Down and Delirious in Mexico City by Daniel Hernandez

happen,’ because of all the security, you know? There’s always police here.”
    â€œBut they paid the police,” Arturo says.
    â€œAhhhhaaaaa,”
they all reply. An unverifiable but—to the teenage mind—completely plausible rumor: The police allowed the emo-bashing to happen. They stood back on purpose.
    â€œYes, the police didn’t do anything,” Vanessa says.
    I gradually put together the pieces of what happened that night, from talking to these kids, from the clips on YouTube, and from press reports. The emo kids of Querétaro had been gathering at the Plaza de las Armas for several months. Like the Glorieta de Insurgentes, the plaza became a meeting point organically, a space where emos could get together, look at each other, then take off to a party or to see a band play. But these gatherings became bothersome to other teens in Querétaro who did not identify themselves as emo. The annoyance transformed into rage.
    A bulletin circulated on Metroflog, then on MySpace, and on hi5, calling for a “rescue” of the Plaza de las Armas from the loitering emos. On the night of Friday, March 7, about eight hundred anti-emo youth poured into the square, hunting for emo blood. A mob developed. The crowds began taunting the emo kids, who had gathered for their usual Friday night out. The taunting turned into pushing, the pushing turned into blows. One emo boy wasvideotaped being pummeled repeatedly as he sought refuge against a stone wall. Later identified by his nickname Ácido, the boy was seen helplessly holding on to two girls, his lower lip quivering in humiliation.
    â€œHe wants to cry! He wants to cry! He wants to cry!”
the mob chanted.
    The police, reportedly caught off guard, arrived in force long after the incident had started. By then at least a dozen emos had been left roughed up, and the rest of them scattered away from Querétaro’s Centro Histórico, chased through the streets by the mobs. The media arrived, allowing the anti-emo youth to explain their grievances. “The emos don’t bother me, what bothers me is that they take a place as if it were theirs,” one young man told a local television newscast from the plaza that night. He talked as though he was pleased with himself about what had just occurred. He was clean-cut and otherwise plain. Just a kid. “It also bothers me a bit,” he added, rolling his eyes, “that they look more like girls than boys.”
    This became a common point of spite against emo boys, repeated over and over in the digital dialogue that exploded across Mexico after March 7, 2008, that emo boys look “gay.” From day one, the wave of anti-emo violence had an antigay undercurrent.
    It must have been a weird night, adrenaline pumping through mobs of teenagers, confusion and excitement fueling the violence. The kids I meet on the Plaza de las Armas say they heard that injured emos were left lying on the sidewalks. Ángel’s father caught up with him that night in the Centro. Like a scene out of an action flick, Dad pushed his son into the safety of a doorway and told him to hide. On the Monday after the country’s first emo riot, the kids on the plaza revealed that they were dressing “less emo” becausethey were afraid a rogue basher might still be prowling Querétaro’s streets. They were dressing down, essentially in disguise, for their own safety.
    â€œWhat’s the emo culture about anyway?” I ask.
    â€œThing is, well, I say, it doesn’t have words to define it,” Ángel says. “I think you just decide you’re emo. It’s a way of life, it’s not a style.”
    â€œThe problem is people think they cut themselves,” Arturo says.
    â€œThat they’re bad,” Vanessa adds.
    â€œI have some scratches, but . . . it’s something else,” Arturo says, trailing off.
    â€œPeople made a mistake with the definition