Down and Delirious in Mexico City by Daniel Hernandez

promised to hang out. In a neighborhood festering with posing, sucking up, and competition, Cristal to me seemed like one person who never hesitated to say exactly what she was thinking, at any moment. That usually involved critiquing someone on their vanity, hypocrisy, or poor fashion choices. The Condesa neighborhood proved to be a fertile territory for this activity.
    Although many of the scenester parties happen in Centro, Centro is not where most scenesters hang out or live. The Condesa, a few neighborhoods over to the southwest from downtown, remainsground zero for style consciousness in Mexico City. Correspondingly, it is the neighborhood where most foreigners try to integrate themselves. It is easily the most gentrified
colonia
in all of D.F., if not the entire country. Beset with exorbitant rents, severe parking issues, and, at last count, three Starbucks locations, Condesa is a hub of trendy boutiques, trendy cafés, trendy restaurants, and trendy-looking people. On weekend nights, cocaine dealers in discreet automobiles prowl the neighborhood’s leafy streets delivering drugs to thumping apartment parties. No one pretends to be risking anything. This isn’t the sort of neighborhood where Mexico City police raid homes looking for narcotics. It is populated by armies of designers, television personalities, artists, politicians, academics, musicians, journalists, marketers, producers, architects, the nouveau riche, and people who work in fashion—the privileged classes, in a few words, and therefore the sort of people who see recreational cocaine use as a matter of social entitlement. Not everyone does it, of course, but it is everywhere. Nearly all the restaurants and bars post signs in restrooms warning customers that if they are caught “consuming drugs,” they’ll be turned over to the authorities. They never say so, but the messages are clearly directed at cocaine users.
How can one neighborhood’s party barometer be so intertwined with a single drug?
    Cristal, who by day trains marathon runners, grew up in the Condesa, as unbelievable as that sounds to many of her recently arrived neighbors. In fact, so did her father and her grandmother, who moved to the
colonia
when she was twelve, Cristal tells me one night. “For starters, there used to be just one
torterίa
” in her dad’s day, she says. One storefront that sold
torta
sandwiches—in the whole neighborhood. “Café la Gloria used to be, like, a lunch counter. They used to have the only TV in the
colonia
and they charged two pesos to come in and watch it. My dad used to go.”
    Cristal bemoans the new Condesa, but as a dedicated scenester she also enjoys its spoils. She can walk into four or five clubs within a few blocks of her house, and she hits them all, several nights a week. She enjoys whiskey on the rocks and the olive plate at Barney’s, a darkened, New York–style bar with low leather couches. She eats as much savory, if pricey, Mexican seafood at La Ostra as her palate desires and nods her head or throws verbal darts at the DJs who play electronica near the bar, as if the restaurant wishes it were a nightclub. Cristal walks to the 7–Eleven in her pajamas—and gets stared at.
“Me vale madre!”
Cristal swears. (I thought for a while about how this phrase might be translated and came up with the satisfactory option of “I could give a fuck.”)
    Cristal suffers from the classic syndrome, native-gentrifier paralysis. She is from where she is—the Condesa—and the hipster-fashionista invasion is one she must learn to adopt, willingly or not. “From being a place to live in,” Cristal tells me, Condesa has “turned into a place to go to.”
    The neighborhood’s transformation speaks to a wider shift in young people’s relationship to popular culture. When the “hipster” happened around 2000, it was the birth of the first global