I’ll be honest. When I first heard about this I laughed my ass off. And kept laughing for the first five minutes or so. And then I felt weary. I mean, who hasn’t made jokes about emo-bashing at one point or another, regardless of how emo you might actually be? But the sad truth is that Mexico is now home to a wave of violence targeted at, you guessed it, emo kids. Of late there have been gatherings of the other Tribes powered by cell phones and social networking, for the sole purpose of locating, and kicking the shit out of, groups of emo kids. It makes me think of punks vs. mods on a massively networked scale.

I’ve seen numerous posts speculating on the cause of such a widespread and extreme reaction; everything ranging from latent homophobia, to outrage with recent elections, to a recent tv personality slagging off on emo kids live on the air:

BoingBoing’s picked up the thread and points to Daniel Hernandez’s Intersections blog where there seems to be the best coverage. Recently though, tensions have escalated. From Brock Thiessen’s Exclaim post:

“More recent reports state that the emos have begun to fight back against the other “urban tribes” and organized marches in Guadalajara and Mexico City, escalating the violence and leading to increased police presence. Also, some Mexican newspapers, such as El Porvenir, have called for government intervention to protect the emos, writing, “It’s the responsibility of the authorities to make sure the threats aren’t carried out and the aggressions are punished.”

We’ve seen the polarization that can occur anytime a group is made to feel marginalized; most subcultures arose as a rejection to the predominant socio-political climate that existed at the time of their inception, but this isn’t any rebellion, it’s other supposedly marginalized groups gang-banging one particular group based primarily on what would appear to be their sense of aesthetics. To me this begs the question, have we moved so far from a positively created individual sense of identity (I am) to a self definition that relies entirely on exclusion (I am not) that it becomes a question of orangised violence towards the latter? It’s a sad state for any subculture which cannot define itself by its own principles and ideology, regardless of aesthetics.

I suppose the only really redeeming thing here was that group of Hare Krishnas marching for tolerance in the midst of all that turmoil…

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