Down and Delirious in Mexico City by Daniel Hernandez Page B

commercial. All these people from Coapa, Satélite, coming over to Condesa. It’s over. It’s time to look for a new place.”
    It is easy to say so, but far less easy to put the thought into practice, as he and others of us know. There is still a party around
the corner that night, and another one around the next corner, and another one after that. Night after night, like it or not. We keep going.
    â€œThe
onda
right now,” a scenester bellows into my ear one night at Malva, a club, at another party, “is that there is no
onda,
and there is all the
ondas.
”

5 | The Warriors

    Welcoming the emos to El Chopo, kinda. (Photo by the author.)
    E rik is sixteen and lives in Ecatepec.
    â€”
Why emos?
    â€”Well, I don’t know, it’s the style of dress that we like, the way of thinking, too.
    â€”
How is that?
    â€”Well, I don’t know, sometimes we have to take our emotions higher and make them more dramatic.
    â€”
And what is that for?
    â€”Well, I don’t know, that’s each person’s thing, it’s like one day you want to be happier, and be sadder another.
    â€”
How do you make things more dramatic?
    â€”It’s when you feel anxious, without knowing what to do, and you start going to other things.
    â€”
Like what?
    â€”Well, cutting your skin, I don’t know, it’s about looking different than the rest.
    â€”
Where on your body do you cut yourself?
    â€”On my wrists, my chest, my legs.
    â€”
What do you cut yourself with?
    â€”Razor blades.
    â€”
Why do you cut yourself in these ways? (In zigzags, crosses, words, and hearts.)
    â€”Because I started getting bored with the normal cuts and so I gave them forms and figures.
    â€”
And this is what you do when you feel depressed?
    â€”Yes, or mad.
    â€”
What makes you mad?
    â€”Well, I don’t know, sometimes when they don’t listen to me, or they don’t try to understand me.
    â€”
When are you depressed?
    â€”Well, most of the time, well, I don’t know, there might not be that much motivation.
    (From Sergay.com, “Special Coverage on the Attacks Against Emos and Gays at the Glorieta de Insurgentes,” filed March 16, 2008, under “News.”)
    At the risk of sounding clichéd, the building in Tacubaya where I live is like something out of a magical-realism novel. Right on AvenidaRevolución, a frenetic southbound artery on the city’s west side, it looks a little dilapidated on the outside but offers clues of a previous golden era, ribbons of delicate tiling, spurts of florid interior detailing, a lingering sense of harmonious geometry and interior grace. Through a large, rounded metal door and down a cool tunnel, a series of row houses face a garden with trees. Everything about my building—the ancient plants, the sagging wooden floors, the rounded doors and interior corners, the chipping paint—makes me feel transported to a different time, an imagined place. My bedroom in our house is on the second floor, with a window facing a square interior patio that opens onto the kitchen and always smells like wet garden dirt.
    My roommates share the building’s history with me. Officially called Edificio Isabel, it was built in 1920. Juan Segura, one of the era’s most revered architects, designed it back when Tacubaya was a western “vacation town” for people from the capital. In the 1970s and 1980s, Tacubaya was made famous as the territory of one of the city’s most feared street gangs, Los Panchos. Long since engulfed by the marching blob of urbanism, the neighborhood today is just . . . here, hanging on, nothing more than a metro station to most people.
    One bright Saturday morning in the spring, my roommate Diego pokes his head out of the kitchen window below me and calls up to get my attention. “You have to look at this,” he says. I peer down. It is a story Diego has just clipped from
La Jornada,
the daily