Down and Delirious in Mexico City by Daniel Hernandez Page A

of emo, because they say they’re loners, and they like being depressed, but that’s not true,” says Vanessa.
    What do you listen to? I ask. They list subgenres of music I hadn’t heard referenced before: “Hard core, screamo.” I jot
down more notes. “The Devil Wears Prada . . . Alessana . . . The Horrors . . .”
    â€œIt’s not new,” Ángel insists. “It’s just, now, it’s more visible.”
    The kids are getting ready to get up and do whatever teenagers end up doing on a Monday afternoon downtown. “You should talk to Ácido,” Vanessa suggests.
    I’d look for him, I say, and we give our good-byes.
    More clues about the emos’ general profile emerge over two days in Querétaro. I talk to several kids, to a sociologist, and to the local human rights commissioner, a bland middle-aged man who speaks about the incident in impenetrable officialese. I find Ácido on MySpace and contact him, asking to meet. His profile online is drowning in emo imagery. In one of his photos, Ácido is dramatically smooching his own reflection in a mirror. His hair drapes over the entire top half of his face, and a studded bull-ring isembedded in the bridge of his nose. We speak briefly on the phone. Ácido sounds scared. Overnight he had become the poster boy of emo victimization. He doesn’t want to draw any more attention to himself. But I press him, and he says we could meet at a mall the next day.
Aha,
I think. The emos, I’d come to find out, also constitute in their core a recognizable type in the era of globalization: middle-class mall kids.
    Ãcido doesn’t show up. He stops responding to calls and text messages. The mood in provincial Querétaro seems calm and peaceful early in the week, and so I return to Mexico City that Wednesday. In the strict geography of the city’s
tribus urbanas,
it has already become a different place.
    Gay and human rights groups in Querétaro call a march for peace and tolerance for the following Saturday, March 15, but elsewhere in Mexico the clashes are just heating up. Something in the universe of young people has caught a spark. The anti-emo wave spreads virally across the country. In the hot Pacific coast state of Colima, five schools cancel classes after a message circulated on the Internet urging local teenagers to “join forces” with their “compatriots” in Querétaro to “clean up Mexico, clean up Colima, and make a better place for everyone.” It is signed, “Association: Death to the emos.” That same night in Durango, in Mexico’s north, police detain eighty anti-emo activists who gather in the state capital city with the intent of hunting down emos. The next afternoon, while people march for peace in Querétaro, emos in Mexico City gather at the Glorieta de Insurgentes to face off against their enemies in an all-out rumble.
    Miscalculating my day, I spend the afternoon at El Chopo, expecting the
glorieta
to ignite in the evening. News footage of theafternoon confrontation shows squads of young people arriving at the plaza in waves, eager for trouble. The aggressors include punks, goths, rockabillies, and skinheads, kids beating each other up simply for how they are dressed. The emos hunker together and fight back, chanting,
“Emos! Emos! Emos!”
The youth strike one another with studded belts. Girls behave particularly ferociously against one another, yanking, pushing, and cursing.
    â€œWe’re against the emos! They’re copying our style!” one long-haired youth in dark attire says to the cameras.
    Riot police from the nearby police headquarters are called to disperse the crowds, but confrontations reportedly spill into the neighboring streets. Only a band of peace-loving Hare Krishnas, who paraded and chanted through the plaza, are able to quell the tensions, “as if it were a joke or scene from a surrealist film,” a