A TV host's mockery, a turf war over a subway plaza, and a night of violence that ended when Hare Krishna devotees started singing — in the country André Breton once called the most surrealist in the world. Interviews with the people who were there point to a different real cause.
In March 2008, organized attacks against Mexico's 'emo' youth subculture spread through several cities, including a major confrontation at Glorieta de los Insurgentes in Mexico City where roughly two hundred emo teenagers faced a smaller, internet-organized group of anti-emo attackers armed with belts. The fight, sparked by a TV host's on-air mockery and a turf dispute over a gathering spot at the Glorieta, was broken up when Hare Krishna devotees who regularly gathered there began singing and dancing, drawing both sides toward them instead of each other. Interviews with people who were there suggest the violence was less about music or fashion than about gender: emo boys' eyeliner, skinny jeans, and open displays of sadness broke with norms of Mexican masculinity in a way attackers found genuinely provoking.
In 1938, the French poet André Breton arrived in Mexico City for a lecture on surrealism and decided, almost immediately, that he didn’t need to give one. “Mexico is the most surrealist country in the world,” he told anyone who’d listen, describing a place where the bizarre didn’t need inventing, it was just how things already worked. Seventy years later, on a night in March 2008, the city produced a scene that might have made him nod: a street brawl between teenagers in eyeliner and teenagers in studded belts, broken up not by police but by a circle of strangers in robes who started singing.
The trigger was small and specific. Mexico’s alternative youth scene, punks, metalheads, and goths who’d built an identity out of El Chopo, the city’s longtime punk and metal market, had also staked out a set of curved concrete benches at Glorieta de los Insurgentes known as Los Sillones, the armchairs. “I could never enter Los Sillones, really, I couldn’t enter,” the journalist Daniel Hernández, who covered the scene and later wrote about it in his book Down and Delirious in Mexico City, said in an interview. “I felt like it was a place where you literally had to have bangs to get in.” When a new wave of emo teenagers started showing up at that same spot instead of keeping to El Chopo, the older scene read it as trespassing. Ollin Sánchez, one of the emo teenagers who tried to join them, remembered it more plainly: “We were not well received… they pushed us out, just like saying, ‘You can’t be here, go away.’” Some of it went past unwelcoming. Punks began cornering emo teenagers at the Glorieta specifically to cut their hair, chopping off the long, side-swept bangs that had become the look’s signature.
Public mockery arrived that February, when the TV host Kristoff Raczyński went on the youth music program TeleHit and told viewers the emo look wasn’t a real movement at all, just a trend for kids without one of their own. The clip spread fast, and it handed the resentment already building at Glorieta de los Insurgentes a script, and a target with a name.
None of that explains why a fight over hairstyles turned into organized, city-wide violence. The attacks that followed were planned in online forums, trading a slogan that made the real stakes explicit: Be a patriot and kill an emo. That’s not a sentence about music.
Emo style, for the boys wearing it especially, meant eyeliner, skinny jeans, and an open display of sadness, exactly the things Mexican machismo culture had spent generations telling boys not to show. Alejandro Castillo, one of the teenagers who dressed that way, traced his own look to Japanese rock bands: “Tight pants, black T-shirts, eyeliner. Let’s say looking a little androgynous, and that’s what I found in Japanese bands.” To the people attacking him, that androgyny read as more than a style choice. Angélica González, a goth known in the scene as Luna Negra and the mother of an emo teenager herself, didn’t hedge about who she blamed. “They were sheep,” she said of the attackers. “All those persons who beat up the emos were sheep.” Darynkayna Marín, a goth organizer who worked to calm the violence from inside her own scene, turned the same question on her own community: “How was it possible, if we consider ourselves empathic people, if we also suffer some discrimination… [that] attacking other people for something so absurd as how they dressed didn’t go well with our ideas?”
Tensions had been building for days when the two sides finally met in force at Glorieta de los Insurgentes in mid-March 2008. By most accounts, roughly two hundred emo teenagers showed up, facing a smaller, internet-organized group of about twenty attackers armed with belts. It should have gone badly for the attackers. Instead, before it could fully turn into a rout, a group of Hare Krishna devotees who gathered at that same traffic circle every Saturday to chant and dance waded directly into the middle of it and started singing. Both sides, caught off guard, drifted toward the music instead of each other. Police made a handful of arrests; the fight itself just dissolved.
The violence didn’t stay contained to that one plaza. Similar attacks followed that year in Tijuana and the next in Tampico. Mexico’s emo scene faded out over the following years anyway, the way most youth subcultures eventually do once the kids in them age past fifteen.
Breton went looking for surrealism in Mexico’s folk art and festivals and never got to see a circle of singing Hare Krishnas break up a youth riot with a dance number. It’s hard to imagine he’d have been surprised. Under the strangeness, though, the fight itself was never about the bangs. It was about who got to look like that in public without paying for it.
Sources: Radio Ambulante’s reporting and interviews, including Ollin Sánchez, Alejandro Castillo, Daniel Hernández, Angélica González, and Darynkayna Marín; Daniel Hernández’s Down and Delirious in Mexico City; contemporary news coverage of the March 2008 clashes and their spread to Tijuana and Tampico; documented accounts of André Breton’s 1938 remarks on Mexico.
Weekly emails — what's happening in CDMX, plus a deep-dive guide like this one.
One weekly note on what's happening in CDMX, plus a deep-dive from the guide — no need to come back and check.