I was just talking with Benoit about the barrio de Tepito of D.F. (Mexico City). It’s a fairly heavy neighborhood. Also called Barrio Bravo. And one of the best places in the world to find cumbia CDs (10 pesos per CD, or about $0.66 cents given the pesos recent 40% devaluation against the American dollar (which Mexicans in America refer to as the peso). Benoit found some of the material for his recent Cumbia Con Bass mix there a few months ago.

[taken from Barrio de Tepito]

Right after talking to him, I take a look at the free book Self-organisation/counter-economic-strategies, edited by incredible Danish arts collective Superflex. In a nice coincidence, the first essay is on Tepitos! PDF here.

The essay, written by Alfonso Hernández y traducido al ingles por Hugo Hopping, is called “TEPITO: a barrio of artisans in light of global piracy”. Here’s an excerpt:

Previously, rural bandits and urban gangsters fought against the local chief or landowner. They had no ideology of power and they did not aspire to use one. Today, however, modern crime is a punitive involution that seeks to wield power, inciting barbarism and terrorism. There is a resurgence of a modern repressive state that protects only the global mobility of capital, and covers up the geopolitics of criminal markets that continue to impoverish countries and trigger migration – from the countryside to the city and from one country to another.

Any similarity between local suffering and what we are experiencing at a national level is presented as pure coincidence, as the media reinforces the black legend of Tepito. Consequently, we feel the need to reveal why we rebel against those who at all cost want to make of our barrio bravo a social-economic laboratory of delinquency and drug dealing. Just as national sovereignty is disappearing, the modern re-
pressive state gerrymanders both the existing districts and the virtual ubiquity of Tepito, altering the economic equilibrium from within as well as from without.

It is hard to believe that piracy impoverishes commerce. Piracy creates controlled financial spaces for those who make their living, by milking the conlict between formal and informal trade and the subsistence economies that surround it, without ever affecting the black market profitability that is financially administered by white-collar executives.

In this pitched battle against the barrio bravo, many of our youth have been corrupted, others have lost their lives, and many more have become prison fodder. Nevertheless, Tepito lives, risking everything, knowing that for a bastard you need a bastard and a half. Even the black sheep is a member of the family and charisma will put an end to the stigma.

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Superflex is on a powerful flex. In addition to helping Palestine apply to enter the Eurovision contest, they also do things like make art… check this recent video: Flooded McDonald’s

Flooded McDonald’s

from Superflex on Vimeo.