Production Services in Mexico for World Nomads

Shooting On Location Throughout the Country

As part of our production services in Mexico, we filmed a series of videos with World Nomads. ‘Mexico Discoveries’ looks past stereotypical viewpoints of Mexican people and culture, and journeys off-the-beaten-track in search of inspiring stories of family, tradition, and history. We filmed mezcaleros in the dusty canyons of Oaxaca, discovered the living Mayan culture of the Yucutan, and jumped into the ring with transgender Lucha Libre wrestlers in Mexico City.

Scouting Mexico City: ‘Challenging the Stereotypes’

For our first chapter of “Mexico Discoveries,” we hit the street of Mexico City to challenge head-on, three common stereotypes about Mexican culture: machismo, tacos, and mariachi music. Join us as we look beyond the machismo, the maiz, and the music.

Filming the ‘Exoticos’ of Lucha Libre

Everyone who has been to Mexico City has come across Lucha Libre. This traditional form of Mexican wrestling is known worldwide for its pageantry, showmanship, and athleticism. Heck, even Jack Black donned the iconic colorful masks for the movie Nacho Libre! Most people associate this hyper-intense form of wrestling with macho culture. Yet, we wanted to show a different side of this most Mexican of sports for our video.

Our host Patrick Abboud headed to the Hercules Moderno Gym in downtown Mexico City for a wrestling practice session with the ‘Exoticos,’ a group of trans and gay wrestlers challenging the traditional gender roles in professional wrestling. They put him through his paces in an intense workout session before demonstrating some of their wrestling moves for him (and on him!).

Filming with the ‘Exoticos’ at Hercules Moderno Gym in Mexico City

During this wrestling workout, Patrick met Diva. Diva is a transgender woman and a professional wrestler: two things that, as Patrick points out in the video, most people wouldn’t put together. Patrick felt a real affinity with Diva; as a gay man himself, he had had concerns about his trip to Mexico. Would he feel safe and accepted? Diva put his fears to rest when they spoke, discussing the growth of the gay community in Mexico City over the last few years and how the ‘Exoticos’ have achieved a level of acceptance in the traditionally male world of Mexican wrestling.

Patrick fell in love with Diva a bit. It’s understandable: she’s a badass boss wrestler who’s grappling with deeply-ingrained gender stereotypes and slamming them to the mat where they belong!

Documenting Modern Mexican Cuisine

The next stop on our stereotype-bustin’ tour of Mexico City was Yuban restaurant. Here we met Fernando Zavala, a pioneering young Mexican chef committed to challenging people’s taste buds with a deep-dive into the culinary complexity of his country. His goal is to take his diners beyond the clichéd view of Mexican food: spicy, slathered in lime juice and salsa, fatty, doughy, and everything made from corn. Fernando’s cooking is like an anthropological menu of Mexico, acknowledging the genuinely multicultural threads that run through the country’s cultural tapestry. As he puts it: “There is not just one Mexican cuisine, there are several Mexican cuisines.”

Fernando cooked us up a special tasting menu at Yuban. As Patrick observes in the video, the dishes were all beautifully presented, with a modern look, but were all, at the same time, uniquely Mexican. They used ingredients inspired by the Asian diasporas of Oaxaca, Indigenous cultures, and the often unacknowledged multiculturalism of Mexico. Fernando is part of a new wave of young Mexican chefs looking to the past, present, and future of their country for culinary inspiration and finding a melting-pot of culinary culture that many Mexican people don’t even know exists.

Hitting up Tacos Don Toño for some tripe and brain tacos!

Of course, we couldn’t eat out in Mexico City without hitting up at least one street-food cart. But we wanted tacos with a twist, in keeping with the message of the video. So we headed to ‘Tacos Don Toño,’ a little taco cart not far from Yuban. Here we sampled tacos stuffed to bursting with delicious but unusual ingredients, tripe, and brains at the top of the list!

Recording a New Wave of Mexican Musicians

At the taco stand, we met up with Dario, a local musician. When people think of Mexico and music, they might picture Dario in a spangled jacket and hat, trumpet in hand, ready to launch into a jaunty mariachi tune. Far from it: the guy we met was a low-key bearded hipster dude, with thick-rimmed glasses and Converse sneakers.

Dario is part of a group of young Mexican musicians taking traditional Mexican music and fusing it with the modern sounds of rock and electronic. They’re just like the young chefs we mentioned earlier: taking the sounds of the past, and fusing them with the sounds of the present, always with their eyes firmly on the future. We dropped in on a rehearsal for Dario’s band, Sonido Gallo Negro, whose music is a fascinating mixture of traditional cumbia music with electronic sounds. Not a sparkly sombrero in sight!

Sonido Gallo Negro creating some wild electronic cumbia music during a rehearsal in Mexico City

Once band practice wound up, we hit the town with Dario to discover more of Mexico City’s underground music scene. He took us to an underground bunker venue where he has a DJ residency. Patrick calls it “the epitome of hipsterdom in Mexico City.”

Dario is thoughtful about this sea-change of Mexican music culture. He attributes these changes in attitude to political change; young Mexicans are experiencing real democracy for the first time, bringing a feeling of change and hope. With seemingly endless possibilities on the horizon, why not experiment with traditional concepts of music, dance, and fiesta, and then turn them gloriously upside-down!

Talk to Us

Learn more about our production services in Mexico or contact us, and we can talk about how to create an integrated campaign in Mexico that maximizes your impact in the digital marketplace while telling powerful visual stories at the same time.

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