|
Los retos culturales de México. Ed., Lourdes Arizpe
Silvia Spitta, Dartmouth College
Los retos culturales de México. Ed., Lourdes Arizpe. México, UNAM: 2004. 388pp.
Los retos culturales de México brings together twenty two scholars—mostly anthropologists associated with the UNAM (Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México) and the ENAH (Escuela Nacional de Antropología), but also specialists in political science, communications, history and geography, comparative literature, performance studies, sociology, and journalism—to think through the impact that the migratory circuit (of Mexicans to the US and Central Americans to Mexico) and new mass media (particularly the internet) are having on Mexican identity and culture. An attempt to counter the all too easy and pessimist Latin American tendency to collapse modernization with homogenization or Americanization, Los retos’ premise is that Mexico, despite being so far from God and so close to the US, is a “megacultural” nation with a resilient and vibrant culture. An exporter as much as an importer of cultures, Mexico, according to Arizpe, is not a mosaic but a “river-rainbow” where different cultural currents continuously interweave creating different patterns. The challenge of our times as numerous essays in the collection understand it (and the word “challenge” re-appears consistently throughout) is how to create a citizen that is literate in and therefore empowered by new technologies. The importance of this volume then lies in its refusal of the semblance of cultural democracy provided by “access” to cyber culture that veils a profound disenfranchisement of large segments of the population.
Published in a series established by the Mexican government in order to further national dialogue on culture and cultural patrimony and to elicit proposals to impact legislation, the essays collected in Los retos actively intervene in the current debate with calls for the preservation of national cultural patrimony, the need to distinguish between tangible and intangible heritages; the need to create an inventory of archeological and religious artifacts; the need to rethink the role of sexuality and gender (and of intellectuals); and finally, and perhaps most importantly, an overwhelming critique of Mexico’s top down impulse in all matters and particularly culture. The volume as a whole calls for cultural decentralization; it critiques the current government’s plan of expanding the role of Conaculta and creating a new ministry of culture by highlighting multiple valuable examples of local and regional cultural interventions which would suffer as a consequence.
Los retos is divided into five sections (“Migration”, “New Mass Media and Information Technologies;” “Citizenship and Democracy;” “Intellectuals and Civil Society;” and “Cultural Politics”) which contain position papers followed by “Textos complementarios” which are generally shorter (but other than that the distinction between essays and complementary texts remains unclear). Basing herself on interviews with Mexican migrant workers in New York City and in the Chopo market in Mexico City (a space dominated by cyberculture, rappers, and cholos), Arizpe frames and introduces the section of Migrations. Given that over 15 million Mexicans currently live in the US (both documented and undocumented) every third family in Mexico has one or more of its members abroad, yet Mexicans as a whole view migrants negatively. Arizpe’s interviewees’ affirmation of their attachment to Mexican culture flies in the face of the generalized sense of alarm at the imminent loss of Mexican culture. Indeed, the convergence of cholos and youth culture shaped by hip-hop, ska, the internet, rasta culture, both in the US and in Mexico (layered and complicated by the additional impact of the Central American gangs or maras salvatruchas on both spaces) is fast leading to the reconfiguration of the symbolic system and the creation of a trans-national youth culture visible in cities across the US, Mexico, and Central America. Linked through migratory circuits, numerous sites on the internet allow migrants to keep in touch with their communities, notify relatives of the remission of dollars, and create a virtual transborder community (www.huandacareo.com.mx, www.zacapumich.com.mx, www.jerez.com.mx, www.zacatecanos.com.mx). The impact these real and cyber circuits of migration are having in the US leads Arizpe to postulate a global Mexican nation and to conclude that the impact Mexicans are having on US culture in art, performance, and culture in general is inordinate: “Hay que reconocer que México ha destacado por su producción cultural, museológica, artesanal y artística que hoy refrenda a través del impacto cultural que han tenido los migrantes mexicanos y sus descendientes. Ninguna otra corriente de migración a Estados Unidos ha tenido un impacto cultural semejante” (p. 20).
Arizpe’s introduction is followed by a very rich and informative series of essays on cholo culture in Mexico City as a means of youth subcultures to affirm Mexican national identity (Cristina Amescua Chávez and Josefa Guzmán Bulnes); on children migrants and sexuality on Mexico’s southern border; on the phenomenon of the maras salvatruchas (Central American migrants to the US who became cholos and were deported to El Salvador, only to form transnational migratory circuits and now are known as gangs who “invade” cities audaciously (both by María Eugenia Ramírez Parra); on the racial discrimination suffered by indigenous migrants who are viewed as “more migrant” than others (Maya Lorena Pérez Ruiz); and on the return of indigenous migrants to Oaxaca and how they are received by their communities (Arturo Augusto Cano Cabrera).
The second section, “New Information and Mass Media Technologies,” opens with an excellent essay by Adriana Malvido with a title that echoes Guadalupe Loaeza’s work on consumer culture “Cibercultura. Estoy en red, luego existo.” This essay tackles the immense paradigm shift and dematerialization of culture that is taking place in our time best exemplified by photography’s transformation from a document of the real to photography’s detachment from the referent and any claim to verisimilitude. Malvido’s critique is followed by the discussion of the cyber work of a series of artists who use the internet to create “Mexican” art such as Pedro Meyer whose site www.zonezero.com serves as a discussion and learning space of new digital technologies; Andrea Di Castro’s www.imagia.com.mx where the artist experiments with GPS technology to map new spaces; Arcángel Constantini, member of the so-called Atari generation and creator of the cyber art collective Net.art, which serves as a contact space for artists across the world; Tania Aedo’s Drag 1.0 where the artist creates virtual identity prostheses as a way of addressing questions of identity in/of cyber space; Fernando Llanos’ www.fllanos.com, a site with more than a million hits which provides visitors with the technologies to create their own narratives. All of these examples allow Malvido to argue for a shift away from the concept of culture to that of “symbolic ecologies;” for the breakdown of the ideological and spatial division between high and low art; and for the use of cyber space as a way of affirming Mexican artists’ creativity and bridging the abyss between society and art. The article includes a valuable list of internet sites in the bibliography.
The articles that follow Malvido’s deal with the challenges to journalism presented by the proliferation of information on the web. They call for the need of a different way of training journalists and scheduling their work rhythm that will allow them to make full use of the technology at hand (Florence Toussaint). Scott S. Robinson’s article on cybercafés provides useful data about who uses these spaces and for what purposes and also notes that cybercafés can expose people from even the most isolated rural areas to foreign content. Thus, a woman from a traditional village can be participating in a titillating live chat with a person across the globe while only a block away from her home. Ana Rosas Mantecón’s study of the film industry in Mexico traces the shutting down of thousands of movie houses as a consequence of the radical decline in a movie going public since 1940 and concludes with the paradox that shapes our time: while the mass media have seemingly become all-pervasive and accessible to all, a vast majority of people are actually disenfranchised and have no access to the few public spaces still in existence. The section ends with Cristina Amescua Chávez’s reflections on performance as a consequence of the teaching of the cyber course “Globalization, migration, public spaces, and performance” in different universities in Lima, Rio de Janeiro, Ohio, and NY.
Section three “Citizenship and Democracy” I found to be the least interesting, consisting of three essays that deal with the obstacles to full citizenship right and full fledged democracy: Héctor Tejera Gaon predictably argues that the main problem is the distance that exists between the needs and expectations of citizens and the actions of the government and concludes with an assessment of the spotty implementation of the 1998 law of Citizenship Participation which resulted in the creation of thousands of neighborhood committees. María Ana Portal discusses Tlalpan’s fight (in Mexico City) over public space in the face of exorbitant growth and the lack of spatial limits and resultant disidentification of individuals with the spaces they inhabit. The last essay of this section, by Margarita Dalton, focuses on the national decree that makes it imperative for 30% of women to participate in local and state elections which bring them into conflict with indigenous (in this case Zapotec) traditions that limit gender roles to very traditional spaces.
The last two sections of the collection are very similar and could have been collapsed into one for all practical purposes. The articles in “Civil Society and Intellectuals” and “Cultural Politics” begin with Adriana González Mateos discussion of the changing role of intellectuals in Mexico, their disenfranchisement from state power and their feminization. This section also includes Xabier Lizarraga Cruchaga’s discussion of homosexuals in the intellectual scene; Rafael Segovia’s contribution traces the emergence of vibrant and active citizens’ groups after the devastating earthquake of 1985 and the Zapatista rebellion of 1994 in face of the ineffectiveness of the centralized government to deal with the crises. Héctor Rosales goes over two groups that redefine the meaning and form of popular culture after 1985 such as Tepito Arte Acá and the “Escuelita” Emiliano Zapata in Coyoacán. The vibrancy, range, and impact of these cultural spaces far transcends their resources and leads the writer to argue that cultural functionaries be required to take courses in cultural promotion in order to be more effective spokespersons for these important spaces. Daniel Gutiérrez Martínez’ essay is the last in section four and covers the emergence of different forms of urban religiosity. The author gives short shrift to the rise of evangelical sects, however.
Section five has the collection come full circle and back to Arizpe’s introductory premise. Enrique Nalda highlights Mexico’s rich archeological patrimony and calls for the need to create an exhaustive inventory but it also strategically intervenes in the current deliberations of whether to transform Conaculta into a Ministry of Culture. Consistent with the all the articles collected in the volume which insist on the local and regional richness of Mexico’s cultural manifestations, Nalda concludes that a centralized Ministry of Culture would be disastrous for local cultures and would derail Conaculta’s current focus on culture and education. Juan Antonio Machuca R. follows with an interesting reflection on tangible and intangible heritages which refuse their uncoupling: the intangible depends on the tangible in all sorts of ways and vice versa. Moreover, he argues against a salvage ethnography that focuses exclusively on heritages that face imminent extinction. Eduardo Nivón Bolán continues in this vein, contrasting Querétaro and Oaxaca’s cultural politics and administrative budget and concludes by emphasizing the creativity and vibrant nature of local, indigenous groups’ cultural production and individuals’ interventions in the safe-guarding and promotion of culture. Carlos J. Villaseñor Anaya’s focus on cultural patrimony again emphasizes local creativity and argues for a decentralization of the understanding of culture. Lourdes Arizpe sums up the main arguments of the various articles in the collection and ends by calling for the creation of new ways of educating citizens so that everyone is able to be a creative user and participant of cyberspace and digital technologies and not simply a passive channel surfer.
|
