In March and April of 2008, emo youth in Mexican and Latin American metropoles were vulnerable to violent, physical attacks, which the world witnessed, aghast, via YouTube. Journalists, pundits, and cultural commentators around the globe wondered, first, how to define “emo”; second, how to explain its presence in Mexico and Latin America; and third, whence such a violent reaction? This essay tackles those questions, and tries to think through emo to something more than the post-NAFTA angst to which it has been commonly ascribed in the US and Mexican media. Tracing a route from US Chicano punk and new wave, to Mexico's self-proclaimed emo youth, to Myriam Gurba's short fiction featuring southern California's Chicana dyke-punk communities, I ask how emo travels, and how these highly self-conscious and very public performances of affect speak to the intersections of race and gender in twenty-first-century Latin@ and Latin American youth culture.
