Other emos encounter far less solidarity on the home front. Nayeli tried to conceal from her mother any physical evidence of the battering she suffered outside the subway station for fear of the riot act that was eventually read to her. Jesús Soto was attacked after a birthday party went sour; the 18-year-old student got an earful from his parents during a three-week convalescence. “They scolded me for going out on the street like this,” recalls the lanky Soto, who sports oversize aviator sunglasses, white Vans, and a mop of spiky black hair. “I told them this is the way I am; I’m not going to change in order to suit other people or to avoid anything bad happening to me.”
American musicians have also voiced their frustration. At a recent concert in Mexico City, My Chemical Romance frontman Gerard Way told the crowd: “Recently we’ve been hearing a lot of stuff about some violence here in your country having to do with kids who want to wear black T-shirts…or some kind of bullshit stuff like that. We don’t want to see any fucking violence. We came here for one reason, and that’s to be at the fucking rock show.”
Yet for every defender who rallies to their cause, there are plenty of detractors who dismiss emos as apolitical posers who put fashion above all other considerations and cherry-pick attitudes and musical styles from other genres. “It’s just a fad. It has no ideology,” says Diego Villalba, 17, a high school student who went through an emo phase for six months last year before shedding his long hair and close-fitting jeans for the baseball cap and baggy shorts he now wears. “It isn’t something that deserves to be taken seriously.”
“I reject their ideology, their apathy, their conformity,” says Arturo Padilla, a 17-year-old punk from the Mexico City suburb of Ixtapaluca, who on one April afternoon wore a black T-shirt that read in Spanish THE INJUSTICES RAIN DOWN LIKE NIGHTMARES. “But the violence against them can’t
“THEY’RE COPYING STYLES AND WAYS OF THINKING THAT ALREADY EXIST. THE EMOS
ARE ROBBING THE IDENTITY OF OTHERS.
I APPROVE OF PEOPLE WHO F--K THEM UP.”
—A 20-year-old metalhead
be justified. You shouldn’t attack emos physically; you should attack them with your mind.”
Other critics are considerably less restrained. “They’re copying styles and ways of thinking that already exist,” says Carlos Navarro, a 20-year-old metalhead. “The sociologists say we don’t understand emos because they’re not the same as us, but that’s not true. The emos are robbing the identities of others, and the metalheads and the punks don’t want them around. I approve of the people who fuck them up.”
When the pro-tolerance marchers approached the entrance to the El Chopo marketplace under police escort in late March, some of the assembled punks and skinheads chanted “Fucking emo kids” and “Emo isn’t culture, faggots, you won’t always be protected.” Others told the demonstrators to go back to Polanco, one of the ritziest neighborhoods in the Mexican capital. And even as Heroiine’s Zavala and Cruz were pooh-poohing the news media’s depiction of urban tribes as young misfits hell-bent on busting heads, an aging punk sauntered around El Chopo on a recent afternoon in a black T-shirt that depicted an extended forearm and razor blade beneath a sentence in English that read, REMEMBER EMO-KIDS...IT’S “DOWN THE ROAD” NOT “ACROSS THE STREET”—a not-so-subtle dig at the alleged penchant of emos for superficial wrist-slashing instead of the vein-slitting that would really put their lives at risk.
HE CIRCULAR PLAZA ATOP THE TInsurgentes subway station is ground zero for Mexico City’s emo community. A seedy, litter-strewn crossroads for office workers, bored teenagers, and the homeless, the plaza brings back memories of Times Square and Piccadilly Circus before gentrification reared its shiny head. The emo kids start to converge in the late afternoon, passing cigarettes and chatting about the latest music and gossip amid the Internet cafés, pizza stands, and drugstores that line the outdoor space.
The mood in the plaza on this April afternoon has lightened considerably since the tense days of March. The left-leaning government of Mayor Marcelo Ebrard has lent the emos a sympathetic ear and hosted meetings to encourage dialogue among some of the city’s rival youth groups. As the first municipal jurisdiction to legalize same-sex civil unions, Mexico City might be expected to provide a hospitable environment to the emos. But elsewhere in the country, too, a number of online calls to mount fresh attacks on local emos failed to trigger much of a reaction. The worst may be over, at least for now. “There may be some more attacks, but they’ll be on a smaller scale,” predicts Sugus Cruz. “People are backpedaling, and the large-scale confrontations won’t happen again.”
MORE AT SPIN.COM For videos and more photos, go to www.spin.com/emo-riots
THE CLASHES
The stories behind other violent rock rivalries
BY DAVID MARCHESE
Mods Rockers
Leave it to those
class-conscious Brits
to beat each other
up over clothing.
The early 1960s saw
skirmishes between
the scooter-riding,
skinny-trousered
mods and the
motorcycle-mad,
blue-jeaned rockers.
The most notorious
throwdown took
place May 1964 in
the seaside resort
town of Brighton and
inspired a Stray Cats
number (“Rumble in
Brighton”) and the
Who’s rock opera
Quadrophenia.
Punks Skins
Lousy with disaffected
youth, England’s late-
’70s punk explosion
provided fertile
recruiting grounds
for thuggish outfits
like the neo-fascist
National Front. A love
of loud guitars and
gobbing meant that
punks and skinheads
ended up at a lot of the
same shows. Gang of
Four guitarist Andy Gill
has recalled the gigs
thusly: “Chairs flying
every where, people
getting hit, glasses
getting smashed.” Like
a Wild West saloon,
then. Only pastier.
Rock Disco
Now largely
understood as thinly
veiled homophobia
and racism, anti-disco
vitriol—stoked by
constant “Disco sucks!”
carping by rock-radio
DJs and cries of
“Sellout!” lobbed at
bandwagon jumpers
like the Rolling Stones
and Kiss—exploded,
literally, during “Disco
Demolition Night” at
Chicago’s Comiskey
Park on July 12,
1979, when 20,000
disco albums were
detonated at a White
Sox doubleheader and
rock fans ran riot.
Norwegian Black
Metal Swedish
Black Metal
These Scandinavian
scare-mongers spent
the early ’90s debating
whose scene was
more evil. Things got
so tense that when
Euronymous, guitarist
for Nor way’s Mayhem,
was found murdered
in 1993, Oslo police
issued a statement
casting suspicion upon
the band’s neighboring
rivals. Even after it
turned out a Swede
wasn’t responsible,
the Nor wegians didn’t
apologize. Now,
that’s evil.
References:
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