Naco Beautiful - Peace Magazine

Naco
8/20/06
9:14 AM
Page 1
Jacobo Zabludovky, Flujo Visuals
Naco is Beautiful
An artistic celebration of low-brow culture puts a new face on Mexican identity.
BY PEPE ROJO
nce upon a time, it lived on the
streets. Now, it’s everywhere.
You can find it on the walls of
museums, on TV screens, in the
pages of books, sauntering down
catwalks and pumping from
speakers. It’s the Tex-mex cowboy playing accordion and dancing with his shoulders on Tijuana’s
Avenida Revolución. It’s the three little piggies cooking humans behind metal curtains advertising carnitas on street food carts across Mexico. It’s naco,
and it’s back with a vengeance.
Initially popularized by TV comedian Luis de
Alba in the 1970s to describe uneducated, low-brow,
lower-class Mexicans, the term ‘naco’ has, since the
turn of the century, been appropriated and reappropriated on many fronts, but always with a sense of
pride and humour that rescues the popular imagery
of Mexico’s past and projects it into the future.
The current turning point in naco’s popular
rescue was ABCDF. First conceived and published
in book form as an inventory of alphabetized
key words and corresponding photographs that
celebrated Mexico City’s low-brow culture, in the
summer of 2001 curators Jerónimo Hagerman and
Cristina Faesler opened ABCDF as a public exposi-
O
tion in Bellas Artes (Palace of Fine Arts). The effect
was pleasantly disturbing: why bother walking city
streets when you could find the whole experience
collected in the museum?
Then, naco turned up everywhere. There was
Sensacional de diseño mexicano, a state-funded
book of flyers, labels, hand-painted signs, truck
decorations and comic books by anonymous
‘brut’ designers across Mexico. Tijuana’s Nortec
Collective started sampling northern band music,
bringing it up to date with a techno dressing.
VJs, most schooled in visual anthropology, began
adding peculiar urban images to their iBooks. And
NaCo t-shirts designed by Robby Vient and Edoardo
Chavarín, two L.A.-based Mexicans, flooded
the country and put the idiosyncracies of local
pronunciation to artistic use with shirts that, among
others, read ‘Pecsi’ (instead of Pepsi) and ‘Estar
Guars’ (instead of Star Wars).
Still, like the emblematic shirts read, “Ser naco es
chido.” Yes, Naco is cool. In fact, naco’s celebration of
low-brow culture is so cool that many young people
would rather go to a dance saloon instead of a trendy
disco. And while they’re there, most would kill to
rock the exquisite wardrobe of that now-archetypal
lower-class Mexican icon, the narco trafficker.
Street artists have also made their mark, using
media personalities from the recent past to decorate
local street corners. In Tijuana, Acamonchi’s
signature stencils show musical TV-show host Raúl
Velasco and Colosio, the murdered 1994 presidential
candidate. In Culiacán, Watchavato uses Malverde,
the patron saint of narco traffickers. And in Puebla,
Toño Amoniaco spray paints Jacobo Zabludovky,
Mexico’s most famous news anchorman, pointing
a gun at the viewer.
Off the streets, two recent additions to the
contemporary repertoire show just how mainstream
naco has become. One is the opening of Kong in
Mexico City. Billed as Latin America’s “first
low-brow gallery store,” Kong, partially owned by
Argentinian-born artist Jorge Alderete, provides a
space for illustrators, designers and consumers who
use populist imagery. In addition to toys, comics,
magazines and CDs, Kong sells art and paraphernalia related to wrestling, the most popular naco
theme recently exported through the Hollywood
mainstream by the Jack Black film, Nacho Libre.
The other indication that naco has permeated
all levels of Mexican culture is a TV show that
premiered on the FX channel (a Fox spin-off) called
NacoTV. For the World Cup, NacoTV sent several
Zoveck design
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Naco
8/20/06
9:14 AM
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Watchavato design
media personalities to Germany to report on the cup
‘a la mexicana,’ naco-speak for arriving without
official FIFA accreditation to support the national
team, drinking as much as possible and trying to
score out of the goal with the ladies.
For all its low-brow humour, however, naco’s
strategy of rescuing the urban-popular works as an
anthropological register, an aesthetic platform and a
postmodern irony. Excavate Marshall McLuhan
from his grave to comment on this collision between
the past and the present and he might tell you it’s a
case of “Forward through the rear-looking mirror.”
For French semiotician Jean Baudrillard it would be
simulacra, a readjusting of the ‘real’ that points
towards an idealization of culture preserved and/or
refashioned to reaffirm authenticity and difference.
Think: Huichol indians who take off their Converse
and don traditional dress only when it comes time
during tourist season to sell their hand-made crafts,
and themselves, as the living exotica of a traditional
past. Ultimately, the growing popularity of naco is
symptomatic of disappearance, or at least an
anxiety that disappearance is imminent.
Where classic Mexican cinema idealized rural life
for the urban citizen, naco’s sampling of life in the
cities idealizes urban life for the media citizen. Like
an endangered species, the urban identities of
Mexico’s lower class are, in the face of globalization,
undergoing not an extinction (as cultural purists
might note when decrying the Converse-related
death of ‘authentic’ Huichol culture) but a transformation. And so naco artists, as something akin to
the creative ethnographer, seek to locate that which
is somehow truly ‘Mexican’ in and among those
lower-income citizens who strive for modernity
despite Third World conditions.
That many of them come from Mexico’s upper
classes should come as no surprise. Only greeneyed guerillas can demand native rights. And only
the wealthy can afford to out-naco a naco.
There’s a joke that recounts how some naco
artists were sent by their university professor to the
city’s downtown core and, upon returning to
the campus from their first exposure to the culture
of the low, announced their intent to make a living
from aesthetically reevaluating the streets. Some
have, and if, as a Mexican familiar with the
intersection between class, race and family, you
know the last names of some of the naco artists,
the joke is dead on.
As such, there’s a certain irony in that what was
once the domain of the lower-class street is now
celebrated in the museums and art galleries of the
bourgoisie, and a definite mourning over the fact
that, as educated young graphics specialists make
design increasingly more streamlined, accessible
and cheap, traditional Mexican street art, such as
Look at us!
Ain’t it funny
how we live
here.
monstruism, is becoming more and more obsolete.
The act of rescue might ultimately be responsible
for the final demise of the subject itself. It’s
no wonder that the San Diego Museum of
Contemporary Art’s current retrospective from
across the border is called Strange New World:
Art and Design from Tijuana.
To survive in these strange days art, like culture,
needs a business plan. As artists continue rescuing
folklore into the arms of mass production, aesthetic
manifestos are sounding more and more like
marketing strategies in independent, government
and corporate circles.
On the independent front, much of the welldeserved and ongoing success of the Nortec
Collective comes down to business acumen. Booed
at their first gig in Mexico City’s zócalo (town
square) because the audience had no reference to
help decode the group’s techno twist on northern
band music, they made a wise move in promoting
their music in Europe and the U.S. before their
second (and successful) try at taking on the home
front. And their book, Paso del Nortec, which
graphically retells the collective’s story, is published
as a bilingual edition. Smart.
On the corporate front, the talk is no longer about
artistic grants, but investment opportunities and
sponsorships. As for national, state and local
governments, Mexico is witnessing an avant-garde
wave in the tourism business sector as it fully
embraces (and funds) naco imagery to pronounce
to the world, “Look at us! Ain’t it funny how
we live here!”
The strategy of utilizing naco art as a reference
point for Mexican-ness has worked wonders for
branding Tijuana. Arguably the most famous of all
Mexican cities, Tijuana has, for global media
consumers, become iconic of urban life in Mexico.
Through their artistic endeavours, Watchavato is
trying to do the same for Culiacán and Don Chicalli
y su infona for Mexicali: brand the particular
character and references of a city in hopes that its
identity catches on, is rescued and then is broadcast
to the world. Interestingly, Toño Amoniaco’s
Panzacola project reverses the formula of tapping
into the exotic or folkloric. His ironic campaign to
promote a small and boring factory town called
Panzacola uses what is, perhaps, the most bland and
familiar image of globalization, the Coca Cola logo.
In the 1970s, when Luis de Alba criticized the
way that the urban poor danced, laughed and
talked, the success and popularity of his comic
routine established ‘naco’ as a disparaging measure
of a socio-cultural identity that was embedded in
class and race. Back then, some people were called
nacos just because of their dark hair. Today, it seems
like almost everyone is, or wants to be, a naco. It has
become a positive measure of Mexican identity.
In museums and books, on catwalks and TV
screens, and pumping from speakers, this revival
and celebration of the low-brow illustrates how
those old class and race-based identities have been
reconfigured and reappropriated to register how
‘real’ Mexicans should see themselves and even be
themselves where they are, where they are not, and
where they never were.
u
CD release party/Mexican Madness poster Designer: Dr. Alderete
60 I PEACE I FALL 06
Kongal, Kong exhibition - Designer: Oscar Reyes