Someone over at Current TV saw my post about the Great Mexican Emo Wars of 2008 and forwarded over a link to a short film by Ioan Grillo looking at the Emo Culture in Mexico City and other parts of Mexico. Check that shit out. And any Mexican emos actually reading this, check out the homies Emery on tour in your country next week! Hopefully they won’t get beat up or stabbed on the metro or anything:

Emery Tour Dates:
07.29.08 - Guadalajara, Jalisco, Mexico - Hard Rock Cafe
07.30.08 - Monterrey, Nuevo León, Mexico - Cafe Iguanas
07.31.08 - Puebla, Puebla, Mexico - Centro de espectaculos
08.01.08 - Mexico City, Distrito Federal, Mexico - Hard Rock Live

Mexican emo kids apparently have something to cry about, as they have been victimized by a bizarre wave of emo-bashings, inspired in part by a popular TV personality’s on-air anti-emo tirade. From LA Weekly blogger Daniel Hernandez:

In Mexico, emo culture is a butt of many jokes. It is either despised intensely or generally ignored. But it’s only the despising sentiment that lately has been getting wide airply. In the above clip, a Televisa on-air personality named Kristoff expresses a serious dose of anti-emo rhetoric and switches to English to say, on network television, “Fucking bullshit” to the emo movement. Some emos I’ve interviewed point to the Kristoff clip as a defining provocation of the current wave of anti-emo violence.

The aggressors responsible for emo attacks in Mexico City, Queretaro and elsewhere come from different subcultures, with differing reasons for their shared hate:

Anger against the emos has come from many quarters: punks and goths who think emos are ripping off their culture, homophobes who don’t find emos masculine enough, and those who simply seem threatened by a group that is so different than the mainstream.

But Mexican emos aren’t taking this shit lying down. They’ve organized marches and protests to bring attention to their plight:

Emos have begun to fight back, organizing marches in Guadalajara and Mexico City. And voices have begun appearing warning of a creeping intolerance in Mexican society. Gilberto Rincan Gallardo, a columnist for the El Porvenir newspaper, argued this week that tolerance is the foundation of any healthy democracy. “If a group of young people like (emos) decides to get together and live life in a certain manner, and doesn’t hurt others, it’s the obligation of the Democratic state to protect them…It’s easy for an eccentric and easily identified minority group to be stigmatized and discriminated against…It’s the responsibility of the authorities to make sure the threats aren’t carried out and the aggressions are punished.”

All I have to say is:

Dear Mexico,

If you don’t want your emos, please send them here. Especially the girls.

Thanks,

America