Shout Out Nestor!

When I was making Una Esquina del Mundo in 2001, a forty-minute black-and-white portrait of a nineteen-year-old Mexican American growing up in Southeast Los Angeles, with roots stretching back to Pico-Union, Sinaloa, and Nayarit, Mexico, I had an idea for the main character, Rudy. I wanted him to be a traditional skinhead, or what we called a Trad.

It probably sounds strange now, particularly because of everything the word skinhead eventually came to represent in the United States. But the subculture had begun among working-class youth in England in the late 1960s, growing partly out of Mod culture and deeply influenced by Jamaican music and style. Ska, rocksteady, reggae, short hair, button-down shirts, straight-leg jeans, boots. Long before the image became inseparable from white nationalism in the popular imagination, there was another history there, one built around working-class identity, style, music, and cultural exchange.

And believe it or not, it was a thing in South Gate in the late 1980s and early 1990s. I don't know exactly how it got there, but it did. Not just South Gate, either. You could find these little pockets all over Los Angeles. It was always a minority, maybe only a few kids here and there, but they existed. At the same time, you had young Mexican and Mexican American kids obsessed with the Smiths, British goth, punk, ska, and Joy Division. I loved all of it.

I had a friend who identified as a Trad. He was a year or two older than me, already trying to start bands and playing guitar. He was effortlessly cool. His first connection to that world had been through the 2 Tone bands, the British ska revival of the late 1970s and early 1980s that brought Jamaican musical influences back into British youth culture while explicitly embracing a multiracial identity. I thought about basing Rudy partly on him. There was something interesting to me about putting this subculture inside another culture where people might not expect to find it. A Mexican American kid from Southeast Los Angeles dressed like a working-class British kid whose style itself had been shaped by Jamaican immigrants. At the time, I don't think I thought too deeply about what all those cultural crossings meant. I just knew people like this. They were around me.

Years later, people would begin asking why Mexicans and Mexican Americans were so obsessed with Morrissey and the Smiths, as though someone had suddenly discovered this strange cultural phenomenon. I always found the question slightly patronizing. Underneath it seemed to be another question: Why were these Mexican kids listening to this music in the first place? But by then it seemed almost ordinary to me. We had been listening to British music for years.

In 2005, Larry Clark made Wassup Rockers, about a group of Central American teenage skateboarders from South Los Angeles. The kids wear tight pants, listen to punk, play in bands, and skate. They reject the gang culture and hip-hop style that people around them expect them to adopt. I remember reading interviews with Clark around the time the film came out and being struck by his fascination with these kids. He talked about the pressure they faced to dress a certain way, listen to certain music, and act "gangsta," and about how instead they listened to punk rock, grew their hair long, wore tight clothes, and skated.

There was something in the way this was presented that stayed with me. It was as if Clark had encountered something unexpected. But I kept thinking: these kids weren't new. Maybe they were new to him. Looking back, I think what bothered me was the gaze. Wassup Rockers presented the apparent contradiction as noteworthy: Latino kids from South Los Angeles wearing tight jeans, skating, and listening to punk rather than participating in what outsiders imagined their culture was supposed to be.

But from where I stood, what was the contradiction?

Fifteen years earlier I had already known Mexican kids who were Trads, rude boys, punks, goths, skaters, and musicians. Mexican kids loved Morrissey. Mexican kids loved Joy Division. Nobody had to explain why. You heard something and it spoke to you. You found other kids who heard the same thing. That was enough. There was a tension between living inside a culture and being observed from outside it. The outsider asks, Why are these Mexican kids listening to this music? The kid asks, Why wouldn't I?

The Chicano and Latino presence in the first wave of Los Angeles punk is another history that often gets pushed to the margins. Mexican American and Latino musicians were there in bands like the Bags and the Plugz and throughout the larger scene. Punk wasn't something that simply arrived in Latino neighborhoods years later. Brown kids were already participating in its creation.

What interested me about Rudy, then, was something larger than making him look cool. I was interested in a young brown person refusing the identity that had already been prepared for him. But actually making Una Esquina del Mundo was difficult enough. I was trying to make a forty-minute film with almost no resources. Once I started thinking seriously about what making Rudy a Trad would require, the idea became overwhelming. The clothes had to be right. The shoes had to be right. His hair had to be right. Suddenly there was wardrobe, styling, haircuts, continuity. All these things that sound simple when you're imagining a film become enormous when you're actually trying to make one. So I let it go. Rudy never became a skinhead. Almost nothing of that idea survived. Except his name, Rudy and the song  "Johnny Too Bad" by the Slickers. A small nod to the Rude Boys. Nobody watching Una Esquina del Mundo would necessarily know that. The reference is buried inside the movie, a remnant of another version of the film I once imagined making.

Years later, I was an adult with a job and an hour-plus commute. When I arrived at work in the morning, I usually needed a little time to unwind. I would sit at my desk and watch videos on YouTube before starting the day. For whatever reason, two things seemed to dominate those mornings:

Joy Division and Key & Peele.

One morning YouTube suggested an episode of Amoeba Records' What's in My Bag? with Vince Staples. He had released Summertime '06 not long before, and I clicked on it. At some point Vince pulls out Unknown Pleasures by Joy Division. That immediately got my attention. He talks about the record, and the interviewer asks him how he got into Joy Division.

Vince answers casually:

"I lived across from the Mexicans growing up."

Then he adds:

"Shout out Nestor."

I laughed. But the comment stayed with me. There was no surprise in the way Vince said it. No explanation was necessary. He grew up in Long Beach. The Mexicans across the street listened to Joy Division. That's how he heard Joy Division. Of course. Something had changed. Or maybe nothing had changed at all. When I was younger, I thought there was something interesting about making Rudy a Trad because it seemed unexpected: a Mexican American kid in Southeast Los Angeles adopting this British working-class subculture that had itself absorbed Jamaican music and style. Years later, Larry Clark would encounter Latino punk skaters in South Central and find something fascinating in their rejection of the identities people expected them to inhabit.

But Vince Staples didn't seem surprised by any of it. For him, Mexican kids knowing Joy Division wasn't an anthropological curiosity. It was simply part of growing up in Long Beach. The Mexicans were the ones who knew Joy Division. Nestor was the authority. That small comment captured something about Los Angeles that I had been trying to understand without quite knowing it since I was young.

Culture doesn't always move in the directions we expect. It doesn't necessarily respect race, nationality, neighborhood, language, or geography. Jamaican music travels to England and becomes part of British working-class youth culture. That culture gets reinvented through 2 Tone. Those records eventually find Mexican American kids in Southeast Los Angeles. Joy Division travels from Manchester to bedrooms in South Gate and Long Beach. And somewhere along the way, a Mexican kid named Nestor introduces a Black kid across the street to a band from Salford.

Nobody asks permission. Nobody stops to wonder whether the music belongs to them. Something in it simply makes sense. Maybe that was what I was trying to put into Rudy all those years ago. I just didn't know how to say it yet.

The Official Not So Official Timeline

1960s, Jamaica → London
Ska, rocksteady and reggae travel with Jamaican immigrants to Britain. Mods, rude boys and working-class British youth collide.

1968–1969, London
Trojan Records starts putting Jamaican ska, rocksteady and reggae into British record shops and homes. Trojan becomes part of the soundtrack of the emerging skinhead scene. Years later they’ll call it the Spirit of ’69. The records, naturally, keep traveling.

1969, England
Jamaican records are everywhere. The first skinhead scene emerges. Short hair, boots, button-downs, working-class style. 

1976, Salford
Four young Englishmen form a band. Eventually they call themselves Joy Division.

1979
Unknown Pleasures is released. Nobody involved is thinking about Mexican teenagers in South Gate, South Central or Long Beach, California.

1979–1981
2 Tone arrives. The Specials, The Selecter, Madness, English Beat. Ska gets another life. Somewhere down the line these records begin migrating across the Atlantic.

Late 1980s, Southeast Los Angeles
Mexican American kids start turning up as rude boys, Trads, punks, goths and skaters. No committee approves this.

1989–1993, South Gate
My friends become increasingly obsessed with the Smiths, Morrissey, Joy Division, ska and British music. Some dress accordingly. I do not.

Early 1990s, South Gate

My friend becomes a Trad. Plays guitar. Wants to start bands. Effortlessly cooler than me. Trojan Records. 2 Tone. The Spirit of ’69. Somehow this makes complete sense. I take notes without realizing I'm taking notes.

2001
I begin making Una Esquina del Mundo. I decide Rudy should be a Trad. Then I realize this requires clothes, boots, haircuts, wardrobe continuity and money. Rudy is no longer a Trad.

His name survives.

2005
Larry Clark makes Wassup Rockers about Central American punk-rock skateboarders in South Los Angeles. People are fascinated. 

Mexican kids in South Los Angeles: Yes? And?

2015
Vince Staples releases Summertime '06. The cover evokes Unknown Pleasures.

On “Summertime,” he wonders who gets to tell him who he is:

“My teachers told me we was slaves / My mama told me we was kings” He doesn't know which story to accept. “I guess we somewhere in between.”

Somewhere in the cultural genealogy of the record is a Mexican kid named Nestor.

Amoeba, Hollywood
Vince Staples pulls Unknown Pleasures out of the bag.

Interviewer: How did you get into Joy Division?

Vince: “I lived across from the Mexicans growing up.”

“Shout out Nestor.”

Me, watching YouTube before work Wait. What?

1979 → South Gate → Long Beach → Vince Staples

Joy Division has somehow traveled from post-industrial Manchester to Mexican American Los Angeles and back out through a Black rapper from Long Beach.

Nobody finds this particularly strange anymore.

Nestor wins.

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The Official Not So Official Timeline accompanies Shout Out Nestor, borrowing the form and authority of a cultural and historical timeline while refusing to behave entirely like one. It mixes established history with personal memory, coincidence, jokes, and cultural detours, treating a friend becoming a Trad in South Gate as worthy of a place alongside Trojan Records, and Unknown Pleasures. 

Part cultural history and part autobiography, it plays with the distinction between what gets recorded as official history and what survives through lived experience. It borrows the organizational language of scholarship, then destabilizes its hierarchies, allowing personal memory, coincidence, and seemingly minor cultural moments to occupy the same historical space as the events that make it into the official record. The Official Not So Official Timeline is less interested in explaining how these connections happened than documenting that they did.