Bad guys dress in costume.

Speaking of fake officials, Daniel Hernandez blogged recently (Aug. 16) about a Mexico City auto-body shop that specialized in customizing phony federal police trucks.

This week, Hernandez writes about protests in Mexico City and beyond in Intersections, one of Chicken Corner's all-time favorite blogs. Daniel "straddles the border" of city culture in the U.S. and Mexico in a ways that seem organic. Or as if there were no real border to straddle. (Except, of course, at the actual border, where the sense of leaving one country and entering another is palpable.)

In addition to blogging demonstrations against "delinquency" and corruption, Hernandez has paid close attention to anti-emo attacks in Mexican cities -- roughnecks beating up kids who dress in old-school punk rock fashion. I could be mistaken, but it seems that recently in Echo Park I have seen far fewer Latino kids with spiked hair, or long dyed black hair, black lipstick, pencil jeans. It could be a coincidence. Or maybe they've moved away. Though it seemed to me that the numbers of emo youth around here grew even as gentrification speeded up in recent years.