“I remember the dawns after a rainy day. The smell of damp earth, how all the animals came out: locusts, ants, spiders – all different kinds of spiders. If I wanted a sugar cane, I only had to go out and cut one. The same went for pumpkins and tomatoes. There were just three houses on the strip where I lived, the rest was all field ...”
Roberto Durán is the founder and mastermind of the Deportivo Chavos Banda, a community centre situated in Mexico City’s most populated borough, Iztapalapa, which also possesses the highest crime rate. Durán, who moved here 40 years ago when he was five, is recalling his earliest childhood memories.
When asked the same question, Fernanda Rodríguez – better known by her musical alias, MC Melodía del Santo Barrio – tells me: “I remember there being loads of frogs and toads before everything was paved. When it rained, I would come out to pick up rocks and watch them come out.”
The transition from wholly rural area to chaotic suburban sprawl has taken less than four decades and is the result of a lack of urban planning sadly characteristic of Mexico City. Of the estimated 1.8 million inhabitants of Iztapalapa, which covers an area of 117sw km, 35% live in conditions of poverty.
In a recent article in El Universal, the journalist Héctor de Mauleón states that 18% of the city’s prisoners had lived in Iztapalapa before they were jailed. In the Desarrollo Urbano Quetzalcóatl district alone — one of the most dangerous in the city, and bordering the Deportivo Chavos Banda — more than 66,000 people live in an area covering 567 blocks. De Mauleón explains: “Some 39% of the houses [in this area] have just one bedroom. Within these chaotic streets you’ll find two markets, two hospitals, five churches, 48 schools and 453 establishments selling alcohol.” Many of these establishments tiran vicio – meaning that, behind the facade of a typical corner shop, the owners also peddle all kinds of illegal drugs.
Since the former president, Felipe Calderón, declared war on the cartels in 2006, there have been tens of thousands of killings in Mexico, but the Federal District has continued to be seen as safe haven against violence by the traffickers. But in recent weeks, a spate of grizzly murders in Iztapalapa appears to have put paid to the city’s official discourse that organised crime doesn’t operate in any consistent way in the city.
Walking through the streets surrounding the Deportivo , we arrive at an alleyway that marks the boundary of a marginal area known as the Barrio Negro. Saúl, our guide, puts out an arm to stop us. “This is apache territory,” he warns. “You have to ask permission to enter.”
A different reality
The entrance to the Deportivo Chavos Banda could not be more of a contrast. It is plastered with advertisements for classes: life drawing, guitar, baking, dance, English lessons, capoeira, a beauty school, personal defence, fabric painting, zumba and kung fu – the list is endless. Inside, the first thing you see is a street post with signs that resemble road names: “Be kind”, “Respect”, “Look out for one another”, “Share”.
A kiosk in the middle of the yard serves as a shop, and to one side of that is a workout station complete with boxing ring. A designated aerobics space is being used by a group of women; from there, they can keep a watchful eye on their children in the play area.
Out front is a basketball court, and a tired-looking futból rápido pitch (a version of futsal played on synthetic turf) which, when it was unveiled more than five years ago, must have been the envy of every sports ground in Mexico City. Behind that is a pro-sized football pitch – albeit one without grass – encircled by a running track, which is always the first facility to be used each day: at around 6am, as the sky awaits the first rays of light, around a dozen women come to pace around the track.
The complex covers two and a half acres. The first of its two buildings contains a small library, an internet room and an administrative office with two signs on the window: “No gossiping” and “The only thing we don’t have here is fear.” The other, newer building is where all those advertised classes take place.
Each Saturday at 1pm, Juan Ramón Navarro teaches life drawing in the multi-use classroom. On the desk, along with some impressive sketches of faces, are several drawings of female nudes and a copy of The Labyrinth of Solitude by Mexico’s Nobel laureate for literature, Octavio Paz.
When I ask why the book is there, Navarro immediately turns to a page with a quote highlighted in yellow: “Rubén Darío, like all the other great poets, considered women to be not only an instrument of knowledge but knowledge itself. It is a knowledge we will never possess, the sum of our definitive ignorance: the supreme mystery.”
He explains: “[That is] to help my students understand why we draw female nudes. I use books as a way for my students to organise their thoughts and ideas, and clear their minds. You can’t draw if you don’t know what’s in your head, or if you don’t let it flow unobstructed.”
Maximiliano Jiménez, one of Navarro’s students, is holding Michael Ende’s book, The Legend of the Full Moon. “I’m not saying this because the maestro is here, because I’d never say anything I don’t think, but what I’ve learned more than anything from him isn’t how to draw, but how to look, to observe different realities – to see the world through different eyes.”
Jiménez is 19, and Navarro, his tutor, just 27. Helping the local Iztapalapa community to see the world through different eyes is precisely the goal of Deportivo Chavos Banda, whose next project is to build a cinema room.
“I’d like this venue to form part of the city’s main cultural line-up,” says Durán, better known as El Flaco (meaning “Lanky”). “What we do here doesn’t just have an effect on the people who come: it helps to change mentalities further afield. The young men and women who come here see that things can be different, that they can be done properly. They’re free to be themselves here and explore their talents, which means they go back out there with a new attitude.”
It’s not only young men and women who use the Deportivo. In addition to the women who start their day striding around the football pitch, older women can also attend classes. When we drop in on a fitness session, the female instructor, displaying some of the lively spirit you find all over the centre, shouts: “Come on, slackers! I want to see you opening and closing those legs as if these boys were on top of you.”
Gang culture
Despite being known colloquially as the Deportivo Chavos Banda, the initials BUI are engraved on one of the pillars at the main entrance. The full name, Bandas Unidas Iztapalapa (United Gangs of Iztapalapa), carries both symbolic and historical weight: the Deportivo is the outcome of a pact between Iztapalapa’s gangs, who organised themselves firstly to call a truce in the face of the street crime that was ravaging the area in the late 80s and early 90s; and secondly, to demand that the government provide them with a space where they could gather, away from the violence. The plot was a wasteground that served as a boundary line between two of the area’s most violent gangs: Los Dragones (“The Dragons”) and Las Ratitas Punk (“The Punk Rats”).
But to fully understand the gang phenomenon in Mexico City, one must go back to the start of the 1980s, the decade in which the best known gang of all, Los Panchitos (heavily influenced by New York punk band The Ramones), was at its height, spreading terror and disorder among the city’s more comfortable and conservative classes. Carlos Hank González – who coined the phrase “A poor politician is a bad politician” – was then the city’s governor; he pulled off some wildly lucrative deals, developed a vast network of arterial roads known as ejes viales, and simultaneously demolished most of the streets with central reservations, setting in motion a public policy that still snubs pedestrians and cyclists to this day.
The chief of police was Arturo “El Negro” Durazo, infamous for his fierce politics of extortion and torture, and who would later be imprisoned for eight years (Durazo was linked to major drug traffickers such as Rafael “Caro” Quintero). Back then, many young people in Mexico, a country perpetually lacking in opportunities, discovered in gangs what they found nowhere else: a sense of belonging and a safe haven.
Durán grew up during the height of the gang culture. “The violence inevitably catches up with you, and there’s no alternative: you have to defend yourself,” he says. “The street is the jungle, and it’s one hell of a jungle.”
It wasn’t only on the streets that Durán learned this lesson: his father showed the young Roberto that in life you should do anything but cower. Durán holds a mixture of fear and respect for his father. His own son, he says, has had a different kind of education: friendlier and more attentive, less marked by tension and violence. Yet, he is grateful to his father: “Much of what I am I owe to him.”
Between the ages of 14 and 25, Durán spent most of his time on the streets. “Being on the street with the gang means devoting yourself to vice, to wickedness,” he admits. Three things saved him from the fate of his friends, almost all of whom are now dead or in prison. Firstly, his talent on a football pitch: not only did the game sustain him financially for several years (the gangs placed bets on matches against other neighbourhoods), it allowed him to get to know people from other gangs, as his skills on the pitch were in constant demand, even from supposed rivals. Secondly: his father’s experience in the military, police force and boxing ring (he was from Tacubaya, a boxing neighbourhood), combined with Durán’s early lessons in Tae Kwon Do, made him a figure few wanted to cross.
Thirdly, and most importantly: his thirst for knowledge. A qualified lawyer, Durán is one of few Deportivo members to have gained a university degree. (Another, Mario Urbina López – a certified public accountant – is the centre’s administrator and is on the board of directors.)
“Being in the gang, I saw [school] as a kind of ‘time-out’ from the ’hood,” Durán says. “The ’hood teaches you restraint. If you spend a lot of time on the street, eventually you’re going to come across someone tougher than you, and you’re always going to be at risk. The less time you spend on the street, the less at risk you are.”
And this is the driving idea behind the Deportivo. In providing a refuge for people of all ages and offering them activities to keep them off the street, the centre represents a fundamental change for the community; a sanctuary that upsets the ecosystem of the streets. Within its walls, people can feel safe and think for themselves, two luxuries in the hood.
By 1991, Durán had become the go-to guy whenever a gang member had any kind of administrative task to take care of. Durán could hold his own with politicians, read the charges made against his friends, and answer letters.
On the day that would change his live forever, some gang members asked him to go with them to talk to Manuel Camacho Solís, Mexico City’s then chief of department (the second highest authority in the city), who was due to hold a meeting in the area. What Durán didn’t know was that the plan of that 50-strong group (“people who’d make your hair stand on end; the types you look into their eyes and know they’ve killed someone”) was to take Camacho Solís by force and demand the plot of land where the Deportivo now stands be handed over to them. Given their advantage in numbers, the official’s bodyguards could do nothing to stop them taking him.
By the time they arrived at the disused plot, the police had been notified – it required a call from Camacho Solís to reassure the forces everything was OK. Durán describes him telling the gang: “You know what, lads, I’m going to help you. I thought my days were numbered. Don’t take this the wrong way but … take a look at yourselves in the mirror!”
After coming to an agreement, Camacho Solís left – and from that moment, the Iztapalapa gangs’ collective has understood itself to be the owner of the plot. What they didn’t realise was that the government had no right to pass the land on to them: it was private property. By the time the owner found out what had happened, however, it was too late to do anything about it.
Around the time of the land grab, two of Durán’s friends were killed in clashes with rival gangs – one “in a fight where [the gang] split into two groups. I went with one and he with the other, where he was fucked up real bad. They really butchered him: a hundred bullets all over his body. They ripped open his stomach, but they didn’t kill him there. He died in front of us, desperate with no way of saving him, about 10 minutes later. Heavy shit.”
The other friend had been standing on a street corner waiting for Durán, who didn’t show up because he decided at the last minute to go with another friend who wanted to settle a score with a guy who had stolen his girlfriend. “I don’t know what would have happened if I’d have been there. I guess they would have done the same to me as they did to him, to make sure there were no witnesses or something. He was killed brutally, too.”
Political deals
Strictly speaking, the land on which the Deportivo stands is still illegally occupied – but few spaces can have been appropriated for more honourable purposes: a privately-owned former rubbish dump, used by the gangs to host their ruckuses, now belongs to the community and provides hundreds of local people with services that would otherwise be unavailable; unthinkable, even.
Since the land belonged neither to the government nor its occupants, however, for a long time any federal support had to be kept under wraps. In those days, the conservative Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) served as an extension of the government, carrying out the functions the state couldn’t authorise.
Durán remembers that institutional relations were almost always with the PRI, who, in exchange for being allowed a presence at official events, or, worse still, for clandestine services as agitators, provided them with building materials, put up temporary classrooms, and even donated cans of spray paint, once the Deportivo had begun to be considered an important centre for urban art. To justify their purchase, the paint was in the colours of the PRI: green, white, red and black.
On one occasion, the Deportivo received a donation of 10,000 cans, which “we took to stationers and paint shops in the neighbourhood to exchange for cans in all different colours”, says Durán. “Two of ours for one of theirs.” Once they realised they had enough cans to paint the entire Deportivo, they had their first brainwave: they would organise a graffiti expo, with ska and hip-hop concerts to liven things up.
For 17 years, Expo Chavos Banda was one of the most important cultural and musical events in the city – although, of course, due to its location and profile, it was always considered “underground”. The graffiti artist Taria remembers: “You had to be in line at seven in the morning to get a tiny part of a wall to paint, but it didn’t matter, all the artists wanted to be there. It was worth the early start too, because the rest of the day you just messed around with the others.”
Koka Lep, now an internationally recognised graffiti artist, recalls being invited to one of the expos to do a mural, “because they knew I painted well, and I was into painting with aerosols”. The result was so spectacular that Koka hasn’t been out of work since, becoming one of the city’s first professional urban artists.
But still the Deportivo had to think on its feet to survive. Despite benefiting from some public funding, such as the money received for several years via the neighbourhood improvement community programme, it has had to come up with its own fundraising methods to survive in the face of the discretionary, arbitrary and sometimes corrupt use of public money in Mexico.
The UN awarded a grant of $10,000 for the airbrushes needed to set up the first workshop, and the Deportivo has received support from other international institutions, such as Deutsche Bank and the Inter-American Development Bank. But partnerships such as with Fundación Alumnos 47 (FA47) – a Mexico City-based foundation that has contributed to the construction of the building where classes are held – have been key to the development of the Deportivo, even if they don’t always manifest themselves directly in improvements to the centre.
A few years ago, FA47 sponsored a draft bill to make the Deportivo a self-sustaining and ecological centre – but lack of resources meant it never got off the ground. In front of the main entrance is a wall full of political propaganda: “More support for urban artists,” it reads. But as with most things related to Mexican politics, the facade appears little more than an empty promise.
Oasis of opportunity
Today, the Agrarista district that includes Deportivo Chavos Banda is labelled by the police as a “red spot”. This means that undercover police enter the Deportivo, and that operations and arrests take place across the whole district.
The battle between the people of Iztapalapa and the law enforcement agencies goes back further than anyone can remember, and it’s not always the police who win. On one occasion, mounted police officers were stripped of their uniforms and horses after beating one of the members of the “Los Chupones” gang. A senior commander had to come along to negotiate the animals’ return (“we held on to the uniforms just to piss them off,” Durán tells me).
Conscious of this ancient antagonism, and of the fact that the police are often complicit in all kinds of crimes, the Expo Chavos Banda exhibitions are self-policed. “Of course, people can bring along their beers or their joints, but if they cross the line, it’s us who handles it.” How? “With a little slap on the wrist,” says Durán, with a wry smile that belies his understatement.
No stranger to this disciplinary approach is Óscar Flores Carranza, better known as “Zaga”, a founding member of the hip-hop group Santísimo Barrio and producer of one of the most important rap events in Mexico, Retumba el Barrio.
Zaga had been toying with the idea of approaching Durán for some time before finally getting his chance during one the graffiti expos: “One time there was an expo and they didn’t have a master of ceremonies, and since I’ve always had a way with words, I did it. That day they invited me for a beer, as a kind of payment. But I’d had one too many by then and I was really fucking out of it.”
Zaga thought that he’d ruined his chances of taking part in the next expo – but not long after, the city’s governor announced a competition to write a song in any genre, using the open government information services at their disposal. Durán asked Zaga to take part, and Santísimo Barrio won the competition.
Both Zaga and MC Melodía, the only woman in the group and one of very few in Mexico’s hip-hop scene, devote a good part of their lives to the hip-hop collective, but they’re more motivated by the idea of using music to help others in their community.
“I get the gang kids. I don’t justify their behaviour, but I get that that’s how they grew up. They haven’t had any option,” says Melodía, despite having herself been threatened by gangs. The boss of a zone she once wandered into without authorisation held her at gunpoint: “It was pretty heavy at first, but then a guy I know came along and recognised me, and he managed to calm things down. We even stayed talking with them there once things were cool. It’s weird, but things can change from one minute to the next like that.”
Both teach at the Deportivo, and go to a lot of effort to make time for the people who approach them. “Music helped us to channel our emotions and experiences,” Zaga says, “and in the workshops I’ve been able to connect with a lot of brothers and sisters that way. There’s a lot of mutual understanding in the classes, and that makes kids want to follow our lead. They see it doesn’t have to be all madness and beef.”
While music was the precursor to everything the Deportivo Chavos Banda is today, the musical events there were not always artistically driven. In 1995, Durán organised the first event called Misa Rock (Rock Mass). It was a reaction to what Durán had seen happening in a rival neighbourhood called Las Espinas (“The Thorns”), where every year a gig was held to mark the anniversary of the gang that controlled the area. Durán didn’t want to hold an event celebrating the culture of violence, but rather one that reflected upon its consequences.
“When I first told them about my idea of putting on a rock concert including a mass for the dead, the imprisoned and the disappeared, the gang were sceptical, but others were up for it and we went for it.”
The only person capable of leading such an event was Padre Chinchachoma, described as, “an angelic bastard, a dude well and truly on another level”. Fr Chinchachoma spoke to the ’hood in their language, and they “spoke to him with a respect they didn’t even show their own father”.
According to urban legend, Chinchachoma had been excommunicated from the Catholic Church – but during Misa Rock, he managed to tame between 1,500 and 2,000 punks who had come for the gigs. “Fr Chinchachoma understood that you can’t come around here if you don’t respect how the gang is. And he was respectful.
“How do you deal with the gang? Exactly how he did. He began mass by saying, ‘Put down your weed, put down your beer, put down your sniff, and you’re going give the boss a few minutes of your time.’ Then he’d talk to the gang in their language, and they all listened. I watched the hardest punks hold each other’s hands during the sign of peace, on their knees. A crazy catharsis fell over the place, and you watched even the hardest among them in tears. That’s when you realise that the gang has stuff going on in their heart, just no way of getting it out.”
Despite being universally recognised as an oasis of opportunities in a desert, the excesses of some events at the Deportivo have raised eyebrows among some locals. And yet, the general view is overwhelmingly positive. “In the end, I learned the hard way that peace is respecting the rights of others, and that is what we try to instil here, especially in the new generations,” says Durán. “We never know what talent we might be uncovering.”
According to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, Mexico has the worst levels of education among its members. And education in Mexico isn’t just bad; it’s also a luxury. In 2015, the National Autonomous University of Mexico, the country’s most highly celebrated educational institution, accepted just 8.9% of applicants. Of the 128,519 students who took the entrance exam, only 11,490 were given a place. The educational and formative work of centres offering an alternative to formal education is essential in a country where 54 million people live below the poverty line.
In this context, the Deportivo constitutes a rare space where there’s room for all. Nowhere is the importance of this outlook clearer than in a figure like Juan Carlos Martínez Martínez, aka El Vampiro (“The Vampire”), a five-time district champion of the bar – a sport that combines weights, gymnastics and circus acrobatics, and which originates from the country’s prisons.
El Vampiro is a leading figure in this sport, and has played a major role in the transformation of personalities like El Gato (“The Cat”), an 18-year-old boy who has just finished a three-year prison sentence for assault with a firearm.
“I don’t exclude the gang boys,” El Vampiro says. “Imagine one of these fellas comes up to you high as a kite and he wants to try the bar; I’m not going to judge him or lay down rules. If someone comes along in that kind of state and you don’t let him in, well, it’s you and you alone who are blocking his chance. So I say let them come as they are, and I’ll accept them and let them have a go and support them.”
El Vampiro is another rare rehabilitation case within the Deportivo. At just 14, he enlisted in the army, where he joined the special forces. Despite his military background, not only did El Vampiro not leave the street gang, but his status, discipline and military knowledge gave him a power that for many years he used for violent purposes. “I was like the gang’s attack dog,” he tells me, before confessing to having had a brutal alcohol and drug addiction before his “problem” – a common euphemism for prison.
“Prison is the best thing that can happen to a drug addict, because you can do what you like there. No one is going to judge you and there are no limits,” says El Vampiro, adding that he lived amid permanent overcrowding, “and that’s serious shit, because there’s nowhere to run in there. If you get into any kind of argument one night, you have to get back to your yard – no matter what.”
“What prison gives you is all the time in the world,” says Héctor Solís, a fellow member of El Vampiro’s bar team. Solís lost three years of his life in the Reclusorio Sur (South Prison) and, like El Vampiro, he used the bar as a means to pass the time. “It destressed me, kept me out of trouble and away from temptation, because there’s a permanent tension in there. Your life is in the balance every second of every day. You never know when a look, the wrong gesture, someone’s bad trip can wind up finishing you off.”
Having brushed with death as a result of his addictions, El Vampiro transformed his life thanks to his strict discipline at the bar. Today, he’s almost twice the weight he was on entering prison (45kg), and he spends his time helping to rehabilitate addicts and anyone who wants to promote the sport to which he is devoted, and the place he considers home, Deportivo Chavos Banda.
View from afar
Having seen the inner workings of the Deportivo; having had long conversations with its founders, participants and protagonists, I felt there there was still one angle missing before I could understand the implications of a space in a place like Iztapalapa: a panoramic view.
Guided by Roberto Domínguez, known in the neighbourhood as Tablota (“Plank”) for his imposing stature and physique, we set out from the Deportivo at 6am to catch the sunrise from the top of the Molcajete hill. Saúl and Moisés, the music teacher, join our convoy headed for the border of Iztapalapa and Tláhuac.
We park up in front of an immense altar where Our Lady of the Holy Death and a picture of Jesús Malverde (also known as the angel of the poor, and the unofficial patron saint of drug traffickers) rest side by side. There we wait for Güero, Tablota’s younger brother, and his uncommonly affectionate and timid pitbull, Tomás. Then we walk through a district that, like so many in Iztapalapa, looks like a building site, before eventually arriving at the foot of the hill.
“Look at the floor, pure fucking gravel – that’s why they’re tearing the hill to pieces,” Tablota explains, as we wind our way through the undergrowth. For an inexpert walker, gravel is only a slightly lesser version of quicksand. The climb puts intermittent stops to the team’s banter as we are forced to catch our breath.
As the day unfolds, and light tones of pink and blue begin to mark out the surrounding contours, we see that on one side of our route up is a huge chasm, caused by the machines that continually extract building material from this hill. “At this rate, in a few years, adiós hill!” Güero says.
The climb isn’t without its hazards: a few wobbles near the thousand-metre sheer drop mean the group’s jokes are replaced by a supportive silence. In the distance, a myriad twinkling lights shine like the burning embers of a dying fire. When we reach the top, the light seems to bend in the sky, and a deceptive sense of harmony engulfs the landscape.
“See over there? That’s the lost city in San Juan. It looks like a Brazilian favela, properly dense. And look over there. That’s the Frente Francisco Villa. Some parts of that district are fenced,” Güero tells me. “To protect them from thieves?” I ask. “No! More like the rats fence them in.”
Our spectacular view is misleading: in the surrounding districts, life is anything but harmonious. The clear signs of further sprawl and overcrowding make it harder to breathe: the air seems to thicken. But then, turning around, we notice how on the other side of this small, slowly crumbling hill, there are still green cornfields and sizeable expanses of land: a flashback to the Iztapalapa of 30 years ago, where frogs and toads hid under rocks, and Mexican salamanders swam in the canals formed by flooded dirt roads.
Soon it is time find a way back down the steep gravel slope. Tablota has been anticipating this moment since the start of the expedition, so we grant him the honour of being the first down. The image of a bulky man well over 6ft tall laughing and rolling down the slope sums up what the Deportivo has been able to do for its people: give them back their right to happiness.
Before joining the Deportivo, Tablota had been suffering from alcoholism, an addiction that landed him in prison. After a hard day’s drinking in one of the lost cities on the edge of the hill, he collapsed in the street. Hours later, he was brought back to consciousness by the emergency lights of a police car. Two young kids sprinted past him. When the police arrived at the spot where Tablota lay semi-conscious, they decided it would be him who paid the price for the robbery of an old stereo and 50 pesos, which had taken place a few blocks away.
Tablota spent a year inside, and only got out when a judge deigned to deal with his case: in the face of the flagrant absence of any evidence, he was released. . “I always wanted to belong to something, to be part of a group. Before, the only option was in the street. That’s not the case any more,” Tablota says.
All around the Deportivo Chavos Banda, individual men, women and families exist under the protection of a community that nurtures as much as it teaches its members. The capoeira teacher, for example, returns to the Deportivo many years after having attended the drawing classes that “marked [his] childhood”.
“The long-term aim is for this place to run itself; for it to have a life of its own,” Durán tells me. It is clear there is a long way to go before that dream is realised, but they’re headed in the right direction.
This revolutionary centre represents one of the few effective antidotes to the daily struggles of life in Mexico City’s suburbs – where bad planning, corruption and bouts of violence have numbed people’s faith and expectations. Beyond being a space of genuine transformation in the community, the Deportivo Chavos Banda project has reawoken a rare beast in this harsh territory: hope.
Translation by Sophie Hughes
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