MEXICAN MODS HELPED RESHAPE THE CARTEL-RAVAGED CITY OF TIJUANA!
It’s Saturday night at Moustache, a small bar in downtown Tijuana. Every month, mods from the local Baja crew throw the Tijuana a Go-Go party here, spinning James Brown, ? and the Mysterians, and the 13th Floor Elevators to a crowd of skinheads, suedeheads, rude boys, and Mexican mods. If it wasn’t for the green-haired girls standing outside, drinking 40s out of brown paper bags, we could easily be in some London basement club 50 years ago.
But this is a relatively recent sight. Not so long ago, Tijuana was the front line in a vicious inter-cartel turf war; close to 500 people were murdered here in the last three months of 2008 alone. And even if you weren’t directly involved, you’d inevitably end up affected in some way: Kidnappings and public gun battles were a regular occurrence, and drug gangs would often hang their victims from bridges—or simply pile up their bodies in the streets—as a threat to their adversaries. Tijuana, a border city that’s long relied on the US tourist trade, quickly became somewhere that no tourist would ever want to visit.
However, while American college kids stopped coming down to Tijuana to get shitfaced on cheap tequila, locals and longtime nightlife regulars kept partying, opening bars and restaurants for themselves and their friends. Six years later, with the annual body count cut in half, it’s these individuals who have helped to reshape Tijuana into the cultural landmark it is today. Among them were the city’s mods, who carried on hosting club nights despite all the violence around them…
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