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Plaza de Armas - Querétaro, México - 7 March 2008. In the grainy, cell phone video footage the crowd surges from left to right. There are around eight hundred young people in the twilit plaza laughing, screaming, and cheering. Towards the right-hand side of the screen is a young man, his face a blur as the crowd repeatedly shoves him against a wall. At one point he turns his head to them, his face contorted in pain.1In the next few weeks similar attacks would spread to cities throughout Mexico as members of various tribus urbanas (urban tribes), defined by their musical interests in punk, ska, or heavy metal, organizing via the Internet and text messaging, and inspired in part by the host of a popular music show on Mexican television, lashed out against los emos.
"Emo" - known by the same name in the United States - has its etymological root in "emotional," and young people who identify as such do so because "their philosophy is to act in accordance with their emotions and feelings," a definition borne out by emo's history in the United States.2The public perception of emo as a US phenomenon fuels Mexican hostility towards it, though commentators and participants in the attacks have attributed the violence to a range of causes from ideological differences over cultural production, to homophobia, to an attempt to divert attention away from national crises in education and unemployment.
For example, Ignacio Pineda, director of Foro Cultural Alicia, which houses and coordinates several youth groups in Mexico City, attributes the heightened violence to a growing conservatism in Mexico. The punks are not the real source of danger, according to Pineda, who sees something more sinister behind the recent violence. "I see this as a very conservative movement, the deliberate objective of which is to divide the youths and distract them from their complete lack of opportunities and hopes for the future," he told the Mexican newspaper La Jornada, warning against the possible spread of violence towards other marginalized groups like blacks, women, and homosexuals.3"It's more convenient for the government to have divided, rather than critical and questioning, youths," he notes.4Édgar Morín,...