ROCKOTITLAN
Written Thurs. March 3rd, 2022; posted Fri. June 3rd, 2022
Rockotitlán was a club, bar, and music venue in Mexico City
dedicated to rock and roll music, 1985-2004.
There's a good picture of the interior at http://rock111mx.blogspot.com/2018/02/rockotitlan-el-lugar-del-rock-1985-1990.html
(Rock Ciento Once) [since Rock Ciento Once = Rock 111, it might be meant to
sound like the label of a college course].
Wikipedia's article on Fernando Arau says "In 1985 [Fernando] together with his brother Sergio they opened Rockotitlán, the first club that would only book Rock en Español bands in Mexico City. Rockotitlán became the centerpiece and meeting place for the nascent genre and featured historical performances of some of the most iconic Mexican rock bands . . . "
I've never been to Rockotitlán, it's closed now, & it has nothing to do (that I know of) with the month we are in. But I fell in love with its name a while back, when it first reached out and grabbed me from the pages of (could it have been) the Rolling Stone magazine. It is derived from Tenochtitlán, the name of the Aztec capital city, which has now grown into Mexico City. Apparently the Arau brothers replaced Aztec Tenoch- (apparently meaning "a rock (stone) [and a] prickly pear cactus") with the English word rock (as in rock music), and glued it together with -o- (originally the Greek technique for combining two roots into one word, as in pyr-o-maniac and klept-o-maniac). That might be the real reason I brought it up, because its name combines an English root and an Aztec ending. That's my kind of word poetry.
Frank Newton
