Carm's corner

I hesitated a bit to post this because, well... current events. Even if I'm not from the US and I don't live there, whatever happens up there affects us... But in the end I decided to post it anyway... So, yeah...


I have a complicated history with Mexican media. There are things I love, classics from the “Golden Age of Mexican Cinema” and indie films, some from our more notorious directors when they used to make their films here and not in Hollywood… that kind of stuff, because I used to be a snob, and during high school and college I had to watch Mexican media to make some analysis. But in the end, I learned to appreciate it, and now I like many many Mexican films.

However, it was something I learned. I didn’t grow up watching Mexican media. My parents didn’t watch Mexican movies or shows, and telenovelas and El Chavo del Ocho were banned at home. There were exceptions, of course, because they did watch El Vuelo del Águila and Nada Personal.

And when I was younger those restrictions weren’t that bad because I spent my days devouring the books we had a t home and the ones at the school’s library, even though they came from some very classist and aspirationalist ideas my father had.

I have fought to shake those ideas off, and it’s a work in progress, because trying to watch more things made in Mexico means watching the good, the bad, and the ugly. But basically, I don’t watch much Mexican stuff as a default, much less the mainstream stuff. I despise Mexican remakes of gringo* mainstream movies or shows, and I won’t apologize for saying it.

Said this, this weekend I watched a Mexican miniseries that at least two people whose taste I trust recommended. It’s called Nadie nos va a extrañar (No one will miss us). It has eight episodes of approximately 35 minutes.

The story takes place in a high school in Mexico City (back then called Distrito Federal) in 1994. A group of four students have a clandestine business in which they sell homework to their classmates. Tenoch is the self-proclaimed leader and the one who started the business, in addition to having the best academic performance in the school. Then there is Daniela, who has the second best academic performance after Tenoch. Marifer does the creative writing and art assignments. And Alex isn't very good at school subjects, but he used to be part of the popular kids’ group, so no one messes with him, and he's tasked with collecting payment for assignments.

They all have their own problems, the typical turbulence of being a teenager, their family life, money, and finishing (or starting) to discover who they are; but everything gets even more agitated when a new classmate arrives in the classroom: Memo, a boy from an evidently higher socioeconomic level, but whose family is not very present (his parents travel a lot and his driver is his only friend). However, when they realize that he is good at English, the group of friends let him join their group.

I watched the first episode, and I wasn’t thrilled. It seemed just another show about teenagers, and I found the references to that year a bit annoying, a bit like when I’m watching a BL drama, and the product placement is not subtle at all. But I must say that I wasn’t a teenager back then, and even though I was in elementary school, I recognized many of the references to music, to TV shows, the ads that were playing on the car radio when the characters’ parents are taking them to school…

And at first, I thought that maybe the target audience of that show is precisely the people who were teenagers back then, as it is very well known that nostalgia sells. But the episodes are short, and I decided I had enough time to try to give it a chance. And I did. I watched episodes 1-6 on Sunday night and only stopped because I didn’t want to go to bed that late, so I decided to watch the last two episodes yesterday (I had the day off, so it counts as the weekend, right?).

I've talked a bit about how I prefer shorter series before, and maybe it's because after my brain broke back in 2017, I have a hard time keeping my attention on longer stories (but thanks to c-dramas, that's changing a bit now), but in general I think it's also because I've always been more inclined to short stories as my preferred narrative form. I love long stories that explain everything in detail, where there's time to develop the characters, to find out their whole story, or to discover how the world of that particular story works; but short stories are like looking at a photograph, like when you're on the bus and the person next to you is talking on the phone and you (involuntarily) hear that little part of their story, without knowing what happened before or what will happen after. It's just a glimpse, a snapshot, from which you have to infer the rest, the implications, the ramifications. And maybe that's a bit more intriguing to me (or maybe it's just my ADHD, ha).

So the fact that it's a miniseries may have helped a little to change my mind about it in the end, or maybe the characters and the nostalgia of an era that I didn't get to live through the heyday hooked me in the end, or maybe it was just my stubbornness to finish stories because I'm always curious about how they're going to end. But I finished the series, even though I don't love shows about teenagers. And the last two episodes destroyed me.

Spoilers from the two last episodes and CW: suicide mention

Throughout the episodes we see how the group's friendship develops, as well as their conflicts, among themselves and in their own lives, as well as the possibility that their business will be discovered and, with it, they will be expelled from school. And we see Memo at the center of everything.

The series begins to hint a little at how it will end from about the middle, with some visual clues, or at least that is the impression that a specific scene gave me. And in episode seven, after Memo’s parents announce that they will move permanently to San Diego (in the United States) and will take him with them, first he gets angry and then seems resigned and calm. But then Memo has some symbolic gestures with his friends that are evidently a farewell. He gives a bag full of gringo candies to Alex; he translates all the lyrics of the songs on the Ace of Base cassette (I know, I know) to Daniela; he gives many cassettes with music and blank ones to Marifer; and, finally, he gives his computer to Tenoch.

At that moment, I had already started to feel my heart sinking. Because I identified that feeling of wanting to say goodbye, of making a last gesture towards the people you love.

By that point, it was already very obvious what was coming, and at the end of episode seven, Marifer and Tenoch (separately) decided that they had to see Memo and they came across the scene of an ambulance taking Memo away from his house.

The last episode opens with Memo’s funeral, so we know there is no happy ending for him. His friends are there, and then we see them back at school. The principal and the teachers don’t want the subject to be talked about and only one teacher (the English teacher) suggests that they remember Memo in their class. At that moment Alex, who also recently suffered the loss of his mother, snaps and tells the group that they didn’t know Memo, that nobody knew him, and that in the end nobody will miss him, “Because that’s how it is when you die. The world goes on and you’re screwed because you’re dead” and that was the part that struck me… I don’t want to go into too much detail about why, but right then I started crying.

It wasn’t just the effect of Memo’s suicide, but what happens afterwards. In the end, life does go on and mourning is carried out like this, in parallel, while you still have to get up to go to school or work, you still have to cook, take care of your children, hand in assignments…

And I don't know, I wanted to write this before I forgot how it made me feel, the impression that the series left on me.

In the end I enjoyed it. In the end I did like it, although it may not be one of my favorite series in the universe.

Something I thought a lot about was all the local references that non-Mexican audiences won't understand, like the names of the telenovelas (which I do identify, but I never watched them and I don't plan to do it either, ha) or the joke (mentioned more than once, iirc) that 1994 was going to be the best year in the history of Mexico, when in reality it was the year in which one of the most severe economic crises in our recent history occurred... or the songs the characters listen to...

Maybe, if you want to try something different, you can give it a chance. I also want to watch more series and movies made in Mexico recently.