On a typical Saturday night, thousands of American teenagers flood Tijuana's Revolucion Avenue in search of the kind of fun they can't find at home. The legal drinking age here is 18, not that anyone bothers to check. There are hookers. And drugs. And there's a rumor that if you know the right people, a particularly exotic combination of both can be arranged without too much of a hassle. When the sun goes down, the crowds thicken outside the 80-odd cantinas along the avenue, and pulsing jock-rock mingles with the aroma of stale beer and fresh vomit to form Revolucion's unmistakable atmosphere. "This is what the world knows of Tijuana," says Pepe Mogt, 31, smiling at the drunken humanity sprawled out before him. "It gives us a lot of material."
What Mogt makes of it is called nortec, a new breed of music that mixes traditional Mexican norteno and tambora riffs on the accordion, tuba and drums with electronica. In the two years since nortec was born, it has become the dominant sound of Tijuana's cool set. But in the same way that rock 'n' roll is more than just the sum of a few chords, nortec has expanded well beyond some creative samples and a break beat. Graphic artists, fashion designers and filmmakers have been inspired to shrug off Tijuana's reputation as a cultural void and address the contrary realities of a place that's neither First World nor Third World; a culture that is neither Mexican nor American; an economy propelled by the dual engines of drug traffic and high-tech maquiladoras; a large, stable middle class sandwiched between grotesque poverty and excessive narco wealth. The goal, simply, is to transform the strangeness of Tijuana into art.
Like Tijuana, Pepe Mogt's musical taste is an accident of geography. Local Tijuana radio played the music of a few electronic bands, but the airwaves were mostly filled with norteno and tambora--Mexican variations on the polkas and waltzes that German farmers brought to central Mexico in the 19th century. With help from a hip uncle, Mogt discovered the sounds of Kraftwerk, New Order and Depeche Mode that were beaming in from San Diego's 91X. Soon he was crossing the border a few times a week to go to concerts and paw through the bins of San Diego's record stores. By 1986, he had scraped together enough money digging ditches and working in restaurants to buy a Yamaha Portasound and began making music with an adolescent synth band called Artefakto.
But nobody was listening. What little tolerance existed in Tijuana for electronic music was obliterated by the arrival in the early '90s of rock en Espanol, an irony-free form of hard rock. Artefakto broke up, but Mogt and his friend Melo Ruiz, 32, kept experimenting with techno and electronica under the name Fussible (foo-SEE-blay) and sending out tapes to record companies. "Our music was too strange for the Mexican labels," Mogt recalls. "They kept telling us to make it more pop or put vocals on. The European labels thought it was too old and unoriginal, because in Europe, you know, there are 300 guys doing break beats. The problem was we were trying to sound just like them."