From the parking lot of the Black Hole, an arcade in a Little Village strip mall, it seemed like an ordinary Saturday night. Guys cruised by in cars, kids zoomed past on bikes, couples walked in the street. The only sign that anything unusual was taking place was the three boys and a girl, covered in zits and Amebix patches, hitting up people for spare change, trying to scrounge together enough money to pay the arcade’s $10 cover charge. The girl was trying to sell a filthy, wadded-up dreadlock the size of a fist, displayed on a napkin on which she’d scrawled $500 o.b.o. These may have been the first white punk kids with the balls to panhandle on 26th Street.
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More than 400 kids and adults were gathered inside the arcade for the second night of Southkore, the first Latino punk festival ever held in America. Put on two weekends ago, it featured 20 bands playing punk and hardcore en espanol, including a surprise Friday-night reunion of the influential south-side band Los Crudos. Some audience members had come from just down the block, others from as far away as Nicaragua. Latino kids outnumbered whites ten to one, but in the glow of the black lights on the ceiling everyone was the same color: jaundiced. The walls were covered in cartoon Day-Glo murals and next to the stage a bank of TVs showed a scene from Santa Sangre with a guy having his penis burned off. When music wasn’t playing the room was filled with the din of arcade games and conversations in Spanish.
“One of the most important things to come out of the festival is the networking,” says Hernandez. “Now that all these bands have met each other, made connections, made friends, they can book tours nationally and play with each other.” He doesn’t think Latinos have ever truly been accepted in the white punk scene, where solidarity and connections are often taken for granted. “White punks are OK with Latinos as tokens, but the minute you want to be counted, forget it. I think we made a lot of them uncomfortable by doing this, and I think that’s wonderful. It’s important for them to get the opportunity to go to a festival where not a single song is in their language. It gives them a chance to understand, one that they may not get otherwise.”
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photos/Jim Newberry.
