The Party Never Ends: Mexico in the Narco Years

This post is mindful of the bicentennial Independencia festivities planned for this week throughout Mexico (but not in Ciudad Juárez, due to fears of narco-violence).

There has been much commentary about what it is like for Mexicans to celebrate such a milestone in the midst of the worst violence since the Revolution (whose centennial will be celebrated later this year).

And that violence, as we know, is rooted in drugs. The following is a very personal narrative on the theme.

One afternoon we take the kids to Parque España again and this time pass by my old apartment on Avenida Veracruz, not the handsomest building in the area, a late modern, probably mid-1960s, a facade of glass and steel and small, crumbling blue tiles. (The quality of construction was a far cry from the golden era in the neighborhood, a fact that led to a lot of destruction and death in the great quake of '85.) Gentrification arrived with a vengeance after I left; today, the ultra-swank Condesa DF hotel is across the street.

Seeing my old place, with its soot-streaked windows, produces a complicated emotional response that I keep to myself, until later when I am alone with Angela and our daughters Ruby and Lucía are asleep at what they are calling "la casa azul," because of the beautiful paint job on the belle époque-era building we're staying in. Not to be confused with La Casa Azul where Diego and Frieda lived, and which we of course visit with the girls.

What happened while I was living in the apartment on Avenida Veracruz is ultimately why I left Mexico in the late 1990s, and how I arrived in the Mojave Desert, which is what my new book--I'm rewriting now!--is about.

Angela has just published her first book, based on the research she conducted during the years we lived in New Mexico, where she grew up surrounded by drug and alcohol abuse inside her family and across the "Land of Enchantment," which is somehow able to maintain its tourist imaginary intact despite epidemics of addiction (in particular to alcohol and heroin).

Angela and I share this narrative. Different places and times, different impacts on our lives. The past is present in our intimacy, in shared trauma and what will be a lifelong need for healing it.

As we talk, the nightly storm is gathering outside. It is the monsoon in Mexico, although they don't use that term here. It's simply "las lluvias," which in the capital often bring violent thunderstorms that snarl transportation both public and private (try hailing a cab in the middle of one). Blue flashes illuminate the windows, thunder rattles the windows.

Both Angela and I have dealt with the demons in many different ways--including writing about them--and those demons had begun to feel somewhat safely removed from our lives.

But here in Mexico we are surrounded by the devastation of drugs. In the saturation reporting of the narco-wars, in the continually growing "internal market" for drugs in Mexico (which the cartels have sought to exploit given their growing losses from competition for the transnational market and--to what extent no one really knows--the interdiction efforts by both the U.S. and Mexican governments). You can log on to "El Blog del Narco" to see the bodies blasted apart by automatic weapons in a club in Durango or along a highway in Tamaulipas.

Thusfar, el D.F. has been spared most of the hardcore violence, but the narcos are here, too. In la Roma, in Condesa, hanging out in the hottest nightspots. And of course they're back home in L.A., too, smalltime to big, consumers and producers and distributors, on the streets and across every social swath and certainly in the audience at the Grammy Museum in L.A. when I went to see Los Tucanes de Tijuana, champions of the "narco-corrido."

"They" are, of course, us.

And as for our bodies, have we tamed the demons of addiction merely by representing them in language, by thinking about them "critically" as academics?

No. They are still there. Angela uses the term "chronicity" to describe the endlessness of addiction. And maybe that's the way it should be: the addict should never deny addiction no matter how far she's come from its anguish. To do so would be to diminish the profound meaning produced along the path to sobriety. This is, of course, a variation of the AA mystique.

(On the other hand, I've begun to think lately that narrowing the narrative of a life into merely a story of addiction and sobriety denies the immensity of everyday life. Through the years I was using I was also writing and loving and desperately trying to make sense of the world--I was alive as I was dying.)

And here in D.F. I see the younger party generation on the streets of la Condesa and la Roma, indulging the "reventón." When I lived here in the 1990s I romanced it as "bohemian," part of the glamour of these neighborhoods, an "onda" (Mexican colloquialism for "vibe") which went back decades, generations, having lured writers and artists from abroad with its taboo-breaking, art-making scene. (It certainly lured the Beat Generation here.)

So. The reventón can be about too much alcohol or this or that substance, about escaping any manner of existential dilemmas. And the reventón is also about chasing life itself.

Or it was. Now, it is implicated in a full-blown war that has claimed 28,000 lives since 2006. The reventón might be a relatively new colloquialism for "party," the particular brand of chilango partying, but the sensibility has been around a long time. In my parents' and grandparents' days the term d'art was "ronda," the bohemian catch-all for an all-nighter that almost always involved losing a love or trying to get one back.

But that sounds so innocent compared to partying and loving in the narco years.

"Will this war ever end?" I ask Angela as we listen to car tires hissing like snakes in the rain.

She quotes a young addict from her book: "No tiene fin."

It is without end.

Image taken by Flickr user Alfonso Contreras. It was used under user Creative Commons license.