Conclusions

For nearly a decade after the Avándaro, music festival the rock legacy of La Onda Chicana lay shattered, which is not to say that native rock disappeared altogether. Gone was the momentum of a countercultural movement that had begun to reveal its numbers. In the aftermath of Avándaro, the scores of native bands looking for commercial success either broke up or switched genres—as in the case of the famed La Revolución de Emiliano Zapata, whose remaining members took up cumbia. Several bands did hold together for a few more years, though only Three Souls in My Mind remained viable beyond the 1970s.^[1] But the terrain for rock performance was drastically altered. Between state repression and a critical disdain, La Onda Chicana found itself orphaned by the cultural industries that had once nurtured it and rejected by the middle-class fans who had been among its strongest supporters. Avándaro proved an ephemeral moment in Mexican history, its cultural significance now largely forgotten.

Mexican rock found refuge in the hoyos fonquis after Avándaro, where the urban edge of lower-class needs and sensibilities affected the full transformation of rock into a vehicle for desmadre. Gone was the pretense of international acceptance as rock became infused with the nihilistic currents of punk music (influenced by groups such as the Sex Pistols and the Ramones, both of which were idolized in the barrio) and was expressed wholly in Spanish. This musical tendency reflected the increasingly dire economic situation of the urban lower classes and the repressive political conditions that kept them there.

During the 1970s there was a surge of capital infusion into the economy under the populist administration of Luis Echeverría and his successor, José López Portillo. The apparent growth of the economy, however, was chimerical, for it was built on inflationary spending and loans against future sales

of still untapped petroleum. Wages rose, but so did prices for basic goods and imports. Meanwhile, the impetus for urban development reflected in massive public-works projects and an influx of social spending further propelled the rural-urban migration patterns already at work. What were once viewed as pockets of urban poverty became veritable ciudades perdidas (lost cities), as they became commonly known. From a modern city with cosmopolitan aspirations Mexico City had become a megalopolis. While Echeverría and López Portillo both spoke of economic redistribution and national grandeur, the unprecedented levels of corruption created by oil profits and the wanton inefficiency of the public sector generated cynicism rather than praise, especially from the lower classes. Lacking a political voice for their viewpoint, lower-class youth turned to rock for articulating their frustrations with a system that disempowered them politically, socially, and economically.

The only vibrant link to La Onda Chicana, however, was the group Three Souls in My Mind, which sustained the banner of rock after Avándaro by taking their music directly to the barrios and transforming their message to reflect the needs and concerns of an audience that differed vastly from the relatively privileged origins of the group's lead singer, Alejandro Lora. With a consistent heavy blues rhythm (the group comprised a guitar, bass, and drums), Lora later explained how the band represented "a species of urban Mexican rock and roll, a rock of the streets with words and experiences that reflect Mexicans' lives, especially those who live in the capital."^[2] Against the rhetoric of revolutionary promise, their songs exposed the truth of poverty, corruption, and repression. This is reflected, for instance, in their 1975 song "Abuso de autoridad," which takes a jibe at Díaz Ordaz's own roquero son:

Lora understood the lower classes' need to experience rock as a cathartic release from the repressions of everyday life. He appealed to the desmadre element of lower-class participation and in turn transformed the Three Souls in My Mind into Mexico's premier rock 'n' roll band, sustained almost entirely by support in the barrio rather than the middle classes. As he later reflected:

I think about it this way, look, when we recorded "Abuso de Autoridad" or "Nuestros Impuestos" we knew that they weren't going to raise people's consciousness. The people aren't conscienticized, or however you might put it. [T]hey don't become more conscious, rather they have a release for a moment. They come out of the hoyo fonqui and now they feel like a guerrilla, but they're not going to take up arms or beat up the president. Yet they feel like they've participated in a political meeting by listening to the Three Souls. It's a psychological escape which I think the government should recognize as such.^[4]

By the early 1980s, numerous other barrio bands influenced by punk rhythms and economic poverty proliferated throughout the marginalized zones of urban Mexico. The rest of the nation was still largely unaware of this growing phenomenon, los chavos banda (punk-rock youth from the barrios), who soon confronted society with their mounting presence.

Concurrent with this movement in the barrios, among the middle classes by the late 1970s came the experimental sounds of Guillermo Briseño, Jaime López, Jorge Reyes, and others who sought a musical fusion reflecting nueva canción, jazz, indigenous, and rock influences. An important source of inspiration was the evolution of rock in Argentina, where artists such as Fito Páez and Charly García were writing songs that dealt (often in metaphors) with military repression and los desaparecidos (extrajudicial kidnappings by military forces).^[5] Inspired by such musicians and determined to create a new musical voice for the post-1968 generation, these Mexican artists struggled to re-create a more respectable rock style, one that disassociated itself from some of the colonized overtones of La Onda

Chicana. For instance, a song by Guillermo Briseño from 1978, "Comparaciones (Apariencias)" goes in part:

Around the mid-1980s, these two musical tendencies—punk-influenced barrio rock and rock-fusion among the middle classes—began to merge, producing an entirely new generation of rock musicians whose material transcended class barriers and brought Mexican rock the international acclaim it had pursued since the 1960s.^[7]

There was also a third trend in rock that emerged around 1980 and that Víctor Roura has labeled the "other rock." Highly commercialized and thoroughly sanitized of any offensive gestures, this teenybopper Spanish-language rock movement—catalyzed by the Puerto Rican pop phenomenon Menudo—was far removed from the underground rock scene and experimental fusion. Raúl Velasco, whose show Siempre en domingo largely defined the parameters of "proper taste" for Mexico's Televisa, directly launched the movement on commercial television. Intent on putting its earlier affiliation with La Onda Chicana squarely behind it, Televisa now hailed what was viewed by Roura as a "rock repossessed, now by nice people, decent, educated."^[8] As Roura continued to describe it, "They invent contests based on youth values designed to show off the new styles: bell-bottomed pants, multicolored sneakers, hair cut short in the style of 'punks,' mini-dresses, androgenous little dances, being in the 'new wave,' living the new romanticism."^[9] Federico Arana came sardonically to label this genre "pedarroc," one imagines as in pedophilic rock 'n' roll, so young are its performers with their adult looks and pretensions.^[10] Once more, rock was being repositioned by the cultural industries within a hegemonic arrangement that sought to contain it as "entertainment" and profit from its marketing spin-offs. Within this discourse of a circumscribed, commodified rebellion a counterculture was again refashioned as style aimed at an elite who wished to "belong."

The cultural industries were once more caught up in the contradiction of adhering to the state's demands for self-censorship yet seeking to profit from the consumers' demands for a more authentic rock product. In a scene

replayed from the famous Doors' appearance in 1969, the rock band the Police gave a concert at the exclusive Hotel de México (in Mexico City) in 1980. Afterward, Sting declared that he would not return to Mexico to "play for the bourgeoisie."^[11] Meanwhile, efforts to sponsor concerts for the masses resulted in cancellations and worse. At a 1980 Johnny Winter performance in Pachuca, for instance, the concert "ended in police repression against the audience."^[12] Two years later, at a Mexico City opening of the film Ladies and Gentlemen, the Rolling Stones police entered the theater and prevented the screening.^[13] These were among the scores of similar incidents that affected foreign rock performance in Mexico and characterized to an even greater degree native rock. If the cultural industries were eager to exploit the obvious demand for rock, this would not occur for a few more years.

With economic conditions worsening, moreover, the government was in no mood to allow the commercialization of a more politicized rock. That strategy would do an about-face during the administration of Miguel de la Madrid (1982–1988), but in the meantime rock (as it had during the late 1960s) found its way via semiunderground channels. This was epitomized by the initiation of an open-air, weekly rock "flea market" organized by aficionados outside the Museo del Chopo in Mexico City in 1980. As word of mouth spread, the Chopo market attracted more attention, and it was ejected from the museum's grounds. It wandered in exile, facing constant police harassment, until it finally established itself semi-institutionally next to the railway depot in the northern part of the capital. Known as the Tianguis del Chopo, by the late 1980s it had become, as José Agustín writes, "the capital of the counterculture in Mexico."^[14]

The early 1980s marked an important turning point for Mexico as the nation teetered on the brink of bankruptcy. If 1968 had severely damaged the PRI's political credibility, 1982 (when Mexican Finance Secretary Silva Herzog informed the U.S. Treasury Department that there was no money left to continue payment on the national debt) dealt an important blow to the PRI's economic credibility. The "lost decade" of economic growth, which Mexico by no means suffered through alone, proved a severe challenge to the ruling party. The PRI survived intact only after using all of the available techniques of rule at its disposal: symbolism and rhetoric, corporatist influence and repression, electoral dominance and outright fraud. La crisis, as Mexicans called this period, blurred the lines between middle and lower classes as workers of all types invented new strategies of economic survival.

What is particularly significant to the history of rock music's relationship

to the state is that after 1982 (with the election of Miguel de la Madrid and the collapse of the peso) there begins a reversal in official policy, embracing what was once deemed anathema. In 1984 the PRI, through its newly created Consejo Nacional de Recursos para la Atención de la Juventud (CREA), actively began to cultivate a relationship with los chavos banda, whose presence could no longer be ignored. Through its official magazine, Encuentro , CREA opened up a channel for expression by marginalized youth that, at least initially, appeared relatively free of censorship. Encuentro featured stories, interviews, and poetry by chavos banda, as well as music criticism and a calendar of weekly events, including rock concerts (many of which were sponsored by CREA).

But in reality, the PRI was responding to a force that was already widely felt. During the early 1980s, youth in the barrios had begun to organize themselves. This was manifested in the Consejo Popular Juvenil, an organization based in the capital with several thousand members whose aim was to sponsor cultural activities for youth in the barrios and prevent gang violence. The Consejo Popular rejected all political affiliations, despite efforts by the PRI and other parties to eventually seek its endorsement.^[15]Encuentro not only underwrote its own reporting of the chavos banda, it also drew on material being published through the Consejo Popular, as in this excerpt from a poem that was republished in Encuentro 's first issue. Here we read the caustic language of a youth rebellion that is anything but bourgeois:

The contents of Encuentro continued to explore various facets of youth culture, both lower and middle class, and featured articles on political themes such as the Sandinistas (supported diplomatically by Mexico), the death of Che Guevara, and the plight of youth living along the U.S. border. But despite its at times radical overtone, the magazine was clearly a propaganda vehicle for the PRI. This created the odd juxtaposition of reports on rock music next to the presidential State of the Union Address (reproduced in

full) and other government self-promotions. As the campaign of Carlos Salinas de Gortari began, Encuentro pictured the PRI candidate on its cover above the caption: "Carlos Salinas de Gortari: A Young Candidate for a Country of Youth."^[17] The PRI by itself could not sanitize the rock movement emanating from the barrios, but by affiliating the party with youth expression it hoped to refashion its reputation as rock-friendly and thus populist. It should not surprise us, then, to find the following language in the 1988 PRI platform: "We will push the authorities of the Federal District to simplify the paperwork, permissions, and licensing for the presentation of artistic and cultural events. In Mexico City and in the rest of the country, we want more rock, theater, cinema, opera, classical and popular music."^[18] Indeed, the PRI not only liberalized access to rock but also directly sponsored rock performances, including those by the confrontational TRI. (In 1984 the drummer in Three Souls in My Mind split from the group and sued to keep the original name. Alejandro Lora, the lead performer, adopted the name "TRI" for his own group, which went on to greater fame. The new name was not only a convenient adaptation of the Hispanicized abbreviation for the group—that is, "the Three"—but a clever play on the "PRI" as well, and it was used to great effect in their performances.)

If the PRI now seemed bent on accommodating the demand for rock music at its various levels, from foreign performers to concerts in the barrios, the government was responding to a reality it could no longer effectively repress. But the shift in official policy generated an important cultural opening that reverberated throughout commercial and intellectual channels. For instance, it was in 1984 that the Mexico City rock station, Rock 101, began operation. Rock 101 is remembered as a fundamental contributor to the revival of a middle-class rock consciousness, in that the station played and discussed not only progressive foreign rock but also rock movements emanating from the Southern Cone: "With the arrival of Rock 101 at first place in popularity among young people, all of the radio stations that played rock had to change their attitude and become more concerned about the quality of music they featured."^[19] By the late 1980s there was a veritable explosion in rock marketing as well as performance. Foreign artists, for years denied entrance to Mexico, now gained access to large stadium audiences. Several new rock clubs aimed at the middle classes opened up in Mexico City and became the foundation for a rechanneling of rock out of the hoyos fonquis and into more institutionalized locations.^[20] From there, it was only a logical next step to record contracts as the transnationals once more began to pursue this nueva onda of rock.

Intellectuals' acceptance of Spanish-language rock performance was an-

other important component of this rock revival. Since rock 'n' roll's initial arrival in Mexico, intellectuals had been generally hostile toward rock music, and Mexican rock in particular. While many intellectuals did regard foreign rock as part of the cultural vanguard, rocanrol and La Onda Chicana were almost uniformly condemned as bourgeois imitation at best, cultural imperialism at worst. When La Onda Chicana retreated to the barrios in the 1970s, it had few followers among leftists who were willing to defend its authenticity as a form of popular culture. This position, however, had begun to change by the mid-1980s, as los chavos banda emerged as a sociological phenomenon and la crisis once more ruptured the close affiliation between intellectuals and the state, which the PRI had recultivated since the early 1970s.^[21] Not only had rock music demonstrated its vitality during a decade of underground survival, but the larger theoretical paradigm of what now constituted "popular culture" was itself being challenged by a new level of critique that questioned the validity of a narrowly defined notion of cultural imperialism. The very term cultura popular underwent a transformation from its exclusively rural orientation into one that embraced all levels of urban cultural expression. In the realm of popular music, this was expressed in a 1983 conference entitled "¿Qué Onda con la Música Popular Mexicana?" In the very title we find the word onda now juxtaposed with the label música popular , suggesting the new fusion of urban and rural sensibilities that had occurred. Popular music (which does not mean pop music) had itself become a contested term, as revealed in the conflicting papers presented at the conference, which covered themes ranging from rancheras, corridos, and indigenous music, to cumbias, commercialized pop, and Mexican rock; speakers included Carlos Monsiváis, René Villanueva of Los Folkloristas, and Federico Arana, among others.^[22] Even more indicative of this transformation was the opening in 1982 of the Museo Nacional de Culturas Populares (where the conference was held) in Mexico City. Here rural and urban popular cultures became elevated to a similar level of importance, suggesting not only the new intellectual acceptance of urban culture as legitimate but, moreover, the PRI's efforts to affiliate itself directly with that legitimacy through official sponsorship.

If rock had scant direct presence in the student movement of 1968, nearly two decades later, in the student movement of 1986, rock performance was a defining feature of student politics as well as leisure. The 1986 movement came in the aftermath of the 1985 earthquake, which had reduced large portions of the nation's capital to ruins and revealed through tragedy the government's utter incompetence at rescue operations and survivor resettlement.^[23] Whereas the 1968 movement challenged the PRI's authoritar-

Figure 19.
The recycling of symbols and discourse from the 1968 student move-
ment finds its way into a commemorative march in Mexico City in 1993, now with
a clear role for rock music. (Photograph by the author)

ianism on the eve of world attention focusing on the Olympic games, the 1986 movement was oriented more toward university reforms. But its size and energy revealed the ability and desire of youth to take to the streets and make their voices heard, this time seeking to leverage government weakness after the earthquake and in the midst of the worst economic crisis since the revolution.^[24] Student protest culture now also reflected a much greater synthesis of traditional corridos, nueva canción, and rock (both foreign and national) than it had in 1968. With the influence of a more politicized rock from the Southern Cone and native rock's completed Mexicanization as it reemerged from the barrios to national prominence, the question of separating rock from social protest had become moot.

Today, the identification between rock music and democratic politics goes almost without question in opposition circles. At a commemorative march marking the twenty-eighth anniversary of the massacre at Tlatelolco, the newspaper La Jornada reported that 100,000 people marched on the Zócalo, "awaiting the only speech that mattered to the youth, and that was none other than rock" (see Figure 19).^[25] A 1994 album by the band Tijuana No features an image of Emiliano Zapata on its cover, a clear political statement in the context of the Zapatista uprising that had erupted at the beginning

of that year; the album's songs, moreover, are filled with attacks on commercial culture and the political system. In a 1995 concert by the band at the U.S.-Mexican border, the lead singer, Teca García (age twenty-seven), shouted: "We dedicate this one to all of us who are Zapatistas," an echo of the stance of "Todos somos Marcos!" ("We're all Marcos") that was popularized throughout the country.^[26] Yet as "Pacho" (age thirty-three), drummer for the band La Maldita Vecindad y los Hijos del Quinto Patio, commented:

Our work is not political, if by political you mean doctrinaire, ideological songs, like the '6os protest songs were and the '70s, with the folkloric Chilean music and nueva canción. We don't intend to educate anyone, we don't believe in ideologies or doctrines. It is political in the broader sense of the word since we speak of the street life, of the everyday person. If you write about them, you're going to confront things that could be considered political.^[27]

This new rock period is also marked by musical and cultural fusion as an aesthetic strategy (despite the preponderance of heavy-metal groups), and it has often succeeded in transcending class divisions. In fact, in order to maintain their credibility as being "against the system," the more successful bands must continue to demonstrate their readiness to perform at outdoor festivals (often for free) and in lower-class settings. Mexican rock has once again become the vanguard of a new countercultural movement, one that transcends class in its opposition to the ruling political party and a mounting culture of repression. As Carlos Monsiváis stated, Mexican rock is now the "principal instrument for those who are marginalized in society, the first zone of expression for the under class."^[28]

But the stakes in the battle over rock's position in Mexican society have been high. Lost is the musical memory and cultural consciousness integral to La Onda Chicana, though la nueva onda (as one journalist has named the present-day rock movement in Mexico) represents an important development in cultural self-representation and political awareness.^[29] Its commercialization process cut off in middevelopment, the fusion represented by La Onda Chicana exists only in direct relationship to the scarce commodity forms—record albums, magazines, photographs—that survived the period, most of which are now in private collections.^[30] Indeed, if we are to take the study of rock music in Mexico seriously, it is above all this consideration that we must keep in mind: what is the relationship among capitalism, state power, and popular memory? The commodification of a counter-cultural movement—often criticized by cultural theorists—becomes an essential factor in the creation and survival of popular memory. Experience,

and thus the memory of that experience, is directly tied to the commodified object itself, in this case the rock album, but also films, T-shirts, posters, and whatnot. The paltry availability of Mexican rock in its commodified form from the period of La Onda Chicana—the literal absence of albums and images—is a direct result of state pressures put on the cultural industries in the wake of Avándaro. The U.S. and British rock movements, in contrast, were thoroughly commodified, indeed creating a superabundance of music and images that have made their way into all corners of the globe.^[31] Lacking access to the commodity form itself and coupled with the elevation of foreign rock as vanguard culture during the 1960s and 1970s, the articulation of a countercultural memory in Mexico is made almost exclusively in terms of U.S. and British rock. (Though at the same time a political memory, that of 1968, is referenced in various songs and festivals.)

In fact, the entire musical memory from La Onda Chicana has been all but lost. Unlike the Woodstock festival, which continues to influence the styles and consciousness of succeeding generations of youth in the United States, the rock-music culture that generated Avándaro survives only in the underground rock-music scene and in the memory of those who were there.^[32] Repressed in the name of cultural imperialism, the memory of Mexico's native rock movement from the early 1970s has been replaced by an imported rock memory of a commercialized counterculture from without. Although today recognized as a familiar term, "Avándaro" has become a reference point absent a shared popular repertoire of images or musical experiences. It is perhaps best seen as a nonmemory, ironically recalled more in terms of the Woodstock experience—which is identified worldwide—than of that experience to which it belongs, La Onda.