Bridging The Gap: Mex One

If the ‘80s are known for b-boys wearing tracksuits and Kangol hats, the 2000s (the decade, not the move) will probably be known for b-boys wearing “BBOY OR DIE” shirts and foam caps.

The outfit has become an instantly recognizable symbol for b-boying worldwide. It’s single-handedly the closest thing to a b-boy uniform the culture has seen in a while. And its message and appeal are clear: either commit fully to the culture, or you might as well be dead to it.

For some, it sounds outlandishly aggressive. For Mex, those are just the facts of life.

“There’s no such thing as hip-hop clothing,” the 27-year-old says. “When hip-hop started, you just took whatever you saw and flipped it.”

It was 2004 when Mex–owner of The BBoy Spot, co-owner of Biggest & Baddest along with Spen, member of Unique Styles Crew of Ft. Lauderdale-came across the hats in Seattle. After buying a few, which were designed as a winter alternative to trucker caps, he was able to find his own supplier. Mex says it wasn’t long before he had thousands of orders from around the world.

Three years later, he struck gold again with the iconic “BBOY OR DIE” shirt. Finding inspiration from the upcoming elections and the previous elections’ “Vote or Die” campaign, Mex reappropriated the slogan for his own life.

“Honestly, that’s probably the best-selling shirt I’ll ever make,” Mex admits. “I have the mentality that if I wasn’t a b-boy, if I wasn’t a hip-hop head, you might as well kill me. Because I love hip-hop so much. So screw it. B-boy or die.”

It’s no coincidence that the b-boy entrepreneur found his mantra in a revised form of another one. Reappropriation, or “flipping it,” as Mex puts it, has been a running theme in his life.

Like how two of his biggest heroes, Malcolm X and Muhammad Ali, have become the faces on two of Biggest & Baddest’s new shirt designs. Or how Mex took his mother’s 30 years of experience as a seamstress and channeled that knowledge into making hip-hop clothing. Or how funk band Fusik’s practice space floor became his bed when Mex’s parents kicked him out of their house in 2006, leaving him homeless.

“I told my mom, ‘Look, I’m not gonna work. I’m not gonna graduate out of high school. I just want to dance and focus on doing this.’ So they kicked me out,” Mex says. He pauses. “That–that really changed me.”

“I was so young that I didn’t care at the time,” he continues. “And ever since then, I’ve never thought about leaving it behind. Ever. Ever. Ever. Like, it hasn’t really crossed my mind.”

That’s a pretty remarkable feat, considering the obstacles Mex has overcome since being a young kid watching his brother trying to do windmills every morning.

Mex currently operates out of a 2,000 square foot facility with an office. Not too shabby for a guy who started out peddling DVDs. The days of barricading his apartment door shut with merchandise are long gone.

But Mex insists it’s not about money–though he’s not anti-money, mind you–but that his work doesn’t feel like work because he’s doing what he loves.
“MTV is not doing it to us; BET is not doing it to us; we are doing it to ourselves.”
In fact, when asked about a typical day in his life, Mex mentioned that he’s trying to be more structured and disciplined. For him, this actually means working less.

“I’m gonna show myself for myself that I can control what I like. It doesn’t control me. I like to set myself with standards,” he explains. “I try to wake up every day at 8, 9 in the morning. And from 8, 9 until 8 at night, it’s work. I just eat my meals for breakfast, lunch and dinner, and then after that I just relax. I need to realize that I need to leave that aside because I do have a relationship that I sacrifice a lot for my work. And I’m trying to really focus on doing that.”

It’s no surprise sense, then, that there isn’t much of a buffer between Mex’s work life and his personal life. Aside from even his clothing lines, events and businesses, Mex is also known for being a bit of a hip-hop purist.

If his collection of Pro-Keds and the mock neck sweaters on the BBoy Spot’s Web site aren’t proof enough, his lengthy diatribes on the need for the elements of hip-hop to be more unified should suffice.

In the same way that Mex paved his own path in helping to establish the Biggest & Baddest brand, customers are welcome to become the “biggest and baddest” by going big and working hard at what they love-which is usually hip-hop related.

MEX SHARES FOUR STEPS TO KEEPING YOUR B-BOY EVENT FROM SUCKING
1) THE HOMEWORK
“If you’re gonna do it, do it right. Study it. Follow it. It takes time, just like everything else. It’s a talent, just like dancing is a talent. Just like judging is a talent.”
 
2) THE FLIER
“The flier is the jam before the jam. If the flier is wack, it’s wack. You gotta have a dope flier, so you better pay somebody that knows what they’re doing.
 
3) THE MUSIC
“Come on, now. At the end of the day, I don’t care if I’m dancing on concrete. If the music is dope, I’m dancing on concrete.”
 
4) THE WORK
“If you’re the promoter and you’re at your event, you gotta look at what’s going on. You gotta be in charge. You’re not having fun; you’re working. Every second that you’re not seeing what’s going on, you’re not helping your event.”
“We need to do this together,” he says. “Because if we don’t do it, no one’s going to do it for us.”

The BBoy Spot, on the other hand, takes on a much more exclusive spin, though it also is meant to reflect original b-boy values.

“With the way b-boying’s going today, everything gets cluttered,” Mex explains. “Basically, I’m carrying on tradition, so I decided to open up a forum, for us, by us. In today’s age, if someone posts, say, for example, a house dancing clip on a b-boy forum, and people are like, ‘Yo, that’s not b-boying.’ Other people will bash you for saying that. So I was like, yo, not disrespecting any other dance form, but this is our dance. We are b-boys.”

At the same time, Mex is no stranger to the concepts of controversy or breaking tradition.

His break with Bboy World in the last year was one of the more publicized b-boy beefs in the b-boy community. And he’s been known to speak his mind even when his beliefs cause tension with more traditional views in the community.

For example, Mex is one of the few subjects for More Than A Stance who seem optimistic about the vibe of recent jams they’ve attended.

“Things are getting better little by little,” Mex says. “Everybody says, especially the older guys–by this, I mean the guys that started dancing in ‘93, ‘94, ‘95–they always say, ‘It’s not like it was in ‘97.’ Well, of course it’s not. Things change. Everything changes, you know?

“If an OG from ‘82 can say, ‘Oh, its not like how it was in ‘82,’ then somebody from ‘77 can be like, ‘It’s not like how it was in ‘77,’” Mex continues. “I like the fact that the youth now, when I go to an event, I feel like I am at a b-boy event. If you go back to 2001, 2002, it felt like high school. We had these people that dressed like this, these people that dressed like that. It was all clutter, and honestly, it was just losing the essence of b-boying.”

At the same time, Mex isn’t without his laundry list of things he hopes to improve when it comes to the current state of the b-boy scene.

He echoes the belief that b-boys should be more responsible and accountable for their actions, both within the hip-hop community and out.

He laments the fact that even though some of his friends are among the most talented b-boys in the world, they struggle to put food on their families’ tables.

“There’s a lot of wrong going on in our community. And honestly, b-boys need to stand up. B-boys need to stop chasing after a bone. B-boys need to stop basically doing things that they know they’re against just because of a certain gig or just because it’s gonna give them a hundred bucks,” Mex says. “We’re not professional. B-boys are getting gigs, and the next thing you know, they’re outside smoking weed. Who wants to work with someone like that, you know?

“MTV is not doing it to us; BET is not doing it to us; we are doing it to ourselves,” he continues. “We need to put our foot down and speak up. If someone did you wrong, say it, put them on blast. If I did you dirty, you better speak out and say it. Our community has a voice. Let’s use it. I don’t have secrets. I’ll bluntly share everything with everyone. Because I know I’m doing this for the right things. Because I don’t give a crap.”

More accurately, it’s because Mex does give a crap.

He gives a lot of craps–enough to attempt to find the precarious balance between speaking out and risking being called a hater, an instigator. Enough, at least, to jeopardize his personal life for overlooked tasks like making and selling gear for b-boys or coordinating events and forums for b-boys.

Not everyone might agree with his views and tactics, but Mex’s tenacity is undeniable.

“One of the reasons I do what I do and I speak the way I speak is because I am one of the few that is willing to sacrifice everything for the betterness of this community,” he says.

And it’s gone noticed beyond the forum posts and foam caps.

Mex says several people have contacted him saying that he’s single-handedly kept them from quitting b-boying.

In one case, he even spoke with someone who had boiled their options down to the two on the iconic Biggest & Baddest shirt: b-boying–or literally dying.

“Someone contacted me on MySpace recently and they wanted to kill themselves. And they said to me, ‘Mex, you don’t know me, but I’ve seen you at your jams and I love the way you speak. So I need advice.’ That’s when it really pops,” Mex says. “When somebody’s telling you these things, that’s–that’s, man…”

He trails off, trying to find the words.

“I do what I do for respect,” he finally says. “When you have people like Poe One, people like Cros, OGs like Swift Rock, like these people respecting me? That means everything to me. I earned that. It wasn’t given to me. That’s what keeps me going.”