Hardpop: Dancing Through the Drug War

Ciudad Juarez—on the US Mexico border—was for many years considered the most dangerous city in the world. It also is home to a place often considered one of the best electronic music dance clubs in the world. Hardpop is a small, 500-capacity club located unassumingly in a shopping center on the side of a highway. But it regularly hosts some of the biggest names in house and techno music in the world. International DJs on tour will often skip over much bigger cities in Mexico like Mexico City, but they’ll always stop at Hardpop. The club opened in 2006, when the rising drug trade infused the entire city with loose cash, and local nightlife was booming. Things seemed to be going well. But by 2008, the city had been plunged into a violent conflict between rival cartels, and the murder rate skyrocketed. Violence had long been a fact of life for working-class people, but it began to reach the more sheltered middle classes as well. Coming out to Hardpop to dance took on new meaning for the club kids. It became a way of seeking freedom in a city that was more and more locked down by military checkpoints, and a place for holding on to community at a time when people were dying left and right.