consumers and citizens

Cultural Studies of the Americas

Edited by George Yudice, Jean Franco, and Juan Flores

Volume 6
Consumers and Citizens: Globalization and Multicultural Conflicts
Nestor Garcia Canclini

Volume 5
Music in Cuba
Alejo Carpentier

Volume 4
Infertilities: Exploring Fictions of Barren Bodies
Robin Truth Goodman

Volume 3
Latin Americanism
Roman de la Campa

Volume 2
Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics
Jose Esteban Munoz

Volume 1
The Fence and the River: Culture and Politics at the U.S.Mexico Border
Claire F. Fox
 Cultural Studies of the Americas Volume 6

Nestor Garcia Canclini

c o n s u m e r s and citizens
GLOBALIZATION AND MULTICULTURAL CONFLICTS

Translated and with an Introduction by George Yudice

University of Minnesota Press

Minneapolis London
The University of Minnesota Press gratefully acknowledges the assistance
provided for the publication of this book by the McKnight Foundation.

Copyright 2001 by the Regents of the University of Minnesota

Originally published as Consumidores y ciudadanos: conflictos multiculturales

de la globalization. Copyright 1995, Editorial Grijalbo, Mexico.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in

a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic,
mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written
permission of the publisher.

Published by the University of Minnesota Press

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Garcia Canclini, Nestor.
[Consumidores y ciudadanos. English]
Consumers and citizens : globalization and multicultural conflicts /
Nestor Garcia Canclini ; translated by George Yiidice.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-8166-2986-2 (hard: alk. paper) ISBN 0-8166-2987-0
(pbk.: alk. paper)
1. MexicoCivilization20th century. 2. MexicoRelations
Foreign countries. 3. Popular cultureMexico. 4. Communication
and trafficSocial aspectsMexico. 5. TechnologySocial aspects
Mexico. 6. ConsumersMexicoAttitudes. 7. Nationalism
Mexico. I. Title. II. Series.
F1234.G22713 2001
972.08'3dc21 00-012031

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

The University of Minnesota is an equal-opportunity educator and employer.

11 10 09 08 07 06 05 04 03 02 01 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
For Sandra
This page intentionally left blank
Contents

Translator's Introduction
From Hybridity to Policy
For a Purposeful Cultural Studies ix

Author's Preface to the English-Language Edition

The North-South Dialogue on Cultural Studies 3

Introduction
Twenty-first-Century Consumers, Eighteenth-Century Citizens 15

Part I Cities in Globalization

1. Consumption Is Good for Thinking 37

2. Mexico
Cultural Globalization in a Disintegrating City 49

3. Urban Cultural Policies in Latin America 67

4. Narrating the Multicultural 77

Part II Postnational Suburbias

5. Identities as a Multimedia Spectacle 89

6. Latin America and Europe as Suburbs of Hollywood 97

7. From the Public to the Private

The "Americanization" of Spectators 109

8. Multicultural Policies and Integration via the Market 123

Part III Negotiation, Integration, and Getting Unplugged

9. Negotiation of Identity in Popular Classes? 137

10. How Civil Society Speaks Today 151

Notes 163

Index 183
This page intentionally left blank
 Translator's Introduction

From Hybiridity to Policy

For a Purposeful Cultural Studies

N estor Garcia Canclini, an Argentine with a doctorate from the Uni-

versity of Paris, has been a professor of anthropology at the Univer-
sidad Autonoma MetropolitanaIztapalapa since the early 19905, where
he heads the Program for the Study of Urban Cultures. He is undoubt-
edly the best-known and the mosc innovative cultural studies scholar
in Latin America. His work straddles the disciplines of anthropology,
sociology, art and literary studies, and cultural policy studies. Among
his many books, Cortdzar, una antropologia poetica (Cortazar, a poetic
anthropology, 1968), on the noted Argentine "Boom" novelist and short-
story writer, and La produccion simbolica (Symbolic production, 1979),
on the relationship of politics and avant-garde art in Argentina, reveal
the range and originality of Garcia Canclini's early work.1 In the late
19705, he began to conduct work on changes in the "popular" or folk
cultures in Mexico, where he resettled as a consequence of the inhos-
pitable atmosphere, particularly for progressive intellectuals like him-
self, created by the military dictatorship in Argentina.2 This work led
him to the creation of a rich and veiy serviceable methodology for study-
ing the intersection of, on the one hand, mass, popular (or "folk," in
U.S. parlance), and high culture, and, on the other hand, modernization

IX
 x Translator's Introduction

in the spheres of communications and the economy. His Las culturas

populares en el capitalismo (1982) (TransformingModernity: Popular Cul-
ture in Mexico [1993]), which won the prestigious Casa de las Americas
prize for best "essay," was an important corrective to both the clien-
telist subordination of indigenous cultures under the Mexican state and
to romantic portrayals of these cultures as pure and innocent, although
he also denounced their oppression.3 It was also a book that resonated
among those Latinamericanists familiar with cultural studies as it was
practiced by Raymond Williams and Stuart Hall, among others. Culturas
hibridas: estrategias para entrar y salir de la modernidad (1990) (Hybrid
Cultures: Strategies for Entering and Leaving Modernity [1995]) further
elaborated the critique of museum-bound views of culture, demonstrat-
ing that the dividing line between all three varieties (popular, mass, and
high) blurs quite frequently and, in most cases, one is the supplement
or constitutive exclusion of the other.4 Rather than posit a postmodern
Latin American condition, he registered, with the detail characteristic of
the ethnographer and the art or literary critic, the ways in which artists,
intellectuals, and popular communities engaged the pressures of mod-
ernization in a changing political context. Consumidores y ciudadanos:
conflictos multiculturales de la globalizacion (1995) (Consumers and Citi-
zens: Globalization and Multicultural Conflicts [2001]) maps the effects of
urban sprawl and global media and commodity markets on citizens,
critically, and yet shows that the complex results offer not only a shrink-
age of certain traditional rights (particularly those of the welfare or
clientelist state) but also openings for expanding citizenship.5 Although
in Garcia Canclini's opinion consumers are not cultural dupes, he also
does not hold to the voluntarist view that consumer choice is the same
as a viable politics. This book includes a range of specific policy recom-
mendations for a Latin American cultural space that can hold its own
against the juggernaut of Hollywood and "Americanism" more gener-
ally. His recently published edited volumes, La ciudad de los viajeros
(1997) (The city of travelers) and Cultura y comunicacion en la ciudad
de Mexico (1998) (Culture and communication in Mexico City), focus
on how the residents of Mexico City experience the built and broadcast
environment;6 Las industrias culturales en la integracion latinoamericana
(1999) (The culture industries in the integration of Latin America) con-
sists of state-of-the-art sectorial analyses of the culture industries for
the purposes of making concrete policy interventions in the creation of
the Latin American cultural space that he proposed in Consumers and
Citizens.7 As I write this Introduction in August 1999, Garcia Canclini
 Translator's Introduction xi

has just completed his latest book, La globalizacidn imaginada (Imag-

ined globalization), in which he addresses many of the issues dealt with
in prior booksmulti- or interculturalism, migration, urban expansion,
and cultural studiesin the context of globalization.8 In this book he
also gives a critical twist to relations between Latin Americans and North
Americans (and especially Latinos) in the context of a U.S. projection
of multiculturalism.

Conditions of Reception: The Currency of Hybridity

Garcia Canclini is best known in the English-speaking world for Hy-
brid Cultures: Strategies for Entering and Leaving Modernity. First pub-
lished in Mexico in 1990, this book has been widely read in cultural
studies circles, in part because of the currency of theories of hybridity
since the 1980s This is both serendipitous and troublesome. The nearly
two decadeslong discussion among U.S. cultural studies scholars con-
cerning flexible and multiple identities has provided a receptive context
for Garcia Canclini's proposal that in late modernity all identities strad-
dle borders, whether geopolitical, cultural, or epistemological.9 For the
purposes of these introductory comments, I am taking a very broad view
of cultural studies, a field that examines multiple, contending forces and
power relations and that includes popular culture analysis, feminism,
postcolonialism, deconstruction, Chicano and other minority discourses,
discussions of border culture, queer studies, and so on. For conjunc-
tural reasons that I shall elucidate subsequently, cultural studies rather
than anthropology or sociology proper is the multifarious field in which
Garcia Canclini's work on hybridity resonates. Cultural studies as a po-
litical and intellectual project has been in an ongoing process of open-
ing itself to revisions from the above-mentioned critical initiatives, as
exemplified by the impetus provided by the work of the Marxist Liter-
ary Group since the late 1970s and the transformations of journals such
as Social Text over this same period. Years before Social Text's ground-
breaking critique of postcolonialism,10 the postcolonial framework had
already been put to the test in the journal in the spate of commentaries
on Fredric Jameson's proposal that all third-world texts are necessarily
national allegories.11 Indeed, the publication of Jameson's essay was ac-
companied -by an account of the critical reception it encountered when
delivered in Havana in 1985.12 A subsequent issue carried Aijaz Ah-
mad's trenchant critique of Jameson's own national (U.S.), gendered
(male), and racial'(white) positioning, and suggested that the neat di-
 xii Translator's Introduction

vide between third and first worlds was not viable precisely because of
the effects of the new strategies of global capitalism and the struggles
against them. 13
The theories of hybridity that received the greatest receptivity at
that time in this comprehensive definition of cultural studies were those
associated with postcolonialism and minority cultures. Most exemplary
is Homi Bhabha's proposal that the colonial situation and its legacy in
postcolonialism introduced an incommensurability in the very heart of
national projects. Colonial mimicry, which Bhabha considers subversive
of European models, for example, both opened up and supplemented
the neat divide between colonizer and colonized. With the intensifica-
tion of transnational phenomena in the postcolonial era, this under-
mining of stable identities was magnified, introducing more numerous
temporalities into the processes of identification. Rather than national
coherence, Bhabha refers to a cultural difference that ensues from the
split between a national pedagogy that takes the "people" as its histori-
cal objects and the performative work by which heterogeneous prac-
tices are transformed into the signs of a national culture while carrying
with them the traces of difference. As such, hybridity is characterized
by Bhabha as "the perplexity of the living as it interrupts the represen-
tation of the fullness of life." 14 Although expressed in a very different
language, reflecting regional and disciplinary differences, Garcia Canclini
also characterized hybrid cultures as being fundamentally liminal, bor-
ders where struggles and negotiations confront "rigid wires and fallen
wires."15 In such sites, power is not defined by "confrontations and verti-
cal actions," but, following Foucault, by "interwoven relations," whose
cultural and political effectiveness is not explained by the imposition
of power, but by the play of differences in the fabric of social life: "What
gives [hybrid cultures] their efficacy is the obliqueness that is established
in the fabric. How can we discern where ethnic power ends and where
family power begins, or the borders between political power and eco-
nomic power?"16 As in Bhabha's reflection on colonial situations, Garcia
Canclini understands Latin American societies as constituted in the "in-
tersection of different historical temporalities" ensuing from the multi-
ple positions that they occupy in the symbolic as well as the political
and financial world economies. As such, the multitemporal hybridity
of Latin American societies is a function of a multiple relation to mod-
ernization. Some have celebrated this heterogeneity as proof that Latin
America invented postmodernism before it ever gave signs of life in Eu-
rope and the United States.17 Garcia Canclini's interest, however, is to
 Translator's Introduction xiii

demonstrate the power of culture in political and economic projects and

to analyze the effects of modernization in the periphery in order to help
devise proposals for bettering life chances for the majority who barely
survive. As we shall see, there is a significant difference in Garcia Can-
clini's approach when compared with Bhabha's. Whether or not hybrid-
ity can discursively subvert Western reason is less important than its
usefulness in pointing to practices that help democratize hierarchical
and authoritarian societies both culturally and economically.
Toward the end of "DissemiNation," Bhabha focuses his discussion
of the slippage between historical pedagogy and cultural performance
on the foreignness that inheres therein. His emphasis is on the aporia
that drives the narration of the nation to posit the "cultural condition
for the enunciation of the mother-tongue,"18 on the one hand, and the
multiplication of borders that trouble the interior of national space, on
the other. "What is ... significant... is the emergence of a hybrid na-
tional narrative that turns the nostalgic past into the disruptive 'anterior'
and displaces the historical presentopens it up to other histories and
incommensurable narrative subjects."19 We might ask what exactly is
Bhabha's own investment in this incommensurable liminality? The an-
swer, it seems, is a form of empowerment that comes from the condi-
tion of estrangement that inheres in liminality: "From this splitting of
time and narrative emerges a strange, empowering knowledge for the
migrant that is at once schizoid and subversive."20 The agency of that em-
powerment is the minority subject. We might inquire into the nature of
the empowerment wrought by liminality: how does it articulate with a
politics? Bhabha argues that the aesthetics of interstiality serves to em-
power the marginalized insofar as it is nonessentialist and nonintegra-
tionist,21 and to foster new modes of cultural identification across the
divides that modernity has drawn throughout the world.22 It is as if
Bhabha expected estrangementor the unhomelyto be redeemed
by an aesthetic practice that relies for its effectiveness on the autonomy
of the institution of art rather than a politics that would struggle to open
the institution into encounters and conflicts (he says little, indeed, about
institutions).

In order to appear as material or empirical reality, the historical or social

process must pass through an "aesthetic" alienation, or "privatization" of
its public visibility. The discourse of "the social" then finds its means of
representation in a kind of unconsciousness that obscures the immediacy
of meaning, darkens the public event with an "unhomely" glow. There
 xiv Translator's Introduction

is, I want to hazard, an incommunicability that shapes the public mo-

ment; a psychic obscurity that is formative for public memory.23

To argue that classic aesthetic distancing (whose counterparts are

the Russian Formalist Ostranienie and the Freudian Verfremdungseffekf)
is the means by which colonized or subaltern "otherness" makes itself
presentBhabha writes "begins its presencing," an allusion to Heideg-
ger's notion of "unveiling"is to misunderstand how two orders of so-
ciality (aesthetics and politics) interact. Literary theory and cultural stud-
ies are rife with these assimilations of social problems to philosophical
and aesthetic categories: Heidegger's homelessness versus homeless peo-
ple; Kristeva's abjects vis-a-vis social "deviants"; Freud's uncanny vis-a-
vis parent-to-child power differentials; French feminists' play of the sig-
nifier vis-a-vis women's sexuality; and so on. It is only by a sleight of hand,
I would argue, that the aesthetic can be made to redeem the "disadvan-
taged" side of this dubious equation. As we shall see, this dichotomy is
evident in various statements from the Latin American Subaltern Studies
Group, who on the one hand is concerned about the exclusion of sub-
alterns from national consolidations and state-oriented cultural critique,
and yet abstracts away the lived presence of subalterns by construing
them as a force of negation (the "unveiling" or rejection of Eurocentrism).
This is indeed a familiar move within a broadly conceived U.S. cul-
tural studies framework: the contention that the most effective struggle
vis-a-vis power is the supplementation that the "weak" introduce into
the hegemonic discourses of the powerful. In a 1985 text, Bhabha had
proposed the "colonial hybrid" as the paradoxical instance in which the
authority invested in the colonists' identity was subverted by the mim-
etism of their colonized others.24 In another influential text from 1985,
Donna Haraway embraced the myth of the cyborg to characterize the
agency that troubled the organic wholeness of identity.25 "[Qommit-
ted to partiality, irony, intimacy and perversity" (151), the "cyborg myth
is about transgressed boundaries, potent fusions, and dangerous possi-
bilities which progressive people might explore as one part of needed
political work" (154). Like Bhabha, Haraway drew on the experience of
minoritized people to characterize her quintessential hybrids and cy-
borgs. "Women of color," and in particular Chicanas such as Chela San-
doval and Cherrie Moraga, who respectively brandished an "oppositional
consciousness" (157) and a mestizo delegitimation of purity and origins
(175), taught Haraway about "the power of the margins" and "liminal
transformation." As hybrids and members of a "bastard race," in Har-
 Translator's Introduction xv

away's words, they are identified as the demolishers of Western identity

and dualisms that are inherent to the "logics and practices of domination
of women, people of color, nature, workers, animalsin short, domi-
nation of all constituted as others, whose task is to mirror the self" (177).
Garcia Canclini also senses the Utopian potential in the critique of
a normative Western subjectivism on the part of "new (or not so new)
social actors, who are no longer exclusively white, Western, and male."
Focusing on Latin American artistswhether of high, popular, or mass
culturewho produce "hybrid" work, Garcia Canclini attributes to
them an "interrogative relationship with societies, or fragments of them,
where they think they see living sociocultural movements and practica-
ble Utopias."26 But the critique of the aesthetics of hybridity expressed
by artists and writers from Tijuana, that most hybrid of border towns,
is instructive of the pitfalls of the knee-jerk assumption that subaltern
cultural practices ensuing from a given social situation are necessarily
subversive. These Tijuana artists and writers took performance artist
Guillermo Gomez-Pena to task for celebrating the hybrid border as the
expression o) a more "multifocal and tolerant" culture. They reminded
him and other postmodern celebrants that hybridity results from hav-
ing to satisfy basic needs by participating in a system of production
and consumption not of one's choosing. These Tijuanans "reject the
celebration of the migrations often caused by poverty in the place from
which people migrate, and which is repeated in their new destination."
They resent, moreover, those ubiquitous theorists and artists from met-
ropolitan centers in Mexico or the United States who "want to discover
us and tell us who we are."27 There is a resentment in these words, for
the Tijuanans suspect that Gomez-Pena and his artistic and theoretical
kin were accumulating cultural capital useful in museological or academic
struggles by claiming to have an experiential knowledge of the aesthetic
of the day appropriation, pastiche, impurity, sampling, and so on
drawn from the experience of the subaltern on the other side of the
border. The Tijuanans understood this as a legitimation strategy that
necessarily traded on the migrants' or maquiladora workers' experience
of hardship.
Although Garcia Canclini understands that hybridity undermines
such dualisms as North/South, European/indigenous, folk/mass"Mul-
tures are no longer grouped in fixed and stable wholes, and therefore
the possibility disappears of being cultured by knowing the repertory
of'the great works,' or of being popular because one manages the mean-
ing of the objects and messages produced by a more or less closed com-
 xvi Translator's Introduction

munity (an ethnic group, a neighborhood, a class)"he also eschews,

for the very same reason, the voluntarism that proclaims the "epistemic
privilege" of the oppressed. Between representation and its undoing by
hybridity, Garcia Canclini, unlike Bhabha or Haraway, concentrates on
the mediation of institutions that never permit one or the other to pre-
vail completely. "The artistic market and the reorganization of urban
visuality generated by the culture industry and the fatigue of political
voluntarism are combined to make unrealistic any attempt at making
of high art or folklore the proclamation of the inaugural power of the
artist or of prominent social actors."28 I would go a little further and
elaborate this insight: neither the representations disseminated by gov-
ernment agencies, the media, labor and consumer markets, or academic
disciplines such as anthropology nor the scrambling of these represen-
tations through the intersection of these institutions or other contingen-
cies provide a foundation for the epistemic privilege of any one individ-
ual or collective subject.
Some U.S. cultural studies critics, including Latinamericanists, are
troubled by Garcia Canclini's reticence in "taking the side" of the sub-
altern. It goes without saying, of course, that he does not side with the
dominant classes, capital, or the culture industries. Garcia Canclini re-
minds his critics that not all subalterns are struggling for inclusion in a
democratic society:
My principal aim is to understand under what conditions and in what
direction the processes of deterritorialization, opening and hybridization
of traditional heritages are contributing to democratization in this fin
de siecle, while many reterritorializationslike that of Sendero Lumi-
noso...have the effect of reinforcing authoritarianism, dogmatism
and fundamentalism (which in Latin America, Eastern Europe and other
areas are obstacles to democratic reconstruction and the resolution of the
basic problems of the inhabitants). 29

This reminder flies in the face of John Beverley's criticism that Garcia
Canclini is reformist rather than radical for not seeking to contribute
to a historical bloc in which the subaltern will have a protagonist role
in the struggle for hegemony.30 From Garcia Canclini's point of view,
Beverley's aspirations appear quite voluntarist. In his more recent work,
including Consumers and Citizens, written after this statement, Garcia
Canclini has devoted most of his energies to discover viable practices
that enable scholar-activists to contribute to this endeavor. His increas-
ing involvement in cultural policy as a complement of research is one
 Translator's Introduction xvii

direction that I comment on subsequently. I argue that such involvement

in cultural policy is not simply accommodationist reformism, as Bever-
ley has alleged.
At heart, Beverley is skeptical that a traditional intellectual (i.e., not
from the subaltern classes) can effectively espouse the cause of the sub-
altern. Consequently, he assimilates in knee-jerk fashion Garcia Canclinis
position to that of neo-Arielist arguments according to which analytic
authority should remain among traditional or "critical" intellectuals.31
Neo-Arielism, for Beverley, "is a variant of Nestor Garcia Canclinis claim
that with modernity the category of subalternity itself is no longer rel-
evant, since it depends for its functional efficacy on traditional, pre-
modern culture that has been overtaken by modernity and urbaniza-
tion."32 Beverley engages in a willful oversight here, disregarding the
target of Garcia Canclinis critique, which is the ways in which discourses
of the "popular" have been manipulated and hybridized. For example,
in Transforming Modernity he takes to task critics "influenced by a Grams-
cian analytical framework" because they draw a Manichaean opposi-
tion between elites and popular masses that enables them to posit too
easily "anesthetizing" or "contestatory" qualities to elite or popular cul-
tural products and practices, without examining the complex media-
tions (religious beliefs, bureaucratic agencies, markets, media, tourism)
that have their own impact on those products and practices.33 Garcia
Canclini goes on, however, to provide his own neo-Gramscian frame-
work that emphasizes the cross-class and transnational industrial artic-
ulations that complicate the Manichaean schema.
In Hybrid Cultures Garcia Canclini extends his critique of neo-
Gramscians' reliance on
superparadigms and generating] popular strategies to which they at-
tempt to subordinate the totality of the facts: all that is not hegemonic is
subaltern, or the inverse. The descriptions then omit ambiguous processes
of interpenetration and mixing in which the symbolic movements of
different classes engender other processes that cannot be ordered under the
classifications of hegemonic and subaltern, modern and traditional.34

This may indeed be the case among the Latin American Gramscians
whom he takes to task. It should be pointed out, however, that by the
time he began his research on Transforming Modernity in the late 19705,
the work of Hall, Williams, and especially Laclau, which made the same
criticisms as Garcia Canclini and in some cases went significantly be-
yond his, had already been published. In 1977, each published a major
 xvni Translator's Introduction

theoretical piece. Williams elaborated a quite workable concept of me-

diations that accounts for ideological processes better than the base-
superstructure dichotomy and raised the question of residual, dominant,
and emergent formations that complicate the notion of ideology within
the hegemonic process; Hall recognized Gramsci's understanding of tra-
dition as something reworked within given conjunctures and elaborated
on the dialogic and ongoing contestation within knowledge and in and
across institutions; and Laclau proposed the oft-cited notion of articu-
lation as the fusion of nonclass elements within the contradictions or
power blocs, which enabled the insight that (reworked) traditions may
be continuous from one power bloc to another, "in contrast to the his-
torical discontinuities which characterize class structures."35

The "Popular"
The criticism that can legitimately be leveled at Garcia Canclini is that
he throws out the baby of the subaltern with the bathwater of the pop-
ular. This is because of a kind of transcultural and translational paral-
lax that makes it difficult to understand how a concept developed in
one geocultural region is applied in another. This problem of parallax
is also at work in the misreadings by several cultural studies critics of
Garcia Canclini's work, particularly their refusal to understand why he
proceeds with caution whenever intellectuals invoke the popular. The
popular and the subaltern are, of course, kindred concepts, both passing
through a foundational theoretical turning point in the work of Anto-
nio Gramsci, on whom Garcia Canclini, despite his critiques of neo-
Gramscians, has taken inspiration, particularly in Transforming Moder-
nity. Before delving into the use of the notion of the popular in Latin
America, of which Garcia Canclini is one of the most astute critics, it
will be worthwhile to give a brief history of the term in Gramsci.
The notion of the popular was used by Gramsci in his diagnosis of
the rise of fascism in 19205 Italy and as part of his program for moving
Italian politics in a more revolutionary direction. In his estimation, pro-
gressive Italian intellectuals were out of touch with the social forces,
particularly the "popular masses," necessary for the construction of a
"national-popular" consciousness or "collective will" that in turn were
necessary for revolution.36 In France, the Jacobins ushered in a national-
popular bloc by creating an alliance with the "popular masses," in par-
ticular the peasantry, which enabled the creation of a modern state (131
32). But the legacy of quasi-feudal "economic-corporate" domination in
 Translator's Introduction xix

Italy, characterized by autonomous city-states, dependent regions, and

a mechanical bloc of social groups, was not conducive to national uni-
fication until the Risorgimento in the mid-nineteenth century, and then
only "inorganically" under the leadership of Cavour and the Moderate
Party, without significant involvement of popular classes. Indeed, the
absence of popular elements enabled the Moderate Party to absorb the
more liberal-democratic intellectuals of the Action Party of Mazzini and
Garibaldi, thus serving the interests of northern (Piedmontese) capital-
ists (204). Gramsci calls this northern dominance a "dictatorship with-
out hegemony," in which Piedmont stood in for but did not properly
function as a "leading" social group (106). The northern bourgeoisie
did not show the "inflexible will to become the 'leading' party," as did
the Jacobins (80). Instead, the Piedmontese state " 'led' the group which
should have been 'leading.'" This state loosely held together ruling-class
"nuclei" throughout Italy, but these nuclei "did not seek to 'lead' any-
body, i.e., they did not wish to concord their interests and aspirations
with the interests and aspirations of other groups" (1045). The result
was the failure to achieve a "national-popular collective will," particularly
without a "simultaneous burst into political life" of the "great mass of
peasant farmers" (132).
The construction of a national-popular will in Latin American so-
cieties faced similar challenges to those outlined by Gramsci. Juan Car-
los Portantiero, for example, considered Gramsci's analysis of "Caesarism"
and "Bonapartism" applicable to Latin American nationalist populisms,
particularly Varguismo in Brazil, Cardenismo in Mexico, Peronismo in
Argentina, arid Aprismo in Peru.37 This situation results when a poten-
tially catastrophic contention between social forces is intervened in by
a third actor, for example, the military, which brings into play an array
of "auxiliary [often popular] forces directed by, or subjected to, their
hegemonic influence," and "succeeds in permeating the State with its
interests, up to a certain point, and in replacing a part of the leading
personnel."38 In this case, the popular forces do not, obviously, take
power, but some of their agendas, particularly those that have been ar-
ticulated into the third actor's ideological offensive against dominant
forces, are incorporated into state policies. The history of the relation-
ship between the left and popular masses has not been a felicitous one
in Latin America, for leftist intellectuals and indeed revolutionaries (e.g.,
Che in Bolivia or the Sandinistas regarding the Misquitos) have not
understood the specificity of popular subjects' historical, geocultural, and
ideological formations. Because these formations are rooted in social,
 xx Translator's Introduction

political, and cultural struggles on a national or regional scale, socialist

or revolutionary strategy must permit the development of cultural poli-
cies in which popular groups participate. This has not often been the
case. In any event, the above-mentioned populisms have left deep marks,
which are only now, under neoliberalism, being scuffed into oblivion.
A proper understanding of the hybridization of modernity and tra-
dition, foregrounded in Garcia Canclini's work since at least Transform-
ing Modernity, would require an account of populism in Latin America
from the 19205 to the 19605, which the scope of this Introduction does
not permit. Suffice it to say that culturally, and literarily in particular,
the experience of populism was accompanied by a series of aesthetics of
hybridity that expressed the struggles, incorporation, co-optation, and
resistance of popular masses.39 These masses resisted and negotiated the
means of incorporation into modernizing projects in the aftermath of
World War I, a process that was intensified as the leading economies per-
mitted developing countries to strengthen import-substitution indus-
trialization. But these historical circumstances that enabled the rise of
this classic Latin American populism changed in the 19605. Import-
substitution industrialization was no longer viable in the world econ-
omy and power blocs were reunited under the control of transnational
capitalism. Leftist articulations of populism, transmuted into guerrilla
movements in many contexts, were energetically countered by new mil-
itary dictatorships (Southern Cone) or authoritarian governments (Mex-
ico). U.S. anti-insurgency policies were an important intervention in
these circumstances, offering the carrot of aid for development (e.g.,
the Alliance for Progress) and the stick of military intervention (e.g.,
the Chilean coup) and training (e.g., the School of the Americas). An-
alytically, as the dominant classes could no longer transform and neu-
tralize these radicalized populisms, outright coercion (torture, massacres,
disappearances) became the prescribed instruments to rein in the threats.
At the same time, new media industries, especially television, whose re-
organization under conglomerates such as Mexico's Televisa and Brazil's
Globo was facilitated by these repressive governments, began to trans-
form the popular into the mass. The mass media, of course, have a longer
history in Latin America than this turning point in the 19605; they be-
came significant players in modernization and education as early as the
beginning of the century in some countries.
According to Renato Ortiz, the 19605 represent the crystallization
of a common cultural consciousness among so-called popular sectors
and leftist intellectuals with the potential to create an alternative hege-
 Translator's Introduction xxi

mony that might change the "equilibrium" between political and civil
society within the state. In countries like those of the Southern Cone,
Brazil, and Mexico, it is not possible to speak of hegemony as an equi-
librium between political and civil society. Ortiz, for example, writes
of the "precariousness of the very idea of hegemony among us."40 In-
stead, what characterized countries such as Argentina, Brazil, and Mex-
ico was a pact between state-aligned elites who promoted import-substi-
tution industrialization and an equally state-aligned popular nationalism
that sought state welfare, delivered in corporatist forms since the 19205
and 19305. The origins of "popular culture" in Latin America can be
traced to this paradoxical state, which re-created those institutions most
responsible for supporting that culture: education, radio, film, muse-
ums, and anthropological institutions. It is through these institutions
that a good deal of "people's culture" was disseminated, not outside of
the market but squarely within the culture industries. The most salient
examples are samba and carnival in Brazil and ranchems on radio and
in film in Mexico. The nationalization of samba, for example, involved
the intervention of the Vargas regime in the 19305, the radio broadcast-
ing and recording industries, as well as various social institutions, such
as carnival, and "popular" networks.41 The shift that takes place in the
19605 is the incipient accommodation of Brazilian and Mexican media
to international standards. This mass-mediated internationalization, of-
ten considered "Americanization," has significant consequences for the
rearticulation of the "national popular," which Garcia Canclini addresses
in Transforming Modernity and subsequent books.
By the time the dictatorships gave way to a new phase of democra-
tization under a neoliberal consensus, the media and a host of new civil
society forms of organization articulated the new logic under which
popular antagonisms would be negotiated. This does not mean that the
racialized popular mass of the population ceased to be a force to con-
tend with; it did mean that the possibility of radicalizing their demands
in socialist terms became increasingly unlikely. Neoliberal populisms
in the 19805 and 19905 in Argentina (Menem), Brazil (Collor), and Peru
(Fujimori) revealed the degree to which the form of incorporating pop-
ular classes had changed. Furthermore, the defeat of the Central Amer-
ican revolutions, the utter marginalization of Cuba, particularly after
the demise of the Soviet Union, and the "fundamentalization" or crim-
inalization of several guerrilla struggles, especially in Peru and Colom-
bia, signaled the unworkability of change by means of armed insurrec-
tion. Indeed, many "national liberation fronts" (e.g., the Sandinistas and
 xxii Translator's Introduction

the Salvadoran FMLN) transformed themselves into civil society organ-

izations after more than a decade of struggle, as did the neo-Zapatistas
almost immediately. I have argued elsewhere that the recourse to civil
society (succored by U.S. foundations and European and global non-
governmental organizations) is fully compatible with neoliberalism.42
As state budgets for social programs are cut, it makes sense to free-
market advocates to have civil society "organize itself," a turn of events
examined by the Mexican intellectual Carlos Monsivais in Entrada libre:
cronicas de la sociedad que se organiza (Free entry: chronicles of a society
that organizes itself).43 It is in this context that Garcia Canclini has made
the clarion call to rethink how we understand popular movements.

Rethinking the Popular

The rethinking of the popular comes with an exuberant rejection of its
incorporation into a national discourse. This is no doubt because of
the fear that a radicalization of populism will engender those forces to
which the dictatorships reacted. It is also due to the recognition that
globalization has altered the circumstances under which it was politi-
cally viable to appeal to the popular for progressive ends. Without pro-
gressive potential, the popularand the claims that it serves as the
ground for opposition to imperialismbecomes a fetishized symbol of
Latin America's hybrid temporality, caught between the magic of the
traditional and the indigenous or African and the realist "rationality"
of modernity. For example, Jose Joaquin Brunner, one of the most influ-
ential intellectuals of the transition to democracy in Chile, reviles the
national-popular as an outdated myth:
The national-popular preserves the old desire to give culture a unifying
ground, be it a class, racial, historical, or ideological one. When culture
begins to deterritorialize, when it becomes more complex and varied, as-
sumes all the heterogeneities of society, is industrialized and massified,
loses its center and is filled with "lite" and transitory expressions, is struc-
tured on the basis of a plurality of the modernwhen all this takes
place, the unifying desire becomes reductionist and dangerously totali-
tarian or simply rhetorical. 44

Echoing Garcia Canclini's recognition of the hybridization of popular

traditions with the market and mass culture, Brunner breathes a sigh
of relief as the national-popular subject recedes into insignificance:
 Translator's Introduction xxiii

Today the national and the popular are in the public plaza but also in
the market, in rural traditions but also in transitory urban styles, in the
mass media, and in educational institutions, in global communications
and the flows that traverse them, and so on. National and (modern) pop-
ular are television (whether it transmits an opera plain and simple or a
soap open); the school, that forms, filters, and selects; Catholicism, elec-
tions and their rituals, rock music in various languages, and Bata sandals.
In other words, Macondo has been nothing but a nostalgic senti-
ment for quite some time, an illusion and a myth of the national-popu-
lar, just like protest song, political painting, the novel of social content,
radical clubs, and Citroneta.
Today it no longer makes any sense to speak of the national-popu-
lar as we did twenty years or half a century ago.4'

This dismissive reaction follows in. part from the other problematic at-
titude concerning the popular: its romantic heroization, to the point
of finding in the Sendero Luminoso or the Colombian guerrillas the
true manifestation of a national-popular. The oscillation between dis-
missal and heroization has had its effect on how the history of popular
agency is conceived.
Taking the Mexican Revolution as an example, the accounts of the
19205 and 19305 portrayed an agrarian revolution in which "the people"
broke with feudal oppression. These accounts took on epic proportions,
as Gilbert Joseph and Daniel Nugent remind us, in the hands of foreign
admirers (e.g., Frank Tannenbaum and John Steinbeck) and partisans
of the new revolutionary state (Jose Valades, Jestis Silva Herzog, etc.).46
Revisionist histories, conditioned by the crisis of the Mexican state in
1968, in contrast, focused on state domination and management, largely
leaving aside popular participation. Indeed, there seemed to be no pop-
ular agency. More recent work, particularly that which is inspired in
Gramsci's accounts of the hegemonic process, provides a fine-grained
historical account of the "articulation of distinctive forms of social
consciousness and experience" that constitute the popular as well as in-
form the state.47 Perhaps the most exemplary study in this regard is Flo-
rencia Mallon's Peasant and Nation: The Making of Postcolonial Mexico
and Peru.48 Mallon proposes an expanded notion of both the popular
and the intellectual, giving historical flesh to Gramsci's insight that con-
sciousness and identity are an achievement of collective everyday prac-
tices in a context of unequal power relations. As such, her work does not
 xxiv Translator's Introduction

merit the criticism leveled by John Beverley that she simply sought to
find the popular elements left out of official histories or demonstrate that
"peasant communities actually did have a decisive role in the formation
of the state in Peru and Mexico."49 Far from assuming that subalterns
can simply be represented in history, Mallon reconstructs a network of
relations in which the meaning of actions (e.g., resistance, influence,
and negotiation) can be discerned. She focuses on practices within the
shifting relations in rural communitiesfamily members of different
generations and gender identities, local intellectuals such as teachers,
justices of the peace, local commissioners of public instruction, and so
onand of these with regional and national officials. Her account of
agrarian reform, education, and local government in the sierra de Puebla
shows that identities and forms of knowledge were fashioned in the com-
plexly negotiated processes of partial integration in and resistance to na-
tional policies and discourses that left a sedimented memory that en-
abled the Mexican state to achieve hegemony in the twentieth century
because it could tap into these discourses. This memory, moreover, en-
abled popular actors in the 19105 to rework already established agendas
and alliances, even if they were subsequently suppressed. Mallon's point
is that this harking back to the past "does not constitute the reactivation
of atavistic peasant communities but rather the reorganization of already
sophisticated political alliances and discourses in a new context."50 The
objective is not so much to argue for the protagonism of peasants in
the construction of hegemony as to demonstrate that they articulated a
historical memory grounded in resistance and negotiation and that
could be used and projected beyond their particular situation in given
historical conjunctures.
This is a view of popular culture already present in Garcia Canclini's
Transforming Modernity. He focuses on handicrafts and fiestas not to
recuperate archaic practices or to criticize their accommodation to the
state, the culture industries, and tourism. Beyond the anthropological
view that fiestas are those moments when a collectivity "goes into its
deepest self, that part that normally escapes it, in order to understand
and restore itself," Garcia Canclini sees them as the means to negotiate
deficiencies in the agrarian structure, fulfill their consumption needs,
earn tourist dollars, and enjoy state sponsorship.31 A skeptical reader
following Garcia Canclini's arguments will assume that Indians simply
adapt their practices to the incentives provided externally, inserting mass
produced nonindigenous music into their fiestas or representations of
modern objects (e.g., airplanes) into their pottery for the benefit of
 Translator's Introduction xxv

tourists and foreign consumers. Despite such commercialization and

the state's intervention to reproduce an ethnic sense of difference and
national identity, Garcia Canclini concludes that the fiesta provides "a
degree of ceremonial readaptation, a new state for a torn community
that finds in the fiesta a means to reassert those elements of its identity
that come from the past and, in changes, a way to update the represen-
tation of its hardships and inequalities as well as its historical cohesion."52
We have here an early formulation of the insight in Consumers and Cit-
izens that identity is a coproduction.
These convergences notwithstanding, one gets a sense that Garcia
Canclini focuses primarily on the changes wrought on indigenous cul-
ture by modernization while Mallon (re)constructs the ways in which
popular groups resist and shape the practices of those who would trans-
form them. In Hybrid Cultures, Garcia Canclini has an almost allergic
reaction to the emphasis that some neo-Gramscians put on domination
and resistance: "There is no folklore belonging only to the oppressed
classes; nor are the only possible types of inter-folkloric relations those
of domination, submission, or rebellion."53 There may be a disciplinary
and conjunctural difference at work here. Garcia Canclini conducts
ethnographic research in the context of transculturation with the con-
sumer, culture, and tourism industries; Mallon examines negotiations
between popular sectors and officialdom in an era of incipient mod-
ernization, before these other mediating institutions further complicated
the scenarios in which the popular classes had, perhaps, a more direct
opportunity to enact their will. The question to ask about popular cul-
ture is not whether or not there is a popular will, but under what cir-
cumstances and in what relations with what other groups it manifests
itself and gains cultural and political space. And if the circumstances
do not favor this possibility, then the task of the scholar-intellectual
might be to shed some light on the means to transform the disadvan-
tages. Here Mallon and Garcia Canclini point in different, although
not contrary, directions. For Mallon, the recovery of "embedded mem-
ory and practice" may "allow us to imagine more clearly how subaltern
peoples might, after conquering the space to do so, create their own al-
ternative polities."54 For Garcia Canclini, recovery is treacherous terrain
and even if it were not, it is not, in itself, enough. "Indians and urban
popular classes [must] manage to convert those 'remnants' [i.e., identity
symbols] from the past into 'emergent,' challenging expressions."55
This transformation is what Garcia Canclini considers the "con-
struction of a counterhegemonic project," but it does not depend only on
 xxvi Translator's Introduction

recovery or knowledge. For him, there are other steps to be taken and
it is probably mistaken to assume that a particular collective actor can
do this on its own. "[Pjopular sectors [must] organize themselves into
cooperatives and unions from which they can begin to regain ownership
of the means of production and distribution" as well as "appropriate] the
symbolic meaning of their work." This is achieved not by "reintegrating]
into an Indian context" (already carried out by state institutions and
tourism), but by "formulating] a strategy for gradual control over spaces
and mechanisms of circulation."56 Furthermore, policy recommendations
for popular self-determination have to be conjunctural; what enables
participation in one historical context may hinder it in another. In-
deed, Garcia Canclini's work has increasingly focused on the policy con-
siderations for enhancing a democratic culture in tandem with his broad-
ening of the examination of the interaction of popular traditions with
transnational culture industries, particularly in the large urban centers
of Latin America. This orientation marks the shift from the focus on
handicrafts and fiestas in Transforming Modernity, written in the late
19705 and early 19805, to Consumers and Citizens, written in the 19905,
with the pivotal work on cultural reconversion in Hybrid Cultures (1990)
about midway. This latter work gives a wealth of examples from art,
literature, music, handicrafts, and urban culture to demonstrate that
traditions have not been rendered obsolete, as Brunner seems to imply
in his well-placed yet perhaps overly emphatic repudiation of Macondismo
(i.e., Latin American magical realism), but that they have been resigni-
fied in the context of the overall restructuring of society, politics, and
the economy. "Instead of the death of traditional cultural forms, we
now discover that tradition is in transition, and articulated to modern
processes. Reconversion prolongs their existence."57

Citizenship in the Age of the "International Popular" and

Fragmented Politics
Throughout the 19805, Garcia Canclini's interests developed gradually
from policies that presume that popular groups can take control of the
production and consumption process to a more mediated understand-
ing of how appropriation works in fragmented urban settings in the
context of an increasing tendency to consume "international popular"
culture.58 "Consider that today no 'national' cinema can recoup invest-
ment in a film from ticket sales within its own borders. It has to target
multiple sales venues: satellite and cable TV, networks of video and laser
 Translator's Introduction xxvii

disk rental outlets. All of these systems, structured transnationally, fa-

cilitate the 'defolklorization' of messages they put into circulation" (chap-
ter 5 of this volume). These conditions foster a collective memory made
from the fragments of different nations, making it difficult for that mem-
ory to be distilled from any one particular group,59 although "Ameri-
can" references may predominate. We are reminded here of Appadu-
rai's suggestion that supranational cultural formations (e.g., the Indian
diaspora or Latinoness in the United States) emerge from processes of
deterritorialization of peoples, commodities, money, images, and ide-
ologies.60 Under these conditions, of what some have considered a "global
ecumene" and others Armageddon, the familiar "national-popular" con-
structions of medium-scale nations ("Spain," "Yugoslavia," "Britain,"
"Italy") obviously founder and give way to a range of smaller nation-
alisms ("Catalonian," "Basque," "Serbian," "Albanian," "Scottish,"
"Padanian") and supranational federations (the European Union) and
trade agreements in search of a supranational cultural cement (the South-
ern Common Market or MERCOSUR).
The "popular" has also given way to a social movement framework,
at first associated with opposition to dictatorships and subsequently to
democratization in the context of the postdictatorial and postauthori-
tarian transition. In this latter context and under the sway of neoliber-
alizing economies and polities, social movements have tended to accom-
modate to a civil society paradigm, according to which citizens engage
in voluntary associations, often organized as nongovernmental organi-
zations (predominant in Latin America) or nonprofit organizations (typi-
cal of the United States), to perform a myriad of social services, includ-
ing cultural activities. Fiscal and juridical forms of organization have
begun to take precedence over the local political bosses who integrated
"popular sectors" into clientelist networks. NGOs and civil society net-
works are flexible and nomadic, capable of producing a sense of partic-
ipation, if not always meeting the needs of the population. There are,
of course, many situations in which this model does not seem to corre-
spond to the antagonisms brought forth by subordinated groups. The
Colombian guerrillas and Sendero Luminoso in Peru certainly are not
good examples of democratic organizations. There is, however, no theory
of civil society that can easily exclude those associations that manifest
undemocratic behavior. Garcia Canclini recognizes the paradox that the
effort to institute democracy may already be tainted by the inclusion of
nondemocratic groups. "How can a program that is democratic and re-
spectful of a group's structures be established if the structures in question
 xxvin Translator's Introduction

are paternalistic, authoritarian, and based on bonds of blood rather than

affinity? Moreover, what if the state that promotes democratization is
also racked by these same nondemocratic characteristics?" (chapter 9 of
this volume). One might, following David Ronfeldt, characterize these
as manifestations of "uncivil society," which are just as likely as democ-
ratizing social movements to emerge in a polity in which state author-
ity is undervalued and a premium is put on difference, decentralization,
and voluntary association.61 The focus of attention, however, has been
on those mobilizations that further the democratization of national so-
cieties, such as the previously mentioned neo-Zapatistas or the Brazilian
movement of the landless (the Movimento dos Sem Terra). Although
the latter two seem to have maintained a certain autonomy from the
state and capital, most civil society organizations are permeable by in-
stitutions of the corporate sector, the government, and the "globalized
civil society" of international NGOs. The supposed autonomy of social
movementstheir particularly social, as opposed to political, agendas
does not obtain independently of channeling by capital and the state.
Drawing on earlier arguments, we can characterize the historical
conjuncture in which these civil society organizations arise as consist-
ing of the following features: (i) the eradication of revolutionary pop-
ulism by the Southern Cone dictatorships and counterrevolutionary Cen-
tral American military regimes of the 19605, 19705, and 19805, or the
authoritarian-paternalistic rule characteristic of countries such as Mexico;
(2) the emergence of social movements that could not appeal directly to
politics, yet stretched the significance of the cultural and the personal to
the point of having political effects; (3) (re) democratization and incor-
poration of social movements under the international hegemony of neo-
liberalism in the 19805 and 19905; (4) the demise of socialism, which left
little opposition to the legitimacy claimed by neoliberals in their program
to transform (through structural adjustment, privatization, and down-
sizing of the public sector) the legacy of the national-popular or national-
populist state (a process that is still taking place); (5) the increasing dis-
persion of so-called popular sectors as a result of urbanization and urban
sprawl, to the point, as Garcia Canclini argues in Consumers and Citi-
zens, that there is little communication across difficult-to-reach sections
of the megalopolis, thus making it impossible to produce coherent nar-
ratives of the popular (chapter 4 of this volume); (6) the abandonment
of public spaces for traditional forms of congregation, again the result of
urban sprawl, but more significantly of a preference for home-delivery
of entertainment via TV, video, and cable; (7) the concomitant trans-
 Translator's Introduction xxix

nationalization of publicness due to various forms of supranational link-

ages, from migrant circuits to multinational networks and supranational
regional integration agreements such as NAFTA (North American Free
Trade Agreement) and MERCOSUR that are rearticulating the imag-
ined community.
Rather than take all of these transformations as bad news, Garcia
Canclini remains optimistic when he recommends urban cultural poli-
cies that respect and disseminate the differences that characterize the
fragmentation of urban sprawl (chapter 3 of this volume). "The diversi-
fication of tastes might have something to do with the cultural forma-
tion of a democratic citizenship" (chapter 7 of this volume). But democ-
racy is much more complicated than the wishful dreams of liberal
theorists. "Hence the paradox: those who sought to bring democracy
to the locality soon learned that they had to make pacts with neighbor-
hood bosses in order to gain access to the dwellers and to insert them-
selves into local sociocultural structures" (chapter 9 of this volume). And
to further complicate the dream of democracy, we might remember Fou-
cault's critique of civil society, which defends itself by identifying and
purging those who are construed as "other" or abject; that is, civil soci-
ety reproduces itself by segregating those to be eliminated, and gener-
ates a host of institutions (e.g., prisons, psychiatric asylums, schools)
that both serve this purpose and conceal it by establishing "rehabilita-
tion" as their mission. This is a view of civil society that flies in the face
of the notion of hegemony that Gramsci had put forth. Gramsci had
written that
[o]f the many meanings of democracy, the most realistic and concrete
one in my view can be worked out in relation to the concept of "hege-
mony." In the hegemonic system, there exists democracy between the
"leading" group and the groups which are "led," in so far as the develop-
ment of the economy and thus the legislation which expresses such de-
velopment favour the (molecular) passage from the "led" groups to the
"leading" group.62

With economic development, there is a fusion of the "ethical" or disci-

plinary state (in the hands of intellectuals) and the "interventionist" or
regulatory state (in the hands of politicians and technocrats), which pro-
tects the economic interests of the national bourgeoisies, as well as " 'pro-
tect[s]' the working classes against the excesses of capitalism."63 The re-
sult is a civil society that presumably regulates itself. Foucault, however,
took a skeptical view of the regulatory society, whose history has been
 xxx Translator's Introduction

told predominantly by focusing only on two of the three tactical instru-

ments that ensure hegemony (national consciousness and its attendant
historical, cultural, linguistic, and philological discourses; and class strug-
gle, with its attendant discourse of political economy). The third in-
strument, which, according to Foucault, has received scant attention,
is the security or welfare state. This security state declared war on the
internal dangers of the polity by means of "bioregulation."64 Elsewhere
I have argued that "bioregulation" by the modern state has been aug-
mented by an expansion of "cultural regulation" in the neoliberal post-
modern state.6' This insight should lead us to view the formulation of
cultural policies with caution.

Subalternity: Negation or Negotiation?

Any theory of democracy, liberal or radical, has to deal with these com-
plicating factors: criminality as a form of (un)civil society and abjectifi-
cation by a society that "defends itself." They also have to be taken into
consideration by those who have most criticized Garcia Canclini: Latin
American subalternists. In the early 19905, a group of Latin American
subaltern scholars was formed in the United States to rethink the crisis
of the left. Although the crisis was generated by the failure of commu-
nism and popular revolutionary struggles in Central America and the
Andean countries, this problem was largely an academic one among
U.S. scholars. Many of these scholars had been involved to some extent
as fellow travelers and in some cases participants in these struggles. As
those struggles were defeated, so too were the foundations of the very
beliefs of these academics. Did "the people" turn against the Sandin-
istas? And if so, where had the Sandinistasaside from confronting the
U.S. juggernautgone wrong? According to John Beverley, neither the
Cuban nor the Nicaraguan revolutions radicalized sufficiently the rela-
tion between the dominant and the subaltern. Even when they sought to
empower "the people," the protagonism of vanguard politicians and intel-
lectuals continued to have "counterproductive effects."66 The implica-
tion is of a neat progressive politics with no complicating factors, if
only the bourgeoisie and intellectuals had opened a space for the sub-
altern. As we shall see, the subalternists' very conception of the subal-
tern does not make this a workable proposition.
There was already a proclivity to attend to the subaltern in the in-
corporation of testimonio into the U.S. academy. But the very genre
raised serious problems about representation: Who speaks for whom?
 Translator's Introduction xxxi

Can the subaltern speak? How are voice and perspective mediated? What
is left of the subaltern in this process of mediation? And so on. These
very questions raised problems for the academics who wrote about tes-
timonio.67 Many derived legitimacy within an institution in transfor-
mation (i.e., undergoing multiculturalization) by becoming experts on
the genre and linking their own subjectivity to that of the testimonial
informants. A scholarship that engages in advocacy is, of course, an im-
portant contribution of the new social movements to cultural studies.
It would indeed be foolish to pretend that there is not already a poli-
tics conditioning research agendas. But the subalternists seemed to be
rather unreflexive about their own stake in the cause of the subaltern.
The adoption of Ranajit Guha's definition of the subalternas
the constitutive exclusion that enables the writing of a historiography
that fails to make the nation "come to its own"68permitted the Latin
American subalternists to turn from the question of representation of
subalterns or of their transactions with colonial or national power bro-
kers to one of their constitutive absence or refusal to engage in colonial-
ity. The questions that Latin American subalternists asked, then, had
to do with the force of the subaltern as a negation of colonialist power
and its manifestation in historiography and other forms of writing. Aca-
demically, this adoption allowed them to have their cake and eat it too.
They could accuse Garcia Canclini of reformism by seeking to create a
democratic space within the already existing system of oppression, and
at the same time not have to engage in a representational politics that
would put them in a similar situation. In other words, their double use
of subalternity (as the oppressed and as negation) is similar to the as-
similation of political categories to aesthetico-philosophical ones that I
discussed earlier in considering the sleight of hand that Bhabha and
Kristeva, respectively, operate in moving from hybrid subjects to hy-
bridity as a condition of interstiality or from abjects to abjection.
Latin American subalternists deride Garcia Canclini's empirical field-
work on popular cultures as one more instance of the ethnographic im-
pulse to know the other. Instead, the subalternists' preferred mode of
practice is textual analysis, for there is where the constitutive exclusion
of absent signification best manifests itself. It thus boggles the mind to
consider that subalternists have no properly subaltern politics. When it
comes to taking a stance, they are no different from your garden variety
identity politicians: they promote "ethnic, nationalist, or regionalist de-
mands, the struggle of women for equality, and the resentment or 'neg-
ativity' that generally characterizes subaltern identities."69 Subalternists
 xxxii Translator's Introduction

put a premium on colonial history and have little to say about the en-
gagement of subalterns with media and consumption. They view strate-
gies of representation with suspicion because they are subject to chan-
neling in consumerist and media circuits that render them ineffective
as means of empowerment. Consequently, the Latin American subaltern
studies group has emphasized the negativity that inheres in the concep-
tion of the subaltern by the South Asian group.
This insight puts the onus on them not only to come up with an
analysis of this crisis of representation, but also to devise an effective
politics. Predictably, this is their quagmire. They claim to summon the
subaltern directly:
We're disconnected, by virtue of being in an elite position, from subal-
tern culture, but now we have a series of techniques that allow us to ac-
cess the subaltern directly, instead of depending on the native informant
of classical anthropology, who just told us what we wanted to know in
the first place. The native informant lent himself or herself to imperial-
ist, colonialist, racist, Eurocentric designs and conceptions. We have got
around the native informant problem, we can hook directly into the sub-
altern now, "boot it up," so to speak.

Despite this note of self-irony, John Beverley remains optimistic that

"our work [can] incorporate th[e] negativity [of subaltern people who
reject representation], and thus become a part of the agency of the sub-
altern in its struggle against domination."71 When asked how exactly
that negativity can be incorporated as part of a political project, Bever-
ley is forced to acknowledge that it is perhaps a one-way street between
subalterns and the institution of the university. Academic subalternists
can devise new ways of detecting the inadequacy of historical texts for
any political or social project, or more generally, transform into concep-
tual terms the practices that resist institutionalization. (Here Beverley
confesses to a "knee-jerk rejection of institutionality.")72 But it seems
as if the question of what an academic might do for subalterns cannot
even be asked. Subalternity, it turns out, is the will to refusal, and as
such it does not constitute the entirety of the psychopolitical makeup
of social and historical "actors." There are, in fact, no "actors" in subal-
ternity. Instead, there is the will to refusal. Subalternity, then, is a kind
of will to power, understood as "relation(s) without relata" that cannot be
represented. As such, it offers the academy a different way of knowing,
setting "aside the dominating visual [or representational] metaphorics of
traditional epistemology." Like the will to power, it is a "self-consuming
 Translator's Introduction xxxiii

concept."73 The question remains: what can a self-consuming concept

offer politics and the "outside" of institutionality? Beverley's argument
that a politics based on the pivotal position of the subaltern can lead to
the creation of a new historical bloc, while well-intentioned and properly
Utopian, seerns quite voluntarist, particularly for an academic whose in-
volvement with subalterns is largely textual.
Ironically, the very possibility of a hegemonic historical bloc seems
foreclosed by the postmodern historical turn that Beverley and other
subalternists acknowledge. This is Alberto Moreiras's argument, him-
self a onetime member and certainly the most self-reflexive of the group.
The struggle for hegemony as the practice of ideological rearticulation
through the Institutions of civil society is, according to Moreiras, already
a given form of counterhegemony, one that is functional to contempo-
rary capitalism. "One must understand politics beyond [the space pro-
vided by] articulation, because articulation, that fundamentally populist
device, as Laclau and Mouffe have taught us, is already the place of a
pseudopolitics."74 The proper space of politics is, for Moreiras, subalter-
nity understood as the confrontation with the necessary incomplete-
ness of articulation, of what defies it. "The subalternist notion of historic
failure points to the identification and study of indigestible blockages
in non-European transculturation, and purports to find in them a crit-
ical possibility for the operational release of modes of cultural-historical
interpretation that counter the necessarily teleological bent of 'historical
transition' or mode of production narratives."75 A viable politics can
then only be negative in a deconstructionist sense, and the subaltern is
that instance of what enables a politics that cannot be captured by the
social. The properly political can then only function as posthegemonic,
"not as a substitute for or as the defeat of the theory of hegemony but
rather as its effective supplement, that difficult place from which to think
of [society's] constitutive exterior."76 Multiculturalism, as the most re-
cent and "successful" form of articulation is, thus, "consistent with the
cultural logic of multinational capitalism," writes Moreiras, citing Slavoj
Zizek approvingly.77
To the degree that democracy understood as multicultural equity
is consistent with multinational capitalism, Garcia Canclini's objective
is to create a supranational cultural space that may be beyond the pa-
rameters of the hegemonic at the same time that it is not outside of
contemporary capitalism, global yet strategically rooted in the local. To
this end, Garcia Canclini's political strategy in Consumers and Citizens
is to view consumption as "means of thinking" that creates new ways
 xxxiv Translator's Introduction

of being citizens. However, the mediated public sphere, particularly in

the context of globalization and regional integration, overflows the clas-
sic sphere of political interactions. The public nowadays is the media-
tion by which social institutions (re)present multiple aspects of social
life to their audiences. In this regard, traditional and even recent progres-
sive thinking on the expansion of citizenship to the "popular" (or "sub-
altern") sectors is outdated, particularly insofar as it holds to the national
frame as the proscenium of action and a "Gutenbergian" conception of
how to negotiate the public sphere. Garcia Canclini advocates rethink-
ing politics in relation to consumption, although not necessarily the
U.S. model. Globalization has transformed the traditional sentimental-
educational terrain of citizenship formation. National patrimonies, folk-
lore, and the high arts are losing viewers and users, or their functions
have shifted. Consumption, then, has to be rethought in relation to the
culture industries. But in Latin America, this means confronting the
problem of "Americanization."
The political problem that Garcia Canclini tackles is also posthege-
monic in the sense that it cannot be resolved at the national level, which
was the frame in which Gramsci conceived of the hegemonic process.
This is precisely why Garcia Canclini considers it important that alliances
of states and civil society groups have an important role in brokering a
supranational cultural space, particularly in setting regulatory policies
so that the affective aspects of cultural interpellationidentity forma-
tionare not so overwhelmingly articulated by national elites or by
U.S.-identified transnational corporations. For Garcia Canclini, neolib-
eralism and privatization are not the answers; these just enable transna-
tional corporations to gain greater control in Latin America. He argues
that since experience has shown that privatization has not made utilities
function any better, the state should get back into the public interest,
helping to create better systems of cultural intermediation (chapter 8
of this volume). In this regard, the activities of the "grassroots explosion"
of the new social movements, which must form part of this Latin Amer-
ican cultural space, cannot substitute for the conventional responsibili-
ties of states in providing resources and incentives in education, health,
social, and cultural services, leaving the administration of these services,
however, to local communities. More specifically, Garcia Canclini's own
model of a culturally integrated supranational federalism is premised
on a range of specific policies: the creation of a Latin American media
space; the creation of book, magazine, film, TV, video common mar-
kets in the region; setting quotas of 50 percent Latin American produc-
 Translator's Introduction xxxv

tion and distribution in movie theaters, video outlets, radio broadcasts,

television programming, and so on; the creation of a Foundation for the
Production and Distribution of Latin American Media; the regulation
of foreign capital, and policies to strengthen Latin American economies;
the development of citizenship by giving greater attention to a politics
of recognition in keeping with the multiplication of claims by all sec-
tors of society (chapter 8 of this volume).
I would propose that Garcia Canclini's view of negotiation might
offer a better opportunity for a radical politics than the subalternists' de-
constructivist negation. The only form of agency available to subalterns
in this politics of negation is refusal, which in any case never comes in
pure form. Garcia Canclini's empirical work registers acts of negotiation
in most spheres of activity, even those that are most culturally precious.
It is the intellectual who sloughs off the transactional qualities from re-
sistance, as if they were not entwined in action. Mikhail Bakhtin's insights
are useful here. According to him, there is no such thing as an absolute
"one's own," but rather a socially worked-out negotiation (or mismanage-
ment) of the constraints and leeways available. Insofar as "one's own"
language or voice is "populated" with others' value-laden voices, it can-
not pass "easily and freely into the private property of the speaker's in-
tentions."78 Taking as his point of departure a similar insight about
identity and even will as a "coproduction," Garcia Canclini argues:
The culturally hybrid features resulting from cross-class interaction force
us to recognize that alongside struggle there is also negotiation. And ne-
gotiation does not appear as a process external to the constitution of the
actors, to which they might resort on occasion for political convenience.
It is a mode of existence, something intrinsic to the groups that take part
in the social drama. Negotiation is located within collective subjectivity,
in the most unconscious culture or politics and daily life. Its hybrid char-
acter, which in Latin America derives from a long history of mixtures
and syncretisms, is accentuated in contemporary societies through com-
plex interactions between the traditional and the modern, the popular
and the elite, the subaltern and the hegemonic. (Chapter 9 of this volume)

Garcia Canclini does not endeavor to tell subalterns how to nego-

tiate. Rather, he and his fellow researchers listen to and accompany peo-
ple as they negotiate the complex and fragmented world at the cen-
tury's end. The aim of his work is to help scholars, policy makers, and
other interested parties to understand how they might help out in these
processes of negotiation that underlie even some of the most fundamen-
 xxxvi Translator's Introduction

talist of movements. Garcia Canclini could, of course, be more reflexive

about this aspect of his work. At times, he tends to speak of a bipolar
divide between negotiation and fundamentalism. This is most evident
in his recent work on comparative multiculturalisms in Latin America
and the United States, to which I turn.

The Incommensurability of Latin American and U.S. Identities

Garcia Canclini is one of a handful of Latin American scholars who have
endeavored to seriously engage the reciprocal impact of Latin Ameri-
can and U.S. societies on each other. Because much of the interest in
his work has come from the transdiscipline of cultural studies as well
as Chicano studies, in both of which representations of identity have a
central role, Garcia Canclini has addressed several recent studies to the
difficulty in using the same termidentityon different sides of the
border. Generally, he exhibits a pronounced distaste for identity poli-
tics as it is practiced in the United States. Although he understands the
historical reasons for the contemporary need to base political advan-
tage on clearly defined communities, he feels that this leads to a dis-
abling separatism. In the Preface to the English-language edition of this
volume, he states that whereas "in Latin America [what] has been called
cultural pluralism or heterogeneity is conceived as part of the nation,...
in the U.S. debate, as various authors explain, 'multiculturalism means
separatism.'" In La globalization imaginada (Imagined globalization),
Garcia Canclini points to certain lexical and semantic gaps when com-
paring Latin America and the United States that, in his estimation, are
convincing evidence of the impossibility of translating deep-rooted cul-
tural concepts across borders. Why, for example, doesn't English have
an equivalent for the Spanish mestizo, the Portuguese mestizo, or the
French metis''. (109). English-language approximations, like creoliza-
tion, belong to a different domain, a linguistic one in this case. And
those terms that do refer to the mixture of raceshalf-caste, half-breed,
mixed-blood, and so onare generally pejorative and even scandalous,
whereas in Latin America mestizo has had positive connotations since
the 19205 in some countries (113). Even taking into account that blacks
and indigenous peoples have been the "others" of the normative demo-
graphic profile in both contexts, blacks (in Brazil) and Indians (in Mex-
ico) have been imagined as the very epitome of the national subject, at
least in their mixed or mestizo variants (116).
 Translator's Introduction xxxvii

Although Garcia Canclini notes that racism is just as rooted in Latin

America as it: is in the United States, he wants to emphasize the relative
plasticity of identity in Latin American contexts that give people a cer-
tain leeway in negotiating identity. In the United States, he writes, "iden-
tities tend to be autonomous unities . . . while in Brazil the subject pre-
serves the possibility of various different affiliations, circulating among
identities and mixing them" (117) ,79 While acknowledging the signifi-
cant difference between U.S. and Latin American forms of identifica-
tion, it seems to me that Garcia Canclini does not go far enough in his
critique of the situation of blacks and Indians who have less leeway in
negotiating away from the stigma of race. Not for nothing does the con-
cept of "bettering the race" (mejorar la raza; melhorar a rafa)or "whiten-
ing" (emblanquecer; emblanquecimento) exist in Spanish America and
Brazil. Latin America does in fact allow for a racially more diverse melt-
ing pot than the United States, but "unmixed" blacks and Indians are
generally excluded. Recognizing this fact does not mean, however, that
the identity politics generated and bolstered by affirmative action in the
United States will work in Latin America. According to Garcia Can-
clini, affirmative action contributes to hard-and-fast separations in the
United States. But one can imagine that millions of Brazilians and Mex-
icans could easily claim to be of Afro and indigenous descent if that
were to give them educational and employment advantages. That would
simply be an expression of the plasticity of identity rather than a fixed
essentialism
Garcia Canclini's view of U.S. identity politics also suffers a bit from
cultural parallax. His view of U.S. separate identities is only partial and
somewhat stereotypical. In fact, there has been a major overhaul of racial
identification in the United States since the 19605. Civil-rights legisla-
tion and judicial action on that basis, a move to decentralize and de-
mocratize American culture, the revision of census categories, and the
emergence of media and consumer niche marketing have all conspired
to refashion American demography into five categories, all of which are
melting pots: whites or European-Americans, blacks or African-Ameri-
cans, Hispanics/Latinos, Asian-Pacific Americans, and Native Ameri-
cans. To these five panethnicities, women and gay men and lesbians
should also be added, for the category of protected groups will include
those who have suffered past disc rimination on the basis of race, color,
gender, and sexuality. This emerging ethnoracial and identity system
also has an implicit premise that there is no one overriding American
 xxxviii Translator's Introduction

normativity, a belief among many liberals and progressives that is deeply

Americocentric. The very system itself is normative, and exercises signifi-
cant force, such as when students are routed into classes depending on
their ethnicity, or when it is expected that members of a given group
will behave in a particular way. Panethnicization has also eroded the
salience of "WASP" normativity, to which Garcia Canclini continues to
refer. Instead, there is an implicit "Anglo-conformity" that characterizes
the descendants of Italians, Poles, Greeks, and Jews just as much as the
Daughters of the American Revolution.
The shift to a discussion of normativity should make it evident that
mestizaje is analogous to "Anglo-conformity." Although it is still true
that whiteness is valued in Latin American societies, the mestizo or mixed-
race person is normative in most Latin American societies, so long as
the mixture does not shade too dark. Venezuelans, for example, refer
to themselves as criollos, irrespective of race, except for indigenous tribes
and blacks from neighboring Guyana, who are considered to be "truly
black." It is this mestizo normativity that has in large part stymied the
efforts of black movements to gain significant empowerment. And not
only blacks. There are various constituencies (e.g., regional groups, such
as the nordestinos of northeastern Brazil) that do not feel integrally part
of the normative nation as it has been projected from the dominant
centers of national polities (e.g., Sao Paulo or Rio de Janeiro). This is a
point that Garcia Canclini himself emphasizes in Consumers and Citi-
zens, and it is for this very reason that his Latin American cultural space
would be a preferable alternative to national cultural policies that have
reified folkloric or high-art norms. Furthermore, as he points out both
in Consumers and Citizens and La globalization imaginada, supranational
trade agreements and transnational migrations are making the national
norm an outdated and unworkable framework for identity. The crux
of the matter, however, is whether or not the U.S. way of negotiating
the increasingly multicultural character of societies will take precedence.
Not so much against this possibility but in the hope of reconverting it,
Garcia Canclini's recent efforts have been aimed at including Latin Amer-
ican agendas in the creation of a democratic multicultural ethos and
politics.
consumers and citizens
This page intentionally left blank
 Author's Preface to the English-Language Edition

The North-South Dialogue on Cultural Studies

O ne way of introducing this book is to say that it examines global-

ization as a process of fragmentation and recomposition; rather than
homogenize the world, globalization reorders differences and inequali-
ties without eliminating them. Hence, the rise of multicultural societies
should be seen in connection with globalizing movements.
The research projects presented here take Latin American cities and
culture industries as their basic objects of study. Although this book
may be understood as having been written from the specific locale of
Latin America, its perspective should not be considered to be outside
the reach of globalization, nor as a difference that leads directly to rad-
ical alternatives, that is, to a totally different society. What is the meaning
of our thoughts and actions when we acknowledge that they necessar-
ily take place within globalization processes, that is, within the hege-
monic tendencies of urbanization and the industrialization of culture?
Some interpret this fact as the triumph of "one way of thinking" and as
the end of ideological diversity. I prefer to consider this situation as a
framing horizon, albeit an open and relatively undetermined one. To
get beyond the binarism of local versus global it is necessary to focus on
the concrete1 conditions in which cultural practices develop in different

3
 4 Preface

countries, on the interaction of globalizing projects and the specific mul-

ticultural social arrangements obtaining in given regions.
It is now a commonplace of history that Latin America was "in-
vented" by Europe. Initiated by Spain and Portugal through conquest
and colonization, this invention was reelaborated through the interven-
tions of France, England, and other metropolitan nations. The ensuing
relations of dependency, characterized in each period by conflicts and
hybridizations, were succeeded in the twentieth century by new link-
ages with the United States. This displacment cannot be seen, however,
as the simple replacement of one master for another. The transition
from dependency on Europe to subordination to the United States was
paralleled by changes in agricultural, industrial, and financial markets,
transformations in the production, circulation, and consumption of tech-
nology and culture, and an upsurge in demographic flows of migrants,
tourists, and exiles. All this altered the structure of dependency.
The changes in the four areas examined in the following pages
cities, markets, technology-culture connections, demographic displace-
ments rendered obsolete past characterizations that helped explain the
relations between Latin America, on the one hand, and Europe and the
United States, on the other. The connections that now make us depend-
ent on the United States and on global powers cannot be explained as
relations of colomality, which imply the occupation of a subordinated
territory, or as imperialist relations, which entail a linear domination
by the imperial center over the subaltern nations. Only if we focus on
the exception of Puerto Rico can one discern a colonial condition; but
all other Latin American countries ceased to be colonies one or two
centuries ago. However, U.S. imperialism relegated these countries to
dependency and a peripheral position within the world system of un-
equal and uneven exchanges.
Another clarification is in otder. Sometimes the displacement of
dependency from Europe to the United States is interpreted as the pas-
sage from a sociopolitical subordination to a socioeconomic submission.
We Latin Americans presumably learned to be citizens through our re-
lationship to Europe; our relationship to the United States will, how-
ever, reduce us to consumers. France, England, Germany, and to a de-
gree the United States inspired our constitutions, the construction of
republican regimes, and the participation of our citizens in political par-
ties, labor unions, and social movements. These liberal influences were
reelaborated in the circumstances of our multiethnic social composition
and the peculiar evolution of our democratic regimes.
 Preface 5

In the past few decades, the intensification of economic and cul-

tural relations with the United States has encouraged a model of soci-
ety in which many state functions have disappeared or been assumed
by private corporations, and in which social participation is organized
through consumption rather than through the exercise of citizenship.
This new metropolitan model has compounded the already existing
problems of the inadequate development and instability of our democ-
racies, and the stranglehold on representative institutions by the dicta-
torships of the 19705 and 19805; the resulting synergy has a greater capac-
ity to transform Latin American civil societies into atomized ensembles
of consumers.
This book attempts to understand why the argument that relations
with the United States have intensified a new mode of dependency is
inadequate for explaining the current transformations in our citizen and
consumer roles. The relation between citizens and consumers has been
altered throughout the world due to economic, technological, and cul-
tural changes that have impeded the constitution of identities through
national symbols. Now they are shaped by the programming of, say,
Hollywood, Televisa, and MTV. For many men and women, especially
youth, the questions specific to citizenship, such as how we inform our-
selves and who represents our interests, are answered more often than
not through private consumption of commodities and media offerings
than through the abstract rules of democracy or through participation
in discredited political organizations. This process could be understood
as loss or depoliticization from the perspective of the ideals of liberal
or enlightened democracy. But we may also posit, as do James Holston
and Arjun Appadurai, that the political notion of citizenship is expanded
by including rights to housing, health, education, and the access to other
goods through consumption.1 It is in this sense that I propose reconcep-
tualizaing consumption, not as a mere setting for useless expenditures
and irrational impulses, but as a site that is good for thinking, where a
good part of economic, sociopolitical, and psychological rationality is
organized in all societies.

Cities
Recognizing these transformations does not mean endorsing the disso-
lution of the city in consumption, nor nations in globalization. Nor do
I believe that this is what is happening. In order to understand the shift
from "classic" identities (nations, classes, ethnicities) that no longer con-
 6 Preface

tain us to new global structures that satisfy in different ways our inter-
ests and desires, we must take into consideration the recomposition of
social relations and the obstacles to satisfaction today. These obstacles
may well be an expression of the Zeitgeist and of the universal crisis in
paradigms and certainties, as we read in much postmodern theory. But
they may also be studied empirically as they accommodate to different
contexts. Both Anglo-American humanities and cultural studies tradi-
tions, more in keeping with the first approach, as well as the predomi-
nantly social-scientific Latin American approaches to the study of cul-
ture, are legitimate.2 My own focus on narratives of multicultural crisis
in an age of globalization as well as my empirical research on how mul-
ticulturalism plays out in cities and communications processes speak
to the relevance of working in both modalities.
This desire for a dialogue between Latin American and Anglo-
American thought, between the social sciences and the humanities (with-
out accepting any necessary correspondence between both pairings),
was motivated by preoccupations about how globalization processes, led
but not governed by U.S. culture, might affect the future of Latin cul-
ture. This concern was not all that evident to me while I was writing,
but two years after the Spanish-language edition was published, I real-
ized (with the help of reviews in Latin American and Anglo-American
forums) that it guided my explorations of changes in communications
industries and their publics in Latin America and my interest in com-
paring these with European audiovisual industries and publics. Some-
what less obviously, this concern also guided my analysis of the decom-
position and transformations of large Latin American cities.
The passage from a Latin-European origin to a North American
"destiny" has modified not only Latin American societies, but also the
social sciences, the arts, and sources of authority and prestige in mass
culture. In less than fifty years, the capital cities that set the trends of
our thought and aesthetics ceased to be Paris, London, and to a lesser
extent Madrid, Milan, and Berlin; their places within the regional imagi-
nary came to be occupied by New York for intellectual elites; by Miami
and Los Angeles for middle-class tourists; and by California, Texas, New
York, and Chicago for migrant workers.
A revealing indicator of the waning importance of the European
conception of the city as a center of civic, commerial, academic, and
artistic life is that the U.S. metropoles preferred by many Latin Ameri-
cans are not even cities. Academics prefer Stanford, Duke, or Iowa (a
campus without a city) over the great urban centers. The middle classes
yearn to realize their fantasies in Disneyland or Disney World, as well
 Preface 7

as in shopping centers that, even when they are in the middle of a city,
require one to move in a deurbanized manner, according to European
standards of urban life. There are veiy few European-style cities like New
York or San Francisco in the United States.
What does this have to do with the disintegration of Latin American
megacities (and many medium-siz,e cities) such as Mexico City, Sao
Paulo, Caracas, Lima, and Bogota? It is obvious that we are not dealing
with imperialist impositions here, nor with mere degraded copies of
U.S. urbanisrn. This book contains analyses of certain Latin American
megalopolises as global cities; however, the transformations that grip
them are generated intrinsically by processes of unequal development
and contradictions internal to them: mass migrations; the contraction
of labor markets; flawed urban and. housing policies; social services in-
adequate for an expanding population and urban sprawl; interethnic
conflicts; the deterioration of the quality of life and an alarming increase
in crime. The large cities of our continent, imagined by governments
and migrants until very recently as trie avant-garde of our modernization,
are today the chaotic scenes of informal markets where hordes of peo-
ple try to survive under the most archaic forms of exploitation, or by
having recourse to networks of solidarity or violence.
All of this is internally driven but at the same time related to new
modes of subordination of peripheral economies and to transnational
restructuring of markets for materi al and communicational commodi-
ties. Just as in the cities of the first world, many Latin American cities
serve as laboratories for degraded multicultural encounters and simul-
taneously develop as strategic centers for commercial, informational,
and financial innovation, dynamizing the local market as it is incorpo-
rated into transnational circuits. For this reason, Mexico City and Sao
Paulo are as revealing as New York or London for research that explores
the rearticulations between the global and the local, between the flows
of deterritorialization and reterritorialization. This research also intro-
duces some "heterodox" issues into the debates on urbanisrn and glob-
alization, or perhaps it only accentuates contradictions that are also
visible in metropolitan multicultural centers.

Communications
The increasing dialogue among cultural studies scholars in the United
States and Latin America is usually carried out in the domain of dis-
cursive analyses, especially those oriented toward literary or artistic pro-
duction. Although, to their credit, they have provided legitimacy for
 8 Preface

testimonies^ popular texts, and other discourses excluded from the canon,
their scope is usually limited to nonindustrialized culture, and their criti-
cal discussion circumscribed within academic institutions. There is little
place within this academic discussion for what takes place in the mass
media, except when the latter is legitimized in relation to issues of im-
portance in the educated sphere. The vast expansion of communications
research in the United States and Latin America, and particularly hard
data concerning investment, the industrial restructuring of symbolic
production, and mass consumption, is rarely incorporated into cultural
studies. The "encyclopedia" Cultural Studies, edited by Lawrence Gross-
berg, Gary Nelson, and Paula Treichler, offers almost no data, tables, or
other empirical materials in its eight hundred pages, although several
essays deal with communications, consumption, and the commercializa-
tion of culture. 4 It is remarkable that a few of the contributors, Gross-
berg among them, do demonstrate an acute understanding of mass cul-
ture in other research not necessarily published under the rubric of
"cultural studies."^
For more than half a century, the cultural exchanges between the
United States and Latin America have taken place less in literature, the
visual arts, or traditional culture than in communications industries.
But even the "high" arts undergo industrialization in keeping with mar-
ket criteria and the search for mass audiences, and this massification is
certainly a key dimension in the meaning of exhibitions such as the
New York Metropolitan Museum of Art's blockbuster Mexico: The Splen-
dors of Thirty Centuries, or of the novels of such best-selling authors as
Isabel Allende, Laura Esquivel, and Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Something
similar takes place in the use of historical patrimony in the tourist in-
dustry and in the circulation of ethnic or national musics in world mu-
sic, all of which contribute to the reproduction and renewal of North
and South American imaginaries. But it is in the competition and merg-
ers among communications corporations dealing with TV, informatics,
and even magazine publishing that we see the greatest ferment in in-
ter- and multicultural activity.
This book, like others written in recent years by the likes of Jesus
Martin Barbero, Renato Ortiz, and Beatriz Sarlo,6 tries to relocate the
theory and debates on identity, heterogeneity, and hybridization within
the context of competing claims to audiovisual space among the United
States, Europe, and Latin America. Beyond the struggles over the ex-
pansion of communications, which reproduce and recontextualize Latin
Americans' concerns about their "Latinity" and their "Americanness,"
 Preface 9

conceptual analysis and empirical research on the differences and coin-

cidences in this interregional triangle are crucial for rethinking cultural
policies. We academics must come to grips with the fact that state poli-
cies have become outdated, be they for the preservation of monumen-
tal and folkloric patrimonies or for the promotion of high culture with
ever-diminishing resources. The effects of the U.S. preference to con-
sider radio, TV, and other communications media as nothing but busi-
ness enterprises, a view being taken up in Europe and Latin America,
should provoke us to reexamine questions of property among these
media, be they state- or privately owned. These effects should compel
us researchers to conduct careful analyses of the reconstitution of public
spaces and the mechanisms, whether defunct or re-created, by which
the multiple voices present in each society are recognized or excluded.
The criticisms of this book by a few European specialists lead me
to think that I have overidealized the exemplary value of European audio-
visual space. The privatization of communications media in Spain and
France since the late 19905 forces us to be less optimistic about the abil-
ity of the European Union to protect the mediated public sphere from
the pressures of the international market. Nevertheless, I think that the
general description of the cultural policy options that I offer here, and
the analysis of their significance for multicultural societies, are still per-
tinent for the discussion that is only now getting under way in Latin
American studies of culture and in U.S. cultural studies. Perhaps this is
an area where it would be appropriate to take into consideration the
contributions of British cultural studies, which are more sensitive to the
importance of examining the industrialization of culture, and whose
vitality and remodeling I had the opportunity to witness in the inter-
ventions of scholars such as Stuart Hall and Philip Schlesinger, among
others, at a meeting of European and Latin American media specialists
in October 1996 organized by the University of Stirling.7
In British research we also find a greater concern with the role of
the state, owing to its function in Britain as a representative of the pub-
lic sphere and as a regulator of private interests. The state's role in cultural
matters in Britain is historically more important than in the United
States.

Multiculturalism(s)
If the Anglo-American and Latin American worlds experience global-
ization differently it is because of the different ways in which they con-
 10 Preface

ceptualize their multicultural character. This is something that was not

completely clear to me when I wrote this book. In my presentation at
the Stirling conference I suggested that the key difference between the
Latin American study of culture and cultural studies might be summa-
rized as follows: What in Latin America has been called cultural plural-
ism or heterogeneity is conceived as part of the nation, whereas in the
U.S. debate, as various authors explain, "multiculturalism means sepa-
ratism" (Hughes, Taylor, Walzer).8 We know that in the United States
it is convenient, as Peter McLaren notes, to distinguish between conser-
vative, liberal, and leftist multiculturalisms. The first one subordinates
ethnic separatism to the hegemony of WASPs and their canon, which
stipulates what should be read and learned in order to be culturally cor-
rect. Liberal multiculturalism postulates the natural equality and cognitive
equivalence of all races. Leftist multiculturalism explains the breaches
in equality as the result of unequal access to resources. But only a few
writers, like McLaren, advocate the need to "legitimize multiple tradi-
tions of knowledge" and to prioritize the construction of solidarities
over the demands of each group. That is why thinkers such as Michael
Walzer express their concern that "the sharp conflict today in North
American life is not the opposition of multiculturalism to hegemony
or singularity," or to "a vigorous and independent North American iden-
tity"; it is, rather, the antagonism of a "multitude of groups to a multi-
tude of individuals." "Equally strong voices and varied intonations do
not produce harmonycontrary to the ancient image of pluralism as
a symphony in which each group played a part (although one might
ask who wrote the music?)but cacophony."9
The Latin American canon, or what we might construe as such,
owes a lot to Europe. Throughout the the twentieth century, however,
it combined influences from different European countries and articu-
lated them in a heterodox manner with diverse national traditions. One
can see the traces of German expressionists, French surrealists, Czech,
Italian, and Irish novelists in the works of authors such as Jorge Luis
Borges and Carlos Fuentes. All of these authors were unknown to each
other, but writers from peripheral countries "can handle" them "irrev-
erently and without superstition," as Borges liked to say, not without
some exaggeration. Although Borges and Fuentes might be considered
extreme cases, I find that Latin American humanities and social-science
scholars, and more generally cultural producers, make a critical appro-
priation of metropolitan canons and reconvert them, so to speak, re-
sponding to different national motivations. Moreover, Latin American
 Preface 11

societies are not structured by a multiplicity of ethnocommunitarian

groupings, butas I suggested earliermore in keeping with French
models of secular republicanism and Jacobin individualism. These mod-
els, of course, are rendered more open and flexible as they come into
contact with the multicultural realities of Latin America.
On account of this different history, the tendency to resolve multi-
cultural conflicts in Latin America through affirmative-action policies
has not been prevalent. This is not to say that in Latin America there
have not been nationalist and ethnicist fundamentalisms, promoting
exclusivist self-affirmations and resisting hybridization by constructing
a single absolutist patrimony that illusorily casts itself as pure. There
are analogies between, on the one hand, the separatist emphasis that
takes self-esteem as a key factor in the rights claims of women and mi-
norities in the United States, and, on the other hand, some Latin Amer-
ican indigenous and nationalist movements that interpret history in a
Manichaean manner, reserving all virtues for themselves and blaming
others for the problems of development. However, this has not been
the dominant tendency in our history. And much less in this era of glob-
alization in which it becomes more obvious that ethnic and national
identities are hybrid constructions, asymmetrically interdependent and
uneven. Indeed, it is in this unavoidable relation to hybridity that each
group must defend its rights. Thus, artistic and intellectual movements
that identify with ethnic or regional demands, such as the Zapatistas in
Chiapas, construe this particular problem as a matter for debate con-
cerning the nation and how it might be relocated within the frame-
work of international conflicts. It is ultimately a critique of modernity.
This is, in fact, the Zapatistas' own strategy. There are, of course, lin-
gering controversies about indigenous autonomy, particularly the am-
bivalence evident in cultural or political independence as it intersects
participation in national and global processes.

Subjects
These reflections imply a question insinuated at the beginning, where
I stated that speaking from Latin America does not entail attributing
any special prerogative to what might be discovered and critiqued from
a peripheral position. The convergences and differences in conceiving
multiculturalism in different regions are also evident in the varying enun-
ciative standpoints or observational locations of cultural research. In
North America one finds constant questioning of universalist theories
 12 Preface

that, in the guise of objectivity, have smuggled in colonial, Western, mas-

culine, white, and other biases. The deconstructive criticisms leveled at
this objectivism have also been developed in Latin American social sci-
ences and humanities: nationalists, Marxists, and others associated with
dependency theory similarly objected to metropolitan social and cul-
tural theories and made creative use, from the 19605 on, of Gramsci and
Fanon. It is only recently that U.S. cultural studies scholarsand some
Latinamericanistsproposed the latter as novel approaches without any
reference to work by Latin Americans who had taken these precedents
as a point of departure with similar objectives in mind. However, when
it comes to other aspects, such as the contributions of feminist critique
to the study of culture, Latin American scholars are quite weak, although
the dialogue with the U.S. academy is fluid and helps to make up for
this shortcoming (e.g., in the work of Heloisa Buarque de Hollanda and
Nelly Richard). 10
Can one hope for a radical renewal ensuing from the claims of these
peripheral or excluded actors? What is the relation between epistemo-
logical creativity and social or geopolitical power? Whatever the answer
to these questions might be, it is evident that in the wake of the 19605
and 19705, when it was common to believe that the colonized, the sub-
altern, workers, and peasants had epistemic privilege, there are not many
left who think that there are privileged positions for the legitimation of
knowledge. We are discouraged from resorting once again to this belief
by the many sound epistemological arguments and many lessons gleaned
from the repeated historical failures of the overvaluation of the oppressed
as the privileged source of knowledge.
If we are to heed the call to attend to the dangers that fundamental-
ism posits for conceptions of identity, and examine their self-affirmation
as a central concern of research and policy, as David Theo Goldberg
recommends in Multicultumlism, then we should shift the analytical em-
phasis to heterogeneity and hybridization. The cultural analyst gains
little by studying the world from the vantage point of partial identities.
It is not enough to study them only from the metropolis, or from the
context of peripheral or postcolonial nations, or even from one isolated
discipline, or even a totalizing knowledge. An effective study of culture
focuses on the intersections.
Adopting the point of view of the oppressed or excluded can be
helpful in the discovery stage, as a way of generating hypotheses or coun-
terhypotheses that challenge established knowledges. Adopting this view-
point also enables us to discern domains of the real that go unattended
 Preface 13

by hegemonic knowledge. But when it comes to epistemological justifi-

cation, it is better to situate the analysis in the intersections in those
zones where narratives encounter and cross each other. Only in these
sites of tension, encounter, and conflict is it possible to pass from secto-
rial (or openly sectarian) narratives to an elaboration of knowledges ca-
pable of deconstructing and exercising control over the conditionings
of each enunciation.
This also means that we should go beyond cultural studies limited
to hermeneutic analysis and open up to a research agenda that combines
signification and facts, discourses and their empirical groundings. In
sum, we should construct a rationality that can encompass everyone's
reasonings as well as the structure of conflicts and negotiations.
To the degree that specialists in the study of culture want to achieve
scientifically consistent research, their final objective is not the repre-
sentation of the voice of the silenced but an understanding and nam-
ing of the places where their demands or everyday life enter into con-
flict with those of others. Contradiction and conflict are categories to be
found at the core of this conception of cultural studies. Not to see the
world from only one pole of the contradiction but to understand its
specific structure as well as its potential dynamics. The Utopias of change
and justice can, in this sense, articulate with the project of cultural stud-
ies, not as a prescription for the selection and organization of data, but
rather as a stimulus for exploring under what (real) conditions the real
will cease to repeat inequality and discrimination, and become a set-
ting for the recognition of others. I take up here a suggestion made by
Paul Ricoeur in his critique of U.S. multiculturalism, that it would be
better to emphasize a politics of recognition over a politics of identity.
"In the notion of identity there is only an idea of the same, while recog-
nition is a concept that directly integrates alterity, that permits a di-
alectic of same and other. The demands on behalf of identity always
contain violence toward the other. The search for recognition, on the
other hand, entails reciprocity."11
This page intentionally left blank
 Introduction

Twenty-first-Century Consumers,
Eighteenth-Century Citizens

T his book attempts to understand how changes in modes of con-

sumption have altered the possibilities and forms of citizenship. The
exercise of citizenship has always been associated with the capacity to
appropriate commodities and with ways of using them. It has also been
commonplace to assume that the difference in modes of consuming and
using commodities is canceled out by equality of abstract rights, actu-
alized in voting, in choosing a political party or a labor union as one's
representative. The insolvency of politics and the loss of belief in its in-
stitutions have created opportunities for other forms of participation.
Men and women increasingly feel that many of the questions proper to
citizenshipwhere do I belong, what rights accrue to me, how can I
get information, who represents my interests?are being answered in
the private realm of commodity consumption and the mass media more
than in the abstract rules of democracy or collective participation in
public spaces.
In these times, when electoral campaigns occupy the television stu-
dio more than the convention hall, engage in a contest of images rather
than doctrinaire polemics, and rely on the seduction of marketing sur-
veys more than on the power of persuasion, it is all too understandable

15
 16 Introduction

for us to be brought together as consumers even when we are being ad-

dressed as citizens. In a world in which technobureaucratic decision mak-
ing and an international uniformity imposed by neoliberalism have over-
ridden debates about the future orientation of societies, it seems that
planning takes place at global levels beyond the threshold of observa-
tion. In these circumstances the only accessible things are the com-
modities and messages delivered to our homes and which we use "as we
see fit."

The Familiar and the Foreign: A Dissolving Dichotomy

We can appreciate the radical character of these changes if we examine
the way in which certain commonsense expressions have varied in mean-
ing to the point of losing it. In the middle of this century in some
Latin American countries, it was not unusual for discussions between
parents and children about what the family could afford to buy or about
rivalries with the neighbors to end with the paternal dictum: "No one
is satisfied with what they have." This "conclusion" condensed several
ideas: satisfaction with the achievements of those who had migrated
from the countryside to the city; recognition of the advances ushered
in by industrialization; the advent of new forms of comfort in daily life
(electric lighting, telephones, radios, even automobiles). All of this made
many Latin Americans feel like the privileged inhabitants of moder-
nity. And the dictum was the defensive response of parents to new de-
mands made by sons and daughters who had attained middle and even
higher education. They were responding to a proliferation of household
appliances, to new markers of status, to radical political ideas, to inno-
vations in art and sensibility, to the adventure of ideas and feelings, all
of which were difficult to get used to.
Generational conflicts over what is necessary and desirable are an-
other way to establish identities and construct what distinguishes us.
We are leaving behind the era in which identities were defined by ahis-
torical essences. Today, instead, shaped by consumption, identities de-
pend on what one owns or is capable of attaining. The constant trans-
formations in technologies of production, in the design of objects, in
the most extensive and intensive communication among societiesand
the concomitant expansion of desires and expectationshave a desta-
bilizing effect on identities traditionally bound to repertoires of goods
particular to an ethnic or national community. That political version
of being satisfied with what one has, which was the nationalism of the
 Introduction 17

19605 and 19705, is now seen as the last attempt of elites who promote
economic development, or of the middle classes and some popular move-
ments, to contain within uncertain national borders the global explosion
of identities and the consumer commodities that differentiate them.
The expression finally lost its meaning. How can we possibly be
satisfied with what we have if we don't even know what it is? In the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the consolidation of modern nations
made it possible to transcend the small-town views of peasants and in-
digenous peoples at the same time that it kept in check the dissolution
of peoples into the boundless dispersion of the world. National cultures
seemed to be reasonably apt systems for preserving, within the homo-
geneity imposed by industrialization, certain differences and a territo-
rial rootedness that coincided, more or less, with the spaces of produc-
tion and circulation of commodities. To eat like a Spaniard, a Mexican,
or a Brazilian was not only a way of maintaining specific traditions but
also an act of reproduction with the commodities generated by one's
society. These products were within easy reach and less expensive than
imported ones. A piece of clothing, a car, or a television program were
more accessible if they were nationally produced. The symbolic value
of consuming "our" products was, moreover, reinforced by the economic
rationality of the times. To seek out foreign commodities and brand
names was a way of attaining prestige and sometimes a choice for qual-
ity. General Electric or Pierre Cardin: internationalization brought with
it symbols of status. Kodak, Houston's hospitals, and Visconti repre-
sented the kind of industry, medical care, and cinema that our countries
did not have. But they were within our reach.
This dualistic, schematic opposition between what is one's own and
what is the foreign no longer seems to hold any meaning when we think
of a Ford assembled in Spain, with a Canadian windshield, an Italian
carburetor, an Austrian radiator, English cylinders and battery, and a
French transmission. I turn on my television set, made in Japan, and
what I see is a world film, produced in Hollywood, made by a Polish
director with French assistants, actors often different nationalities, and
scenes filmed in four countries that also put up the capital. The large
corporations that provide us with food and clothing also have us travel
bottlenecked on highways that are the same the world over, and frag-
ment the production process by making component parts of commodi-
ties in countries where the labor costs are cheaper. Objects thus lose any
necessary tie to territories of origin. Culture becomes a process of multi-
national assemblage, a flexible articulation of parts, a montage of features
 18 Introduction

that any citizen in any country, of whatever religion or ideology, can

read and use.
What distinguishes internationalization from globalization is that
in the days of the internationalization of national cultures, when you
were not satisfied with what you had you could find an alternative else-
where. The majority of messages and commodities that we consumed
were made in our own societies, with strict policing of customs offices
and laws that protected what each country produced. Nowadays, what
is produced in the entire world is right here and it is difficult to know
what is our own. Internationalization was an opening of the geographic
boundaries of each society for the purpose of bringing in the material and
symbolic commodities of all the other societies. Globalization operates
according to a functional interaction of dispersed economic and cultural
activities, and a multicentric system of production of commodities and
services, in which the speed of circulation around the globe is much
more important than the geographic sites where decisions are made.
There are two ways of interpreting the discontent wrought by glob-
alization. For certain postmodern writers, the problem is not what is
lacking but the obsolescent and fleeting nature of what one has. We shall
examine this culture of the ephemeral when we consider the shift from
moviegoers who select what films to see on the basis of directors, actors,
and their place in film history, to video viewers who are only interested
in premieres. Much of what is done in the arts today follows rules of
periodic innovation and obsolescence, but not, as in the case of the avant-
gardes, by engaging in true experimentation. Instead, cultural expres-
sions are subordinated to the values that "dynamize" markets and fash-
ion: inexhaustible consumption, surprise, and entertainment. For similar
reasons, cultural policy becomes erratic: with the decline of emancipa-
tory narratives that construe the present as a part of history or as a search
for a renewed future, political and economic decisions are now made
according to the seductive immediacy of consumption, or in line with
a free-trade ethos stripped of any memory of its errors, or on the basis
of the frenzied importation of the latest models. As if past experience
did not teach anything, these policies lead to foreign debt and a crisis in
the balance of payments.
A more complete understanding of the effects of globalization should
also focus on those groups whose unmet needs have multiplied. The
neoliberal mode of globalization consists of cutting jobs in order to lower
costs. The competition among transnational corporations, whose center
of decision making all but escapes detection, renders insignificant the
 Introduction 19

interests of labor and nations. The result is that 40 percent of the pop-
ulation in Latin America is deprived of stable employment and a mini-
mal safety net. Latin Americans are condemned to barely survive the
ups and downs of an informal economy that is also globalized, ogling
the hodgepodge of merchandise hawked on the street corners: Japanese
electronic gadgets and clothes made in Southeast Asia, esoteric herbal
remedies, and local crafts. In these immense shantytowns that encroach
on the historic centers of large metropolises, there are few reasons for
satisfaction when one sees goods from every corner of the earth for the
benefit of the haves who buy them and immediately walk off oblivious
to their surroundings.

What Doubts Are There?

At the same time that we accept globalization as an irreversible tendency,
we want this book to cast doubt on two premises: that the global can
stand in for the local, and that neoliberalism is the only way to partici-
pate in globalization.
If we consider the diverse ways in which globalization incorporates
different nations and different sectors within each nation, it is evident
that homogenization is not the way in which it relates to local and re-
gional cultures. Many national particularities persist despite transna-
tionalization. Furthermore, the market's reorganization of production
and consumption to maximize and concentrate profits transforms those
particularities into inequalities. The question to ask, then, is whether
the neoliberal mode of globalization is the only one, or the most desir-
able one, for carrying out a transnational restructuring of societies.
To answer this question obviously requires a thorough economic
analysis of the contradictions of the neoliberal model. But it is also im-
portant to discern what is cultural about globalization, the market, and
consumption. None of these processes take place or change without hu-
man relations and social constructions of meaning. It might be obvi-
ous to invoke this principle, but it is a necessary counterbalance to the
prevalence of market and consumer analysis conducted solely in the in-
terest of commercial efficiency, or the supposed expediency of global-
ization as the quickest way to increase sales. The latter are plausible ex-
planations of social relations if we look at society only from the vantage
point of business or advertising.
What other outlooks are there today? Not long ago a political per-
spective was seen as an alternative. The market discredited that position
 20 Introduction

in a curious way: not only by fighting it and showing itself more effi-
cient as a way of organizing societies, but also by cannibalizing it, sub-
mitting politics to the rules of commerce and advertising, spectacle and
corruption. A better alternative, however, may be found in the social
relation at the heart of politics: the exercise of citizenship. But we must
approach citizenship without dissociating it from those activities through
which we establish our social belonging, our social networks, which in
this globalized era are steeped in consumption.
In order to establish the analytic relations between consumption
and citizenship, we have to deconstruct those conceptual frameworks
that render consumer behavior as predominantly irrational and assess
citizen action on the basis of rational ideological principles. Indeed,
consumption is usually imagined as the site of the sumptuary and the
superfluous, where the primary drives of subjects can be classified and
ordered by means of marketing analysis and advertising schemes. On
the other hand, citizenship is reduced to a political matter, as if people
voted and acted on public issues for only individual reasons or on the
basis of the rational debate of ideas. Such a separation is evident even
in the latest work by a lucid political theorist such as Jiirgen Habermas.
His self-critique of his book on the public sphere still seeks to discern
"new institutional arrangements that enable opposition to the transfor-
mation of the citizen into a client."1
When I propose in chapter i of this volume that consumption is
good for thinking, I am basing my analysis on the hypothesis that when
we select goods and appropriate them, we define what we consider pub-
licly valuable, the ways we integrate and distinguish ourselves in soci-
ety, and the ways to combine pragmatism with pleasure. I then go on
to explore how received views of consumption and citizenship can change
if they are examined in tandem, employing the analytical tools of eco-
nomics and political sociology. But these concepts also need to be exam-
ined as cultural processes with the aid of anthropological methods suit-
able for discerning and analyzing diversity and multiculturality. My
concerns are thus compatible with studies on cultural citizenship car-
ried out in the United States, in which citizenship is seen not only in
relation to rights accorded by state institutions to those born within
their territorial jurisdiction, but also as social and cultural practices that
confer a sense of belonging, provide a sense of difference, and enable
the satisfaction of the needs of those who possess a given language and
organize themselves in certain ways.2
 Introduction 21

It should be said, however, that U.S. work on cultural citizenship

is aimed at legitimizing minorities, whose practices, based on linguistic,
educational, and gender differences, are not sufficiently recognized by
the state. I share the interest in opening up a state-designated notion
of citizenship to that multicultural diversity, butin keeping with the
importance given in this book to cultural policiesI feel that the affir-
mation of difference should be joined with efforts to reform the state,
not only for it to accept the autonomous development of diverse "com-
munities," but also for it to guarantee equal access to the resources
brought by globalization.
In Latin America too the experiences of the social movements have
led to a redefinition of what is understood by citizenship, not only in
relation to rights of equality but also rights to difference. This entails a
desubstantialization of the concept of citizenship traditionally employed
by jurists. Rather than abstract values, rights have come to be seen as
something constructed and changing in relation to practices and dis-
courses. Citizenship and rights have to do not only with the formal
structure of a society; they also refer to the status of the struggle for
recognition of others as subjects with "valid interests, relevant values,
and legitimate claims." Rights are thus reconceived as "regulatory prin-
ciples of social practices that define the rules of expected reciprocity in
social life in accordance with the agreed upon (and negotiated) mutual
attribution of obligations and responsibilities, guarantees and preroga-
tives of each member." Rights are seen as the expression of a state order
and a "civil grammar."3
In truth, we are only beginning to achieve this equilibrium between
state and society. The rejection of state domination and monolithism
led, in the 19705 and 19805, to an overvaluation of autonomy and the
transformative force of the social movements. Once we rethink citizen-
ship as a "political strategy,"4 we can more easily include emerging prac-
tices that have not yet been sanctioned by the juridical order and rec-
ognize the role of subjectivities in the renewal of civil society. It thus
becomes possible to understand the relative place of these practices
within the democratic order and to search for new forms of legitimacy
that take a more lasting form in another type of state. Rethinking citi-
zenship also presupposes a recognition of the right to access and be-
longing to a sociopolitical system, as well as the right to participate in
the remaking of the system, that is, to redefine the very arrangement in
which we desire to be included.
 22 Introduction

Redefining citizenship in connection with consumption and polit-

ical strategy requires a conceptual framework for examining cultural con-
sumption as an ensemble of practices that shape the sphere of citizen-
ship. This framework also enables us to transcend the fragmentation
that characterizes renewed analytical interest in this category. The dis-
satisfaction with the juridical-political sense of citizenship has led to ad-
vocacy for a notion of cultural citizenship, as well as forms of citizen-
ship defined by race, gender, and ecology, to which we can add an infinite
multiplicity of demands, resulting in a splintered concept.5 In the past,
the state provided the framework (albeit unjust or biased) that contained
the variety of forms of participation in public life. Nowadays, the mar-
ket brings together these forms of participation through the medium
of consumption. We need to respond with a strategic concept that can
articulate the various strands of citizenship so that they complement
each other in the new and the old settings of the state and the market.
This revision of the links between state and society cannot take place
unless we take into account the new cultural conditions in which the
public and the private have been rearticulated. The public sphere, where
citizens discuss and decide matters of collective interest, emerged in
the eighteenth century, as is well known, in countries like Germany and
France, where it had a limited scope. Communities of readers and par-
ticipants in enlightened circles established a democratic culture based
on rational critique. But the rules and rituals of access to the salons of
the democratizing bourgeoisie limited the debate on the common in-
terest to those who could inform themselves as readers and who could
understand society in accordance with the communicative rules of writ-
ing. Until the middle of the nineteenth century, the vast sectors of the
population excluded from the bourgeois public spherewomen, work-
ers, peasantswere considered, in the best of cases, virtual citizens who
could be incorporated into deliberations on matters of common inter-
est only insofar as they became literate. That is why leftist parties and
social movements that represented the excluded practiced a Gutenber-
gian political culture rooted in books, magazines, and pamphlets.
Some intellectuals and political activists (e.g., Mikhail Bakhtin, An-
tonio Gramsci, Raymond Williams, and Richard Hoggart) acknowledged
the parallel existence of popular cultures that constituted an informal
"plebeian public sphere," organized through the medium of more re-
stricted oral and visual communications. In many cases, they tended to
see this sphereas did Gtinther Lottes in a not so distant text, from
1979as "a variant of the bourgeois public sphere," whose "emanci-
 Introduction 23

patory potential" and "social presuppositions have been suspended."6

Some Latin American writers have been working on and providing cul-
tural acknowledgment for these diverse modalities of communication.
But we have provided scant theoretical frameworks for understanding
these popular circuits as forums where there emerge networks for the
exchange of information and citizen apprenticeship relating to the con-
sumption of contemporary mass media. In this regard, we have not
gotten beyond the facile idealizations of political and communicational
populism. 7
Neither social revolutions, nor the study of popular cultures, not
even the exceptional sensibility of certain alternative political and artis-
tic movements, have shown the degree to which the public and the ex-
ercise of citizenship have developed since the nineteenth century; it is,
rather, the vertiginous growth of audiovisual communications technolo-
gies that has made this evident. But these very electronic media that cat-
apulted the masses into the public sphere are responsible for channel-
ing citizen activity toward consumption. They led to the establishment
of other means of gaining information, of understanding the commu-
nities to which one belongs, of conceiving and exercising rights. Disil-
lusioned with state, party, and union bureaucracies, the publics turn to
radio and television to receive what citizen institutions could not deliver:
services, justice, reparations, or just attention. Of course, one cannot
claim that the mass media, with their call-in programs or live public fo-
rums, are any more successful than public institutions, but they fasci-
nate because they listen and people feel that they do not have to
put up with the long waiting periods, the delays, or the red tape that de-
fer or distance the satisfaction of their needs.... The televised scene moves
rapidly and is seemingly transparent; the institutional scene is slow and
its forms (particularly those forms that make possible the existence of
institutions) are complicated, so much so that they take on an opacity
engendered by desperation.8

It is not, however, as if the old agentsparties, unions, intellectu-

alshave been displaced by the mass media. The sudden appearance
of these media points, more accurately, to a general restructuring of the
articulations between the public and the private. One can also detect
this in the reordering of urban life, in the decline of nations as struc-
tures that rein in the social, and in the reorganization of the functions
of traditional political actors. That is why our research on the transforma-
tions wrought by the culture industries is preceded in the first section
 24 Introduction

of this book by an overhaul of the ways in which we think of con-

sumption and everyday life in megacities. The changes in communica-
tions and technology are interpreted as part of larger restructurings.

The New Sociocultural Scene

We can summarize the sociocultural changes that are occurring in all
of these fields in five kinds of processes:

1. A rearrangement of the institutions and circuits for the exercise of

public life. Local and national institutions decline in importance as
transnational corporate conglomerates benefit.
2. The reformulation of patterns of urban settlement and coexistence.
Condominiums rather than neighborhoods, multicentric distribution
throughout the urban landscape rather than face-to-face interaction.
This is especially the case in large cities, where basic activities (work,
study, consumption) often take place far from home and where the
time spent in moving through unknown places reduces disposable time
for occupying one's own place.
3. The reelaboration of "one's own," as a consequence of the predomi-
nance of goods and messages emitted by a globalized economy and
culture over goods and messages based in the cities and nations in
which one lives.
4. The consequent redefinition of the sense of belonging and identity,
ever less shaped by local and national loyalties and more and more
by participation in transnational or deterritorialized communities of
consumers (youth in relation to rock; TV viewers of CNN, MTV,
and other satellite-beamed programs).
5. The shift from the citizen as a representative of public opinion to the
consumer interested in enjoying quality of life. One indication of
this change is that argumentative and critical forms of participation
cede their place to the pleasure taken in electronic media spectacles
where narration or the simple accumulation of anecdotes prevails over
reasoned solutions to problems. Another indication is the ephemeral
exhibition of events instead of a sustained and structural treatment.

Many of these changes got their start with the industrialization of culture
in the nineteenth century. Telenovelas, for example, have their origins in
theater performed in town squares or in serialized romances. The an-
tecedents of radio and television mass audiences go back to the school
 Introduction 25

and the church.9 All of these constitute the cultural bases of what we
now identify as the plebeian public sphere. What is new about the sec-
ond half of the twentieth century is that these audiovisual and mass
modalities for organizing culture have been subordinated to corporate
profit criteria, as well as to a global order that deterritorializes their con-
tents and forms of consumption. The combination of deregulatory and
privatizing tendencies with the transnational concentration of corpora-
tions has decreased the number of public voices, in "high" as well as in
popular culture. This restructuring of economic and cultural practices
leads to a hermetic concentration of decisions among economic and
technological elites, and generates a new order of exclusion of the ma-
jorities now incorporated as clients. The diminishing effectiveness of tra-
ditional and enlightened forms of citizen participation (parties, unions,
grassroots associations) is not offset by the incorporation of masses as
consumers or as occasional participants in spectacles that political, tech-
nological, and economic power brokers offer in the media.
We might say that as we leave the twentieth century, the societies
that organize us as consumers for the twenty-first century return us to
the eighteenth as citizens. The global distribution of commodities and
information makes it possible for core and peripheral countries to come
closer: we purchase transnational products in comparable supermarkets,
on television we watch the latest films by Spielberg or Wim Wenders,
the Barcelona Olympics, live coverage of the fall of an Asian or Latin
American president, or the destruction resulting from the latest Serbian
bombing. In Latin American countries, an average of 500,000 hours of
television are transmitted yearly, while the countries that compose Latin
Europe transmit only 11,000. In Colombia, Panama, Peru, and Venezuela
there is one video player for every three households with a television, a
higher proportion than in Belgium (26.3 percent) or Italy (16.9 percent).10
We may be underdeveloped as endogenous producers of electronic me-
dia, but not as consumers.
Why isn't this simultaneous access to material and symbolic goods
accompanied by a global and more complete exercise of citizenship? The
attainment of technological comfort and information from everywhere
coexists with the resurgence of fundamentalist ethnocentrisms that iso-
late entire peoples or that pit them fatally against each other, like the
ex-Yugoslavians and the Rwandans. The contradictions are likely to
erupt in peripheral countries and in those metropolises where selective
globalization results in the exclusion of the unemployed and migrants
from basic human rights such as work, health, education, and housing.
 26 Introduction

The enlightenment project to generalize these rights led many, through-

out the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, to seek a home for all in
modernity. With the imposition of a neoliberal conception of global-
ization, according to which rights are necessarily unequal, the novelties
of modernity now appear to the majority only as objects of consump-
tion, and for many as little more than a show to be watched. The right
of citizenship, which should be to decide how these goods are produced,
distributed, and used, is circumscribed to the domain of elites.
However, when we recognize that when we consume we also think,
select, and reelaborate social meaning, it becomes necessary to analyze
how this mode of appropriation of goods and signs conditions more
active forms of participation than those that are grouped under the label
of consumption. In other words, we should ask ourselves if consump-
tion does not entail doing something that sustains, nourishes, and to a
certain extent constitutes a new mode of being citizens.
If our answer is yes, it becomes necessary to accept the premise that
public space overflows the sphere of classic political interactions. " 'Pub-
lic Space' is the 'mediated' 'mediatory' frame in which the institutional
and technological mechanisms endemic to postindustrial societies pres-
ent the multiple aspects of social life to a 'public.' " n

From the People to Civil Society

The study of the restructuring of the relations between consumption
and citizenship allows us to explore ways out of the muddle in which
the crisis of "the popular" has left us. At demonstrations in Latin
American cities, one can still hear expressions such as "If these aren't
the people, then where else can one find them?" This was a convincing
formula in the 19705 when military dictatorships suppressed parties,
unions, and student movements. It is understandable that one or two
hundred thousand people gathered in Buenos Aires's Plaza de Mayo, in
Santiago de Chile's Alameda, or marching in the streets of Sao Paulo
could feel that their defiant outburst represented those who had lost
the possibility to express themselves through political institutions. The
restitution of democracy opened up new spaces for making demands.
However, in the countries mentioned here, as in the rest of Latin Amer-
ica, the crisis of liberal, populist, and socialist models, the collapse of tra-
ditional forms of representation, and the absorption of the public sphere
by the mass media rendered these claims questionable. In those nations
where voting is noncompulsory, more than half of eligible voters ig-
 Introduction 27

nore elections. Where it is obligatory, polls show that 30 to 40 percent

have not decided for whom to vote as late as one week before the date
of the election. If demonstrations in the streets and public squares de-
crease in size, dispersing into myriad parties and movements of youth,
indigenous peoples, feminists, human-rights advocates, and so many
others, we are left with the last part of the question: where are the people?
In any event, when those whom we call "the people" vote, another
alarming concern arises: Why do leaders who have impoverished their
following manage to hold on to the consensus of the mistreated masses?
There is not only one single explanation. Explaining this is rather like as-
sembling a jigsaw puzzle. It entails understanding how hegemonic forces
manage to position themselves in the strategic settings of the economy
and politics, and in communications, precisely the medium in which
societies are transformed in this second half of the twentieth century.
In contrast, we find that leftist, socialist, or simply democratic move-
ments are incapable of acting in these decisive scenarios. They have spent
their time debating where the struggle was not taking place or echoing
the arguments of yesteryear. We have already referred to the belated dis-
covery that the discussions on the public interest and the formulation
of alternatives should (also) take place in the electronic media that in-
form the vast majorities.
The problem of speaking in the name of the popular is that it has
not encouraged us to radically question the discourse and politics of
representation, but rather to substitute that notion with the concept of
civil society. In Mexico in the mid-1990s, for example, the claims to
enact civil society come just as easily from the opposition parties as from
the dozens of movements of urban activists, youth, feminists, religious
groups, and the neo-Zapatista guerrilla insurgency. They all question
the ability of parties to adequately express social demands. The formula
"civil society" has the advantage, at times, that its "spokespersons" can
be differentiated from those of the state. However, the diversity of its
representatives, the often antagonistic character of its demands, and
the almost always minoritarian character of its support end up reproduc-
ing problems that the concept of the popular never managed to resolve.
Just as "the popular" increasingly became elusive due to the multi-
plicity of representations disseminated by folklore, the culture indus-
tries, and political populism, so also the concept of civil society is used
nowadays to legitimize the most heterogeneous agendas of groups, non-
governmental organizations, private corporations, and even individu-
als. Despite i:he various interests and strategies that inspire these sec-
 28 Introduction

tors, they all coincide in accusing the state of society's problems and in
assuming that things would be better if the state ceded its initiatives
and power to civil society. But since each understands something diff-
erent by this vague concept, it can appear as a typical imagined com-
munity, in the terms that Benedict Anderson used to define the nation. 12
When one reads how civil society is written about, it is possible to
imagine her as "a lady who understands things very well,13 knows what
she wants, what she has to do; she is good, very good, and of course is
the only possible adversary against state perversion."14 A new source of
confidence in this age of uncertainties, civil society appears to be one
more totalizing concept destined to overlook the heterogeneous and dis-
integrated ensemble of voices that circulate throughout nations. Some
authors define the modes of interaction that the notion of civil society
encompasses as different from those of the economy and the state, al-
though connected to them. The best reformulation is given by Jean L.
Cohen and Andrew Arato, who includeand at the same time differ-
entiate "the intimate sphere (particularly the family), the sphere of
associations (especially voluntary associations), the social movements,
and forms of public communication," 15 although their weighty tome
gives short shrift to this last modality.
The rapprochement of citizenship, mass communications, and con-
sumption has, among other aims, to give recognition to the scenarios
in which the public is constituted. It becomes evident that in order to
live in democratic societies it is indispensable to accept that the market
of citizens' opinions includes as great a variety and dissonance as the
clothing and entertainment markets. Remembering that citizens are also
consumers leads to finding in the diversification of tastes one of the
aesthetic foundations for the democratic conception of citizenship.

The Reinvention of Politics

If we give due acknowledgment to the shift in the locations where citi-
zenship is practicedfor example, the shift from the people to civil
societyand to the restructuring of the relative weight of the local,
the national, and the global, then we will also have to acknowledge the
changes in the politics of representation of identities. Another, cultural
mode of doing politics will have to emerge, as well as other kinds of
cultural policies.
The process that we have begun to describe as globalization can be
summarized as the passage from modern identities to other forms that
 Introduction 29

might be labeled postmodern, despite the increasingly ill-fitting impli-

cations of the term. Modern identities were territorial and almost always
monolinguistic. They were imposed by subordinating regions and ethnic-
ities within more or less arbitrarily delimited spaces. These were called
nations and, defined by the form of their state organization, they were
pitted against other nations. Even in multilinguistic zones such as the
Andean and Mesoamerican regions, the policies of modernizing homog-
enization concealed their multiculturality under the domination of the
Spanish language and the diversity of modes of production and con-
sumption were contained within national arrangements.
In contrast, postmodern identities are transterritorial and multilin-
guistic. They are structured less by the logic of the state than by that of
markets. Instead of basing themselves on oral and written communica-
tions that circulated in personalized spaces, characterized by close inter-
action, these identities take shape in relation to the industrial production
of culture, its communications technologies, and the differentiated and
segmented consumption of commodities. The classic sociospatial defi-
nition of identity, limited to a particular territory, needs to be comple-
mented by a sociocommunicationai definition. Such a theoretical refor-
mulation entails that policies concerning identity (or culture) should
deal with historical patrimony and develop strategies regarding the lo-
cations of information production and communications that play a role
in shaping and renewing identities.16
What kind of citizenship is expressed by this new type of identity?
In Part I of this book I have sought to think of the contemporary citi-
zen as the inhabitant of the city more than of the nation. This citizen
feels rooted in his or her local culture (rather than the national culture
that the state and parties speak o f ) . But this urban culture is also the
site of intersection of multiple national traditionsthose of the mi-
grants that come together in any metropolis. At the same time, these
traditions are reorganized by the transnational flow of commodities and
messages.
The juridico-political coordinates of the nation thus lose force,
formed as they were in an age when identity took shape exclusively in
relation to the territory of its inhabitants. Now we see vanish, once and
for all, those identities conceived of as the expression of a collective
being, of an idiosyncracy, or of an imagined community secured by
bonds of territory and blood. National culture is not extinguished, but
it is converted into a formula that designates the continuity of an un-
stable historical memory, continually reconstructed in interaction with
 30 Introduction

transnational cultural referents. That is why passports and national iden-

tity papers become multinational (as in the European Union) or coex-
ist with other forms of identification. Millions of inhabitants at the end
of this century have several national passports, or they make greater use
of the documents that define them as migrants rather than those that
tether them to the land of their birth. Or they are simply undocumented.
How can they believe themselves to be the citizens of only one coun-
try? In contrast to the juridical notion of citizenship, which states at-
tempt to delimit on the basis of the criterion of "sameness," new hetero-
geneous forms of belonging emerge, and their networks are interwoven
with the circuits of consumption: they constitute "a space of struggles,
a terrain of different memories, and an encounter of unequal voices."17
Free trade and supranational integration agreements (the European
Union, the North American Free Trade Agreement, MERCOSUR),
which I treat in Part II of this book, provide specific institutional con-
figurations to the passage from the national to the global and from the
public to the private.18 The differential study of the changes that these
commercial agreements bring about in different sociocultural areas is
one way of going beyond the metaphysical preoccupation with the "loss
of identity." Almost always trapped in a fundamentalist view of ethnic
and national cultures, this view makes it difficult to discern the various
effects of globalization. Empirical analysis of these processes, on the other
hand, makes evident four sociocultural circuits in which transnational-
ization and regional integration differentially operate:

The historico-territorial circuit. This is constituted by an ensemble of

knowledges, habits, and experiences organized throughout various pe-
riods in connection with ethnic, regional, and national territories. They
enter into play especially in matters relating to historical patrimony
and traditional popular culture.
The culture of elites. This is composed of written and visual symbolic
production (literature, visual arts). Historically, this sector formed part
of the patrimony according to which each nation defined and elabo-
rated its own sense of collective self. But it is fitting to distinguish it
from the first circuit because it encompasses works representative of
the upper and middle classes who have a greater level of education.
This culture is not known nor appropriated by the entirety of each
society, and in recent decades it has been integrated into international
markets and circuits of valuation.
 Introduction 31

Mass communications. This circuit is devoted to the mass spectacles of

the entertainment industries (radio, film, television, video).
Restricted systems of information and communication. These are meant
for the decision makers, who make use of satellite communications,
fax, cellular phones, and computers.

Throughout this book, I shall refer to these four circuits of cultural de-
velopment in order to distinguish the different levels of integration
within supranational development. The restructuring of national cultures
does not take place in the same way, nor as deeply, in each of these cir-
cuits. Thus, the recomposition of identities will vary according to their
participation in any one of them.
The competency of national states and their cultural policies dimin-
ishes when we move from the first circuit to the last one. Conversely,
the younger the inhabitants, the more their actions correspond to the
third and fourth circuits, as studies of cultural consumption have shown.
In the younger generations, identities are organized less in keeping with
historico-territorial symbolsfor example, those of national memory
and more in tune with those of Hollywood, Televisa, or Benetton. Anal-
ogously, the historic centers of large cities lose importance as neighbor-
hoods spread, out, providing meeting places for youth. These places are
not organizational nodes so much as "margins where youth can invent
themselves." Rather than the core of a hypothetical interiority contained
and defined by the family, the neighborhood, the city, the nation, or
any of these waning frames, identity comes to be experienced as a "fo-
cal point for a shattered repertoire of miniroles."19 Under these condi-
tions, is it possible for identities to be the object of politics and policy?
There are forms of national and transnational political solidarity,
evident in the ecological movement and in nongovernmental organiza-
tions, that can be adapted for the practice of citizenship in a globalized
world. But the masses, and even the politicized sectors, are little at-
tracted by these international structures. This is borne out by the low
voter turnout in the European Parliament elections in 1994 and the lim-
ited resonance of Latin American integration initiatives in the agendas
of social movements and the platforms of national political parties.
In our analysis of the place of culture in these supranational and
free trade agreements in Europe, between the United States, Mexico,
and Canada, and among some Latin American countries, we come to
suspect that these may be nothing more than agreements among corpo-
 32 Introduction

rate executives. What possible effectiveness can cultural integration poli-

cies have if they are limited to the preservation of monuments and folk-
lore patrimonies, or to the high arts that are, in any case, losing their
audience? These observations are not a minor matter. They must pose
a challenge to globalization. We must ask whether free trade agreements
can also serve the purpose of developing endogenous culture industries
(film, television, video), for these constitute the terrain where mass tastes
and citizenship are shaped. Or are we condemned to continue to be
the suburbs of North America? It should be acknowledged that if this
tendency wins out it will not be due exclusively to unilateral cultural
policies. Our study of the increasing "Americanization" of consumer
tastes in film and video verifies that it is also a matter of the prefer-
ences of civil society.
I am not sure if the expression "Americanization" (it might be more
accurate to speak of North Americanization) is adequate, but I cannot
find a better one. It should be noted at the outset that I am not only
referring to the hegemony of U.S. capital and corporations. They are,
without a doubt, a key factor in the confusion of an expanding global-
ization with the worldwide export of one country's film, television, and
food styles to the entire planet. Our analysis of the changes in the sup-
ply of cultural commodities and in the tastes of audiences indicates
that the economic control wielded by the United States is linked to the
rise of certain aesthetic and cultural features that are not exclusive to
that country. They find in it, however, an exemplary representative: the
predominance of spectacular action over more reflexive and intimate
forms of narration; the fascination with a memoryless present; and the
reduction of differences among societies to a standardized multicultur-
alism where conflicts, if admitted, are "resolved" according to very West-
ern and pragmatic modalities.
We insist on asking about the meaning of the imposition of an aes-
thetics of action in the context of an epoch whose phase of political hero-
ics has ended. Where are we being led, imprisoned in the present and
in this culture of premieres, when it all coexists with the reawakening
of fundamentalisms in certain premodern traditions? What is the func-
tion of the culture industries that not only homogenize but also treat
differences in such a simplistic manner, while electronic communications,
migrations, and the globalization of markets become more complex as
people come together? These questions suffice to realize that the multiple
connections between consumption and citizenship are neither mechan-
 Introduction 33

ical nor easily reducible to the coherence of economic paradigms or po-

litical sociology.

Research as Essay
This book stands halfway between a research study and a collection of
essays. The first three chapters are outgrowths of empirical studies of
cultural consumption in Mexico City. These research projects provided
the points of departure for the current reflection on the transformations
in culture in the Mexican capital and other Latin American cities.20
The texts included in this book represent my personal position on
various polemics that have been raging in the area of studies of urban
cultures. I advocate, for example, the need to go beyond the opposi-
tion between an anthropology that wraps itself in the mantle of com-
munity autonomy and a sociology or a communications approach that
can only make general statements about cities and culture industries.
Working with anthropologists, sociologists, communications analysts,
and art historians afforded me the chance to gain new and multifocal
information on microsocial interaction in everyday life and on the
macrotendencies projected by censuses and surveys. Coordinating the
contributions of all of these researchers was more than an administra-
tive task or an academic routine; it was a stimulating challenge posed
by their discrepancies. I would like my references to their work to be
interpreted as my acknowledgment in this more expansive sense. I would
also hope that the crafting of the written word in these essays demon-
strates that the city and the culture industries attract me not only as ob-
jects of knowledge but also as places where one imagines and narrates.
The four chapters of Part II, which deal with the restructuring of
identities in this era of the industrialization of culture, supranational
integration, and free trade, are based on personal documentary explo-
rations as well as collective research that I coordinated on the changes
in habits and tastes of film, television, and video viewers in four Mexi-
can cities.21
I have tried to use only those data from these studies that are nec-
essary to substantiate the theoretical-methodological and cultural pol-
icy arguments with which this book deals. Those who would like more
information on the changes in Mexico City or on audiovisual indus-
tries and their audiences can consult the above-mentioned books. I
would like to emphasize that those studies on consumption were ques-
 34 Introduction

tioned anew from the perspective of the transformation in citizenship.

Nevertheless, this latter issue requires further research. There is a spe-
cial need for more analyses of social movements, to which I give some
attention only in the chapter on the negotiations among popular classes.
I would like this book to be read like a conversation with anthro-
pologists, sociologists, and communications specialists, as well as with
artists, writers, and art and literary critics, on the meaning of citizens
and consumers in the midst of cultural changes that alter the relation
between the public and the private. Likewise, this is also a continua-
tion of an ongoing dialogue with those responsible for cultural policies
and with participants in consumer and citizen movements. With them
I have discussed many of the issues dealt with in these pages. The essay
format of this book corresponds to the open character of these conver-
sations and the fragmentary perspectives with which we engage in de-
bates on these matters.
I would like to thank various readersJuan Flores, Jean Franco,
Anibal Ford, Sandra Lorenzano, Jesus Martin Barbero, Eduardo Nivon,
Renato Rosaldo, Ana Rosas Mantecon, and George Yiidicefor their
comprehensive commentary on the essays gathered in this book. The
list of those who have made valuable observations at symposia or after
publication of some of the essays in journals would be too long to enu-
merate. In some cases, the references to their published works do them
at least a little justice. I should make special mention of the financial
support provided by various Mexican institutions: the Consejo Nacional
para la Cultura y las Artes, the Departamento del Distrito Federal, and
the Institute Mexicano de Cinematografia. Likewise, the Organization
of American States and the Rockefeller Foundation contributed so that
these essays could have a firm foundation in empirical research on Mex-
ico City and the culture industries. I would like to acknowledge the
Universidad Autonoma Metropolitana, especially the Anthropology De-
partment, for its material support, for the fruitful academic exchange
that colleagues and students provided. Above all, I would like to thank
the members of the Program in Urban Cultural Studies who accompa-
nied me in these anthropological research projects, ever open to the in-
sights and uncertainties of dialogue with other social sciences.
 Part I
Cities in Globalization
This page intentionally left blank
 Chapter 1

Consumption Is Good for Thinking

P roof that common sense does not coincide with "good sense" can
be obtained by focusing one's research on consumption. In everyday
language, consumption is usually associated with useless expenditures
and irrational compulsions. This moral and intellectual disqualification
is based on other commonplaces regarding the omnipotence of the mass
media, which presumably incite the masses to gorge themselves unthink-
ingly with commodities.
There are still some who fault the poor for buying televisions, video
players, and cars when they don't even own a home. How can one make
sense of families who squander their Christmas bonuses on parties and
presents when they don't have enough to eat and dress themselves
throughout the year? Don't these media addicts know that newscasters
lie and that telenovelas distort real life?
Rather than responding to these questions, one can inquire into
the way in which they are formulated. Nowadays we see consumption as
more complex than the simple relation between manipulative media and
docile audiences. It is well known that numerous mass communications
studies have shown that cultural hegemony is achieved by dominators
who corner their audiences. Between them there are intermediaries like

37
 38 Consumption Is Good for Thinking

the family, the neighborhood, and their fellow workers.1 These studies
no longer posit the relation between senders and receivers as one of dom-
ination. Communication is not effective if it does not include collabo-
ration and transaction between both parties.
To make headway in this area of work, it is necessary to situate
communication processes in a larger conceptual framework that emerges
from theories and research on consumption. What does it mean to con-
sume? What is the rationalityfor producers and consumersof an
incessant expansion and renewal of consumption?

Toward a Multidisciplinary Theory

It is not easy to answer these questions. Research on consumption may
have proliferated in recent years, but it continues to reproduce the com-
partmentalization and disconnection characteristic of the social sciences.
There are economic, sociological, psychoanalytic, psychosocial, and an-
thropological theories on what takes place when we consume. There are
literary theories on reception and aesthetic theories on the critical fate
of artworks. But there is not a sociocultural theory of consumption. I
attempt to bring together here the main lines of interpretation and to
indicate their points of convergence with the goal of contributing to a
global conceptualization of consumption that includes the communi-
cation and reception of symbolic commodities.
Let me begin with a definition: consumption is the ensemble of soci-
ocultural processes in which the appropriation and use of products takes
place. This characterization leads us to understand our acts of consump-
tion as something more than the exercise of tastes, whims, and unre-
flexive purchases, as is presumed by moralistic judgment, and as some-
thing that goes beyond individual attitudes explored in market surveys.
In this view, consumption is understood according to its economic
rationality. Various trends within this framework posit consumption as
a moment in the cycle of social production and reproduction. It is the
site of completion of the process initiated when commodities are pro-
duced. It is where the expansion of capital and the reproduction of the
labor force are realized. From this point of view, needs and individual
tastes are not what determine who consumes what, and in what man-
ner. The planning of the distribution of commodities depends, rather,
on the administration of capital. In its organization for the provision of
food, housing, transport, and entertainment to the members of a society,
the economic system "thinks" about how to reproduce the labor force
 Consumption Is Good for Thinking 39

and increase profit on commodities. We may not agree with this strat-
egy, that is, with the selection of who will consume more or less, but it
is undeniable that the supply of goods and the inducement through ad-
vertising to buy them are not arbitrary acts.
Nevertheless, the macrosocial considerations of large-scale eco-
nomic agents are not rationalities that shape consumption. Marxist stud-
ies of consumption, as well as earlier mass communications research
(from 1950 to 1970), exaggerated the determining force of corporations
on consumers and audiences.2 A more complex theory of the interac-
tion of producers and consumers, senders and receivers, as developed
in certain currents of urban anthropology and sociology, shows that con-
sumption is also motivated by an interactive sociopolitical rationality.
When we examine, from the perspective of consumer movements and
their demands, the proliferation of commodities and brands, of com-
munications and consumer networks, we see the contribution to these
processes of the rules and motivations of group distinction, educational ex-
pansion, technological innovations, and fashion. "Consumption," Manuel
Castells has written, "is the site where class conflict, rooted in unequal
participation in production, continues in the distribution and appro-
priation of commodities."3 To consume is to participate in an arena of
competing claims for what society produces and the ways of using it.
The importance of demands for increased consumption and for a so-
cial wage in organized labor initiatives, and the critical perspectives de-
veloped by consumer groups, are evidence of how popular sectors think
about consumption. If consumption was once a site of more or less uni-
lateral decisions, it is today a space of interaction where producers and
senders no longer simply seduce tKeir audiences; they also have to jus-
tify themselves rationally.
The political importance of consumption can also be appreciated,
for example, in the arguments of the politicians who curbed hyperinfla-
tion in Argentina, Brazil, and Mexico. They based their electoral strate-
gies on the increased indebtedness that a change in economic policy
might have on those who bought cars or appliances on credit. "If you
don't want a return to inflation and higher taxes, which will make it
impossible to pay off what you bought, you should vote for me again,"
said Carlos Menem in seeking reelection as president of Argentina. A
formula used in his electoral campaignthe "layaway vote"demon-
strates the complicity of consumption and citizenship nowadays.
A third line of research, the study of consumption as a marker of
difference and distinction between classes and groups, has led to a fo-
 40 Consumption Is Good for Thinking

cus on the symbolic and aesthetic aspects of the rationality of consumption.

There is a logic to the construction of status markers and in the ways of
communicating them. Books by Pierre Bourdieu, Arjun Appadurai, and
Stuart Ewen, among others, show that in contemporary societies a sig-
nificant aspect of the rationality of social relations is constructed less in
the struggle for the means of production and satisfaction of material
needs than in the appropriation of the means of symbolic distinction. 4
There is a coherence to the places where the members of a class, and
even class fractions, eat, study, live, and take vacations. This also goes
for what they read and enjoy, how they inform themselves, and what
they transmit to other groups. This coherence comes into view when
socioanthropological research seeks to understand these arenas synergis-
tically. The logic that drives the appropriation of commodities as ob-
jects of distinction is not the same as the logic involved in the satisfac-
tion of needs. It is defined, rather, by the scarcity of those commodities
and the impossibility that others should have them.
This said, this research model's shortcoming is that it tends to under-
stand consumption as primarily a means of creating divisions. If the mem-
bers of a society did not share the meanings of commodities, if these
were meaningful only for the elites or the minorities that use them,
they would not serve the purposes of differentiation. An imported car
or a computer with new features distinguishes its few owners because
those who do not possess them know their sociocultural meaning. Con-
versely, a handicraft or an indigenous feastwhose mythic sense is
possessed by the ethnic group that generated itbecome elements of
distinction or discrimination when other sectors of the same society take
interest in them and understand their significance in some measure. Con-
sequently, we should acknowledge that consumption contributes to the
integrative and communicative rationality of a society.

Is There a Postmodern Rationality?

Some currents of postmodern thought have drawn attentionin the
opposite direction to the one we endorseto the dissemination of mean-
ing, the dispersion of signs, and the difficulty of establishing stable and
shared codes. The scenarios of consumption are invoked by postmodern
writers as the most compelling evidence for the crisis in modern ration-
ality and its effects on some of the principles that had governed cultural
development.
 Consumption Is Good for Thinking 41

Jean-Francois Lyotard is no doubt correct in pointing out that the

metanarratives that organized modern historical rationality have been
exhausted. But one cannot deduce from the demise of certain totaliz-
ing narratives that the global has disappeared as a horizon. Postmodern
critique has served the purpose of rethinking the condensed forms of
organization of the social that modernity introduced (nations, classes,
etc.). But is it legitimate to extend this questioning to the extreme of a
supposed postmodern disorder, to a dispersion of subjects that has its
paradigmatic manifestation in free markets? It is odd that in this era of
planetary concentration wrought by markets so much influence should
be attributed to uncritical celebrations of individual dissemination and
visions of societies as erratic coincidences of drives and desires.
It is also surprising that postmodern thought should be constituted
almost exclusively by philosophical reflections, even when it deals with
such concrete objects as architectural design, the organization of the
culture industry, and social interrelations. When we try to verify hypothe-
ses in our empirical research, we observe that no society or group can
support too much erratic eruption of desires, nor the concomitant un-
certainty of meanings. In other words, we need structures by means of
which to think and give order to what we desire.
It is useful to remember here several anthropological studies on rit-
ual that touch on the questions relating to the supposed irrationality of
consumers that we raised at the beginning of this chapter. How can we
distinguish forms of expenditure that contribute to social reproduction
from those that dissipate and fragment it? Is the "squandering" of money
in the consumption of popular groups a self-sabotage of the poor, a sim-
ple demonstration of the incapacity to organize themselves for progress?
A clue in answering these questions is the frequency with which
these sumptuary, "excessive" expenditures are associated with rituals and
celebrations. A birthday or the anniversary of a patron saint may jus-
tify the expense on the basis of morality or religion. However, the expense
also makes possible an event through which the given society conse-
crates a rationality that gives it order and security.
Through rituals, according to Mary Douglas and Baron Isherwood,
groups select and pin downin keeping with collective agreements
the meanings that regulate their lives. Rituals "serve to contain the drift
of meanings" and to make visible public definitions of what is judged
valuable by general consensus. Rituals are effective when they make use
of material things to establish meanings and practices that preserve them.
 42 Consumption Is Good for Thinking

The costlier these things, the stronger the affective investment and the
ritualization that fixes the meanings associated with it. Douglas and
Isherwood define many of the things consumed as "ritual trappings"
and see consumption as a ritual process whose primary function is "to
make sense of the inchoate flux of events."5
Anxious or obsessive behavior around consumption may have a
profound dissatisfaction at its origin, according to many psychologists.
But consumption is otherwise associated, in a more radical sense, with
a dissatisfaction that generates an erratic flow of meanings. Buying ob-
jects, wearing them on the body, or distributing them throughout the
home, assigning them a place within an order, endowing them with
functions in one's communication with others, are resources for thinking
one's own body, the unstable social order, and uncertain interaction
with others. To consume is to make more sense of a world where all
that is solid melts into air. That is why, aside from their usefulness in
expanding the market and reproducing the labor force, insofar as they
distinguish us from others and help us communicate with them, "com-
modities are good for thinking," in Douglas and Isherwood's words.6
Through this play of desires and structures, commodities and con-
sumption also serve to give political order to each society. Consump-
tion is a process in which desires are converted into demands and so-
cially regulated acts. Why do indigenous artisans or popular merchants
who become rich because of the felicitous reception of their work, or
many politicians and union leaders who accumulate wealth through cor-
ruption, continue to live in working-class neighborhoods, control their
expenses, and try not to "stand out"? Why do they prefer to continue
belonging to their original groups (sometimes holding on to power) than
to show off their prosperity?
Alfred Cell's study of the Muria Gond people of India proposes a
subtle approach to explain this regulatory aspect of consumption.7 Thanks
to changes in the tribal economy in the last century, the Muria got richer
than their neighbors, yet maintained a modest lifestyle that Appadurai,
turning Veblen on his head, calls "conspicuous stinginess."8 They spend
quite prodigally on certain commodities so long as they correspond to
shared values and do not alter the sumptuous homogeneity.
In indigenous villages in Mexico, I observed the acceptance of ex-
ternalmodernobjects, so long as they can be assimilated to com-
munitarian logic. The growth of income, the expansion and variety of
consumer items, as well as the technical capacity to appropriate new com-
modities and messages owing to higher levels of education, do not have
 Consumption Is Good for Thinking 43

enough power to drive members of the group to abandon themselves

to the novelties. The desire to possess "the new" does not operate as
something irrational or independent of the collective culture to which
these people belong.
Even in totally modern situations, consumption is not something
"private, atomized and passive," argues Appadurai, but "eminently so-
cial, correlative and active," subordinated to a certain political control
by elites. The tastes of the hegemonic sectors have something like a "fun-
neling" function, for they condition the selection of external offerings
and provide politico-cultural models for the administration of the ten-
sion between what is one's own and what comes from afar.
In the studies on cultural consumption in Mexico, to which I will
refer later, we found that popular sectors' lack of interest in experimen-
tal art exhibitions, theater, or film is due not only to the weak symbolic
capital they draw on for the appreciation of those forms of communi-
cation, but also to group loyalty to their communities. Within the urban
setting, it is their family context, their neighborhood, and their jobs
that maintain the homogeneity of their consumption and control the
deviations in their tastes and patterns of spending. On a larger scale, what
is understood as national culture continues to serve as the context of
selection for what comes from outside.

Transnational Consumer Communities

These communities of belonging and control, however, are undergoing
restructuring. What group do we belong to when we participate in a
sociality constructed primarily in relation to globalized processes of con-
sumption? We live in a time of fractures and heterogeneity, of segmen-
tations within each nation, and of fluid communication with transna-
tional orders of information, fashion, and knowledge. In the midst of
this heterogeneity, we find codes that unite us, or at least permit us to
understand each other. But those shared codes refer ever less to the eth-
nicity, class, and nation into which we were born. Those old units, in-
sofar as they endure, seem to be reformulated as mobile pacts for the in-
terpretation of commodities and messages. The definition of a nation,
for example, is given less at this stage by its territorial limits or its politi-
cal history. It survives, rather, as an interpretive community of consumers,
whose traditionalalimentary, linguistichabits induce them to re-
late in a peculiar way with the objects and information that circulate in
international networks. At the same time, we find international com-
 44 Consumption Is Good for Thinking

munities of consumerswe already gave the examples of youth and

television viewersthat provide a sense of belonging where national
loyalties have eroded.
Since the agreements among producers, institutions, markets, and
publicswhich constitute the interpretive pacts and renew them peri-
odicallyare struck in these international networks, it turns out that
the hegemonic sector of one nation has more in common with the elites
of another than with the subaltern sectors of its own nation. Twenty
years ago, the adherents of dependency theory reacted to the first signs
of this process by accusing the bourgeoisie of a lack of loyalty to na-
tional interests. And, of course, the national character of these interests
was defined by the "authentic" traditions of the people. Today we know
that this authenticity is illusory, for the sense of one's own repertoire of
objects is arbitrarily delimited and reinterpreted in historical hybrid
processes. We can also see an analogous hybrid process in the mixture
of "autochthonous" and "foreign" ingredients in consumption by pop-
ular sectors, in the peasant artisans who adapt their archaic knowledges
in order to interact with tourists, in workers who manage to adapt their
work culture to new technologies while maintaining their ancient and
local beliefs. Several decades of transnational symbolic construction have
created what Renato Ortiz has labeled an "international popular culture,"
with a collective memory made from fragments of different nations.9
Although their psyches might continue to harbor a national memory,
consumers from the popular classes are nevertheless capable of reading
the quotations of a multilocalized imaginary assembled by television
and advertising: Hollywood and pop stars, jeans and credit-card logos,
sports heroes from various countries, and national sports figures that
play in other countries, all constitute a constantly available repertoire
of signs. Marilyn Monroe and Jurassic animals, Che Guevara and the
fall of the Berlin Wall, the most-consumed soft drink, and Tiny Toon can
be cited or alluded to by any international advertising designer, con-
fident that his or her message will have meaning even for those who
have never traveled outside of their country.
It is necessary, therefore, to find out how identities and alliances
are restructured when a national community wanes or when segmented
participation in consumptionwhich becomes the principal criterion
of identificationcreates solidarity among elites from each country
within one transnational circuit and solidarity among popular sectors
within another. In our study of cultural consumption in Mexico, we
found that the separation among hegemonic and subaltern groups is
 Consumption Is Good for Thinking 45

no longer presented as the opposition between one's own and imports,

or between the traditional and the modern, but by a differential affilia-
tion with cultural subsystems with a different complexity and capacity
for innovation.10 While some follow Brahms, Sting, and Carlos Fuentes,
others prefer Julio Iglesias, Alejandra Guzman, and Venezuelan telenovelas.
This split is operative not only in the consumption of entertain-
ment. It also segments social sectors via strategic commodities that po-
sition them in the contemporary world and enable them to have decision-
making capacity. While technological modernization in industry and
services requires greater work skills, there is a concomitant increase in
school absenteeism and ever lesser access to innovative information by
middle sectors (and still less by popular sectors). The knowledge to use
data and instruments that enable people to act autonomously and cre-
atively is limited to those who can afford to subscribe to information
services and exclusive television networks (on satellite dishes and retrans-
mitters of metropolitan channels). The rest are offered mass communi-
cations, concentrated in large monopolies, that carry standard North
American programming, plus repetitive lite entertainment shows pro-
duced in each country.
The characterization of consumption as an unreflexive site of use-
less expenditure can be criticized as follows. The majority of people are
turned away from the most creative trends in contemporary culture as a
result of the reorganization of transnational symbolic systems, which takes
place according to neoliberal rules of maximum profitability of mass
commodities and the concentration of culture among select, decision-
making elites. Cultural leveling and depoliticization do not follow from
the structure of the medium (television, radio, or video). The possibilities
for interaction and critical reflection, on the contrary, have been demon-
strated many times, albeit in small-scale experiments that do not trans-
late into higher effectivity among mass publics. Similarly, the deepening
of political apathy should not be attributed only to the contraction of
public life arid the retreat of families to home delivery of electronic en-
tertainment. Nevertheless, this transformation in the relations between
public and private in everyday cultural consumption marks a funda-
mental change in the conditions for the practice of a new type of civic
responsibility.
If consumption has become a site from which it is difficult to think,
this is the result of its capitulation to a supposedly free, or better yet fe-
rocious, game of market laws. If consumption is to articulate with a
reflexive exercise of citizenship, it would have to meet the following re-
 46 Consumption Is Good for Thinking

quirements: (a) a vast and diversified supply of commodities and mes-

sages representative of the international variety of markets, with easy
and equal access for the majority; (b) multidirectional and reliable in-
formation on the quality of products, with effective consumer control
and the capacity to refute the pretensions and seductions of advertis-
ing; (c) democratic participation by the principal sectors of civil society
in material, symbolic, juridical, and political decisions that organize con-
sumption, such as health standards relating to foodstuffs, concessions
of radio and television frequencies, prosecution of speculators who hoard
the most necessary products, and management of crucial information
for decision making.
These political actions, which elevate consumers to citizens, entail
a conception of the market as not only a place for the exchange of com-
modities, but as part of more complex sociocultural interactions. Simi-
larly, consumption is seen not so much as the individual possession of
isolated objects, but rather as the collective appropriation, within rela-
tions of solidarity with and distinction from others, of commodities that
provide biological and symbolic needs, and that serve to transmit and
receive messages. The theories of consumption reviewed in this chapter
suggest that, when considered complementarily, commercial value is
not something contained "naturally" in objects but is rather the result
of sociocultural interaction among the people who use them. The ab-
stract character of commercial exchanges, accentuated nowadays by the
spatial and technological distance between producers and consumers,
led to the belief in the autonomy of commodities and in the inexorable
character, extraneous to the things themselves, of the objective laws
that presumably regulate the relations between supply and demand.
The encounter of modern and "archaic" societies permits us to see that
commodities have functions in all societies, and that the commercial
aspect is only one of them. Humans exchange objects to satisfy cultur-
ally defined needs, to integrate with and distinguish ourselves from oth-
ers, to fulfill our desires and to map out our situation in the world, to
control the erratic flux of desires and to give them stability or security
through institutions and rituals.
Within this multiplicity of actions and interactions, objects have a
complex life. In one phase, they are only "candidates for commodity
status."11 Then they go through another, properly commercial phase.
Finally, they lose this aspect and take on another. For example, masks
made by indigenous peoples for ceremonies are sold to a modern con-
sumer and ultimately are put on display in urban apartments or in
 Consumption Is Good for Thinking 47

museums, where their economic value is forgotten. Another example is

that of the song produced for exclusively aesthetic reasons, which, once
it is recorded, attains mass appeal and profits. Then it is appropriated
and modified by a political movement and becomes a resource of iden-
tification and collective mobilization. These changing biographies of ob-
jects and messages suggest that the commercial aspect of commodities
is their opportunity and their risk. We can act as consumers by situating
ourselves in only one of these processes of interactionsay, that which
regulates the market. As citizens, we can also take more time for reflec-
tion and experimentation, taking into consideration the multiple po-
tentialities of objects and taking advantage of their "semiotic virtuos-
ity"12 in the varied contexts where people might encounter one another.
To pose these questions implies relocating the pubic. The discred-
iting of states as administrators of the basic sectors of production and
information, and the lack of credibility of political parties (including
those of the opposition), have contracted the spaces where it was possi-
ble to look after the public interest, and where it should be possible to
limit and manage the otherwise savage struggle of private commercial
powers. In some countries we can detect the emergence of nonpartisan
and nongovernmental institutionssuch as the ombudsman, human-
rights commissions, and independent news groupsthat make it pos-
sible to uncouple the need to value the public sphere from the province
of corrupt state bureaucracies. Some consumers want to be citizens.
After the 19805, the "lost decade" of economic growth in Latin Amer-
ica, during which states surrendered part of their control of society to
private corporations, it has become clear where privatization at any cost
leads: to national decapitalization, underconsumption by majorities, un-
employment, and impoverishment of cultural offerings. The articula-
tion of consumption and citizenship requires a relocation of the mar-
ket within society, the imaginative reconquest of public spaces, and
interest in the public. Consumption can be a site of cognitive value; it
can be good for thinking and acting in a meaningful way that renews
social life.
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 Chapter 2

Mexico
Cultural Globalization in a Disintegrating City

R esearch on cultural consumption in a large city places us at the in-

tersection of debates in the social sciences. There are three inter-
connected problems that demonstrate this linkage between the crisis of
megacities and the crisis in social knowledge:
1. Can one still speak of the city and of urban life in a megalopolis with
more than ten million inhabitants?
2. To what degree can urban cultures defined by local traditions survive
in an era in which culture is deterritorialized and cities reordered to
form transnational systems of information, communication, com-
merce, and tourism?
3. How can we study urban issues using the existing tools of the social sci-
ences? Which discipline is most relevant for understanding new urban
cultural processes: sociology, anthropology, or communications studies?

Sociologists versus Anthropologists

What is the difference between an urban sociologist and an urban an-
thropolist? It has been said that the former studies the city while the

49
 50 Mexico

latter studies in the city.1 Sociology constructs broad maps of behavior

on the basis of census data and statistics, whereas extended field studies
enable dense readings of social interaction.
A number of anthropologists have rebelled against the retreat of
their discipline to small-scale causes and their effects. Why should we
confine ourselves to speak only about the neighborhood while remain-
ing silent about the city? Why should we adopt an approach proper to
the study of a village for our work in large urban centers? Some scholars
think that the narrow scope of anthropology does not permit an exam-
ination of what is essentially urban. The formation and life of the city
escape us if we cannot show to what degree the narrow relationships
we document in case studies are conditioned by the broad structures of
society.2
Other scholars argue that anthropology is distinguished not by its
object but by its method of study. While sociologists speak of the city, an-
thropologists let the city speak: their detailed observations and in-depth
interviews, their customary residence with people, are ways of trying
to listen to what the city has to say. This dedication to the eloquence
of everyday acts has been methodologically rich and ethically generous.
Nonetheless, questions arise from an epistemological point of view. How
reliable is what inhabitants say about their way of life? Who is speak-
ing when subjects interpret their experience: the individual, the neigh-
borhood, or the class to which the individual belongs?
Any urban problemtransportation, pollution, or street vendors
presents us with such a diversity of opinions, and even studies, on the
basis of which it is difficult to distinguish the real from the imaginary.
Perhaps there is no place where epistemological critiques of common
sense and ordinary language are more justified than in large cities: we
should exercise caution when recording the divergent voices of our in-
formants and endeavor to discern whether they know what they are talk-
ing about. The intensity of experience overshadows the unconscious mo-
tivations for people's actions, making it possible to edit the sequence of
events so as to construct personally advantageous versions of the truth.
An uncritical study of the fragmentation and discourses of the city
has two drawbacks: it reproduces urban fragmentation through mono-
graphic description without explaining it, or it simulates an integration
of the fragments, often drawing on the "explanations" given by the least
insightful informants. The methodological populism of anthropology
thus becomes the "scientific" ally of political populism.
 Mexico 51

The postmodern debate over anthropological texts has also led us to

suspect that we anthropologists too do not really know what we are do-
ing when we conduct ethnographic studies. Malinowski (1922) thought
he was describing the Trobrianders exactly as they were, but his Diaries
also reveal a repugnance for their culture coincident with his passion for
the "animality" of their bodies. The debates between Robert Redfield
and Oscar Lewis about Tepoztlan suggest that perhaps they were not
speaking about the same locality, or that their writings were more than
testimony to "having been there" and, instead, as Geertz suspects, were
a jockeying for place among those who "are here" in universities and
symposia.3
With the development of anthropological hermeneutics and ethno-
psychoanalysls, interpretive procedures for recording the various layers
of meaning concealed beneath the appearance of acts and discourses
have become more sophisticated.4 It remains nonetheless difficult to ar-
ticulate the various meanings that subjects attribute to their practices
and the social and cultural conditioning by which the city provides mean-
ings for each act, often unbeknownst to the actors themselves.

Babel
The problems of what is said and left unsaid by urban subjects, of what
sociology says about them and what anthropology hears from them, are
joined by an additional difficulty recently discerned in megacities such
as Mexico City. This difficulty complicates all of the preceding ones: What
happens when one cannot understand what a city is saying, when it
turns into a Babel and the chaotic poliphony of its voices, its dismem-
bered space, and the scattered experiences of its inhabitants dissolve the
meaning of global discourses?
In Mexico City there are 263,000 indigenous Mexicans belonging
to more than thirty ethnic groups who speak a corresponding number
of languages.'' They more or less continue to organize their homes, neigh-
borhoods, and support networks, work out their disputes, and conduct
their transactions with the state and their compadres just as they did
when they lived in Puebla, Oaxaca, or Guerrero. But one does not have
to be an indigenous migrant to lose touch with one's language or to have
only a fragmentary experience of the city. We all experience this, at least
since the 1940s. At that time, the Federal District had one and a half mil-
lion inhabitants. Now, with sixteen million, the urban perimeter spreads
 52 Mexico

over a territory that no one can apprehend and in which there are no
longer any encompassing parameters of organization. The 9.1 square
kilometers of Mexico City's territory at the end of the last century do
not comprise even 1 percent of the metropolitan area of today.6 That
century-old city continues to exist as the so-called historic downtown,
but demographic, industrial, and commercial expansion has created
many other urban areas on the periphery that overlap with other cities.
When we began to study the consumption of culture in Mexico
City five years ago, we surveyed 1,500 homes with the hope of creating
a map of behaviors.' We were surprised by the low use of public cultural
infrastructure: 41.2 percent reported not going to the movies for more
than a year; 62.5 percent of those who claimed to like theater had not
seen one play in this period; 89.2 percent had not attended concerts.
Nor did popular spectacles and local neighborhood festivals manage to
attract in a consistent way more than 10 percent of the population.
What do people do on weekdays, after work or school? According
to the survey, the majority of the inhabitants of Mexico City prefer to
stay at home rather than use the city in their free time; 24.7 percent
say that their principal activity is watching television; 16.3 percent just
rest, sleep, or do housework.
On weekends, the majority of the population spend their "free" time
in the seclusion of their home life. About 20.5 percent regularly leave
the city; they include people in middle and high income brackets with
weekend homes in the nearby towns that surround Mexico City, as well
as those who travel to Puebla, Toluca, and environs to visit family and
friends. In both cases, their trips are planned in keeping with the desire
to put distance between themselves and the city, in search of a "differ-
ent environment," one less polluted and "closer to nature."
Whether they seek to escape the hubbub of the city, confine them-
selves to domestic life and electronic amusements, or make use of parks
and shopping centers, all the interviewees referred to the hostile envi-
ronment of the city. Because it is difficult on workdays to avoid long
commutes, danger, and smog, free time is experienced as such when one
is liberated from the pressures of the city and the tensions of public
transport. From Monday to Saturday, the crowds on the street neces-
sarily make pragmatic use of urban space, going to and from work and
engaging in the basic activities of consumption. But it is precisely the
three million vehicles that traverse the city and the 22.5 million person-
trips that the city endures every day, their noise and their fury, that
discourage recreational and cultural uses of the city.8
 Mexico 53

Why does the general public attend shows so infrequently? One

explanation, consistent with international trends, is that participation
in public cultural facilities (movie houses, theaters, dance spaces) is de-
clining, while home delivery of culture (radio, television, video) is on
the rise. Our survey, which revealed sparse attendance at shows involv-
ing collective use of urban space, also found that 95 percent of Mexico
City's population regularly watches television, 87 percent listens to ra-
dio, and 52 percent of the city's families have videocassette players.
There is another explanation for declining attendance at public
shows, which ensues from the territorial and demographic growth of
the city. In addition to economic and educational inequalities, which
in every society limit the access of majorities to many cultural goods,
the irregular and complex urban development of Mexico City and the
unequal geographic distribution or facilities make it difficult for people
to attend public shows. Almost all of the "classical" cultural venues (li-
braries, museums, theaters, movie houses, concert and dance halls) are
concentrated in the central and southern zones of the city. Consequently,
residential segregation reinforces income and educational inequality.
Radio and televison, which are more evenly distributed through-
out the entirety of the city, disseminate information and entertainment
to all sectors better than the spatially based public venues, access to which
has become more difficult as the historic downtown area loses residents
to disconnected towns of the periphery.
Our research team had lengthy discussions relating to what these
precarious data included or excluded. Communications specialists and
some anthropologists emphasized the retreat to domestically consumed
culture, the replacement of theaters by radio, of movie houses by home
video, and of attendance at stadiums by televised sports events. From
the macrosocial perspective of our survey, anarchic urban growth goes
hand in hand with the expansion of the electronic media. Industrializa-
tion and migration, which over the past fifty years increased the city's
population from one and a half million to sixteen million, are part of
the same policy of modernization that locates cultural development in
the expansion of the media. The imbalance generated by irrational and
speculative urbanization is "compensated" for by the effectiveness of
communication in technological networks. Territorial expansion and
massification of the city, which reduced interneighborhood interaction,
took place simultaneously with the reinvention of social and cultural
bonds via radio and television. Today these mediawith their vertical
and anonymous logicsketch out the new and invisible links of the city.
 54 Mexico

From a more specifically anthropological perspective, some schol-

ars interpreted the survey data in terms of the multiple uses that people
still make of public spaces. During long periods of cohabitation with
neighborhood residents, we made a number of discoveries about public
interaction: the amount of time women spend conversing while shop-
ping; the value that neighborhood parties have for those who attend;
what youths learn by traversing the city on their way to work or to dance
danzon or rock at night; the constant renewal of city life while waiting
for the bus, buying tortillas, talking on the phone, making necessary or
chance trips through the cityscape. It is difficult to capture the signifi-
cance of these occasional activities with surveys, or to quantify their
persistence in individual memory or in discussions among family mem-
bers or friends.
The telescopic gaze of these surveys and the close-up gaze of field-
work yield different and partially legitimate ways of naming the same
ungraspable city.
We extended the reach of our study by carrying out a series of in-
vestigations on particular aspects of urban life that combined qualita-
tive and quantitative techniques. We administered our general survey
in a shantytown to serve as a reference point that would allow us to de-
termine the similarities and discrepancies between the general structure
of consumption in the city and in the local culture; we studied the main
areas of Coyoacan (its historic downtown area, its multifamily dwellings,
and its squatter settlements); we sought to understand the specificity
of cultural reception in the Museum of the Templo Mayor and the
Museum of Popular Cultures, and the pleasures of buying handicrafts.9
I should like to elaborate on the implications of these approaches
to the different kinds of cultural activities in Mexico City, drawing on
the research we conducted on the Second Festival of Mexico City in
August of 1990.10 We studied the behavior of the audiences at a repre-
sentative sample of the nearly three hundred shows included in the fes-
tival (we selected thirty-three events, including plays, dance, opera, rock,
and other kinds of music, performed in theaters, dance halls, parks, and
plazas). Since this festival was the most important cultural event of the
city, in terms of both the diversity of the art and shows presented and
the size of the audiences that it attracted, it enabled us to discover how
different sectors of the city related to art and culture.
This was not simply an audience survey. We explored the relation
of the festival to the city and the mass media; we examined the areas
from which the audiences came and how they found out about the var-
 Mexico 55

ious events, whether the festival's unusual cultural program had modi-
fied their usual cultural behavior, and whether and to what degree the
critical evaluations of the public and the press coincided or diverged.11
The behavior of the spectators was more easily interpreted against
the backdrop of ordinary patterns of reception of mass-mediated fare
and relations to cultural institutions and urban space, as they were reg-
istered in our survey of 1,500 homes. Inversely, the study of the festival
provided greater detail about some tendencies found in the general sur-
vey on consumption in Mexico City. Combined attendance at all events of
the festival, which failed to reach two hundred thousand, constituted
both in volume and the range of social sectors represented by the par-
ticipantsmore or less 10 percent of the residents who claim to regu-
larly attend public cultural institutions and events.
Four groups alone accounted for almost three-fourths of the audi-
ence: students (20.91 percent), office workers (19.90 percent), profession-
als (17.78 percent), and arts workers (14.18 percent). Workers comprised
2.14 percent, artisans 1.37 percent, while the retired and unemployed
did not reach even i percent of the audience. As for level of education,
those who had completed primary and secondary school comprised 20.02
percent, while 78.54 percent had attended preparatory high school and
higher education. The Mexico City Festival reproduced the segmenta-
tions and segregation in the general population ensuing from inequal-
ity of income, education, and residential distribution of the city's in-
habitants.
The surveys and, especially, the interviews and ethnographic ob-
servations revealed a vast diversity in those who attended the festival.
Not even those spectators who are characterized as "popular" formed a
homogeneous group. An enormous; gap divides those who listen in rapt
near immobility to the "romantic music" of Marco Antonio Muniz from
those who would rather dance the danzon with Pepe Arevalo, and from
those who seek generational identity in Santa Sabina's rock music. These
demographic segments do not always encounter each other peacefully:
we found that adherents of popular and high culture viewed each other
with indifference or disdain; this was the case even within the popular
sector, divided between rock fans and bolero enthusiasts.
One finding that revealed the degree of heterogeneity and segrega-
tion of the spectators is that most of them did not even realize that the
show they were watching was part of the festival, and only 12 percent
demonstrated any knowledge of the festival's other activities. Even at
those events that had better informed and educated audiences, only 32
 56 Mexico

percent could mention other festival activities. Responses to questions

about how they found out about a given program varied according to
the audiences: those who attended performances of classical music,
dance, and theater generally found out through the press; those who
attended rock concerts had seen fliers and posters or had received rec-
ommendations from friends; those who went to dance halls found out
through the electronic media and attendance at previous events. In
sum, the reality of the premise that a festival or a city can count on a
homogeneous public, on whose basis publicity can be indiscriminately
designed, existed only in the minds of the organizers. The majority of
the public could not have cared less that the event they attended was
part of a festival, and even less about knowing who sponsored it. On
reading our research report, one of the organizers acknowledged that
"we officials are the only ones who attribute any importance to logos."
It should be mentioned, however, that the festival did matter to
the press, which gathered information on all events each day, making it
possible to take it in at a glance, and which provided discussion of the
festival's general cultural policies, its share of financing within the city
budget, and the capacity of the event to meet social needs.
One of the conclusions of this study is that not only does the city
not possess one public for culture but that such a public cannot even
be brought together by a consolidated program like that of the festival.
Despite its encompassing and multidisciplinary character, its appeal to
both cultivated and popular audiences, and its location in both enclosed
and open-air spaces, the festival turned out to be a kind of laboratory
of the multicultural heterogeneity and dispersion of Mexico City. And,
like the festival, the city can be said to exist more for the government
and the press than for its citizens. Some urban researchers, notably de-
mographers and sociologists, see the city as a whole. In contrast, and
with few exceptions, most anthropologists and cultural studies scholars
see the city as a disassembled jigsaw puzzle.
This disintegrated conception of the city jibes with ways in which
popular urban movements see it. These movements are almost always
guided by local and segmented perspectives, linked to the areas of the
city in which they live, others to their experience as street vendors, and
so on.12 In each zone, their actions are carried out without contextual-
izing them in the historical development or more general affairs of the
city. Only extraordinary movements, such as the ones that emerged with
the earthquake of 1985, or ecological movements and some recently
formed political parties, demonstrate an integrated vision of the met-
 Mexico 57

ropolitan area.13 These novel cases are characterized by their responses

to the deterritorialization and dehistoricization produced by transnational
culture and their search for new forms of rootedness. In some cases,
they revalorize the neighborhood, in others the historic downtown area,
and in a few cases the entirety of the city. For some European authors,
such reaffirma tions of urban territoriality are ways of holding on to the
meaning of the city, insofar as it is an expression of local society, or
forms of resistance to incorporation into international markets as one
mere component.14 This hypothesis is useful for understanding some
of the current conflicts in the Mexican capital.
Several anthropological studies have revealed that since inhabitants
of a megacity such as Mexico City find it difficult to take part in and
identify with it as members of its entirety, they identify with the barrio
or an even smaller unit. Maria Ana Portal's work on small historic colo-
nial or pre-Columbian towns, absorbed nowadays into the greater met-
ropolitan area of Mexico City, reveals that the notion of citizenship at
work here is limited to a sense of belonging to those towns and to par-
ticipation in feasts in honor of the patron saint. "In these towns, boys
and girls becomes citizens upon getting married, at which time they are
invited to participate in the festivities, having been informed of their
responsibilities. The saint keeps watch; everything has to be done right.
If not, he punishes them," commented one resident of San Andres To-
toltepec, a town in which modern jobs such as laborer and chauffeur
have acquired greater importance than peasant occupations. Neverthe-
less, the residents continue to identify with the collectivity and to affirm
a sense of belonging by means of rituals whose symbolic meaning is
rooted in agricultural contexts.15
Even in the most modern of the city's neighborhoods, character-
ized by social disorganization and the crisis of partisan political repre-
sentation, individualist reactions and corporatist entrenchment are the
rule. When the rules for the right of access to the city lose their effec-
tiveness, or when the access to jobs and services is subject to political
arbitrariness and corruption, many residents seek protection in sector-
ial groupings and subordinate themselves to the paternalism of local
bosses or religious leaders. Guillerrno de la Pena and Rene de la Torre's
study on urban identities in Guadalajara reveals three modes of organi-
zation that may also be found in other cities: (a) a "family corporatism"
whereby members of an extended family participate in common activi-
ties of production and consumption as a defense against competition
and uncertainty at the larger social level; (b) a "neighborhood corpo-
 58 Mexico

ratism" whereby neighborhood groups, under a strong and often reli-

gious leadership, organize the search for housing and jobs, the use of
their free time, and the creation of mutual help networks that com-
pensate for the lack of services and protection; (c) a "civic association"
that pursues similar goals, giving priority, however, to democratic par-
ticipation over corporatist or authoritarian domination. Right up to the
present, according to Pefia and Torre, "the old modes of assistance, such
as families, churches, and paternalistic bosses," provide the hegemonic
context in which identities take shape and citizenship is exercised.16

Glocalization or the Globalization of the Local

On the one hand, the majority retreats to its immediate surroundings
and seeks to forget the larger urban context. On the other hand, some
people begin to think of the city as a whole precisely when its disinte-
gration reaches alarming proportions. It is not only the politicians and
government officials who, faced with the need to administer it globally,
seek its gestalt. Common problems such as pollution, traffic, and the in-
teractions of the national and international market oblige certain groups
to transcend the local in order to understand what takes place in the
megalopolis. In addition to the historical city, with its monuments and
neighborhoods that bear witness to the historical density of the centuries
that have passed, and the industrial city, which emerged in the 19405,
there is the globalized city, connected to worldwide economic, finance,
and communications networks.
Until recently, urbanization theories characterized cities as being very
different from the countryside and as the sites where the agricultural
skills of the labor force gave way to secondary or tertiary skills. This
process became evident in Mexico when urban expansion followed in-
dustrial growth.
Nowadays, however, urban research has given greater importance
to informational and financial processes over industrialization as the
most dynamic economic agents. This change is leading to a reconcep-
tualization of the functions of large cities. Insofar as today's economic
profile is not characterized by the passage from agriculture to industry
and then to services, but by the constant interaction of these three sec-
tors by means of information processes (whether in technology, man-
agement, or marketing), large cities are the nodes where these move-
ments take place. In an intensely transnationalized economy, the major
metropolitan areas are the nodes connecting the economies of different
 Mexico 59

societies to each other. It is no accident that it was Japanese entrepre-

neurs who coined the neologism glocalize to refer to the new "world-
entrepreneur" whose culture articulates information, beliefs, and ritu-
als deriving from the local, the national, and the international.17
This process is evident not only in the major urban agglomerations,
which also happen to be concentrations of high economic power, such
as New York, London, and Tokyo. Saskia Sassen has argued that the new
strategic role of these cities derives from the "combination of spatial dis-
persion and global interaction," as well as their capacity to concentrate fi-
nancial accumulation and innovations in consumption.18 And Manuel
Castells's analysis of the new phase of economic growth in Spain, which
started in 1985 as a consequence of integration into the European mar-
ket, shows that one source of dynamism in such cities as Madrid and
Barcelona is their role as articulators of management, innovation, and
marketing. The complexity of such international articulation requires
increasingly sophisticated mechanisms of entrepreneurial and commu-
nications management. Urban communications and information-pro-
cessing services take on a leading role in the generation of investment
and jobs.19 Both authors point out that the coexistence of a new elite,
which administers these services, with migrants and the unemployed
generates radically different conditions for the exercise of citizenship.
It is worth asking what sociocultural consequences this reorganiza-
tion has already had in Mexico City. There is an obvious boom in con-
struction of buildings for financial and information services, and the
development of tourism; both initiatives have changed the urban land-
scape in a number of areas (for example, along the Paseo de la Re-
forma, in Polanco, and in the southern part of the city). The Festival
of Mexico City and the Festival of the Historic Downtown Area, events
whose goals include increasing the city's allure for tourists and turning
it into an international metropolis, belong to a set of large develop-
ment projects by means of which Mexico City's current administration
is redefining the city's image. Changes undertaken in Alameda Park,
Santa Fe, and Xochimilco, as well as projected development proposals
and international investment, are resituating local culture within the
networks of globalization.20 Along the same lines, the program of the
Fideicomiso de Estfmulo al Cine Mexicano [Fund for the Development
of Mexican Cinema] promotes the use of Mexico City as a site for film-
ing foreign movies.21
Urban accommodation to globalization is not limited to large-scale
government and corporate development projects. This redefinition of
 60 Mexico

urban phenomena is discernible even in everyday contexts: executives

and mid-level managers talk on cellular phones while driving from home
to the office, where they pick up faxes transmitted the night before,
answer them, put the information through their computer systems and
modems, then go home at night to watch the news in English on chan-
nels received by cable or satellite.
Such actions suggest that the city is being reordered through elec-
tronic and telematic linkages. It is the same big city that grew along
with its industry, as we are reminded every day by spectacular levels of
pollution, but it is also a city that has been connected both within itself
and with other countries not just by traditional means of air and land
transportation, mail and telephone, but by cable, fax, satellite, and other
electronic technologies.
Such transformations lead us to a theoretical redefinition of cities.
In the fragmented space of this capital city lacking a center, we must
work toward combining sociodemographic and spatial with sociocommu-
nicational definitions of the city.

A City without a Map

"Each city receives its shape from the desert counterposed to it," says
Marco Polo in Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities. When the city invades
the desert, the forest, the mountain, everything that surrounds and em-
braces it, it breaks into pieces, losing its sense of space and challenge to
these borders.
How, then, is one to describe the sprawling city from an anthropo-
logical perspective? Should we reactivate theories (now considered illu-
sory) of the autonomy of the barrios, of the multitudes' scattered retreat
into their homes, of the attempt to preserve exclusive small-scale territo-
ries for communities of youths or neighbors? Or should we also try to
understand the new forms of identity organized in nonmaterial networks,
in the processes of transmission of knowledge, in the diffuse linkages
of commerce and the ties of transnational trade?
These options should not be considered mutually exclusive. Anthro-
pologists can study the small histories of the city, and the big ones too.
They no longer have a monopoly on the intimate and everyday aspects
of urban life. Sociologists and communications specialists also conduct
urban field studies. Perhaps as this century comes to a close we can best
distinguish ourselves by the old anthropological concern with otherness
and others. But the other is no longer territorially distant and alien;
 Mexico 61

the other is composed of the multicultural realities that constitute the

city and its inhabitants. Anthropologists carry the other inside them-
selves as they participate in various local cultures and as they become
decentered in transnational cultures. But, as we witnessed in the ten-
sions and fragmentation of the Festival of Mexico City, it is more ardu-
ous to reconcile these multicultural realities within collective processes
than in relation to the individual. The current coexistence of indige-
nous traditions and communications industries, of the local and the
global, does not eradicate the struggle and discrimination these antino-
mies encompass. On the contrary, in trying to achieve cohesion within a
single program that encompassed the educated and the popular, the Mex-
ican and the foreign, festival organizers encountered dissension: hisses
from rock fans when the romantic music of Marco Antonio Muniz was
announced or the denial of legitimacy for rock music by lovers of bal-
let or traditional indigenous folklore. Comparable conflicts arise be-
tween those who defend local cultures and those who seek to transna-
tionalize or commercialize the city.
The current problems of urban anthropology are not limited to
understanding how people reconcile the vertiginous and bewildering
rhythms of globalized urban speed with the slow rhythms of their home
territories. Our task is to explain how the apparently greater commu-
nication and rationality of globalization provokes new forms of racism
and exclusion. The ever more frequent fundamentalist outbursts tak-
ing place today in big cities such as Los Angeles or Mexico City, Berlin
or Lima, make one think that anthropologists must not take too much
satisfaction in being apologists of difference. The point is to imagine
how the use of international information and the simultaneous need
for belonging and local roots can coexist without discriminatory hier-
archies in a democratic, intelligent, and egalitarian multicultural society.

Detectives or Psychoanalysts?
This relocation of the anthropologist's task requires a mastery of the
many practices that transform the city: of the "real," dispersed prac-
tices recorded in surveys or field studies, and of the discourses of the
urban imagination that reunify or segregate. To ask about the meaning
of the city is to explore the structure and the destructuring of demo-
graphic, socioeconomic, and cultural forms that have a certain objec-
tive "reality." But it also calls for investigating how subjects represent
those acts through which they inhabit these structures and subjective
 62 Mexico

experiences. The meaning of the city is constituted by what the city

gives or does not give, by what the subjects can do with their lives within
an overdetermined habitat, and by what they imagine about themselves
and others in order to "suture" the flaws, the absences, and the disap-
pointments generated by urban structures and interactions in response
to their needs and desires.
In an age of globalization, in which the city is constituted not only
by what takes place within its territory, but also by the way in which it
is traversed by migrants and tourists, messages and goods from other
countries, we construct what is ours with greater intensity against the
backdrop of what we imagine about others. Not only do we project
our fantasy onto the desert in our weekend trips in search of the natu-
ral environment surrounding the city, we also find that fantasy in the
proliferation of different kinds of discourse created by the multiple
groups that inhabit the city or pass through it. Hence our interest in
working with texts that describe and imagine the city: informants' sto-
ries, journalistic and literary chronicles, photos, radio and television
talk, and music that narrates our urban experiences.
Why should anthropologists be concerned with such heterogeneous
materials? The idea is to contrast different kinds of discourses, to con-
sider the social facts about which these discourses speak and the expe-
rience of the subjects who utter them. We need to bring this research
strategy to epistemological debates, laying claim to the need for apostem-
pirical and posthermeneutic anthropology. What does this mean? Above
all, to cease assuming that what is observable in facts acquired through
surveys and fieldwork is the truth. Nor do we think that the conflict
between empiricists and hermeneuts can be resolved by a confronta-
tion between "facts" and "discourses." The truth does not emerge, as in
detective work, by submitting the discourses to a demonstration of the
facts. The anthropologist is more the psychoanalyst than the detective,
inquiring into the possible correlation of a discourse with facts in order
to determine the degree to which it is fantasy or delirium. Simultane-
ously, the anthropologist inquires after what the facts mean for the sub-
jects who experience them, knowing that the signification (rather than
"the truth") of the facts does not inhere in them but lies in the process
by which subjects construct and undergo the facts, transform them, and
experience the resistence provided by the real. Anthropologists situate
themselves in this intersection between facts and discourse. Both have
a certain consistency that gives them their relative objectivity and makes
scientific analysis possible, but at the same time both are organized by
 Mexico 63

an imaginary regime whose meaning is not exhausted by objective

appearances.
This perspective allows us to change the answer to the postmodern
question: Who speaks in anthropological studies? This no longer im-
plies choosing between the anthropologists or the informants. What
speaks, more than a social agent, is a difference, a fissure, a search for
the Other and of that which is Other. Or, rather, the many forms of
understanding otherness that coexist in a large multicultural city. This
difference and this fissure are usually "sutured" within each society by
means of relations of power and rituals of social cohesion. In large cities,
we observed, the acts of government and the discourse of the media
bring together in imaginary wholeness the dispersed fragments of the
urban fabric. We also find that the city is able to exist, for a few mo-
ments, in the solidarity of the people who suffer disasters like the 1985
earthquake or who take part in a plebiscite, in certain feasts, or in a
shared concern about the environment. The perspective of the anthro-
pologist, or of any social scientist, at once local and global, can recog-
nize in those acts projects for social recomposition as well as simulacra
of the moment of suturing. In the language of an anthropology in-
fluenced by psychoanalysis, we might say that any labor of under-
standing ends up restoring, by means of criticism, evidence of lack and
conflict.
What are the possibilities ensuing from the encounter between an-
thropology and psychoanalysis today? As in the relation between soci-
ology and anthropology, it is not so much a matter of dialogue be-
tween two ways of knowing that deal with different objects. It is, rather,
a conversation on what takes place in the act of wanting to know, a
conversation on distance and difference, on lack and the resources we
mobilize to cover over that lack. In this dialogue, anthropology (and
sociology) can learn not to sociologize, to dispense with descriptions of
social closure, whether it is of the kind represented by rites or what we
find in the simplest acts of survival. In turn, psychoanalysis can learn
from the anthropologist about social conditions, collective organiza-
tion, and stories and rites through which people gather in cities in order
to live together with what we lack. We seek to get a better understand-
ing not only of what we as men and women know we are, but also of
how we attempt to deal with what we never manage to become.
The crisis of the city is homologous to the crisis of anthropology. Per-
haps that is why the disintegration of the city exasperates and changes
the character of anthropological problems. The debate on whether it is
 64 Mexico

possible or advisable to do anthropology in the city or, of the city, as-

sumed the existence of a territorially delimited urban area whose real-
ity could be grasped. The problem hinged on whether or not anthropo-
logical methodology could encompass such a large-scale object. Now
we think that what takes place in the city is the sedimentation of a mul-
tidetermined set of internal and external global processes that no one
discipline can study by itself. Under these circumstances, the best that
we anthropologists can do is to rely on our skills in the study of alterity
and not worry too much about the scale of the object of study. Instead,
we should devote our energies to discerning what happens to what we
thought was the same as it is altered in its encounters with the other.
We are interested in the globalized city as a multicultural scenario.
This approach leaves many issues unresolved. But there is one issue
that it would be scandalous to omit, given that we are discussing our
deterioriated Mexico City. It can be formulated thus: Is there a specific
way in which Latin American cities undergo change? Europeans speak
of the "rebirth of the city," as a consequence of their highly developed
infrastructure and excellent services that are linked to international inno-
vations. Latin American cities, however, are increasingly catastrophic.22
Intolerable pollution during most of the year, floods and landslides, in-
creases in extreme poverty, a general deterioration of the quality of life,
and systematic and uncontrollable violence are characteristics with which
Santiago, Mexico City, Bogota, Caracas, Buenos Aires, Lima, and Sao
Paulo "prepare" for the twenty-first century.
All this calls for cautious engagement with those postmodern ur-
ban theories and grassroots movements of recent decades that celebrate
dissemination and multipolariry as the bases for a freer life. The ad-
vance of grassroots organization and decentered plurality following a
period of urban planning that saw the regulation of urban growth and
the satisfaction of certain basic needs (as in almost all the cities of Europe
and the United States) is different from the explosion of survival tactics
that can only count on scarcity, erratic expansion, and the plunder of
soil, water, and air. In those countries that entered the twentieth cen-
tury with low birthrates and with planned cities and democratic govern-
ments, the digressions, detours, and loss of power by centralized orders
can be praiseworthy paths for a decentralizing logic. But in places like
Mexico City, disseminationgenerated by the population explosion,
the invasion of land by poor people and speculators, without any dem-
ocratic forms of representation or urban administrationrequires both
 Mexico 65

more decentralization and more planning, more civil society, and more
state intervention.
I have spoken of the need to complement anthropology with soci-
ology, communications studies, and psychoanalysis in order to get to
the bottom of what happens in large cities. I would like to conclude by
confessing my dissatisfaction with what some of us experience when
we speak only with the voices of the social sciences and why this spurs
me to work during the coming years with discourses that imagine the
city.
Can ethnographic style describe with expressive effectivity the in-
tersection of cultures and the experience of internal alterity in such com-
plex cities? How can we record the vertiginous and heartrending move-
ment of the city if we remain fixed in the synchronous, depersonalized
units with which statistics freezes the social flow? Literary, artistic, and
mass media discourses not only document a compensatory imagination,
but also serve to record the city's dramas, what is lost in the city and
what is transformed. These discourses can help us find a style of expla-
nation and interpretation appropriate to the scale and style of what is
taking place. Jose Emilio Pacheco ended his novel Las batallas en el de-
sierto [Battles in the Desert, 1982] by talking about the buildings that
were demolished during his childhood in the Mexico City neighbor-
hood Colonia Roma: "That city is finished. That country is no more.
No memory remains of the Mexico of those years. And no one cares:
who could be nostalgic about that horror?"23
Shouldn't the discourse of the social sciences contain these daring
declarations, especially when we talk about catastrophes? Since I began
to study Mexico City, I have asked myself, as have so many other re-
searchers overwhelmed by the data: ''Why don't we leave?" I can find no
better expression of the threatening and deeply affectionate nature of
this city than these lines by Efrai'n Huerta:
Ciudad negra o colerica o mansa o cruel
o fastidiosa nada mas: sencillamente tibia.

Black city, angry city, or city that is tame or cruel

or perhaps just irritating: simply indifferent. 24
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 Chapter 3

Urban Cultural Policies in Latin America

W hat principles should guide cultural action in today's large urban

centers? Almost everything written on cultural policies envisions
them within a framework of identity, whether national or that of the
inhabitants of a particular territory. Similarly, the scant literature on
urban cultural policies assumes that they should refer to the ensemble
of traditions, practices, and modes of interaction that distinguish the
residents of a given city.
But just as the notion of national cultures has been put into doubt,
we must also question what it means to belong to a city, especially a
megacity. Are there still in Mexico City, Sao Paulo, or Buenos Aires
common features that enable us to identify their inhabitants as chilan-
gos, paulistas, and portenos?1 Research on social and symbolic behavior
in these three Latin American cities, carried out in the past five years,
has led us to reconsider how to formulate cultural policies. My proposals
are based in part on the peculiar conditions in metropolitan conglom-
erations exceeding ten million inhabitants. However, I think that the
conclusions derived from the study of these megalopolises make attrac-
tive working hypotheses for research on and cultural policies for medium-
size cities, at least those in the two-million population range or larger.

67
 68 Urban Cultural Policies in Latin America

This is particularly germane in cities characterized by the influx of mi-

grants and tourists, industrial development, and the transnationaliza-
tion of communications and finance. These flows deterritorialize local
culture, as has been the case in Santiago de Chile, Rio de Janeiro, Lima,
Caracas, Bogota, Monterrey, Guadalajara, and other similar cities.
In what follows, we examine the challenges to cultural policies posed
by two changes: (i) the dissolution of monadic identities; and (2) the
decreasing importance and displacement of traditional-local cultures
(of both elites and popular groups) brought about by the advance of
electronic media and communications.

The Dissolution of Monadic Identities

Until recently, cultural policies were thought of as a means to conserve
and administer historical heritages that had been accumulated within
clearly delimited territories. These in turn were defined by a nation, an
ethnic group, a region, or a city. The state assessed what should or should
not be supported, guided by the criterion that practices should be faith-
ful to the territory and the given ensemble of traditions that distin-
guish each people. Moreover, each modern nation-state arranged diverse
and dispersed ethnic and regional traditions in harmonious display in
its national museums and in textbooks that are still identical today across
the many zones of a country.
On the basis of this unifying strategy, the cultural differences iden-
tified with the various cities of a given country were taken to be partic-
ular variants of a common "national being." It is true that the differ-
ence between portenos and provincials, between paulistas and cariocas,2
between chilangos and the inhabitants of the cities of the interior provided
attractive materials for folklore and regional humor. No one doubted,
however, that these confrontations between brothers were held in check
by the profound unity of Argentines, Brazilians, or Mexicans.3
In the second half of the twentieth century, the simulacrum of
monadic identities loses verisimilitude and disintegrates, quite ostenta-
tiously, in large cities. What does it mean to be a chilango in a city like
Mexico City, where more than half of the inhabitants were born in
other areas of the country? In the preceding chapter, I noted that there
are 263,000 Indians in this capital city. Additionally, there are several
million city dwellers who come from predominantly indigenous regions
(Oaxaca, Guerrero, Michoacan, etc.). These people leave their ethnic
 Urban Cultural Policies in Latin America 69

mark on the capital city when they build homes, eat, seek health care,
or weave their networks of solidarity.
In Sao Paulo, the most modern and industrialized city of Brazil,
there are more than one and a half million northeasterners and even more
migrants from Minas Gerais, Rio Grande do Sul, and other states. Sev-
eral anthropological and sociological studies have taken note of the enor-
mous heterogeneity of the paulista population, including that segment
which is usually lumped together as "urban popular sectors." Large cities
create patterns of uniformity, refashion local habits, and subordinate
them to "modern" styles of work, dress, and entertainment. To live in a
large city means that the majority of migrants, wherever they come
from, aspire to have their own home on a paved street, with electricity
and running water, near schools and health clinics. Nevertheless, the
homogenization of consumption and sociability, fostered by common
patterns according to which these services are organized, does not do
away with particularities. "The social construction of leisure time," An-
tonio Arantes explains, "is not the result of one overdetermining factor
(economic or educational), but of the play of multiple variables that
condition each other reciprocally." In addition to social position, gender
and age are also quite important.4 Following Eunice Ribeiro Durham's
lead, it is also possible to speak of the different ways in which society is
seen from the periphery.5 But even then, it should be noted that the
populations in diverse peripheral zones develop peculiar ways of gather-
ing, speaking, and satisfying their necessities. The popular sectors, espe-
cially those who do not have a car or a telephone, tend to identify the
boundaries of the city with those of their own neighborhood. There they
elaborate their networks of interaction, which display differing modal-
ities within the same urban space. Neighborhood dwellers move into
the wider space of the city, but only in a limited manner, as they travel
the larger arteries on their way to work, to make transactions, or to seek
a special service.
Research on consumption in large cities carried out by the Work-
ing Group of the Latin American Social Science Council (CLACSO)
in Buenos Aires, Santiago de Chile, Sao Paulo, and Mexico City re-
vealed a destructuring effect in urban experience.6 This is especially the
case in the latter two cities, where the metropolitan area grew at a much
faster rate than public cultural facilities. Researchers have observed an
atomization of symbolic practices and an ever-declining attendance at
movie houses, theaters, concerts, and other collective venues of cultural
 70 Urban Cultural Policies in Latin America

consumption. This dispersion can also be detected in cultural and po-

litical popular movements, characterized by their local and compart-
mentalized points of view. In our studies of Sao Paulo, Buenos Aires,
and Mexico City, we observed that the mayor, the governor, or the re-
gent, who are charged with administrating the entire city, are distant
figures and only become recognizable when they are associated with
some aspect of the neighborhood or of the immediate surroundings.7
Whether in their political demands or in the organization of artistic
events or other forms of entertainment, neighborhood movements may
have to strategize around the disturbances generated by street peddlers,
celebrating the feast of the local patron saint, or getting public trans-
port to come to the locality. It is unlikely, however, that they will take
the global problems of the city into consideration. The cultural poli-
cies of popular movements are local, they relate to what is of immedi-
ate interest and have little to do with large-scale issues such as ecology
or the programs of large institutions. Even when these movements en-
ter into alliances, their vision of the city is a sum of fragments and it is
difficult to coordinate or rank their demands within programs of wider
scope.
Perhaps the two best examples of why one cannot speak of a ho-
mogeneous identity in large cities are youth gangs and discrimination
against migrants. The gangs compensate for atomization and fragmen-
tation in large cities by offering group belonging. Faced with dimin-
ished expectations of attending school or getting a job in lean labor
markets, gangs offer thousands of youths other forms of socialization
and other means of access to commodity consumption. But gangs also
take intercultural conflicts to their most exasperating extremes, such as
the acrimonious encounter of natives and migrants or the clashes be-
tween migrants of diverse origins, their turf battles and struggles for
sociopolitical control. The irritation conveyed by their very names says
it all: Satires [satyrs], Ratas Punk [punk rats], Nifios Idos [runaway kids],
Bastardos [bastards], Funerales [funerals]. These are some of the gangs
active in Mexico City.8 Youth gangs, like the informal economy and
other fractal phenomena, are indicative of the inadequacy of macro so-
cial and cultural policies in providing effective and wide-ranging solutions.
The suspicion of large sectors of the population toward these macro
policies and the irreducible and often irreconcilable multiplicity of lan-
guages and lifestyles, of strategies of survival and communication, are
evidence of the decomposition of megacities.
 Urban Cultural Policies, in Latin America 71

Another promising, yet unexplored means of documenting the dis-

crimination that inhabitants of different parts of a given city thrust upon
each other, but especially against migrants, is to study the ways in which
humor reworks racism and class prejudice. In Buenos Aires, the massive
arrival of provincial migrants since the 19405 was characterized as a "zoo-
logical avalanche." The newly arrived are called cabecitas negras [black
heads], sometimes "public telephones," the joke being that they are
"black, square, and don't work."
The mass migration of the poor from the northeast and the infu-
sion of Arab capital into Sao Paulo in the 19805 provided grist for jokes
such as the following: An Arab contractor looks for good northeastern
bricklayers in construction sites throughout Sao Paulo. He tells them
they will have to reemigrate to Iraq, but they will be paid in dollars.
Those who agree board a plane that makes an emergency landing in
the Sahara. They deplane, and when they see the vast stretch of sand,
they ask: "Where's the cement?"
In Mexico City, humor based on class prejudice has increased with
every catastrophe, as if satire provided an escape from the terror of an
earthquake or an explosion, or, simultaneously, from the fear provoked
by the "invasion" of migrants and popular sectors. In November 1984,
soon after a gas storage plant in San Juanico, on the periphery of the
capital, exploded and killed five hundred people and destroyed 1,500
homes, dozens of macabre jokes were heard throughout Mexico City.
"What did you think of the explosion in San Juanico?" "What a shame!
But if it were to occur in Las Lomas, it would be a tragedy."9 "In San
Juanico they don't make grilled tacos; instead they serve grilled nacos."10
We know that this kind of humor does not circulate only among
middle and upper sectors in large cities. It is also part of radio and TV
programs, that is, of communications cultural policies. As Carlos Mon-
sivais has observed, sarcasm directed at subaltern people does not em-
anate only from elites. The mass media disseminate it quite successfully
and mass audiences celebrate it.11 Many comedians, from Cantinflas to
Hector Suarez, who ridicule popular stereotypes find great resonance
in discriminatory mass-media policies as well as in the self-denigrating
tendencies of the ridiculed. The subaltern's complicity in the reproduc-
tion of inequality suggests that we should reconsider the possibilities of
democratizing cultural policies and our idealizations of civil society.
One of the few Latin American texts that has dealt with this issue
is Antonio Flavio Pierucci's study of racism toward northeasterners in
 72 Urban Cultural Policies in Latin America

Sao Paulo. This researcher sought to understand the mechanisms of po-

litical culture that explained Fernando Henrique Cardoso's defeat when
he sought the mayoralty of Sao Paulo in 1985.
Pierucci conducted his research in the areas of the city where the
most votes were cast for Janio Quadros, who was elected, and Paulo
Maluf, the candidate of the right. He found that a major factor among
the lower middle class was dislike of northeastern migrants, whom they
blamed for the decline of the city. The most visible problems in Sao
Paulo, attributable to industrialization and modernizing expansion, pro-
moted by paulista elites, were overshadowed by the conviction that the
city's past, imagined in all its splendor, had been ruined by the "lowly"
migrants. Pierucci concluded that the "conservative common sense" and
the right-wing vote of a large proportion of popular sectors was due to
the idealization of differences. They perceived racial and ethnic differ-
ences as fixed and concrete, while rejecting egalitarian thinking as ab-
stract. Hence his wariness regarding populist idealizations of the rights
to difference and the celebration of irreducible differences in certain
postmodern trends.12

Fragmentation of Traditional Culture, New Electronic Linkages

The cohesion of national and urban cultures was generated and sus-
tained, in part, because high and popular cultures provided specific
iconographies to express local identities. The tango, Jorge Luis Borges's
writing, and Antonio Berni's painting represented the symbolic universe
that made Buenos Aires distinctive (although its origins and influences
obviously extended to other territories). Mexico City was characterized
by the films of Pedro Infante, the architecture of its historic center, and
the music of Chava Flores (although the repercussions of and capacity
for sociocultural representation of all of these cultural forms encom-
passed people from other regions).
What happens to the connections between certain cities and cer-
tain symbols when national musics are hybridized with those of other
countries or when films are the result of international coproductions?
In order to reach wider audiences and make a profit, film and television
favor spectacular plots that are easily understood by all cultures. Na-
tional references and local styles dissolve in those films, and paintings
and television series increasingly resemble each other in Sao Paulo and
Tokyo, New York and Mexico City, Paris and Buenos Aires.
 Urban Cultural Policies in Latin America 73

Local folkloric repertoires, whether they spring from high art or

popular culture, do not disappear. But their impact is diminished in a
market made hegemonic by transnational electronic cultures, particu-
larly because the social life of cities no longer takes place exclusively in
historic or traditional centers but is largely displaced to commercial cen-
ters on the beltways. People promenade less in the parks specific to each
city and ever more in the shopping malls that mirror each other from
one corner of the world to the other.
In a study of Bogota and Sao Paulo, Armando Silva explored the
sites where the inhabitants tend to congregate. He found that adults,
especially those over fifty, tended to gravitate to the most traditional
places (churches, plazas, cafes, and, in Bogota, bakeries). As his subjects
decreased in age, he found that they preferred shopping centers and
metro stations.13 This trend, which is observable in other cities with
dense historic and noteworthy areas, such as Buenos Aires and Mexico
City, suggests that younger generations are drawn to what Marc Auge
has called "nonplaces." The proliferation of these "installations neces-
sary for the rapid circulation of peop>le and commodities,"14 which affects
the use of space and the citizenry's habits, reveals a displacement in ur-
ban agglomerations, a decrease (but not the disappearance) of the dis-
tinctive in favor of the deterritorialized and the dehistoricized. Beatriz
Sarlo is correct in characterizing shopping malls as "spaces without qual-
ities: an interplanetary jet set of Cacharel, Stephanel, Fiorucci, Kenzo,
Guess, and McDonalds." "The relationship of the mall to the city that
surrounds it is one of indifference." The mall "offers die model of a minia-
ture city, sovereignly independent of tradition and environment." "It
has been constructed too rapidly, without attention to the variations,
ups and downs, corrections, destructions, or the influence of more am-
bitious projects." "And when there is history, there is no passionate
conflict between the resistance of the past and the drives of the pres-
ent."15 But can't these neutral sites, like the malls, turn into places by
means of the ways in which new generations mark them and make
them significant though use, incorporating them into their own history?
Our research on cultural consumption in Mexico City bears out
this decrease in the use of emblematic places, in keeping with a differ-
ent, complementary process. We found that attendance at public spec-
tacles and gatherings increasingly shifted to home reception of radio,
television, and video. Survey results, which we summarized in the pre-
ceding chapter, showed that the institutionalized sector (i.e., film, the-
 74 Urban Cultural Policies in Latin America

ater, music and dance concerts) fell short of 10 percent of all cultural
consumption. Regular attendance at traditional, popular spectacles and
feasts also failed to reach a higher market share. That this situation holds
in a country like Mexico, with strong ethnic and popular traditions and
with greater state sponsorship than elsewhere, suggests that in other
countries there is even less receptivity for local cultural fare.
On the other hand, we found that almost all homes in Mexico City
have television and radio. The amount of time that these appliances
occupy in people's use of free time reveals that there has been a reorgan-
ization of cultural habits, increasingly oriented to home reception of
audiovisual product, which conveys international symbolic codes. The
majority of people receive their information and entertainment more
from a dislocated, international system of cultural production than from
culture linked to particular territories and local products specific to them.
The disintegration of the city as a result of demographic expansion
and urban sprawl diminishes the organizational significance of the his-
toric center and shared public spaces that once encouraged common
experiences in the Mexican capital. Territorial expansion and the massi-
fication of the city that reduced interaction among neighborhoods are
processes that date from the 19505 to the present, precisely the same
period in which radio, television, and video spread throughout the city.
These are the new invisible, electronic links that have reorganized rela-
tions among inhabitants in a more abstract and depersonalized man-
ner, while connecting us all to a transnational symbolic order.
Do cultural or communications resources still have the power to
bring people together in live gatherings, without mediation, in cities
that are wired for cable? A good part of communication takes place via
newspapers or television. These very media, however, show that the in-
habitants also gather in political demonstrations, in fairs and feasts, and
even in the chaos of the subway at rush hour, in waiting lines, and
among crowds of shoppers. Can cultural policies bring together these
multiple groups who at the end of this century are dispersed through-
out our megacities? Or does this interest in designing policies that might
encompass the diversity of megacities betray outdated nostalgia for those
times in which we still believed in totalities?

Policies for Citizenship

I. Consideration of these data brings us to our first conclusion, that the
cultural needs of large cities require multisectonal policies tailored to
 Urban Cultural Policies in Latin America 75

particular zones and economic, educational, and generational strata

in sum, to the complex heterogeneity of what is referred to simplisti-
cally as "the public." Perhaps the cities we mention here have never
been homogeneous. Perhaps the point of departure for urban poli-
cies should not be to think of heterogeneity as a problem, but rather
as the point of departure of a democratic plurality.

2. The most democratic and popular cultural policies are not necessar-
ily those that offer spectacles and messages that reach the majority,
but rather those that take into account the variety of needs and de-
mands of the population. Neither elites nor popular sectors consti-
tute a homogeneous mass, as revealed by the fragmentation of their
practices. The very same city that massified them connected them at
the same time with a great variety of (national or foreign) symbolic
offerings, thus encouraging the pluralization of tastes. Therefore, they
require differentiated cultural action. Cultural policies that dogmati-
cally uphold one legitimate identity in each city or nation will not be
more democratic. Only those that encourage the coexistence of mul-
tiple forms of being porteno in Buenos Aires, paulista in Sao Paulo,
and chiljingo in Mexico City will achieve that end.

3. Policies that promote local traditions enable the maintenance of ad-

herents, thus contributing to the preservation of the historical features
that give the inhabitants of a city their distinctive identity. Without a
doubt, urban imaginaries continue to be constituted by memories sed-
imented in each city, by particular emblematic neighborhoods, ideal-
ized trajectories and scenarios, by rituals through which inhabitants
take possession of the urban terrain, or by singular narratives that glo-
rify it. It is the complicitous synergy of all of these phenomena that
activates ecological movements and local feasts even in the megalopo-
lis. To cultivate this fervor may be a resource for inspiring citizen re-
sponsibility. Few are the urban movements that do not base their or-
ganization and political mobilization on that fervor. We are, however,
also familiar with reactionary cultural policies that foster xenopho-
bia, as a nostalgic refuge for what some see as resistance to modern-
ization and globalization. In any case, the predominance of mass-
media consumption and the population's need to receive international
information indicate that the promotion of traditional cultures ac-
quires meaning and efficacy by linking those cultures with the new
conditions of internationalization.
 76 Urban Cultural Policies in Latin America

4. The culture industries today are the principal means of enabling re-
ciprocal knowledge and cohesion among the segmented organizations
and groups of large cities. In order to re-create a shared imaginary for
urban experiences, territorially identified neighborhoods and groups
should come together in solidarity for the purpose of information and
cultural development prompted by the mass media, so long as these
provide forums for public interests. Citizenship is no longer consti-
tuted solely in relation to local social movements, but also through
the communicative processes of the mass media.
 Chapter 4

Narrating the Multicultural

I would like to propose a discussion of the current state of multicul-

turalism and its function in urban studies of culture. My work is sit-
uated primarily in the social sciences; however, insofar as I take interest
in the city not only as an object of knowledge but as a site in which to
imagine and narrate, I attend to certain issues that belong to the do-
main of literature. Multicultural intersections and the industrialization
of the symbolic have induced literary theory to expand its analytical
repertoire to include signifying processes that textualize and narrate the
social differently than in canonical literary works. Rather than dwell
on what the literary field might look like after its object is shattered, I
prefer to air a concern raised by the studies alluded to: What do we do
when we narrate the multicultural and what is the significance of this
narration in contemporary societies?

Constructivism versus Fundamentalism

My first concern is that narratives of multicultural society are currently
divided between academic theories and sociopolitical movements. The
social sciences and humanities conceive of identities as historically con-

77
 78 Narrating the Multicultural

stituted, imagined, and reinvented in ongoing processes of hybridiza-

tion and transnationalization, which dissolve their ancient territorial
roots.1 In contrast, many social and political movements unequivocally
emphasize the original territorial foundations of ethnic groups and na-
tions, dogmatically avowing the telluric and biological traits associated
with that origin, as if they were unaffected by historical vicissitudes and
current changes. Interethnic and international conflicts betray obstinate
tendencies to treat each identity as if it were a hard, compact kernel of
resistance. For this reason, they demand absolute loyalty from each mem-
ber and demonize their critics and dissidents. In many countries, pu-
rity is invoked as a defense against modern trends that relativize the
specificity of each ethnic group and nation with the objective of creat-
ing democratic forms of coexistence, complementarity, and multicul-
tural governability.
In truth, the opposition between the constructivist discourse of cul-
tural studies and the fundamentalist doctrines of ethnic or national
movements is a recent one. Over the past two centuries, literature, phi-
losophy, and anthropology, on the one hand, and fundamentalism, on
the other, reveal powerful complicities. Folkloric romanticism and po-
litical nationalism were allied in the effort to bring about, on the basis
of tradition, ordered ethnic and sociocultural groupings in fewer than
two hundred juridico-territorial containers called nations. It was deter-
mined that the inhabitants of a given space were to belong to one ho-
mogeneous culture and therefore have one single distinctive and co-
herent identity. A culture of one's own was to be created in connection
with a territory and organized conceptually and practically in relation
to collections of objects, texts, and rituals that would enable the affir-
mation and reproduction of the signs of distinction for each group.
It was determined that to have an identity was the same as belong-
ing to a nation, to a. spatially delimited entity, where everything shared
by the inhabitantslanguage, objects, customswould differentiate
them neatly from others. Those identitarian referents, although histor-
ically variable, were embalmed in folklore as markers of the "traditional"
phase of national development, and enshrined as essences of national cul-
ture. Even today they are exhibited in museums, transmitted in schools
and through the mass media, affirmed dogmatically in religious and po-
litical discourses, and defended by military authoritarianism as it be-
gins to lose power.
This model was so persuasive that it brought into existence nation-
ally circumscribed zones of culture, knowledge, sports, and other fields.
 Narrating the Multicultural 79

Art and literary histories, for example, were written as histories of na-
tional arts and literatures. Even the avant-gardes, which attempted to
transgress sociocultural conventions, were identified with certain coun-
tries, as if national profiles defined their projects for renewal of culture.
That is why we have Italian Futurism, Russian Constructivism, and the
French nouveau roman.
Many literary studies have shown the fictive and arbitrary charac-
ter of the multicultural "solutions" assayed within the purview of those
nationalisms. Let me give two examples. Josefina Ludmer demonstrated
that in salvaging from illegality the voice of the gaucho and establish-
ing an ensemble of oral markers for culture and politics, criollismo also
excluded Indians, blacks, and immigrants from this national definition.2
Antonio Cornejo Polar argued that each definition of the legitimate cor-
pus of Peruvian literature excluded important components of the his-
torical process. It was first defined as a Hispanic literature (Riva Agiiero
y Prado), then as mestizo literature (Luis Alberto Sanchez and others),
with the purpose of harmonizing the contradictory tendencies of mod-
ern Peru into a homogeneous system "sufficiently differentiated so that
it would merit the qualifier 'national.'"3
A great part of artistic and literary production continues to be cre-
ated as an expression of national traditions and circulates only within
each given country. The plastic arts and literature continue to be sources
of the nationalist imaginary, providing scenarios for the consecration
and communication of regional signs of identity. But an ever-larger por-
tion of the production, diffusion, and reception of art is carried out
nowadays in a deterriorialized manner. Many writers publicized as "great
national artists" by cultural diplomats and marketers, for example, the
writers of the "Boom," display in their works a cosmopolitan sense that
enables them to resonate internationally.
I wonder if the shift from national monadic identities to global mul-
ticulturalism is not accompanied by the survival of fundamentalism to-
day in the guise of Latinamericanism. As we noted, ethnic and national
political movements continue to exist, seeking to justify themselves with
supposedly distinctive national and symbolic heritages. But the process
that has achieved the most verisimilitude is the fundamentalism of Ma-
condismo. It freezes the "Latin American" in a premodern sanctuary
and sublimates this continent as the place where social violence casts
its spell through the affects. This literary mode includes texts from very
different countries, from those of the Cuban Carpentier to those of the
Colombian Garcia Marquez, the Peruvian Vargas Llosa, the Chilean
 80 Narrating the Multicultural

Isabel Allende, and the Mexican Laura Esquivel. It aligns them into one
paradigm of reception, which is also one particular way of pitching Latin
America's heterogeneity in the marketplace of cultural globalization.4
The exaltation of irrationalism as the supposed essence of the Latin
American gains its "consistency" from the mediation of the market and
the hype of many critics and contributes to the opposition that the fun-
damentalist fixation of identity poses to social constructionist interpre-
tations of multicultural societies. Market and critics normalize this iden-
tity so that it becomes difficult to recognize it as imagined, polyphonic,
and hybrid. Hence the importance of cultural studies analyses of how
the culture industries and urban mass life are organized to preserve lo-
cal cultures and at the same time foster the most open and transna-
tional phases in their history. This observation can also be phrased as a
question: How is it possible for the ideologies that represent and dig-
nify these two movementsfundamentalism and cosmopolitanism
to coexist?
Currently, the social sciences consider identity not as an eternal
essence but as an imaginary construction. Globalization diminishes the
importance of the foundational events and territories that supported
the illusion of ahistorical and self-absorbed identities. Today, identitar-
ian references are shaped not by the arts, literature, and folklorewhich
for centuries gave nations their distinctive featuresbut by textual and
iconographic repertoires furnished by electronic communications media and
by the globalization of urban life. What is the meaning, within this pro-
cess, of the imaginary constructions that contradict it?

The Flaneur and the Narrative of Consumption

It may be easier to conduct research on social processes if we adopt a
social constructionist perspective on multiculturalism. The prevalence
of fundamentalist interpretation in accounts of these processes leads us
to ask whether or not every narrative implies some form of uncritical
celebration. Let's examine, in this regard, what occurs in the megacity
of the Mexican capital.
How do cultural studies encompass the dispersed meanings of a
large city? The problem is largely a narrative one. This is what Wim
Wenders insinuates when he says that maps make him uneasy, especially
if they represent a country or city in which he has never been. He con-
siders each name and seeks to find out what each indicates. "Looking
at a map is tolerable only if I try to find a path, draw an itinerary that
 Narrating the Multicultural 81

allows me to travel through the country or city at hand."5 Urbanism,

Wenders observes, poses similar problems to those that are intrinsic to
constructing narratives. Both entail describing routes and coordinates
in a universe where, without these heuristics, one would reach thousands
of different places without arriving anywhere.
This anxiety-producing uncertainty in the face of a disordered mul-
tiplicity is encountered in many Latin American cities that have grown
vertiginously and without any planning. Let's review the figures presented
in chapter 2: Mexico City had a population of one and a half million
in 1940; by 1960 it had grown to five million, and by 1990 it reached
fifteen million inhabitants. The city sprawled beyond its perimeters over
an enormous territory almost without any coordinates to organize it.
It is obvious that the city today cannot be narrated, described, or
explained as it might have been at the beginning of the century. The
sense of living together in the capital was structured in relation to shared
historical markers, within a space that all inhabitants felt could be cir-
cumscribed in their daily meanderings. The identifying heritage of Mex-
ico City could be portrayed as a realist representation of a territory and
a history. To be sure, all heritages and every historical or literary narra-
tive is a metaphor of a social alliance. Every construction of national
heritages and legitimation narratives in a given era is the result of selec-
tive, combinatory, and performative processes shaped by the struggles
of social groups in their bids for hegemony. These processes change rela-
tive to the objectives of the actors in struggle for the hegemony and
renewal of their pacts. In every period, the resulting policies have, of
course, been weighted unequally to the benefit of "noble" neighbor-
hoods vis-a-vis poor ones, and toward "distinguished" cultural goods
vis-a-vis "vulgar" ones. But since the revolution, these differences were
partially subordinated to an experience of national unity, of Mexican-
ness, which the capital city represented more or less coherently.
Newspaper chronicles from the end of the nineteenth and the be-
ginning of the twentieth centuries conditioned the meaning of urban
life by instilling a sense of modern commercial development that com-
plemented pride in the city's monuments. Mexico City was articulated
in the web of its urban design, its monuments, and its historical cele-
brations. To this transcendental, patriotic ritualism was added another,
secular mode of representing the city: the promenade and the chronicle
that recorded it. The writer and statesman Justo Sierra wondered how
the expression flaneur, which the French used to designate the taste for
strolling through the city, might be translated in Mexico City. Julio Ramos
 82 Narrating the Multicultural

has observed that flanerie is a mode of entertainment associated with

modern commercialization and its spectacular display in consumption.
What is it that one looks at as one strolls through the modern city?
Manuel Rivera writes: "The streets of Platero have establishments that
can satisfy the most demanding whims of taste and fashion: great show-
cases filled with merchandise behind the display windows; a multitude
of elegant ladies promenade on those streets."6
To be a flaneur, adds Ramos, is not only a way of experiencing the
city. "It is, rather, a way of representing it, looking at it, and telling
what one saw. The private, urban subject of flanerie approaches the city
with the gaze of someone who sees an object on exhibition. The show
window, therefore, becomes an emblematic object for the chronicler."7
The promenade is a process of symbolic consumption that integrates
the fragments of the modern metropolis that emerged in an already splin-
tered condition. By stringing together the segments of the chronicle
into a narrative, an urban order is achieved by means of what Ramos
calls the "rhetoric of the promenade." The chronicles published in news-
papers are the proper communicative medium of this incipient moder-
nity, where the partial meanings of urban experiences are intertwined.
This function still holds even today. From Salvador Novo to Car-
los Monsivais, Jose Joaquin Blanco, and Herman Bellinghausen, the
journalistic chronicle is a way of organizing the discontinuities of ur-
ban life. The chroniclers of today, especially those who write after 1968,
add to the playful narrative the presence of political demonstrations by
students and new social movements. Through these the chronicler seeks
to understand how the city is being transformed. It is significant, for
example, that Monsivais should have published collections of more or
less frivolous chronicles, such as Escenas depudory liviandad, and other
more critical pieces on urban movements such as Entrada libre. Crdni-
cas de la sociedad que se organiza. In their attempt to witness and artic-
ulate urban experiences, the chroniclers of today devote a good part of
their work to the culture industries and the new modes of consumption.
Is it possible to grasp the multiple narratives that "organize" the
economically and communicationally industrialized city? One would
have to figure out not only how to bring together the novels, journalis-
tic chronicles, political speeches, radio and televisual representations of
the city, but also the more complex task of connecting the multiple in-
ternal and external narratives that traverse the city. Like so many other
large cities, Mexico City contains indigenous languages from all over
the country, whose speakers are migrants to the capital: Mixtecos from
 Narrating the Multicultural 83

Oaxaca, Purepechas from Michoacan, Nahuas from Guerrero, and an-

other twenty ethnic groups. One also finds English, French, German,
and Spanish with Chilean, Argentine, and Central American accents, as
well as information and advertising, telenovelas and cop shows that are
transmitted in transnational circuits. The Mexican capital is thus re-
ordered multiculturally in the articulation of international mechanisms
of negotiation, innovation, and commercialization. The narratives of
the megacity are also created through telephone, fax, televisual and
finance communications that link it with other countries.

The City as a Video Clip

There coexist in Mexico City all the different places of Latin America
and many from throughout the wodd. As if peering into Borges's "Aleph"
or looking at a video clip, we ask ourselves how we might enumerate
even one sequence of this infinite ensemble. To live in this "gigantic
instant," which is every instant in a city such as this, is bewildering not
so much because of the "million delightful and atrocious events" that
take place in it, but rather because "everyone occupies the same spot,
without being superimposed or transparent."
It occurred to me to apply this Borgesian story to Mexico City af-
ter reading Edward W. Soja's Postmodern Geographies, where it is used
to refer to Los Angeles. Like Soja, I do not see any other way to refer
to the "pool of cultures" that constitute the Mexican capital than to as-
semble a "succession of fragmentary glimpses, a free association of reflec-
tive and interpretive field notes," observations that are "contingently
incomplete and ambiguous." Soja cakes this approach because he knows
that "any totalizing description of the LA-leph is impossible."8
In the final instance, says Soja, megacities such as Los Angeles
with its juxtaposition of historical temporalities, of what comes from
east and west, north and south lead us to ask whether the meaning
we sought in a unified temporal logic should not be explored in the si-
multaneous relations that take place in a single space. We can see this
in certain foundational texts of Latin American urban literature, such
as Borges's, and before him Macedonio Fernandez's. It is even more ev-
ident in Ricardo Piglia's Macedonio-like Museum, La ciudad ausente
[The absent city]. There Piglia exasperates his readers with superimposed
histories and digressions, which, like symptoms of impossibility, defy
unifying the infinity of stories into one single narrative. He attempts
to "use lost \vords to narrate everyone's history."
 84 Narrating the Multicultural

Large cities torn by erratic growth and multicultural conflicts are

the sites where we can best observe the decline of metanarratives, of
Utopias that projected an ascendent and cohesive human development
throughout time. Even in those cities laden with signs of the past, like
the Mexican capital, the weight of the present and the perplexity of an
anticipated uncontrollable future erode temporal experiences and priv-
ilege simultaneous connections in space. In the preceding chapters it
was suggested that this may be one of the reasons why emancipatory
movements based on the great historical narratives (the proletariat, na-
tions) lose their effectiveness. On the other hand, urban social move-
ments and ephemeral, fragmentary actions earn a higher rating.
Borges's story "The Aleph" anticipates all this in an exemplary way.
Like the narrator who is rendered speechless before the Aleph, that
point in space that contains all others, we find ourselves incapable of
encompassing the Mexico City of today in one description. If we look
at it from the inside, from the purview of everyday practices, we see
only fragments, instants, locations fixed in place by a myopic perception
of the totality. From afar, it all seems a confused mass difficult to discern
according to theory-driven models of urban organization. There is no
organizing focus because Mexico City "is everywhere and yet, completely,
nowhere,"as the author of Ficciones wrote.
To narrate is to know that it is no longer possible to have the expe-
rience of order that the flaneur expected to find in his strolls through
the city at the beginning of the century. Nowadays the city is like a
video clip, an effervescent montage of discontinuous images. We can
no longer travel downtown twenty kilometers on the bus and expect a
story by Carlos Fuentes or the Kaliman to transform the crowded and
bumpy ride into a peaceful reading experience. Some of us still insist
on smuggling in the newspaper or a fotonovela, but soon the constant
braking of the bus or the crowds on the subway force us to give up.
That's why three million drivers prefer to get in their cars and risk
bottlenecks, perhaps hoping to find in them a momentary refuge. No
sooner do I enter the beltway than the traffic seems to harmonize with
the strings of the Telemann concerto I am listening to. The Dodges and
Chevrolets changing lanes to pass me are the intrusive trumpets and
saxophones, the Mercedes that overtakes us all moves like an oboe,
smoothly, almost imperceptively. Just when the second movement be-
gins, always an adagio or an andante when I listen to Baroque music,
the traffic slows down as we near the ramps where those who come from
the Viaduct join us. It is a movement of many changes, from third to
 Narrating the Multicultural 85

second, from strings to piano, and back to strings, while the cars limp
to a halt and the sleepy traffic makes it impossible for us, for all of us
together, to reach the final allegro.
The cars stop. I change the station. I search for that other, contem-
porary Baroque, the vertiginous rock that does not pretend to go any-
where. It is better attuned to the fast tracks that get bottlenecked, to
the furious horns of cars trapped by a demonstration, or to the disor-
der of pedestrians crossing haphazardly when blackouts disable the
traffic lights. "It's difficult to walk / in a strange place / where you can
see hunger / as in a great circus in action." . . . "The great circus in this
city / stop, continue, stop," sings the group Maldita Vecindad [Cursed
neighborhood].
Walking through the city is like a video clip in which diverse mu-
sics and stories are mixed, but in the intimacy of the car, with a backup
of external noise. One alternates passing by seventeenth-century churches
with nineteenth-century buildings and constructions from every decade
of the twentieth, interrupted by gigantic billboards layered with models'
phony bodies, new cars, and newly imported computers. Everything is
dense and fragmentary. As in the videos, the city has been created by
plundering images from everywhere, in any order whatsoever. Good
readers of urban life must adapt themselves to the rhythm and bliss out
on the ephemeral visions.
I end up asking myself if we will be able to narrate the city again.
Can there be stories in our cities, dominated as they are by disconnec-
tion, atomization, and insignificance? It is no longer possible to imag-
ine a story from the purview of a historical or modern center that would
permit us to draw the only possible map of a compact city that has
ceased to exist. At this late stage we can only glimpse fragmentary rein-
ventions of neighborhoods or zones, timely triumphs over anonymity,
and disorder made possible by signs of belonging and multiple spaces
of participation. Perhaps the only totalizing narratives of Mexico City
that achieved some verisimilitude in recent years have been the chroni-
cles of Carlos Monsivais and Elena Poniatowska; they describe the soli-
darity of the survivors of the 1985 earthquake participating in their po-
litical and ecological performances. Confronted with the city's chaos,
they sought to restore some measure of national unity. Something sim-
ilar has occurred with radio and television, which function as urban
narrators. It is as if these media can only surmount the simultaneity
and dispersion of the video clip, the daily obsolescence of sound bites,
when the pain and the disorder of extraordinary events prompt them
 86 Narrating the Multicultural

to "recuperate" the historical density and meaning of living together in

a city or a nation.
Monsivais takes this difficulty in narrating the chaotic megacity to
an exasperating extreme when he tells us that "now we can only rely on
a legend in the making: the miracle of endurance and survival. How
can we fail to admire the coexistence of millions of people who in the
midst of disasters act to distribute water, build housing, organize trans-
portation, innovate work schedules, and provide public security?"9
Simultaneously modern and postmodern, we oscillate between two
positions, which coexist in the paradoxical text by Wim Wenders quoted
earlier: "I fully reject stories because they only generate lies for me, and
the biggest lie is that they create a connection where there is no con-
nection whatsoever. On the other hand, we need these lies, so much so
that it is totally senseless to organize a series of images without lies,
without the lie of a story."
I read Wenders as if he were speaking of the myths that have been
used to order the multicultural history of Mexico with the purpose of
re-creating meaning and solidarity in the midst of a changing urban
life. "Insofar as humans create linkages and connections, stories make
life more tolerable and help dispel terror."
 Part II
Postnational Suburbias
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 Chapter 5

Identities as a Multimedia Spectacle

I dentity is a narrated construct. It involves the establishment of a set

of founding events, which almost always refer to the appropriation of
a territory by a people or the independence gained in the struggle against
foreigners. The narrative proceeds by adding up the feats through which
the inhabitants defend their territory, order their conflicts, and establish
the legitimate ways of life there in order to distinguish themselves from
others. Textbooks and museums, civic rituals and political speeches were
for a long time the mechanisms by which each nation's Identity (with a
capital I) was formed and its narrative rhetoric consecrated.
Radio and film contributed in the first half of this century to the
organization of identity narratives and the meaning of citizenship in
national societies. In addition to epic tales of heroes and great collective
events, they introduced the chronicle of everyday life: common habits
and tastes, ways of speaking and dressing, that differentiated one people
from another. Radio helped previously distant and unconnected groups
from diverse regions of a country to recognize each other as part of a
totality.1 The news programs that linked disparate zones, like the films,
portrayed intercultural conflicts and showed the migrating masses how
to live in the city, and proposed new possible syntheses of a national
identity in transformation.

89
 90 Identities as a Multimedia Spectacle

Whereas in the 19405 and 19505, Mexican and Argentine cinema

projected their identity narratives through mass visual culture, in the
19605, allied with the emerging television industry, they changed course
and structured the imaginary of developmentalist modernization. The
mass media were agents of technological innovations, they sensitized
us to the use of electronic appliances in everyday life, and they liberal-
ized customs within a more cosmopolitan framework; but they also uni-
fied the patterns of consumption in line with a national vision. Because
the media were owned predominantly by national capital and adhered
to a developmentalist ideology, which sought modernization through
import substitution and the upgrading of industry in each country, even
the most internationalized agents at this point in timesuch as TV
and advertisingbeckoned us to buy national products and encouraged
the dissemination of local knowledge.
All of this waned throughout the 19805. The opening of each coun-
try's economy to global markets and processes of regional integration
diminished the role of national cultures. The transnationalization of tech-
nologies and the commercialization of cultural commodities attenu-
ated traditional forms of identity. Now it is within globalized networks
of symbolic production and circulation that trends in art, publishing,
advertising, and fashion are set.

An Anthropology of Transcultural Citations

Where does identity reside? By what media is it produced and renewed
at this end of the century? To answer this question, we shall contrast
the way in which classical anthropology defined identity with how it is
constituted today.
If anthropologythe social science that has studied the formation
of identities more than any otherencounters difficulties today in deal-
ing with transnationalization and globalization, it is because of the habit
of considering the members of a society as belonging to one homoge-
neous culture and, for that reason, having one distinctive and coherent
identity. That singular and unified vision, confirmed by classic ethnogra-
phies and many national museums established by anthropologists, is
not adequate for understanding intercultural situations.
Theories of "cultural contact" have always posited contrasts between
groups only on the basis of what differentiates them. The problem with
this approach is that most intercultural situations today are constituted
not only in relation to differences among cultures that have developed
 Identities as a Multimedia Spectacle 91

separately, but also by the unequal ways in which groups appropriate,

combine, and transform elements from several societies. Subject to fewer
restrictions and greater speedup, the circulation of people, capital, and
messages brings us into daily contact with many cultures; consequently,
our identity can no longer be defined by an exclusive belonging to a
national community. The range of legitimate objects of study should
therefore not be limited to differences, but should extend to hybridization.
According to this alternative view, nations become multidetermined
scenarios where diverse cultural systems intersect and interpenetrate. If
social science is to say anything significant about identity-formation
processes in an age of globalization, it will have to attend to the hetero-
geneity and coexistence of various symbolic codes in a group and even
an individual subject, as well as discern intercultural borrowings and
transactions. Identity today, even among broad sectors of the popular
classes, is polyglot, multiethnic, migrant, made from elements that cut
across various cultures.
We thus confront a double challenge. We must endeavor to under-
stand, simultaneously, postnational formations and the remodeling of
subsisting national cultures. A great part of current artistic production
still expresses national iconographic traditions, circulating only within
the confines of a given country. As such, the visual arts, literature, radio,
and film remain sources of nationalist imaginaries, providing scenarios
in which the signs of regional identity are consecrated and communi-
cated. Yet an ever-expanding sector of the creation, dissemination, and
reception of art operates today according to deterritorialized procedures.
As with the writers of the "Boom" mentioned in the preceding chapter,
the great national painterssay, Tamayo or Boterohave gained an
international resonance by opening up local iconographies to the inter-
national avant-gardes. Even those who choose to speak for the narrow-
est imagined communitiesRio de Janeiro or the Bronx, Zapotec myths
or the Chicano borderlandsachieve their meaningfulness precisely
because their work operates as a "t ranscultural citation" within art mar-
kets and exhibitions in [hemisphericTrans.] American metropolitan
centers.2
It is not unusual to see the particularities of each country condensed
into the framework of transnational conceptual networks at interna-
tional exhibitions. "ParisBerlin," "ParisNew York," two shows at the
Centre Georges Pompidou, revisited contemporary art history not by
parceling it into national patrimonies but according to trends that cut
across borders. The art market, however, is inflexible in subordinating
 92 Identities as a Multimedia Spectacle

the local meanings of artworks, converting them into secondary, folk-

loric references within a homogenized international discourse. The lead-
ing galleries, with their headquarters in New York, London, Milan, and
Tokyo, circulate these works in a deterritorialized fashion and encour-
age the artists to accommodate to "global" publics. Fairs and biennials
also contribute to this multicultural enterprise, as evidenced in the 1993
Venice Biennale, where most of the fifty-six countries represented did
not have their own pavilions. Almost all Latin American contributions
(from Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Cuba, Ecuador, El Salvador,
Mexico, Panama, Paraguay, and Peru) were included in the Italian sec-
tion. This was not apparently of great concern in an exhibition titled
"The Cardinal Points of Art" and dedicated to demonstrating that art
today is constituted by "cultural nomadism."3

The Regional and the Global

As in other eras, when identities were displayed in national museums,
a new phase in economic transnationalization and in the very character
of communications technologies (from television to satellites and fiber
optic networks) has, since mid-century, contributed to the increasing
protagonism of those world cultures exhibited as multimedia spectacles.
Consider that today no "national" cinema can recoup investment in a
film from ticket sales within its own borders. It has to target multiple
sales venues: satellite and cable TV, networks of video and laser-disk
rental outlets. All of these systems, structured transnationally, facilitate
the "defolklorization" of the messages they put into circulation.
Cinema's survival problems have been dealt with by acquiescing to
the tendency to transnationalize, eliminating in the process most na-
tional and regional features. This involves the promotion of a "world
cinema" that seeks to use the most sophisticated visual technology and
marketing strategies in order to gain a foothold in a market of global
proportions. Coppola, Spielberg, and Lucas, for example, construct spec-
tacular narrativesJurassic Park, Frankenstein, Batmanfrom myths
intelligible to most spectators, independent of culture, educational level,
national history, level of economic development, or political system.
World cinema, according to Charles-Albert Michelet, "is closer to Claude
Levi-Strauss than to John Ford."4 The point is to fabricate such a daz-
zling spectacle that it will persuade viewers once or twice a year that it
is worth the trouble to leave the living room sofa for the lesser comfort
of a dark theater.
 Identities as a Mult media Spectacle 93

Regional cultures, nevertheless, persist. Even the global cinema of

Hollywood leaves some room for Latin American, European, and Asian
motion pictures that, precisely because they capture certain local is-
sues, have the power to interest multiple publics. Brazilian cinema of
the 19705 and the first half of the 19805, for example, widened its mass-
market appeal inside and outside of Brazil by combining testimonies
about identity with an imaginative and parodic treatment of the inter-
nationalization of the country. Macunaima, Dona Flor and Her Two
Husbands, and Xica da Silva are representative of this tendency. We
could also mention the example of political rereadings of detective sto-
ries in the Argentine context, as in Adolfo Aristirain's films; or histori-
cal narratives told from the perspective of everyday intimacy as in the
Mexican pictures Red Dawn and Like Water for Chocolate. The latter,
which in a few months surpassed Mexican box-office records (1.5 mil-
lion), is at best a well-filmed telenovela. Its success is not, however, un-
connected to the themes dealt with by other, less conventional Mexi-
can filmsLa Tarea, La rnujer de Benjamin, El bultothat ironically,
irreverently, and without complacent nostalgia rework stock crises in
family identity and national political projects.
Such films reveal that identity and historyincluding local or na-
tional identitiescan still be custom-fit into cultural industries that
require a high profit margin. The cleterritorialization of art does not tell
the whole story; simultaneous to it, there are strong reterritorializing
tendencies, represented by the local demands of social movements, on
the one hand, and mass-media processes, on the other. Differences and
forms of local rootedness are produced and reproduced by regional ra-
dio and television, niche markets for folkloric musics and crafts, "de-
massified" arid "mesticized" consumerism.5
Research on the ideology of global managers suggests that corpo-
rate globalization, which tends to homogenize in order to reap profits,
should pay greater attention to local and regional differences. What do
anthropologists discover when they read the Harvard Business Review
and the Journal of Consumer Marketing? In his most recent book, Re-
nato Ortiz, for example, finds that the intellectuals of corporate global-
ization foster universalization by exploiting the coincidences in thought
and taste in all societies. Computers, credit cards, Benetton clothing,
Barbie dolls have all contributed to this form of globalization. How-
ever, once these forms of homogenization come to be understood as
the antithesis of the local, a new view envisages universalization and
regional particularization to be complementary:
 94 Identities as a Multimedia Spectacle

Coca-Cola was only able to make profits in the Spanish market when it
shortened its bottles to the size of other soft drinks in the country; a
German publicity campaign using U.S. basketball stars had little effect
because they were unknown to European sports fans; Brazilian jeans are
cut more tightly in order to emphasize women's body shape; Japanese
manufacturers know that Europeans tend to buy high-end compact stereo
components that can be kept hidden in a cabinet, while U.S. consumers
prefer jumbo speakers.

Once it is evident that a recognition of multicultural differences does

not disappear even in the most pragmatic of corporate strategies, the
contrast between homogeneous and heterogeneous, Ortiz argues, loses
importance. It then becomes necessary to understand how world seg-
mentsyouth, senior citizens, the oversized, the disaffectedshare
converging habits and tastes. "The world is a differentiated market con-
stituted by strata defined by their affinities. Rather than produce and
advertise commodities for 'all' consumers, they are promoted globally
among specific groups." Consequently, Ortiz advocates abandoning the
notion of homogenization and speaking, instead, of "cultural leveling"
as a way of "capturing the process of convergence in cultural behavior,
while preserving the differences in the various strata."6
Nations and ethnic formations continue to exist. For the majori-
ties, however, they are less and less important as determinants of social
cohesion. We need not fear that these forms of identity will be eradi-
cated by globalization; rather, ethnic, regional, and national identities
are being reconstructed in relation to globalized processes of intercul-
tural segmentation and hybridization. If we conceive of nations as rela-
tivized settings, crisscrossed by other symbolic matrices, then the ques-
tion that arises is what kinds of literature, film, and television are capable
of narrating the heterogeneity and coexistence of several codes within a
group and even in one individual subject.

In the Media: Identity as a Coproduction

Current reflections on identity and citizenship have couched themselves
within several cultural contexts characteristic of nineteenth- and early-
twentieth-century nationalisms; they can no longer be confined, how-
ever, to folklore or political oratory. These reflections have to take into
account the diversity of artistic repertoires and communications media
that contribute to the reelaboration of identities. Moreover, the study
 Identities as a Multimedia Spectacle 95

of identities cannot be the task of a single discipline (anthropology or

political sociology), but the concerted effort of transdisciplinary work,
with contributions from specialist;; in communications, semiology, and
urbanism.
Multimedia and multicontextuality: these are two key notions for
the redefinition of cinema, other communications systems, and culture
in general. Just as the survival of cinema depends on its relocation to a
multimedia audiovisial space (along with television and video), so too
national and local identities will endure to the degree that we resituate
them within multicontextual communications processes. Dynamized in
this way, identity will not be seen simply as a ritualized narrative, the
monotonous repetition proclaimed by certain fundamentalisms. As a
narrative that we renew continually, that we reconstruct with the collab-
oration of others, identity should also be understood as a coproduction.
Nonetheless, this coproduction is accomplished under unequal con-
ditions among the various participating actors and powers. On the one
hand, national economies and cultures have eased their border controls in
response to the pressures of cultural globalization and regional economic
integration. On the other hand, the asymmetrical circumstances in which
international agreements are crafted can be aggravated by trade liberal-
ization. A theory of identities and citizenship has to take into account
the diverse forms of their recomposition as they move through unequal
circuits of production, communication, and cultural appropriation.
Globalization processes have a lesser effect within the space of his-
torical-territorial culture, that is, the set of regional and ethnic knowl-
edges, habits, and experiences reproduced more or less according to a
set profile throughout the centuries. Inasmuch as profits on investment
are small and symbolic inertia quite protracted in the areas of historical
heritage, artistic and folkloric production, and certain forms of peasant
culture, the impact of economic liberalization is likely to be limited.
In a second circuit, that of the mass media that disseminate (via ra-
dio, television, video) entertainment and information to majorities, we
can speak of certain peripheral countries such as Brazil and Mexico that
have the human, technological, and economic resources to continue
producing nationally, with a measure of autonomy, and even expand
to international markets. The majority of Latin American countries, how-
ever, are quite dependent, not so much on global capital in general but
on U.S. production.
The dissolution of national and regional identities is even greater
in the third circuit, composed of computers, satellites, fiber-optic net-
 96 Identities as a Multimedia Spectacle

works, and other information technologies linked to decision making as

well as expanding and highly profitable forms of entertainment (video,
video games, etc.)- The effects on the reconstitution of identities of this
kind of technological and economic globalization, particularly in the
workplace and in consumption, are just beginning to be studied. Cur-
rent discourses on competitive productivity, the rituals of integration
among workers and corporate management, the subordination of en-
tertainment iconography in keeping with delocalized codes are some
of the processes in which the refashioning of local identities according
to global matrices is quite evident. Many traditional habits and beliefs
survive in these spaces, providing input for the differential styles that
manifest themselves in different countries, even where production and
consumption are high-tech. But it should be obvious that as we come
under the logic of world competitiveness, as we watch television and
inform ourselves electronically, use computer systems for many every-
day activities, identities based on local traditions are reformulated ac-
cording to "cultural engineering."7
One of the greatest challenges for rethinking identity and citizen-
ship today is finding a way to study how relations of continuity, dis-
continuity, and hybridization are produced among local and global, tra-
ditional and ultramodern systems of cultural development. We have to
examine not only coproduction, but also conflicts that revolve around
the coexistence of ethnicities and nationalities in the workplace and in
sites of consumption. Although hegemony and resistance continue to be
useful analytical categories, the complexity and nuances of these inter-
actions also compel us to study identities as processes of negotiation,
inasmuch as they are hybrid, flexible, and multicultural.
When we take into consideration the social conflicts and the mul-
ticultural changes that accompany globalization, it becomes evident that
the media spectacles we see cannot account for what takes place in in-
dustry. It is necessary, then, to clarify a statement made at the begin-
ning: identity is a construct, but the artistic, folkloric, and media nar-
ratives that shape it are realized and transformed within sociohistorical
conditions that cannot be reduced to their mise-en-scene. Identity is
theater and politics, performance and action.
 Chapter 6

Latin America and Europe as Suburbs of Hollywood

D ecember 1993, in Brussels: for the first time, controversies over cul-
tural policies took center stage in international economic debates.
This meeting of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT),
at which 117 countries approved the most far-reaching trade liberaliza-
tion in history, nearly broke down because of disagreements in three
areas: agriculture, textiles, and the audiovisual industry. The conflicts
in the first two areas were resolved through mutual concessions negoti-
ated between the United States and European governments. An analy-
sis of the discrepancies that led to the exclusion of film and television
from the agreement is of the greatest importance for understanding the
predicaments confronted by national cultural policies in this age of glob-
alization and the possibilities for waging a more effective politics of cit-
izenship from the purview of culture.

The Conflict of Economic and Cultural Strategies

The United States demanded unrestricted circulation of audiovisual
products; the Europeans sought to protect their media industries, espe-
cially cinema. The discrepancy derives from two ways of conceiving of

97
 98 Latin America and Europe as Suburbs of Hollywood

culture. The U.S. position is that entertainment should be treated as a

businessnot only because it is, but also because it is the second-largest,
after aerospace, of all sources of export income. In 1992, U.S. produc-
ers sent more than $4.6 billion in entertainment programs and films to
Europe. 1 In this same period, European exports totaled $250 million. 2
This asymmetry is evidenced further in European movie-theater and
television programming. U.S. distributors controlled 80 percent of the
French and 91 percent of the Spanish film markets in 1993. The result-
ing loss of screen time for the national cinemas of these countries gener-
ated great unrest among local artists and producers. The greatest expres-
sions of irritation occurred when Jurassic Park premiered simultaneously
in 180 Spanish and 400 French theaters.
Latin America is not to be outdone in this competition among the
largest importing nations of U.S. entertainment. The figures have grown
in the past few years because we receive not only film and television
programs, but also films, games, and other forms of entertainment on
video. Mexico, for example, barely in sixteenth place in 1990 among
importers of U.S. films, had the distinction of reaching tenth place
worldwide in 1993, with investments totaling $36.9 million. 3
In debates prompted by GATT negotiations, European motion-
picture worker associations defended their jobs, but they also put forth
the argument that film is not exclusively a commodity. It is also a pow-
erful instrument for the expression and self-affirmation of one's language
and culture, and their dissemination beyond one's borders. They made
reference to the contradiction whereby the United States demands the
free circulation of its communications in foreign countries, while article
301 of its own commercial law permits restrictions on cultural products
from abroad. U.S. radio and television stations broadcast nationally pro-
duced programming almost exclusively and, furthermore, disqualify
imports through advertisements such as "Why buy music you don't
understand?" Various experts have asked what if any advantage there
might be for Europe to open its telecommunications markets without
restriction to the two countriesthe United States and Japanthat
have closed their own markets to European products.4
Until a few years ago, each national film industry was allotted, for
the sake of survival, a quota of screen time (50 percent in several Latin
American countries). This was one means of limiting U.S. expansion-
ism. We know that movie-theater attendance is falling worldwide for
very complex reasons. In France, where 411 million tickets were sold in
1957, sales reached only 121.1 million in 1990.^ Latin American movie
 Latin America and Europe as Suburbs of Hollywood 99

theaters closed their doors en masse in the 1980s when attendance fell
off by an average of 50 percent. In Mexico, 410 million in sales in 1984
had shrunk to 170 million in 1991. In reality, the decrease in moviego-
ers does not signal the disappearance of film; instead, television and
video have taken up the slack, propagating home viewing.7 If U.S. en-
terprises have taken the lead in capitalizing on these changes in tech-
nology and cultural habits, it is because they can adapt more rapidly
than the film industries of other countries. In fact, they encourage these
innovations enthusiastically, thus gaining nearly worldwide control of
television and video distribution as well as surviving movie-theater
chains.
What can producers, filmmakers, and distributors who are not from
the United States do? They do not constitute a bloc that reacts in the
same way in all countries or all industry sectors. In the recent GATT
debates, the English and the Germans washed their hands of "whatever
might happen to the image industries: they had already given up many
years earlier the possibility of creating their own culture in that sec-
tor."8 France, Spain, and Italy tried to maintain national and European
film quotas as a means to better production and to establish new sources
of subsidy for their own film industry. This practice was criticized by
the United States as a form of "unfair competition."
Even in Europe's Latin countries, who defend the "cultural exemp-
tion" to free trade, there are some who see film and television as nothing
more than merchandise. As such, it is up to the spectators to decide
what should or should not be exhibited. "They deserve what's corning
to them," said a radio commentator, arguing that 90 percent of Span-
ish cinema is terrible. "But why take it out on film?" Eduardo Haro
Tecglen responded in a newspaper article: "What percentage isn't equally
bad in literature, theater, painting, carpentry, plumbing, the priesthood,
or people's qualities overall?" One encouraging by-product of the de-
bate is that it sharpened the self-criticism of Spanish cinema and soci-
ety, particularly regarding the criteria of evaluation to be implemented
in a democracy. Taking the size of the audience as an indicator of quality,
Haro Tecglen argued, is like using election results to evaluate a govern-
ment. "This is what is happening. It could be said that American film
is slightly less bad: 80 percent. Perhaps because they can attract the best
filmmakers in the world, they have greater economic potential. Be that
as it may, it is here to stay."9 In sum, the crisis of the film industry can
no longer be understood as a problem internal to each country, nor in
isolation from the transnational reorganization of symbolic markets. It
 100 Latin America and Europe as Suburbs of Hollywood

is situated at the intersection of tensions between free trade, cultural

quality, and particular ways of life.
The European debate offers useful insights for the analysis of these
issues in the Latin American context. In Europe, too, neoliberal reforms
of the state have led to the privatization of radio stations, TV channels,
and a sizable segment of informational and telematic circuits. In some
countries, the cultural action of the public sector was reduced to pro-
tecting the historical heritage (museums, archaeological sites, etc.) and
promoting traditional arts (visual arts, music, theater, literature). The
premise here is that, given declining attendance, these forms of culture
would not survive without artificial respiration from the government.
Communication and information media linked to the new technologies,
which require greater investment but have the power to reach vast au-
diences, have been sold off to private enterprise, most often U.S. and
Japanese corporations.
It is becoming evident that national identities are no longer defined
exclusively by cinema, television, and video, but by the whole ensemble
of "communication highways." Satellite transmission and fiber-optic
cable have transformed scientific communication (electronic mail, tele-
medicine), office information systems, financial services for banks, in-
tercorporation transactions, and, obviously, the distribution of cultural
products. From the United States, Turner Communications masterminds
the distribution of films, cartoons, and news in many Latin American
countries and is now even operating in several European countries, such
as France. Before long, U.S. films will arrive in movie theaters via satel-
lite in hundreds of cities in all continents, without the complexities of
customs' checks, as in the case of packaged pictures and videos. Televi-
sion and home computer access to video games, electronic shopping,
national and international news is also becoming more common. The
Europeans are asking who will control these networks: information and
entertainment audiovisual production is predominantly in the hands
of U.S. companies, and 70 percent of worldwide sales of electronic de-
vices for the mass market is controlled by Japanese firms. Europe is al-
most as ill prepared as Latin America to compete in the mass-mediated
reorganization of culture. Furthermore, because of limited production
and technological innovation in this area (the exception is Phillips), only
small countriesBelgium, Switzerland, Ireland, Holland, and the Scan-
dinavian countrieshave been cabled. This technology is almost non-
existent in France, Spain, Portugal, and Greece, where the preferred
means of delivery is the airwaves. 10
 Latin America and Europe as Suburbs of Hollywood 101

Europe's weakness in the recent GATT negotiations prompted

pointed responses from leading filmmakers (Pedro Almodovar, Wim
Wenders, Bernardo Bertolucci), actors' unions, television and film direc-
tors' associations, executives, and politicians. Their interests were at stake
in the options given to audiovisual communication and they urgently
sought a reformulation of the concepts used in drafting cultural policies,
inasmuch as such policies have to factor in how new interactions be-
tween local cultures and global processes affect the public good. Sev-
eral directors and writers involved in this debate have created works of
great sensitivity to regional traditions. Their films and novels are incon-
trovertibly Spanish or German, or even more locally based in the ur-
ban cultures of Madrid, Berlin, or Rome. Nevertheless, they understand
that the possibility to go on filming or distributing pictures, videos,
and books relevant to local cultures depends on the degree of control
that they secure within the most advanced networks of transnational
communications.
And what about Latin America? The situation in Europe may help
to bolster the demands of Argentine, Brazilian, and Venezuelan film-
makers who, among others, have won international prizes in recent years,
but who find little support in their home societies, racked as they are
by financial and legal crises. In some countries, government institutions
that provided subsidies have folded, as did Brazil's Embrafilme. Film
production is bound to fall (from 40 to 70 per year to 3 or 4, as in the
early 19905 in the above-mentioned countries) if those who draft cul-
tural policies continue to ignore the importance of mass communica-
tions. It is difficult for the state to make strategic interventions if the
majority of cultural ministries and councils persist in believing that cul-
ture and identity are shaped predominantly by fine arts, with a pinch
of indigenous and peasant cultures, traditional crafts and musics.
If it is true that part of our identities is still rooted in those tradi-
tional symbolic formations, it should also not be forgotten that 70 per-
cent of the population are city dwellers and that an increasing number
of these live in an almost exclusive connection with the culture industries.
Lacking national cultural policies, these industries are condemned to
importing arid distributing that world folklore whose most characteristic
examples are U.S. television series and Spielberg's and Lucas's movies.
Meanwhile, the public in each country becomes accustomed to a me-
dia "normalcy" embodied by the most spectacular narratives contrived
from myths that are intelligible to spectators from any country. Will
our cultural policies continue to trod dirt roads or will they gain access
 102 Latin America and Europe as Suburbs of Hollywood

to a paved culture, to international information and communications

superhighways?

From Cinema to Multimedia Space

In the GATT negotiations, Europe proved to be more flexible in the
areas of agriculture and industry than in audiovisual space. "France can
forgo producing potatoes and still be France, but if we stop speaking
French, lose our cinema, our theater, and our own narrative, we will
become just another slum suburb of Chicago," said a French television
executive.11
Five days before signing the GATT accord, the Spanish govern-
ment passed a law establishing minimum screen-time quotas for Euro-
pean cinema. In cities with more than 125,000 inhabitants, at least one
film from a European Community nation will be screened for every
two from other continents. Other measures require television channels
to pay higher rental fees for airing films. There is even talk of video
distributors and rental outlets having to contribute part of their profits
toward the financing of film production. It is increasingly evident that
the survival of cinema does not depend on movie-theater screenings
alone, but on its new role within the ensemble of factors in the audio-
visual field. Nowadays, film is a multimedia product that can only be
financed by contributions from the various venues in which it circulates.
When all is said and done, however, the survival of cinema, impor-
tant as it is, pales in comparison to the total deregulation of the entire
area of communications, the goal of U.S. trade policy. Fiber-optic net-
works and the digitization and compression of images will bring a
"downpour of five hundred channels on Europe" before the end of the
century. Juan Cueto, until recently director of Spanish TV's Canal +,
has said that cinema is a McGuffin (scenes in Hitchcock films that add
nothing to the plot but serve to thicken it). "Cinema is a locomotive,
Hitchcock's McGuffin, and what is important is what it drags behind it."
Forecasts predict a similar fate for Latin America in the near fu-
ture. Movie theaters have closed in Buenos Aires, Sao Paulo, Caracas,
Bogota, and Mexico City, while upwards of 50 percent of homes in these
cities count videocassette recorders and cable television among their pos-
sessions. Video rental clubs, the major outlet for cinema, offer from 70
percent to 90 percent U.S. films, depending on the country. Produc-
tions representative of European cultures, with which we Latin Ameri-
cans have the closest ties, together with works from other countries in
 Latin America and Europe a:; Suburbs of Hollywood 103

the region, do not exceed 10 percent of all the disposable fare on televi-
sion and video.
U.S. hegemony is even greater when it comes to the control of in-
formation and telematics. There is not one country in Latin America,
except for Brazil, with state policies for investment in high-end research,
production of equipment, and personnel training, all necessary to com-
pete in the development of cultural innovations associated with cut-
ting-edge technologies. Subordination to U.S. technological and com-
munications production is becoming even more accentuated in Mexico
since the signing of NAFTA, an eventuality to be repeated in those Latin
American countries that will follow suit in joining the accord. The rea-
son for this is that the economic opening negotiated in NAFTA actu-
ally limits investment from countries outside the region in the national
economies of this hemisphere. At the very least, the United States and
Canada can request preferential treatment whenever a Latin American
country signs an accord with a country outside the region.

Nationalism All Over Again?

The United States has benefited in many ways from industrial devel-
opment in Germany and Japan. It also has an overwhelming control of
almost all postindustrial software production, that is, of electronic infor-
mation and communications programs. After the collapse of the Soviet
bloc, the "American Way" has jurassically expanded the dissemination
of its spectacles throughout the universe. Europe's energetic negotia-
tions in the recent GATT rounds and the measures taken by some coun-
tries to protect their audiovisual production are a few of the alterna-
tives that make it possible to envisage a symbolic world in which not
everything is in the hands of Hollywood and CNN. At least, according
to Regis Debray, it helps to question whether what is good for Columbia
and Warner Brotherswhich we already know is good for the United
Statesis also good for humanity. 2
Some intellectuals become alarmed by what they consider to be a
resurgence of nationalism, an "anti-North Americanism, based on ide-
ological myths" and statist interventions that are conducive to authori-
tarianism. For Mario Vargas Llosa, "when it functions freely, the mar-
ket allows, for example, for films produced in the 'periphery' to reach
millions of movie theaters throughout the world, as in the case of Like
Water for Chocolate or El Mariachi."13 These exceptions are exactly that,
rare cases, as one can easily confirm by surveying the meager space given
 104 Latin America and Europe as Suburbs of Hollywood

to Latin American and European films (and also Asian and African films)
in movie listings, television offerings, and video club holdings in any
North American city, and in every country in which programming is
controlled by U.S. distributors. In the United States, only i percent of
all movie tickets sold are for films in languages other than English. 14
The numbers do not support what Vargas Llosa says: "the disappearance
of borders, the integration of the peoples of the world in a system of
exchange that benefits all, and especially those countries that urgently
need to overcome underdevelopment and poverty." "Those ideals of our
youth" that socialism could not attain have been made possible by "cap-
italism and the market."11 A novelist's fiction?
To conclude, we might say that the current European debate refor-
mulates transnational mass communications policies, in at least three
ways:
i. It calls for a reformulation of the relations between the national,
the continental, and the global. There is no dearth of racist and chauvin-
ist outbursts as Latin Americans and Europeans confront the transna-
tional restructuring of markets by proposing a return to a telluric na-
tionalism, as if "national roots" were the only source of true art. This
"horticulture of creation," as Andre Lange has called it, has always been
a meager aesthetic and sociologically unverifiable: "What are Mozart's
roots? Salzburg, which sent him off with a swift kick in the ass, or all
of Europe, which provided him with forms, themes, librettos?" "Should
Andre Wajda, the Polish filmmaker, have refrained from giving us a
provocative Danton?" 16 It is not difficult to give a similar repertoire of
Latin American examples, from the hybrid multicultural "roots" of tango
or revue theater to internationally recognized writers, musicians, and
painters (for example, Octavio Paz, Astor Piazzolla, and Cesar Pater-
nosto, to mention only those surnames beginning with P). They are
renowned for the quality of their innovations, for their way of speak-
ing on "their own" without taking refuge in the local. The question is
how to make it possible, in the current phase of the industrialization
and transnationalization of communications, for Mexican, Argentine,
or Colombian artists not only to communicate with one or ten thou-
sand compatriots but to gain entry into the circuits of a Latin Ameri-
can cultural space, from which vantage point they might dialogue with
the voices and images that come to us from the entire planet.
A crucial issue that will determine whether or not this Latin Ameri-
can space represents our multicultural societies is the degree to which
it channels action in a decentralized manner, recognizing the diversity
 Latin America and Europe as Suburbs of Hollywood 105

of regional styles and aesthetics. The current tendency is to concen-

trate television and other audiovisual media in two or three oligopolies:
the 6,000 radio and 550 television stations in Latin America "represent,
in reality, 6,550 times the same fare; they compete vigorously to get a
piece of the advertising pie, but to get this they all have to have the
same kind of programming." 17
2. The articulation of public services and private interests. Precisely
because their influence is so great, and because they require huge in-
vestments and a high level of efficiency, the new audiovisual technolo-
gies should not depend predominantly on the bureaucratic apparatuses
of the state. But because they constitute the cultural space where in-
equalities and asymmetries among societies are most accentuated, they
cannot be left unmonitored and exclusively to the dictates of competi-
tion in international markets. Once the euphoria of the fall of the Berlin
Wall subsided, and the complications this brought to Europe were dis-
cerned, thinkers such as Alain Touraine explained that the market might
be good for demolishing the "centralized, clientliest or totalitarian state,"
but not for providing a principle for the construction or management
of social life." New questions arise: "How can the state be made to in-
tervene without falling into the trap of defending inward-looking na-
tional traditions?" How is it possible to combine support "for creation
and the survival of enterprises capable of competing in the market" with
"policies for patronage and indirect support for cultural institutions,
schools, museums, universities, and associations"?18
Other authors, from Jiirgen Habermas to Dominique Wolton, in-
sist on the need to give greater depth to the "construction of a Euro-
pean public space" that provides for the combined administration of
the public and the privateexpanding in proportion to the multipli-
cation of translated books, and film and TV coproductions (e.g., the
Franco-German channel Arte)and the opening of daily columns in
national newspapers to foreign writers. One challenge yet to be met is
the broadening of intercommunications in high culture so that they also
include a public space for popular sectors. This broadening is espe-
cially needed in media such as television that are more disposed to cel-
ebrate their national sports or to disseminate "quaint" views of other
societies than to provide historical references and significant intercul-
tural confrontations.
I see in these European polemics an attempt to ensure that the neo-
liberal paradigm does not become a self-fulfilling prophecy. They also
exemplify the search for a path that does not confuse the inevitability
 106 Latin America and Europe as Suburbs of Hollywood

of the globalization of economy and culture with U.S. hegemony. We

too, on this side of the Atlantic, can benefit from this distinction. We
too must recalibrate the balance of public and private on a scale larger
than that of the nation by creating a Latin American culture of demo-
cratic citizenship and a Latin American space for communications. This
requires that states, international organizations such as UNESCO, OAS,
and others, nonmonopolistic business enterprises, and NGOs foment
transnational coproductions and distribution programs. Furthermore,
the continental range of these initiatives must be buttressed by national
laws that establish minimum screen time in movie theaters and on tel-
evision, not only for the cinema of each country, as in the past, but for
a continental Latin American production, more in keeping with the
European model, which has a realistic vision.
3. The need to reposition each culture industryfilm, television,
videowithin a multimedia policy that also includes advertising and
other commercial by-products of mass symbolic practices. Currently,
the European and U.S. film industries are sustained through a combi-
nation of exhibition in movie theaters and other venues such as na-
tional and foreign television, cable and satellite broadcasts, and video.
In Italy, France, and Spain the crisis generated by low movie-house at-
tendance for local film production is mitigated by television broadcasts,
which comprise up to 90 percent of financing. In the United States,
two hours and forty minutes of advertising are enough to finance one
hour of a series. In France, it takes ten hours of advertising to raise that
amount. In Mexico, on the other hand, private television can show a
film as many times as it wants over a year and a half for only twenty
thousand dollars, even though the first minute of advertising during
the transmission of the film earns the channel two hundred thousand
dollars. We know it is not easy to balance public and artistic interests
with the tendency to seek easy profits among audiovisual entrepreneurs.
For example, an Argentine initiative to tax videos and films transmit-
ted on television in order to subsidize and therefore help reinvigorate
the film industry was denounced by the channels and video club owners.
In order to change this situation, it is indispensable for Latin American
states to take on the public interest and regulate entrepreneurial activity.
December 1994. At the end of the year, presidential and parliamen-
tary elections were held in several Latin American countries with the
largest audiovisual industries: Venezuela, Colombia, Mexico, and Brazil.
Argentina held a constitutional assembly in 1994 and scheduled its pres-
idential election for 1995. There is no reason to assume that the gov-
 Latin America and Europe as Suburbs of Hollywood 107

ernments that privatized radio stations and television channels in re-

cent years, and thatwith the exception of Mexicotore down the
infrastructure that supported cinema, are going to recognize the disas-
trous consequences of neoliberal deregulation and absolute commer-
cialization of audiovisual space for national cultural production. Most
of the opposition parties also seem unconcerned that we will produce
fewer films and books, fewer cultural television programs, or that our
video clubs have become the branch stores of Hollywood. Will the in-
tegration projects and free-trade agreements being negotiated through-
out America help reactivate the culture industries? We can only imag-
ine that this will be possible if they reanimate regulation policies and
publicly financed promotion of Latin American culture. These ques-
tions will only enter electoral agendas and international negotiations if
there is mobilization by artists, independent producers, and some form
of organization on the part of cultural consumers, say, moviegoers and
television viewers. That such organization does not exist in Latin Amer-
ica is one of the most alarming symptoms of our lack of protection as
spectators. Is it still possible for us to produce, create, and choose as
citizens? Or will we become complacent with the modicum of liberty
that channel surfing affords us?
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 Chapter 7

From the Public to the Private

The "Americanization" of Spectators

T he future of multiculturality depends not only on policies of national

and international integration. The habits and tastes of consumers
condition their capacity to become citizens. Their exercise of citizenship
is shaped in relation to artistic and communicational referents, and to
their preferred entertainment and forms of information. Let's examine
how cultural practices and preferences are being restructured in relation
to the transformations taking place in the film, television, and video
industries.
The crises of the film industry have almost always been related to
technological changes. The appearance of the talkies, cinemascope, and
competition from television were some of the innovations that cast doubt
on the cinematographic industry and language. In the past decade, the
questions about the continued existence of cinema are really about di-
minishing audiences.
Thousands of movie houses have shut down in all Latin American
countries, as in other continents. Movie theaters have become video game
parlors, evangelical churches, or parking lots in Montevideo, Sao Paulo,
Bogota, and Mexico City. In a country such as Argentina, with a strong
cinematographic tradition, seven provinces no longer have movie houses.1

109
 110 From the Public to the Private

Nevertheless, more films are seen now than in any prior period.
But they are watched at home, on television, or on video. Of 16 million
Mexican homes, more than 13 million have a television set and more
than 5 million own a video player. There are 9,589 video clubs distrib-
uted throughout the country, including popular areas and small peas-
ant villages.
The dissemination of video and the growth of its profits are the
greatest in the United States. Income from the rental and sale of videos
went from $3.6 million in 1985 to $10.3 million in 1991. It is not usual
for a cultural industry to triple its earnings in six years. These figures
increased in the same period in which audiences vacated movie houses.
In 1989, these constituted 80 percent of film revenues; currently they
provide barely 25 percent.
In what ways is it different to view film when it passes from the
movie house to home projection? This chapter, which synthesizes several
research findings in four Mexican cities,2 highlights four transformations:
1. A new relation between the real and the imaginary.
2. A different positioning of the phenomenon of film between the pub-
lic (urban cultural consumption) and the private (reception of enter-
tainment at home).
3. A reorientation of cinema in relation to national and transnational
culture.
4. The emergence of multimedia spectators, who relate to film in various
waysin movie houses, or via television, video, and entertainment
magazinesand who consider it part of a broad and diversified sys-
tem of audiovisual programs.

Intimacy in a Crowd
The film viewer is an invention of the twentieth century. We can trace
its origins in Robertson's camera obscura, in nineteenth-century exper-
iments with photography and X rays, and, of course, in Lumiere's, Felix
Mesquich's, and others' first projections, when people still did not know
how to look at those "animated scenes," and the public, on seeing the
locomotive approaching on the screen, frantically rushed out.3
Only with the construction of permanent movie theaters, from 1905
on, did there begin to emerge habits of perception and attendance, a
new distinction between the teal and the imaginary, another sense of
verisimilitude, of solitude and collective ritual. People learned to be
film viewets, to go to dark auditotiums periodically, to choose to sit at
 From the Public to the Private 111

the proper distance from the screen, to enjoy movies by themselves or

in the company of others, to pass from the intimacy of the projection
to the exchange of impressions and gregarious celebration of the stars.
Films thus came to be selected by the names of the actors or the direc-
tors, to be situated in film history or among the ads in culture and en-
tertainment sections.
What remains of all this when movies are viewed on television, in
one's illuminated living room, interrupted by ads, the telephone, or other
members of the family? What becomes of cinema when we no longer
go to the movie house but to the video club, or when we watch what-
ever appears on television?
Video is appealing above all because it costs more or less the same
to rent as to buy a movie ticket. Moreover, each video is watched by
several people, and viewing it at home eliminates extra expenses (car-
fare, food), the dangers of the city, the lines, and other inconveniences.
Older moviegoers, accustomed to the theaters, may lament the loss of
the spectacle and the poor quality of the television screen, but video
viewers welcome the possibility of operating the projection themselves,
stopping it, going back over scenes, and above all not having to put up
with commercial breaks.4 It is logical for broad sectors of the viewing
public to prefer home entertainment instead of having to travel through-
out the city. But for filma traditional stimulus for going out and us-
ing the city, where urban themes are generatedto become a reason
for staying in the privacy of the home means that a radical change has
taken place in the relations between cinema and public life.
Film widened its communicative action thanks to television and
video. But this expansion transformed the productive process and the
ways of viewing films. Instead of going to the theater to seek, in Carlos
Monsivais's words, "intimacy in a crowd," a devoted community gath-
ered in the dark silence in front of the screen, television and video en-
courage the restricted sociability of the couple or the family and a dimin-
ished attention to the film. They permit distractions and even enable
other activities while one follows the story line. Also changed are the ways
of getting information on what to watch, on how to develop tastes and
locate them within the history of film and the history of the nation.

From the National to the Transnational

The success of what is known as Mexican cinema's "golden age"ap-
proximately 1940 to 1954was due to the creativity of several filmmak-
ers (Emilio Fernandez, Luis Bunuel, Ismael Rodriguez) and the pres-
 112 From the Public to the Private

ence of actors capable of becoming idols (Pedro Infante, Jorge Negrete,

Maria Felix, and Dolores del Rio, among others). Also important was
the convergence of entrepreneurs and state support, and a distribution
system that reached almost all of Latin America. These factors combined
with the capacity of the cinematic narratives and characters to represent
Mexican national culture and contribute to the sentimental education
of the masses who migrated to the cities in those years.
The mass media contributed to the formation of cultural citizenship.
Through radio and cinema, Carlos Monsivais says, Mexicans learned
to recognize themselves within an integrated whole, above ethnic and
regional divisions. Ways of acting and speaking, tastes and codes of cus-
toms, disconnected or in conflict in the past, were brought together in
the language with which films represented the emergence of the masses,
legitimizing their styles of feeling and thinking? The continental expan-
sion of Mexican cinema, like that of Argentine cinema, during World
War II and subsequent years was aided by Hollywood's abandonment
of the Latin American market as it concentrated on producing propa-
ganda films for U.S. troops stationed in Europe. "We had a privileged
position," observes Ignacio Duran Loera, "because we had greater access
to raw materialsacetate and celluloidwhich in Argentina were very
difficult to obtain in time of war."6
This favorable international situation was key for the success of Mex-
ican cinema. But its contribution to the modernization and massifica-
tion of national culture was also a key factor in the development of
this art industry. Cinema was not merely a prosperous commercial ac-
tivity; it became that because it also played a major, imaginative role in
the renewal and growth of society.
Mexican cinema's role in shaping a mass audiovisual culture and a
symbolic language to express social process lost its effectiveness because
of a combination of factors. The most important were the reduction of
state support; the closing off of the Cuban market with the revolution
and the contraction of South American markets due to economic diffi-
culties; the rapid expansion of television as a new agent of entertain-
ment and conditioner of the social imaginary; competition from U.S.
cinema, which, revamped thematically and formally and strengthened
by large investments and greater effectivity in distribution, gained con-
trol of international markets. 7
To these processes one should also add the changes in the relation
between film and national culture when its principal means of diffusion
are television and video. On the one hand, these new means enable a
 From the Public to the Private 113

more balanced distribution throughout the national territory of what

is shown in Mexico City. In contrast with the situation in museums, li-
braries, and theaters, most of which are concentrated in the capital, the
dissemination of TV channels and video clubs throughout the country,
with homogeneous programming designed by monopolies, makes it pos-
sible for viewers in large and small cities to have access to almost the
same cinematographic repertoire. This "egalitarian democratization" is
heightened by the designers of television programming and video club
catalogs who cater to tastes based on the premise that everybody in the
country resembles one another.
But such a "national unification" achieved by the mass distribution
of cinema is, in a way, paradoxical. In contrast to education and cultural
policies that throughout this century sought to construct a common
Mexican identity on the basis of national symbols, of actors, objects,
and customs issued from the nation, almost 80 percent of the films avail-
able on video are of U.S. origin. European cultures with which Mexico
has long had relations, particularly the Spanish, as well as Latin American
cultures, with which we share a common language, history, and politi-
cal projects, are represented in less than 10 percent of available film on
television and video. Mexican film available in video clubs also fails to
reach 10 percent of the total and the inventory virtually excludes films
that document contemporary conflicts. When we consider all this to-
gether with the preponderance of North American film, it is logical, as
Deborah Holtz observes, that video viewers should relate to cinema with
the assumption that "reality resides elsewhere."8
The predominance of one foreign film industry can be even more
disconcerting on taking into account that corporations linked to U.S.
capital, Multivision and Blockbuster, control minority stakes in televi-
sion and video markets. The hegemonic role of Televisa in these media
suggests that the unilateral audiovisual repertoire is solely of its own
making and conforms to its cultural objectives. Televisa's interests in
Spanish, Latin American, and U.S. Hispanic markets are evident in only
a few entertainment programs (Siempre en domingo), news magazines
(Eco), and short-lived series of Mexican films or spectacles (Cadena de
las Americas). We can assume that most viewers' preferences for U.S.
pictures and the overriding popularity of North American stars (Kevin
Costner, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Tom Cruise, Sylvester Stallone, Mel
Gibson), confirmed by a survey we conducted in Mexico, are determined
in part by the bias of the repertoire and the near absence of other na-
tional cinemas.
 114 From the Public to the Private

What do video viewers think of Mexican cinema? They see it through

the comparative framework established by U.S. film. This is borne out
not only by the predominance of U.S. movies and actors mentioned in
surveys, but also by development of aesthetic taste, the value placed on
spectacle and types of stars, and of course on the skewed proportion of
programming. U.S. film is thought of as the norm precisely because
U.S. product has a 6085 percent market share in all venues: movie
houses, television, and video. Blockbuster video outlets make a glaring
classificatory slip that bears this out. The majority of their racks are
classified by "genre" (action, suspense, comedy, children, etc.), repre-
sented almost exclusively by U.S. films, with a few Mexican exceptions.
In a corner, we find a few dozen European, Latin American, and perhaps
a couple of Asian films, all united under the category "foreign film."
U.S. film does not appear in this section. Is it therefore not a national
cinema? Is it then film pure and simple?
There is a significant difference between male and female viewers
of national and U.S. cinemas. Majorities of both genders prefer U.S.
film, but because men are most attracted to action films (thrillers, adven-
ture, and espionage films), their answers on surveys show a higher pref-
erence for North American movies. Women, on the other hand, show
a preference for "sentimental" and "family" dramas, which leans them
more toward Mexican cinema. In any case, for both men and women
the relation between the national and the North American is negotiated
symbolically through action and social violence, while Mexican cinema
where these modes are less prevalentprovides scenarios for the por-
trayal of sentimental and family conflicts.
That Mexican film occupies such a low standing in movie theaters
and video clubs does not mean, at least so far as our data indicate, that
there is an equally low interest in and value placed on it by film, TV,
and video viewers throughout the country. A considerable percentage
of those interviewed, when asked what they did not find in video clubs,
mentioned Mexican films. Although it is clear that the majority prefer
U.S. films, it is not the case that all sectors judge Mexican film in the
same way, nor show preference for the same films. The 25 to 40 age
group showed greater interest in some new national films such as La
tarea and Like Water for Chocolate. Others that can be included in this
category, Danzon, Rojo amanecer, and La mujer de Benjamin, on the other
hand, sparked the interest of those in the 45 to 60 age group, because
of the greater correspondence between the events presented and the age
of the protagonists (e.g., those who lived through the student demon-
 From the Public to the Private 115

strations of 1968). The percentage of new films mentioned in our ques-

tion regarding the most recently rented video, also indicates that na-
tional cinema is not neglected by the majority. Nor is this interest limited
to the golden age of Mexican cinema. What is evident from the declared
preferences is that there is not only one national film public. Diverse
eras, genres, styles, with different proportions of entertainment and artis-
tic pursuit, find faithful or recently interested publics. The question
that arises here is whether current cinematographic policies, in which
the aesthetic dimension of films is subordinated to ratings, can take into
consideration this multicultural diversity of publics.

Film, Television, and Radio: Multimedia Spectators

Up to twenty years ago, films could recoup their cost through national
and international movie-theater chains. As we noted in the preceding
chapter, now they have to venture into many other venues to attempt
to make good on their investment: national television and that of other
countries, cable, parabolic antenna, and video broadcasts. In Mexico
and other countries, these latter circuits are usually under the control
of transnational corporations. As cinema becomes more dependent on
new technologies, it is increasingly difficult to produce film and video
in Latin American countries, where investment in these areas has fallen
off in recent years, as a result of reductions in public spending and the
lack of interest in providing incentives for innovation in cutting-edge
technologies.
Video has become, in less than a decade, the most diffused venue
for viewing films. Those who go to movie theaters once a week or every
two weeks rent two or three films on video per week. Add to them those
who have lost the custom of going to movie theaters, or who shrink
from traversing the city to a theater showing the film they want to see,
and the masses who never had the custom to go to movie theaters and
nevertheless see from two to four films per week on video or television.
The study we carried out in Mexico City provides a profile of these
new spectators. Sixty percent of video club clients are less than thirty
years old. Only those who grew up watching video have a "natural" rela-
tion to the television screen and are less bothered by it than those who
go to movie theaters. Video, however, is popular not only among the
young. More video viewers have children than those who go to the
movies, which implies that they stay at home because of family obliga-
tions. Many of those who watch videos at home also go to the movies,
 116 From the Public to the Private

but for them the family promenade or friendly gathering is as impor-

tant as the choice of film. People go out not only to enjoy the film but
also for the rituals before and after the showing.
The moviegoer, that invention of the beginning of the century, has
been changing in the past decade. Surveys that ask about moviegoers'
and video viewers' knowledge of film history show that the majority of
both groups do not know the names of the directors. Almost all movie-
goers leave the theater before the credits. In video clubs, arrangement of
films by genre, with little or no information about the directors, con-
trasts with the saliency of actors' names and "intense" (dramatic, sex-
ual, violent) scenes represented on the box covers. This suggests that these
businesses have no interest in locating the films in cinema history or in
relation to their "authors." Whereas access to the movie house is usually
guided by consulting newspaper listings and one's own viewing history,
which often involves having to go to other parts of the city, video view-
ers go to rental clubs near their home without making prior decisions.
One of the most notable differences between cinephiles and video-
philes is that the relation of the latter with film takes place in a present
without memory. Video clubs in Mexico City consider films older than
eighteen months to be of no interest, and for them to remain on exhi-
bition that long they must turn a good profit. Video renters' dissatisfac-
tion almost never refers to the lack of films from other periods or from
countries other than the United States, but rather to the lack of suffi-
cient copies of films that have recently premiered. What is important is
not the film itself, nor the director, but the most recent film available,
especially if it is an "action-adventure," the most requested genre in
video clubs.
Immediacy and the value of the instantaneous are reflected in what young
videophiles seek. The number of images that succeed each other by frac-
tions of a second are the beginning of a challenge to time that does not
correspond to time. It is the illusion of a transgression emanating from
the rhythm that this fictitious reality imposes. The pleasure of expecta-
tion thus modifies the way of seeing. This survey confirms that the new
image consumers are addicted to rhythm more than they are to plots.
(Deborah Holtz)

The proliferation of video clubs throughout the city and the uni-
formity of available repertoires make it possible for consumption to be
a neighborhood activity. Everyone has all the available titles near their
home. In the Federal District thete is one movie theatet fot evety 62,868
 From the Public to the Private 117

inhabitants, and some districts have fewer than five theaters. There is,
on the other hand, one video club for every 4,500 inhabitants (Debo-
rah Holtz).
If the passage from movie houses to video clubs means fewer trips
throughout the city, the selection of films to view on television, as is
well known, is even more passive. Pay-per-view is available only for the
smallest minorities, and almost all TV viewers have their options lim-
ited by the four or six films that the channels air during the evening.
People do not see what they prefer, but they prefer what they are offered.9

Diversification of Tastes and Citizenship

Let me review two of the conclusions pertinent to the analysis of cul-
tural policy that ensue from our research on viewers' aesthetics: on the
one hand, the preponderance of spectacular action over other dramatic
and narrative modalities; on the other, the possibility that national cin-
emas can subsist in the midst of the transnational and multimedia re-
organization of audiovisual production and markets.
i. It is thought-provoking that cinematographic and televisual reper-
toires, as well as audience tastes, should give precedence to an aesthet-
ics of action in an age that has seen the demise of the heroic phase of
political movements. Politics has often put a premium on action: the
antitheoretical pragmatism or "militance" of political parties, the exalta-
tion of everyday heroism and of "what-can-be-demonstrated-in-concrete-
practice" in social movements, and, of course, the extreme subordina-
tion of politics in guerrilla hyperactivism. The failure of many armed
groups, the decline of militant cadre in political parties, the displace-
ment of political action by acting in the media, and the institutional-
ization of social movements all led to a shift from radical heroism to
negotiation arid other mediated forms of resolving power struggles.
Of all these changes, the transference of political staging to the elec-
tronic media is the process that best preserves in a depoliticized mode
what there is of action in politics. Alter all, we are speaking of theatrical
action. Let's not forget that politics, from solemn parliamentary speeches
to everyday rituals in which hierarchies are acknowledged, has always
had a theatrical side. But televisual spectacularization accentuates it, and
thus modifies political action.
Fernando Collor, Carlos Menem, and Alberto Fujimori are some
of the leaders who in recent years have cultivated this change. Their
publicity campaigns, both preelectorally and while in power, cast them
 118 From the Public to the Private

in the role of sports figures and thus constructed their public images.
Menem has sought to display his omnipotence by playing soccer and
tennis, piloting airplanes, driving race cars, and going out with exuber-
ant models all in the same day. Renato Janine Ribeiro has said that
Collor's image crafters transmitted "an impression of efficiency, energy
and youth, suggesting to public opinion that through his physical energy
and will the president could conquer the problems of Brazil, from in-
flation to underdevelopment. 10 It is not political action itself (an even
less reasoned argument) that is offered to resolved social problems, but
rather, brute force. The mass-media political hero bases himself more
on brute force than on his intelligence or ability. Of all the examples of
this semantic shift in what can be understood as political actionor
its convergence with media actionthere is none better than George
Bush's welcoming of Brazil's president at the White House with the so-
briquet "Indiana Collor." Ribeiro recalls Bush's curious interpretation
of the Indiana Jones films:
Spielberg's character is, above all, an archaeologist, an intellectual. The
filmmaker's strategy to make him likable, even if he is in the service of
knowledge (a cause that generally makes characters hateful to mass audi-
ences), was to have him carry out his quest with the utmost energy, giv-
ing him a kind of second existence. Neither Bush nor Collor, however,
showed any interest in research, or in Indiana's knowledge-producing di-
mension. Moreover, the "heroic" phase of Collor's presidency was marked
by a strong and explicit aversion to the academic, scientific, and cultural
sphere. In sum: Indiana Jones is, in Bush's universe of references, a hero
of force rather than knowledge." 11

The denouement of the transubstantiation of political action into

communicational action is not always so felicitous as in the impeach-
ment of Collor in Brazil. Ribeiro concludes his analysis by arguing that
the destruction of the public sphere provoked by these heroic presi-
dents can boomerang on them when citizens and media ally to restore
the dignity of the public. However, Latin America's recent history sug-
gests that there are numerous situations in which societies accept the
transubstantiation and prefer a political scene in which political heroes
resemble those of film and television.
The majority consensus held on to by the governments of Menem
and Fujimori seems to be based on the complacency with their om-
nipotent exhibitionism and their capacity to confirm it through finan-
cial stability. If we take into consideration the signs of productive stag-
 From the Public to the Private 119

nation, the increase in unemployment and poverty, one cannot but

think that the overwhelming vote for these figures is not due to their
power to transform their countries and generate well-being, but to that
more modest power that consists of overcoming the panic produced in
periods of hyperinflation and instability. Correlatively, the recent elec-
toral failures of opposition parties are interpreted in Argentina, Peru,
Mexico, and other countries as an expression of fear of what might be
lost if there are changes, if the economy is destabilized, if inflation re-
turns, and it is not possible to continue enjoying certain commodities.
The fact that these interpretations are linked to worries about consump-
tion shows the degree to which it is operative in shaping citizen opin-
ions. Consequently, it is not so surprising that the media should play
an important role in generating consensus or that the frivolous actions
that politicians use to demonstrate their power should take on a posi-
tive meaning.
The consensus achieved among majorities by politicians who act
against their interests has been explained by reference to the evasive
effects of the media, whose model is the preponderance of alienating
entertainment over consciousness-raising information in North Ameri-
can culture industries. I prefer another hypothesis: the correspondence
(rather than mechanical determination) of, on the one hand, narrative
structures, the rise of spectacular action, and the fascination with a
memoryless present in film and television, and, on the other, an anec-
dotal rather than argumentative vision in political discourse, as well as
a media-constructed political heroism that enables leaders to show their
power not through their intervention in the structural changes of his-
tory but in the mininarradon of feats of virtuosity linked to corporal
ability and consumption. In this same vein, we can correlate the declin-
ing attendance at places of public cultural consumption (movie houses,
theaters) and the retreat to the home for electronic entertainment with
declining public forms for the exercise of citizenship.
2. I should like to explore whether it is possible for national cine-
mas, as integral parts of the cultures of each country, to survive under
the current conditions in audiovisual markets. To answer this question
implies knowing what possibilities there are for Latin American cinemas
to reformulate their projects so as to insert themselves in the new rela-
tions among financing sources, producers, directors, distributors, pro-
moters, and, of course, the diverse types of audiences, some of whom go
to movie theaters, but most of whom devote their evenings and week-
ends to video rentals and their television screens.
 120 From the Public to the Private

Nevertheless, we can report that audience surveys do not condemn

movie theaters to the ash can of history. Although surveys show that
the youngest, the unmarried, and those over fifty prefer to see films there,
movie theaters continue to be attractive for all ages and social strata.
The desire to see films in movie houses surpasses 50 percent of viewers
in the four Mexican cities studied, but the percentage of those who ac-
tually attend theaters does not rise higher than 36 percent. Practice would
be closer to desire, the surveyed explain, if movie-house projections
were of better quality, if they were more diversified, if the theaters were
cleaned and renovated periodically, and if complementary services (park-
ing, drinks, etc.) made attendance more pleasant.
The mass success of some Mexican pictures, such as Solo con tu
pareja, that deal with topics of interest to youth, or of films that relate
national history to everyday intimacy, as, for example, Like Water for
Chocolate, Rojo amanecer, and other similar films, indicates that Mexican
pictures that transcend the stereotypes of commercial success can find
an audience. Our research confirmed that quality films can attract a
relatively broad, albeit selective, public predisposed to relate to demand-
ing films and capable of establishing a more complex relation with
them than mere entertainment. A good example are the Muestras In-
ternacionales de Cine [International Film Festivals] in Mexico City,
which have an excellent public resonance.
Nevertheless, the most salient feature in the restructuring of mar-
kets is the segmentation of publics. On the one hand, we have an elite
with knowledge of film history who attends the Cineteca, annual festi-
vals, cine clubs, and views television film showings with few commer-
cial breaks (channels n and 22); on the other, an enormous audience
that is not even aware that there are options other than Televisa and
video clubs.
It may be possible to construct intermediate circuits. This is begin-
ning to take place in large and medum-size cities where small "art cine-
mas" with daily multiple programming have been established. In some
cases, commercial television, and not only the "cultural channels," car-
ries out this function. Surveys at movie theaters and video clubs on what
people want to see on television and video show that mass audiences
are more diversified and complex than is assumed by those who divide
them into the educated and the entertained.
The system of video clubs seems condemned to being the most mo-
notonous circuit in terms of repertoire. This is due to its speedy eco-
nomic success as a purveyor almost exclusively of U.S.-made entertain-
 From the Public to the Private 121

ment. In Mexico, as in other countries, this aesthetic unilateralism is

more the result of the pragmatic criteria of business than a careful at-
tention to the interests and preferences of viewers. In a way, the "neg-
lect" of the internal differences in the mass of videophiles corresponds
to a depersonalized form of consumption: videophiles are less inclined
to ritual than moviegoers, and have: not made prior choices about what
to see. The vast majority of video viewers declared in our surveys that
they go to the clubs without knowing what they will rent.
Nevertheless, a minority of viewers are beginning to inform them-
selves in newspaper sections on what's new in video and in other media
that provide brief reviews. Moreover, there are enough examples of Latin
American countries with better equipped video clubs, as regards quality
and international representation (Argentina, Brazil, Colombia). They
also make good profits, which suggests that including Jim Jarmusch,
Derek Jarman, and the best of Latin American cinema will not sink sim-
ilarly stocked businesses in Mexico. Some examples of the new Mexi-
can cinema lead us to such optimistic predictions. Danzon, which sold
twenty-five thousand cassettes, is not the only example. On this view,
neither television nor video are substitutes for movie houses; there is,
rather, an interdependence between the three media that can contribute
to the revitalization of cinematographic production, which is what hap-
pened in European coutnries.
It is reasonable to think that the integration of the audiovisual
field is based not only on the complementarity of cinema, television,
and video as regards production and distribution. When we observe
changes in audience habits, we have grounds for surmising that view-
ers might propose solutions for the combination of cinema with reper-
toires available in movie houses and on television and video. Movies
today are a multimedia process, followed by multimedia spectators.
Perhaps this integrated vision of the various distribution circuits
for film and the greater attention to the cultural diversities of publics
will liberate us from the spectacular uniformity with which the crisis of
the audience is currently being addressed. World cinema does not seem
to be the only way to intensify the connections of film and publics, nor
to give a shot in the arm to sagging national cinemas. Even Spielberg's
films and those of other astute market multiculturalists can backfire
from too much of a good thing: the obsession to chock their films with
attractive ingredients from eveywhere. No need to even mention what
happens in the hands of less expert filmmakers who kill a story's verisimil-
itude to satisfy the demands of international coproducers, who must have
 122 From the Public to the Private

or get rid of this or that actor. When it seemed that Raul de la Torre's
Funes, un gran amor was going to receive U.S. financing, the owner of
the whorehouse was cast as a North American. When the money came,
it was Italian, so Gian Maria Volonte was chosen to play that role.
Such a circumstance brings into existence a new category of characters:
the foreigners. In many recent Argentine films, curious characters wend
their way through the plot without the slightest idea of what they are
doing there; sometimes they even admit it. The most obvious example is
Volonte's Funes. .., who meanders through the film muttering unintel-
ligible utterances and who finally flees terrified, at the same time as the
whorehouse disappears, this whorehouse of the fictive narrative, of the
absurd story of the film and the grotesque project that he was bamboo-
zled into. 12

The large demand for films that deal with historical themes or con-
temporary social problems is evidence that light entertainment is not
the only reason why people continue to see films. For large numbers,
which are even higher among the youngest viewers or the most edu-
cated, the problematic treatment of current issues, close to everyday
life, as well as intercultural matters and artistic innovations, is the mo-
tivation for watching movies. The diversification of tastes might have
something to do with the cultural formation of a democratic citizenship.
The question is to what extent this variety of interests will be con-
sidered in policies for the production and distribution of films, even
when they are not the most profitable. Without a more active role on
the part of public power in the definition of the rules of use and circu-
lation of film, seeking, for example, greater financing in the television
and video sectors, it is unlikely that a quality cinema can be promoted,
one that will also serve to fill movie houses and help increase profits.
Will we have film for publics or for corporate executives? Are these mu-
tually exclusive options?
 Chapter 8

Multicultural Policies and Integration via

the Market

I n 1994 the Latin American presidential summit held two meetings in

two emblematic cities to try to reanimate a project that had languished
for some time: regional integration. The first, held in June in Cartagena
de Indias, included a representative of the Spanish government; the sec-
ond, held in December in Miami, included Clinton but not Fidel Castro.
The first attempt to include this continent in the world economy
took place five hundred years ago. Homogeneous labor-control meth-
ods in different regions facilitated the unification of local styles of pro-
duction and consumption. The Christianization of the Indians, their
introduction to literacy in Spanish and Portuguese, the design of colo-
nial and subsequently modern urban space, the uniformization of po-
litical and educational systems engendered enabled one of the most effec-
tive homogenizing processes on the planet. With the exception, perhaps,
of the Arab countries, there is no other area of the world where such a
large number of independent states share the same language, history,
and dominant religion, or have occupied for more than five centuries a
more or less shared position in their relation to metropolitan countries.
Nevertheless, this historic integration contributed little to consistent
economic development or to competitive participation in global ex-

123
 124 Multicultural Policies and Integration

change. In the cultural sphere, despite the multiplication of integrating

organizations since the 19505Organization of American States (OAS),
Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (CEPAL),
Latin American Free Trade Association (ALALC), and so onLatin
American countries have not even been able to establish lasting forms
of collaboration and reciprocal knowledge. It is still almost impossible
to find Central American books in Montevideo, Bogota, or Mexico. We
can learn through U.S. news agencies that Argentine, Brazilian, and Mex-
ican films have won prizes in international festivals. But such news
sources do not distribute them throughout the continent. Our publi-
cations, films, and musical works have just as much difficulty entering
North America and Europe as do our steel, our grain, and our crafts.
Two decades ago, developmentalismlike other evolutionary mod-
ernizing tendenciesattributed Latin American disintegration and
backwardness to "cultural obstacles," that is, to those traditions that dif-
ferentiated the region. There was confidence that with industrialization
our societies would be able to modernize homogeneously and establish
fluid linkages among themselves. This did happen, in part. It is now
easier to communicate via television networks than through books, or
via fax than through the mail.
Nevertheless, there persist marked ethnic, regional, and national dif-
ferences among Latin American countries. And we no longer believe
that modernization will do away with them. On the contrary, the so-
cial sciences tend to accept Latin America's heterogeneity and the coex-
istence of diverse historical temporalities that are articulated to a degree
but not dissolved in a uniform style of globalization. Multitemporal and
multicultural heterogeneity is not an obstacle that needs removal but a
necessary piece of information for any development and integration
program.
However, the free-trade agreements that promote greater economic
integration (such as NAFTA among Mexico, the United States, and
Canada; MERCOSUR and other accords among Latin American coun-
tries) have little interest in the possibilities and obstacles presented by
greater social disintegration and the low level of cultural integration in
the continent. The cultural policies of each country and their exchanges
with others are still programmed as if economic globalization and tech-
nological innovations had not already begun to reconfigure identities,
beliefs, conceptualizations of what is one's own, and one's connections
to others.
 Multicultural Policies and Integration 125

Indigenous Peoples and Globalization

In order to understand the current challenges of the multicultural char-
acter of Latin American development projects, we should distinguish
between two of its modalities: on the one hand, its multiple ethnicities;
on the other, the multicultural outcome of modern forms of segmenta-
tion and the organization of culture in industrialized societies.
Indigenous rebellions and mobilizations bring home the importance
of Latin America's multiethnic relations. Their complexity, however, is
quite evident in everyday life circumstances. Many branches of our
economies cannot develop without the participation of the 30 million
indigenous people who live in Latin America. These groups possess dif-
ferentiated territories, their own languages (whose speakers are increas-
ing in certain regions), and work and consumption habits that distin-
guish them. Two and a half million Aymaras, 700,000 Mapuches, more
than half a million Mixtecos, 2 million Mayas, 2 million Nahuas and 2
million Quiches, and approximately 10 million Quechuas have remained
a fundamental part of Chile, Bolivia, Peru, Ecuador, Guatemala, and
Mexico throughout their five centurieslong resistance.
There is no dearth of research on what these multiethnic relations
represent in processes of modernization and integration. As modern-
ization becomes problematic and it is obvious that metropolitan mod-
els of development are not applicable mechanically in Latin America,
that version of history that considered modern technologies incompat-
ible with non-Western traditions is no longer compelling. It is thus feasi-
ble to focus on the sometimes positive role of cultural diversity in eco-
nomic growth and in popular strategies of resistance. On this view,
ethnic and religious solidarity is seen as contributing to social cohesion
and production techniques and traditional consumption habits are under-
stood to be the basis of alternative forms of development.1
In some societies, consensus is achieved through multicultural poli-
cies that recognize diverse modes of economic organization and politi-
cal representation. Some examples are ethnodevelopment programs in
various Latin American countries, legislation to guarantee the auton-
omy of indigenous peoples on Nicaragua's Atlantic Coast, and juridical
reforms of ethnic issues that are currently being negotiated in Mexico.
These are examples of a partial shift from paternalistic indigenismo to
modes of greater self-determination.2 But these attempts at reformula-
tion are not instituted without resistance from racist elites, who still see
 126 Multicultural Policies and Integration

indigenous cultures as antiquated remnants or mere survivals that are

of interest only to folklorists and tourists. On the other hand, many
indigenous groups refuse to be integrated, even in pluralist societies,
because they consider ethnicities to be "potential nations," completely
autonomous political unities.'
Neoliberal economic policies have intensified these conflicts. In the
past decade, they accentuated poverty and marginalization among In-
dians and mestizos, and they continue to aggravate migration, displace-
ment, and struggles over land and political power. Intercultural conflicts
and racism are on the increase in many national border areas and in all
large cities on the continent. Never before has it been so necessary to
develop education, communications, and labor-regulation policies in
the interest of greater interethnic democratic coexistence. In countries
such as Peru and Colombia, peasant and urban economic conditions
have deteriorated, spurring guerrilla movements, alliances between peas-
ant struggles and narcotraffickers, and other explosive expressions of
social disintegration. The segregationist fundamentalism of ethnic or
paraethnic movements such as Sendero Luminoso only makes it more
difficult to implement integration projects. In the United States, the
restructuring of labor conditions and increasing racism have led to in-
tensified repression of Latin American migrants, contradicting the in-
tegrative tendencies of free-trade agreements.
Despite the social upheavals that continue to vex intercultural rela-
tions, an analysis of the issues raised by these relations cannot be under-
stood only in terms of the antagonism between dominant and subaltern
groups. There are also promising changes in some government policies
and new modes of relating traditions to modernization among indige-
nous groups.
Presently there are movements that balance their energetic claims
for cultural and political autonomy with demands for full integration
in modern development. They appropriate modern forms of knowledge
as well as technological and cultural resources. They combine traditional
healing procedures with allopathic medicine, ancient techniques of ar-
tisanal and peasant production with international credit and the use of
computers. They seek autonomous democratic changes in their regions
and egalitarian integration in modern nations. Guatemalan, Mexican,
and Brazilian peasants send fax reports on the violation of human rights
to international organizations. Indians from many different countries use
video and E-mail to lobby for the defense of alternative ways of life.
 Multicultural Policies and Integration 127

At least in these cases, the problems of socioeconomic integration

do not seem to ensue from the incompatibility between tradition and
modernization. The failure of globalizing policies stems from a lack of
flexibility in modernization programs, cultural incomprehension in their
application, and, of course, the persistence of discriminatory habits in
institutions and among hegemonic groups.4 State reform in the guise
of deregulation of services and subordination of public responsibilities
to private interests does very little to expand the social agency of these
multiple styles of life and the various forms of participation of margin-
alized sectors.

The Failure to Coordinate Cultural Policies and Consumption

The problems raised by multicultural phenomena at the end of this
century cannot be reduced to multiethnic conflicts, nor to the coexis-
tence of diverse regions within each nation. The forms of thought and
life connected to local or national territories are only one part of cul-
tural development. For the first time in history, the majority of com-
modities and messages received in each nation have not been produced
in their own territory, do not result from the particular relations of pro-
duction, and do not convey meanings connected exclusively with given
regions. They operate, in our view, according to a transnational, deter-
ritorialized system of production and diffusion.
Since the 19505, the principal means of access to cultural commodi-
ties, aside from schooling, are the electronic communications media.
The number of homes with radio and television in Latin America is
equal to, and in some areas even greater than, that of homes in which
family members have completed primary school. Although textbooks
have provided a modest integration of Latin America, they are usually
limited to a national-historical perspective and often distort the his-
tory of neighboring countries. These shortcomings are not overcome
by the historically weak information and "up-to-the-minute world re-
ports" on television and radio. Our enormous consumption of the mass
media, greater than that of the metropolitan countries, as pointed out
earlier, is not nourished by endogenous media production with better
information and greater potential to bring Latin American countries to-
gether. Like cinema, televisionand radio to a lesser degreegive pri-
ority to information and entertainment that originates in the United
States. The representation of the diversity of national cultures is low in
 128 Multicultural Policies and Integration

all of our nations, and there is even less airtime given to the cultures of
other Latin American countries.
As we near the end of the century, we must turn to the actions and
decisions of those responsible for cultural policies if we are to deal effec-
tively with the problems raised by the culture industries (the primary
agents) and globalization (the main tendency) for our multicultural so-
cieties. We also need to ask who can be integrated into these processes
and what are the conditions for the democratization of transnational
integration.
The following summarizes the approaches taken by those organi-
zations most involved in dealing with (or neglecting) these problems:
1. State cultural policies are still focused on the preservation of mon-
uments and folkloric heritages, and in the promotion of the fine arts
(visual arts, theater, classical music), whose audiences are diminishing.
Public action regarding electronic industries has been reduced to the
privatization of radio and television stations as well as other circuits of
mass diffusion, precisely those in which there have been attempts to
sustainalmost always with little successartistic and information
programs that represent cultural diversity.
2. In contrast, large transnational private corporations (mostly U.S.-
based, but also Latin Americanbased conglomerates such as Televisa
and Rede Globo) have dedicated themselves for decades to the most
profitable and most influential communications media. They have thus
penetrated into family life and become the principal organizers of mass
entertainment and information. Some Latin American corporations have
produced recreational programs with broad transnational coverage, thus
favoring a greater presence of national or "Hispano-American" themes
and styles. Recent audience surveys show that they have high receptiv-
ity among the popular classes. More educated people prefer U.S. TV
series, films, and music.5 But the main question today, in my view, is
not how many foreign or national messages circulate (although this may
still be important), but rather the disdain or apathy of all programs
(whether Dallas, Cristina, or Siempre en domingo) toward minority or
regional cultures that have not been sanctioned by world folklore. Also
deplorable is the censorship of debates about society itself and the lack
of a diversity of information indispensable for the construction of citi-
zenship and integration with other countries in the region.
3. The cultural actions of international organizations and those pro-
moted by the meetings of ministers of culture reproduce on a Latin
American scale the view of states, which gives priority to high culture,
 Multicultural Policies and Integration 129

on the one hand, and monuments and folkloric heritage, on the other.
They give preference to a conservationist vision of identity and to an
integrationist view based on traditional cultural goods and institutions.
For example, of the sixty-seven projects recognized by UNESCO as ac-
tivities of the "World Decade for Cultural Development" in Latin Amer-
ica in 199091, twenty-eight were dedicated to conservation of cultural
heritage; seventeen to participation in cultural life and development;
ten to the cultural dimension of development; eight to advancement of
creativity and activity in the arts; three to the relation between culture,
science, and technology; and only one to the mass media.6
Some Latin American governments have recently signed accords to
facilitate the exchange of books, works of art, and antiquities through
customs houses. Mutual cooperation programs have also been created.
Worthy of mention are book collections such as the Biblioteca Ayacu-
cho and the Biblioteca Popular de Latinoamerica y el Caribe; the jour-
nal supplement series Perio-libros, which includes works by prominent
writers and artists; the decision to create a Latin American Fund for
the Arts and another for Cultural Development; Latin American en-
dowed chairs and Latin American and Caribbean Culture Houses in
each country. All of these are definite advances in the mutual knowl-
edge of the continent's nations. But these measures are limited to the
field of written culture and "classical" plastic arts and music.
Meanwhile, the Working Group on Cultural Policies of the Latin
American Social Science Council (CLACSO) has carried out research
on cultural consumption in large Latin American cities that offers data
similar to ours in Mexico City. For example, audiences for high culture
do not exceed 10 percent of the population.7 It is no doubt necessary
to expand support for literature arid the nonindustrialized arts, but at
the end of the twentieth century it does not seem convincing to say
that we are promoting cultural development and integration if we lack
public policies for the mass media through which 90 percent of the in-
habitants of this continent inform and entertain themselves.
4. Cultural resources involving everything from traditional artisanal
knowledges to radio and video programs also circulate in nongovern-
mental organizations and associations of independent artists and media
workers. Festivals, exhibitions and workshops, networks of alternative
audiovisual programs, magazines, and books in which cultural develop-
ment is documentedall of these are sponsored with scarce local fund-
ing and a great amount of free work, sometimes with subsidies from
universities and international foundations. According to a directory put
 130 Multicultural Policies and Integration

out by the Institute for Latin America, there are more than five thou-
sand independent groups of education, culture, and communications
producers in our region. We value their contributions toward the for-
mation and organization of popular sectors in defense of their rights,
and toward the documentation of their life conditions and cultural pro-
duction. But their actions are strictly of local scope and cannot be taken
as a substitute for the actions of states. These independent groups al-
most never include the mass media and consequently have little influ-
ence over the majority's cultural habits and ways of thinking.
That states, corporations, and independent organizations work in
isolation hinders the development of multicultural societies in Latin
America; instead, it produces greater segmentation and inequality in
consumption, impoverishment of endogenous production, and discour-
agement of international integration. In recent years, the reduction of
public investment and weak action on the part of private enterprise have
produced the following paradox: greater trade among Latin American
countries and with metropolitan ones is promoted at the same time that
we produce ever fewer books, films, and records. Integration is encour-
aged at the same time that we have fewer things to export and lower
salaries reduce what majorities can consume.
The drawbacks are even more dramatic with regard to Latin Amer-
ica's access to cutting-edge technologies and communications high-
ways: satellites, computers, faxes, and the other media that provide in-
formation necessary to make decisions and innovate. The subordination
of Latin American countries will get even worse with the elimination
of free-trade agreements, trade barriers to foreign products, and the few
surviving subsidies for local technological development. We will be left
more vulnerable to transnational capital and cultural trends devised out-
side the region as there is an increase in cultural and scientific depend-
ence on cutting-edge communications technologies, which require high
financial investments and generate more rapid innovations. The multi-
culturalism generated by these trends does not represent diverse histor-
ical traditions but rather stratification resulting from the unequal ac-
cess to advanced communications by countries and sectors internal to
each society.
How do the modes of access to transnational communications sys-
tems produce new forms of sociocultural stratification? The incorpora-
tion into global culture of the great majorities, especially in peripheral
countries, is limited exclusively to the first phase of audiovisual indus-
tries: free entertainment and information on radio and television. Small
 Multicultural Policies and Integration 131

sectors of the middle and popular classes have updated and upgraded
their information as citizens through access to the second stage of the
media, which includes cable television, environmental and health edu-
cation, as well as political information on video, and so on. Only small
fractions of the corporate, political, and academic elite are connected
to the most dynamic forms of communication, to that third stage that
includes fax. E-mail, satellite dishes, as well as the informational and
playful interactivity of aficionado videomakers and horizontally organ-
ized international networks. In some cases, a handful of popular groups
gain access to these latter circuits through the dissemination of com-
munity newspapers, radio stations, and video production.
The extension of the last two models of communication is a key
condition for the development of democratic forms of citizenship to-
day. People need access to international information and must have the
capacity to intervene in meaningful ways in global and regional integra-
tion processes. The multinational complexity of problems such as envi-
ronmental contamination, drug traffic, and technological innovations
requires information that transcends local spaces still circumscribed by
nations, and coordinated action in a supranational public sphere.8
What is being done in Latin America to develop the forms of citi-
zenship that require the most advanced and interactive forms of cul-
tural difrusio>n and consumption? If we believe that endogenous produc-
tion and the representation of regional interests in these fields require
not only the organization of civil society but also state initiatives, then
we need to keep track of the amounts invested to this end.
Latin America has more than 8.3 percent of the world's population
but only 4.3 percent of engineers and scientists active in research and
development, and it only invests 1.3 percent of all the resources in this
field.9 These figures raise questions about the participation of a conti-
nent such as Latin America in international markets and about its ca-
pacity for self-management in the future.

Cultural Integration in an Era of Free Trade

The multicultural integration of Latin America and the Caribbean re-
quires constitutional and political reforms that guarantee the rights of
diverse groups in the context of globalization, that promote understand-
ing and respect for differences in education and in traditional forms
of interaction. But it is also the responsibility of public institutions to
develop programs to facilitate reciprocal information and knowledge
 132 Multicultural Policies and Integration

in culture industries that provide mass communicationsradio, TV,

film, video, and interactive electronic systemsto different peoples and
subgroups within each society.
We need policies to promote the formation of a Latin American
audiovisual space. In an era in which film, video, records, and other in-
dustrial forms of communication are unable to recoup their high costs
if distributed exclusively in a given country, the integration of Latin
America becomes an indispensable resource for the expansion of markets,
thus facilitating our own production. I would like to mention three
proposals that adumbrate what these policies might look like:

1. The creation of common Latin American markets for books, film, tel-
evision, and video, accompanied by concrete measures to promote pro-
duction and favor the free circulation of cultural commodities. (The
steps taken in this direction, more declarative than practical, demon-
strate the need for more fine-tuned diagnostics of the consumption
habits in Latin American countries as well as their most determined
public policies.)
2. The establishment of quotas for minimum screen time, radio air-
time, and other Latin American cultural commodities in each coun-
try of the region. (Notice that we do not recommend returning to
the narrow policy that established a 50 percent quota for national mu-
sic and cinema; this new suggestion is inspired by a 1993 Spanish law
that took into account regional conditions of production and circu-
lation and decreed that movie houses in cities with more than 125,000
inhabitants should show 30 percent European films.) The promotion
of a Latin American market for cultural commodities will not be
effective unless it is accompanied by measures that protect that pro-
duction through its circulation and consumption.
3. The creation of a Latin American Fund for Audiovisual Production
and Diffusion. Its role would be to finance in part film, television,
and video production, to provide smooth coordination of state, cor-
porate, and civil institutions, to imagine new channels of distribu-
tion (video rental outlets, high-quality cultural programs, mass audi-
ences for national and regional television networks, a Latin American
cable signal).10

Free-trade agreements should not foment an indiscriminate open-

ing of markets, but take into consideration the unequal development
 Multicultural Policies and Integration 133

of national systems as well as the protection of the rights of produc-

tion, communication, and consumption by ethnic and minority groups.
It is necessary to regulate the participation of foreign capital, including
that of larger Latin American economies or of transnational corpora-
tions based in the region, in order to prevent monopolies from stran-
gling the cultural industries of the smaller countries. But more impor-
tant than restrictions, it is necessary to seek collaboration agreements
that balance the relations between "truly exporting countries (Brazil,
Mexico), emerging exporters (Argentina, Chile, Venezuela), and those
that only import (the rest)." 11
A democratic multicultural development will be realized in each
nation only if there are favorable conditions for the expansion of re-
gional, ethnic, and minority radio and television stations; or at least of
programming designated for the expression of different cultures, sub-
ject to collective public interest rather than commercial profitability.
The promotion of these policies requires a reformulation of the role
of the state and of civil society as representatives of the public interest.
It has been said that it is necessary to put an end to overly protectionist
populist states in order to reduce the risks of centralization, clientelism,
and bureaucratic corruption. But after a decade of privatization we have
not seen private corporations make telephones or airlines function any
better, or even elevate the quality of radio and television programs.
Rather than mire ourselves in the quagmire of the state versus the mar-
ket, we have to create policies to coordinate the diverse actors who par-
ticipate in cultural production and intermediation.
The goal is not to reinstall the proprietary state, but to rethink the
role of the state as an arbiter or guardian against subordinating collec-
tive needs for information, recreation, and innovation to the profit mo-
tive. To guard against the risks of state intervention and the frivolous
homogenizaton of diverse cultures by the market, it is necessary to get
beyond the binary option between the two and to create spaces where the
multiple initiatives of civil society can emerge: social movements, artists'
groups, independent radio and television stations, unions, ethnic groups,
and associations of consumers, radio listeners, and television viewers.
Only the multiplication of actors can favor a democratic cultural de-
velopment and the representation of multiple identities. The new role
of states and international organizations (UNESCO, OAS, SELA [Latin
American Economic System], ALADI [Latin American Association for
Integration], etc.) will be to reconstruct public space, understood as a
 134 Multicultural Policies and Integration

multicultural collective space where diverse agents (states, corporations,

and independent groups) will be able to negotiate agreements for the
development of public interests. Such changes in communications and
cultural policies are necessary for the exercise of diverse forms of re-
sponsible citizenship, as conditioned by transformations in sociocultu-
ral settings, current forms of consumption, and transnational integration.
 Part III

Negotiation, Integration, and

Getting Unplugged
This page intentionally left blank
 Chapter 9

Negotiation of Identity in Popular Classes?

A ny serious attempt at rethinking citizenship should endeavor to

understand how the process of negotiation relates to the other con-
cepts invoked in the title of this chapter. Indeed, recent studies seeking
to redefine the concepts of identity, class, and the popular have taken
the analysis of negotiation processes as a key heuristic. But I place the
question mark at the end of the title to ask whether or not negotiation
is possible in the current context of the restructuring of political and
communicational spheres.
Without playing down the history of each of these terms or what
specific sets of issues they evoke, [ would like to deal conjointly with
the crises of identity, social classes, and the popular. What makes this
joint analysis possible is the convergence of crises in each domain: on-
tologico-funclamentalist conceptions of identity, historico-dialectical con-
ceptions of class, and melodramatic conceptions of the popular. His-
torically, the trajectory of this triple crisis might be characterized as the
passage from the epic affirmation of popular identities, which is an in-
tegral feature of national societies, to the acknowledgment of transna-
tional conflicts and negotiations in the constitution of popular and
other identities.

137
 138 Negotiation of Identity in Popular Classes?

As this century winds down, however, we are also experiencing a

reorganization of symbolic and political markets resulting in the disso-
lution of the spaces of negotiation. We have already noted in previous
chapters that the subordination of political action to mass-mediated spec-
tacle undermines the importance of parties, unions, strikes, and public
mass demonstrations, that is, those very instances in which negotiation
takes place.
I should explain that in speaking of "negotiation of identity," I will
be concerned only with cultural aspects and will only occasionally refer
to the political dimensions of negotiation. Likewise, I focus only on
questions of daily life, or of the interaction of cultural policies and pop-
ular viewers and listeners, rather than on negotiation as a matter of in-
stitutions, labor unions, or well-organized movements.1

Fundamentalists and Eclectics

Today a reflection on these matters should begin with a critique of on-
tologico-fundamentalist conceptions of identities, which we have carried
out in part in the preceding pages. We examined the waning of roman-
ticism and nationalism as ideological bases for conceptualizing iden-
tity. We can no longer consider the members of society as belonging to
one homogeneous culture, with a corresponding single distinct and co-
herent identity. The transnationalization of the economy and symbols
has eroded the verisimilitude of this mode of legitimizing identities. If
we follow Arjun Appadurai's classification, there are at least five con-
temporary processes that challenge this territorial and nationalist char-
acterization of discreet identities: (i) etbnoscapes: demographic move-
ments of immigrants, tourists, refugees, exiles, and temporary workers;
(2) technoscapes: the flows produced by technologies and multinational
corporations; (3) finanscapes: currency exchanges in international mar-
kets; (4) mediascapes: repertoires of images and information created for
planetary distribution by culture industries; and (5) ideoscapes: repre-
sentative ideological models of what might be called Western modernity,
that is, conceptions of democracy, liberty, welfare, and human rights
that transcend the definitions of particular identities.2 To these ideolog-
ical matrices, I would add other forms of traditional non-Western thought
(for example, Eastern, Latin American) that are diffused throughout
other continents.
Confronted by these contemporary transformations that have rela-
tivized the foundations of national identities, some have turned to pop-
 Negotiation of Identity in Popular Classes? 139

ular cultures as the last preserve of traditions. As ahistorical essences,

they are appealed to as the last resistance to globalization. The recrude-
scence of nationalisms, regionalisras, and ethnicisms at the end of the
twentieth century acts to reduce the historical work of the incessant con-
struction and readaptation of identities to a simple exaltation of local
traditions. The warlike fundamentalism of many movementsrang-
ing from those in the ex-Yugoslavia and the ex-USSR to certain groups
in Latin Americaannuls any space of transaction. For such groups,
identity is not something that can be negotiated; it is simply affirmed
and defended.
These movements express, in part, identitarian demands that have
been suppressed or incompletely incorporated in the constitution of
modern nations. In some cases, their dogmatism and violence are pro-
portional to the oppression suffered by broad social sectors and to the
stupidity demonstrated by the neoliberal mode of globalization in ig-
noring ethnic and regional particularities. Why, then, do we claim that
these fundamentalist reactions are in crisis and have no future? Limiting
ourselves to Latin America, it can be said that such ways of "resolving"
identity questions are untenable in countries with a very hetereogeneous
sociocultural composition that have been undergoing centuries-long
processes of modern internationalization. It is quite unlikely and im-
practicable that the multiple ways of being Argentine, Brazilian, or Pe-
ruvian can be reduced to a fixed package of archaic features, to a mono-
chrome and ahistoric heritage.
Policies that acknowledge the important contribution of negotiation
are based on the constitutive role of transactions in the development of
cultures. I have already referred to anthropological studies of Latin Amer-
ican indigenous groups' strategies of work, commerce, and consump-
tion. The energetic defense of their ethnic heritage and their political
autonomy is not at odds with their intercultural transactions and their
critical integration into modernity. Indigenous peoples often seek the
most advanced techniques of production and consumption of industrial
commodities, and demand access to education and to mass communica-
tions. Although there may be ethnic movements that resist Westerniza-
tion, broad sectors nevertheless appropriate knowledge as well as mod-
ern technological and cultural resources.
Adopting modernity does not mean that they necessarily substitute
their traditions. Indigenous groups are often eclectic because they have
discovered that the pure preservation of traditions is not always the most
appropriate path to reproduce and better their situation. As I showed
 140 Negotiation of Identity in Popular Classes?

in a previous book dealing with the transformation in craft production,3

the negotiated reformulations of their iconography and traditional prac-
tices are tactics that enable them to expand trade and earn money that
will permit them to better their daily life. Multicultural consumption,
through which they seek to satisfy their needs by taking advantage of
their traditional resources and those of different modern societies, re-
veals great flexibility in how popular sectors reconstitute themselves.
We should not, however, idealize the imaginative adaptations of tra-
ditional groups. As Eduardo Menendez's research shows, the transac-
tions of popular sectors in combining traditional and scientific medical
practices supposes "that they accept and 'solve' their problems within
the limits established by the dominant classes." Within these limits, sub-
altern groups try to achieve effectivity through self-exploitation and the
subordinated appropriation of "external" production.4 In contrast to the
analyses of Friedrich Earth and R. C. Harman, 5 who understand trans-
actions as relations of reciprocity, the choice of intermediary means of
negotiation, adopted as their own by popular groups, demonstrates that
it is also difficult to shake loose of the conditions of oppression. In the
midst of economic recession, these groups demand higher salaries at the
same time that they limit their consumption. Their reaction to politi-
cal hegemony, which they are unable to modify, is to transact personal
arrangements to obtain individual benefits. The meaning of these acts
can only be considered as an impoverishment if they are interpreted
within the dominationsubordination paradigm. A broader and more
detailed consideration of the daily interactions of subaltern majorities
reveals that Latin American countries are hybrid societies where differ-
ent forms of disputing and negotiating the meaning of modernity are
in constant contention.

From Epic to Melodrama: The Postrevolution

The reconversion of traditional symbolic heritages in contemporary eco-
nomic and symbolic markets erodes the coherence and future receptiv-
ity of the fundamentalist epic. However, the binary opposition between
what is and is not popular continues to organize a great part of politi-
cal and academic thought, not only in the traditional currents of the
right but also in those of the left, not only in folklore studies but also
in sociological research on modern processes. This is borne out in what
remains of Marxism, as well as other theories that deal with social con-
flict. Their historicism had greater explanatory power than the natural-
 Negotiation of Identity in Popular Classes? 141

ization of the popular by fundamentalists. The notions of class and class

struggle served to show that identity is modified in keeping with histor-
ical changes in the productive forces and struggles among the relations
of production. Consequently, the popular was no longer defined by a
series of internal features or a repertoire of preindustrial contents, pre-
dating the massification of culture, as is the case in national-populist
doctrines and in the majority of folklore studies. The Gramscian cur-
rent, which best represents this historicism, characterized the popular
not according to its essence but by its position in relation to the hege-
monic classes.
It is not the purpose of this chapter to analyze the waning recep-
tivity of the Gramscian framework as a perhaps too mechanical effect
of the collapse of so-called socialist political systems and projects. I am
more interested in exploring what this model facilitates and makes diffi-
cult from a heuristic perspective, particularly in the style of research
that it foments. These difficulties emerge precisely from the scarce or
empty role attributed to negotiation in many of these studies.
Neo-Gramscian anthropologistsespecially in Italy, where the most
valuable contributions to the study of the popular have been realized
generally avoid the risk of the Manichaean. They pay attention to the
"network of reciprocal exchanges, borrowings, and conditionings" among
hegemonic and popular cultures.6 However, the numerous Latin Amer-
ican studies that adopted this orientation in the 1970s and 1980s re-
duced the complex relations between hegemony and subalternity to a
simple bipolar confrontation. The most political and voluntaristic Gram-
scian currents emphasized the autonomy and resistance of the popular
classes with little substantiation. Many research projects turned into a
partial catalog of the actions through which popular sectors gave conti-
nuity to their traditions of opposition to hegemonic ideology and poli-
tics. Certain tendencies of anthropological ethnicism and local "grass-
roots" thought still share this schematic view.
The defeat of popular movements in recent years brings to the cen-
ter of debate a question ignored by those who base their research and
political practice on this hypothesis of popular autonomy, which is as-
sociated with revolutionary or insurrectional voluntarism. The question
is: Why do the subaltern classes collaborate so frequently with those who
oppress them? For example, they vote in elections, and make pacts with
their oppressors in matters of daily life and in political confrontations.
Answering this question requires a more complex conception of
power and culture. We suggest that the reduction of interactions among
 142 Negotiation of Identity in Popular Classes?

classes to permanent conflicts, and of politics to war, overlooked the

complicities and reciprocal uses that knit the web of relations between
hegemonic and subaltern groups. The construction of this new perspec-
tive in sociology, anthropology, and communications has been achieved
by a triple reconceptualization: of power, the action of subalterns, and
the structure of intercultural relations.
Thanks to Michel Foucault's contributions, 7 and empirical studies
on social movements, power is no longer seen only as top-down domi-
nation over the dominated but as decentered, multidetermined political
relations, whose conflicts and asymmetries are tempered through com-
promises among unequally positioned actors. Not even in monopolis-
tic concentrations of power, intensified by neoliberal policies, is there
an omnipotent manipulation of sociocultural relations. A range of stud-
ies, from anthropological research on government institutions that work
with popular cultures to investigations into the strategies of communi-
cations corporations, have demonstrated that power is won and renewed
through centers that are disseminated, initiatives that are multipolar, ac-
tions and messages that are adapted to the variety of addressees and cul-
tural references that in every case provide an order that shapes identities.
For example, in our own research on the Fondo Nacional de Fo-
mento a las Artesam'as [National Fund for the Promotion of Crafts] in
Mexico and on the private businessmen who trade in these products,
we found that the relative consensus achieved by them was a result of
the fact that not only do they not exploit artisans economically but they
even offer them services: loans, assistance with bank credits, technical
and stylistic training to increase their marketability, and help with the
rules of commerce, which artisans do not fully understand.
The "solidarity" expressed through these interactions does not di-
minish the degree of oppression suffered by the majority of the thirty
million indigenous Latin Americans, and among them the eleven to four-
teen million artisans. However, when economic domination is com-
bined with an exchange of services, it is understandable that their first
course of action is not confrontation. Rather, their actions reveal them
to be a complex combination of workers, subordinates, clients, and be-
neficiaries who try to take advantage of the rivalry among institutions
and private agencies.8 Symbolic interactionists might say that negotia-
tion is a key component in the functioning of institutions and socio-
cultural fields. Identities are constituted not only in the bipolar conflict
between classes but also in contexts of institutional actionin a factory,
a hospital, a schoolthat operate insofar as all of their participants,
 Negotiation of Identity in Popular Classes? 143

whether hegemonic or subaltern, consider themselves part of a "negoti-

ated order."9 Conflicts among different and unequal actors are processed
within the (revisable or negotiated) order established by institutions and
more or less institutionalized everyday structures of interaction.
How are subaltern urban groups positioned in relation to conflicts
and negotiation? In answer to this question, I will mention briefly two
evaluation studies of cultural policies in two very different countries,
Mexico and Argentina, that nevertheless share one characteristic: asym-
metric and intense intercultural relations.
The first study was conducted in Tijuana, on the border between
Mexico and the United States. We evaluated the activities of the Pro-
grama Cultural de las Fronteras [border cultural program].10 This pro-
gram was created by the Mexican government in 1982 to "affirm Mexi-
can identity" on the northern border against the threat posed by increasing
U.S. influence. The activities of this program were guided by appeal to
a Mesoamerican identity more in congruence with the central section
of the country and with traditional features deriving from the evolu-
tion of indigenous and colonial cultures, which were stronger in the
center and south than in the arid lands of northern Mexico. The largely
bilingual inhabitants of Tijuana and other border cities, whose interac-
tion with North Americans has led to exuberant hybridization, claim
that they are no less Mexican than their compatriots from other regions.
Indeed, they argue that the sixty million crossings per year between Ti-
juana and San Diego keep them constantly aware of difference and in-
equality. Consequently, they claim that they have a less idealized image
of the United States than the residents of the capital who are similarly
influenced by television and imported consumer commodities. They
add that those who encounter U.S. culture from a distance, through
the consumption of images and objects detached from social interac-
tion, are subject to a more abstract and passive "gringo" influence. In
contrast, those who negotiate economic and cultural matters on a daily
basis necessarily distinguish between what is one's own and what is for-
eign, between what they admire and what they reject from the United
States. In this regard, it is instructive to consider how migrant Indians
organize on both sides of the border according to their ethnic group
and the region from which they come (Oaxaca, Michoacan, Guerrero).
At the same time that they express their original identity in specific spaces
and rituals, they also reformulate their cultural patrimony, acquiring
knowledges and customs that enable them to reposition themselves in
new labor, sociocultural, and political relations. They undoubtedly con-
 144 Negotiation of Identity in Popular Classes?

tinue to be Mexican (of which U.S. racism continually reminds them),

but their identity is polyglot and cosmopolitan, endowed with a flexi-
ble capacity to process new information and understand habits that are
different from those of their original symbolic matrices.
The other study, which complements these observations, examined
how the Programa Cultural en Barrios [neighborhood cultural program]
in the municipality of Buenos Aires fared in dealing with the needs and
demands of Bolivian immigrants who enrolled in the program in Villa
Soldati, one of the poorest zones of the Argentine capital." Initiated in
1983 after the military dictatorship, this program was conceived as part
of Raul Alfonsfn's governing policy. Aimed at democratizing access to
culture and promoting new modes of political participation, it endeav-
ored to eradicate what survived of authoritarianism in the social fabric.
On the one hand, the program sought to deliver cultural goods that
were almost always restricted to elites (conferences, concerts, and art
workshops), the hypothesis being that democratization of opportuni-
ties would by itself bring about the appropriation of those goods. On
the other hand, some cultural promoters who celebrated the ethnic ori-
gin of the inhabitants encouraged activities rooted in the local culture.
Some of these, such as the celebration of the Virgin of Copacabana,
were successful; others, which also seemed to be related to what the
Bolivian migrants considered "their own," found little receptivity. One
of the reasons for the difference in uptake was that the inhabitants of
the barrio were organizing their culture in order to adapt it to the de-
mands of living and working in Buenos Aires. For example, it was ob-
served that among the new generations the affirmation of their own
culture did not automatically entail the continuity of language and other
traditional features of the group. For example, consider the answers of
one young Bolivian who studied at the university but continued to live
in the barrio:

"Have you ever considered learning Quechua?"

"No, because one tends to do what is practical in everyday life. I
would only need to learn Quechua if I wanted to become an anthropolo-
gist, return to Bolivia, to a little town in Bolivia, or maybe if I wanted to
speak with a newly arrived Bolivian woman to explain to h e r . . . I don't
know. . . something. Then, for example, I would need to learn . .. But, I
don't know, you leave behind those things that are not going to help
you. . ."
"Does your mother speak it?"
 Negotiation of Identity in Popular Classes? 145

"Not all of the time . . . we never made an effort to learn."

"And what does she think of your not learning Quechua?"
"Well, she too doesn't think it's so necessary. She sees us thrust into
this society and . . . simply believes that we have to live here, in this soci-
ety with whatever exists here, with what prevails in this culture."

It is not common for shantytown dwellers to express themselves in so

complex a manner. I deliberately chose the son of Quechua speakers
who was enrolled in the university. The oscillation between his original
circumstances and his acquired intellectual position gives us an idea of
the speed of transitions, especially in the urban areas of Latin America,
and the broad range of negotiations through which these actors move.
This example also reveals that the loss of language is not necessarily ac-
companied by the loss of ethnic cohesion. Cohesion is provided by the
residential community in an urban barrio in Buenos Aires, experienced
by Bolivians as if it were their own territory. Their experience is analo-
gous to that of Mixteco or Purepecha migrants from Mexico who take
up residence in the poor barrios of California in the United States.
This research showed that the continuity of the group is also
achieved through the conservation of family and festive traditions, the
strongest of which are compadrazgo [godparenthood] and other "non-
modern" bonds of power, often in contradiction with the democratiza-
tion of social and cultural relations. How can a program that is demo-
cratic and respectful of a group's structures be established if the structures
in question are paternalistic, authoritarian, and based on bonds of blood
rather than affinity? Moreover, what if the state that promotes democ-
ratization is also racked by these same nondemocratic characteristics?
The migrants who adapted to life in Argentina and to the large
city demanded in turn that cultural promoters accommodate their cul-
tural codes, formulated in part through processes of apprenticeship in
negotiation with the state. They had learned that the different sections
of the bureaucracy with which they dealt generated different images: a
"clientelist and corrupt" state, a "bureaucratic and inefficient" state, a
"public and no-charge" state, a "welfare" state, or an "authoritarian" state.
Consequently, they guided themselves according to the following rule:
"Our strategy depends on what bureaucrat we deal with." These frag-
mentary and sometimes contradictory representations of the state are
articulated in the structures of bossism and clientelism, in the hierarchi-
cal and asymmetric hierarchies proper to the political culture of each
popular group.
 146 Negotiation of Identity in Popular Classes?

It is not easy to discern what counts as popular within this play of

relations. If we define the popular as the traditional and local culture
of a given group, it seems to characterize only private family life or feasts.
Meanwhile, modern hegemonic culture is acquired by these groups in
order to move within the public world. Yet this culture is not only nor
primarily part of enlightened modernity, which is usually expressed in
objective and democratic rules for political representation. It is also a
complex amalgam of modern and traditional relations of power. Hence
the paradox: those who sought to bring democracy to the locality soon
learned that they had to make pacts with neighborhood bosses in order
to gain access to the dwellers and to insert themselves into local socio-
cultural structures.
The difficulties that "culturally well-meaning" promoters have in
gaining a space within the paternalism of the state and vis-a-vis the mix-
ture of resistance and authoritarianism of subaltern groups reveal that
the "popular" cannot be defined neatly according to the criteria of so-
cioeconomic class analysis. The culturally hybrid features resulting from
cross-class interaction force us to recognize that alongside struggle there
is also negotiation. And negotiation does not appear as a process exter-
nal to the constitution of the actors, to which they might resort on oc-
casion for political convenience. It is a mode of existence, something
intrinsic to the groups that take part in the social drama. Negotiation
is located within collective subjectivity, in the most unconscious cul-
ture of politics and daily life. Its hybrid character, which in Latin Amer-
ica derives from a long history of mixtures and syncretisms, is accentu-
ated in contemporary societies through complex interactions between
the traditional and the modern, the popular and the elite, the subaltern
and the hegemonic.
What do we understand by popular once we accept this perspec-
tive? It is not a scientific concept, with a series of distinctive features
that can be univocally defined. It does not, therefore, warrant an epic
vision of its history or its practices, according to which what is "popu-
lar" is neatly and firmly opposed to whatever is not. Popular designates
the position of certain actors in the drama of struggle and transaction.
That is why some of us have suggested shifting from an epic character-
ization of the popular to a theatrical or melodramatic one.
I would like to recommend reformulating the original question
Why do popular sectors collaborate with those who oppress them?as
well as the following one: Why does the melodrama, from tango and
Mexican film to the police beat and the telenovela, have greater recep-
 Negotiation of Identity in Popular Classes? 147

tivity among popular sectors than any other genre? Jesus Martin Bar-
bero's research on the telenovela identifies the "recognition drama" as
the pivotal element of these narratives: the son recognized by his father
or mother, the wife by her husband, lover, or neighbors. Instead of ref-
erences to the social contract and large sociopolitical structures, the melo-
drama gives greater importance to other primordial forms of sociabil-
ity, such as kinship, neighborhood, territorial, and friendship solidarities.
Martin Barbero asks, "To what extent does the success of melodrama
in these countries relate to the failure of social and political institu-
tions that have developed without any concern for that other sociality,
and that are incapable of assuming its cultural density?"12

From Melodrama to Video Games: Postpolitics

A major feature of the 19805 and 19905 has been the disappearance of
spaces for political negotiation. In this regard, communications analysis
will provide insights analogous to those of anthropological microsocial
analysis by discovering the role of transactions and pacts in social con-
flicts. Communications research helps us understand how the reorgani-
zation of social interaction by video politics strangles possibilities for
negotiation.
Political struggles have become "abstract" owing to the incapacity
of bureaucratic leaders to deal with the sociocultural density of every-
day life. This abstraction is exacerbated as direct action gives way to
electronic mediation. The first decades of Latin American populism,
from the 19305 to the 19505, also saw the expansion of the first mass
media (press and radio). Popular participation, simultaneously promoted
and mediated by these communications agents, was combined with
labor and political organization. Public spaces such as parliaments, and
grassroots action such as street meetings and demonstrations, strikes,
and physical confrontations between the actors of civil society and gov-
ernment powers, put "teeth" into the "concrete" forms of negotiation.
Nowadays, social conflict and the management of its transactions
have been displaced to hermetic places, channeled by forces that the
citizenry has no way of confronting. Where and by whom are deci-
sions made about electoral campaigns that cost millions of dollars? What
forms of monitoring are there for the image-engineering of candidates
whose appeal is not based on their political platforms but on the op-
portunistic machinations of political marketers? Even the stylization of
the product (the candidate's plastic surgery and change of dress, for which
 148 Negotiation of Identity in Popular Classes?

image consultants receive fat fees) is publicized by the press and televi-
sion as part of the preelection political spectacle. This dissolution of
the public sphere as a space for popular participation is aggravated by
technobureaucratic decision making in neoliberal governments. The
conflicts are negotiated by politicians (increasingly technicians rather
than politicians in the traditional sense) and businessmen; labor unions
and social movements find out about it in the newspapers and televi-
sion newscasts. What is left for the citizens?
In this play of simulacra, the leaders who competed for the presi-
dency of their respective countries in the last round of Latin American
elections all share one feature: they do not want to be taken for politi-
cians. Alberto Fujimori, who does not know karate, was photographed
during the campaign in a white gi, in the act of cracking a brick with a
karate chop. He looked like an angry angel, remarked Beatriz Sarlo, a
prophet, a karate fighter who exploited his Japanese physiognomy. He
was anything but a Peruvian politician. Carlos Menem and Fernando
Collor de Mello were filmed engaging in sports, dancing, or chatting
about frivolous topics with everyday people. Here the contact with pop-
ular culture is sought through the construction of mass-media icons,
not through the exchange of information or the analysis of the prob-
lems of popular sectors. There are no "intellectual" discourses, nor di-
rect confrontations or impromptu engagements with social conflicts.
In this postpolitical phase, in which everything takes place without strug-
gle, there also seems to be no place for negotiation. Everything is pho-
tographed, filmed, televised, and all the images are consumed.13
This tendency to substitute spectacle for conflicts became evident
most eloquently when the Gulf War was presented as a video game.
We did not see bodies in direct fightingonly the "representation en
abime" of a monitor screen displaying another monitor screen. Nor was
there any debate, for which reason there was also no negotiation. Instead,
we witnessed two unchanging rivals pitched in battle against each other
with no explanation. In this video game, in which signs are replaced by
simulacra, "any question of truth [disappears] (regardless of whether truth
is defined as an effect of discourse or otherwise); all questions turn on
efficiency, skill, velocity, and distance."14
When the difference between reality and the symbolic, and the ques-
tion of the legitimacy of representations, are abolishedwhen every-
thing is a simulacrumthere is no place for a reasoned confrontation
of positions, nor for change, not even for negotiation. The struggle for
identity disappears because there is no discourse that positions itself in
 Negotiation of Identity in Popular Classes? 149

relation to a reality of one's own. There is only an unordered succession

of images, as in the video game, without external references to the vi-
sual pseudonarration.
Despite its all-encompassing intentions, video politics does not be-
come the only form of culture. The mass receptivity of melodramas
transmitted by television and other media, as well as the persistence of
critical reflection and oppositional social movements, keep open the
quest for recognition among people and questions about struggle among
groups.
I would therefore like to hazard a conclusion that might prompt
new investigations. Conflicts today are not limited to classes or groups.
They are also found in two cultural trends: reasoned negotiation and
critique or the simulacrum of consensus induced through a devotion
to simulacra. There is no choice between two absolutes here, for simu-
lacra, as we know, are part of the signifying relations of every culture.
However, how we negotiate a compromise between both tendencies is
decisive for whether democratic participation or authoritarian media-
tion will predominate in the future society.
This page intentionally left blank
 Chapter 10

How Civil Society Speaks Today

I t is said that when Jack Lang was the French minister of culture,
upon being asked what he understood by the term culture, he an-
swered: everything for which there is a General Directorate. The ma-
jority of cultural policies carried out by Latin American countries still
seem mired in this bureaucratic inertia. Or, to express it more graphi-
cally, they are ruins from a lost era.
The critiques of government action and the analyses of sociocultu-
ral changes presented in this book deal with the inability of policies to
respond to what takes place in civil society. Forty years after the elec-
tronic communications media appropriated the public-sphere scene
and became the principal agents in shaping the collective imaginary,
the ministers of culture still look after the fine arts. In the best of cases,
they give some support to traditional popular culture, but they almost
never have anything to say about modern urban cultures: rock, comics,
fotonovelas, videos, that is, the media through which mass thought and
sensibility move. They ignore the sites of consumption where the aes-
thetic foundations of citizenship take shape.1
State cultural bureaucracies still draw their interests, rhetorical styles,
and communicative strategies from the era when literature, painting,

151
 152 How Civil Society Speaks Today

and music provided the codes and key concepts for interpreting the
world. They lack departments for dealing with video and informatics,
and what is left, after privatization, of film and television production is
relegated to the margins of the budget. Although politicians have learned
in recent decades the importance of managing their mass images elec-
tronically, they manage their cultural budgets as if they were nineteenth-
century leaders seeking to cast their magnificence in the luster of bronze
sculpture.
This is not to say that cultural policy should surrender to the mass
allure of ratings. We should not, of course, forget Brahms and Joyce,
Alfonso Reyes and Heitor Villalobos, simply because they have few cus-
tomers. When I point out that states give artificial respiration to concert
halls and art and literature reviews, I am questioning only their exclu-
sive support for these cultural forms, which in any case is insufficient:
they give them just enough oxygen for them barely to survive. I belong
to a group of advocates who still see the need for supporting high and
popular traditions of preindustrial art as a means of discovering the
memory of what has made us what we are. We ask, with less fascina-
tion, ingenuousness, and irresponsibility, if this voyage through tech-
nological culture and mass markets is worth the effort. 2
Contemporary culture lives in tension between an accelerated mod-
ernization and the critiques of modernity. The most radical and lucid
challenges of the 19905 to the sensibility, thought, and imaginary of
the postindustrial era are brandished today by those who experienced
the tumultuous breaks, renewals, and disillusionments of this second
half of the twentieth century. Let me cite two examples, among the
many that could be offered. The first is Time and New York Review of
Books art critic Robert Hughes's collection of articles on the alliances
between art, television, and markets. His assessment of the transforma-
tion of high and mass culture enables him to explain "the numbing eclec-
ticism" of the art of the 19805 in New York. "Its imaginative drought
recalls a sad Russian joke: nowadays when you place a phone order for
a filet mignon it is delivered by television." Only a long-range perspec-
tive, rooted in the history of art, makes it possible to realize that the
two hundred thousand artists that can be considered active in the
United States today are no more important for the development of
culture "than, say, the Japanese neopaladins that Charles Jencks cate-
gorizes as a subgroup left out of the history of architecture." You can-
not expect more, says Hughes, from a period in which artists rewarded
 How Civil Society Speaks Today 153

by the market resort to synthesizing fashions, dispensing with any "ideal

of slow maturation," taking advantage of "whatever stylistic devices bring
notoriety, without regard for the sterility that results over the long term."3
Besides homogenization and short-term commercial interests, Hughes
also finds that U.S. art is menaced by judgmentalism, ranging from
moral prescriptions to dogmatic conceptions of citizenship. I am inter-
ested in how he confronts the two moralisms: on the one hand, the
puritanism and racism of those who censored Mapplethorpe's photo-
graphs or advocated cutting funding for public-supported radio; on the
other hand, a populist multiculturalism that justifies exhibition of
"kitschy farragos" or applauds ethnic groups for their "naive hobby
crafts."4 Neither the rejection of difference nor its unrestricted approval
encourages art that "challenges, refines, criticizes," and "aims for excel-
lence," which are the ways in which modern artists help citizens resist
a submissive viewership. Hughes puts his hopes in artistic explorations
that will continue to dispel the leveling, abstract illusions of Western
democracy. He warns, however, that these possibilities will not flourish
if artists fall prey to the dictates of i:he market or the well-meaning en-
deavors of a homogenizing multiculturalism. Aesthetic inquiry is still
the means whereby differences of quality and intensity, perspective and
experimentation emerge. Through it we realize that the coexistence of
ethnicities and cultures, their unequal hybridization, do not constitute
a happy, peaceful world family.
Nevertheless, not all art produced today shows this inability to re-
late to conflictive forms of citizenship. I am thinking, by way of con-
trast, of the ''unplugged" singers of today's jazz-rock. Ever since Eric
Clapton cut his Unplugged album and found millions of fans who pre-
ferred the acoustic versions of his greatest hits, MTV has sponsored,
beginning in 1990, a series of de-electrified concerts, with fewer arrange-
ments and simulations. Other musicians who had achieved celebrity
using the playback and the clip also decided to re-create small jam ses-
sions affording them a space in which to improvise and take risks. Sinead
O'Connor and Joe Satriani, Gilberto Gil and Stevie Ray Vaughan, and
a hundred others in their wake, are cutting unplugged albums and
turning down stadium concerts for more intimate concert halls. The
market is too vigorous and astute to throw away the opportunity to
use this revival of direct experience between musician and audience as
a way of lifting sagging sales. Returning to the past as a way of generat-
ing new business was a lesson already learned in retro fashion, nostalgia
 154 How Civil Society Speaks Today

films, and graphic design. But perhaps the most interesting outcome is
the willingness of musicians and listeners to reencounter the moment in
which music is composed, simply and interpersonally, with no touch-ups.
In the plastic arts, in music, and in any cultural creation, we nec-
essarily swing between the plugged and the unplugged. One cannot
do without international information, not only to be technologically
and aesthetically up-to-date, but also to nourish symbolic production
grounded in multicultural migrations, exchanges, and hybridizations.
But there are moments too when we need to return what is our own,
to our national or ethnic peculiarity, to personal interaction in our do-
mestic spaces or to our modest individual quests.
Integration and competition with others can be stimulating, but
there continue to exist local needs in the midst of globalization. I know
that it is not necessarily tenable to lump together the dynamism of artis-
tic creation and the demands for autonomy of social groups, especially
oppressed ethnic minorities. But there is a coincidence between the ex-
periments of some jazz and rock musicians who renounce some forms
of intermediationparticularly electronic enhancementand endeavor
to capture the flavor of African and Latin American musics, and the mo-
bilization of indigenous peoples and popular classes who question who
benefits from transnational commercial integration and for what reasons,
when they do not have paved roads, schools, transport, or any of the ba-
sic resources that would enable them to stand alongside others as peers.

Integrate or Unplug
I have tried to explain in this book why setting up a choice between
these two options is not a good formulation. Unlike the epoch in which
those who placed all their hopes in some magic transformation of the
state were diametrically opposed to those who staked all change on the
proletariat or the popular classes, now it is a matter of trying to remake
the state and civil society in relation to each other. In order not to sim-
plify what we mean by one or the other, we need to rethink simultane-
ously policies and forms of participation. This means that we have to
understand ourselves as citizens and consumers.
It is clear that at the heart of this reformulation there is an attempt
to reconceptualize the public sphere. Neither subordinated to the state
nor dissolved in civil society, it is reconstituted time and again in the
tension between both. I am therefore interested in the hermeneutic line
of reasoning that incorporates Habermas's and Bakhtin's contributions:
 How Civil Society Speaks Today 155

the public sphere is a "field of competing traditions," "a space of het-

eroglossia," in which "certain meanings and traditions are reinforced"
(the role of the state), "but, in the process, new forces can attribute dif-
ferent meanings or emphases to the same concepts" (the role of civil
society), thus avoiding the danger of exclusivity and authoritarianism.5
The future of multicultural society and the competitive participa-
tion of (material and symbolic) Latin American industries in the world
market depends on how we combine these two notions of the public.
After a decade that saw a spate of privatizations, too readily conceded
by state leaders, it is now evident that private enterprise does not nec-
essarily mean that telephones, airlines, or cultural communications func-
tion any better. This failure does not justify reinstalling the state as the
guardian of territorial nationalism, or as an efficient administrator, or
as the agent of populist forms of assistance. The real challenge is to re-
vitalize the state as the representative of the public interest, as the ar-
biter or guarantor that will not allow the collective need for information,
recreation, and innovation to be subordinated to commercial profitability.
To this end, it is necessary that cultural policies, political parties
critical of neoliberalism, and social movements go beyond a Gutenber-
gian conception of culture and develop strategies for action in the media.
We must, of course, also reformulate the reasons why we need "high
culture," that is, schools, publishing houses, libraries, and public muse-
ums. But above all we need to imagine how to valorize the public in-
terest in radio and television, in cutting-edge technologies, scientific
experimentation, and aesthetic innovation that circulate through the
mass media and information networks
Is it possible to unplug, or at least decondition, ourselves from hege-
monic information networks? This question, which independent or-
ganizations rooted in "civil society" tried to answer in the 19605 and
19705, has been much enriched since the 19805 by information networks.
In the hard sciences, the use of modems has enabled the development
of fluid international communications, with access to innovations for
established and younger researchers. The costs are low and often paid
by their institutions. In the social sciences, the process has been slower
and perhaps there are not many possibilities of creating a scientific public
space, in which qualitative information can be absorbed and transmit-
ted, without reducing the sociocultural particularity of given countries
or their contribution to differences of opinion and theoretical debates.
It seems to me that these conditions point up the opportunities
and the limits of efforts to establish an alternative sociopolitical public
 156 How Civil Society Speaks Today

space. Indeed, nongovernmental organizations and other international

action initiatives benefit from uncensored rapid access to knowledge
about conflicts in the ex-Yugoslavia or Chiapas, but there is still much
to decide when wading through the hundreds of "pages" of unprioritized
information that electronic listserves deposit every day on subscribers'
computer screens. How does one assess opinions and rumors, how does
one differentiate them from certified information, and how does one
situate each fact in its proper historical and sociopolitical contexts when
one lacks the direct experience of living in the region from whence they
come? There were discrepancies in information about the events in Chi-
apas in 1994 among those directly involved, the press, and nongovern-
mental organizations that got their information through electronic
means; these discrepancies revealed the ambivalences that these alter-
native modes of communication generate. On the one hand, they made
it possible for a multiplicity of local, national, and international actors
to exercise influence on the development of the conflict, above all, to
defend human rights. But the expansion of these informative channels
has also revealed difficulties for those who, from a multicultural per-
spective, seek to apply abstract principles concerning democracy and
justice in the specific conditions of the region.

International Redefinition of the Public

When we look into processes of transnational integration, we realize
that reclaiming the public cannot be carried out only within the purview
of each nation. The megacorporations that have restructured the mar-
ket according to principles of global administration have created a kind
of "world civil society" in which they are the protagonists.6 Enjoying
much greater decision-making power than political parties, labor unions,
and social movements of national scope, they have remodeled the/>-
lic space that had been shaped by the coordinating action of modern
states. These corporations now construct this space on a global scale,
subordinating the social order to their own private interests. For this rea-
son, to think of the exercise of citizenship only at the local or national
level is the political equivalent of confronting Sony or Nestle with com-
mercial strategies at the retail level.
Strategies for reconstituting the public as a multicultural collective
can avail themselves of the competitive spaces in which political organ-
izations and networks of international studies participate, using them
in a way analogous to that of transnational corporate practices. How-
 How Civil Society Speaks Today 157

ever, when we look to the proceedings of the Organization of Ameri-

can States or the meetings of ministers of culture, we see how Utopian
are our hopes that there might be space within these precincts for con-
structing a democratic multicultural society and defending an interna-
tional public interest. But we cannot dispense with this hope if we want
multiculturalism and national integration to mean more than the Ca-
dena de las Americas network on Televisa or Benetton's billboards.
When we examine the globalization of urban consumption or the
transnational character of the mass media, we realize that the public
sphere is not limited to political action or national space. The reach of
the public extends beyond state activities and practices directly linked
to political acrors. It also encompasses the ensemble of national and in-
ternational actors capable of influencing the organization of collective
meaning and the cultural and political foundations of citizens' endeavors.
The public is virtually all of humanity and, correlatively, "public space"
is the medium in which humanity surrenders itself unto itself as a spec-
tacle. The word spectacle, to be sure, may provoke a wrong interpreta-
tion because public space does not reduce the media to spectacular im-
ages and words. It is also composed of discursive elements, commentary,
discussion, with the most "rational" objectives of elucidation. What is
most important to point out, however, is that "social public space" does
not at all honor the national borders of each "civil society."7

This extension of the field of national political representations is evi-

dent, in the context of European integration, in the importance given
economic and political "metadiscourse" of continental scope. This is
also taking place in the newly constructed space of free trade in North
America, evident in the spillover effects on the consumption habits and
the exercise of citizenship in the three national societies implicated.
"European citizenship," "internationalization of citizenship," and
even "global citizenship" are expressions that began to have currency in
the 1990s.8 Can the processes of democratization, which have operated
with much difficulty within national borders, be extended to transna-
tional systems for the administration of power, commodities, and com-
munications? How can the notions of rights and responsibilities estab-
lished in the West on secular foundations and on the basis of individual
evaluation be made compatible with "communitarian" societies based
on religious principles? In spite of the globalization of material goods
and information, local or regional traditions and beliefs continue to
differentially shape the public and the private as well as the procedures
 158 How Civil Society Speaks Today

for inclusion and exclusion. At the same time that multicultural relations
and integration projects among nations require supranational and post-
local forms of administering conflicts, analysis needs to take into con-
sideration the differences that persist: some due to the continuation of
particular ways of life, others because global restructuring assigns un-
equal places to elites and masses. In any case, these less integrated sec-
tors also participate, as we pointed out, in globalization, through hu-
man-rights, feminist, and ecological movements. In sum, globalization
appears as a necessity that has to be expressed in a global endeavor for
citizenship. Yet there are diverse ways of being a global citizen.
All of this poses challenging consequences for so-called civil society.
If there is any hope that modernization in Latin America will prevail
over the decadence experienced in the past decade, and that states will
renew their interest in the public, its principal site of realization will be
civil society. The little that has been done recently to carry out this cul-
tural priority, which entails fending off the inevitability of the neolib-
eral project and questioning the absolutism of the market, has been gen-
erated in civil society. But who, at this late stage, can say what exactly
we should understand as civil society, especially if we take into consid-
eration the international expansion of the notion?
Several chapters in this book included attempts to deconstruct the
confusion of civil society with the market, and of Latin American inte-
gration with agreements between governments and corporate executives.
But we also pointed to the risk involved in a reactive celebration of
civil society, rehearsing the disillusionments experienced by those who
placed their hopes in fundamentalism and populist voluntarism.
In consideration of the manic oscillation between modernization
and decadence in Latin America, and in consideration of the inability
of state bureaucracies to extricate themselves from it, we hear again that,
regardless, all this is not very important because "the people are strong"
or because there continue to be (ecological, human-rights, women's,
and youth) social movements in which we might see realized the prom-
ise of social regeneration. These movements are and continue to be valu-
able sites of resistance butas Norbert Lechner states so wellthey
almost never rise above a "corporative reaction against crisis."9 After thirty
years of attempting to construct alternatives to parties and governments,
there is no country in which comprehensive projects have been imple-
mented, much less policies to restructure state bureaucracies and de-
clining economies.
 How Civil Society Speaks Today 159

If we look at the entirety of civil society, there are even greater causes
for alarm. We asked earlier why majorities elect and reelect presidents
and parliaments that do not represent their interests. The explanations
reviewed are inadequate. There remain questions for future research:
How do we interpret the preference of parties, unions, and many so-
cial movements for negotiation over confrontation? The preference of
sectorial and even individual "solutions" over political democratization
and the redistribution of material and symbolic goods? To what degree
are the failure and distrust of popular movements the result of their al-
liances with corrupt forces (narcotraffic, mafias) or the resigned accept-
ance of primitive exploitation in informal markets? I know of few soci-
ocultural research projects that have begun to give convincing answers
to these questions. They are, nevertheless, crucial for understanding the
answers most frequently given for the decadence of neoliberal modern-
ization: consensus or collapse.

Citizenship and Consumer Communities

A key issue for redefining civil society, one that has come up constantly
in this book, is the crisis of the nation. Lechner speaks of a "desire for
community" which he believes acts in reaction to the disbelief provoked
by promises that the market will bring about social cohesion. We might
ask what community he is referring to. The recent history of Latin Amer-
ica suggests that if there is anything like a desire of community, it is
held less by large entities such as the nation or a class than by groups
such as religious communities, sports leagues, age cohorts, and mass-
media fans. A feature common to these atomized "communities" is that
they cluster around symbolic consumption rather than in relation to
productive processes. It is difficult to imagine, therefore, how they might
contribute to reanimating the economy. Only in cases of extreme need
do economic solidarities appear: strikes, popular soup kitchens, disaster
aid. Civil societies appear less and less as national communities, under-
stood on the basis of territorial, linguistic, and political unity. They be-
have, rather, as interpretive communities of consumers, that is, ensembles
of people who share tastes and interpretive pacts in relation to certain
commodities (e.g., gastronomy, sports, music) that provide the basis for
shared identities.
It is not possible to generalize the consequences for citizenship of
this increasing form of participation through consumption. Apocalyp-
 160 How Civil Society Speaks Today

tic criticisms of consumption point to its individualist organization as

the reason for disconnecting from citizenship, from our shared circum-
stances, from collective concern about inequality and solidarity. These
criticisms are partially correct, but the expansion of communications
and consumption generates associations of consumers and social strug-
gles, even among marginal groups, who are better informed about na-
tional and international conditions. Imaginary communities are some-
times "scenes" that make evasion possible, and at other times circuits
where the social bonds, sundered by urban sprawl or delegitimized by
the loss of authority by parties and churches, are reconstituted. This
ambivalence is also found in sports communities or music fans, capa-
ble of reviving the fundamentalist and racist stereotypes of nationalism
(such as intercultural battles during world soccer championships) or gen-
erational violence (the moralizing discrimination aimed at rock fans or
the furious rejection of "society" by youth groups after rock concerts).
Consumption is good for thinking, but not only in keeping with mod-
ern rationality. Not even parties and social movements have succeeded
working exclusively in this way. We might conclude, then, that the prob-
lems entailed in the transition from the public to the citizen are not
very different from those experienced by party or union militants (or
clients) when they attempt to act as rational citizens.
Popular epics still exist. The gimmicks of video politics are not
enough to reduce them to simulacra or lead them astray among so many
sports, music, and telenovelesque spectacles. The seduction of the me-
dia cannot anesthesize society to the point that the 40 percent to 50
percent of the population that lives in extreme poverty ceases to elicit a
response or their rebellions evaporate into thin air. But it is true that
the conditions for civil society to dialogue with itself have been struc-
turally transformed. So long as the actions of the masses are not com-
mensurate with the reach and effectiveness of the media, dissent will
continue to be atomized, and group behavior erratic, connected more
by consumption than by communitarian desires. Social research is only
beginning to deal with these new relations between civil and political
society, so different from those conceptualized by the modern liberal
paradigm. Meanwhile, I find an apt description of this drama of dis-
persed social communication in some literary texts. Diamela Eltit be-
gins her study of a marginal person's speech in Santiago de Chile thus:
"Tatters of newsprint, fragments of extermination, syllables of death,
pauses that lie, commerical slogans, the names of the dead. A profound
crisis in language, an infection of memory, a disarticulation of all ide-
 How Civil Society Speaks Today 161

ologies. What a shame, I thought. But that shame is Chile, I said to

myself."10
An interpretation of contemporary society without voluntaristic il-
lusions is not much of an encouragement for taking the side of the ex-
cluded and the exploited. Only by love of the desperate do we manage
to conserve hope, Walter Benjamin used to say. 1 will add that as artists,
writers, and [social] scientists, we too can justify solidarity as long as
we aspire to emancipation, or at least as long as we hold on to the prem-
ise that emancipation and the renewal of the real also constitute part of
social life: Utopia, in other words.
Postmodern thought provoked us during the 19705 and 19805 to
free ourselves i:rom the illusions of rnetanarratives that augured totaliz-
ing or totalitarian emancipations. Perhaps it is time to emancipate our-
selves from this disenchantment. Although the description of social life
given by the social sciences offers us hard data to prove that Latin Amer-
ica is in decay, we should also take: heart from sociocultural changes
that offer signs of hope. But it is not easy to find hope in prevailing
monotonous cultural policies or regressive social policies. Perhaps our
disagreement will prove to be an inducement to rediscover the role of
intellectuals vis-a-vis the state and civil society.
Allow me to characterize this challenge by stating that we are not
obliged to believe ingenuously in civil society, nor to take a calculating
concern for the limits of governability and the realism of power. "Intel-
lectuals speak as if they were ministers," observes Ricardo Piglia, and
"politics has become a practice that decides what a society cannot do.
The politicians are the new philosophers: they decree what should be
taken as real, what is possible, what are the limits of truth." 11 It occurs
to me that our first responsibility is to salvage these tasks that are prop-
erly cultural from their dissolution in the market or in politics; that is,
to rethink the real together with the possible, to distinguish globaliza-
tion from selective modernization, to reconstruct a democratic multi-
culturalism from its foundation in civil society and with the participa-
tion of the state.
This page intentionally left blank
Notes

Translator's Introduction
1. Nestor Garcia Canclini, Cortdzar, una. antropologia poetica (Buenos Aires:
Nova, 1968); idem, La production simbolica (Mexico City: Siglo XXI, 1979). [The
"Boom" is an expression used to characterize the rapid emergence to worldwide
recognition of a generation of writers in the 19605. These included Julio Cortazar,
Carlos Fuentes, Gabriel Garcia Marque;:, and Mario Vargas Llosa, among others.
See Doris Somrner and George Yiidice, "Latin American Literature from the Boom
On," in Postmodern Literature, ed. Lawrence McCaffery (Westport, Conn.: Green-
wood Press, 1986). Trans.}
2. In Latin America, as in certain European countries (e.g., Italy), popular
refers to the culture and practices of the peasantry and the working classes. This is
why the Gramscian account of the struggle for hegemony, as reviewed later in this
Introduction, is significant in Latin America, where these classes predominate over
the small middle class and the tiny aha burguesia. In the United States, although
popular does refer etymologically to "the people," it has become a synonym for
mass culture. This may be a result of the pervasiveness of the mass media and con-
sumer industries early on in the United States. It also stems from the lack of a uni-
versal populism, that incorporates all subaltern classes. Although there have been
populist moments, especially in the iSgos and during the 19305, these did not draw
their definition of national identity from an equivalent miscegenated imaginary as

153
 164 Notes

in almost all Latin American countries. The failure to incorporate blacks, especially
in working-class struggles, meant that populism could only be partial rather than
a national universal. One might say that apartheid has undermined any possibility
of a national-popular identity, and now that neoliberal postmodernity foments
the multiplication of differences, this possibility is foreclosed. The national-popu-
lar requires generalization across differences in region, politics, and race.
3. Nestor Garcia Canclini, Las culturas populares en el capitalismo (Mexico
City: Nueva Imagen, 1982); idem, Transforming Modernity Popular Culture in Mex-
ico (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1993). In Latin America, serious critical stud-
ies were (and to some degree still are) characterized as "essays," in the tradition of
the most important critical thinking in the region: Andres Bello, Domingo Faustino
Sarmiento, Silvio Romero, Jose Enrique Rodo, Jose Carlos Mariategui, Jose Vas-
concelos, Mario de Andrade, Gilberto Freyre, Sergio Buarque de Holanda, Alfonso
Reyes, Jose Lezama Lima, Fernando Ortiz, Octavio Paz, Angel Rama, Roberto Fer-
nandez Retamar, and many others. The reason for this is that most of these writers
were not incorporated into the academic world in which writing is a much more
professional endeavor. Some were journalists, others had diplomatic posts or othet
state-related positions. Intellectuals are increasingly being integrated, as in the
United States, into university systems, but these are fragile in many countries of
the region, a factor that forces many to remain "independent" of the academy (al-
though not necessarily of other institutions).
4. Nestor Garcia Canclini, Culturas bibridas: estrategias para entrary salir de
la modernidad (Mexico City: Grijalbo/Consejo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes,
1990) [English translation: Hybrid Cultures: Strategies for Entering and Leaving
Modernity, trans. Christopher L. Chiappari and Silvia L. Lopez (Minneapolis: Uni-
versity of Minnesota Press, 1995)].
5. Nestor Garcia Canclini, Consumidores y ciudadanos: conflictos multicul-
turales de la globalizacion (Mexico City: Grijalbo, 1995).
6. Nestor Garcia Canclini, ed., La ciudad de los viajeros (Mexico City: Gri-
jalbo/UAM, 1997); idem, Cultura y comunicacion en la ciudad de Mexico (Mexico
City: Grijalbo/UAM, 1998).
7. Nestor Garcia Canclini, Las industrias culturales en la integracion lati-
noamericana (Buenos Aires: Eudeba/SELA, 1999).
8. Nestor Garcia Canclini, La globalizacion imaginada (Mexico City and
Buenos Aires: Paidos, 1999).
9. Garcia Canclini, Hybrid Cultures, 2.61.
10. Social Text 31/32 (1992). Some of the essays in this volume were incorpo-
rated into Anne McClintock, Aamir Mufti, and Ella Shohat, eds., Dangerous Li-
aisons: Gender, Narration, and Postcolonial Perspectives (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1997).
11. Fredric Jameson, "Third-World Literature in the Era of Multinational
Capitalism," Social Text 15 (fall 1986): 65-88.
12. [George] Y[iidice]. Espi'nola, "Introduction to Special Section on Contem-
porary Cuban Culture," Social Text 15 (fall 1986): iiixn.
 Notes 165

13. Aijaz Ahmad, "Jameson's Rhetoric of Otherness and the 'National Alle-
gory,'" Social Text 17 (fall 1987): 3-25. Madhava Prasad counters, however, that
Ahmad does not adequately account for the nationalist framework that he criti-
cizes. The national is not liquidated by global capitalism but reconverted as part
of its strategies. Madhava Prasad, "On the Question of a Theory of (Third) World
Literature," Social Text 31/32 (1992): 57-83; McClintock, Mufti, and Shohat, Dan-
gerous Liaisons, 141-62.
14. Homi K. Bhabha, "DissemiNation: Time, Narrative, and the Margins of
the Modern Nation," in Nation and Narration, ed. Homi K. Bhabha (New York:
Routledge, 1990), 314.
15. Garcia Canclini, Hybrid Cultures, 261.
16. Ibid., 259.
17. For an extended critique of this argument, see George Yiidice, "Post-
modernity and Transnational Capitalism in Latin America," in On Edge: The Crisis
of Contemporary Latin American Culture, ed. George Yiidice, jean Franco, and Juan
Flores (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992), 1-28.
18. Bhabha, "DissemiNation," 317.
19. Ibid., 318.
20. Ibid., 319.
21. Homi K. Bhabha, "Beyond the Pale: Art in the Age of Multicultural
Translation," in ippj Biennial Exhibition (New York: Whitney Museum of Ameri-
can Art/Abrams, 1993), 66.
22. Homi K. Bhabha, "Introduction: Locations of Culture," in The Location
of Culture (New York: Routledge, 1994), 6.
23. Homi K. Bhabha, "The World and the Home," Social Text 10:2/3 (1992):
H3-
24. Homi K. Bhabha, "Signs Taken for Wonders: Questions of Ambivalence
and Authority under a Tree Outside Delhi, May 1817" [1985], in The Location of
Culture, 112.
25. Donna J. Haraway, "Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and So-
cialist Feminism in the 19805," Socialist Review 80 (1985): 65-108; reprinted as "A
Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twen-
tieth Century," in Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New
York: Routledge, 1991), 149-81. Subsequent references are given in the text.
26. Garcia Canclini, Hybrid Cultures, 248, 249.
27. Ibid., 239.
28. Ibid., 244.
29. Nestor Garcia Canclini, "Too Much Determinism or Too Much Hy-
bridization?" Travesia: Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies 1:2 (1992): 167.
30. John Beverley, "Sobre la situation actual de los estudios culturales," un-
published manuscript. Part of the essay, dealing with the crisis of cultural studies,
was published in Siglo XX.
31. Jose Enrique Rodo's Ariel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967),
originally published in 1900, is a call to Latin American intellectuals to eschew the
 166 Notes

allure of U.S. utilitarian culture and instead model their politics on a quasi-Kantian,
disinterested aesthetics. Were Rodo to have taken an activist role in educational
policy, it would be possible to see in him an analogue of Matthew Arnold, in whose
Culture and Anarchy (1869) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1961) culture
is characterized as the atmosphere in which an aesthetic technocracy would rule
more effectively than the aristocratic or capitalist classes.
32. John Beverley and James Sanders, "Negotiating with the Disciplines: A
Conversation on Latin American Subaltern Studies," Travesia: Journal of Latin
American Cultural Studies 6:2 (November 1997): 255.
33. Garcia Canclini, Transforming Modernity, 26; Las culturas populares, 54-55.
The very able translator of this book rendered "impugnadoras" as "challenging."
In this case, I think "contestatory" fits the context better.
34. Garcia Canclini, Hybrid Cultures, 199.
35. Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1977), 95-100, 121-27; Stuart Hall, "Culture, the Media, and the 'Ideologi-
cal Effect,' " in Mass Communication and Society, ed. James Curran, Michael Gure-
vitch, and Janet Woollacott (London: Edward Arnold, 1977), 315-48; Ernesto La-
clau, Politics and Ideology in Marxist Theory (London: NLB, 1977), 164.
36. According to Gramsci, every social group that plays a role in economic
production "creates together with itself, organically, one or more strata of intellec-
tuals which give it homogeneity and an awareness of its own function not only in
the economic but also in the social and political fields." Such unified awareness
requires "cultural battle," not only to create a class consciousness but also to gen-
eralize that consciousness to other classes to achieve hegemony, which is a histori-
cal act. "An historical act can only be performed by 'collective man,' and this pre-
supposes the attainment of a 'cultural-social' unity through which a multiplicity
of dispersed wills, with heterogeneous aims, are welded together with a single aim,
on the basis of an equal and common conception of the world... . [G]reat impor-
tance is assumed by the general question of language, that is, the question of col-
lectively attaining a single cultural 'climate.' " This broadening of the sphere of in-
tellectual action leads Gramsci to declare that "all men are intellectuals" insofar as
they "participate in a particular conception of the world,.. . and therefore con-
tribute to sustain a conception of the world or to modify it, that is, to bring into
being new modes of thought" (Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Note-
books, ed. and trans. Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith [New York: In-
ternational Publishers, 1971], 3, 348-49, 9). Subsequent references are given in the
text.
37. Juan Carlos Portantiero, Los usos de Gramsci (Mexico City: Folios Edi-
ciones, 1981).
38. Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 219-20.
39. One thinks, for example, of Jose Vasconcelos's and Gilberto Freyre's aes-
thetics of mestizaje and mestifagem in the respective contexts of Mexico and Brazil;
Fernando Ortiz's notion of transculturation to characterize the reciprocal condi-
 Notes 167

clonings of various races in Cuba; Alejo Carpentier's and Jose Lezama Lima's re-
flections on marvelous realism and the baroque character of the (Latin) American
continent; Gabriel Garcia Marquez's magical realist Macondismo; and many other
similar expressions that draw on the ways in which popular beliefs, traditions, and
practices intersected the attempts at modernization in the many regions of the hemi-
sphere. With hindsight, many critics now see these as the supportive yet fetishized
metaphorical renderings by artists and intellectuals of the syncretisms and often
conflictive social and cultural patchworks ensuing from the encounter of peasants
and workers with the industrializing and commercial bourgeoisie and landed cre-
ole elites.
40. Renato Ortiz, A moderna tradi(ao brasileira (Sao Paulo: Editora Brasiliense,
1988), 65.
41. Alison Raphael, "Samba and Social Control: Popular Culture and Racial
Democracy in Rio de Janeiro," Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 1980; Hermano
Vianna, O Miste'rio do Samba (Rio de Janeiro: Jorge Zahar, 1995).
42. George Yiidice, "The Globalization of Culture and the New Civil Soci-
ety," in Cultures of Politics/Politics of Cultures: Re-Visioning Latin American Social
Movements, ed. Sonia E. Alvarez, Evelina Dagnino, and Arturo Escobar (Boulder,
Colo.: Westview Press, 1998), 372.
43. Carlos Monsivais, Entrada libre: cronicas de la sociedad que se organiza
(Mexico City: Ediciones Era, 1987).
44. Jose Joaquin Brunner, "Seis Preguntas a Jose Joaquin Brunner," Revista
de Critica Culturalr.i (May 1990): 21.
45. Ibid.
46. Gilbert M. Joseph and Daniel Nugent, "Popular Culture and State For-
mation in Revolutionary Mexico," in Everyday Forms of State Formation: Revolu-
tion and the Negotiation of Rule in Modern Mexico, ed. Gilbert M. Joseph and Daniel
Nugent (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1994), 5-6.
47. Ibid., ii-i2.
48. Florencia Mallon, Peasant and Elation: The Making of Postcolonial Mexico
and Peru (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995).
49. Beverley and Sanders, "Negotiating with the Disciplines," 242.
50. Mallon, Peasant and Nation, 319.
51. Garcia Canclini, Transforming Modernity, 31, 38.
52. Ibid., 91.
53. Garcia Canclini, Hybrid Cultures, 156.
54. Mallon, Peasant and Nation, 19.
55. Garcia Canclini, Transforming Modernity, 84.
56. Ibid.
57. Nestor Garcia Canclini, "Cultural Reconversion," in On Edge, 31, and
Hybrid Cultures, 155.
58. Garcia Canclini, Hybrid Cultures, 230. Garcia Canclini borrows the phrase
from Renato Ortiz, who in A moderna tradifdo brasileira uses it to refer to the in-
 168 Notes

tegration of Brazil into an international order of mass media that requires certain
standards of production. The fact that Brazil is one of the largest producers of tel-
evision programs for export has been internalized into the styles of popular con-
sumption and in ways that do not correspond to the cultural imperialism hypoth-
esis ("Do popular-nacional ao internacional-popular?" 182-206). Of course, this
sleight of phrase does not carry with it the Gramscian assumptions about the abil-
ity of popular groups to influence the "leading" groups, which in any case have
been internationalized.
59. Renato Ortiz, "Uma cultura internacional-popular," in Mundializafao e
cultum (Sao Paulo: Editora Brasiliense, 1994), 139.
60. Arjun Appadurai, "Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural
Economy," in Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapo-
lis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 38.
61. David Ronfeldt, "The Battle for the Mind of Mexico," Rand Corpora-
tion, June 1995. Electronic posting: [email protected].
62. Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 56 n. 5.
63. Ibid.
64. Michel Foucault, Ilfaut defendre la societe (Paris: Gallimard/Seuil, 1997),
170, 219.
65. George Yiidice, "The Expediency of Culture," unpublished manuscript.
66. Beverley, "Sobre la situacion actual de los estudios culturales," 16.
67. These questions and problems are addressed in some of the contribu-
tions to The Real Thing: Testimonial Discourse and Latin America, ed. Georg M.
Gugelberger (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1996). Furthermore, the de-
bate over the truth of Rigoberta Menchii's testimonio only provided more fuel for
the questioning about the subaltern. See the essays by John Beverley and David
Stoll in The Real Thing and Stoll's book, Rigoberta Menchu and the Story of All
Poor Guatemalans (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1999). Rigoberta Menchu's tes-
timonio was published in English as /, Rigoberta Menchu: An Indian Woman in
Guatemala, ed. and introd. Elisabeth Burgos-Debray, trans. Ann Wright (London:
Verso, 1984).
68. Ranajit Guha, "On Some Aspects of the Historiography of Colonial India,"
in Ranajit Guha, ed., Subaltern Studies II (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1982), 7.
69. Beverley, "Sobre la situacion actual de los estudios culturales," 28.
70. Beverley and Sanders, "Negotiating with the Disciplines," 241.
71. Ibid., 242.
72. Ibid., 249.
73. Bernd Magnus, Stanley Stewart, and Jean-Pierre Mileur, Nietzsche's Case:
Philosophy as/and Literature (New York: Roudedge, 1993), 25.
74. Alberto Moreiras, "La exterioridad de la no liberacion: Subalternismo y
practica teorica," 18. Unpublished manuscript.
75. Alberto Moreiras, "Totalization and the Politics of Theory," 27. Unpub-
lished manuscript.
 Notes 169

76. Moreiras, "La exterioridad," 20.

77. Ibid., 22. Moreiras quotes the following passage from Zizek: "The cru-
cial point here, however, is that this ['ethnicization of the national' or] 'regression'
from secondary to 'primordial' forms of identification with 'organic' communities
is already 'mediated': it is a reaction to the universal dimension of the world mar-
ketas such, it occurs on its terrain, against its background. For that reason, what
we are dealing with in these phenomena is not a 'regression' but rather the form of
appearance of its exact opposite: in a kind of 'negation of negation,' this very re-
assertion of primordial' identification signals that the loss of organic-substantial unity
is fully consummated" (Slavoj Zizek, "Multiculturalism, or, the Cultural Logic of
Multinational Capitalism," New Left Review 225 [1997]: 42).
78. Mikhail Bakhtin, "Discourse in the Novel," in The Dialogic Imagination:
Four Essays by M. M. Bakhtin, ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson and
Michael Holquist (Austin: University ofTexas Press, 1981), 294.
79. Here he is drawing on Rita Laura Segato, "Alteridades historicas/iden-
tidades poh'ticas: una cri'tica a las certezas del pluralismo global," Antropologfa
working paper series, no. 234, Anthropology Department, University of Brasilia,
1998, 14.

Author's Preface
I would like to thank Hugo Achugar, John Beverley, Roman de la Campa,
Sandra Lorenzano, Jesus Martin Barbero, Walter Mignolo, Bernardo Subercaseaux,
and George Yudice for their comments on this book, which stimulated me to
think what I now add in this Preface. See also John Beverley, "Estudios culturales y
vocacion politica," Revista de Critica Cultural 12 (July 1996); Roman de la Campa,
"Latinoamerica y sus nuevos cartografos: discurso poscolonial, diasporas intelec-
tuales y enunciacion fronteriza," Revista Iberoamericana 62:176-77 (July-Decem-
ber 1996): 697-717; Jesus Martin Barbero, "Resefia al libro Consumidores y ciu-
dadanos," Magazin Dominical de El Espectador 654 (November 1995, 26b); Bernardo
Subercaseaux, "Comentario a Consumidores y ciudadanos," Revista de Critica Cul-
tural 12 (July 1996); George Yudice, "Tradiciones comparativas de estudios cultur-
ales: America Latina y los Estados Unidos," Alteridades 5 (Mexico City, 1993), and
"Civil Society, Consumption, and Governmentality in an Age of Global Restruc-
turing: An Introduction," Social Text 45 (winter 1995).
1. James Holston and Arjun Appadurai, "Cities and Citizenship," Public
Culture 2:2 (1996): 187-204.
2. [Garcia Canclini has opted to distinguish between the Anglo-American
and Latin American cultural studies traditions by referring in English to the first as
"cultural studies" and to the second as 'estudios culturales" or "estudios de la cul-
tura." The difference, to a great but not exclusive degree, hinges on the preference
of the former for theoretically driven discursive analysis within the humanities,
and the prevalence of social-science research within the latter. See Nelly Richard,
 170 Notes

La insubordination de los signos (Santiago: Editorial Cuarto Propio, 1994), for a

critique of the latter in the Chilean context. Trans.]
3. [Testimonies are discourses of witnessing, usually told by individuals be-
longing to subaltern groups to an ethnographer, journalist, or academic, who tran-
scribes and edits the text, which then circulates in academic and political networks
that provide solidarity for the plight of the witnesses. This plight might be politi-
cal repression, economic oppression, gender or race discrimination, and natural
catastophes. Testimonies were recognized as a genre in the early 19705 by the Cuban
cultural center Casa de las Americas as a way of legitimizing the expression and
representation of subaltern or "popular" groups. Since the early 19905, in the wake
of the implosion of communism and the "triumph" of neoliberalism, many critics
have begun to question the representativity of this genre as well as its political
effectivity. See The Real Thing: Testimonial Discourse and Latin America, ed. Georg
M. Gugelberger (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1996). Trans.}
4. See Lawrence Grossberg, Gary Nelson, and Paula Treichler, eds., Cul-
tural Studies (New York: Routledge, 1992).
5. Lawrence Grossberg, We Gotta Get Out of This Place: Popular Conservatism
and Postmodern Culture (New York: Routledge, 1992).
6. Martin Barbero, "Resena al libro Consumidoresy ciudadanos'; Renato Or-
tiz, Mundializafdo e cultura (Sao Paulo: Editora Brasiliense, 1994); Beatrix Sarlo,
Escenas de la vida posmoderna. Intelectuales, ante y videocultura en la Argentina
(Buenos Aires: Ariel, 1994).
7. See my "Hybrid Cultures and Communicative Strategies," Media Devel-
opment 44:1 (1997): 2.2-29.
8. Robert Hughes, Culture of Complaint: The Fraying of America (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1993); Charles Taylor, "The Politics of Recognition," in
David Theo Goldberg, ed., Multiculturalism: A Critical Reader (Oxford: Blackwell,
1994), 75-106; Michael Walzer, "Individus et communautes: les deux pluralismes,"
Esprit (Paris, June 1995).
9. Walzer, "Individus et communantes," 109, 105.
10. Heloisa Buarque de Hollanda, "O estranho horizonte da critica feminista
no Brasil," in Carlos Rincon and Petra Shumn, eds., Nuevo Texto Critico 1415 (1995):
25969; Nelly Richard, "Signos culturales y mediaciones academicas," in Beatriz
Gonzalez Stephan, Cultura y tercer mundo (Caracas: Nueva Sociedad, 1996).
11. Paul Ricoeur, La critique et la conviction: Entretien avec Francois Azouvi et
Marc de Launay (Paris: Calamann-Levy, 1995), 96.

Introduction
1. Jiirgen Habermas, "L'espace publique, 30 ans apres," Quaderni 18 (Paris,
autumn 1992).
2. See Richard Flores et al., "Concept Paper on Cultural Citizenship," work-
ing paper of the Working Group on Cultural Studies of the Interuniversity Pro-
gram, and Renato Rosaldo, "Cultural Citizenship in San Jose, California," paper
 Notes, 171

presented in the session "Contested Citizenship," Annual Meeting of the Anthro-

pological Association of America, Washington, D.C., November 1993. [See also
William V. Flores and Rina Benmayer, eds., Latino Cultural Citizenship: Claiming
Identity, Space, and Rights (Boston: Beacon Press, 1997). Trans.]
3. Vera da Silva Telles, "Sociedade civil e construcao de espacos piiblicos,"
in Anos po. Politica e sociedade no Brasil, ed. Evelina Dagnino (Sao Paulo: Editora
Brasiliense, 1994), 91-92.
4. Evelina Dagnino, "Os movimcntos socials e a emergencia de uma nova
nocao de cidadania," in Anos go, 103-15.
5. This disseminated perspective on citizenship is noticeable in recent books
like that of Ban van Steenbergen, ed., The Condition oj Citizenship (London, Thou-
sand Oaks, and New Delhi: Sage, 1994), in which the contributors offer perspec-
tives on each of the modalities mentioned.
6. Giinther Lottes, Politische Aufkldrung und Plebejisches Publikeum (Munich:
Oldenbourg, 1979), no, quoted in Habermas, "L'espace publique, 30 ans apres."
7. Some groundbreaking texts that go beyond the populist model are Jesus
Martin Barbero, De los medios a las mediaciones (Mexico City: Gustavo Gili, 1987)
[English translation: Communication, Culture and Hegemony: From the Media to
Mediations (London and Newbury Park, Calif.: Sage Publications, 1993)]; Beatriz
Sarlo, Escenas de la vida posmoderna. Intelectuales, arte y videocultura en la Ar-
gentina (Buenos Aires: Ariel, 1994); Anfbal Ford, Navegaciones. Comunicacion, cul-
turay crisis (Buenos Aires: Amorrortu, 1994); Renato Ortiz, Mundializacao e cul-
tura (Sao Paulo: Editora Brasiliense, 1994).
8. Sarlo, Escenas de la vida posmoderna, 83.
9. Martin Barbero, Communication, Culture and Hegemony, Part 2.
10. According to the World Communications Report, published by UNESCO
in 1990; quoted in Rafael Roncagliolo, "La integracion audiovisual en America
Latina: Estados, empresas y productores independientes," paper presented at the
symposium on Cultural Policies in Processes of Supranational Integration, Mexico
City, 3-5 October 1994.
11. Jean-Marc Ferry, "Las transformaciones de la publicidad politica," in El
nuevo espacio piiblico, ed. Jean-Marc Ferry, Dominique Wolton, et al. (Barcelona:
Gedisa, 1992), 19.
12. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and
Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983).
13. [In Spanish, as in other Romance languages, all nouns are gendered. So-
ciety is feminine, hence the puns on "her" gender. Trans.]
14. Soledad Loaeza, "La sociedad civil me da miedo," Cuadernos de Nexos 69
(March 1994): vvi.
15. Jean L. Cohen and Andrew Arato, Civil Society and Political Theory (Cam-
bridge: MIT Press, 1994), ix.
16. As I argue earlier, I do not consider that modern and postmodern identi-
ties should be analytically differentiated in any absolute way. I conceive of post-
modernity not as a different stage nor one that substitutes for modernity. It is,
 172 Notes

rather, the development of modern tendencies that are reworked in the multicul-
tural conflicts of globalization. I have elaborated on this position in my book Cul-
turas hibridas: Estrategias para entrary salir de la modernidad (Mexico City: Grijablo,
1990) [English translation: Hybrid Cultures: Strategies for Entering and Leaving
Modernity, trans. Christopher L. Chiappari and Silvia L. Lopez (Minneapolis: Uni-
versity of Minnesota Press, 1995].
17. Roberto Alejandro, Hermeneutics, Citizenship, and the Public Sphere (Al-
bany: State University of New York Press, 1993), 6-7.
18. I take the expression "institutional configurations" from Peter Dahlgren,
"Introduction," in Communication and Citizenship, ed. Peter Dahlgren and Colin
Sparks (London: Routledge, 1993).
19. Pierre-Yves Petillon, "O! Chicago: images de la ville en chantier," in Jean
Baudrillard et al., Citoyennete et urbanite (Paris: Editions Esprit, 1991), 144.
20. The results of these research projects are provided in the following works:
Nestor Garcia Canclini, ed., El consume cultural en Mexico (Mexico City: Consejo
Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes, 1993); and Nestor Garcia Canclini, Julio Gullco,
Maria Eugenia Modena, Eduardo Nivon, Mabel Piccini, Ana Maria Rosas, and
Graciela Schmilchuk, Publicos de arte y politica cultural: un estudio del II Festival
de la ciudad de Mexico (Mexico City: DDF, INAH, UAM, 1991).
21. See Nestor Garcia Canclini, ed., Los nuevos espectadores. Cine, television y
video en Mexico (Mexico City: Imcine-CNCA, 1994).

1. Consumption Is Good for Thinking

This chapter is an expanded version of an article of the same title that I pub-
lished in Didlogos de la Comunicacion 30 (Lima, June 1991).
1. See, for example, James Lull, ed., World Families Watch Television (New-
bury Park, Calif: Sage, 1988); Jesus Martin Barbero, Communication, Culture and
Hegemony: From the Media to Mediations (New York: Sage, 1993); and Guillermo
Orozco, ed., Hablan los televidentes. Estudios de recepcion en varies paises (Mexico
City: Universidad Iberoamericana, 1992).
2. See, for example, Jean-Pierre Terrail, Desmond Preteceille, and Patrice
Grevet, Capitalism, Consumption, and Needs (New York: Blackwell, 1985).
3. Manuel Castells, The Urban Question: A Marxist Approach (Cambridge:
MIT Press, 1977), Appendix.
4. Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987); Arjun Appadurai, ed., The Social
Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective (New York: Cambridge University
Press, 1986); Stuart Ewen, All Consuming Images: The Politics of Style in Contempo-
rary Culture (New York: Basic Books, 1988).
5. Mary Douglas and Baron Isherwood, The World of Goods (New York: Ba-
sic Books, 1979), 65.
6. Ibid., 6z.
 Notes 173

7. Alfred Cell, "Newcomers to the World of Goods: Consumption among

the Muria Gonds," in Appadurai, The Social Life of Things, 11037.
8. Ibid., 47.
9. Renato Ortiz, Mundializac,ao e cultura (Sao Paulo: Editora Brasiliense,
1994), chapter 4.
10. Nestor Garcia Canclini and Mabel Piccini, "Culturas de la ciudad de
Mexico: sfmbolos colectivos y usos del espacio urbana," in Nestor Garcia Canclini,
ed., El consume cultural en Mexico (Mexico City: Consejo Nacional para la Cultura
y las Artes, 1993).
11. Appadurai, The Social Life of Things, 29.
12. Ibid., 57.

2. Mexico

This chapter appeared in Ciudades 20 (Mexico City, December 1993).

1. This is a well-established distinction, still held to by some anthropolo-
gists. See, for example, Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures (New York:
Basic Books, 1973).
2. The most consistent attempts to convert the city from a place in which
one studies into an object of study can be found in Brazilian anthropology. See
Eunice Ribeiro Durham, "A pesquisa antropologica com populacoes urbanas: prob-
lemas e perspectivas," in Ruth Cardoso, ed., A aventura antropologica (Rio de
Janeiro: Paz e Terra, 1986), and "A sociedade vista da periferia," Revista Brasileira
de Ciencias Sociais i (June 1986): 85-99.
3. Oscar Lewis, Tepoztldn (New York: Holt, 1960); Robert Redfield, Tepoztldn:
A Mexican Village (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973 [1930]); Clifford
Geertz, Works and Lives: The Anthropologist as Author (Stanford, Calif: Stanford
University Press, 1987).
4. For a summary of these developments, see George E. Marcus and Michael
M. J. Fischer, Anthropology as Cultural Critique (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1986). See especially the chapter titled "Taking Account of the World His-
torical Political Economy: Knowable Communities in Larger Systems."
5. See Marjorie Thacker and Sylvia Bazua, Indigenas urbanos de la ciudad
de Mexico, proyectos de vida y estrategias (Mexico City: Institute Nacional Indigenista,
1992). As in the entire country, statistics on the size of the indigenous population
are the source of many debates, as are statistics on any matter in Mexico. Thacker
and Bazua's estimate is based on the Eleventh Population and Housing Census of
1990 and includes children less than five years of age and those who do not speak
indigenous languages yet belong to an indigenous family despite having been born
and raised in the capital.
6. Jerome Monet, "El centro historico de la ciudad de Mexico," in Sdbado,
Literary Supplement for Unomdsuno (Mexico City, 26 August 1989): 12.
 174 Notes

7. See Nestor Garcia Canclini and Mabel Piccini, "Cultures de la ciudad de

Mexico: simbolos colectivos y usos del espacio urbano," in El consume cultural en
Mexico, ed. Nestor Garcia Candini (Mexico City: Consejo Nacional para la Cul-
tura y las Artes, 1993), and Nestor Garcia Canclini, Eduardo Nivon, and Patricia
Safa, "II consume culturale a Citta del Messico," La Ricerca Folklorica 28 (October
1993): 41-47.
8. Juan R. Gil Elizondo, "El futuro de la ciudad de Mexico. Metropoli con-
trolada," in Atlas de la ciudad de Mexico (Mexico City: Departamento del Distrito
Federal y El Colegio de Mexico, 1987), 418.
9. Eduardo Nivon, "El consumo cultural y los movimientos sociales"; Pa-
tricia Safa, "Espacio urbano, sectores sociales y consumo cultural en Coyoacan";
Ana Maria Rosas Mantecon, "La puesta en escena del patrimonio mexica y su
apropiacion por los piiblicos del Museo del Templo Mayor"; and Maya Lorena
Perez Ruiz, "El Museo Nacional de Culturas Populares: espacio de expresion o
recreacion de la cultura popular," in Garcia Canclini, El consumo cultural en Mexico.
10. Nestor Garcia Canclini, Julio Gullco, Maria Eugenia Modena, Eduardo
Nivon, Mabel Piccini, Ana Maria Rosas, and Graciela Schmilchuk, Publicos de arte
y politica cultural. Un estudio del II Festival de la ciudad de Mexico (Mexico City:
DDF, INAH, UAM, 1991).
11. To obtain this information we employed four techniques: (a) audience
surveys, (b) field observation and open-ended interviews of audiences, (c) inter-
views of officials of the organizing institutions, of participating artists, and of crit-
ics, (d) systematic analysis of press coverage and criticism of the festival.
12. See Nivon, "El consumo cultural y los movimientos sociales."
13. It should be pointed out that the ecological view of the city is encom-
passing only in territorial terms. Otherwise, it gives little consideration to the eco-
nomic and political dimensions of sociability.
14. Aldo Bonomi, "La machina metropoli," paper presented at the sympo-
sium "The Rebirth of the City in Europe," Florence, 6-8 December 1992.
15. Maria Ana Portal Ariosa, "Religiosidad popular e identidad urbana. El
caso de San Andres Totoltepec, Tlalpan, D.F.," Ph.D. diss., Anthropology Depart-
ment, Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico, 1994, chapter 3.
16. Guillermo de la Pena and Rene de la Torre, "Identidades urbanas al fin
del milenio," Ciudades 2.2. (Mexico City, April-June 1994).
17. See Armand Mattelart's analysis of entrepreneurial culture in La commu-
nication-monde (Paris: Editions La Decouverte, 1991), 26062.
18. Saskia Sassen, The Global City: New York, London, Tokyo (Princeton, N.J.:
Princeton University Press, 1991).
19. Manuel Castells, "Estrategias de desarrollo metropolitano en las grandes
ciudades espanolas: la articulacion entre crecimiento economico y calidad de vida,"
in Las grandes ciudades en la decada de los noventa, ed. Jordi Borja et al. (Madrid:
Editorial Sistema, 1990).
20. Raul Monge, "Los grandes proyectos: Centro Historico, Alameda, Polanco,
Santa Fe y Xochimilco," Proceso 750 (18 March 1991): 1013.
 Notes 175

21. Ricardo Camargo, "La ciudad de Mexico como escenario," El National

(Mexico City), 9 March 1993, 20.
22. See the symposium cited earlier, "The Rebirth of the City in Europe,"
and the articles by Manuel Castells and Guido Martinotti in Las grandes tiudades
en la decada de las noventa.
23. Jose Emilio Pacheco, Las batallas en el desierto (Mexico City: Ediciones
Era, 1981), 67-68 [English translation: Battles in the Desert and Other Stories, trans.
Katherine Silver (New York: New Directions, 1987).]
24. Efrain Huerta, "Declaracion de odios," in Poesia completa, ed. Marti Soler
(Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Economica, 1988 [1944]), 102-5.

3. Urban Cultural Policies in Latin America

1. [Chilango, paulista, and porteno are the names given to the inhabitants
of, respectively, Mexico City, Sao Paulo, and Buenos Aires. Trans.]
2. [Cariocas are the inhabitants of Rio de Janeiro. Trans.}
3. Among the studies that have dealt with this imaginary construction of
national identities, see Adolfo Prieto, El discurso criollista en la formation de la Ar-
gentina moderna (Buenos Aires: Sudamericana, 1988); Beatriz Sarlo, Una modemidad
periferica: Buenos Aires 1920 y 1930 (Buenos Aires: Nueva Vision, 1988); Renato Or-
tiz, Cultura brasileira & identidade national (Sao Paulo: Editora Brasiliense, 1985);
Roberto Schwartz, "Nacional por substracao," in Que horns sdo (Sao Paulo: Com-
panhia das Letras, 1987); Roger Bartra, Lajaula de la melancolia. Identidady meta-
morfosis del mexicano (Mexico City: Grijalbo, 1987) [English translation: The Cage
of Melancholy: Identity and Metamorphosis in the Mexican Character, trans. Christo-
pher J. Hall (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1992)]; Claudio
Lomnitz-Adler, Exits from the Labyrinth: Culture and Ideology in the Mexican Na-
tional Space (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992).
4. Antonio Augusto Arantes, "Horas furtadas. Dois ensaios sobre consume
e lazer," unpublished manuscript.
5. Eunice Ribeiro Durham, "A sociedade vista da periferia," Revista Brasileira
de Ciencias Sociais 1:1 (June 1996): 8499.
6. See Oscar Landi, A. Vacchieri, and L. A. Quevedo, Publicos y consumes
culturales en Buenos Aires (Buenos Aires: CEDES, 1990); the articles by Nestor Gar-
cia Canclini, Mabel Piccini, Patricia Safa, Eduardo Nivon, Ana Rosas, and Maya
Lorena Perez in El consume cultural en Mexico, ed. Nestor Garcia Canclini (Mex-
ico City: Consejo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes, 1993); Carlos Catalan and
Guillermo Sunkel, Consumo cultural en Chile: la elite, lo masivo y lo popular (Santi-
ago: FLACSO, 1990); and Arantes, Horas furtadas.
7. See Eduardo Nivon, "El consume cultural y los movimientos sociales,"
in Garcia Canclini, El consume cultural en Mexico.
8. See Hector Castillo Berthier, Sergio Zermeno, and Alicia Ziccardi, "La
cultura de las bandas," in Cultura y postpolitica, ed. Nestor Garcia Canclini (Mex-
ico City: Consejo Nacional para la Culcura y las Artes, 1995).
 176 Notes

9. For those unfamiliar with Mexico City, Las Lomas is one of the tradi-
tional elegant neighborhoods.
10. "Nacos" is the pejorative name given in Mexico to Indians and members
of popular groups, especially those who live in cities.
11. Carlos Monsivais, Entrada libre. Cronicas de la sociedad que se organiza
(Mexico City: Era, 1987), 144-50.
12. Antonio Flavio Pierucci, "Linguagens autoritarias, voto popular," in Anas
oo. Politica e sociedade no Brasil, ed. Evelina Dagnino (Sao Paulo: Editora Brasiliense,
1994). 137-49-
13. Armando Silva, Imaginarios urbanos. Bogota y Sao Paulo: cultura y comu-
nicacion urbana en America Latina (Bogota: Tercer Mundo Editores, 1992), 2058,
272-75.
14. Marc Auge, Los "no lugares. " Espacios del anonimato: Una antropologia de
la sobremodernidad (Barcelona: Gedisa, 1993), 41 [English translation: Non-places:
Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity, trans. John Howe (New York:
Verso, 1995)].
15. Sarlo, Una modernidad periferica, 15-19.

4. Narrating the Multicultural

A first version of this chapter was presented in the symposium "La literatura
latinoamericana: encrucijada de lenguas y culturas," University of California, Berke-
ley, April 1994.
1. In these introductory paragraphs I rehearse, with certain changes, the the-
oretical discussion that I presented on these issues in Hybrid Cultures: Strategies for
Entering and Leaving Modernity (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995).
2. [Criollismo refers to a regionally defined literature that draws on the cus-
toms of popular classes to depict a nativist world distinguished from the European
and the North American. Trans.} On the gaucho genre, see Josefina Ludmer, El
genero gauchesco. Un tratado sobre lapatria (Buenos Aires: Sudamericana, 1988).
3. Antonio Cornejo Polar, "Literatura peruana: totalidad contradictoria," Re-
vista de critica literaria latinoamericana, 9:18 (Lima, 1983): 31-50.
4. The dangers of this homogenization of Latin America for metropolitan
consumption are pointed out by literary and art critics. See Carlos Damaso
Martinez's interview, "Jean Franco: el multiculturalismo y el poder del centro,"
Espacios 12 (Buenos Aires, June-July 1993): 37-40; Mari Carmen Ramirez, "Imagen
e identidad en el arte latino de Estados Unidos," La Jornada Semanal 228 (Mexico
City, 24 October 1993): 18-25; and George Yudice, "Globalizacion y nuevas formas
de intermediacion cultural," in Hugo Achugar y Gerardo Caetano, eds., Mundo,
Region, Aldea: Identidades, politicas culturales e integracion regional (Montevideo:
FESUR, 1994), 134-57-
5. Wim Wenders, "Historias para soportar la vida," La]ornada Semanal (Mex-
ico City, 18 January 1987): 67.
 Notes 177

6. Manuel Rivera Cambas, Mexico pintorsco, artistico y monumental, vol. 2

(Mexico City: Editora Nacional, 1967), 198.
7. Julio Ramos, Desencuentros de Li modernidad en America Latino.. Literatura
y politico en el siglo XIX (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultural Economica, 1989), 128.
8. Edward W. Soja, Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Criti-
cal Social Theory (London and New York: Verso, 1989), 222-23.
9. Carlos Monsivais, "Nueva gui'a de pecadores y anexas," Introduction to
"Gui'a del plerio disfrute de la ciudad de Mexico," La Jornada (Mexico City), 18
December 1994, 27.

5. Identities as a Multimedia Spectacle

1. Jesus Martin Barbero, Communication, Culture and Hegemony: From the
Media to Mediations (New York: Sage, 1993).
2. I borrow this expression from Art from Latin America: La cita transcul-
tural, the catalog for the exhibition curated by Nelly Richard in the Museum of
Contemporary Art in Sydney, 10 March-i3 June 1993.
3. This formula was coined by Achille Bonito Oliva, curator of the Biennale.
Cited in Lelia Driben, "La XLV Bienal de Venecia, los puntos cardinales del arte
nomada de 56 paises," La Jornada (Mexico City), 23 August 1993, 23.
4. Charles-Albert Michelet, "Reflexion sur le drole de drame du cinema mon-
dial," CinemAction (1988): 156-61.
5. [Garcia Canclini employs the notion of mestizaje (race mixing) to refer to
certain types of hybrid consumer commodities. The neologism mesticize is prefer-
able to the idiomatic miscegenated, which in English has a pejorative connota-
tion. Tram.]
6. Renato Ortiz, Mundializac_ao e cultura, (Sao Paulo: Editora Brasiliense,
1994), chapter 5. See also Armand Mattelart, La communication-monde (Paris: La
Decouverte, 1992); Stuart Hall, "The Local and the Global: Globalization and Eth-
nicity," in Culture, Globalization, and the World System (Binghamton: State Uni-
versity of New York at Binghamton, 1991).
7. Gideon Kunda, Engineering Culture: Control and Commitment in a High-
Tech Corporation (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1992). I review here cer-
tain lines of research that are being adopted and elaborated in Mexican industrial
anthropology, particularly on maquiladora production. See Luis Reygadas, "Estruc-
turacion de la cultura del trabajo en las maquiladoras," project proposal submitted
to the Doctoral Program in Anthropology at the Universidad Autonoma Metro-
politana-Iztapalapa, 1993.

6. Latin America and Europe as Suburbs of Hollywood

This chapter is a revised version of a lecture given at the Forum "Vision
Iberoamericana 2000," sponsored by LINESCO in Cartagena de Indias, Colom-
bia, 16-18 March 1994.
 178 Notes

1. "Un negocio de mas de 500 ooo millones de pesetas," El Pats (Madrid),

n December 1993, 35.
2. "Entrevista a Edouard Balladur, primer ministro Frances. <Que es lo que
quiere EU . . . la desaparicion del cine europeo?" El National (Mexico City), 23 Oc-
tober 1993, 27.
3. Variety, 28 June 1993; cited in Deborah Holtz, "Los piiblicos de video,"
in Los nuevos espectadores. Cine, television y video en Mexico, Nestor Garcia Can-
clini (Mexico City: Imcine-CNCA, 1994).
4. Pierre Musso, "Audiovisuel et telecommunications en Europe: quelle re-
compositions?" Quaderni. La revue de la communication 19 (Paris, winter 1993): 13.
5. Joelle Farchy, Le cinema dechaine. Mutation d'une Industrie (Paris: Presses
du CNRS, 1992), 37-38.
6. Statistics obtained from the Institute Mexicano de Cinematografia.
7. I analyze this shift in audience in the next chapter.
8. El Pats, n December 1993, 35.
9. Eduardo Haro Tecglen, "Cine agonico," ElPais, u December 1993, 57.
10. Bernard Miege, "Les mouvements de longue duree de la communication
en Europe de 1'ouest," Quaderni. La revue de la communication 19 (Paris, winter
1993).
11. El Pais, ii December 1993, 35.
12. Regis Debray, "Respuesta a Mario Vargas Llosa," El Pais, 4 November
'993-
13. Mario Vargas Llosa, "La tribu y el mercado," El Pais, 21 November 1993.
14. Marco Vinicio Gonzalez, "Cine mexicano en Nueva York," La Jornada
Semanal 230 (7 November 1993): 46.
15. Vargas Llosa, "La tribu y el mercado."
16. Andre Lange, "Descartes, c'est la Hollande. La communaute Europeenne:
culture et audiovisuel," Quaderni. La revue de la communication 19 (Paris, winter
1993): 98.
17. Antonio Pasquali, "Bienvenida global village," Intermedios 8 (Mexico City,
August 1993): 14.
1 8. Alain Touraine, "La excepcion cultural," El Pais, n December 1993.

7. From the Public to the Private

1. Information from the Argentine Subsecretariat of Culture.
2. The study Los nuevos espectadores. Cine, television y video en Mexico (Mex-
ico City: Imcine-CNCA, 1994) was edited by Nestor Garcia Canclini and carried
out with the participation of Deborah Holtz, Javier Lozano Espinosa, Maria Euge-
nia Modena, Ella Fany Quintal, Guadalupe Reyes Domfnguez, Ana Rosas Man-
tecon, Enrique Sanchez Ruiz, and Jose Manuel Valenzuela. It is based on surveys
of film and video spectators in Mexico City, Tijuana, and Merida between 1990
and 1993.
 Notes 179

3. This is how Felix Mesquich tells the story of the 1896 projection of
L'Arivee d'un train en gare de La Ciotat in his Tour de manivelle. Souvenirs d'un
chasseur d'images (Paris: Grasset, 1933), 5-6; quoted in Andre Gaudreault and Ger-
main Lacasse, "Premier regard, les 'neo-spectateurs' du Canada Francais," Vertigo
10 (Paris: 1993): 19.
4. Ana Rosas Mantecon, "Los publicos de cine," in Garcia Canclini, Los
nuevos espectadores.
5. Carlos Monsivais, "Notas sobre el Estado, la cultura nacional y las culturas
populates," Cuadernospolitico* 30 (Mexico City, 1984).
6. Ignacio Duran Loera, "El cine mexicano y sus perspectivas, Intermedios 4
(October 1991). See also Emilio Garcia Riera, Historia documental del cine mexi-
cano (Guadalajara: CNCA, Gobierno de Jalisco, Imcine, 1992), especially vol. 3.
7. See, for example, Garcia Riera, Historia documental del cine mexicano,
vols. 4 and 5; and Hugo Vargas, "El cine mexicano: la eterna crisis y la nueva gen-
eracion," La. Jornada Semanalftj (29 February 1991).
8. Deborah Holtz, "Los publicos de video," in Garcia Canclini, Los nuevos
espectadores.
9. Ella Fany Quintal and Guadalupe Reyes Domi'nguez, "Merida: ver cine
en una ciudad de provincia," in Garcia Canclini, Los nuevos espectadores.
10. Renato Janine Ribeiro, "A politica como espetaculo," in Evelina Dagnino,
ed., Anos oo. Politica e sociedade no Branl. (Sao Paulo: Editora Brasiliense, 1994).
11. Ibid.
12. Raul Becerro, "El cine por venir," Punto de vista 47 (Buenos Aires, De-
cember 1993): 8.

8. Multicultural Policies and Integration via the Market

This chapter is a reworking and expansion of a paper presented at the Forum
"Vision Iberoamericana 2000," sponsored by UNESCO in Cartagena de Indias,
Colombia, 16-18 March 1994. The meeting was for the purpose of preparing a
dossier of documents for the summit of Iberoamerican presidents, which was held
in June of the same year, in Cartagena de Indias.
1. Lourdes Arizpe, "Pluralismo cultural y desarrollo social en America Latina:
elementos para una discusion," Estudios Sociologicos 2:4 (Mexico City, January-April
1984); Rodolfo Stavenhagen and Margarita Nolasco, Politica cultural para un pais
multietnico (Mexico City: Universidad de las Naciones Unidas, 1988).
2. [In Latin America, and especially in Mexico, Central America, and the
Andean countries, indigenismo is the name for a literary and artistic style that rep-
resents the circumstances and struggles of indigenous peoples. It is also the name
for political movements and state policies regarding indigenous peoples. Tram.]
3. Guillermo Bonfil Batalla, eel., Hacia nuevos modelos de relaciones inter-
culturales (Mexico City: Consejo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes, 1993).
 180 Notes

4. On these topics, see Jose Jorge de Carvalho, O lugar da cultura traditional

na sociedade moderna in Semindrio folclore e cultura popular. As vdrias faces de um
debate (Rio de Janeiro: INF Coordenadoria de Estudos y Pesquisas/IBAC 1992),
2338 [Spanish translation: "Las dos caras de la tradicion: Lo clasico y lo popular
en la modernidad latinoamericana," in Cultura y pospolltica, ed. Nestor Garcia Can-
clini (Mexico City: Consejo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes, 1995), 125-65];
and Roger Bartra, Oficio mexicano (Mexico City: Grijalbo, 1993).
5. Emile McAnany and Antonio C. La Pastina, "Telenovela Audiences: A
Review and Methodological Critique of Latin American Research," paper pre-
sented at the Eighteenth Convention of the Latin American Studies Association
(LASA), Atlanta, March 1994. See also Joseph D. Straubhaar, "Mas alia del impe-
rialismo de los medios. Interdependencia asimetrica y proximidad cultural," Co-
municacion y sociedad 18-19 (Guadalajara, May-December 1993).
6. Fernando Calderon and Martin Hopenhayn, "Educacion y desarrollo en
America Latina y el Caribe: tendencias emergentes y lineas estrategicas de accion,"
Third Meeting of the World Commission on Culture and Development, San Jose,
Costa Rica, 22-26 February 1994.
7. See Carlos Catalan and Guillermo Sunkel, Consume cultural en Chile: la
elite, lo masivo y lo popular (Santiago: CLACSO, 1990); Nestor Garcia Canclini,
ed., El consume cultural en Mexico (Mexico City: Consejo Nacional para la Cultura
y las Artes, 1993); and Oscar Landi, A. Vacchieri, and L. A. Quevedo, Publicosy
consumes culturales de Buenos Aires (Buenos Aires: CEDES, 1990).
8. The Economic Commission for Latin America (CEPAL) is one of the
few international organizations of the region that has begun to deal with these
questions. See La industria cultural en la dindmica del desarrollo y la modernidad:
nuevas lecturas para America Latina y el Caribe, LC/G. 1823 (14 June 1994).
9. Ibid., 47.
10. Manuel A. Garreron, "Poh'ticas, financiamiento e industrias culturales en
America Latina y el Caribe," Third Meeting of the World Commission on Cul-
ture and Development, San Jose, Costa Rica, 12-26 February 1994.
11. Rafael Roncagliolo, "La integracion audiovisual en America Latina: Es-
tados, empresas y productores independientes," paper presented at the sympo-
sium on Cultural Policies in Processes of Supranational Integration, Mexico City,
3-5 October 1994.

9. Negotiation of Identity in Popular Classes?

This chapter is based on a paper presented at the seminar "Entre el acontec-
imiento y la significacion: el discurso sobre la cultura en el nuevo mundo," Tru-
jillo, Spain, December 1992.
1. For a more encompassing review of popular culture studies, see Chandra
Mukerji and Michael Schudson, eds., Rethinking Popular Culture: Contemporary
Perspectives in Cultural Studies (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991); Claude
 Notes 181

Grignon and Jean-Claude Passeron, Lo culto y lo popular. Misembilismo y pop-

ulismo en sociologia y literatura (Buenos Aires: Nueva Vision, 1991) [translation of
Le savant et le populaire: miserabilisme etpopulisme sodologie et en litterature (Paris:
Gallimard/Seuil, 1989)].
2. Arjun Appadurai, "Disjunctive and Difference in the Global Cultural
Economy," in Global Culture, Nationalism, Globalization and Modernity, ed. Mike
Featherstone (London/Newbury Park/New Delhi: Sage, 1990). See also Daniel
Mato, ed., Teoria y politica de la construction de identidadesy diferencias en America
Latinay el Caribe (Caracas: UNESCO-Nueva Sociedad, 1994).
3. Nestor Garcia Canclini, Culturas hibridas: estrategias para entrary salir de
la modernidad (Mexico City: Grijalbo/Consejo Nacional para la Cultura y las
Artes, 1990), chapter 5 [English translation: Hybrid Cultures: Strategies for Entering
and Leaving Modernity, trans. Christopher L. Chiappari and Silvia L. Lopez (Min-
neapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995)].
4. Eduardo Menendez, Poder, estratificacion y salud (Mexico City: Ediciones
de la Casa Chata, 1981), 316-86.
5. Friedrich Earth, Los grupos etnicosy sus fronteras (Mexico City: Fondo de
Cultura Economica, 1976); R. C. Harman, Cambios medicos y sociales en una co-
munidad maya tzeltal (Mexico City: Institute Nacional Indigenista, 1974) [origi-
nal English version: "Medical and Social Changes in a Tzeltal Mayan Commu-
nity," Ph.D. cliss., University of Arizona, 1969].
6. Alberto M. Cirese, Ensayos sobre las culturas subalternas (Mexico City:
Centro de Investigaciones y Estudios Superiores en Antropologia Social, 1979),
53-54-
7. See, for example, Michel Foucault, Historia de la sexualidad I: La voluntad
de saber (Mexico City: Siglo XXI, 1977). [English: The History of Sexuality (New
York: Pantheon, 1978)].
8. Cecile Gouy-Gilbert, Ocumicho y Patamban: dos maneras de ser artesano
(Mexico City: Centre d'Etudes Mexicaines et Centramericaines, 1987).
9. I take the phrase from Anselm Strauss, Negotiations: Contexts, Processes
and Social Order (San Francisco, Washington, and London: Jossey-Bass Publish-
ers, 1978). For a recent discussion or the contributions of this writer and his
followers, see the collection compiled by Isabelle Baszanger and her introduc-
tion, "Les chantiers d'un interaccionisme americaine," in Anselm Strauss, La
frame de la negotiation. Sodologie qualitative et interactionisme (Paris: L'Harmattan,
1992).
10. Nestor Garcia Canclini, Jennifer Metcalfe, and Patricia Safa, "Politicas
culturales y necesidades socioculturales en la frontera norte," mimeo, 1989.
11. Rosalia Winocur. "Politicas culturales y participacion popular en la Ar-
gentina. Evaluacion del Programa Cultural en Barrios," thesis presented in the
Facultad Latinoamericana de Ciencias Sociales (FLACSO), Mexico City, 1992.
12. Jesus Martin Barbero and Sonia Munoz, Television y melodrama (Bogota:
Tercer Mundo Editores, 1992), 2629.
 182 Notes

13. Beatriz Sarlo, "Cultura y pospoh'tica: un recorrido de Fujimori a la guerra

del Golfo," in Cultura y pospolitica, ed. Nestor Garcia Canclini (Mexico City: Con-
sejo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes, 1995).
14. Ibid.

10. How Civil Society Speaks Today

1. On this topic, see Renato Rosaldo, Culture and Truth: The Remaking of
Social Analysis, especially the chapter "The Changing Chicano Narratives" (Boston:
Beacon Press, 1989); and George Yudice, Jean Franco, and Juan Flores, eds., On
Edge: The Crisis of Contemporary Latin American Culture (Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press, 1992).
2. For a compelling treatment of this matter, see Jose Jorge de Carvalho, O
lugar dd cultura traditional na sociedade moderna, in Semindrio folclore e cultura
popular. As vdrias faces de um debate (Rio de Janeiro: INF Coordenadoria de Estu-
dos y Pesquisas/IBAC, 1992).
3. Robert Hughes, Nothing if Not Critical: Selected Essays on Art and Artists
(New York: Knopf, 1990).
4. Robert Hughes, The Culture of Complaint (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1993).
5. Roberto Alejandro, Hermeneutics, Citizenship, and the Public Sphere (Al-
bany: State University of New York Press, 1993).
6. See Renato Ortiz, Mundializacao e cultura, (Sao Paulo: Editora Brasiliense,
1994), chapters 4 and 5.
7. Jean-Marc Ferry, "Las transformaciones de la publicidad poli'tica," in El
nuevo espacio publico, Jean-Marc Ferry, Dominique Wolton, et al. (Barcelona: Gedisa,
1992), 18-20.
8. See Jiirgen Habermas, "Citizenship and National Identity," and Richard
Falk, "The Making of Global Citizenship," in The Condition of Citizenship, ed.
Bart van Steenbergen (London, Thousand Oaks, and New Delhi: Sage Publica-
tions, 1994).
9. Norbert Lechner, "La biisqueda de la comunidad perdida. Los retos de la
democracia en America Latina," Sociologica 7:19 (Mexico City, UAM-Azcapotzalco,
May-August 1992).
10. Diamela Eltit, El padre mio (Santiago: Francisco Zegers Editor, 1989), 17.
11. Ricardo Piglia, Critica y fiction (Buenos Aures: Siglo Veinte, 1990), 177.
Index

Action Party, xix Anderson, Benedict, 28

Aesthetic distancing, xiv "Anglo-conformity," xxxviii
Affirmative action, xxxvii, n Anthropologists: as
Agreements: supranational, 31; trade, detectives/psychoanalysts, 61-65;
xxvii domestically consumed culture and,
Agtiero y Prado, Riva, 79 53; rebellion by, 50; sociologists vs.,
Ahmad, Aijaz, xi 49-51
ALADI. See Latin American Anthropology, 41-42, 49, 95, 142; crisis
Association for Integration of, 51, 6364; methodological
ALALC. See Latin American Free populism of, 50; narrow scope of,
Trade Association 50; postempirical/posthermeneutic,
Alameda Park, changes in, 59 62; psychoanalysis and, 63;
"Aleph, The" (Borges), 83, 84 sociology and, 63, 65; urban, 39, 61
Alfbnsi'n, Raul, 144 Anti-North Americanism, 103
Allende, Isabel, 8, 79-80 Appadurai, Arjun, xxvii, 5, 40;
Alliance for Progress, xx= classification by, 138; on
Almodovar, Pedro, 101 conspicuous stinginess, 42; on
Alta burguesia, i6^m consumption, 43
Americanization, xxi, 32, 103; Arantes, Antonio, 69
confronting problem of, xxxiv Arato, Andrew, 28

183
 184 Index

Arevalo, Pepe, 55 Borges, Jorge Luis, 10, 72; "Aleph" and,

Aristirain, Adolfo, 93 83,84
Arnold, Matthew: Rodo and, 166031 Botero, 91
Art, 7; creation/dissemination/ Bourdieu, Pierre, 40
reception of, 91; judgmentalism Brunner, Jose Joaqui'n, xxvi; on
and, 153; politics and, ix nationalist-popular, xxii-xxiii
Arte channel, 105 Buarque de Holanda, Sergio, 16403
Audience surveys, 15, 54-55, 116, 120, Bunuel, Luis, in
121, 128, 174011 "Bureaucratic and inefficient" state, 145
Audiovisual industry, 33, 1045, 1IO > Bush, George: Collor and, 118
121; commercialization of, 107;
GATT and, 97, 102, 103; Latin Cadena de las Americas, 113, 157
American, 104-5; reorganization of, Caesarism, Gramsci on, xix
117. See also Film industry Calvino, Italo, 60
Auge, Marc: on nonplaces, 73 Cantinflas, 71
"Authoritarian" state, 145 Capitalism: global, xii, i65ni3;
Aymaras, population of, 125 multinational, xxxiii
"Cardinal Points of Art, The"
Bakhtin, Mikhail, xxxv, 21, 154 (exhibition), 92
Barth, Friedrich: on transactions, 140 Cardoso, Fernando Henrique, 72
Bellinghausen, Herman, 82 Caribbean Culture House, 129
Bello, Andres, i64n3 Cariocas, 68
Benjamin, Walter, 161 Carpentier, Alejo, 79, 167^9
Berlin Wall, 44, 105 Casa de las Americas, x, i7On3
Berni, Antonio, 72 Castells, Manuel, 59; on consumption,
Bertolucci, Bernardo, 101 39
Beverley, John, xvi, xxiv; on dominant/ Castro, Fidel, 123
subaltern, xxx, xxxii; on politics/ Centre Georges Pompidou, exhibitions
subaltern, xxxiii; skepticism of, xvii at, 91
Bhabha, Homi, xvi, xxxi; on colonial CEPAL. See Economic Commission for
mimicry, xii; "DissemiNation" and, Latin America and the Caribbean
xiii; on otherness, xiv Change, Utopia of, 13
Biblioteca Ayacucho, 129 Chiapas, n, 156
Biblioteca Popular de Latinoamerica y Chilangos, 67, 68, 75
el Caribe, 129 Cine clubs, 120
Bioregulation, xxx Cinema, in, 116: art, 120; global, 92,
Blanco, Jose Joaqui'n, 82 93, 121; multimedia space and,
Blockbuster (corporation), 113, 114 102-3; national, xxvi, 98, 113, 114,
Blood, affinity and, xxviii 119; protecting, 97; reorientation of,
Bonapartism, Gramsci on, xix no; survival of, 92-93, 102-3. See
"Boom," 91, i63ni also Mexican cinema
Borders: disappearance of, 104; hybrid, Cinematographic tradition, 109-10,
xv I I J , 121
 Index 185

Cinephiles, videophiles and, 116 Civil society, xxii, xxviii, 5, 46, 65, 156;
Cineteca, 120 citizenship and, 28; concern for, 27,
Cities: anthropological perspectives on. 158, 159; criminality and, xxx;
60; consumption and, 5-7, 24; crisis flexibility of, xxvii; Foucault
of, 63-64; describing/imagining, critique of, xxix; idealizations of,
60, 62; disintegration of, 6, 7, 71; intellectuals and, 161; multiple
6364, 74, 81; globalization and, 58, initiatives of, 133; organization of,
62; migrants in, 69; multicultural, xxii; people and, 26-28; political
6, 63, 64; narrating, 82-83, 85; society and, xxi, 160; public space
rebirth of, 64; shopping malls and, and, 157; redefining, 21, 154, 155,
73; sociocommunicational 159; self-dialogue of, 160; self-
definitions of, 60; strategic role of, regulation by, xxix
59; transformation of, 6, 61, no; as CLACSO. See Working Group on
video clips, 83-86. See also Cultural Policies of the Latin
Megacities American Social Science Council
Citizenship, 25, 59, 158, I7in5; Clapton, Eric, 153
apprenticeship, 22; civil society Classes: crisis of, 137; difference/
and, 28; complicity of, 39; distinction between, 3940;
conceptions of, 28, 153; conflictive identity and, 141
forms of, 153; consumption and, 5, Class prejudice, 71
15, 26, 32-33, 45-46, 47, 119, Class struggle, identity and, 141, 142
159-60; culture and, xxix, 10, 20, "Clientelist and corrupt" state, 145
21, 106; development of, xxxv, 131, Clinton, Bill, 123
151; disconnecting from, 160; Cohen, Jean L., 28
diversification of, 117-22; exercise Collor de Mello, Fernando, xxi;
of, 20, 23, 25, 119, 157; fragmented filming of, 148; television image of,
politics and, xxvi-xxx; globalization 117-18
and, xxxiv, 31, 157; identity and, 29, Coloniality, xiv, xxxi-xxxii, 4
58, 89, 95; internationalization of, Colonia Roma, 65
xxvi-xxx, 157; judicial notion of, 30; Commerce, xxv, 81, 83; diffuse linkages
in Mexico City, 57; multicultural of, 60; transnational system of, 49
diversity and, 21; policies for, 74-76; Commodities, 17, 46, 143, I77n5;
political notion of, 5; popular and, cultural, 90, 127, 132; consumption
xxvi-xxx; public opinion and, 24; and, 15, 42; distribution of, 38, 39;
rapprochement of, 28; recognition global distribution of, 25; interpreta-
and, xxxv; redefining, 21, 22, 96, tion of, 43; transnational flow of, 29
137; responsible, 134; right of, 26; Communications, xxiii, 7-9, 29, 42,
sense of belonging and, 20; social 49, 65, 131, 134, 142; advance of, 53,
movements and, 76; transformation 68; collaboration/transaction and,
in, 34, 160 38; electronic, 32, 80; forms of, 43,
Civic associations, 58 95, 102; identities and, 94;
Civil grammar, 21 interethnic democratic coexistence
Civil-rights legislation, xxxvii and, 126; multicontextual, 95;
 186 Index

Communications (continued), popular sectors, 44; rapprochement

oral/visual, 21-22; public, 28; of, 28; rationality of, 40, 160;
restricted systems of, 31; technology reconceptualizing, 5; segmentation/
and, 100; transformation of, 6, 100, inequality in, 44, 130; social life
104, 137; transnational, 49, 68, 101, and, 26, 47; study of, 37, 38, 39-40,
104, 130-31; U.S. hegemony over, 46; symbolic, 82; by videophiles,
103; urban, 59. See also Mass 121. See also Cultural consumption
communications Continental, global/national and,
Communications specialists, 60; 104-5
domestically consumed culture and, Coppola, Francis Ford, 92
53 Cornejo Polar, Antonio, 79
Communities: autonomy of, 33; desire Cortazar, Julio, i63m
for, 159-61; imaginary, 160; Cortdzar, una antropologica poetica
restructuring of, 43 (Garcia Canclini), ix
Conflict administration, supranational/ Costner, Kevin, 113
postlocal forms of, 158 Counterhegemony, xxv, xxxiii
Constructivism vs. fundamentalism, Criollismo, xxxviii, 79, I76n2
77-78 Crowds, intimacy in, no-n
Consumerism, demassified/mesticized, Cruise, Tom, 113
93 Cueto, Juan, 102
Consumers, 109; associations of, 160; Cultural activities: globalization and,
citizens and, 5, 15961; commu- 18; principles guiding, 67
nities of, 24, 4347, 159; electronic Cultural behavior, 55, 94
media and, 25; producers and, 46; Cultural consumption, 21, 45-46,
public opinion and, 24 73-74, 107; empirical studies of, 33;
Consumidores y ciudadanos: conflictos in Mexico, 43, 44-45, 52, 73; public,
multicultrales de la globalization 119; research on, 49
(Garcia Canclini), x Cultural contract, theories of, 90-91
Consumption, 18, 21; anxious/obsessive Cultural development, 40, 53, 74,
behavior around, 42; 96, 129, 152; circuits of, 30-31;
characterization of, 45, 52; cities democratic, 133; mass media and,
and, 5-7, 24; citizenship and, 5, 15, 76
26, 32-33, 45-46, 47, 119, 159-60; Cultural differences, xii, 68
commodities and, 15, 42; cultural Cultural forms, xxvi, 72, 81, 144, 152
policies and, xxxiv, 12731; defined, Cultural heritage, 129, 143
38; economic agents and, 39; Cultural integration, 32, 124; free trade
flaneur and, 8083; globalization and, 131-34
and, 20, 25; high-tech, 96; Cultural leveling, 45, 94
homogenization of, 69; increase in, Cultural needs, 46, 74-75
38, 39; mass-media, 75; as means of Cultural nomadism, 92
thinking, xxxiii; in Mexico City, 54, Cultural offerings, impoverishment of,
55; multicultural, 140; narrative of, 47
8083; politics and, xxxiv, 39; by Cultural pluralism, xxxvi, 10
 Index 187

Cultural policies, xvi, 31, 33, 70, 74, 21, 75; differences among, 90-91;
101-2, 124, 134, 151, 155; challenges ethnic, 30; fragmentation of, 72-74;
to, 68; consumption and, 127-31; globalization of, 106; hegemonic,
controversies over, 97; development 141, 146; home delivery of, 53;
of, xx, 9, 101, 117; globalization and, indigenous, x, xxv; industrialization
97; historical heritages and, 68; of, 3, 9, 24; Latin American, 9, 10,
interaction of, 138; in medium-sized 107; mass, xxii, 152; mass media
cities, 6768; ratings and, 152; and, 100; as multinational assem-
reactionary. 75; unilateral, 32 blage, 17-18; national, 29, no; pool
Cultural practices, 20; transformation of, 83; regional, 19, 93, 139; study of,
in, 109; understanding, 49 12, 13; technology and, 4, 152; tradi-
Cultural production, 74, 130 tional, 146; transnational, 57, 61, 73,
Cultural relations: democratization of, no; urban, 29, 33, 72, 77, 101; video
145; intensification of, 5 politics and, 149; visual, 90; zones
Cultural resources, 74, 126,129-30, 139 of, 78. See also Local cultures
Cultural space: audiovisual technology
and, 105; Latin American, x, 1045; Danzon (film), 54, 55, 114, 121
supranational, xxxiv Daughters of the American
Cultural strategies, economic strategies Revolution, xxxviii
and, 97-102 De Andrade, Mario, 164^
Cultural studies, xi, xiv, xvi, xxxvi, 80; Debray, Regis, 103
British, 9; constructivist discourse of, De la Torre, Raul, 122
78; defining, xii, [3, i6gn2; globali- Del Rio, Dolores, 112
zation and, xi; Latin American, 10, Democracy, 113, 149; abstract rules of,
i69n2; rubric of, 8; social move- 15; hegemony and, xxix; media and,
ments and, xxxi; U.S., 6, 9, 12, i69nz 5; as multicultural equity, xxxiii;
Cultural Studies (Grossberg, Nelson, nondemocratic groups and, xxvii;
Treichler), 8 restitution of, 26
Culturas hibridas: estrategias para entrar Demographic expansion, 4, 74
y salir de la modernidad (Garcia Dependency, 44; displacement of, 4
Canclini), x Deterritorialization, 7, 57, 93
Cultura y comunicacion en la ciudad de Development, 59-60, 124; alternative
Mexico (Garcia Canclini), x forms of, 125; modern, 126; multi-
Culture industry, 33, 76, 101; consump- cultural, 125, 133; supranational, 31.
tion and, xxxiv; endogenous, 32; See also Cultural development;
globalization and, 128; repositioning, Economic development;
106; transnational, xxvi Underdevelopment
Cultures: citizenship and, 106; Diaries (Malinowski), 51
coexistence of, 153; collective, 43, Difference, ethnic sense of, xxv
151; commercialization of, 8; Discourse, 27, 63, 65; facts and, 62;
concentration of, 45; conception of, international homogenized, 92;
139, 14142, 151; consumption of, 4, political, 89, 119. See also
53; contemporary, 152; democratic, Metadiscourse
 188 Index

Discrimination, 13, 71 Escenas de pudory liviandad, Monsivais

Dismissal, heroization and, xxiii and, 82
Dissemination, celebration of, 64 Esquivel, Laura, 8, 80
"Dissemination" (Bhabha), xiii Estudios culturales, i69D2
Diversity: cultural, 125, 128; Estudios de la cultura, i6<)m
discerning/analyzing,
o / o 20: Ethnic groups, xxxvii, n, 78, 8283,
multicultural, 21, 115, 156-57 126, 139; consumption by, 133;
Doha Flor and Her Two Husbands fundamentalist doctrines of, 78;
(film), 93 persistence of, 94
Douglas, Mary: on rituals, 41-42 Ethnicism, n, 139; anthropological, 141
Duran Loera, Ignacio, 112 Ethnic issues, 10, 16, 72, 125, 145
Ethnicities: coexistence of, 153; multiple,
Eclectics, fundamentalists and, 138-40 125; as potential nations, 126
Eco, 113 Ethnography, xxv, 65
Ecological movements, 56, 75, I74ni3 Ethnopsychoanalysis, 51
Economic Commission for Latin Ethnoscapes, 138
America and the Caribbean European Community, screen-time
(CEPAL), 124, i8on8 quotas and, 102
Economic development, xviixix, xxix, European Parliament, voter turnout in,
5, 17, 125, 142; globalization and, 18; 3i
Latin American, 47, 123-24 European Union, xxvii, 30
Economic policies, 39, 126 Ewen, Stuart, 40
Economic rationality, 17, 38 External objects, acceptance of, 42
Economic strategies, cultural strategies
and, 97-102 Facts: discourse and, 62; signification
Economy: globalization of, 106; of, 62
transnationalization of, 138 Familiar, foreign and, 1619
Elbulto (film), 93 Family corporatism, 57
Elections, 15, 1067 Fanon, Frantz, 12
Electronic linkages, 7274 Feasts, gathering for, 74, 75
Electronic media, 24, 27, 53, 56, 60, Federal District, population of, 51
117; advance of, 68; consumers and, Felix, Maria, 112
25 Feminism, xi, 12
Elites: culture of, 30; political control Fernandez, Emilio, m
by, 43 Fernandez, Macedonio, 83
ElMariachi (film), 103 Fernandez Regamar, Roberto, i64n3
Eltit, Diamela: on marginal person's Festival of Mexico City, 59; multi-
speech, 160-61 cultural heterogeneity/dispersion
Embrafilme, 101 of, 56; participation in, 57; research
Entrada libre. Cronicas de la sociedad at, 5455; segmentation/segregation
que se organlza (Monsivais), xxii, 82 at, 55, 61
Epistemological creativity, Festival of the Historic Downtown
social/geopolitical power and, 12 Area, 59
 Index 189

Fideicomiso de Estimulo al Cine Fundamentalism, 25, 95, 158;

Mexicano, 59 constructivism vs., 7778;
Field studies, 50, 54, 60, 1741111 cosmopolitanism and, 80;
Film industry: crises in, 99, 109; negotiation and, xxxvi
foreign, 113; GATT and, 97, 101; Fundamentalists, eclectics and, 13840
Latin American, 98-99, 101; Funes, un gran amor (film), U.S.
subsidies for, 99; transformation in, financing for, 122
109. See also Audiovisual industry
Films, 32, 33; action, 114; communi- Gangs, names of, 70
cative action of, in; distribution of, Garcia Canclini, Nestor: critics of, xvii;
122; foreign, 114; history of, in, 116; education of, ix; on international
Latin American, 115; market for, 132; popular culture, xxvi; on neo-
as multimedia product, 102, 115-16; Gramscians, xvii; on
national, 115; national culture and, subalterns/democratic society, xvi
112; privatization of, 152; public/ Garcia Marquez, Gabriel, 8, 79, i6}nz;
private, no; recouping costs on, 115; Macondismo and, 167^9
via satellite, 100; U.S., 114 Gatherings, attendance at, 73, 74, 75
Finanscapes, 138 GATT. See General Agreement on
Flaneur, 84; narrative of consumption Tariffs and Trade
and, 80-83 Geertz, Clifford, 51
Flores, Chava: music of, 72 Cell, Alfred: on Muria Gond people, 42
FMLN, xxii General Agreement on Tariffs and
Folklore, xxv, 27, 61, 73, 78 Trade (GATT); agriculture and, 102;
Fondo Nacional de Fomoento a las audiovisual industry and, 97, 102,
Artesanfas, 142 103; debates on, 99; Europe and,
Ford, John, 92 102; film/television and, 97, 101
Foreign, familiar and, 1619 Geopolitical power, epistemological
Fotonovelas, 84,151 creativity and, 12
Foucault, Michel, xii, xxx, 142; on civil Gibson, Mel, 113
society, xxix Gil, Gilberto, 153
Foundation far the Production and Global: vs. local, 3;
Distribution of Latin American national/continental and, 104-5;
Media, xxxv regional and, 92-94
Free trade, 31, 107, 124, 126; cultural Globalization, 4, 5, 6, n, 94, 131, 158;
exemptions to, 99; cultural cities and, 58, 62; citizenship and,
integration and, 131-34; cultural xxxiv, 31, 157; consumption and,
quality and, 100; elimination of, 20, 25; cultural, 18, 80, 95, 97;
130 culture industry and, 128; debates
Freud, Sigmund, xiv on, 7; economic, 18, 96, 124;
Freyre, Gilberto, 16403, i66n39 effects of, 18-19, 30, 32, 90; failure
Fuentes, Carlos, 10, 45, 84, i63ni of, 127; as fragmentation/
Fujimori, Alberto, xxi; photographing, recomposition process, 3; historical-
148; television image of, 117-18 territorial culture and, 95;
 190 Index

Globalization (continued), indigenous democracy and, xxix; struggle for,

peoples and, 125-27; and xvi, xxiv, xxxiii
internationalization compared, 18; Heidegger, Martin: on unveiling, xiv
as irreversible tendency, 19; Latin Heritage, identification of, 81
America and, 19; local and, 3, Heroization, dismissal and, xxiii
58-60, 154; multiculturalism and, Heterogeneity, xxxvi, 8, 10, 12; degree
xi, 9-10, 79, I72ni6; nations/sectors of, 55-56; homogeneity and, 94;
of, 19; neoliberalism and, 19, 26, multitemporal/multicultural, 124
139; regional integration and, xxxiv; High culture, 73, 155; popular culture
resistance to, 139; rhythms of, 61; and, 55, 72; priority to, 128-29;
summarizing, 2829; universaliza- transformation of, 152
tion and, 93; urban life and, 80 Historical heritages, 100; cultural
Globo, xx policies and, 68
Glocalization, 58-60 History, 139, 141; identity and, 93
Goldberg, David Theo, 12 Hitchcock, Alfred: McGuffin and, 102
Gomez Pena, Guillermo, xv Hoggart, Richard, 21
Gramsci, Antonio, xix, xxii, 12, 21, Hollands, Heloisa Buarque de, 12
i66n36; on democracy/hegemony, Holston, James, 5
xxix; on fascism, xvii Holtz, Deborah: on video clubs/movie
Grassroots, 64, 141, 147 theaters, 11617; on videophiles, 113,
Grossberg, Lawrence, 8 116
Groups, difference/distinction Homelessness, homeless people and,
between, 3940 xiv
Guadalajara, urban identities in, 57 Homogeneous: heterogeneous and, 94;
Guerrilla struggles, fundamentalization/ in large cities, 70
criminalization of, xxi Homogenization, 93, 94, 153, I76n4;
Guevara, Che, xix, 44 modernizing, 29
Guha, Ranajit: on subaltern, xxxi Huerta, Efrain: on city, 65
Guzman, Alejandra, 45 Hughes, Robert, 152-53
Humanities, Anglo-American, 6
Habermas, Jiirgen, 20, 105, 154 Human rights, 126, 156
Hall, Stuart, x, 9; on Gramsci, xvii Humor, in Sao Paulo/Mexico City, 71
Haraway, Donna, xvi; wholeness of Hybrid Cultures: Strategies for Entering
identity and, xiv and Leaving Modernity (Garcia
Harman, R. C.: on transactions, 140 Canclini), xi, xxv, xxvi
Haro Tecglen, Eduardo, 99 Llybridization, xiv, xxii, 4, 8, 12, 78, 91,
Harvard Business Review, 93 94, 96, 143, 153; aesthetics of, xv, xx;
Hegemonic groups, 143: consumption multicultural, 154; multitemporal,
by, 4445; economy/politics/com- xii; resisting, n; theories of, xi, xii
munications, 27; subaltern groups
and, xxx, xxxii, 126, 140, 141, 142 Identity, 8, 47, 57, 78, 144;
Hegemony, xiv, xxi, xxx, 96, 141; anthropology defined, 90;
bidding for, 81; cultural, 37; citizenship and, 29, 58, 95;
 Index 191

Identity (continued), class/class struggle Inequality, 13, 44, 130, 160

and, 141, I/) 2; classic, 56; as Infante, Pedro, 72, 112
coproduction, xxxv, 9496; crisis Informal economy, 19
of, 137; ethnic, n; formation of, Informatics, 152
xxxiv, xxxviii, 16, 17, 29, 33, 60, 67, Information: consciousness-raising,
77, 91, 137, 138, 142; fundamentalist 119; global distribution of, 25;
fixation of, 80; generational international, 102; mass media and,
conflicts and, 16; history and, 93; 76; networks, 155; for NGOs, 156;
homogenous, 70; internationaliza- processing, 22, 59, 156; production,
tion and, 93; Latin American/U.S., 29; restricted systems of, 31;
xxxvi-xxxviii; local, 96; loss of, 30; technologies, 96, 100; television
media and, 94-96; Mesoamerican/ and, 127; transnational system of,
Mexican, 143; modern, xi, 29, 49; U.S. hegemony over, 103
I7ini6; monadic, 68-72; multi- Institute for Latin America, directory
national, 30; multiple, 133; as by, 130
narrated construct, 89; national, Institutionalization, xxxii, 30
xxv, 89, 95-96, 100, i63n2, 164^; Integration, 104, 130; competition and,
negation of, 138; performance/ 154; cultural, 32, 124, 131-34;
action and, 96; politics of, 13, 28; economic, 124; multiethnic
popular, 137; postmodern, 29, relations and, 125; regional, xxxiv,
I7ini6; as processes of negotiation, 30-31, [23; supranational, 33;
96; reformulation of, 24, 29, 31, 94, transnational, 128; unplugging and,
96, 124; regional, 79, 91, 95-96; 154-56
shared, 159; sociospatial definition Intellectuals, 148; politicians and, 161;
of, 29; struggle for, 14849; state/civil society and, 161
symbols, xxv, 101; theater/politics Interaction, 39, 69
and, 96; Western, xv Intercultural relations, 78, 89, 126, 143,
Identity narratives, 90; citizenship and, 160; globalization and, xi;
89; radio/film, 89 reconceptualization of, 142
Identity politics, xxxvi; cultural International Film Festivals, 120
parallax for, xxxvii-xxxviii Internationalization, xxi, 75,139; and
Ideology, 3; developmentalist, 90 globalization compared, 18; identity
Ideoscapes, 138 and, 93; symbols of status and, 17
Iglesias, Julio, 45 International organizations, cultural
Imperialism, 4; opposition to, xxii actions of, 12829
Import substitution, xxi, 90 Invisible Cities (Calvino), 60
Indigenous peoples, x, xxv, n, 139, Irrationalism, exaltation of, 80
I73n5; circumstances/struggles of, Isherwood, Baron: on rituals, 41-42
I79H2; globalization and, 125-27; Italian Futurism, 79
modernization among, 126
Industrialization, 16, 53, 72; homo- Jacobin individualism, n
geneity imposed by, 17; urban Jameson, Fredric, xi
expansion and, 58 Jarman, Derek, 121
 192 Index

Jarmusch, Jim, 121 Latin American Fund for Audiovisual

Jencks, Charles, 152 Production and Diffusion, 132
Joseph, Gilbert, xxiii Latin American Fund for Cultural
Journal of Consumer Marketing, 93 Development, 129
Jurassic Park (film), 92; Spanish/French Latin American Fund for the Arts, 129
premieres of, 98 Latinamericanism, 79
Latin American Subaltern Studies
Kaliman, 84 Group, xiv
Lechner, Norbert, 158, 159
Labor force, reproduction of, 38-39 Left, popular masses and, xix
Labor regulation, 123, 126 Legitimation strategy, xv
Labor unions, 4, 15, 138, 148, 156; Leisure time, in Mexico City, 52
negotiation/confrontation and, 159 Levi-Strauss, Claude, 92
La ciudadausente (Piglia), 83 Lewis, Oscar: Tepoztlan and, 51
La ciudad de los viajeros (Garcia Lezama Lima, Jose, 164^, 167^9
Canchm), x Lifestyles, multiplicity of, 70
Laclau, xvn, xxxiii Like Water for Chocolate (film), 93, 103,
La globalization imaginada (Garcia 114, 120
Canclini), xi, xxxvi Liminality, xiii, xiv
La mujer de Benjamin (film), 93, 114 Literacy, 7; Spanish/Portuguese, 123
Lang, Jack: on culture, 151 Literary theory, xiv
Lange, Andre: on horticulture of Local, globalization and, 3, 58-60, 154
creation, 104 Local cultures, 19, 29, 74, 90, 146;
Languages: crisis in, 160; multiplicity displacement of, 68; participation
of, 70 in, 61, 75
La production simbolica (Garcia Lottes, Gunther: on bourgeois public
Canclini), ix sphere, 22-23
Las batallas en eldesierto (Pacheco), 65 Lucas, George, 92, 101
Las culturas populares en el capitalismo Ludmer, Josefina, 79
(Garcia Canclini), x Lumiere, no
Las industrias culturales en la integration Lyotard, Jean-Francois, 41
latinoamericana (Garcia Canclini), x
Las Lomas, 71, I76n9 Macondismo, xxvi, 79, 167^9
La Tarea (film), 93, 114 Macunaima (film), 93
Latin America: invention of, 4; Maldita Vecindad, 85
multicultural realities in, u Malinowski, Bronislaw, 51
Latin American Association for Mallon, Florencia, xxiii, xxiv; on
Integration (ALADI), 133-34 embedded memory/practice, xxv
Latin American Culture House, 129 Maluf, Paulo, 72
Latin American Economic System Mapplethorpe, Robert, 153
(SELA), 133 Mapuches, population of, 125
Latin American Free Trade Association Maquiladoras, xv, I77n7
(AIALC), 124 Marginalization, 126, 127
 Index 193

Mariategui, Jose Carlos, 164113 Mesquich, Felix, no

Markets, 132, i';2-53; art, 91-92; Messages: defolklorization of, xxvii;
international, 131; labor, 7; mass, interpretation of, 43; transnational
152; niche, xxxvii; political, 138, 147; flow of, 29
restructuring of, 7; surveying, 15; Mestifagem, i66n39
symbolic, 99, 138; telecommuni- Mestizaje, xxxviii, i66n39, I77H5
cations, 98 Mestizos, xxxvi, xxxviii, 79
Martin Barbero, Jesus, 8; on telenovela, Metadiscourse, 84, 161; economic/
H7 political, 157. See also Discourse
Marxist Literary Group, xi Mexican cinema: golden age of, 11112,
Mass, the popular and the, xx 115; mass audiovisual culture and,
Mass communications, 31, 39, 45, 132; 112; opinions of, 114; success for,
importance of, 101; rapprochement 120; video clubs and, 113
of, 28; reformulating, 104 Mexico: The Splendors of Thirty
Mayas, population of, 125 Centuries (New York Metropolitan
McClaren, Peter, 10 Museum of Art), 8
McGuffin: described, 102 Mexico City: deterioration of, 56-57,
Media, xx, 15, 71, 78, 129, 130, 151, 157; 64; expansion/massification of, 74;
communicative processes of, 76; heritage of, 81; indigenous
construction of, 148; consumption Mexicans in, 5152; metropolitan
of, 75; culture and, 100; democracy area of, 52; narratives of, 85;
and, 5; discourse of, 63; expansion population of, 81; recording, 60;
of, xxxvii, 53-54, 160; identity and, recreational/cultural uses of, 52
94-96; normalcy, 101; omnipotence Mexico City earthquake (1985), 56, 63,
of, 37; protecting, 97; public sphere 85
and, 23, 26; U.S. position on, 98. Michelet, Charles-Albert, 92
See also Electronic media Migration, 7, 53, 126; cities and, 62,
Mediascapes, 138 69; globalization and, xi;
Megacities, 58, 80; crisis of, 49; multicultural, 154; racism/prejudice
decomposition of, 7, 70; growth/ and, 71
multicultural conflicts in, 84; Minorities, xii; consumption by, 133;
narratives of, 83; notion of, 67. See cultural citizenship and, 21
also Cities Misquitos, Sandanistas and, xix
Melodrama, 147-49 Mixtecos, 82, 125, 145
Memory: collective, xxvii; embedded, Moderate Party, xix
xxv; national, 44 Modern, 42; postmodern and, 86
Menchii, Rigoberto: testimonio of, Modernity, xiii, xvii, 26, 72, 127,
i68n67 139-40, 158; critique of, n;
Menem, Carlos, xxi; filming of, 148; developmentalist, 90; enlightened,
layaway vote and, 39; television 146; indigenous culture and, xxv,
image of, 11718 126; multiethnic relations and, 125;
Menendez, Eduardo, 140 neoliberal, 159; realist rationality of,
MERCOSUR, xxvii, xxix, 30, 124 xxii; selective, 161; technological, 45
 194 Index

Monadic identities, dissolution of, Multimedia, 95, 121; cinema and,

68-72, 79 102-3; culture industry and, 106;
Monolithism, rejection of, 21 spectators, no
Monroe, Marilyn, 44 Muniz, Marco Antonio, 55, 61
Monsivais, Carlos, xxii, 82, 85, 112; on Muria Gond people, 42
megacities, 86; on sarcasm/ Museum of Popular Cultures,
subalterns, 71; on theaters, in reception in, 54
Moraga, Chern'e, xiv Museum of the Templo Mayor,
Moreiras, Alberto, xxxiii, :69n77 reception in, 54
Mouffe, Chantal, xxxiii Music, 152; African/Latin American,
Movie theaters, 103, 106, 113, 115, 119; 154; hybridization of, 72;
access to, 116; closing of, 102, 109; nonindigenous, xxiv;
construction of, no; in Federal plugged/unplugged, 153-54
District, 116-17; films at, 100, 120; Mutual help networks, 58, 129
Latin American, 98-99; number of,
11617; surveys at, 116, 120; videos Nacos, 71, i76nio
and, 11617, !2i NAFTA. See North American Free
Movimento dos Sem Terra, xxviii Trade Agreement
MTV, 5; de-electrified concerts on, 153 Nahuas, 83, 125
Muestras Internacionales de Cine, 120 Narratives, 6, 77, 80-83, 85; identity,
Multicontextuality, 95 89, 90; internal/external, 82;
Multicultural collective, public as, national, xiii
156-57 Nation, juridico-political coordinates
Multiculturalism, xxxi, xxxiii, xxxvi, 8, of, 29
29, 77, 86,121, 130,; 156, 157; in cities, National, 16; continental/global and,
6, 63, 64; citizenship and, 21; conser- 104-5; ethnicization of, 169^7;
vative/liberal/leftist, 10; democratic, transnational and, 111-15
161; future of, 109; globalization National culture, xii, xxxviii, 17, 29;
and, xi, 9-10, 79, I7i-72ni6; diversity of, 127-28; film and, 112;
hegemony/singularity and, 10; fundamentalist view of, 30;
Latin American, n; populist, 153; Mexican, 112; notion of, 67, 72;
separatism and, 10; social construc- remodeling of, 31, 91
tionist perspective on, 80; U.S., xi, National Fund for the Promotion of
13; Western version of, 32 Crafts, 142
Multiculturalism (Goldberg), 12 National identity, 11, i63n2; dissolution
Multicultural societies, 9, 61; of, 95-96; ethnic sense of, xxv;
constructionist interpretations of, foundations of, 138-39; trans-
80; democratic, 157; future of, 155; formation of, 89
Latin American space and, 104-5; Nationalism, n, 16-17, 94>J39; political,
narratives of, 77 78; popular, xxi; return of, 103-7;
Multicultural studies, rise of, 3 stereotypes of, 160; territorial, 155
Multidisciplinary theory, 3840 National movements, xxi-xxii;
Multiethnic relations, 29, 125, 127 fundamentalist doctrines of, 78
 Index 195

National popular, xvii, xxi, xxii-xxiii, O'Connor, Sinead, 153

xxvii, 141, 16403; construction of, Officials, interviews of, I74nn
xix; critique of, xxiii One's own, reelaboration of, 24
Nation-state, ethnic/regional traditions Organization of American States
and, 68 (OAS), 106, 124, 133, 157
Negotiation, 83; fundamentalism and, Ortiz, Fernando, 164^, i66n39
xxxvi; negation and, xxxv; Ortiz, Renato, xx, 8, 167^8; on
subalterns and, xxxv homogeneous/heterogeneous, 94;
Negrete, Jorge, 112 on international popular culture, 44
Neighborhood movements, 57-58, 70, Ostranienie, xiv
85 Other, xiv; search for, 63
Nelson, Gary, 8
Neo-Arielism, xvii Pacheco, Jose Emilio, 65
Neo-Gramscians, xvii, xxv Panethnicities, xxxvii, xxxviii
Neoliberalism, xx, xxii, xxxiv, 16, Paraethnic movements, 126
105-6, 148, 155, I7on3; cultural "Paris-Berlin" exhibition, 91
regulation and, xxx; democratiza- "Paris-New York" exhibition, 91
tion under, xxi; globalization and, Participation, 15, 154
19, 26, 139 Paseo de la Reforma, 59
Neoliberal reforms, 100, 107, 142, 158 Paternosto, Cesar, 104
Neo-Zapatistas, xxii, xxviii, 27 Paulistas, 67, 68, 72, 75; heterogeneity
Nestle, confronting, 156 of, 69
News programs, intercultural conflicts Paz, Octavio, 104, 164^
on, 89 Peasant and Nation: The Making of
New York Metropolitan Museum of Postcolonial Mexico and Peru
Art, 8 (Mallon), xxiii
New York Review of Books, Hughes in, Pena, Guillermo de la, 57; on
152 citizenship/identity, 58
NGOs. See Nongovernmental People: civil society and, 26-28;
organizations deterritorialization of, xxvii
Nongovernmental organizations Piazzola, Astor, 104
(NGOs), 47, 106; features of, xxvii, Pierucci, Antonio Flavio: on racism,
xxviii; information for, 156 71-72
Nonpartisan institutions, 47 Piglia, Ricardo, 83; on
Nonprofit organizations, xxvii intellectuals/politicians, 161
Nordestinos, xxxviii Plaza de Mayo, 26
North American Free Trade Agreement Political action, 23, 74, 78; subordi-
(NAFTA), xxix, 30,103,124 nation of, 138; transubstantiation
Novo, Salvador, 82 of, 118
Nugent, Daniel, xxiii Political heroes, mass-media, 117-18
Political parties, 4, 15, 56, 57;
OAS. See Organization of American credibility of, 47; militancy of, 117;
States negotiation/confrontation and, 159
 196 Index

Political populism, 27; dispersion and, Portal, Maria Ana, 57

70; idealization of, 23; method- Portantiero, Juan Carlos, xix
ological populism and, 50 Portenos, 67, 68, 75
Political society, civil society and, xxi, Postcolonialism, xi, xii
160 Postmodernism, xii, 6, 40-43, 161;
Political solidarity, modern and, 86; neoliberal, i64n3
national/transnational, 31 Postpolitics, 147-49
Political strategy, xxxiii, 21 Postrevolution, epic/melodrama and,
Politicians, intellectuals and, 161 140-47
Politico-cultural models, 43 Poverty, 64, 119, 126, 160; overcoming,
Politics: avant-garde art and, ix; con- 104
sumer choice and, x; consumption Power, xvii; conception of, 141-42;
and, xxxiv; culture and, 149; hege- reconceptualization of, 142
monic, 141; radical, xxxv; reinvention Prasad, Madhava, i65ni3
of, 28-29; subaltern and, xxxiii; Press coverage, analysis of, I74nn
subordination to, 117; television Private interests, public services and,
and, 117-18; video, 147, 149, 160 105
Polo, Marco, 60 Privatization, xxxiv, 133, 152, 155
Poniatowski, Elena, 85 Producers, consumers and, 46
Popular, the,; citizenship and, Programa Cultural de las Fronteras, 143
xxvi-xxx; crisis of, 137; defining, Programa Cultural en Barrios,
xvii-xxii, 137, 141, 146; inter- immigrants in, 144
national, xxvi-xxx; mass and, xx; Program for the Study of Urban
national, xvii, xix, xxi, xxii-xxiii, Cultures, Garcia Canclini and, ix
xxvii, 141, i64n3; rethinking, xxii Promenade, 82
xxvi; social movements and, xxvii Psychoanalysis, 65; anthropology and,
Popular culture, xi, xxiv, xxv, 21, 23, 30, 63
73, 75, 141, 151; high culture and, 55, Public, 75; changes in, 6; cultural
72; international, xxvi; origins of, diversities of, 121; films for, 115, 122;
xxi; subalternists and, xxxi global, 92; international redefinition
Popular masses, xvii; left and, xix of, 15659; multicultural diversity
Popular movements: cultural, 70; of, 115, 156-57; multiple, 93;
defeat of, xxx, 141; dispersion and, segmentation of, 120; transition
70; failure/distrust of, 159; from, 160
understanding, xxii "Public and no-charge" state, 145
Popular sectors, 69; consumption by, Public cultural facilities, 53, 69
44; dispersion of, xxviii; organiza- Public institutions, mass media and, 23
tion by, xxvi Public interest, xxxiv, 133
Populism, 147, 154, i($4n3; communi- Public life, institutions/circuits of, 24
cational, 23; methodological, 50; Publicness, transnationalization of,
nationalist, xix; political, 23, 27, 50, xxviiixxix
70; radicalized, xx, xxii; revolu- Public opinion, citizen/consumer and,
tionary, xxviii; universal, i63nz 2-4
 Index 197

Public responsibilities, subordination Regional integration, 30-31, 123;

of, 127 globalization and, xxxiv
Public services, private interests and, Representation: changes in, 26; crisis
105 of, xxxii; discourse/politics of, 27;
Public space, 26, 147; abandonment of, political, 125
xxviii; civil society and, 157; Research, 37, 41, 49, 54-55, 77, 142; as
collective participation in, 15; essay, 3334; model, shortcomings
multiple uses of, 54; reconstruction of, 40; social, 160; social behavior,
of, 9, 133-34; scientific, 155; 67; sociological, 40, 140; on
sociopolitical, 155-56 symbolic, 67
Public sphere, 131, 148; in Britain, 9; Residential community, cohesion and,
mass media and, 26; negotiating, H5
xxxiv; plebian, 21 Reyes, Alfonso, 152, :64n3
Purepecha, 83, 145 Ribeiro, Renato Janine: on
Collor/Bush, 118
Quadros, Janio, 72 Ribeiro Durham, Eunice, 69
Quality of life, 7, 64 Richard, Nelly, 12
Quechuas: learning, 144-45; Ricoeur, Paul, 13
population of, 125 Rights, reconception of, 21
Quiches, population of, 125 Risorgimento, xix
Rituals: anthropological studies on,
Race, 72; bettering/whitening, xxxvii 41-42; civic, 89; identity in, 143;
Racism, 126, 144; in Latin America, patriotic, 81
71-72 Rivera, Manuel: on modern cities, 82
Radio, 73, 74; multimedia spectators Rodo, Jose Enrique, i64n3, i66n3i
and, 115-16; privatization of, 100, Rodriguez, Ismael, in
107 Rojo amanecer (film), 114, 120
Rama, Angel, 164113 Romero, Silvio, 164^
Ramos, Julio: on fltinerie, 81-82; on Ronfeldt, David, xxviii
rhetoric of promenade, 82 Rural communities, shifting relations
Ratings, cultural policy and, 152 in, xxiv
Rationality, economic/sociopolitical/ Russian Constructivism, 79
psychological, 5
Real, imaginary and, no Samba, nationalization of, xxi
Recognition, 147; citizenship and, Sameness, criterion of, 30
xxxv; politics of, xxxv, 13 San Andres Totoltepec, 57
Red Dawn (film), 93 Sanchez, Luis Alberto, 79
RedeGlobo,i28 Sandanistas, xxi, xxx; Misquitos and,
Redfield, Robert: Tepoztlan and, 5r xix
Regional, global and, 92-94 Sandoval, Chela, xiv
Regional culture, 19, 93, 139 San Juanico, 71
Regional identities, 79, 91; dissolution Santa Fe, changes in, 59
of, 95-96 Santa Sabina, music of, 55
 198 Index

Sao Paulo, migrants in, 69 negotiation/confrontation and, 159;

Sarlo, Beatriz, 8; on Fujimori, 148; on neoliberalism and, xxviii; popular
shopping malls, 73 and, xxvii; transformative force of,
Sarmiento, Domingo Faustino, 164113 21

Sassen, Saskia: on strategic role of Social participation, consumption/

cities, 59 citizenship and, 5
Satriani, Joe, 153 Social power, epistemological creativity
Schlesinger, Philip, 9 and, 12
School of the Americas, xx Social production, cycle of, 38
Schwarzenegger, Arnold, 113 Social relations: democratization of,
Screen-time quotas, 102, 132 145; recomposition of, 6
Secular republicanism, n Social reproduction, 41, 63
Segmentation, 44, 55, 61, 120, 125, 130; Social sciences, discourse of, 65
intercultural, 94 Social struggles, 160
Segregation, 61; degree of, 55-56; Social Text, xi
residential, 53 Society: communitarian, 157;
SELA. See Latin American Economic contemporary, 161; historical
System temporalities and, xii; integrative/
Sendero Luminoso, xvi, xxiii, xxvn, 126 communicative rationality of, 40;
Sense of belonging, redefinition of, 24 peripheral view of, 69; state and, 21
Separatism, multiculturalism and, 10 Sociocommunicational definitions, 29
Shared imagery, re-creating, 76 Sociocultural conventions, 30, 79, 146,
Shopping malls, cities and, 73 151, 161
Siempre en domingo, 113, 128 Sociocultural scene, described, 24-26
Sierra, Justo, 81 Sociologists, 60; anthropologists vs.
Silva, Armando: on gatherings, 73 49-51
Silva Herzog, Jesus, xxiii Sociology, 39, 40, 49, 50, 140, 142;
Sociability, homogenization of, 69 anthropology and, 63, 65; political,
Social arrangements, multicultural, 4 33,95
Social behavior, research on, 67 Sociopolitical structures, 77, 147
Social composition, multiethnic, 4 Soja, Edward W., 83
Social conflict, 147 Solidarity, 142, 160
Social contract, 147 Solo con tupareja (film), 120
Social imaginary, television and, 112 Sony, confronting, 156
Social interaction, reorganization of, Southern Common Market. See
H7 MERCOSUR
Social knowledge, crisis in, 49 Space: audiovisual, 105, 132; identity
Social life, 161; consumption and, 47 in, 143; Latin American, 104-5;
Social movements, 4, 28, 78, 84, 93, multicultural collective, 134; state
142, 148, 149, 156, 158, 160; analyses paternalism and, 146; urban, 55. See
of, 34; citizenship and, 76; cultural also Cultural space; Public space
studies and, xxxi; democratizing, Spectacles, attendance at, 73, 74
xxviii; emergence of, xxviii, xxxiv; Spielberg, Stephen, 25, 92, 101, 118, 121
 Index 199

Stallone, Sylvester, 113 and, 4; local, 130; transformations

State: domination, rejection of, 21; in, 16; transnationalization of, 90;
intellectuals and, 161; intervention, U.S. hegemony over, 103
65; remaking, 154; society and, 21 Technoscapes, 138
Steinbeck, John, xxiii Telematics, U.S. hegemony over, 103
Suarez, Hector, 71 Telenovelas, 24, 37, 45, 83, 93, 146-47
Subalternity: double use of, xxxi; Televisa, xx, 5, 31, 120, 128, 157;
negation/negotiation and, hegemonic role of, 113
xxxxxxvi; as self-consuming Television, 32, 33, 37, 73, 105; cable, 92,
concept, xxxiixxxiii 102, 131; dissemination of, 112, 113;
Subalterns, xxiv, 140, 143; academic, films on, 106, no, 120; GATT and,
xxxii; colonial history and, 97; influence of, 143; market for,
xxxi-xxxii; consumption by, 44-45; 132; multimedia spectators and,
deconstructivist negation of, xxxv; 115-16; national, 115; politics and,
democratic society and, xvi; 11718; privatization of, 100, 107,
dominant and, xxx, xxxii, 126, 141, 152; satellite, 92; social imaginary
142; negotiations and, xxxv; politics and, 112; transformation in, 109;
and, xxxiii; popular culture and, U.S. position on, 98, 127; video
xxxi; resistance/authoritarianism of, and, 112; worldwide control of, 99
146; sarcasm against, 71; testimonio Television viewers, survey of, 128
of, xxx Testimonio, xxxi, 8, i68n67; defined,
Subjectivism, xv, 21 !7On3; incorporation of, xxx
Subjects, 11-13 Theaters. See Movie theaters
Subordination, 117, 127, 130, 138; Theoretical-methodological
sociopolitical, 4 arguments, 33
Surveys, telescopic gaze of, 54 Thought, Latin American/Anglo-
Symbolic, 40, 69, 74; identities and, American compared, 6
101; industrialization of, 77; Torre, Rene de la, 57, 58
research on, 67 Touraine, Alain, 105
Symbolic commodities, reception of, 38 Tourism, xxvi, 49, 62
Symbolic markets: reorganization of, Transculturation, xvii, xxv, xxxiii,
138; transnational reorganization of, 90-92, i66n39
99 Transforming Modernity (Garcia
Symbols of status, internationalization Canclini), xvii, xx, xxi, xxiv, xxvi
and, 17 Transnational, national and, 11115
Transnational corporations, 18, 115, 130,
Tamayo, 91 133, 156-57
Tannenbaum, Frank, xxiii Transnationalization, 30-31, 58, 60, 78,
Tastes, diversification of, 11722 134, 156; dealing with, 90; democ-
Technology, 115, 126, 139; com- ratization of, 128; economic, 92
munication/information media Treichler, Paula, 8
and, 100; communications, 92, Trobrianders, 51
130-31; consumption of, 4; culture Turner Communications, 100
 200 Index

Uncivil society, xxviii Video clubs, 104, no, 114, 121;

Underconsumption, 47 dissemination of, 113; membership
Underdevelopment, 104, 118 profiles for, 115-16; Mexican film
Unemployment, 47, 119 and, 113; in Mexico City, 116; movie
UNESCO, 106, 129, 133, I77ni, i79ni theaters and, 116-17; multimedia
Universalization, globalization and, 93 policy and, 106; proliferation of,
Unplugging, integrating and, 154-56 116, 117; surveys of, 120; system of,
Unplugged (Clapton), 153 120-21; U.S. films from, 102
Urban culture, 29, 33, 72, 77, 101 Video games, 96, 100, 147-49
Urbanization, xvii; globalization and, Videophiles: cinephiles and, 116;
xi; hegemonic tendencies of, 3; consumption by, 121; surveys of,
industrial growth and, 58; in 116, 121
Mexico City, 53; regulation of, 64 Villa Soldati, immigrants in, 144
Urban life, 7, 24, 49, 84, 85, 95; Virgin of Copacabana, celebration of,
discontinuities of, 82; globalization 144
of, 80 Volonte, Gian Maria: Funes and, 122
Urban policies, 7, 64, 75 Voluntarism, xvi, 28; populist, 158;
Urban sprawl, xxix, 74, 160 revolutionary/insurrectional, 141
Utopia, 161
Wajda, Andre, 104
Valades, Jose, xxiii Walzer, Michael, 10
Vargas Llosa, Mario, 79; on "Welfare" state, 145
borders/integration, 104; on film Wenders, Wim, 25, 80, 86, 101; on
production, 103; samba and, xxi urbanism, 81
Vasconcelos, Jose, 164^, i66n39 Williams, Raymond, x, xvii, 21
Vaughn, Stevie Ray, 153 Wolton, Dominique, 105
Veblen, Thorstein, 42 Working Group on Cultural Policies of
Venice Biennale, 92 the Latin American Social Science
Verfremdungseffekt, xiv Council (CLACSO), 69, 129
Video, 32, 33, 37, 53, 96, 101, 102, 109, World Decade for Cultural
151, 152; appeal of, in; dissemi- Development, 129
nation of, no; market for, 132;
movie theaters and, 121; networks Xenophobia, 75
of, 92; public information on, 131; Xica da Silva (film), 93
renting, 115, 116, 119; taxing, 106; Xochimilco, changes in, 59
television and, 112; worldwide
control of, 99 Zapatistas, n
Video clips, cities as, 83-86 Zizek, Slavoj, xxxiii, i6gn77
Nestor Garcia Candini received his doctorate in philosophy from the
University of Paris. He lived in Argentina until 1976, and since then has
resided in Mexico. He currently directs the program of studies on urban
culture at the Universidad Autonoma Metropolitana in Mexico City.
He has published twenty books on cultural studies, globalization, and
the urban imagination; his book Hybrid Cultures (Minnesota, 1995) was
chosen by the Latin American Association to receive the first Ibero-
American Book Award for the best book about Latin America.

George Yudice teaches in the American Studies program and in the De-
partment of Spanish and Portuguese at New York University. He is the
coeditor of On Edge: The Crisis of Contemporary Latin American Culture
(Minnesota, 1992).