Down and Delirious in Mexico City

It's a balmy summer night after another seasonal afternoon rainstorm, and though it's midweek, the Condesa might as well be celebrating a national holiday. The streets are jammed with tiny commuter cars, and the sidewalk cafés and cantinas are packed with the kind of Diesel-clad people who are fond of rolling their eyes, sprinkling their chatter with unnecessary English and smoking Camels. Valets are working hard, dashing from corner to corner. And as they seem to do every night in this neighborhood, police cruisers are on patrol, their siren lights inexplicably on, perpetually signaling motorists to move on.

Mexico City is experiencing its 15 minutes. Hollywood, perhaps drawn to the heat from the new Mexican cinema, is making movies here. The global art market is hungry for work by Calderón, Okon and others. American Apparel has arrived: The L.A.-based company is producing a monthly bilingual zine on newsprint called Mexico City Monthly, which concerns itself entirely with how cool Mexico City is. Every culturista in the U.S., it seems, is "dying to see" the D.F. Much of the attention is focused on the Condesa. Flowery reports about how neato and on-the-edge the general area is have appeared in The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and other foreign papers and magazines. But the truth is, the Condesa is really beginning to suck.

Month after month, it seems, a swanky new café opens. Meanwhile, fancy, overpriced buildings designed by trendster architects are drawing in moneyed creatives looking for that sort of homogeneous "urban lifestyle" you can find in the "coolest" neighborhoods of the global cosmopolitan capitals. Tijuana Mayor Jorge Hank Rohn, one of the wealthiest, most corrupt politicians in all of Mexico, is planning to open a casino smack in the middle of the already congested district. Homeowner groups in the Condesa are fighting the proposal. But knowing the way the bureaucracy in Mexico works — money talks more than anything — it's almost certain they'll lose.

"There's a bridge-and-tunnel effect going on here now," says Okon, strolling the tree-lined sidewalks of the neighborhood he's lived in for most of his life. "It's the same phenomenon of gentrification that you have in the U.S. They come here to party, break beer bottles at 3 a.m. and leave."

If the Condesa was once the epicenter of the cutting-edge creative energy in Mexico City, Okon and Calderón's La Panadería was its brain, heart and reproductive organ. The place was the site of some of the most innovative and daring art happening anywhere in the Americas in the late '90s and early part of the 2000s. Many of Mexico's most celebrated young artists had their first or most significant showing there, including Eduardo Abaroa and Mariana Botey. There were bands, screenings and parties. Artists invited from around the world came to participate and make art there. It was sceney before the city knew it had a scene.

La Panadería reflected the times, and the art often trafficked on the dubious edges of legality and acceptable taste. In one piece Okon and Calderón jointly exhibited, they presented footage of themselves smashing a car window and attempting to steal a car stereo. The piece was meant as an "other side" reaction to the artists' experience of being robbed, a common occurrence in the D.F.

The gallery, says Okon, was about the flow of information. "We didn't only care how outsiders saw Mexico, but how can I, living in Mexico, have access to what is happening in Japan? How can I, living in Mexico, have access to living culture? It wasn't about how others saw us, it was about participating."

Okon's flat is above what was once La Panadería. That space is just another trendy Condesa café now, with a valet, a bar, an arty magazine rack and an endless soundtrack of hotel-lobby electronica.

La Panadería's closure is the stuff of art-scene lore. Okon says it was difficult to maintain the loose collective that operated the place. "It was organic, and like every organism, it had a life span."

Cocaine also had a negative effect, he says. Back in the heyday of the experimental arts scene, I remember: Coke was everywhere. At parties, at bars, during large family events where my guides were invited guests, at concerts, even at art openings. The drug craze inspired the artist Teresa Margolles to make Cards for Cutting Cocaine, credit-card-sized art pieces that on one side reproduced gruesome photographs of victims of Mexico's bloody narco wars. She handed them out at openings.