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Welcome to the first entry in Cinco to Celebrate, a series highlighting five Mexican businesses in New York City that are worth your time and money this Cinco de Mayo—and beyond. Here's more about the importance of the series and where you can read every article this week.
If you bring up Mexican American culture, most people’s minds will drift towards California or Texas on a map. Often forgotten in conversations about the diaspora are New York Mexicans, who have a distinct subculture imbued with attitude and a fashion-forward sensibility that is worthy of as much adoration as their Western counterparts.
The issue isn’t a numeric lack of New York Mexicans as much as it is a dearth of concentrated neighborhoods where New York Mexicans can actually get together and push their culture forward. There’s no true equivalent to L.A.’s Boyle Heights or Chicago’s Pilsen here. The lack of physical spaces to hold the culture together is exactly what a new collective in New York, Migo Events, is trying to address by throwing monthly parties where young creative Mexicans gather, exchange ideas, and most of all, dance.
RECOMMENDED: Introducing Cinco to Celebrate, a series spotlighting five Mexican-owned businesses in NYC
Migo Events was created by Paulina Montiel and Noe Zepeda, two artsy friends who met at a New York Fashion Week party. Growing up in New York, Zepeda says that he mostly listened to hip hop and felt pretty disconnected from his Mexican heritage, but he also didn’t feel like he could take creative ownership over a genre like hip-hop, which is rooted in Black culture. It wasn’t until the pandemic that he decided he wanted to combine his heritage with his love for fashion to create something fresh. “Going to high school here, you had to be fly just to be cool with people,” Zepeda tells Time Out. That fly New York sensibility is what inspired his Mexican-centered streetwear brand, Ghetto Friends.
In contrast, Montiel, who is from Washington, had experience moving through different Mexican diasporas in the U.S.: She’s gone from New York to L.A. and back again. Like Zepeda, she’s always been into fashion and has her own brand, Pau Chains. Zepeda and Montiel kept finding themselves in similar spaces and realized they both dreamed of fostering a community of Mexican American creatives. They began by producing Peso Pluma nights and other Mexican-centered parties for different venues. “Then I thought, why don’t we just do this ourselves?” Montiel tells Time Out.
“Migo” is short for “amigo” and it’s how some New York Mexicans greet each other; the name of the event is itself a reflection of the friends’ attempt to articulate something unique about New York Mexicans. Their first Migo party was last October and they packed out an art show at a Mexican restaurant in the Lower East Side. Since then, they’ve thrown more than a dozen events. When choosing venues, Montiel and Zepeda say it’s important to them that every event space they work with is Latinx-owned, like Limosneros, the restaurant in Williamsburg where they recently had a corridos-themed party.
“It’s just a space for everyone to come together—Mexicans who love fashion, Mexicans who love lowriders, Mexicans who just want to come out and dance rancheras,” Montiel says.
When you go to a Migo event, you can expect a theme, and the best dressed gets $50 in cash. Because Mexican fashion is not always visible or encouraged in the East Coast, Montiel and Zepeda hope that the cash prize pushes people to wear their boots or hats or bring out their best chola/cholo looks, too. Migo Events are spaces where you can be unapologetically Mexican, which seems like a great starting point for a collective hoping to reclaim a sense of pride in their heritage.
Sonically, you can expect to hear rancheras, corridos, and banda. You can often find DJ Amores, known for spinning cumbias at the club, behind the decks. Montiel and Zepeda’s favorite thing about throwing Migo Events is seeing people become friends at the parties and then see them come back with those friends to future events. At a recent function, someone brought a guitar and played mariachi music, and the crowd lived for it.
Migo Events is a space for young Mexicans to see other young Mexicans who are models, designers, photographers, and exist in all sorts of creative fields so that they can begin to expand their ideas of what Mexicans are capable of. “A big thing we learned was that investing in a community and investing in someone really pays off in the long run because it helps them develop their career and go do whatever they need,” Montiel tells Time Out. She imagines a reality in which agencies and brands hit up Migo Events whenever they need dope Mexican talent. “I want to create a little economy with us so we can hire each other.”
There’s a sense that the sleeping giant that was New York’s Mexican community is beginning to wake up. “New York is Puebla York,” Zepeda says, referring to the nickname many Mexicans give New York (there’s a huge presence of Mexicans from Puebla in the city and the surrounding area). This generation of New York Mexicans are getting organized and are eager to push a larger cultural movement. If their parents’ job was to figure out how to survive in America, the job of young Mexican Americans is to tell the world they’re here to stay, so you better pay attention.
“Overall,” Zepeda says, “We just want to push confidence to our people.”
Catch Migo’s next party on May 4 in Williamsburg. You can follow their Instagram for updates.