Maggie Herrera is keeping the course, but she's definitely not going to commit.
"I don't have any plans," she says. "I've had friends who had
plans, but they never panned out. I'm going to finish school and continue
booking bands, but after that I'm just going to wait and see what happens.
"I was really into skating for a long time. I carried a skate board
and hung out with the other skater kids, and if you're a skater, you go into
punk, so I was like a little skater, punk-rock girl. At first, I was going
to a lot of punk shows, so in 1993 when I was 14, I just started throwing
the shows myself at a garage by the Hamburger House on Alameda Street. We
rented it for something stupid like a hundred dollars, and we stapled carpet
all over the walls and spray painted it and called it The Rug Burn. After
we lost that place, we opened another place called The Dumpster Dive that
was really gross, but we threw good shows there.
"We got listed in an underground book called 'Book Your Own Life' that
lists people to call if your band is going through different cities, and a
lot of bands come through El Paso because it's a perfect spot to stop between
Austin and Phoenix, or L.A. or Denver. They can either drive for 20 hours
to get where they're going or they can stop here, play a gig, get some free
food and maybe make a few bucks merchandising. I was living with my parents
and they would let these punk-rockers stay at the house, and my mom would
make them pancakes in the morning, these really stinky Mohawk guys, and my
mom would ask them like, 'Where are you from,' and, 'Where are you going from
here?'
"Being into punk was like being a rocker, it's a rebellious thing.
It was cool without being a cool kid, you were an outsider.
"After I got out of high school, I started booking shows at Ralph's
Pizzeria on Mills. This guy would just leave us there, kids he didn't even
know throwing punk shows. I was meeting punk-rockers from all over the country
because I was in the book, and also because of word of mouth. After the pizza
place got shut down, I was doing stuff at The Attic and then other, bigger
venues.
"I had some friends from high school who really got into hiphop, and
when they had any hiphop shows coming through El Paso, they'd call me because
they knew that I knew about booking, and that's how I got involved in being
hiphop. Punk and hiphop are similar, they're both like youth against media
and youth against the man and doing the do-it-yourself thing, but I think
punk is dying out and hiphop is rising.
"Hiphop was mostly black, but it's become universal. In El Paso it's
mostly Hispanic because it's El Paso, but there are also black and white kids
into it. Hiphop's a lifestyle, a culture. It's rap, it's break-dancing, it's
art, it's graffiti, deejaying and emceeing, there's all these elements in
being hiphop.
"I was working for punk and hiphop labels and I booked bands like Hickey,
Grimy Offensive Drunks, We're Not Fags, Vaginal Blood Farts, The Nobodies,
The Queers. I went with The Queers and The Chinese Love Beads on tour to Colorado
and California and Vegas. I went just to go, to get out of town, and being
on tour is great, especially if you don't have to perform.
"The best part of being a promoter is that you get a lot of free music
and other stuff. I was working for a booking company called Industrial Strength
Records which also runs Industrial Strength Piercing, and they'd send me these
bags of piercing jewelry, different rings and gages of all different sorts,
and I went a little crazy. I pierced my cheeks and my mouth and my nose and
my ears and my eyebrows and my belly-button and my tongue, but then I decided
it attracted too much attention so I decided to just keep the one in my lip.
I've had it since I was 18, and I feel naked without it. It's like some people
can't go out of the house without a watch.
"I make money doing bookings but I wouldn't call it a living. I constantly
do other jobs and I've worked at the mall a lot. Working at the mall is great
if you're lazy. I worked mornings at a tee-shirt shop and nobody buys a Metallica
tee-shirt on a Tuesday morning, so I'd be stuck in this store alone, and I
mastered cart-wheels; I do cart-wheels like nobody's business.
"I've been surrounded my whole life by my family's artsy thing. My
mom taught art and my grandmother's a printmaker; my uncle is really talented
and my aunt is an artist. My dad's a teacher now but he has this whole artist
vibe about him because he's an Indian from Taos. I'm an Indian, too--a Puebla--and
being an artist is in my blood.
"When the Bridge Center moved downtown, I got a job working the cafe.
At first it was just a coffee machine, but then we started making sandwiches,
and it slowly became more organized, and there was more cooler stuff going
on.
"I asked if I could do a hiphop show at the Bridge and it went pretty
well and made more money than their usual acoustic guitar stuff does, so now
all my hiphop shows are part of the Bridge and my new title is 'Events Coordinator'.
They wanted me to do more Bridge-like music also, but how was I supposed to
find flamenco guitarists? I was trying to provide something that's not going
on anywhere else.
"I get uncomfortable living in the same place too long and I'm a chronic
mover. I mostly live in Sunset Heights, and I just move from one apartment
to another. I've had a lot of bad roommate situations. My first roommate was
this wild, trust-fund lesbian, and since then I've only lived with people
who are gay, insane, or gay and insane. I have a lot of gay friends but I'm
not gay; I'm straight. It's a lot more fun that way because El Paso is definitely
not the city to be gay in. I feel sorry for my gay friends here because gay
life here sucks. It's too hidden. Well, the Old Plantation is here, but it's
not as out as it should be. Nothing's as it should be here.
"I was born in Germany when my dad was stationed there in the army,
and my mom wasn't into the military lifestyle so we always lived in the little
towns off-base. That was cool because I didn't grow up real American. I love
El Paso because the border thing is different, and I love downtown, it's crazy.
I hate the Eastside and the Westside, but the Lower Valley is cool because
it has that El Paso flavor, and just having Juárez here is really cool.
It's a great place to be in high school because you experience the whole bar
life in Juárez before the kids in the rest of the country. You learn
what the drinks are and how to handle yourself, but at the same time, that's
what kind of kills it here because everyone's already barred and clubbed out
by the time they're 22.
"I have a tattoo of a turtle on my back, a devil on my thigh, some
baby-blue stars with yellow rays and a Virgo symbol on my leg, and I'm going
to get one of my name inside a sacred heart on my birthday. It's in two weeks,
and then I'll be 23. I'm getting pretty old. Things change at 22. At 21, you're
still crazy and young, but when you say, 'Oh, I'm cool, I'm 22,' it doesn't
sound as good as at 20 or 19. It's like you're not really a kid anymore."