Read Online Down and Delirious in Mexico City by Daniel Hernandez - Free Book Online

listening.
    There are only free chairs, no tables, so I take a seat and hover near a group of friends. One of them, a baby-faced guy maybe in his mid-thirties, with a black patch over his left eye, smiles and raises his beer at me in salutation. He is wearing a black leather vest and jeans and dusty black biker boots. His hair is jet-black, long, dangling directly down the sides of his head. He introduces himself as Julio. His openness makes him stand out merrily among the rockers around us. We quickly fall into conversation and ritual beer-chugging. I never ask Julio why he wears an eye patch. He welcomes me. We drink, we toast. He is a rocker, all the way, Julio says. He cheerily greets a woman sitting at another table in a corner, then casually mentions to me she is his ex-wife. I don’t remember how we start talking about politics, but I do recall that somewhere along the way Julio begins going on about the ways the Mexican government keeps young people down. This is always a fruitful discussion in the orbit of El Chopo.
    I ask if I can turn on my recorder.
    â€œRecord it! Record it!” Julio hollers. “All right
banda,
all right,” he says, leaning in, adding some authoritative heft to his voice. “Here comes a course in sociology, history, and music.”
    A friend of his laughs and hoots behind him.
    â€œSpeaking to you is Julio Ayala,” he continues. “Musician with twenty years in rock-n-roll,
güey.
No bullshit. Ask anyone who knows.”
    Twenty years. I’m impressed. Being
banda
for twenty yearsmeans he is a true survivor. What
hoyos fonquis
did he know? What acts of state violence did he see? What movements did he dabble in? What bands? But Julio at the moment isn’t taking questions. He is in the middle of delivering a lesson.
    â€œWell, what is the
pedo
with our country?”
    I pause.
Pedo
is the Mexican Spanish word for “fart,” but it’s more decorative street-level meaning is “crisis,” “problem,” or “fight.” Julio adjusts himself in his seat. “Our country is used to giving its ass to foreign politics. There are treaties, like Bucareli, that say the role of our country is to be the maquiladora”—the sweatshop—“to big capital.
    â€œSo, the government gives its ass to remain the dominant class. They give themselves, to be the big dogs, but make no mistake, they still wear leashes.”
    We are pleasantly drunk, and it is loud inside the bar. Julio’s train of thought wanders a bit. “The Chinese. The Chinese have survived Mao, and we Mexicans have survived the PRI, the PAN, and the PRD,” Julio continues, listing the acronyms for Mexico’s other major political parties.
    â€œThe people know how to survive the political parties, and you all know it,” he adds, referring to no one in particular. “But the people put on costumes, you know it. Because we know what is happening, we put on costumes.”
    â€œOne time, I was here at this very spot, and I was talking to a partner about just this. We were talking about how a party like the Green Ecologist party could rise here,” Julio went on. “Could it be possible that people need a party to be green ecologists? The party is you, the
patria
”—the homeland—“is you. The
patria
is in your heart. Everyone chooses their own
patria
.”
    With this, Julio Ayala decides his impromptu course is done. He leans back in his seat, finishes off his beer bottoms-up, thencatches himself and leans again toward me, back toward the mic. “My good-bye now to the
banda,
to not bore you. . . . Here at the
tianguis
. . . I’m here, I’ll be here, we’ll be here next week—despite you.” He stands up to go, but he’s really just heading to the next table.
    â€œGood-bye,” Julio says into the mic.
Click
. Very rock-n-roll.
    We say we would keep in touch. I am
“banda,”
he