Parenting & Family Quote by Santiago Durango

There is a whole origin myth compressed into that shrug of a sentence: not destiny, not “vision,” just proximity, adolescence, and one band loud enough to rewire a brain. Santiago Durango frames a creative movement as something that happened to them before it was something they engineered. That matters because punk history is often flattened into heroic individualism. Durango’s line insists on the opposite: scenes are social ecosystems, built out of friendships, rides to shows, shared tapes, and the kind of obsessive listening that turns into a private language.

The Ramones aren’t a random reference; they’re a template. Their stripped-down speed and cartoonish minimalism made rock feel doable for kids who didn’t have conservatory chops or industry permission. So “got into the Ramones together” reads like an initiation ritual, the moment a group of teens discovers a way out of the standard high school script. The subtext is that taste can be a form of solidarity, and solidarity can become infrastructure: bands, zines, venues, labels, an entire counter-public.

There’s also a quiet corrective here to the polished retrospective. Durango, associated with Chicago’s early punk ecosystem, deflates the tendency to mythologize those years as inevitability. The intent feels both affectionate and anti-romantic: a reminder that cultural shifts often begin as hangouts, not manifestos. Punk’s big democratic promise wasn’t just “anyone can play.” It was “you don’t have to do it alone.”