![]() ![]() Over the decades, El Chopo has grown bigger and broader, absorbing a dizzying array of music-inspired subcultures and sub-subcultures into its mosh-pit phenomenology. El Chopo is the only one of its kind in Mexico City, and it provides a space for young people who otherwise face a tough time.” “Everybody is free to dress the way they want and have the ideology they want as long as they respect the laws. But overall, Camacho says, El Chopo benefits the area. The biggest problem is public drinking, by minors and adults who buy alcohol from the surrounding bodegas. Mario Alberto Camacho Soriano, director of public safety for the Mexico City borough of Cuauhtemoc, says trouble rarely occurs at the market. Here you find things that are more interesting.” “There’s more variety here, and not just commercial music,” says Santiago Dias, 26, a photographer, browsing the stalls with his friend Makia Lara, 28. Younger, poorer Mexicans favor bootleg CDs that cost one-tenth the price and can be bought from the hundreds, if not thousands, of illegal vendors operating across the city.īut if you’re looking for some underground garage rock band or obscure British ska septet, El Chopo is pretty much the only game in town. Mexico’s middle-class music shoppers generally head for climate-controlled U.S.-style malls that sell legal, full-price CDs from a fairly circumscribed sonic spectrum. Though its population is more than twice that of L.A.’s, Mexico City has few, if any, equivalents of places like Melrose Avenue that fuse conspicuous consumption with funky, alternative mise-en-scene. After Magali dyed them black her grandmother warned her, “Now you’ll never marry.” In Mexico, superstition still counts for something, and young people know they transgress at their peril. Magali’s makeup, white powder with a slash of black lipstick, augments her early-Blondie ensemble: white button-down shirt, black suspenders, skinny black tie and a pair of satin gloves that originally went with her mother’s white wedding dress. Adriana, in a black skirt and fishnet top, could be channeling punk princess Joan Jett. “We’re all strange in some way, and El Chopo is a place where everyone can show their strangeness,” says Tania Magali, 16, trying on a pair of knee-high boots with her friend, Luz Adriana, also 16.īoth girls’ attire reflects El Chopo’s aggressively retro aesthetic. Maybe even a cluster of Rude Boys in porkpie hats and 2-tone suits who - notwithstanding their Mayan and Zapotec facial features - look as if they’d just time-traveled in from Brighton, England, circa 1980. But on a typical Saturday you’ll likely run into biker chicks, dreadlocked Rastas, grungy death-metal heads, tie-dyed hippies, skateboarders, ‘zine artists and neo-Bolshevik booksellers hawking battered copies of the holy trinity of underground literature: Chomsky, Bukowski and Che. Punks in plaid pants and leather jackets and Goths (or darketos, as they’re called here) in Nosferatu chic dominate the scene at El Chopo. It’s also where many young Mexicans who don’t fit in elsewhere seem to wind up. It’s not only where you can pick up a bootleg copy of the Clash’s “London Calling,” buy a Rasta cap, recruit a bass player for your band, grab a quick snog with your boyfriend or girlfriend (away from prying parental eyes) and get one or more body parts pierced, all in a single afternoon. Since its humble beginnings in the early 1980s, “El Chopo,” as it’s popularly known, has mixed anti-authoritarian politics and under-the-radar lifestyles, and, more recently, cash and commerce. ![]() That’s why, for nearly a quarter-century, Mexico’s young and disaffected, along with a number of their graying elders, have flocked to El Tianguis Cultural del Chopo, an open-air flea market that every Saturday commandeers a three-block area of this capital city. And what’s the point of wearing a “Never Mind the Bollocks” T-shirt if almost nobody here knows what bollocks are?īut you can’t keep a good anarchist or “Oi” skinhead down. The requisite apparel - long black coats, bovver boots, a spiky headful of gel - can seem borderline masochistic with summer temperatures hovering in the mid-80s. ![]() It takes a certain fearlessness, or sublime indifference, to be a punk, Goth or other type of tribal provocateur in this tradition-minded metropolis. ![]()
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