Poor Mexico City Youth Find Community in New Subculture; Become Targets for Police, Thugs Associated Press
go to original August 31, 2012

In this Aug. 24, 2012 photo, youth known as “reggaetoneros” dance at a discotheque in Ecatepec, in a suburb of Mexico City. (Eduardo Verdugo/ Associated Press )

MEXICO CITY — At the end of the first week of school the teenagers poured into the crowded suburban discotheque by the dozens, leaving their backpacks at the door. They rushed onto a dance floor covered in shoulder-high soap suds and started shaking their hips, some grinding against each other in the sexually suggestive dance that is the trademark of this city’s newest youth craze.

Thousands of lower-income Mexico City teens have become obsessive imitators of a Puerto Rican subculture based on garish street fashions and the throbbing blend of reggae, hip-hop, and Latin music called “reggaeton.”

Nearly every weekend for more than a year, youths known as reggaetoneros have amassed by the hundreds in metro stations before heading off to dance at clubs or clandestine parties, taking over entire subway cars and singing their favorite songs as loudly as possible.

But Mexico City, a bastion of liberalism in a conservative country, is showing little tolerance for poor, raucous youth imitating a foreign subculture most have seen only on the Internet. Reggaetoneros are increasingly being met with open hostility and even violence.

Last month, hundreds clashed with police after a party was canceled in the downtown nightlife district called the Zona Rosa because more people showed up than could fit into the bar where it was being held.

Authorities said that as many as 600 angry youths who couldn’t get into the club went on a rampage at local subway stations, damaging turnstiles and streetlamps. Police detained 200 of the young people. None were charged, and they were released within a day.

Two weeks later, reggaetoneros gathering at the Chabacano metro station were assaulted by a group of young men who had planned their attack on Facebook. Surveillance cameras caught more than a dozen young men kicking a prone reggaetonero and whipping him with their belts.

The Facebook page was one of at least a dozen launched in the last year that urges people to kill or beat up reggaetoneros. YouTube videos ridicule reggaeton music and the way its fans dress.

Many of the attackers are members of porros, descendants of informal student groups created by the government in the 1960s to quell student uprisings. Today, they have transformed themselves into youth gangs that operate out of high schools and universities, where authorities have limited powers to enter.

A member of one porro group, who asked not to be identified for fear of reprisal, said the groups have beaten up reggaetoneros on at least four or five occasions because “they feel superior and are acting like the metro stations belong to them.”

Sociologists say, however, that reggaetoneros are being stigmatized because they come from rough neighborhoods and because of the way they dress.

Mexican reggaetoneros of both sexes tend to tweeze their eyebrows and wear skin-tight, neon-colored pants, loud jewelry, thick-framed eyeglasses and bedazzled baseball caps worn sideways. The boys wear their hair in cropped bowls or gelled mohawks. Girls dress in tight, spangled tops, their bangs gelled to their foreheads.

Read more at The Washington Post

We invite you to add your charity or supporting organizations' news stories and coming events to PVAngels so we can share them with the world. Do it now!