Cultura Popular

P O P C U L T U R E
LATIN AMERICA!

Introduction

Defining the Popular in the Latin American Context

The notion of popular culture is not a straightforward one, and a single definition of the term “popular” has proved elusive. The term is often used simply to refer to cultural products enjoyed or experienced by large numbers of people, chiefly but not necessarily those on the lower rungs of the social hierarchy. Alongside this perhaps obvious numerical sense of the word, some people use “popular” to signify “low-brow” culture, diametrically opposed to “elite” culture in terms of sophistication, the received standards of good taste, and its presumed consumers. Others consider “popular culture” to refer solely to that which has origins in preindustrial traditions, and the term may often be synonymous with “folk” or “peasant culture” in certain Latin American contexts. In this book it is not our intention to try to establish a single understanding of the concept of popular culture; rather, we intend to familiarize readers with the main definitions and ideas that have been put forward. Leading scholars who have provided theories on what constitutes popular culture in the Latin American subcontinent  include Jesús Martín-Barbero, Renato Ortiz, Fernando Ortiz, Angel Rama, Ricardo Gutiérrez Mouat, Néstor García Canclini, William Rowe, and Vivian Schelling.

Martín-Barbero has noted the tendency to classify the popular either as the romanticized notion of the “authentic” or as the negative idea of “vulgarized.” He proposes that the popular in Latin America is instead a “dense space of interactions, interchanges and re-appropriations, the movement of mestizaje (cultural hybridity)” (1994, p. 92). Renato Ortiz has said that the notion of the “popular” as merely synonymous with nu- merical consumption arose in the Brazilian context as a consequence of the emergence of the culture industry and a market of symbolic national goods since the 1970s.

Mouat has further observed that “mass culture bridges the gap be- tween marginal cultures (popular and regional) and consumer culture, whose mode of production and circulation is now perceived to be hege- monic” (1993, p. 163). He does not believe that popular culture and mass culture are one and the same thing; rather, he considers mass culture to be a form of mediation between popular and hegemonic culture. Canclini, meanwhile, believes that the traditional view of popular culture as existing in opposition to elite culture is in- valid, since this binary is complicated by the existence of mass culture. However, he illustrates how  the distinctions among these three categories are increasingly be- ing blurred by the processes of moderniza- tion and globalization. Globalization is not, however, a purely negative force, bringing with it only the eradication or appropria- tion of popular culture; it also provides new openings for the reception and inter- pretation of cultural products. As William Rowe and Vivian Schelling note: “the vast increases in channels of communication which flow  across  cultural boundaries have the effect of dismantling old forms of marginalization and domination and mak- ing new forms of democratization and cul- tural multiplicity imaginable” (Rowe and Schelling 1991, p. 1).

In their study of popular culture in Latin America, Rowe and Schelling identify three different versions of popular culture in the subcontinent:  first, popular culture seen as authentically rural, threatened by industrial- ization and the modern culture industry; second, popular culture as a variant of mass culture, trying to copy the cultural forms of advanced capitalist nations; third, popular culture as the culture of the oppressed, sub- altern classes, in which their imaginary, ideal future is created. In Rowe and Schelling’s view all these categories com- bine and intermingle in Latin America. They also draw a distinction between popular and mass culture: the former shares neither the audience nor the popularity (in raw nu- merical terms) of the latter, despite the fact that neither remains entirely distinct from the other. The traditional duality between “popular” (or “low”) and “high” culture is dangerous, they argue, since it can lead to other assumed, symmetrically polarized op- positions that have highly pejorative impli- cations for popular culture, such as “vulgar” versus “polite” and “impure” versus “pure.”

As a result of these assumed oppositions, popular culture is often thought of as the domain of the uneducated and illiterate. Latin America has one of the lowest rates of school completion in the world, pre- school education is barely available, and residents of rural areas are less likely to re- ceive a decent education than their urban counterparts. At times the only access Latin Americans have to education is outside for- mal institutions (i.e., traditional schooling) in what has been termed popular education. The uneven patterns of literacy make it harder for large sections of the region’s population to have access to some forms of popular culture (those using the written word, in particular) than to others. But in the context of Latin America the interlinking of literacy/popular education and popular culture is much more extensive.  In fact, in many of its manifestations it is often difficult to separate Latin American popular culture from popular education. Perhaps the best-known and arguably the most effective popular educational method is that developed by  Brazilian educator Paulo Freire (1921–1997) in the 1960s and 1970s. Freire’s method differs from traditional teaching methods in that students are encouraged to learn first and foremost about their “oppression” and to develop the tools to “liberate” themselves. As Liam Kane ex- plains, “politically, education could never remain neutral: traditional education promoted the values of the dominant classes ignored the real-life knowledge  and experience of the ‘oppressed,’ and maintained a social order in which the oppressed came to blame themselves, not the oppressors, for their destitution” (2000, p. 595). The kinds of materials used in Freire’s method, which has been popularized throughout the third world, include literatura de  cordel (chapbooks), murals, popular songs, films, theater, and so on. The consciousness-rais- ing techniques  that Freire espoused were partly inspired by Liberation Theology and are reminiscent of Brazilian dramatist Au- gusto Boal’s Theater of the Oppressed, both of which, in turn, can be said to play a sig- nificant role in popular education in Latin America and beyond.

Much popular cultural production in Latin America,  then, serves to liberate the individual or communities from oppression or can be adapted to that purpose. There are many examples of such “liberatory” cultural expressions discussed in this book, including the work of Mexican mu- ralist Diego Rivera and the plays and songs written and performed under military dictatorships in Chile and Argentina. This in itself is one of the favored interpretations of popular culture—a culture of resistance. Analyses of culture using this perspective can be found in the work of Paraguay’s Roa Bastos and Brazil’s Marilena Chauí, for ex- ample. Thus, not only does popular culture have strong ties with popular education in Latin America,  but it also frequently has links with left-wing politics. One signifi- cant example of this can be found in Chia- pas, Mexico, in the form of the Zapatismo movement, and another in the form of the Movimento  dos Sem Terra,  or Landless People’s Movement in Brazil: both success- fully integrate the political and the cultural in their agendas.

Key Theoretical  Perspectives

The theorists cited above tend to agree on certain key concepts and issues that inevitably crop up when the issue of popular culture in Latin America is discussed. Be- low we have summarized these central notions as they have been conceived in and applied to this particular regional context.

Modernity

Uneven processes of development characterized Latin American countries through- out the twentieth century and continue to do so in an increasingly globalized new millennium. Cultural theorists often refer to the “other” or “peripheral” experience of modernity in Latin America, where the modern and the premodern continue to co- exist. Canclini, for example, has contrasted the advanced state of cultural modernity in the region with its relatively underdeveloped socioeconomic  and political modernity. For this reason, Latin American popular culture embraces both elements of postmodern mass media, such as the ubiquitous telenovela (television soap opera), and vestiges of the cultural practices of colonial or even pre-Columbian civilizations, such as religions created by African slaves in Cuba (Santería) and Brazil (Candomblé) or food and dress of indigenous origin in Mexico and the Andean countries. The work of Mexican photographer Gra- ciela Iturbide effectively portrays this co- existence of the indigenous/rural and the modern.

In the context of Latin American culture, Santería and Candomblé are often viewed as folkloric in the sense that their basic content predates industrialization. Folk- lore, then, is frequently thought of as being in opposition to modernity.  It is generally associated with rural or indigenous populations and with communities  rather than in- dividuals; a certain naïveté of spirit is suggested by the term itself. Theorists of popular culture recognize, however, that it is increasingly difficult to talk of expres-sions of culture that are “authentically” indigenous, rural, and premodern given the extent of  mestizaje  (racial mixing, in Spanish and Portuguese, respectively), the migration of rural populations en masse to urban areas, and the wide- reaching power of the media (consider, for example, the influence of the media con- glomerates Televisa in Mexico and Globo in Brazil). That said, tourists in Latin Amer- ica, both international and domestic, frequently seek out the “exotic,” which more often than not in cultural terms means the folkloric. This preindustrial “other” is particularly attractive  to Europeans, North Americans, and urban Latin Americans, who feel that modernity  has forced upon them a globalized culture that is no different from that of the rest of the Western world. This pursuit of the “exotic” or folkloric in turn affects cultural production in the region, since many producers of traditional handicrafts, for example, depend on the tourist market for their economic survival. Some tourists are drawn to indigenous communities, in Peru and Mexico, for example, where they fully expect to see “Indians” dressed in traditional garb.

Hybridity

Latin American cultural forms have perennially been involved in complex negotiations with foreign models and the demands of Westernization, giving rise to what has been called cultural mestizaje, or cultural hybridity. With the advent of modernity this process intensified, as exemplified by the development of cinema in Latin  America. As Ana López says, “we could argue that the cinema was one of the principal tools through which the desire for and imitation of the foreign became paradoxically identified as a national characteristic shared by many Latin American nations” (2000, p. 167).

Canclini argues that the dependency  the- ory model, which opposes cultural imperi- alism to national popular cultures, is inadequate to  understand current power relations in Latin America.  Latin American culture has often entered into a complex dialectical relationship with its European and North American counterparts, not least with regard to local film industries and the omnipotent and omnipresent Hollywood product. Latin American  films, such as the Brazilian  chanchadas or, more recently, Mexican horror films, have reappropriated Hollywood techniques and genres, often in the form of parody, in order to “dehierarchise,” to use Canclini’s terminology, the established asymmetry between the center (Hollywood) and the periphery (locally produced film) (Canclini 1989, p. 229).

Canclini’s work on “deterritorialisation” and intercultural movements across the U.S.-Mexican border is particularly useful in the context of Latin American  reworkings of Hollywood paradigms. He analyzes hybrid and simulated cultural products in border contexts, such as in cities like Tijuana, and argues that the homegrown  ver- sion becomes a resource for defining identity, whereby the “authentic” becomes relativized. Tijuana-based periodicals,  for example, rework definitions of identity and culture from the starting point of the bor- der experience, becoming a voice for a generation who grew up exposed to both Mexican and U.S. culture (Canclini 1989, p. 238). The work of Chicano performance artist Guillermo  Gómez Peña focuses explicitly on this notion of border crossing. Chicanos, some but by no means all of whom inhabit the physical frontier land with the United States, experience two cultural worlds. Canclini argues that popular sectors in Latin America deal with ideolog- ical oppression today by “incorporating and positively valuing elements produced outside of their own group (criteria of prestige, hierarchies, designs, and functions of objects)” (p. 260).

Transculturation

Transculturation is an alternative and more positive term for acculturation. “Acculturation” suggests that one culture subsumes another, as  colonial  relations are  frequently perceived. “Transculturation” suggests that two cultures in contact are both influenced in what is often a complex process of negotiation.  It is thus similar to the notion of hybridity, discussed above, and it offers a more inclusive definition of national culture (that is, it does away with the need to define what is “authentic” and homegrown). The theory of transculturation is most often associated with Uruguayan critic Angel Rama (1926–1983), who borrowed the expression from the Cuban intellectual Fernando Ortiz (1881–1969).  Ortiz, in Cuban Counter- point: Tobacco and Sugar (1940), argued that the slave trade and agriculture in the Caribbean combined elements of African and Hispanic cultures, which influenced each other. Rama later picked up on the notion of transculturation “as a model for a nationalism capable of integrating the heterogeneous elements characteristic of many Latin American countries”  (Gollnick 2003, pp. 110–111). Both Ortiz and Rama felt that discussing Latin American culture and politics as a unidirectional, center-periphery relationship (seen, for example, in the influential dependency  theory of the 1960s, which ultimately blamed the region’s backwardness on the growth of the nations of the “center”) was inadequate. That criticism can also be found in the theories of a number of other cultural critics from Latin America. Renato Ortiz, for example, has argued that it is too simplistic to view Brazilian culture as unique and peripheral and that it makes more sense to consider it within the context of a globalized culture industry. The Brazilian writer Roberto Schwarz, in his theory of  “misplaced ideas,” which is beginning to gain popular- ity among scholars of Latin American  cultural studies, holds that in Brazil ideas appropriated from Europe have always been negotiated first.

Cultural Imperialism and Globalization

Latin Americans  themselves,  however, do not always read the importing of ideas, cul- tural practices, and technologies from abroad in the same way. The notion of cultural imperialism continues to influence as- pects of popular culture in Latin America. As Arturo Arias points out, “from the very first  moment  when  present-day Latin American nations came into contact with the Western world, they were placed in a subordinate position and an asymmetrical relationship of power to the West, politically, economically and culturally” (2003, pp. 26–27). A consciousness of this subordinate position and of the threat (perceived or real) of cultural domination, particularly from the United States, was particularly strong in the region in the 1960s. Anti- imperialist  messages can be found, for example, both in the protest music of this period and in the reaction to Latin American cultural expressions that dared to appropriate cultural forms from abroad, such as the Tropicália movement in Brazil. The famous text by Ariel Dorfman and Armand Mattelart on cultural imperialism in Disney cartoons was well known among the region’s left-wing intelligentsia and students in the 1970s, and anti-U.S. feeling is present to this day in many grassroots social move- ments in Latin America. Notions of cultural imperialism  are making a comeback in some quarters, in the face of the threat (again, perceived or otherwise)  that global- ization now poses to national cultures. Within the context of neoliberal globaliza- tion, the products, not least music CDs and movie DVDs, of  Europe and all North America continue to  swamp the Latin American market (Schelling 2000, p. 27).

That said, in recent years, creative possi- bilities have been opened up by economic and cultural globalization, a feature of late modernity that has given rise to new mar- kets and increasingly important additional sources of income. In popular music, this process has produced such crossover music as that of Ricky Martin and Shakira. In cin- ema, it has led to international coproduc- tions. As this book testifies, Latin Americans continue to enjoy a rich and distinctive pop- ular culture, a fact that is recognized and ap- preciated by the hundreds of thousands of foreign tourists who visit the region annu- ally. Equally, armchair travelers are today able to buy translations of the novels of so- called Boom and post-Boom writers Gabriel García Márquez and Isabel Allende or the New Age fiction of Paulo Coelho at their lo- cal  bookstore, to  purchase posters and greeting cards featuring images by Diego Rivera or Fernando Botero, or even to see a display of  the Afro-Brazilian  dance-fight capoeira performed by students at a nearby college. Images of Latin America created abroad can be found in chapter 8, “Cultural Icons”; such images reflect foreigners’ perennial fascination with Latin America, of- ten considered as the “exotic other.”

Popular Culture in the Context  of This Book

As discussed above, there is no one work- able definition of popular culture, and for the purposes of this book we have taken the term to encompass aspects of all the main theoretical positions outlined above. Thus, we have included cultural products enjoyed by the mass market, such as com- mercial music and blockbuster movies. We have also considered culture produced by the poor masses, sometimes referred to as the “popular” classes, such as the architec- ture of shantytowns in Brazil and Peru. We have chosen to illustrate both “elite” cul- ture designed to embrace those on the lower rungs of the social hierarchy, such as the  murals of  Diego  Rivera and José Clemente Orozco, and “low-brow” culture that often sets out to undermine the pretensions of “high” or “hegemonic”  art, such as the parodic chanchada musicals made by the Brazilian film industry and the films of Cantinflas in Mexico. Finally, we have included elements of folk or peasant cul- ture, such as popular medicine and healing in Mexico and Central America, and we have included contemporary urban cul- ture, such as street slang in Mexico and Ar- gentina and rap and hip-hop music in Brazil. We thus hope to have covered all bases and to have avoided privileging any particular definition of popular culture.

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P O P C U L T U R E

LATIN AMERICA!