| Field | Detail |
|---|---|
| Subject | Mexico City Underground (Tianguis del Chopo) |
| Type | Event |
| Era | Modern |
| Location | Tianguis Cultural del Chopo · Santa María la Ribera, Mexico City, Mexico |
| Date | 1980 CE |
| Style / Technique | Clandestine countercultural tattooing on improvised cassette-motor machines, transitioning to licensed studio work |
| Connected to | Mexican and Central American Prison Tattooing, Chicano Black & Grey, El Socio (Jose Luis Zuniga Jaramillo) |
Archive Note
Mexico City in the early 1980s was hostile ground for anyone with a modified body. After the Avándaro rock festival in 1971, the government cracked down on rock concerts and youth gatherings, and police routinely detained kids who showed visible marks. So the work went underground. On October 4, 1980, the Tianguis Cultural del Chopo opened inside the Museo Universitario del Chopo on Calle Doctor Enrique González Martínez in Santa María la Ribera. The weekly market became a sanctuary where urban tribes traded music, zines, and radical ideas, and where a tattoo scene could survive.
The first pioneers worked the street with almost nothing. El Aguarrás, remembered as the chief pioneer, ran stands alongside El Burro, El Guero, and El Ganso from 1982 to 1986. They used aliases to dodge the police and built their own machines, cassette player motors driving guitar strings out of plastic pens, with homemade pigment. Crude rigs, real results. Their clients were the punks and metalheads who filled the Chopo, and their stands proved body work could thrive with no imported gear and no permission.
The market itself kept moving. In August 1985 the authorities evicted the Chopo from its original site, and for three years it wandered, a parking lot in San Rafael, the Casco de Santo Tomás campus, wherever it could land. Pioneers like El Aguarrás and El Ganso carried their kits in bags and set up wherever the market stopped. In February 1988 the Chopo finally settled for good on Calle de Aldama in the Guerrero neighborhood, between Calle del Sol and Calle de la Luna. A permanent address let the artists build networks and trade safer hygiene practices.
The first storefronts came from inside the scene. José Luis Zúñiga Jaramillo, known as El Socio, secured the first official government permit in 1984 and opened a registered studio in Tepito, a legal space in a neighborhood that did not deal in legal things. In 1995 he published Tatuajes Arte Marginado, the first Spanish language book of its kind in Latin America. In late 1993 the artist Jerónimo López Ramírez, known as Dr. Lakra, joined other locals to open Dermafilia in Coyoacán, run as a collective where resident artists shared costs and showed their designs in the open.
Then the trade went uptown. In September 1993 Tattomania opened, founded by Gerardo Ruiz with artists El Russo, El Chapulin, Michael, and Raul Ruiz, known as El Piraña. It was the first commercial studio authorized by local health authorities, working with disposable needles and professional pigments. By 1999 Gallery Tattoo opened in the Zona Rosa, founded by Gabo, Hector, Axl, Lucas, and Ponch, and ran there for over twenty years before moving to Avenida Veracruz in the Condesa. Shops in high traffic bohemian districts turned a countercultural act into a fashionable choice.
Regulation closed the circle. Through the 1990s the trade sat in a legal gray area under the General Health Law, with no framework built for body alteration. In 2002 deputies in the Legislative Assembly of the Distrito Federal proposed formal rules for permanent body decoration, and the city established the Tarjeta de Control Sanitario, a sanitary control card. Artists now had to train in asepsis, first aid, and the disposal of hazardous biological waste. By the mid 2000s the health secretariat was inspecting studios in the Zona Rosa, and the clandestine era was over. From flea market stands to a licensing card in roughly twenty years.