TIJUANA, Mexico [singlepic id=53 w=320 h=240 float=right]

TJ isn’t quite the vacation paradise it once was. Stories of drug lords besieging police stations with rocket fire, or of kidnappers mailing severed fingers to the families of their victims, have overshadowed the appeal of cheap tequila and zebra-painted donkeys.  A snapshot of the day’s news on March 28th, 2009:

A police officer’s relative executed on Bulevar 2000
A man shot in the chest at home by intruders in Real Del Mar
A motorcycle drive-by in La Presa
A dope boat intercepted 35 miles south of El Rosario
A “March Against Impunity” conducted along the border, including banners reading “DO NOT CROSS INTO TIJUANA BECAUSE YOU WILL BE KIDNAPPED.”

In a single day, enough has happened here to deter thousands of American tourists from crossing the border.  There are no güeros in sight. Just us – two discreetly dressed Stanford undergraduates pacing the empty streets and markets of the once-popular Centro, waiting for a DJ whose only lead has been “you’ll know who I am.”

We are waiting in front of a farmacía whose logo is a massive syringe piercing the crust of the earth. Discounted Prozac is prominently displayed. Across the street, gelled metrosexuals and uniformed janitors cross the border, passing between the grates of metal “roto-gates” manned by armed soldiers, a stone’s throw away from a betting parlor occupied by potbellied 60-year-olds in sombreros. For three hours we tentatively wander the neighborhood, asking anyone with distinctive hair or stylish clothing if his name is Roberto.  A little after 6:00 PM, an inconspicuous black Corolla pulls up to the curb in front of us, piloted by a thirty-something with a bright red emo comb-over.  He is not, frankly, as recognizable as he suggested.

We don’t know exactly what we’ll ask him. We do know that Roberto Mendoza, AKA Panoptica, has been a newsworthy figure since the late 1980s, when he was just a teenager in a laptop garage band; we know that he’s one of the founding members of Tijuana’s Nortec Collective, that he pioneered the city’s current love affair with ranchero/techno mash-ups, that this movement has inspired a wholesale revitalization of the Tijuana arts scene. But, to be honest, we haven’t come in with a specific line of questioning. Maybe we’ll ask something about the significance of his movement or the burgeoning success of his fellow Tijuanense artists, whose spinoff album Tijuana Sound Machine was up for a Grammy.  Roberto, on the other hand, has a definite agenda for this interview.

Roberto Mendoza:  Let me get you up to date on what’s going on.  We’re talking about Nortec Collective, right?

Irys Kornbluth:  Yeah, I mean… it    doesn’t really matter…

RM:  (interjecting) No.  I want to talk to you about that… Because we split. There is a huge fight going on.  Between me and another guy from the Nortec Collective.

IK:  Which one?

RM:  Pepe.

IK:  Pepe?

Max McClure:  Fussible?

IK:  We got the idea for this story because we saw a documentary on Pepe.  It was made a couple of years ago.

RM:  Well, a couple of years ago we were still together.  But now, it’s very, very bad.  The thing is that…I’m going to tell you the story from the beginning.

The Nortec story begins, improbably, with a loophole in the Federal Communications Commission’s regional programming regulations. Since neighboring San Diego radio stations could own only a certain number of stations in a given metropolitan area in the US, they began licensing their programming to Mexican-owned radio towers across the border.  This move eventually led to the ClearChannel Goliath dominating the newly available markets, but in the meantime it exposed a generation of Tijuanense teenagers, including Roberto, to the more obscure college radio programming of the American market – late-night electronica ranging from Karlheinz Stockhausen to Tangerine Dream.

Electronic music hadn’t yet made it big in Mexico. Indie rock had already crossed the border into clubs like Iguana’s, where Roberto remembers seeing Nirvana, Dinosaur Jr., and Sonic Youth.   But it was the late-millennium Electronic Dance Music explosion – mid-80s breakbeat, electropop, industrial – that was the real revelation to Tijuanense musicians.  It produced a string of border-based DJs, many of whom would later create the Nortec movement. Artefakto, one of the most influential electronic bands of the Tijuana techno movement, was originally a collaboration between Roberto and Pepe “Fussible” Mogt – the Pepe with whom things are now “very, very bad.”

“We all ended up telling ourselves the same thing,” Roberto says about Artefakto’s traditionalist electro sound. “It was not us, you know. It was more European.” Record labels also felt the music lacked something unique – something Mexican. Artefakto, by now called Fussible, failed to penetrate the lucrative European market largely because, as Mendoza realized, it did not sound “other” enough.
“So at the same time,” he continues, “we heard Señor Coconut [electrolatino pioneer Uwe Schmidt] and Dandy Jack [Chilean expat DJ Martin Schopf] doing versions of cha-cha-cha and mambo, and we said, ‘Why don’t we do something like that?’”

In search of a more Mexican sound, Pepe visited a Norteño recording studio, bringing back a number of rejected banda backing tracks – horn sections and tambora beats – and a vague notion to mash them with techno records in a style Roberto would call “Nor-tec.” The two, enthused by the concept, brought these recordings to the attention of Bostich, a mutual DJ friend. As the story goes, the three then presented their collected work at the birthday party of a fourth artist – Hiperboreal. The response was promising. Within weeks, Bostich had a dancehall hit with “Polaris,” and Hiperboreal joined the new movement, bringing along three other DJs – Terrestre, Plankton Man, and Clorofila. Together, these DJs called themselves the Nortec Collective, and they soon put up enough money to record a thousand copies of what they dubbed the “Nortec Sampler” – a selection of their early experimentations with the cross-cultural genre. It was at this time that Roberto began to adopt his Panoptica stage persona, separating himself from his longtime collaborator Pepe “Fussible.”

RM: We went to Mexico City and knocked on some doors, some labels, and of course everybody didn’t care about it.  But one guy, Camilo Lara from EMI, was dating this girl from a label in LA.  And she saw the record and said, ‘What’s that?’ and Camilo explained what it was.  She heard it, and said ‘Can I take this?’ and she went back home to LA and talked to [founder of Island Records and Bob Marley producer] Chris Blackwell. And the guy really liked it and said, ‘You know guys, you have to sign this.’ By that time we already had a really big following here in the city.

MMc:  Just through  playing concerts?

RM:   Yeah, and on the presentation of the first record, we invited a lot of people.  It was a huge event.  For Tijuana, it’s huge to have maybe like three, four thousand people.  So Palm Pictures took that as a good idea to bring media from the US and some places outside the US. They flew the NY Times and the LA Times to TJ for that event.  And the event was massive.  It was not only the concert, but you had art installations and shirts and clothes. With the same theme – Nortec.

The media presented the Nortec ethos as nothing less than a redefinition of Tijuanense identity. This makeover encompassed everything from the kitschy matching-suits style of Los Tigres del Norte – whose classic “Contrabando y Traición” the Collective would frequently sample in early shows – to the new narcochic that had grown out of Tijuana’s recent crime wave. Suddenly, the Collective’s shows were packed with young hipsters dressed semi-ironically in the Norteño buckle-bunny style. Lionized by the press, they were even chosen by President Zedillo to spin at the Mexican pavilion at the 2000 World’s Fair.

As we snake through the chaotic streets of La Revolución, Roberto apologizes for his tardiness – when he was leaving his house, he saw a car hit a young boy. While another onlooker beat up the driver, Roberto tried to call for an ambulance and bring attention to the unresponsive child.

“I hope that kid’s alright,” he says, nodding his hair away from his eyes. “You have to get help for this kid instead of fighting.”

Though his English is good, Mendoza speaks with a slight lisp and a Mexican accent, and he has a propensity for sudden explosive statements like “That’s stupid!” or “What the fuck is going on!” These pepper his speech as we roll up to the Transmedios Centro de Arte Multimedia, a friend’s alternative arts hub and restaurant perched on a ritzy but violence-ridden hill above the sprawling downtown.

Places like Transmedios evoke a cosmopolitan Tijuana.  As we walk into the minimalist café, the bartender, a tía-like middle-aged Mexican woman, mentions that we look very Belgian.  The walls are sprinkled with posters for something called Sonic Death Rabbit, and the trip-hop playing in the background rotates from French to Spanish to Russian.  Tucked away in a residential barrio, Transmedios reveals another side of the Tijuana art scene – quiet, refined, and eccentric.

Roberto sits across the table from us, slouching slightly.  His eyes are hidden behind sunglasses, and he seems physically worn out from spending hours mixing in the studio.

“Every time there is a band together,” he says, “there are always problems.”  He sips from a tall glass of Diet Coke and releases a sigh.  “By that time, we were just five producers, and everything was supposed to be won over by a democratic solution.”  Mendoza tells us about the Collective’s monthly meetings. The DJs would review each other’s work, giving each other both criticism and support.  He admits that, for a while, these gatherings were a breeding ground for Nortec culture and their way of making editorial decisions about joint albums.  But now he sees them as the root cause of the break-up.

“When you say, ‘I don’t like your song,’ then there will be a guy in turn who says, ‘I don’t like your song.’  I don’t think it was objective, you know.  We were evolutionarily staying in the same place, and I didn’t like that.”  This came to be a common sentiment among all the members, and Fussible and Clorofila saw this as a cue to take a break.  Roberto saw it as a copout.

RM:  For me it’s stupid, because I feel like I have this girlfriend, ‘I love you, but we need to get some time alone and then go back,’ and I’m like, ‘What the fuck are you talking about?  We’re breaking up.’  There’s no ‘Then we see other people and come back to each other.’  Come on, don’t be stupid!  You know it’s over, you know?

Instead, Roberto suggested that the band remain together, but release a series of solo albums entitled “Nortec Collective Presents.” Pepe nixed the idea. Slowly but unmistakably, what might have been a fairly typical band hiatus began moving in a more unusual direction. Roberto first noticed something was awry when he attempted to log into the group’s Myspace page. Even though he had designed and maintained the site for two years, his password no longer worked.

RM:  I was like, ‘What the fuck is going on?’  When I talked with Pepe, he said, ‘You know what, Roberto? I changed the password.’ And I was like, ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’ And he said, ‘Because I am not liking what you are doing with the page.’ And I’m like, ‘What?’

Roberto called the US label and discovered that he had been denied the rights to produce under the name Nortec Collective – at Pepe’s request. He was no longer on the band’s official roster. Perhaps most disturbingly, he found that the Collective’s newest project was to be released, with great fanfare, under the name “Nortec Collective Presents Bostich + Fussible.”

Looking to fight his imminent excision from the band, Roberto went immediately to Mexico City to secure his rights to produce under the title “Nortec.” Panoptica had coined the term in the early days of the movement, and, finding that the Collective had never copyrighted their name, he says he hoped to safeguard his own musical future.

The media, however, did not see it that way. On blogs and Mexican news sites, fans referred to Roberto as a “rat” for having “stolen the Nortec name.” Fussible and the record company threatened legal action. Roberto began receiving phone calls threatening both to burn his car and kidnap his children.

Roberto claims that Pepe was doing everything in his power to win over the media. La Frontera, Tijuana’s largest daily, ran a full-page ad endorsed by Pepe that accused Roberto of being a traitor and liar.  At this point in our conversation, Roberto’s face turns very grim.

RM:  That’s when I said to myself, ‘So the revolution begins.  I’ll see you in court, Pepe.  Fuck you.’…I always kept myself in the background, not in the spotlight, since I always tried not to be a rockstar, but just to make music, but Pepe was the one that girls go to. Whenever you talk to people they say, ‘Oh no, he’s really friendly,’ and I always say, ‘Yeah, Hitler was really friendly.’

Somewhat startled by his comment, we look to the garden behind Transmedios, where what we believe to be a sick rooster is making an ominous wheezing noise. Panoptica may have a tendency towards the histrionic, but the slow erasure of his legacy does have a dystopian feel to it – the band bureaucracy “disappearing” one of its founders after he strays from Nortec orthodoxy.

The furor has calmed down in recent months. Roberto remained silent in the immediate aftermath of the breakup, taken aback by the intensity of the initial onslaught. More than anything, it was this reluctance to appear before a hostile press corps that both ended the feud in the public eye and decided it, definitively, in favor of Fussible. Nevertheless, Roberto is starting to stage a belated counteroffensive. He has begun blitzing local media outlets, interviewing with Rolling Stone Mexico, amd touring with a live band as the Nortec Panoptica Orchestra (under a legal use of the coveted Nortec name). It is only because of his all-or-nothing approach to PR that we even secured this interview.

As he puts it, Roberto is not looking to destroy his former bandmates. He respects their talent and sees the possibility of reconciliation. But, as he puts it, “I have to put my fist on Pepe’s face first, have to beat him up. After that, I can help him up.” The man who was both his friend and collaborator for 15 years is now the object of his contempt – and not merely because of his legal machinations. Roberto sees nothing of value in the commercial direction on which Pepe has staked the Collective’s future. Latinized bubblegum pop like Fussible’s “Tijuana Makes Me Happy” “does not,” he says, “make me happy.” Somewhere in the fight, Mendoza has lost respect for the man who, by all accounts, is Nortec’s rock star.

Roberto doesn’t believe that anybody is to blame for the current dilemma, though he does attribute part of the mess to the music industry. He believes their label mishandled the group – particularly the Collective’s international rights. The disconnect between the American and Mexican music industries made it difficult for the Collective to consistently protect their work and name, a problem that became apparent when Roberto and Fussible simultaneously claimed rights to the Nortec name in the two different countries. In retrospect, the very loopholes that set the stage for the movement have estranged its musicians.

“Making music is great,” Roberto says. “But everything around it is bad.”

As it gets dark, we’re joined by a friend of Roberto’s named José, the man who owns and runs Transmedios. He takes us to the building’s spacious backyard with a striking view of the neon breadboard that makes up midtown. Roberto’s hands are clasped behind his back. In this backyard, the owner explains, a group of teenagers used to make bonfires out of marijuana, and yesterday, a man was shot down the street.  When he heard the gunshots, José locked himself in the house for 12 hours until he felt it would be safe to go outside again.

“But it’s a good house,” he says.