I can't help but laugh. We laugh together.

“Mexicans don't trust other Mexicans,” the guy sighs.

During my first stay in Mexico City with the Uruzquietas, Don Alfredo's nephew Sebastián guides me on excursions to the city center. Sebastián's usual look is baggy jeans and hemp jewelry. With dark brown skin and intensely curly and shiny black hair, he is a Mexico City native whose genetic code leans heavily toward
afromestizo,
the African-dominant racial mixture. He is walking ahead of me, moving like a cool and calm explorer of the urban obstacle course, a tropical gangster. He takes me for the first time to El Chopo.

“You can get good jeans there” is all he says by way of explanation.

Then as now in 2008, my initial fascination with the market is superficial. Mohawks, dreadlocks, all the outward sincere displays of “true music fans”—didn't all of this go out of style with the start of the new millennium? Don't irony and cynicism reign now? El Chopo is on its face a retro throwback. Just a few blocks long, one street wide, the once-a-week Tianguis Cultural del Chopo—
tianguis
is a Náhuatl word that survives in usage today, meaning “market”—is the permanent citadel of the Mexican counterculture. Or what's left of it. This is where a small band of romantic souls keep their idea of utopia or anarchy on perpetual repeat. The
choperos,
as the writer Carlos Monsiváis once put it, “find a provision of energy in the obsessions that so many others have retired.” The landscape is jarring, definitely, coming across hordes of punks and rastas and skinheads, dressed almost too perfectly so, week after week. This quality of persistence is precisely what makes so many others dismiss El Chopo as a parody of itself, a thing of quaintness.

But something about the attitude of the regulars intrigues me. Ritual attendants at Chopo are usually suspicious of outsiders. They treat their market like it is an intangible jewel to be protected—as if they were hiding a secret they don't want you to know about. The day I meet the guy who tags me as a tourist and instructs me to get to a hotel and not emerge till morning, I hobble back to Tacubaya feeling both chastened and hopeful.
At least someone talked to me this time
. I have been going to El Chopo about a couple times a month since I moved here, trying to figure it out. Most times I
am alone. I wander the stalls, browsing the tour T-shirts, pipes, jeans, hoodies, and vintage jackets. I look at
HELLO MY NAME IS
stickers, leather and hemp jewelry, skateboards, old rocker magazines, CDs, concert DVDs, Doc Martens boots, hip-hop mix-tapes, beanies, spray-can caps, studded wristbands—whatever a young Mexican kid needs to visually present himself as an “alternative”
individual. It's all sold here. The punk, goth, skinhead, rockabilly, skater, hip-hop head, tagger, emo, or rasta, or any mix-and-match combination of the above, is at home. Carrying an item bought at El Chopo implies its own kind of currency. The
tianguis
has a value beyond its obvious function of commerce.

One afternoon I meet a woman in plain motherly clothing standing at the back of the market resting against a chain-link fence, behind the area where bands play and hard-core “anarco-punks” sell patches and vegan tacos. The woman's little son is nearby. A conversation bubbles up between us. “I met my husband here,” she tells me, “way back in 1982.”

I don't know this at the time, but the woman is referring to a different physical location. For its first several years after starting in fall 1980, I'd later find out, El Chopo took place at the Museo Universitario El Chopo, a museum affiliated with the UNAM, the national university, which is how the
tianguis
got its name. But El Chopo is El Chopo wherever it's held, and over the years it's been held at many places before finding its home here on Aldama Street. It is not just a street market, it is a happening.

The woman and I watch a group of kids in
lucha libre
wrestling masks mosh incoherently to the sounds of an indie band playing before us, in the shadows of a few nondescript apartment towers and a huge electrical generator plant. The moshing kids can't be more than fifteen or sixteen years old. They wear masks, they tell me later, because their favorite band, Los Elásticos, wear masks.

The Chopo mom is silent. She sighs. “It used to be a lot more punk.”

The first iteration of the Tianguis Cultural del Chopo happened on October 4, 1980. That's a month before I was born—or in rock-n-roll
terms, aeons ago. It did not have a name at first. The
tianguis
came together in response to a call from the director of the Chopo museum at the time, the author Ángeles Mastretta, for a “space for musicians, collectors, producers, and all the
banda
interested in rock, jazz, and related sounds to exchange, distribute, and sell records and everything related to music,” according to a small volume on the history of the market,
Tianguis Cultural del Chopo: Una larga jornada
.

“Bartering was El Chopo's blood,” writes the author of the history, an original
chopero
named Abraham Ríos. “Esoteric records appeared: the European progressives, the Mexican productions by Focus, the psychedelic H. P. Lovecrafts and Ultimate Spinach; the first Zappas, the Happy Trails of Quicksilver Messenger Service, Grape Jam, or Fever Tree.”

A nerve had been struck. The spontaneous market grew and grew. It outgrew the museum and spilled out onto the streets. The local borough government and neighborhood toughs seeking to extort the rockers constantly threatened to kill the market, sometimes through direct violence. It moved several times, conjuring images of a chosen tribe of rockers wandering the desert of the unforgiving city. But El Chopo could not be contained. The
chavos,
the
banda,
had spoken.

“There was no place for
chavos
to get together at the time,” says Javier Hernández Chelico, another Chopo OG. Hernández, gray-haired and wearing jeans and a vest, writes a weekly column on the market in the daily
La Jornada.
We meet one day near the anarco-punks. “They took control of a thing that was not theirs. There was no directive, no order. The
chavos
generated El Chopo.”

The term
banda
pops up often in discussion on the Chopo community. Its meaning is simple yet elusive. Evoking youth, rock-n-roll, and resistance,
la banda
is the umbrella under which all subcultures
are accepted. To be
banda
is to be part of the crew, the tribe.
Banda
is the ultimate compliment. But back then, forming part of the
banda
functioned also as a survival mechanism for the young people of Mexico. In the period when the foundations of El Chopo were being laid, the government didn't just frown upon alternative types, it killed them. The Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, had ruled Mexico as a quasi-authoritarian state since the end of the Revolution, the so-called “perfect dictatorship.” The PRI dominated all segments of government and society at large and regarded state violence as a fundamental tool of order and control. Three critical events, in 1968 and in 1971, laid the groundwork for a
banda
revolution to which El Chopo owes its existence. The bartering rockers who founded and still guard El Chopo were doing nothing short of standing up to a history stacked mightily against them.

In late July 1968, a series of innocent-looking brawls between rival street gangs and so-called
porro
student groups sparked an unprecedented popular movement for government reform—a movement that was ultimately defeated by the government with fatal force. The student brawls had violently been repressed by state riot police, who entered campuses and caused wider mayhem on the streets. The repression generated an indignant response from the university communities. Marches were staged. Manifestos were drafted. Far-left political groups, unions, and professionals of many kinds joined the movement. The PRI began feeling the heat.

The PRI—and its partner in paranoia and repression, the U.S. intelligence community—feared that if left unchecked, the movement that emerged in summer 1968 would grow and embarrass the country hosting the first Olympics staged in the developing world or, worse, could possibly herald a Cuban-style upheaval in Mexico, which was what some in the movement at the time actually wanted. It had to be stopped. Days before the opening of the
1968 Olympic Games in Mexico City, on October 2, government forces opened fire on hundreds of unarmed protesters who had gathered for another rally at the Plaza de las Tres Culturas in Tlatelolco. Shots rang out across the city that rainy night as the PRI, its police and its paramilitaries, sought to squelch once and for all a peaceful student movement that clamored for reform, accountability, and transparency in the government. The number killed at Tlatelolco may never be fully known. The government initiated a blackout campaign on the massacre that to this day is only beginning to be unmasked.

Tlatelolco was a turning point. It left a permanent scar on those who survived it and provided a key reference point of collective trauma for generations to come. The one-party state had declared open war on its sons and daughters. It was only the beginning of an epic struggle. From then on, as was happening in other Latin American pseudo-democracies, Mexico initiated a so-called Dirty War against dissidents. From university students in the cities to land-rights leaders in the countryside, activists of every stripe were arrested, persecuted, or simply “disappeared.” Journalists were silenced or put on the PRI payroll. People from those generations still tell stories of being profiled, rounded up, roughed up, harassed, and intimidated as they raised their voices in protest against the regime.

A second mass attack on unarmed demonstrators followed on June 10, 1971. Demonstrators in D.F. attempted to march to the Zócalo from a collection of technical colleges in a northeast area of the city known as Casco de Santo Tomás, near metro San Cosme. A paramilitary group known as Los Halcones, or the Falcons, surrounded the students with clubs and guns. Many died in the violence that followed. Once again, we'll never know how many for sure. The news media by then operated as a complicit
arm of the PRI, the party's willing censors and stenographers. The dailies reported the next day that a “conflict between students” had occurred at the Casco de Santo Tomás. President Luis Echeverría, who had been interior minister during Tlatelolco and therefore instrumental in its execution, once more succeeded in violently squelching dissent. The Jueves de Corpus massacre, as it was named because it occurred on the Corpus Christi feast day, would largely be forgotten.

Yet a concurrent revolution was also brewing. Rock-n-roll from the United States, Latin America, and Europe had been trickling into Mexico and infecting a receptive youth population with the potent ideal of liberation through music. Through television, film, foreign magazines, and foreigners traveling to Mexico to hunt for native psychotropic plants, young people in Mexico became acquainted with the rocky tide of the global counterculture, as Eric Zolov chronicles in his book
Refried Elvis.
In Mexico it came to be known as La Onda, the Wave. La Onda encapsulated the counterculture's many faces: protest rock, folk rock, psychedelic rock, and a phenomenon Zolov refers to as La Onda Chicana, a reference to the infusion of a Mexican sensibility into the U.S. American rock idiom—think Carlos Santana.

On September 11, 1971, La Onda reached its climax at the Avándaro music festival, also known to this day as Mexico's Woodstock. An estimated two hundred thousand people overwhelmed the woodsy resort area in the state of México, west of the Federal District, where the concert was held. The event was messy, disorganized, and didn't end till the next night. Bands with such names as Los Tequila, Peace and Love, Los Dug Dug's, and Three Souls in My Mind (who eventually became the legendary rockers El Tri) played while soldiers ominously stood guard on the outskirts. It was a watershed moment. There were no confrontations with authorities
at Avándaro, but in the days that followed the one-party state swiftly condemned the festival. Photos emerged showing nudity, Mexican flags modified with the peace sign, and members of the
banda
happily dancing around with an American flag. “While the U.S. flag stood for imperialism at protests in 1968, at Avándaro in 1971 it symbolized solidarity with youth abroad and especially the Chicano fusion at the heart of the Mexican rock counterculture,” Zolov writes. Yet, predictably, the images scandalized the regime, the press, and leftist intellectuals who saw Avándaro as a sign of looming cultural imperialism from the United States. From then on, rock concerts were severely repressed in Mexico. The PRI routinely refused permission for foreign bands to play on Mexican soil for years thereafter.