Down and Delirious in Mexico City (9 page)

What are we doing here again? Last time I was at Pasagüero, Mark “the Cobra Snake” Hunter and Steve Aoki were DJing. The leading scenesters in Los Angeles, down in Mexico to throw a party. People were desperate to get in. Now, another party at Pasagüero. My friend Cristal, a dedicated Mexico City scenester, is having a vodka. Cool kids are everywhere around us, talking, drinking, laughing, posing for photos.

“Isn't this, kinda, you know, fake?” I suddenly ask Cristal.

“Nothing that we have is ours,” she admits blankly. “We follow the current.”

Cristal and I remain concerned with the particulars. Who's taking photos? Where is Diario de Fiestas? Where is Domestic Fine Arts? Who will go home with whom? What's happening later? What am I wearing?

“It's
malinchismo,
” Cristal says. I ponder this for a moment. Could the surge in this distinctly new subculture—“hipster,” “scenester,” “cool kid,” whichever you prefer—be yet another expression of the storied Mexican tradition of unduly overvaluing anything foreign and First World? The party is for Nike, we determine. Nike is throwing a party at Pasagüero and we are here even though we aren't sure exactly why. Yet we see no other option but to be here.

“Look,” Cristal says, hollering over the noise. “We're here celebrating a transnational brand, not a brand of huaraches.”

I nod and take a swig of my beer. It tastes flat and stale, even though the bartender had just popped it open. Cristal is right, I think. Nike would never sponsor a brand of Mexican-made, handcrafted leather footwear, as traditional and old as our precolonial ancestors. That wouldn't be “cool.” Transnational, globalization cool, I mean, which is what companies like Nike vigorously sell to young Mexicans.

A camera's flash comes careening into my personal space, ready to capture a moment mindlessly, and I duck. “Us, those of us who are just under thirty, we're growing up without the blanket of our parents,” Cristal continues. “But those who are twenty, I feel for them. We got a bit of it, but they completely missed it.”

By “blanket of parents” Cristal means the old social order, the way fathers and mothers in Mexico once ruled the household and the entire social structure of a young person's life. Now it is not the same. Hierarchies have flattened. The domestic social structure has disintegrated. Old rites of passage have calcified. Kids come out as gay when they're still in middle school. Everyone has MTV or some form of it on cable at home. Eighteen-year-olds lose their virginity in hotels
de paso
with hourly rates and court one another on hi5 or MySpace. The truly restless and economically desperate become men by surviving the trek to the North. Now every young
person in Mexico is an agent of his or her own destiny. The result is that just about every liberated, moderately middle-class young person in Mexico has, it seems, gravitated toward fashion and hipsterdom.

We look around the club. Lights and sounds and flashy faces bombard us on all sides. Yet nothing seems worth a second glance. Another party at Pasagüero. Lines at the bathroom. Lip gloss. Flashy cheap jewelry. Cristal is wearing a bandanna around her neck and glossy sneakers herself. We watch as a friend alleviates her boredom by sitting on a large speaker—she has just discovered she likes the way the sound vibrations feel on her privates. Cristal chugs at her drink and hollers once more: “They're the children of radio and television.”

I had first met Cristal on the street one night in Condesa, maybe in December, everyone diving into their last overdose of pre-Christmas partying. Neither of us remembers the details. She must have been getting into a car and I must have been crossing the street. In an instant, we turned around, looked at each other head to toe, and decided with one shared glance,
Oh, we're supposed to be friends.
We exchanged a few words, were heading to different parties, but promised to hang out. In a neighborhood festering with posing, sucking up, and competition, Cristal to me seemed like one person who never hesitated to say exactly what she was thinking, at any moment. That usually involved critiquing someone on their vanity, hypocrisy, or poor fashion choices. The Condesa neighborhood proved to be a fertile territory for this activity.

Although many of the scenester parties happen in Centro, Centro is not where most scenesters hang out or live. The Condesa, a few neighborhoods over to the southwest from downtown, remains
ground zero for style consciousness in Mexico City. Correspondingly, it is the neighborhood where most foreigners try to integrate themselves. It is easily the most gentrified
colonia
in all of D.F., if not the entire country. Beset with exorbitant rents, severe parking issues, and, at last count, three Starbucks locations, Condesa is a hub of trendy boutiques, trendy cafés, trendy restaurants, and trendy-looking people. On weekend nights, cocaine dealers in discreet automobiles prowl the neighborhood's leafy streets delivering drugs to thumping apartment parties. No one pretends to be risking anything. This isn't the sort of neighborhood where Mexico City police raid homes looking for narcotics. It is populated by armies of designers, television personalities, artists, politicians, academics, musicians, journalists, marketers, producers, architects, the nouveau riche, and people who work in fashion—the privileged classes, in a few words, and therefore the sort of people who see recreational cocaine use as a matter of social entitlement. Not everyone does it, of course, but it is everywhere. Nearly all the restaurants and bars post signs in restrooms warning customers that if they are caught “consuming drugs,” they'll be turned over to the authorities. They never say so, but the messages are clearly directed at cocaine users.
How can one neighborhood's party barometer be so intertwined with a single drug?

Cristal, who by day trains marathon runners, grew up in the Condesa, as unbelievable as that sounds to many of her recently arrived neighbors. In fact, so did her father and her grandmother, who moved to the
colonia
when she was twelve, Cristal tells me one night. “For starters, there used to be just one
torterίa
” in her dad's day, she says. One storefront that sold
torta
sandwiches—in the whole neighborhood. “Café la Gloria used to be, like, a lunch counter. They used to have the only TV in the
colonia
and they charged two pesos to come in and watch it. My dad used to go.”

Cristal bemoans the new Condesa, but as a dedicated scenester she also enjoys its spoils. She can walk into four or five clubs within a few blocks of her house, and she hits them all, several nights a week. She enjoys whiskey on the rocks and the olive plate at Barney's, a darkened, New York–style bar with low leather couches. She eats as much savory, if pricey, Mexican seafood at La Ostra as her palate desires and nods her head or throws verbal darts at the DJs who play electronica near the bar, as if the restaurant wishes it were a nightclub. Cristal walks to the 7–Eleven in her pajamas—and gets stared at.
“Me vale madre!”
Cristal swears. (I thought for a while about how this phrase might be translated and came up with the satisfactory option of “I could give a fuck.”)

Cristal suffers from the classic syndrome, native-gentrifier paralysis. She is from where she is—the Condesa—and the hipster-fashionista invasion is one she must learn to adopt, willingly or not. “From being a place to live in,” Cristal tells me, Condesa has “turned into a place to go to.”

The neighborhood's transformation speaks to a wider shift in young people's relationship to popular culture. When the “hipster” happened around 2000, it was the birth of the first global cultural movement predicated on the basic goal of being fashionable. There was no other value as dominant. It was about knowing what to listen to, knowing what to eat, knowing what to read, and knowing what to wear. Genre boundaries were obliterated. You could dress like a sixties hippie while listening to Run-D.M.C. and reading Ayn Rand. That was sort of the ideal, being as eclectic and obscure with your tastes as possible, and being an expert in everything deemed “good,” and in everything deemed not good as well, just to be safe. Punks or goths use fashion to identify themselves as part of a group,
but hipsters in the abstract sense use fashion for the sake of using it. To stand out, not blend in.

A decade into the phenomenon, hipsterdom expanded into the mainstream at an alarming pace. The “hip” dominates pop media, from movies to marketing. It penetrates the consciousness yet remains a cipher. Hipsterdom's cultural borders are constantly shifting, or potentially nonexistent. For ten years it has largely maintained a heavy load of internal baggage. There is a strong element of self-loathing: Nothing is worse than being called a hipster, even if you are one—and at the same time, hipsters tell themselves, everyone
wants
to be one. It is the price of successful penetration: Hipsterdom cannibalizes itself, an internally built mechanism. Its death is announced every day. Hip is so mainstream it's not even hip anymore. But don't ever forget the important corollary: Some people still manage to be really, really hip.

To that end, at some point in the last couple of years, it didn't matter what city you lived in. What mattered was that you were plugged in, turned on, and had all the right tastes. When it all comes down to being fashionable, fashion becomes important. In Mexico City, that remained a relatively renegade obsession. An element of risk is central to life here, with the specter of holdups and kidnappings, with epic traffic jams, pollution, and arbitrary pauses in the water and electricity supplies. In Mexico City, living with risks translates beautifully to street fashion. The trend-conscious urban adventurers think nothing of risking a look that might register as too bold or outrageous in other places. The city's young fashion designers take this conceit to its maximum reaches, then detonate it. New currents in clothes by young designers are
bold, aggressive, and distinctly androgynous. Clothes meant for partying.

But there are stark differences between hipster iterations north
and south of the border. In Mexico, young people may follow through close and constant Internet analysis the street-fashion trends in Los Angeles, London, Paris, and New York. But unlike many of their American counterparts, the hipsters of Mexico City make no pretense of being “poor” or “D.I.Y.” Most Mexican hipsters do not dream of living in run-down lofts in far-off, frightening reaches of the city, but prefer orderly upper-middle-class districts such as Del Valle and Coyoacán, or the established chic hoods. There is no Mexico City version of a “trailblazing” Bush-wick or South Central. In Mexico City, hipsterdom is essentially an expression of middle-class comfort.

I begin thinking hard about this, after some months of hitting up scenester parties, night after night of free access and free drinks. I am burning out. I am seeing the same people over and over, and having the same sort of night with them, each time. In Mexico City, the coolest of the cool were still congregating and partying for the most part in one neighborhood, Condesa. Many remained proud of it. And those who weren't had made themselves a miniculture of saying so—without ever leaving, of course. “Condesa was at its best four years ago,” Arellano tells me the day we sit down for lunch. “I'm about to leave this neighborhood. It's too commercial, way too commercial. All these people from Coapa, Satélite, coming over to Condesa. It's over. It's time to look for a new place.”

It is easy to say so, but far less easy to put the thought into practice, as he and others of us know. There is still a party around
the corner that night, and another one around the next corner, and another one after that. Night after night, like it or not. We keep going.

“The
onda
right now,” a scenester bellows into my ear one night at Malva, a club, at another party, “is that there is no
onda,
and there is all the
ondas.
”

Welcoming the emos to El Chopo, kinda. (Photo by the author.)

E
rik is sixteen and lives in Ecatepec.

—
Why emos?

—Well, I don't know, it's the style of dress that we like, the way of thinking, too.

—
How is that?

—Well, I don't know, sometimes we have to take our emotions higher and make them more dramatic.

—
And what is that for?

—Well, I don't know, that's each person's thing, it's like one day you want to be happier, and be sadder another.

—
How do you make things more dramatic?

—It's when you feel anxious, without knowing what to do, and you start going to other things.

—
Like what?

—Well, cutting your skin, I don't know, it's about looking different than the rest.

—
Where on your body do you cut yourself?

—On my wrists, my chest, my legs.