Vita Chronicles IV: Soundman Politics
A theory in progress and a note on the future of Vita Chronicles.
Dream contributor Max Pearl articulated some ideas in this piece. If you’re an editor, please let Max and I write about Mexico City’s Hi-NRG scene. If you are a Vita Chronicles subscriber and are curious as to where this project is headed, scroll to the bottom.
When Apolinar Silva of the mobile sound system known as Polymarchs told every Mexican to raise their fist, more than 200,000 hands flung in the air. Operating a 50-foot sound and light rig from the main artery of Mexico City, Apolinar Silva rang in the new year 2025 to the tune of “Living On Video” of the Montreal pop duo Trans-X next to Mexico City’s mayor.
Clouds of slime-green lasers could be seen for miles. Women dressed like pharaohs danced on the main stage as an homage to Polymarch’s honorific title: El Farónico. Thousands of miniature replicas of $100 dollar bills were strewn across Reforma Avenue. Babies and puppies were swaddled by their parents while $50 peso mezcal shots were sold alongside Modelo tall-boys and some sort of blue-drank. There were grandmas in tracksuits, tall Swedes, and an American man sporting gorp-core smoking a cigarette while a local effusively told him about the event’s historical significance. Phones tethered to selfie sticks hovered above the audience, broadcasting the show on Facebook Live to Polymarchs fan clubs in the United States.
Polymarchs's renown extends across the country and beyond. Since the 1980s, the DJ collective has held public electronic music, most notably under the helm of its founding MC, Tony Barrera. At his height as a performer, Tony led the largest queer, proletarian mobile-disco scene in the country, performing his flavor of Hi-NRG alongside disco mainstays such as Sylvester and Grace Jones. Tony was tragically murdered in 1998 in what people believe to be a homophobic hate crime. Since then, Tony’s uncle, Apolinar, embraced the family sound system as its lead sonidero, taking Polymarchs on the road in a massive truck with Tony’s face painted on one its sides.
On December 31st, hundreds of thousands of old and new legions of ravers, interlopers, and politicians proved just how famous Polymarchs is. Though many sonideros like Apolinar Silva have been sidelined or even repressed by local governments, this new guard of politicians are eager to celebrate them as a pillar of popular culture. And Polymarchs’s baroque New Year performance might be an indicator of where the ruling party’s aesthetic sensibility is headed.
Not everyone is happy with the recent change in tune.
Mexico City footed the bill for The Largest Discotheque in the World, which cost 12 million pesos (or around $600,000 USD) to stage, making it one of the most expensive spectacles to date. The event was mired in controversy from the outset. Opposition leaders claimed that the government contract was corrupt, given that Apolinar Silva’s daughter serves as a spokesperson for the president (the government was forced to respond.)
Others took to social media to express their discontent. “Musically speaking, the Polymarchs party is equivalent to a welfare check or financial aid,” read a viral tweet. “All [Polymarchs’ music] says about us is that CDMX is a city of nacos1,” wrote Mexican TV actress Laisha Wilkins.
Fans responded to critics simply: they just hate to see us happy.
Other than being historic in budget, production scope, and attendance, Polymarchs’ performance also marked a hard pivot from the City’s unsavory policies towards public sound systems, usually helmed by sonideros or “soundmen” — multi-hyphenate musical talents, engineers, producers, and orators that have hosted popular dance parties since the 1950s.
Just a few years back, the City’s mayor Miguel Ángel Mancera of the PRD party attempted to ban these gatherings altogether. During this period2, the government exacerbated police presence at forums, sending grenadiers to disperse the large gatherings. Joyce aka Sonidera MX, a prominent sonidera in the scene, once likened this form of government repression to “feeling like one is undocumented in their own country.”
More recently, in early 2023, the bulldozing, four-wheeling wielding council member, Sandra Cuevas, sent her cronies to violently dismantle Sonido Sincelejo’s humble musical apparatus in the Santa María La Ribera neighborhood. Sincelejo usually plays cumbia and danzón to a crowd of elderly residents in the neighborhood’s public square. At the time, residents danced in protest, holding tiny bluetooth speakers into the air.
Much has changed in the two years since the Santa María incident or Miguel Angel Mancera’s reign of terror. For starters, Mancera is no longer in office and the polemic Sandra Cuevas switched her allegiance from the dying PRD to the dominant Morena party and then defected. Founded in 2011 by former president Andrés Manuel López Obrador (2018-2024), Morena is currently led by Claudia Sheinbaum, a polarizing figure in Mexican politics whose management of the tariff war and stick-it-to-Trump3 attitude has earned her fans outside of the country’s borders. At home, she boasts an impressive 85% approval rating after being sworn-in just last October. Also under Morena’s giant, burgundy mantle is Clara Brugada, who succeeded Claudia Sheinbaum as the capital’s mayor after her stint as representative of the borough of Iztapalapa — a neighborhood famous for birthing some of the most famous cumbia ensembles in the country and sonidero communities.
Since its ascendance to power, many have argued that Morena follows the political and cultural playbook of its most influential political predecessor, the PRI party, which ruled Mexico for over 70 years. This includes a centralized approach to the state, virtual control over congress, writing and rewriting of “Moral Charters,” a constant redefining of what is Mexican identity, and plenty of opportunities to publicly rally in support of the party.
There are some notable differences in the ways in which these parties approach “culture” and its relation to “mexicanness.” While the PRI funded muralists and created cultural institutions aimed towards increasing literacy and safeguarding the budding mythology of the Mexican stateMorena has reduced funding for cultural institutions to fund social programs, re-worked Mexico’s most famous literary press into a former shell of itself, and recast Mexican identity in its image –– which is still nebulous considering its power stems from a multi-party, ideologically diverse coalition. The country's current cultural conflict is primarily defined by class and the factors that determine one's access to culture based on their socioeconomic standing.
Historically, sonideros have existed and flourished on the margins of “high culture” and in physical spaces (neighborhoods, dancehalls, and streets) peripheral to political interests. Relegated to the realm of subculture, sonideros have made enormous contributions to music, graphic design, dance, and engineering, emerging as cultural bastions for the working class.
Prior to the advent of social media, sonideros also pioneered a cross-cultural, transnational exchange that has shaped Mexican diasporic world-building in the United States4. Today, it’s just as easy to go to a baile in the Mexican state of Puebla as it is to attend one in Staten Island, New York. Given sonideros’ long-time ability to organize across borders, I shouldn’t have been surprised when I saw several of them operating the sound system through which Morena militants rallied in support of the party in the New York borough of Queens. Back in 2022, local Morena supporters pontificated to a crowd in the hundreds about the virtue of López Obrador’s political movement — their voice amplified by sonideros themselves. Outside of Mexico, sonideros already hold the literal aux cord for Morena’s political, cultural, and moral project.
In the past six years, Morena has executed a savvy communications strategy. Daily morning press conferences hosted by the president are broadcast digitally, making them accessible to everyone, including Mexicans living outside of the country. Political campaigning largely takes place over TikTok, a platform that boasts 74.1 million daily active users in Mexico alone. Recently, Morena launched a podcast, La Moreniza, where young party militants express their views on “current events.” An army of pro-party “political commentators” also host daily news shows that have amassed hundreds of thousands of followers on YouTube.
Much like the Republican Party’s embrace of WWE, Kayfabe, and a growing alternative media ecosystem, Morena has aligned itself with signifiers of popular Mexican culture that are anti-elite. This includes sonideros.
In the fall of 2023, Mexico City declared that sonideros were part of the City’s intangible cultural patrimony and presented a plan that allows for the preservation, protection, and dissemination of sonidero culture for the present and future. While the mea-culpa approach to years of violent repression appears to be a triumph, I am suspicious of what government appropriation of a subversive mobile sound system community does to sonidero culture itself.
After years of interviewing sonideros based in Mexico City and New York and attending myriad bailes, I was always struck by how inclusive the movement is. Everyone gets a shout-out from the individual behind the light rig. No one is spared from the sharp lasers, smoke machines, the thumping bass, or the dancefloor –– especially if you don’t actually know how to dance5. Just as sonideros engage their audiences with personalized shoutouts and direct participation, Morena has incorporated similar tactics in its rallies, using call-and-response dynamics and populist messaging to foster a sense of belonging among supporters.
The sonidero performance is ridden with significance, including nods to party-goers, groups, musical traditions, time periods, spaces, and places. Outside of Mexico’s borders, sonideros pioneered a new way to engage with the Mexico of the mind, producing a new lexicon of national aesthetics rooted in the imagination. As Morena looks to the sonidero in search of its own visual and sonic identity, capitalizing on “cultural issues” in the realm of class divides, a polarization, and unrelenting violence, I’m interested in seeing how this aesthetic will cohere in the era of soundman politics.
Notes from the mental miscellanea:
The Texas Rangers accidentally made caps that say “Tetas.6” I bought it.
A mass crematorium was found in the Mexican state of Jalisco and the country’s general prosecutor said that “it is not credible that a situation of this nature would not have been known by the municipal and state authorities.” To quote my friend María Guillén: the situation was probably known. Mexico has been at war for years; and authorities have no intention of ending it, but rather managing it. And one of the ways to manage it is to normalize it.
In a twisted turn, the US government renamed the CBP One app to CBP Home, with a new option to “self-deport.”
I lived it: I listened to the worst remix of “Intro” by The xx set to the tune of Eminem’s “Lose Yourself” during a spin class.
It’s been almost year and I still only want to listen to The Durutti Column’s “Party (The Version).”
My brother asked me if MJ Lenderman was “a podcast.”
The future of Vita Chronicles
I’ll be sending missives once (and sometimes twice!) a week. You can expect me to cover Mexico City’s public life, the New York City of the mind, things I find on the internet, music, and theories about nationalism that are hopefully legible. This Saturday, I’m heading to an “emo march” in downtown Mexico City, marking the infamous 2008 clash between emos and punks. The confrontation grew so intense that hundreds of local cops were deployed, but in the end, it was the Hare Krishnas who managed to restore peace.
Until then,
Vita
“Naco” as in “trashy” is pejorative Mexican slang with class connotations.
Part of the sonidero resistance was chronicled in the excellent 2018 documentary, “Yo no soy guapo.”
Sheinbaum brings a stick-it-to Trump-without-alienating-Trump vibe to foreign policy that people seem to dig.
Me.
“Tetas” means boobs, by the way.
thanks for sharing vita <3