ABSTRACT
Reed Johnson, in a 2004 Los Angeles Times article titled El Chopo is the place to be for outcasts, describes the market's location as an aging neglected part of the city, the type of neighbourhood that Mexicans call a barrio bravo, a term connoting hardship, pride and wild, unruly creativity. A number of Mexican intellectual accounts of El Chopo emphasise its quasi-Utopian communal collectivism, often invoking historic precedents of Mexican youth countercultures. The underground economy of El Chopo spills over into and blurs with overground and mainstream commodification and tradition. The democracy of the marginal that Monsivais observes echoes Keohane's democratic citizenship, where participation in the marketplace of 'bargaining, haggling, wheeling and dealing' is a levelling process that seemingly reduces distinctions of class and wealth. El Chopo represents both a preservation of the historical resistant aspects of subcultures and a free flow and interaction between different subcultures.
