Down and Delirious in Mexico City by Daniel Hernandez Page B

newscaster remarks.
    No serious injuries are reported in any of the confrontations, yet the violence seems to bring on a kind of collective ecstatic release. The Internet swells with messages about the brawls in Querétaro and Mexico City. Older adults are bewildered. Younger adults—people who see themselves as truer rockers from preceding generations—look upon the anti-emo phenomenon with embarrassment and disdain. These “kids,” rockers of older generations are saying, have no idea what they’re doing. Since their arrival, emos have widely been seen among other subcultures as being superficial copycats. And—their worst crime of all—as being new on the scene, with no history, no apparent values.
    The anti-emo wave spreads further. Emos start appearing on daytime talk shows, decrying the violence. Newspaper editorials weigh in. Members of the international press send dispatches back home. Some Mexicans begin to view the whole affair as one long and embarrassing punch line. “They’re beating up the emos,”I report in a text to Cristal one of those nights. “Good,” she responded curtly. “They want to cry anyway.” The emo riots and the emos in general are seen as indicative of a larger fault in modern Mexican youth. It raises an anxiety about the free-market free-for-all culture invading from the North: that limitless appetite of consumerism, that middle-class malaise personified by a fifteen-year-old, bone-skinny boy in purple stripes and sneakers. On one offensively crass (and therefore hugely popular) blog called Hazme el Chingado Favor—roughly, Give Me a Fucking Break—one contributor summed up the emo disdain in an exasperated comment: “I don’t know if I should shit myself with laughter or start crying to see that my country is going down the drain.”
    Sunday, March 16, the day after the riot at the Glorieta de Insurgentes. It’s a cool, calm night. I’m standing here, lounging against the walls of the metro station, looking for more emos to interview. Clusters of kids are mingling in the plaza’s shadows. In a corner, I spot a group standing around, laughing, hollering at one another, and playing music on their cell phones. A quick attire scan—jeans narrow as tubes and hairstyles of the slash-and-spike variety—confirms I should approach. They are boys, but most of them are chattering like young girls, their voices pitched and nasal, their mannerisms effeminate. I can hear them refer playfully to one another as
chica
and
hermana
—“girl” and “sister.” They are gay teenage emos.
    I strike up a chat. The boys are well versed in the mainstream talking points of what is happening. It is “discrimination,” they say, because lots of emo boys are “bi, gay, whatever you want.”
    â€œYou know the movie
The Warriors
?” asks one of the boys, José Luis. “That’s the best way to describe this.”
    They all nod and laugh and chatter away. Capital police cruise around the plaza, elevated on Segways like motorized puppets. With the gay district Zona Rosa nearby, I am not too surprised to observe a muscular older American with blond hair and blue eyes hovering around the boys, making his best effort to just “hang out.” The boys tell me they were at the confrontation between the emos and their adversaries on Saturday. They are back at the plaza now in defiance. And because there really isn’t anything better to do on a Sunday than hang out and shoplift from the
glorieta
’s tiny pharmacy.
    â€œYesterday you saw who was really an
emo
emo, who showed up,” says Aldo, a wispy-haired sixteen-year-old. “Because a lot of them are
poseurs.
”
    â€œAnd how long have you been an emo?” I ask innocently.
    â€œSince November,” Aldo says.
    It doesn’t dawn on Aldo that his answer provides exactly the kind of fodder that makes the