With more than 22 million residents, Mexico City can be very noisy. But amid the daily chaos, there’s one sound everyone seems to recognize.
It’s a recording used by scrap metal collectors across the city. It goes: “We buy mattresses, drums, refrigerators, stoves, washing machines, microwaves — or any old scrap metal you have!”
The high-pitched voice blares from speakers mounted on slow-moving pickup trucks used to collect bulky items people want to get rid of. The message, now part of the city’s auditory landscape, just turned 20 years old.
The voice belongs to Marimar Terrón, who was only 9 years old when she recorded it in 2004 at the request of her father, Marco Antonio Terrón, a scrap metal collector in the eastern suburb of Chimalhuacán.
“My dad told me, ‘Help me with this recording. I get tired walking in the sun and yelling all day,’” she recalled.
They recorded it at home using a small stereo system, cassette tapes and a handheld microphone. After four hours and multiple takes, they settled on a version they liked. Terrón then rigged the tape to a megaphone on his truck and began using it during his daily rounds.
Soon, other collectors wanted a copy. Marco began selling CDs of the recording for about one dollar each, and the sound spread quickly across the capital.
The message has since been featured in TV shows, songs and even international events. In 2022, a Mexican fan blasted it from a speaker at the FIFA Men’s World Cup in Qatar. More recently, it appeared in Netflix’s Oscar-nominated musical “Emilia Pérez.”
Despite its viral fame, the Terrón family didn’t initially profit from the recording. The original message wasn’t trademarked, and by the time they registered the rights in 2013, the sound had already become part of the public domain in practice.
“Copyright is complicated here,” said Marimar. “It’s expensive and slow. Enforcing it hasn’t been easy.”
Her father still works as a scrap collector. It’s hard to know exactly how many informal scrap collectors currently work in the city, but some sources point to thousands of people.
But with rising costs and the growing use of online platforms like Facebook, fewer scrap collectors are doing neighborhood rounds. That could mean the iconic call may fade from daily life in the years to come.
But for now, the jingle continues to echo through the streets — part of the living soundtrack of Mexico City.