Hey, you, emo kid in Kansas rocking out to Hawthorne Heights as you thumb through the current issue of Alternative Press and draw a cracked heart on the rubber toe of your Jack Purcell. You think you got reason to be doleful? Well, then check out your ilk in Mexico. They've been getting their asses kicked lately as part of a country-wide anti-emo movement and now they're fighting back (this clip is in Spanish, but images speak louder than words. Check out the dudes arming themselves with leather belts. What is this, West Side Story?).
LA Weekly's Daniel Hernandez has been covering the phenomenon for the paper and on his blog Intersections. "A bizarre wave of emo-bashings is sweeping across Mexico. The movement is being generated on message boards and social networking sites by non-emo youth who highly dislike the emo look and attitude. Hernandez reports that it started on March 7th in Queretaro where about 800 young people hunted down emos in the city's Centro Historico for some head bashing. "The next weekend it spread to Mexico City, where emos faced off against punks and rockabillies at the Glorieta de Insurgents, the epicenter of emo social space in the capital."
So what brought all this about? Good old fashioned machismo? Harry24 gives a lengthy discourse here on the "Anti Emo Death Squad" page at last.fm, and even theorizes that the growing emo scene is part of a government conspiracy to cultivate emo kids because they can be easily manipulated (unlike metalheads).
But Harry24 best sums up his emo hatred here (broken English and grammar left intact): "An interesting fact of this, is that the Heavy Metal community is not the only one against emos, we can also find that, pop-listeners, skaters, punks, goths, and other people are against emos here in Mexico. But why metal/rock listeners are not the only ones against emos??? The answer is simple, emo attitude here in Mexico is anti-youngster: they do not drink, they do not have sex, they do not have fun, they go to concerts just to cry, they go to parties just to sit in a corner and cry, and they feel victims of everything, it is really, a very stupid behavior."
Wow, and you thought the rednecks in your town were bad. [Daily Swarm]
This is so bizarre.