Love and Rage

Four

Love

If participants in Mexico City's punk scene take pleasure in oppositionality and dissent, reveling in the intensity of rage stoked at punk shows, at protests, in contestations over accurate histories, and sometimes in combative interpersonal exchanges, then how do they also stimulate the love that ideally helps the scene cohere and spurs people to act according to their anarchist principles—hopefully, beyond the context of punk shows as well as within them? In addition to witnessing many moments of conflict and strife, I saw plenty of camaraderie and commiseration. I listened to a great deal of talk about the positive, respectful relationships that people valued. I heard love and rage paired, the two affects tangled together as a way of suggesting how to actively, consciously respond to injustice—a pairing not uncommon in leftist circles in Mexico and elsewhere.

Although I heard a great deal about how to experience rage properly in the context of the punk show, I witnessed comparatively little consensus about the love side of the equation in any context. People spoke a lot about friendship in telling me about their histories in the scene, who they admired, and who they spent time with, but also in discussing specific practices like the slam, one of whose monikers is un baile de amistad (a dance of friendship). Noting the importance of friendship in another global punk scene, Ingo Rohrer (2014) has extensively analyzed it as a key relationship undergirding the local and translocal punk scene in Buenos Aires, his observations extending to both the utility of friendship as a method of social cohesion and its capacity to break down, causing dissolution. Additionally, Francesca Polletta (2002) has written about the benefits and drawbacks of friendship as a foundation for social movement. organizing since the mid-twentieth century, something that helped me think about the interactions unfolding around me, especially in the context of punk collectives trying to accomplish projects in the scene or with groups beyond it.

Though a key practice like the slam may occasionally be referred to as a dance of friendship, it's also referred to as un baile de solidaridad (a dance of solidarity). Even more frequently and in a more pointed manner than that with which they mentioned friendship in conversation, people emphasized the importance of solidarity, which clearly was a goal for many who saw themselves as taking part in a politically active punk scene. Scene participants used the term solidaridad a great deal when speaking about the way that punk and an anarchist politics aligned, particularly through the practices of autogestión. Solidarity was sometimes employed to explain a sense of unity among la banda as a class-based relation that many people in the punk scene and beyond it share. It was also invoked to name a sense of commonality with people in other punk scenes internationally. But as often as not, the concept of solidarity was discussed as an ideal, conjured to lament failures of good feeling such as fighting or feuds, contrasted with a sense of lack that scene participants experienced in their relationships both within the scene and with others in their broader networks.

A shifting concept of solidarity itself may contribute to a sense of its illusiveness among participants in Mexico City's punk scene. While the use of solidaridad to indicate banda unity accords with a deep, class-based history of both terms, scholars and activists have been questioning the definition of solidarity for some time. In the early theorizing of solidarity, from hay-gul to Durkheim, issues around class and wage labor were central to it. In this historical view, solidarity occurs as workers unite to denounce the disproportionate rewards they experience, being producers rather than owners of capital, receiving relatively low wages in exchange for their labor while owners reap large profits. In recent decades, some scholars have shifted away from considering waged labor as central to solidary relationships, however, not only because of the lessening power of labor unions and the rise of informal employment in deregulated neoliberal contexts, but also because of a greater recognition that other affective ties can ground solidary relationships in a globally networked world.

In this chapter, I pay attention to those affective ties in Mexico City's punk scene, heeding the discourse of friendship and solidarity and grouping the two concepts together under the idea of"love." I ask, what does love entail in a scene built largely among men and a small number of women who are knit together through deep, long-standing friendship ties? And how do you go from the love of friendship within the punk scene to a relational politics that can extend not only throughout but beyond it, fostering solidarity with people who have different ways of relating, different beliefs, and different backgrounds?

To get at these questions, I'm compelled by recent voices on the importance of friendship and romantic love in activist contexts. For example, in The Radicality of Love, philosopher Srečko Horvat values solidarity but ultimately privileges love over it in the work of revolutionary movements. He identifies an impressive act of solidarity from the recent past, when Coptic Christians formed a human chain to protect Muslim worshippers during protests in Tahrir Square, commenting, “This was—and still is—one of the most remarkable scenes from the so-called 'Arab Spring'; this moment of unity, courage and... discipline.” Naming other spectacular moments of solidarity like this one, Horvat nevertheless continues to privilege love as an even more effective relation for changing political systems:

solidarity already contains love... but to arrive at love one must go a step further. To love would mean to do it even when there is no event, no special occasion, or level of consciousness. That would be the true event: when love is not (only) provoked by extraordinary cracks in the world, but can be found in the seemingly boring daily activities, even repetitions, or—reinventions.

In Mexico City's punk scene, there is a name and a whole constellation of practices through which to enact a discipline of boring, everyday actions in the pursuit of a kind of revolution: autogestión. To achieve autogestión, energy must be spent in consistent activities—training, outreach, mutual aid, direct action, and direct democracy—practices that, ideally, prepare individuals and groups to bond together in ensuring their own needs. Learned from local anarchists, the term autogestión suggests the dogged commitment and effort it takes to change social and political life. In the punk scene, this emphasis on political commitment expresses itself not only in the embrace of the practices of autogestión but also in a prominent split that participants perceive between what is most frequently called “destroy punk” versus a more conscientious, socially engaged way of participating in the scene.

While there is some controversy regarding the acceptability of what might be termed a “lifestyle politics,” in which an individual's personal choices—such as not consuming animal products—are understood to represent that person's political engagement, some people validate that as a productive political stance as people model behaviors they'd like to see more of in the world. The “destroy "punk" (or, less often, "rocker") is the figure far more consistently singled out for derision among local punk-scene participants for having an inappropriate politics and work ethic. Allegedly, the destroy punk sees the punk scene solely as a series of opportunities to hacer desmadre (create mess or chaos), often in spectacularly destructive ways like binge drinking, certain forms of drug consumption, provoking fights, or perhaps even instigating a portazo. Certainly, destroy punks aren't judged to have the knowledge or commitment to carry out the practices of autogestión, especially when they happen beyond the confines of pleasurable punk shows.

While I have argued that taking a dissenting stance and feeling rage are pleasurable for participants in the punk scene, negative discourse around the more hedonistic destroy punk reveals that this pleasure exists in tension with a strongly positive valuation of effort and work. This is striking in the context of Mexico City, where many scene participants struggle to make a living. Though I heard a few people talk about their interest in “work refusal”—with some attempting to link their work in the informal economy to that politicized rejection of waged labor and the central value accorded to work in modern life —there is still a strong, traditional work ethic that pervades the scene. Not only did the majority of punk-scene participants identify as banda, having grown up in more economically marginalized neighborhoods in Mexico City, but several participants I knew had been migrants to the U.S. or Europe. Many more had relatives, friends, and neighbors who had migrated in search of better work opportunities. For many of my male friends in the scene especially, their work appeared to weigh heavily in their sense of self-worth and status, despite the difficulty of finding the sort of regular, waged labor that might have marked a sense of masculine social belonging in earlier periods.

Getting by is a potentially all-encompassing endeavor, requiring ingenuity and grit as people navigate the daunting economic landscape of Mexico City. My friends repeatedly drew my attention to issues of work during my time in the monster city, inviting me to visit them in their workplaces, seeking out my company when they were without work, and talking about the kinds of non-paid work they did within the scene and in support of causes they championed. The pervasiveness of talk about work and identities centered on industriousness led me to see the punk scene as a site of affective labor, where various practices—including the practices encoded in autogestion and the rigors of punk performance itself—build relationships, whether or not those relationships lead to the accumulation of capital. While no one of my acquaintance is free from the hustle to make ends meet, some participants' activities to earn money clash with their anti-capitalist beliefs, as well as with more meaningful forms of work experienced as autogestión. Other friends attempted to knit their work-for-sustenance with their autogestive work when they could.

All this focus on work took place against a backdrop of high-profile problems with labor in Mexico City during my fieldwork period. These events compelled me to further investigate labor conditions for punk-scene participants and how their work to get by accorded—or didn't—with the affective labor encoded in autogestión. In this chapter, I'll further describe the work involved in punk performance while detailing the various practices of autogestión and how they are enacted within and sometimes beyond the punk scene.

Seed: Sidewalk Scene

Out of the blue, my friend called, inviting me to tag along with him as he worked on a rainy summer evening. He sold books and D.V.D's in a makeshift booth near a large, popular park during the week, and then in the Chopo market on Saturdays. In the past, I had accompanied him as he sourced books. Tonight, my task was simply to provide company as he watched over his puesto, one of a long row of metal rods and thin wooden slabs, protected by a blue plastic tarp. We stood around on the pavement chatting as passersby wove their paths along the busy sidewalk.

It was not unusual for this mischievous friend to press me to borrow out there pornographic videos, enjoying my marked lack of appreciation for such offers. But specializing in that little neesh had its benefits, he informed me. He had developed a clientele. He familiarized himself with his regular customers' preferences, and they would repeatedly come back for his personalized attention. There wasn't much traffic on this gloomy evening, however, and the vendors began to thin out. He piled his books and the elements of the booth into a shopping cart, and we walked slowly through the drizzle as he leaned his back into the heavy, creaking vehicle, pushing it through a long, unwieldy maze of streets, sidewalks, and empty lots.