/ARTS & ENTERTAINMENT/CULTURE-MEXICO: Thousands Celebrate Tattoos and Piercings

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Diego Cevallos

MEXICO CITY, Dec 4 2001 (IPS) - More than a thousand people dyed, pierced or burned their skin at a tattoo festival held in Mexico where specialists in these unique art forms gathered to share experiences and information on new techniques.

In an environment that combined techno, rock and new age music and the smell of burned flesh, some 100 tattoo and piercing artists from Mexico and other countries showed thousands of people – fans, neophytes and the merely curious – what their art is all about.

The Eighth Mexico-International Tattoo Expo 2001, Nov 25, attracted a colourful crowd to the capital – people with long hair or shaved heads, many with plenty of skin visible to show off their tapestries of tattoos, and a sea of pierced noses, eyebrows, tongues and lips adorned with jewellery.

“This is really ‘chido’ (great)! There is a bit of everything here, and one can choose a new piercing or tattoo with confidence,” said Pablo, a young man who proudly shows off his forearms covered with permanent pictures of spiders, flies and other insects.

Jorge Castro, considered one of the best tattoo and piercing artists in Mexico, said the event served to show the public that his vocation is an art and that it can be performed safely and hygienically.

The more than 30 booths attended by Castro’s colleagues offered an endless array of piercing and tattoo designs, most belonging to the categories known as Japanese, tribal, gothic, new age, pre- Hispanic and mechanoid.

The practitioners of tattoos and piercing, vocations that date back to antiquity, have asked government authorities to regulate the sector because they are worried that some among their ranks are performing the services in sub-standard ways that endanger the health of the clients.

Perforating the skin, whether to place jewellery or to lay the ink for tattoos, opens the way for the transmission of several diseases, including human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), the precursor to AIDS.

An estimated 2,000 people in Mexico practice this unique art, but just 10 percent take the necessary hygienic precautions, says Miroslava García, congresswoman for the leftist Democratic Revolutionary Party (PRD), which is drafting a legislative bill on the matter.

García said that some 80,000 tattoos and piercings are performed each year in Mexico.

According to recommendation from health authorities, the sites where these activities are performed must be enclosed, the artists must wear latex gloves and all material used in making incisions or perforating the skin must be disposable.

Danny Yerna, one of the exposition’s organisers, said that just 15 percent of Mexican tattoo artists work in enclosed shops and just 2.5 percent work with equipment that meets health standards.

The tattoo is a skin-decorating technique performed by making tiny perforations to place dyes under the epidermis layer.

Scarification also is becoming more popular, and usually consists of cutting the skin with a scalpel or razor and introducing irritants into the wound to create deep scars.

Another related practice is branding, which is to make permanent scar marks on the skin using a hot iron.

In spite of increasing acceptance of tattoos, piercings and scarification, many people still see these markings as a transgression from social norms, though for many ancient peoples they were an important part of their aesthetic culture, and were often used in ceremonies, such as in rites performed before a war.

In Mexico, there is evidence that the populations of the pre- Hispanic era engaged in scarification and tattoos, perforated many parts of the body, distorted the shape of the skull, filed the teeth or inlaid them with precious stones.

These practices usually were related to the cycles of agriculture, life, or climate, or to religious beliefs, war, simple aesthetics or sexual motives.

Even today there are groups of native Mexicans who pierce their ears and lips to place small cylinders of metal or wood inside the perforations.

“We practice a millennial art and we do so because of historic roots, not for simple reasons of style or transgression, like some think we do,” stated tattoo artist René Mascareño.

At the expo, the tattoo and piercing professionals examined the latest in the devices for their art, such as a tattoo machine that makes 3,000 tiny punctures in the skin per second, and disposable instruments used for piercing.

The organisers said the event was a great success, with thousands of participants, including at least 1,500 who opted on-site to get a new tattoo or piercing.