Special to The News
Tuesday, March 3
Julio César slouches against the ticket booth wall inside Mexico City's Buenavista Metro station, his outstretched legs wrapped tightly in black jeans. César, 18, says he's been "emo" for over a year now.
The soft-spoken teen says he joined the emo movement because he loves the pop-punk music scene and its sense of fashion. His long hair, angled into swooping bangs, is cut just below his makeup-rimmed eyes. His thin frame is covered head-to-toe in black.
César has just returned from the open-air stalls of the city's Tianguis Cultural del Chopo, where punks and skaters brush easily past the longhaired metalheads and heavily pierced "darks." The Aldama Street market has been the gathering ground for urban subcultures for decades.
On any given Saturday afternoon at El Chopo, Rastafarian booths blasting reggae music sit beside walls lined with black, crushed-velvet trench coats. Tarps covered with pirated Metallica and Iron Maiden CDs hang beside SpongeBob Squarepants backpacks - an ironic staple of emo fashion. The smells of street-fried tacos and marijuana drift through the thick heat as policemen loiter around the periphery.
But just a year ago, El Chopo and other youth-group meeting grounds in the city weren't such easygoing places to be, especially for emos like César.
A series of Internet posts targeting emos as effeminate fashion copycats led to a tussle at the Glorieta Insurgentes Plaza that pitted punks and metalheads against the emos. Images of the showdown were splashed across newspaper front pages and TV news programs.
City officials stepped in and helped organize a march for youth tolerance, but after the mostly emo marchers set out from El Chopo, they were pelted with bottles, garbage and insults by their detractors. The incident again made headlines.
It was the first time that many of the subgroups had entered into the public consciousness, and experts and the media scrambled to explain them.
Observers began proliferating the academic term "tribus urbanas," or "urban tribes," a concept developed in 1990 by French sociologist Michel Maffesoli. The phrase describes cultural groups as individual tribes, joined together by common interests, as well as a common enemy: other urban groups.
But just as quickly as it appeared, the tension dissipated. Today, members of the urban tribes are eager to downplay the problems.
Strolling around the Glorieta de Insurgentes on a Friday afternoon, Christian Montiel Solórzano said everyday people are more likely to start fights than are members of the punk or dark movements.
"I feel that we're all the same. We all have the same rights," said the 16-year-old dark, his four spiraling lip piercings accenting his simple black T-shirt and closely cropped hair.
César, the emo hanging out at the Buenavista Metro station, said he still occasionally feels threatened by other urban cultural groups for being who he is. However, despite the lingering tensions, he says the local media has blown rivalries between emos, punks, darks and other groups out of proportion.
Fernando Aguilar, a professor of youth politics at the UNAM, said that urban groups largely coexist peacefully, and that their members have been unfairly marked as dangerous and aggressive as a result of a few isolated incidents.
"The media create a supposed rivalry between these groups, a rivalry that doesn't exist," he said.
PEACEFUL COEXISTENCE
Montiel Solórzano, the "dark," said he was drawn at an early age to the sinister and mystical elements of gothic culture, as well as to its longevity. The gothic movement began in the United Kingdom during the 1970s and came to Mexico a decade later. The punk and metal subcultures also grew out of musical movements from the 1970s, and the skater scene developed around the urban street sport that boomed during the same period.
The emo subculture, however, came later. It grew out of the Washington hardcore punk scene of the mid-1980s, later incorporating pop-punk influences as it moved more toward the mainstream in the late 1990s. Today in Mexico, emo adolescents are often viewed as the weakest class of urban culture, as members tend to be younger and more passive.
Like the drifters through El Chopo's narrow alleyways, the Glorieta Insurgentes fills with members of differing cultural groups as the weekend evenings wind down. The plaza walls are lined with slouching teens, many of them emo, dark, skaters and even Hare Krishna. The plaza rings with the clacks of skateboards against pavement and the shrill laughter of teenage girls. Youths stand in close circles or sit clustered in the dark alleys exiting to the streets, some enjoying quick hits from inhalants.
Benjamín Flores Esquivel, an 18-year-old dark, skates off a curb with a few of his friends, some emo, some "raztecas" reggae fanatics.
"The fighting between groups is stupid, and it happens in a moment of craziness," he said, fiddling with his pentagram necklace. "For me, it's easy to exist with people from other groups."
Vividiana Aguiar Cinta, also 18, agreed.
"Not all punks harass emos. They're friends," she said while passing through the plaza.
"Fighting comes from intolerant people."
COMMUNITIES OR TRIBES?
Aguiar belongs to the Straight Edge movement, but is usually reluctant to label herself in any way. She said she was drawn the movement's ideals, including abstaining from alcohol, drugs, premarital sex and the maltreatment of animals.
Angélica González Chávez, known affectionately as "Mamá Dark," agreed that labeling individuals or calling cultural groups "tribes" only further stigmatizes members of the movements.
"We're not urban tribes, we're urban communities within a larger community," she said, wearing a ripped black shirt secured artfully with safety pins. "We're human beings like the rest of the world. We're neither marginal nor marginalized."
González, a mother of three, left the punk movement 20 years ago to join the dark culture. She echoes a common sentiment expressed during last year's anti-emo episodes: The incidents were blown up to serve as smokescreens for the government, shifting national discourse from political debate to the so-called disputes within urban groups.
"We are communities that respect each other - we have to. We don't have the luxury to discriminate against others for their beliefs or style when we ourselves are discriminated by the same society," she said.
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