- Post date
- 25 Mar 2018
- Caption
- I am cleaning up my long-neglected blog (I guess I had one) and I found this post from 2015 which in some ways is the first proto-post for this IG account. This flyer is part of Octavio De La Torre’s superb flyer collection from the Tijuana music scene (1990s and forward). I chose to share this one as this gig that took place in 1993! To highlight the following: 1.While the Blockade against Cuba is still around, globally this policy has long crumbled. Nonetheless, the thawing in US-Cuba relations and Cuba’s own internal dynamics are transforming Cuba into something yet unknown.
2. The Ché Café Collective continues to fight off permanent closure as part of UCSD’s corporatization of every single student or independent run space or enterprise. Just like every single youth/music created space.
3. As we can see in this flyer, Kaos from Mexicali and Tijuana’s Mercado Negro (both Baja’s hardcore institutions), along with Liberated Youth from SD were scheduled to perform. The line-up in this gig is proof of that time when the Borderlands had a very active —and politicized— youth-oriented music scene, in which the scene’s participants continuously played or attended shows in either side of the border. These types of shows became much more difficult after 9-11 as the U.S. began to require “foreign, non-immigrant” musicians to have a “work permit” to perform in the U.S. regardless that many of these musicians could cross legally as visitors to San Diego with the Border Visas. These eventually diminished the movement of bands to both sides of the border.
Nonetheless, I refuse to end this with “See? The old days were better,” adage as we know that the flow of music in the borderlands among members of different youth cultures persists and continues in other ways and other sites. As a coda, I add now (2018) that all these flyers/photos/videos that are posted in this account give us a small, but powerful glimpse of where “we” (as in people like us in the past) as a collective have been before, what we have created and what “we” (as in people now and in the future) can build upon, imagine and create places, spaces, music, art, happenings, communities, and futures.
- Location
- Che Café Collective
- Type
- flyer
- View on Instagram
- https://www.instagram.com/p/Bgxe3qcHqY5/
- View on Internet Archive
- https://archive.org/details/199304171000_201906