The Fonki Hole
A Story of the Underground Mexican 70s Rock & Roll Scene
You wake up on a sunny day in early September. It’s 1971 and you just turned 21. Your family is from Oaxaca, the colorful state on the pacific coast of Mexico, but your parents moved to the capital. Your father listens to “trios” (bolero-style music, most commonly played by three men with guitars and lyrics so romantic that even Frank Sinatra would be put to shame). Your mother is too busy handling her side business to listen to music. You listen to rock & roll - the music genre that made your father regret injecting his love of music to you.
You listen to rock from both the United States and the UK: The Doors, Emerson, Lake & Palmer, Pink Floyd, David Bowie and so on, but you are also into Mexican rock. But what was Mexican rock at this time? Well, it was not so different from what was happening in the U.S. During the '60s, a lot of Mexican musicians were making Spanish versions of classic songs like “Good Golly, Miss Molly” by Little Richard or “Bony Moronie” by Larry Williams, and during the late '60s and early '70s rock bands in Mexico decided to go down the progressive rock route. The likes of “La Tribu”, “Los Dug Dugs”, “La Revolución de Emiliano Zapata” and “Three Souls in my Mind” are as trippy and funky as you would expect bands of this era to be. These Mexican rock bands undoubtedly took inspiration from the classic anglo-speaking bands; they did a great job at keeping their Latin American essence intact. Some bands who mixed prog rock with symphonic and Mexican indigenous music would go as far to be known as “etno rock.”
From Left to Right: La Revolución de Emiliano Zapata, Los Dug Dug’s, Three Sous in My Mind & Bandido
The Mexican rock scene, led by Carlos Santana, gained a lot of popularity around the early '70s. Conservative groups began to worry about the influence that this music had on the young and the restless. They were reminded of student movements that took place in 1968 when demonstrations led to the disappearance or death of a significant number of young students at the hands of the government.
Back in your room, your older sister comes in and sits next to you. She is the main reason why you are into music, literature, and cinema. She studied philosophy at Mexico’s biggest public university, responsible for breeding hardcore free and progressive thinkers and one of the roots of the 1968 student movements. She lost friends during the demonstrations.
Your sister tells you about a festival that will be happening on the 10th and 11th of September. The location is a three-hour drive north of Mexico City, in a mountain town surrounded by beautiful woodland. Originally called the “Festival de Música y Ruedas Avándaro,” the event was conceived as a car race, with musical acts scattered throughout the program, but word spread and quickly it morphed into Woodstock's younger, bigger, wilder cousin.
She is planning to hitchhike with a group of friends and asks you to come. Sounds like an intense trip so you pass on the invitation.
A week later, she tells you wild tales about music, dancing, weed and mescaline, but also brings news that would have an impact on Mexican rock music for the rest of the decade…
The Festival Rock y Ruedas de Avándaro became one of the biggest events in the ‘70s overnight. Optimistic estimates account for half a million festival-goers who were mostly unexpected, which forced the organizers to cancel the automobile races and turn the entire circuit into a concert space. Rivers of young people who arrived by hitching a ride, without tickets, tents, or even food were part of the party, which was immortalized by the likes of Polydor records and others who recorded the event or transmitted it live on radio stations.
After three days of sharing rain, music, mud, and sweat, the festival ended– but the aftertaste would linger for years.
Photos: Archivo Pedro Meyer
The news your sister shared is confirmed by the radio; after some of the musicians challenged the government during their acts and sang about drug use, the president of Mexico, influenced by conservative politicians, decided that festivals like Avándaro could incite bigger movements and threaten the status quo. He not only banned large music events but orchestrated a series of actions to halt rock music abruptly: radio stations were prohibited from transmitting it, record labels were pushed to stop publishing albums, and well-known rock producers left the country.
Mexican rock music was censored and pushed into exile.
Fast forward 10 months. You and your sister are walking back from the movie theater and, for the first time in a long time, she talks about rock music without becoming sad about the government prohibition. She tells you about a place she went to where rock music has been hidden and kept alive. These places, mostly homed in abandoned theaters or clandestine bars, were known as “Hoyos Fonki” or “Funky Holes.” The underground of the underground in the '70s.
She invites you to the next gig with her friends on Saturday night. This time you accept.
That night, you hop in your sister’s friend’s car and drive to an unknown location. They hand you a beer and everyone smokes weed while the non-designated driver navigates. The radio is playing Cumbia.
You arrive at el Hoyo Fonki. The venue looks dead from the outside and, even during the daytime, you wouldn’t come near it. It is a big three-story house. The windows have been spray-painted and the only apparent entrance is a thick metal garage gate for cars, with a cutout door for people. One of the girls in your group knocks on the door and you hear a voice asking who you are. The girl mumbles something and the door opens.
You pass through the garage, then the kitchen, and enter a long hallway that leads to a cloud of smoke. Every step takes you deeper into a stench of sweat, weed, and vomit. The lights are barely helpful but you follow the voices of a group of people at the end of the hall. You realize that this place is definitely not dead.
When you arrive in the main room of the house, a big crowd of people shows itself. The air is thick and it does not smell right. No music is playing and all you can hear is murmuring. Your sister gets you a beer from one of the corners of the room where they keep bottles cold in buckets of water. She smiles and tells you not to worry because the band will start playing any moment now. This place is the purest form of a shithole but you trust her.
After a 20-minute wait, your fear slowly turns into excitement. Some lights point to what pretends to be the stage. You finally get a grasp of the number of people in the room and see that the crowd is five times bigger than you originally thought. The speakers begin to screech and, suddenly, the noise of guitar chords slowly takes over; the amps spit a melody that gives you goosebumps and you are instantly hypnotized.
Photo: Source Unknown
You are smiling uncontrollably for the bands that promised a Latin American music revolution are not dead. They were hiding. Hiding from a government that didn’t hesitate to kill when it felt the youth were getting out of control. Who banned a whole cultural movement out of fear. Remembering that makes you appreciate the music being played even more but, most importantly, makes you respect the kids who are weaving sounds with their instruments. In a country where the people who raise their voices disappear, these musicians are the truest of rebels, the toughest of punks.
You go to sleep that night thinking about the fact that music is unstoppable.
Rock music in Mexico remained hidden throughout the '70s. The genre didn’t make a commercial come back until the 1980s when bands in other countries were filling massive stadiums and selling ridiculous amounts of albums. These factors probably motivated interested parties in Mexico to rethink their priorities.
Without Hoyos Fonkis, rock music shaped by '60s non-conformists and revolutionaries would have died, and the messages of freedom in a country that had to fight for it in repeated times would have disappeared. The fight lived through rock music and rock music lived through beautiful shitholes.
Feel inspired and want to know more about Mexican rock? Listen to our Funky Hole playlist below!