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Prologue: à e Chatter Box These three laissez-faire conversations, plus the prologue and an epilogue, are an exercise in improvisation. The purpose is to ponder as we meander through the elusive terrain of popular culture. Let us start with the category: Latino, instead of Hispanic, serves as identifier in the subtitle of the book. Will this cause an uproar? FREDERICK LUIS ALDAMA:
Uproar? Nah…At this point, people are exhausted of the name wars, don't you think? What to call ourselves? Who cares! Frankly, finding a solution is less interesting to me than acknowledging that years, decades, centuries have been wasted in finding the impossible word that best suits us. Impossible because words are transient, inaccurate…light as smoke. ILAN STAVANS:
FA:
I like the idea of an impossible word.
Ludwig Wittgenstein persuasively argued that the confines of our world are also the confines of our language. That which can't be said does not exist… IS:
Or perhaps, that which can't be said can be thought and eventually said—as per Chomsky, meaning that our language faculty works primarily to give shape to thought and secondarily as a communication device. Either way we shake it, the use of our language faculty sets in motion all variety of mental faculties associated with goal setting and action: our dialogue made public. FA:
The act of naming plays a stunning role in the Genesis. In the first couple of chapters, Adam is established as the centripetal force of the universe. His use of language suggests arbitrariness. He names the tree tree without having a singular reason for it. And in doing the naming, he appropriates the objects, placing them at his service, so to speak. Human language as a tool of control. IS:
Along those lines, already in the nineteenth century, there was a big debate—a quarrel, really—over how to name everything south of the Rio Grande. You've written about this game in The Hispanic Condition (1995) and elsewhere. Some people argued that you can't call it Hispanic America, that is, Hispanoamérica. There is a huge territory called Brazil that did not fit what the name was supposed to enclose. Page 2 → Unfortunately for the advocates of Hispanic America, Brazilians do not speak Spanish, but a variant of Latin called Portuguese. FA:
IS:
A variant that is one of the Romance languages.
Let me go on…Many islands in the Caribbean were colonized by the French, British, and Dutch, and no Spanish is spoken there either. So some said, calling ourselves Hispanic America excludes too much land and too many peoples. We should choose some other name. FA:
IS:
A semantic conundrum.
But the naming of this part of the whole continent was not just a semantic discussion among linguists, historians, and scholars of one sort or another. In fact, from the beginning it was a deeply political discussion. FA:
IS:
Semantics, as I see it, is a branch of political science.
The nineteenth century, particularly in its second half, saw the continuing expansion of the United States (it annexed Texas in 1845 and then up to half of Mexican territory in 1848) and of France, Britain, Belgium, and Holland, which were fighting among each other in the dividing up of the world-pie: Africa, Middle East, and, of course, Latin America. This is also the time when, in 1823, President Monroe proclaimed—urbi et orbi—the Western Hemisphere no longer a place suitable for European colonization. Yet a few years later, this became the policy of “America for the Americans,” a strategy whereby Latin America became America's backyard. FA:
IS:
Do you mean North America swallowed South America whole?
In a sense, yes. This is why the discussion about how to name ourselves south of the U.S./Mexico border became as ferocious as the political consequences of the eventual choice. FA:
IS:
Are you a proponent of Hispanic?
FA: IS:
Hispanic dangerously evokes Spain, a European country.
I knew you wouldn't endorse it.
Indeed, at one point many preferred Ibero-America (Iberoamérica, in Spanish) since it made direct reference to the peninsula as a whole, which included Spain and Portugal. It seemed more capacious, therefore, to include the main concern, the huge territory of Brazil. Yet there was still the problem of the Caribbean islands where French was spoken, in particular Haiti, Guadeloupe, and Martinique. So some thought, with respect to Hispanic America, Ibero-America to be an improvement—yet it still did not include Francophone America. FA:
IS:
As we say in Yiddish: oy gevalt!
Page 3 → Of course, French, Spanish, and Portuguese are of Latin origin. So the name Latin America allowed for the exclusion of the Americans north of the Rio Grande—Río Bravo, as it's called in Mexico—as well as all the Europeans, while embracing the French, Portuguese, and Spanish languages. It appeared then to be an additional ideological barrier to European and U.S. expansionism. Now, even though the term Latin America is more capacious, it still does not take into account a minority of people in Latin America and the Caribbean who speak Dutch (in the islands comprising the Dutch Caribbean), French, or English. FA:
Again, the name game bores me, Fede. I've played it for some years: it's fruitless. I leave it up to you to choose! As for me, you can call me a Spic. IS:
I know, but that doesn't free us from the urgency of finding a suitable term for the subtitle. Well, taking into account the very specific historical and other reasons I've expounded on, and the limitations of Hispano or Ibero, I believe it's preferable to go the Latino route, although, as mentioned, it's still a flawed designation. FA:
Fiiiiineee! I'm ready to move on…Actually, before we do: I need to caution you. I rather like the word Hispanic, in spite of the reservations you listed. And I enjoy going back and forth between Hispanic and Latino, procrastinating in my choice. Or rather, making a no-choice. In fact, the more I think of your argument, the less sustainable it seems to me. For what we're after in this volume doesn't pertain to Latinos (that is, people of Hispanic descent in the United States) alone but Latin America as a whole, and even the entire Hispanic civilization, which, obviously, includes Spain. Much of our discussion will address popular manifestations of culture in Argentina, Mexico, Cuba, and the Iberian Peninsula, even though the liminal space north of the Rio Grande is our base, our springboard, our Aleph. IS:
As long as it's clear for the reader, which you've now done, I don't see a challenge. That said, perhaps we might consider the term Latin/o America as our umbrella designator. Or is this too orthographically clunky? FA:
It makes me cringe…It isn't a term but a slogan. Actually, it is crucial for the audience to recognize how unclear the whole typography in use nowadays is. The name game is a trap! IS:
Also, I want to say something about its counterpart: the name United States. It assumes a political and military operation (war of Page 4 → independence and unification), and it names a geographical location (the new nation). But, as you implied, it swallows a whole continent in its designation, since the new nation became the United States of America. Its citizens are called Americans, as if Mexicans or Brazilians or Cubans are other than Americans. There are 193 United Nations member states, and with the sole exception of the United States, not one FA:
of them bears the name of a continent nor do their people refer to themselves by the name of a continent. Only the citizens of the United States do it: we call ourselves Americans and not United Statians, for example, as we are called in Spanish: estadounidenses. Or else, U.S. Americans, as Germans like to refer to us. Europeans do the same thing, especially after the year 2000, although they leave out of their continental appellation places like Turkey, Albania, and Cyprus. In the end, names about geographical locations—and, thus, gerunds—have a double edge: they circumscribe by means of exclusion. That is, they create a semantic space from which the not-named is expelled. This is the nature of language, though: to name is to appropriate. And that which is left out of the sphere of appropriation is disavowed. IS:
FA: IS:
These semantic discussions keep coming back.
Believe me, they are syllogistic…
Perhaps we can find satisfaction in the words of Oscar “Zeta” Acosta, an author you studied in your early, inspiring book Bandido (1996, rev. 2005). At the end of the Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo (1972), as Acosta is lying naked looking at himself in the mirror in his hotel room in El Paso, after pawning his clarinet and camera for $15, he declares himself neither to be a Chicano, a Mexican, nor an American, but a “brown buffalo lonely and afraid in a world I never made.” FA:
Are you suggesting that we describe ourselves as buffaloes? Or, better even, as cockroaches, the other animal metaphor Acosta used in his second autobiography, The Revolt of the Cockroach People (1973)? I actually like the approach. Yes, in the eyes of the American mainstream we are cockroaches, although I would choose another animal, not out of preference but because it invokes the attitude we've mastered: the dog. IS:
FA:
Why?
We're been domesticated. Needless to say, I'm not talking of the hunting dog. The experience of Latinos in the United States is one of servitude. Acosta is an emblematic figure of the Chicano Movement Page 5 → precisely because he refused to adapt, to become an indentured species. Let's move away from the animal metaphors and return to him. What appeals to me the most in the sentence you quote from The Autobiography of the Brown Buffalo is not “lonely and afraid,” for those adjectives describe Acosta to the dot. I'm more attracted to “a world I never made.” Of course, all of us live in a world that is not ours, yet we try to mold it, to have a place in it. Acosta was overwhelmed by a feeling of alienation. He felt estranged, disconnected not only from “America,” as he called the country (to the chagrin of friends and acquaintances), but from Mexico and, especially, from Chicanos. Today that feeling of alienation is less pronounced, perhaps because Latinos—yes, I'm endorsing your choice of terms!—are the largest, fastest-growing minority. What does it mean to be the largest minority? That you are not at the helm already, you are certainly scheduled to set the tone and tune of things, for better or worse. IS:
FA:
Why for better or worse?
Is it not Peter Parker who is told by his uncle, as Parker is reckoning with the identity Spiderman early on in the Hollywood saga, that “with power comes responsibility”? To be at the helm ain't no bag of chips! Apologies if I return to images of insects, albeit an anthropomorphized one in this case. IS:
Spidey, and today Marvel has the Afro-Latino Miles Morales shooting webs, brings to mind another word in our subtitle: culture. It's pertinent to talk about it before continuing. Culture from the anthropological point of view is always the set of all products of human activity at a given moment and place. The institutions of marriage and burial are as much culture as baking of cookies, writing of novels and comics, as well as making of films. In the most rigorous and at the same time capacious characterizations, there are always three main ingredients in culture: (1) material culture: cars, houses, computers, and so on, that is, everything made by humans and existing as objects; (2) intellectual culture: mathematical equations, novels, comics, operas, paintings, scientific discoveries, and so on, that is, everything made by humans existing as products of reasoning, the emotions and the imagination; and (3) interpretation of culture—essays, philosophical treatises, and so on—that is, all FA:
hermeneutical efforts to assign meaning to material and intellectual culture and to assess their value or importance to humankind. I've always liked the sound of the word culture, although, in all honesty, I've never been able to happily define what it means, at least Page 6 → not to my own satisfaction. It's like the word real. Is there something that isn't real? Even a dream is real insofar as it belongs to this world. Once again we're in a syllogistic—and, why not, solipsistic—conundrum, the dialectical tension between a definition and its counterpart. Of all the zillion things that surround us, what isn't culture? If you agree that nothing isn't, then the definition of culture should be “the study of everything.” IS:
Your approach is self-negating, Ilan. Yes, culture is everything. But what have we gained in describing it thus? I prefer to understand culture as the unity of material, intellectual, and interpretive activities. And I suggest that we use that approach in our conversations. FA:
I'm far more interested in our title: ¡Muy Pop!And, consequently, in the portion of the subtitle that pertains to popular culture. For what intrigues me are the degrees of separation, if there are any, between highbrow and popular culture. What constitutes highbrow, sophisticated, elite culture? You will answer that the multiple layers of culture, as you described them, belong to the upper echelon of society: in our case, the bourgeoisie. And that culture which belongs to the working class is lumpen, proletarian, popular. IS:
FA:
I'm not sure I would distinguish them that way.
I'm glad because in a pluralistic, democratic society like the United States, where the aesthetics of the middle class reigns, the border between highbrow and popular is foggy. Is John Updike highbrow and Stephen King lowbrow? Perhaps, but each of them engaged in crossovers. Diana Krall and Elvis Costello, husband and wife? They appeal to a majority, although small educated elites might also embrace them. Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction (1994)? It makes the lowbrow mainstream. Woody Allen's The Purple Rose of Cairo (1985)? It makes the mainstream lowbrow. In the Hispanic world, the separation between these two spheres might be more emphatic. Cantinflas is lumpen, as is Pedro Infante. Roberto Bolaño is the equivalent of Tarantino: he makes B-literature chic. Shopping at Wal-Mart? Owning a velvet poster of Jesus Christ? Wearing a soccer T-shirt of Atlante? These are all features of a proletarian self. IS:
You've devoted a generous amount of your intellectual energy to analyzing kitsch in the English-speaking world and lo cursi in Latino civilization. FA:
Lo cursi is one of the most interesting phenomena, from my perspective. It's the manufacturing of a cheap aesthetic for mass Page 7 → consumption. Yet that aesthetic often has an empowering quality, as in the case of Cantinflas and Tin Tan. IS:
I suggest we leave this discussion for the first of our conversations. And let us promise that much of our own definitions of Latino culture and highbrow vs. working-class art shall be reevaluated, even put upside down, as the chapters of this volume unfold. FA:
IS:
Yes, it is time we circumscribe the parameters of these dialogues.
FA: IS:
You're feisty!
Yes, but only on the page. In real life, I'm far more pleasant.
I wouldn't know it, since I've never met you. Anyway, that is an important starting point. The reader should know that you and I have never met in person. In other words, this entire project is done a distancia, removed from each other. FA:
IS:
I still consider you a friend. In fact, I promise to send you an e-card this Valentine Day. Do people still meet
tête-à-tête to become amigos? A waste of time these days, it seems to me. Through Facebook, one can have hundreds of friends without much effort. I am being sarcastic, of course. I do not even have an active Facebook. I am still old-fashioned to some extent, and I find a warm abrazo and a chat around a warm cup of tea cannot be replaced by phone or e-mail or Facebook. Yet it's a proven fact that friendship may develop and deepen by virtual exchanges. You and I are living proof of this. Alright: this is what we've set ourselves to accomplish. FA:
IS:
You make it sound daunting…
We are about to debate—often in a fiery fashion!—the material and intellectual realities of Latino culture, as well as their interpretations. We will try to discover affinities and connections between the different components of Latino culture through the prism of our own sensibilities. In my opinion, intellectual culture doesn't exist and develop without the support of material culture. Intellectual culture finds its foundations and building blocks in material culture, but at the same time that intellectual culture develops, it furthers the development of material culture. Indeed, there is a constant interaction and mutual feeding between material and intellectual culture. In a healthy society, this feeding is part of what we call progress. FA:
Frankly, I'm not sure progress is a feature of culture. Science and technology, no doubt. But not music, literature, or the arts. For instance, is Dante's The Divine Comedy (circa 1308–21) better than Dostoevsky's The Idiot (1869)? Is Bach's Brandenburg Concertos (1721) Page 8 → better than Aaron Copland's Fanfare for a Common Man (1942)? Of course, technology plays a crucial role in popular culture. Comic strips are more fancifully produced in the early twenty-first century than they were in the middle of the twentieth. TV is also more developed. The use of digital cameras makes moviemaking less stilted, more harmonious. Content might not change, but the streaming of it surely does. IS:
But then there is interpretation. For instance, we have science and the philosophy of science, art and aesthetics, moral and ethics, where philosophy of science, aesthetics, and ethics are all interpretations of their respective subjects. FA:
Your central point—that interpretation pushes culture forward—is unquestionably true. Entertainment needs a reaction, a response to appraise how accurately it represents the topic it set out to describe. And that, as far as I am concerned, is what this book is about: a critic's eye. Eye and I, if I might put it, somewhat playfully. The proliferation of online reviews of items on amazon.com, for instance, makes it clear that nowadays everyone is a critic. A democratization of opinion has taken place before our eyes. Nevertheless, the critic, understood as a person whose lifelong quest to understand a certain cultural manifestation enables that individual to reach a refined, distilled sense of taste based on knowledge and experience, is more important than ever. That is because opinions might come easily but interpretation requires not only information but insight. That insight gives way to a unique epiphany: the critic's opinion matters because it is injected with authority. IS:
FA:
Authority is a contested word, no?
It might be contested. Still, authority, at least in the humanities, comes from two sources: intuition and experience. IS:
Anyway, it's crucial to explain, as I have already insinuated in my disquisition on Facebook, that our three sustained conversations are taking place in the form of e-mail exchanges. As in all conversaciones de sobremesa, a number of topics keep on recurring, such as heroism and kitsch. The first, “On Hero-worship,” delves into the psychological, social, and religious factors defining the way Latinos look at heroism through the prism of gender. In this conversation we explore the role of sports and talk about ranchera movies, as well as about the Mariachi in Latino folklore. We also discuss Oscar Lewis's The Children of Sánchez (1961) and the influence of the Catholic Page 9 → Church on daily life. The second conversation, “Cartooned!!!,” is about the centrality of comic strips, what they say, and how they say it. It ponders the idea that popular culture is ephemeral rather than everlasting. It continues the discussion on heroism by inserting the theme of superheroes. It also discusses the effect of hallucinogens like marijuana and peyotl in popular culture. And it reflects on ethnic Barbies. The third FA:
conversation, “The Allure of lo cursi,” delves into the mechanics of kitsch. This conversation addresses the impact of telenovelas. It analyses the place of pornography in the Latino imagination. And it talks about cuisine as an expression of human emotions. An epilogue to the three conversations meditates on what the senses experience through a particular cultural lens. Plus, to root our dialogues, a series of images, some well known, others less familiar, are gathered in a middle gallery. I like it: the sections are well defined. And I like our postmodern approach, that is, the art of talking about the art of talking about… IS:
FA: IS:
Might we say post-postmodern, given that our goal is to work against and toward some kind of referent?
The image in the mirror, or else, the mirror in the image, as in Diego Velázquez's Las Meninas (1656).
Either way, it's hard not to notice how you have been engaged by a number of different intellectuals, scholars, and journalists (Verónica Albin, Mordecai Dasche, Jorge Gracia, Iván Jaksic, Donald Yates, et al.) in book-long conversations such as the present one. FA:
IS:
I just love the format…
FA:
You're famous as a conversador.
A fine conversation is like playing jazz on the saxophone! The tradition of improvisation is long and inviting. One is tempted to go on different sideways. But the need to harmonize, to suit into a coherent set, to fit one's rhythms with the rest of the instruments, is equally important. Thus, there is tension between following a set path to reach an end and looking for alternative ways to get there. That tension makes my juices flow! The reader should know the time frame we gave our endeavor: the conversation started in January 2011 and ended sixteen months later, in June 2012, with minor updates in the early months of 2013. IS:
FA: IS:
This time-frame was set in order for our engagement to have finality.
Have you said something about the autobiographical?
Page 10 → Sorry, I forgot: the reflective and historical shall be juxtaposed with the personal. That is, our own stories should be fair game in these conversations. FA:
In the end, we are always what we talk about, what we study, are we not? A couple of cartoonish scholars whose Ping-Pong game becomes a chatter box. IS:
FA:…a
box where we hear our own echo—and occasionally get a knock by the ball itself.
Who knows if anyone will be interested in what we say? Still, the inherent fatuity of the endeavor shouldn't stop us from embarking on it. What we hope to achieve, as far as I am concerned, is less important than what the actual journey together will offer: the possibility of meditating on a topic that is in desperate need of context. IS:
Much thought has to be given to the vitality of Latino popular culture, its past, its present, and its likely future. And I say Latino and not Mexican, Cuban, Puerto Rican, and so on, because Latinos are an amalgam of nationalities. That amalgam adds a certain thickness to our topic, without making it ponderous. Our subject is vast. FA:
IS:
Ready, set, go…En sus marcas, listos, fuera.
Page 11 →
[1] On Hero-worship An appropriate place to start this first conversation might be on the nature of heroworshiping in Latino culture. You've written eloquently, and influentially, on Mario Moreno, the arch-famous comedian known as Cantinflas. I know he is one of your idols. FREDERICK LUIS ALDAMA:
Are an idol and a hero the same thing? Well, an idol, in ancient times, represented a deity, whereas a hero was a person of distinguished courage. Strictly speaking, Cantinflas is neither one nor the other. Still, he is unquestionably my idol as well as my hero. ILAN STAVANS:
One of your books is titled after an essay you composed on him and originally published in the journal Transition (1995). The centennial of Cantinflas's birth took place in August 2011. FA:
All Hispanic comedians are Cantinflas's children, just as all Spanish-language writers are Cervantes's heirs. His anarchic humor presents a picture of the peladito, the urban, unemployed, downtrodden street-wise who is capable of surviving in spite of the harsh circumstances he encounters. Cantinflas refuses to work. His rebellion is against the rapid industrialization Mexico is undergoing. Too much is going on in his eyes. He doesn't have the training to be employed in a factory job. At best, he can shine shoes on a street corner, maybe sell tacos. He refuses to fit into any social canon, especially when it comes to fashion. (Is he the first to wear his pants down?) But what I am most at awe about is his language: his syntax is a mess. That, indeed, is his sharpest weapon in his anarchic war against the system. There is a terrific scene at the end of the movie Allí está el detalle(1940) where Cantinflas is on trial for having stolen someone's wallet. He refuses to have a lawyer represent him. As he defends himself, his syntax begins to confuse everyone in the court. That confusion is his redemption: he is set free after the judge himself can't put a standard sentence together. IS:
FA:
Is he a people's hero? I mean, do people see his actions as models?
I do not think anyone wants to be like Cantinflas. However, everyone laughs with him. And therein lies his revolutionary dimension: in the face of adversity, even apocalypse, he makes the audience laugh. Page 12 → Nothing more Mexican than that: if you can't beat them, laugh at them. Jokes are one of Mexico's most effective weapons to battle adversity. It is often said that after an earthquake or a hurricane, jokes arrive way before the police makes an appearance. IS:
FA:
Cantinflas is well liked throughout the Spanish-speaking world. This speaks to his universality.
Humor, as you know, is difficult—impossible?—to translate. Try adapting a joke from one language to another; you'll kill it on the spot. The fact that Cantinflas's movies are enjoyed in Santiago, Bogotá, Buenos Aires, and Madrid does speak to his universality. He is not Charlie Chaplin (who, by the way, made his career in silent films) because you do need knowledge of the Spanish language to appreciate him. So Cantinflas's appeal is limited to the Hispanic world, where it is deep and transformative. IS:
I wonder if this stripping down that happens in the translation process doesn't tell us something about the distinction between a culturally located humor and a universal capacity for laughter. Cantinflas films rest heavily on bringing together the incongruous beliefs specific to Latinos of the Americas. An audience outside Mexico, for instance, might not pick up on the incongruities of folk belief because they are not familiar with the common doxa of the locale. Yet, folks the world over share similar responses to incongruous movements, and the misreading of minds to comic effect is a worldwide phenomenon. Is the way we worship Cantinflas a symptom of how Latinos approach the hero? Is there a type of hero-worship that is unique to us? FA:
IS:
In his lectures On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History (1841), Scottish essayist and historian
Thomas Carlyle discussed heroes from the perspective of masculinity. A hero for him is a great soul, free, outward, and courageous, capable of understanding the meaning of things. In Victorian times, Carlyle believed hero-worship was a transcendent endeavor, a way to simultaneously envy and celebrate greatness, to dream of being a valiant man by applauding those who represent that quality. Ralph Waldo Emerson, a transcendentalist, proposed a similar model in Representative Men (1850). The Hispanic world, needless to say, is dramatically different. Not only now but in the past as well. Our model of the hero, resulting from a the clash between East and West and between North and South, has changed over time. At the outset of modernity, it was connected to the various Indian rebellions against the European colonists. Perhaps Page 13 → the Argentine Gaucho modeled in José Hernández's El Gaucho Martín Fierro (1872) should be used as an example. And prior to it, Domingo Faustino Sarmiento's Facundo (1845), since Hernández wrote his poem in response to Sarmiento's denigration of the Gaucho. What I mean is that our heroes are outlaws, foragidos. FA:
What do we cherish in them?
Their rebellious spirit. Octavio Paz once suggested, in Alternating Current (1967), three categories of rebellion: the revoltoso (the mutineer), the rebelde (the rebel), and the revolucionario (the revolutionary). These instances display a degree of nuance: the first is a supporter of anarchy, eager and ready to subvert authority at all cost. The second is an individualized antagonist. And the third works with others and has an ideological plan. We embrace the second and third as admiring options, but even the first one offers an attractive option. That these models are mostly—almost exclusively—masculine says much about our cult of machismo. IS:
I want to talk more about machismo. But first I want to continue with heroes that are also comedians. You have written about Mexican comedian Germán Valdéz in his famous role as Tin Tan. FA:
Ah, yes: another hero of mine. Tin Tan is a Chicano Cantinflas. Or maybe Cantinflas is a Mexican Tin Tan. I love the way Tin Tan pokes fun at the immigration issue, how his humor is bi-national, Mexican and American. Someday I would like to produce a book-long essay (full of pictures) on him. In 2005, he became the subject of a documentary called Ni muy muy, ni tan tan: Simplemente Tin Tan, which in Mexican Spanish is a game of words that roughly translates as “neither this nor that.” IS:
My crystal ball says: you will and soon. In a conversation with historian Iván Jaksic, called What Is ‘la hispanidad’? (2011), you talk about Tin Tan ridiculing The Beatles. FA:
In a great scene, he changes the lyrics of “I Want to Hold Your Hand” into sheer, crystalline Spanglish. In my view, Tin Tan is the real thing when it comes to Spanglish. I am currently writing a history of the Spanish language. Both Cantinflas and Tin Tan play a role in it. IS:
FA:
What do Cantinflas and Tin Tan have in common?
They are revoltosos. Their ideological base is anarchic. That is, they don't offer a particular plan to counteract the ills of society. Instead, they simply criticize those ills. Their criticism is offered by means of humor. Through laughter, they poke fun at the clash between the haves and have-nots, between gringos and Mexicans, between knowledge Page 14 → and ignorance. I would go even further: in apocalyptic times, they use comedy as a panacea. Their magnetism is found in the freedom they invoke. Almost nothing is sacred for them. Well, that isn't true. Neither of them targets religion, specifically the Catholic Church. Still, they are admiringly brave. IS:
Might we also consider the way they relish in the relajo as an expression avant la lettre of a transborder pícaro sensibility? FA:
IS:
They are pícaros, that is, rogues, rascals…
Carlos Monsiváis called out Tin Tan as a “sujeto transfronterizo”…How might we also think of their upturning convention as performative pachuco figures? FA:
Cantinflas isn't a border-crosser, certainly not in the way Tin Tan plays for the pachucada, the MexicanAmerican population in California. Like W. E. B. DuBois, he is a promoter of a double-consciousness, an identity that exists in the interface between two languages (Spanish and English) and cultures (Mexico and the United States). IS:
One primary source of hero-worship in our popular culture is soccer. It doesn't traffic in humor but in athletic competency. FA:
El fútbol…The role soccer players (Pelé, Maradona, Kaká, Forlán, Messi, “Chicharito”) have is that of idols. But what kind of idolatry is being presented here? Their private lives are often kept in private. What the fans celebrate is their team spirit—that is, if they have such a thing, which sometimes, when they play for the national team, is turned into patriotism—but especially their bodies and the gymnastics they engage in during a game. That is what interests me: the athlete's male body. IS:
At first blush, the sculpted athlete's body can be beautiful—even enter the realm of the sublime. Some, like Jets' quarterback Mark Sanchez, exploit this magnificently. Of course, there is the physical training involved in the making of the athlete's body. This is an amazing feat. Even more amazing are the myriad ways in which the athlete's body shapes those movements and actions that constitute the game, that are beautiful in themselves individually and that make the game globally an aesthetic experience. Soccer players are heroes because they are both athletes and artists. When you watch a football match you are both admiring the work well done and the artistry in which it is done. FA:
In Hispanic culture, the female athlete's body lags far behind. Instead of women athletes, we celebrate women models. That is because people do not equate women's muscles with beauty. IS:
Page 15 → Yet there is great beauty in the body of an accomplished female gymnast. Women participate and excel in many activities that require strong muscles and physical beauty. I am thinking, for instance, of the physical training ballet dancers have to undergo to be proficient in their profession. Nobody would deny that their muscles are those of an athlete, yet they are lean and strong and beautiful. FA:
Perhaps this applies to women divers. In any case, Hispanic civilization is still awkward when it comes to female athletics. A handful of women athletes are celebrated, but they are easily eclipsed by their male counterparts. What we cherish in women is their beauty, their delicacy, and—unfortunately—their quiet demeanor. Take women's soccer. No league in the Spanish-speaking world commands attention. In fact, I'm not sure there are even professional leagues, although there must be by now. The United States isn't altogether different, I'm afraid. Women's soccer here is big every four years, as the World Cup takes place, otherwise the sport is dormant, not to say ignored. In Spanish-speaking movies—I'm talking here of the type that is set in ranchos—the same phenomenon occurs: men distil valor whereas women represent beauty. IS:
Let us then talk about movie stars, another—and essential—form of hero-worship, albeit a more democratic one, don't you think? FA:
At least males and females are equally adored…I will start with Mexican matinee idols like Vicente Fernández. He is always photographed with his sombrero and mustache. The look is a legacy of the Golden Age of Mexican cinema, where the hero was always a rural male, valiant and independent, whose personal pride—he was humilde and honrado—turned him into an admirable type. Since then, the countryside has lost its allure. For instance, I recently translated Juan Rulfo's stories in El llano en llamas (1953), which I titled The Plain in Flames (2012). None of the characters there falls into this kind of heroics. They are not only poor but they have been pushed to make untenable moral decisions. Plus, they do not see the countryside as desirable. It seems to me that Rulfo's aesthetics are a refutation of the Vicente Fernández model. IS:
I agree with you entirely, Ilan. In fact the rural appears in Mexican films of the last decade or so mostly as the site or location of gun-fights between law officers and drug smugglers (the films generically known as FA:
narcopelículas). And the rural areas of yesteryear packed with Mexican cowboys (charros) wearing big hats have shrunk to a town and a bar (a cantina) with a Mariachi (solo or band) singing Page 16 → boleros (romantic songs) or narcocorridos (songs about drug traffickers). Ilan, for the time being please hold your comments on the role of drugs in Latino culture for our third conversation. I do want us to say something now about the Mariachi as a type, since it holds a central role in Latino popular culture. It's true. Mariachis are descendants of the medieval troubadour. They use their instruments (accordion, guitar, trumpet, etc.) to sing the misadventures of the heart. They do so in bands. The majority of them are men, although recently there have been some women mariachis. Their custom is intriguing: they look like bullfighters, their pants and jacket tight; but they wear a large sombrero, which they take off when the lyrics deal with romantic love. IS:
In Mexico City, there are places, such as the Plaza Garibaldi, surrounded by bars and restaurants, where many mariachi bands hang out waiting to be hired and taken to the place where they are to sing one or several songs, usually as part of an attempt to seduce or court a woman or to celebrate somebody's birthday. Perhaps, too, we see just a sprinkle of irony—or would this be parodic pastiche?—in that these balladeers in tight pants increasingly share space at night with the city's queer romancers. FA:
There is much to say about ranchera movies. In Mexico today, these movies are still shown on TV on a daily basis, although to the best of my knowledge they are not being made any longer. Perhaps the ranchera movie has been replaced by its narco counterpart. IS:
Yes, the ranchera movies are no longer made. Yet at the peak of their production, you would still find some strange and strangely appealing iterations of the genre, such as Abismos de pasión (or Cumbres borrascosas, as it was sometimes titled—Luis Buñuel's 1954 adaptation of Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights; this film resets the Brontë story in Catholic Mexico, with Heathcliff played by Jorge Mistral and Cathy renamed Catalina. In a different vein, there was director Emilio “El Indio” Fernández's film La Perla, an adaptation of Steinbeck's eponymous short novel, The Pearl (1947). It starred the famous actors Pedro Armendáriz and María Elena Marqués and, like the Buñuel film, was a blockbuster. FA:
I love The Pearl (also 1947). In fact, I find “El Indio” Fernández's film more accomplished than Steinbeck's novella. How about Allá en el Rancho Grande? IS:
Yes. I am glad you mention this picture, for it is both a classic and Page 17 → an oddity. Fernando de Fuentes directed it in 1936, and the cinematographer was Eisenstein's Mexican disciple Gabriel Figueroa. The film's plot is not only highly artificial but so too is the particular way it is developed. On the one hand, the film fits nicely within the traditional genre of realism. It all takes place within a real time and place: real horses, real hacienda, and supposedly real events. The two close childhood friends, José Francisco (Tito Guízar) and Felipe (René Cardona) hail from different social classes (hacendado and employee) and happen to fall in love with the same woman. As friends since childhood their mutual affection has transcended class differences and barriers, but their love for the same women turns them into rivals and ultimately total antagonists. However, Figueroa's cinematography infuses a heavy dose of artificiality into the plot and its realistic genre. Figueroa seeks to embellish the town, the hacienda, the landscape…everything. And then, as it later became the rule in ranchera films, the flow of events is constantly interrupted by songs adoringly caressed by Figueroa's camera. Indeed, Tito Guízar, already a famous singer, became even more famous following the enormous success both of his song “Allá en el Rancho Grande” and of the film of the same name that launched the fad of the singing charro in Mexican pictures. (He was so appreciated and entrenched in Mexican culture that his songs were frequently heard on the radio as late as the sixties.) Normally, the film would be a melodrama. But its embellishment of reality and constant use of songs turn it into a comedy. It holds a significant place in Mexican film history. It's a classic. It established the aesthetic standards and the formal devices for all ranchera films that came afterwards. From 1936 on, up to the end of the Golden Age of Mexican cinema, we see the same artificiality, embellishment, and interruption of story line by a singing charro bursting into song. FA:
I wonder, fleetingly, if we should genuflect, along with Mexican film scholars, before the masterful Figueroa. I genuflect in adoration: Gabriel Figueroa, in my eyes, is a Renaissance painter with a camera. His black-andwhite landscapes are splendid. IS:
Figueroa was Eisenstein's disciple, and for this we get mastery of cinematic craft as well as a continued forging of the highly aestheticized image of the indio. FA:
Yes, we owe it to Figueroa for beautifying the indigenous population. In a country with an inferiority complex, where the word indio Page 18 → is used in derogatory ways, this is no small feat. From the time of the conquest up until the age of independence, it was the indio who served as the social, economic, and religious foundation. But secession from Spain early in the nineteenth century and the arrival of a mestizo mentality turned the indio into a relic. The country didn't quite force Indians into reservations but it did ostracize them. IS:
Recall Sergei Eisenstein's ¡Que Viva Mexico!(1931), where the Mexican peasant is represented more for the sake of the photography than for the sake of a recognizable toiling and living presence. Perhaps we should restrain somewhat our reverence of Figueroa—and likewise “El Indio” Fernández, who shared this same inclination. That said, we have and do worship such figures—and hunger for more… FA:
IS:
The audience's hunger for the new genre seemed to know no limits.
This drive to satisfy the hunger of audiences led not only to numerous replicas of Allá en el Rancho Grande but to the remaking of the film. Fernando de Fuentes himself remade it in 1949 with Jorge Negrete. As you know well he was a leading actor at the height of his fame as the prototypical singing charro. Most of Negrete's pictures used the by then mandatory device of finding any excuse for the actor to sing. Also, many took place in fake rural settings, where people did their traveling on horseback and mules at a time when in fact the most common means of transportation were cars and buses. Plots were simple and repetitive: a protagonist (the good guy), an antagonist (the bad guy), and the girl as love-interest to both. These basic ingredients may be (and were) shuffled in different ways, but a necessary element was always the songs. In fact, many of the films of the Golden Age are simply elaborations of musical themes. Whenever a song (about, say, two fellows and a girl) became popular with an already established audience, the decision to build a film around it became almost automatic. FA:
The same thing could be said of Pedro Infante, who was a friend of Jorge Negrete and with whom he co-starred in two films: Los tres alegres compadres (The Three Merry Pals, 1952) and Dos tipos de cuidado (Two Dangerous Fellows, 1953). IS:
You mention Infante and Dos tipos—a film made the same year Negrete's untimely death cut short a rather charmed life. He had been married for about a year to María Félix, the most famous Mexican actress of the time who was dubbed by journalists “the most beautiful woman in the world.” (Celebrities and millionaires showered her with jewels; Diego Rivera, desperately in love with her, painted her Page 19 → portrait.) That year it seemed that Hollywood's doors were starting to open for Jorge Negrete, who owed his popularity more to his singing than to his acting, which was in fact quite limited. In contrast, Pedro Infante was a much more gifted actor who excelled in comedy and in melodrama. He was younger and more athletic looking than Negrete. Contrary to Negrete, who did most of his films in rural settings, Infante did his pictures mostly in urban environments, mainly Mexico City. Infante's films were more sophisticated, and he shared star billings with actors of all ages, from children to old men and women. He could do comedies and real tearjerkers. He could play the role of a millionaire and that of a humble carpenter. He did a large range of roles, from calm to violent, meek to courageous, charming to repulsive, but in all of them he would eventually turn out to be a hero and the clean guy mothers would like their daughters to marry. Perhaps his varied gifts and his talent as an actor are best displayed in the trilogy: Nosotros los pobres (We, the Poor Ones, 1947), Ustedes los ricos (You, the Rich Ones, 1948), and Pepe el Toro (Pepe the Bull, 1953). Audiences loved his singing; when he sang a funny song he actually had people bursting at their sides with laughter. He died in 1957 in a plane crash—his mourning drew the largest crowds in Mexico City ever recorded. FA:
Jorge Negrete and Pedro Infante remain the most popular entertainers we have ever had in Mexico. Today people of all ages continue to watch their films on DVD, especially those of Pedro Infante. María Félix, the only actress in Mexico who had an honorific name—La Doña—was well known to all Mexicans and to Latin American and European audiences. She made films in Europe (Spain, France, Italy), but never in Hollywood. IS:
Yes, her real success was in Mexico. Whether playing a prostitute, a gold digger, a wealthy dame, and so on, she would always play her part as a stone-cold, hard-driven, ambitious woman. It seems she was biographically very much like her roles, looking for wealthy, power-wielding partners. Her last husband was a French banker, a millionaire. Together with Dolores del Río—“Princess of Mexico” as she was known—they were the most famous actresses in Mexico. This said, Dolores del Río played much more varied and capacious roles. FA:
IS:
Both had European features.
In a country where class is linked not only to wealth but to a European Page 20 → look (a non-indio look), both María Félix and Dolores del Río were either ready-made or made-to-order for the blockbusters. Not to mention, of course, others with a European look like Lupe Veles (María Guadalupe Vélez de Villalobos) aka “Mexican Spitfire” and Rita Hayworth (Margarita Carmen Dolores Cansino); Hayworth even plucked her brows to reconfigure herself at the request of the Columbia Pictures mogul Harry Cohn. FA:
I wholeheartedly admire Luis Buñuel. I genuflect toward him, as I do toward Figueroa. He never did a ranchera movie. But a stunning film by him analyzing the role of machismo in society—a narrative still current more than sixty years after its trumpeted debut at the Cannes Film Festival—is Los olvidados (1950), known in English as The Young and the Damned. It is the best depiction I know of street life in Distrito Federal in the midtwentieth century. Furthermore, the movie should be seen alongside Cantinflas's Allí está el detalle.Brazilian films like Pixote (1981) and City of God (2002) owe much to Buñuel. He was interested in casticismo, class struggle, and religion. Taken together, Viridiana (1961), Simón del desierto (Simon of the Desert, 1965), La vía lactea (The Milky Way, 1969), and The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (1972) are an admirable study of Hispanic extremes. But Los olvidados is a genuine study of how cult personalities define social relations. The protagonist, El Jaibo, played by Roberto Cobo, whom I knew personally, is a bully who controls the life of a gang of orphan children. He instills fear in them by forcing himself on their will. One could argue, of course, that such interaction takes place everywhere. It might be said that among destitute people such a person has a stronger appeal. But there's something authentically Mexican about El Jaibo, a yo no sé qué that mesmerizes me every time I see the film. He is the opposite of Cantinflas and Tin Tan: un cabrón, a tyrant. IS:
Along those lines, we should add to this genealogy Gerardo Tort's more recent film adaptation of the play De la calle (On the Street, 2001), a film I often teach in conjunction with Los olvidados. FA:
De la calle is a stunning film. In fact, all the ones you've listed reflect on the psychological dynamic of street life, where spontaneity enables the characters to construct hierarchies based on authority. Hero-worship depends on that: the interface of authority, admiration, and fear. IS:
Certainly our hero-worshiping culture begins in childhood. Briefly, let's now turn our discussion to children's songs. FA:
Page 21 → When I was growing up, I listened attentively to Cri-Cri, aka El grillito cantor. Today I find him unfathomable. But he left a deep impression on me when I was little, a fact that—in all honesty—scares me. For Cri-Cri did nothing in his songs but reduce human behavior to predictable stereotypes. IS:
Composer and songwriter Francisco Gabilondo Soler—that was his real name!—has mysteriously captured my attention, too. We had a boxed set of his records in California. I was mesmerized by the colorful cover art—an FA:
ant carrying an umbrella—and by the songs. He wrote his songs for children, and they are generally about children. Perhaps they were deeply appealing for us because they sound like flash fiction stories sung along with catchy tunes. Cri-Cri used all kinds of music styles, his songs following the rhythm of mambo, cha-cha-cha, or any other generic music out there. He was as inventive in music as he was in the subject matter of his stories. I recall well his popular song “El chorrito” that was about a water fountain, the variations of its trickle and imaginative characters like ants carrying umbrellas. The themes of Cri-Cri's songs are funny and pedagogical, and they usually describe events that concern the everyday life of children, like the nature and contents of dreams. Everything that one way or another is related to children's experiences and emotions found musical expression and story-form in Cri-Cri's compositions. Parents like ours loved these songs and bought the records because they thought they were edifying. And we as children liked them because the stories were amusing, imaginative, and playful. Oddly, my sense is that parents today in Mexico do not buy songs by Cri-Cri. Parents in Mexico and the United States don't seem to pay attention to any musical compositions for children. Perhaps parents are no longer interested in listening to music for children and selecting the compositions they could consider worthy. It's as if the education of children's musical brains ceased to matter. You might be right. Children's music is still in its infancy among us. Or better, it is stuck in the nineteenth century. IS:
Yes, there appears to be a sense that music is not important in the total education of the child's senses; that is, it doesn't participate in the growing of their aesthetic capacities and feelings. Let me turn the conversation to other heroes close to home. Your father acted in Chespirito. FA:
Page 22 → He did, albeit he had a very small role. The impact of Chespirito's humor in Hispanic civilization is still in need of interpretation. His characters—El chavo del Ocho, El chapulín colorado, El doctor Chapatín(all starting with ch)—are beloved throughout Latin America. What kind of comedy does Chespirito present? One based on easy gags. Yet those gags say much about who our heroes are. El chapulín colorado might be a klutz. He isn't masculine the way Pedro Infante is. That, precisely, is its contribution: he is an anti-hero. He helps people not by force but by clumsiness. Still, he helps people. And he does it because he projects a childish innocence. IS:
FA:
How does all this hero-worship manifest itself in real life?
Ever read The Children of Sánchez by Oscar Lewis? The fact that Sánchez, the father, is the center of gravity in the family in this insightful anthropological study might serve as a stepping-stone to reflect on this psychological behavior. The chemistry of hero-worship in Hispanic society is found in our Mediterranean DNA. But we've given it its own twist, as Lewis shows. IS:
Lewis made extremely valuable contributions to sociology in a relatively short time. It's too bad he died young and surrounded by controversy. FA:
Five decades after its original publication, the dust has finally settled and it is possible to appreciate the vigor, depth, and stylistic qualities of The Children of Sánchez. Much hoopla took place around the book, describing it as a misconstrued depiction of family life in Mexico in the mid–twentieth century. Critics accused Oscar Lewis of endorsing a “culture of poverty” in the so-called Third World, a term he himself had coined. In their opinion, this was a condescending view of the have-nots that only explained why they could not quite escape the dim circumstances that surrounded them. But Lewis, in my opinion, was wrongly attacked, in part because his book was read in the sixties as a window into the developing world, and the relationship between the developed and the so-called Third World was then entering a period of intense crisis. Also, The Children of Sánchez became controversial because there was a declared war on poverty in the United States, led by the Johnson Administration, that fought against the country's IS:
extremely high number of poor people with almost one out of every five Americans living a under the poverty line. That domestic war had some positive results, including the Economic Opportunity Act of 1964, which, although hotly contested, brought along, among other things, programs that Page 23 → are still around today such as Head Start and Job. “The culture of poverty” is used but in the wrong way. The full name of the report by sociologist and U.S. Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan was “The Negro Family: A Case for National Action,” and it suggested that a significant reason for poverty among blacks was the absentee father. FA:
Lewis's research interests were primarily outside the United States, no?
Yes, he worked primarily in Mexico, Puerto Rico, Cuba, but had worked on India and conducted fieldwork on the Blackfoot Indians of Canada and on Texas farmers. Even though there was a growing Latino population in California, Texas, and throughout the Southwest, as well as in the Northeast and in Florida, and while he did occasionally focus on the Bracero program, which brought temporary agricultural workers north of the Rio Grande between 1942 and 1955, mainly to replace the native male labor that had been sent to the front during the war, he concentrated on the Spanish-speaking countries that are in the vicinity of the United States. His vision of the “culture of poverty” is articulated in the introduction to Five Families: Mexican Case Studies in the Culture of Poverty, which was published in 1959, a couple of years before The Children of Sánchez. Lewis writes there that “Poverty becomes a dynamic factor which affects participation in the larger national culture and creates a subculture of its own.” He is convinced that it's possible to speak of the culture of the poor “for it has its own modalities and distinctive social and psychological consequences for its members.” It seemed to Lewis that the culture of poverty cut across regional, rural-urban, and even national boundaries. “For example, I am impressed by the remarkable similarities in family structure, the nature of kinship ties, the quality of husband-wife and parentchild relations, time orientation, spending patterns, value systems, and the sense of community found in lowerclass settlements in London, in Mexico City slums and Mexican villages, and among lower class Negroes in the United States.” And he adds: “I want to draw attention to the fact that poverty in modern times is not only in a state of economic deprivation, of disorganization, or of the absence of something. It is also something positive in the sense that it has a structure, a rationale and defense mechanisms without which the poor could hardly carry on.” I do not believe Lewis overemphasized the point. In the United States, a country made in part by immigrants, poverty is perceived as a temporary stage, a state one is able to overcome through hard work. But Page 24 → in the developing world, there is a sense of doom, of lack of agency in regard to poverty. For instance, social mobility in Mexico is almost non-existent: the chances for a low-income person to move up to the middle class are bigger today than when Lewis was a visitor, but they remain tough, not to say improbable. The idea of an American Dream is just not present in Mexico: pobre pero contento is one of the famous sayings by Cantinflas, the most popular comedian in Mexican history ever, poor but happy. IS:
Lack of social mobility has been endemic in Mexico, where half the population is poor. This has fed and will continue to feed social unrest. Quite recently the electricity workers trade union established a new, independent, political party, together with organized workers from many quarters and a large base of non-organized people. Resistance and rebellion are starting to emerge. Much discussion will be needed. Oscar Lewis would have had a privileged place to voice his concerns, his analyses, and his proposals. FA:
Controversy, needless to say, is an essential feature of democracy: without debate there is no consensus; not to react to social injustice is to be dormant, to give up one's civic responsibilities. Lewis himself attracted the controversy in his choice of topic. His focus in The Children of Sánchez centered on the vecindades, slums in downtown Mexico City where he said the poor live with limited provisions, many of them having come from rural areas to find work in the capital as the nation was undergoing a rapid process of labor centralization. This inclination toward the dispossessed came to him naturally. He had been born into an immigrant Yiddish-speaking family (his real last name was Lefkowitz) and grew up on a farm in Upstate New York. His Jewish background predisposed him toward a life of social justice. He was a low-income student who went to the City College of New York, where he majored in history, and then moved not too far, to Columbia University, where he did his doctorate in anthropology. He taught at Brooklyn College, among other places, and was one of the founders of the anthropology department at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign. IS:
His understanding of anthropology is directly linked to his experience as a Jew and an immigrant child, and here again his legacy is polemical. He held the conviction that “anthropologists have a new function in the modern world: to serve as students and reporters of the great mass of peasants and urban dwellers of the underdeveloped countries who constitute almost eighty percent of the world's Page 25 → population.” What happens to the people of these countries, Lewis insisted, “will affect, directly and indirectly, our own lives. Yet we know surprisingly little about them. While we have a great deal of information on the geography, history, economics, politics, and even the customs of many of these countries, we know little about the psychology of the people, particularly the lower classes, their problems, how they think and feel, what they worry about, argue over, anticipate, or enjoy.” FA:
This perception of social reality is still relevant. What mission did he set for his discipline?
In his view, anthropologists should perceive themselves as scientists fully committed to objectively analyzing destitute populations. How they study those populations and what he means by objectively analyzing is where Lewis's contribution becomes decisive. He wasn't one to arrive at a place to gather amounts of demographic and sociological data, most of it dealing with behavioral patterns. Instead, he focused on a particular subject—a chosen town, a family, a handful of individuals—and interviewed them profusely over an extended period of time. In the case of The Children of Sánchez, his research on Mexico and on Mexican families started in 1943, but he concentrated on the Sánchez family from 1956 on. It is one of the five families that are part of Five Families. He then concentrated on the Sánchezes until The Children of Sánchez was released, after which he continued his meetings with several of the members. That effort resulted in another book, A Death in the Sánchez Family (1969). In short, the span of time that Lewis spent on Mexico and on the Sánchezes was more than a quarter of a century. IS:
FA:
The role of “subaltern subjects” in the humanities has been a topic of discussion of late in the academy?
Yes, and I ask: What gives a journalist or a scholar the right to usurp the voice of someone else? What is compromised in such situations, its opponents believe, is objectivity itself. But Lewis was ahead of his time. He understood the traps of such types of research but did not think, and rightly so, that such hindrance reduced the overall value of the effort. He makes it clear when he states in the book that “my personality influenced the final outcome of this study.” He made the interviewees volunteer information they would not otherwise have offered. And he chopped, edited, reorganized, and overall manipulated the material he had collected. “While I used a directive approach in the interviews,” he continued, “I encouraged Page 26 → free association, and I was a good listener. I attempted to cover systematically a wide range of subjects: their earliest memories, their dreams, their hopes, fears, joys and sufferings; their jobs; their relationship with friends, relatives, employers; their sex life; their concept of justice, religion, and politics; their knowledge of geography and history; in short, their total view of the world.” It strikes me that the real protagonist of The Children of Sánchez, albeit a silent, implicit one, is the tape recorder. Lewis would have never been able to accomplish the anthropological task had he not had access to this technological device that transformed the way modernity approaches the human voice. The tape recorder is indeed a miraculous instrument. It stores speech, allowing the person recording it to do something with it we are all incapable of in life: to return to a sentence, to examine it, to codify it. Lewis accumulated hundreds of hours of interviews with Jesús, the Sánchez patriarch, which constitute the prologue and epilogue of the book, and his four children, Manuel, Roberto, Consuelo, and Marta, making the core narrative, each child showing up three successive times in an order dependent on their age. Once the interviews Lewis did were transcribed, he gave free rein to his writing aptitudes, shaping the material so as to create semblance of plotline coherence. The tape recorder was the mechanism that allowed him to travel from his field of work to the field of his imagination. IS:
What did he seek to accomplish with this methodology? Do you believe it was solid enough to give a faithful account of social reality? FA:
While Lewis was generally interested in the overall effects of poverty, his ultimate goal, at least as it concerns the Sánchez family, was really psychological, or I should say mythical. What the anthropologist was after was not only how Jesús Sánchez relates to his wives and children, and how each of them relates to the others, but, from a IS:
more Platonic perspective, how the Mexican people behave, what is the country's archetypal pattern toward authority, sex, food, happiness, illness, and death. In other words, Lewis looked at the particulars of a given family in order to understand the universals. As it happens, shortly before The Children of Sánchez appeared, Mexico as a whole had undergone a period of soul-searching, of “national psychologizing,” an effort that embraced the theories of C. G. Jung, Freud's disciple, to apprehend the set of symbols that apparently lay buried in everyone's collective unconscious. Among the studies published before Lewis that subscribed to that position were Samuel Page 27 → Ramos's Profile of Man and Culture in Mexico (1938) and Octavio Paz's The Labyrinth of Solitude (1950). FA:
What might have driven Lewis's research program?
My own impression is that Lewis's kind of anthropology—and maybe the controversy he attracted also? —derives from his Jewishness. The Jewish approach to culture, at least the diasporic Jewish approach, is defined by a double-consciousness, one that juxtaposes an outsider and insider's angle. And that is what he sought to accomplish as a social scientist: to simultaneously look at the culture of poverty in Mexico as an American academic who visited the vecindad to record conversations with the Sánchez family, and to become not only an acquaintance but a close friend and confidant of its members. Judging from the content of the book, his subjects were able to tell him things they did not tell each other and maybe not even themselves. To what extent did Lewis's presence in the family alter its dynamic? Did he himself become, hidden or otherwise, a Sánchez relative, albeit an honorary one? Another hidden facet that shouldn't go unnoticed is the way translation is embedded in the book. Lewis was not only perfectly fluent in Spanish but he understood Mexican slang. Not only did he transcribe his interviews, he translated them into English in order to make the narrative accessible to his target audience. Who was that audience? Notice that Five Families was released by a trade New York publisher, Basic Books, and The Children of Sánchez by another, Random House, meaning that Lewis did not aim for an academic audience, e.g., in this case he did not seek the imprimatur of a university press, but sought a wide public beyond the campus walls that was interested in social issues, from economics to armed struggles. That his book came to that specific public in English and not Spanish arguably made its content more widely known and perhaps even more palatable in certain intellectual circles. All these aspects matter because Lewis's composite picture of family life at a moment when Mexico is a model developing nation on the fast track to industrialization is not only vivid but astonishingly moving. Since it's finally possible to see the book's brightness in full, the book is something else: a Balzac-like novel, although Lewis probably would not have approved such a portrait. Balzac-like because while offering a domestic vista he delivers an epic canvas about upheaval, social and psychological, while completely disappearing behind his subjects, thus forbidding the reader a glimpse of his own Page 28 → opinions, which are offered only in the twenty-page introduction and never again; and a novelist because Lewis displays an extraordinary talent for creating literary characters—young and old, male and female, strong and weak in their personality yet never limited in their narrative scope and commanding in their storytelling disposition. It might be said that those creations are based on real people and that, as a result, they are not fictional. But is not that what fiction is always about, making the real not unreal but extra real? Are not all fictional characters based on actual people? And so, the question must be asked: should The Children of Sánchez be read as a novel? Should it be seen as an accurate description of daily affairs in Hispanic society? Either way, in the sense of what a larger-than-life father figure does in our society, its devastating impact is unavoidable. IS:
The father as priest. By the way, ever seen those holograms of Jesus blinking or the Virgen de Guadalupe in a talisman hanging below the mirror in a taxi? FA:
I love them! I have a friend who hung one in his living room years ago in order to oppose evil spirits, which he thought were after him. With the hologram he feels protected from them. An essential ingredient of popular religion is superstition. IS:
Yes, it is a strange phenomenon. It is superstition and it is a great deal more. Take the case of the McCourt family and its surroundings as depicted in Angela's Ashes (1996), a book I heartily enjoyed while moved by the FA:
most opposite feelings of attraction and horror. Well, in this memoir Catholicism is materially a series of unwaveringly identical rites, such as prayer, communion, repentance for sins committed, fear of hell, belief in immortal life of the soul after death. At the same time, Catholicism is the Church and its staff, that whole hierarchy that despises its flock (working people barely surviving in a state of extreme poverty) and is always colluding with the authorities, the CEOs, the business owners, the ruling class as a whole. It's the Church dictating to the poor codes of behavior, manners, and customs with the aim of leading them all to the passive acceptance of a subordinate role in society—in our so-called Valley of Tears. As Frank McCourt writes in this first volume of his memoirs, he manages to make a better life for himself and for his mother and siblings only after he breaks with the Church. That is, after he ceases to believe in the Church's rituals and dictates. It's a radical transformation Page 29 → for him. And I believe this has come about in the last few decades for millions of people around the world and in the United States. The Catholic Church no longer rules people's lives the way it used to. It does not, I agree. But I do not have the same negative approach to religion that Frank McCourt presents in Angela's Ashes. Beyond the institution of the Church itself, belief is crucial in daily life. It certainly is in my life. And I am not a religious person. IS:
Altogether I feel we can safely say that the Catholic Church has lost much ground among the Latino population, but that doesn't mean that the Church is giving up the struggle to regain its old prestige. Pope Benedict XVI rushed the beatification process of his predecessor John Paul II because the Church needed a hero to divert attention from the abuse scandal in Ireland and other European countries. FA:
I couldn't stand Pope Benedict XVI. Something about his rigidity, his pompous, doctrinaire approach, his Nazi past. I predicted his abdication in a brief essay included in my Spanish-language personal anthology Lengua Fresca (2012). Therefore, it was a thrill to see him followed by Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio of Buenos Aires, thereafter named Pope Francis. IS:
And, it was an acknowledged fact even by the Vatican that John Paul II always gave his support to the Mexican priest Marcial Maciel Degollado, a founder of Los Legionarios de Cristo (The Legionnaires of Christ)—the most influential and richest Roman Catholic congregation since the beginning of the Cold War—even though he knew Maciel was a drug addict, raped (and continued raping) boys most of his adult life, and committed other crimes. So a lackluster pope engulfed in scandals sought help from a preceding lackluster pope who hid his sexual abuse crimes committed by his subordinate Maciel. FA:
Perhaps with Pope Francis comes a change in the typical profile. Not only is he the first non-European to be named the head of the Roman Catholic Church in thirteen centuries; he is also a Jesuit, a denomination known for its passion to education as well as for being ostracized by the Vatican. IS:
Ilan, I'm all about celebrating Latinos where we have not been allowed before, but perhaps we might tread cautiously here, too; that is to say, perhaps it is a tad early in the day for us to rejoice—or to criticize—the election of Bergoglio as the new Pope. In Argentina, other countries in Latin America, and Europe many have already published compromising investigative journalistic articles that are beginning Page 30 → to bring to light possible ties with the military dictatorship of Videla y compañía. If these prove to be verified beyond a shadow of a doubt, they may taint his biography irreparably. We shall see. FA:
In Latin America, the Jesuits have been prime motors of educational change. Perhaps that is why they have a troubled history, having been expelled in 1767. Pope Francis is a welcome antidote to Pope Benedict: personable, down-to-earth, allergic (to the degree that is possible in such circles) to protocol, and empathetic to the poor. Oy, what a relief it is to have a Latin American pope! The irony, of course, is that, again, he's Argentine, a country known for its pedantry. IS:
I'm a bit more tentative when it comes to religious orders, Jesuit or otherwise. Yes, the Jesuit order's pedagogical zeal has been vital since its founding in 1534 by the Basque Ignatius of Loyola. And without a doubt today they own and run many universities in many countries. As you know, they run the well-known private FA:
college in Mexico City, Universidad Iberoamericana. However, while they have been important safeguards of education, there's still a nagging sense that they are more about the promotion of obscurantism than objective learning. This is perhaps not entirely surprising. Loyola's Rules for Thinking with the Church favor whatever the Catholic Church hierarchy considers to be the truth over and above empirical proof. His Rule 13 comes readily to mind, declaring that the Church has “defined anything to be black which to our eyes appears to be white, we ought in like manner to pronounce it to be black.” Wherever lines are drawn in this discussion, what we do know is that the church has lost much ground with today's Latino population. IS:
We shall see if this is an effective means for the Catholic Church to regain lost ground.
FA:
In what sense is belief crucial for you?
Reason alone is insufficient as an instrument to carry us along. Spinoza talks of two spheres: reason and faith. Of course, he is the ultimate rationalist, reducing the laws of the universe to his more geometrico. In the Ethics, he presents an astonishing nomenclature of human emotions: how many emotions there are, how they relate to one another, and to what extent is reason capable of controlling our emotional life. Yet Spinoza concedes that, while reason has the upper hand, there are aspects of our emotional life impossible to handle, a including despair. Despair is a response to the unknown, e.g., the accidental nature of the universe. Despair and the unknown—religion is an answer to them. And the least polished (read “Spinozean,” unprocessed, Page 31 → animistic, childish) reason is, the more room there is to believe in magic. Magic is a feature of childhood but when reason is not distilled, it is carried on to adulthood. A stereotype of the uneducated, countryside folk makes an emphasis on their belief in magic. To me that stereotype is not as constrained. Many of us so-called educated people are superstitious. IS:
FA:
Give me an example.
Every time I am in an airplane that is about to take off or land, I recite to myself—in my mind—the Hebrew prayer Shema. As I suggest in With All Thine Heart (2010), I do not attend synagogue in a systematic way. This doesn't mean I am a nonbeliever. Or else, Sigmund Freud had talismans in his doctor's office that were not quite decorations. Joseph Conrad used certain types of pens to write his stories. Isabel Allende always starts a new novel on the exact same date she began The House of the Spirits (1982). Why do we engage in these kinds of behavior? Because deep inside we fear that reason is not enough. Because the child in us is still around. Because there is a spiritual aspect of life we cannot altogether ignore. In other words, we might claim to have left an atavistic mind-set behind but remnants of it are still with us. IS:
FA:
You are not an unbeliever, you said.
No, I'm not. I'm enthralled by religious manifestations. I love jumping in a taxi in which the driver has an icon of the Virgen de Guadalupe hanging under the front mirror. It does not generate dismissal in me but respect. I do not think the Virgin will protect him. But it doesn't matter what I think; what matters is what he believes. IS:
FA:
Could one say that the icon is keeping the driver from understanding the world as it is?
No. Truth is, none of us understand the world as it is. Not even scientists. That is because scientists reduce it to a series of causes and effects. But there is more to the human experience than the scientific method. Don't get me wrong: the scientific method is the foundation of progress. Yet using it to discredit a spiritual appreciation of reality is being a reductionist. I agree with Christopher Hitchens: God is not great! And neither is He all knowing! (I write He with capital H out of respect for the unknown.) But neither is science. Tell me, do you come from a religious home? IS:
No, not really. My father is an atheist. Only in the few years before she died, did my mother's otherwise indeterminate and diffuse Catholicism peek from beneath the covers. Before she died she asked Page 32 → for a priest. At first I felt chilled and deeply uncomfortable. Then I resigned myself to the same manner of thinking you express above: what matters is what she believes. FA:
My paternal grandmother was Catholic but never went to Mass and kept her beliefs very much to herself. My maternal grandmother was more inclined to showing her religiosity—behind closed doors—and to buying Virgin Mary statuettes, Jesus velvet-posters, and other external symbols of Catholicism. I grew up very much like my brother, mostly unaware of the impact of religion on other people's lives and indifferent to their religious beliefs and cravings. We never gave them much thought and they never invaded our lives. We were spontaneously irreligious, agnostic, atheists. The Catholic Church did not inflict visible marks on our feelings and behavior, and its symbols were for us just forms of popular art, like the legend and the omnipresent representations of the Virgen de Guadalupe. I don't have velvet Jesus posters up on the walls in my house, but I do have plenty of those beautifully baroque Russian Virgin Mary icons. The Church does inflict those marks on Hispanic civilization. By marks we mean wounds, injuries, scars. Yet calling them that way is being nearsighted. What is our civilization without Catholicism? The question is absurd. It's as if we asked: what is the world without the color blue? Or without sugar? Hispanic popular culture is, even if only tangentially, a by-product of the encounter between Iberian and indigenous cultures in the early sixteenth century. Our sense of guilt, our conception of the self, our understanding of time, our cuisine, our sexuality, our dreams, all spring from there. Don't you think? IS:
Absolutely. Just thinking of literature, admittedly a small domain within the vast cultural universe you have in mind, would force anyone to acknowledge the huge impact Catholicism has had in Western civilization, particularly in its Latino American variant. We find this impact in the common use of certain words and tropes, and in many specifically religious allusions. Indeed, our whole literary tradition would be incomprehensible without acknowledging the essential legacy of the varied and heterogeneous authors who penned the Bible; of those who did the fundamental doctrinal work in the early centuries of our era, such as the Neoplatonists Plotinus, Porphyry, and Saint Augustine; of the medieval thinkers who gave us the lexical and conceptual treasure-trove of scholasticism, among them its epitome Saint Thomas, and of the mysticism—so influential in our literature—of Meister Eckhart, Catherine of Siena, Teresa of Jesus, and John of Page 33 → the Cross, to name a few. (By the way, both Teresa of Jesus and John of the Cross had Jewish ancestors and their literary work is still widely read today. Reading them remains a true pleasure.) FA:
I propose to leave our discussion on Hispanic kitsch for the epilogue. However, I was struck by your reference to Virgin Mary statuettes and Jesus velvet-posters. The endless mutations Jesus and the Virgin undergo among us are an invitation to think about the role of sacred objects in non-religious spaces. In Hispanic civilization, Catholic icons spill out from the altar and the confessionary to the kitchen, the classroom, the automobile. IS:
FA:
How about the toilet?
Point well taken. Ever come across a Virgin de Guadalupe in a restroom? I have. Plenty of times. What is it doing there? Protecting the faithful at all times. Yet the connection between the religious and the scatological is complicated. Why is it sacrilegious to think of Jesus Christ defecating? Francisco de Quevedo, the Spanish Golden Age poet, loved to write about farts, urine, and poop. Yet in the context of his devout time (he was born in 1580 and died in 1645), he could not go as far. IS:
I guess the definite prototype here is Rabelais. His Gargantua and Pantagruel (circa 1532) remains unsurpassed in its scatological irreverent humor. But how could we not mention the first couple pages of Oscar “Zeta” Acosta's Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo. Here the narrator stands up from the toilet and stares for a while at his feces; then, in a greatly hilarious comparison and identification he sees in the different colors, the mucus coating and the overall shape of his excrement the composing of a possible abstract expressionist painting. Poop and painting, indeed! FA:
“Zeta” was a true imaginist: he does not much think ideas as he vomits them. I remain amazed at how little he is known. Chicano playwright Carlos Morton and I have written a one-actor play about his last night. It had a stage reading in 2011 at the Wellfleet Harbor Actor's Theater, known as WHAT, in Cape Cod. IS:
FA:
His last night where?
Maybe at the hospital. Maybe in jail. Maybe just his last night before he crosses the border and disappears—another Ambrose Bierce. The device in the play is precisely that “Zeta” is alone with his own ghosts. That last night he revisits his odyssey as he prepares to move into the Más Allá, the beyond. IS:
I cannot wait to see it…As you talk about in your book Bandido, Page 34 → Acosta published his coming-ofage narrative in 1972, then two years later he disappeared forever in Mexico. I believe this book is not only the apex of Acosta's brief life, but the apex of Chicano writing in the seventies and beyond. Today it should have a place of honor in Latino literature as an utmost Rabelaisian, anarchic, and highly idiosyncratic work of art. FA:
Rabelaisian, yes, and still marginalized. Some months ago, while launching The Norton Anthology of Latino Literature (2011), along with some contributors (Luis Rodríguez, Rubén Martínez, and Susana ChávezSilverman) at the Los Angeles Public Library, someone in the packed audience complained I had spent too much time with “Zeta,” whose role in Latino letters should be better left unnoticed, as “it gives us as bad rep.” I remember receiving a similar comment when at Lincoln Center I lectured on Cantinflas. He is the stereotype of the mexicano peresozo we should better forget. This approach frightens me. Or at least annoys me. Let us only see the polished, presentable side. Both Cantinflas and “Zeta” are complex (yes, Cantinflas too). That complexity needs to be embraced. It is in other cultures, no doubt. Take Dave Chappelle and Sarah Silverman, for instance. IS:
FA: IS:
I could not agree with you more.
Anyway, let us move on…In Mexico, our particular brand of Catholicism is called guadalupanismo.
FA:
The cult of the Virgen de Guadalupe.
The Virgen de Guadalupe, who is a mestiza, appeared (I was about to write: revealed herself) in front of Juan Diego in 1531. Maybe we could talk of that date as the birth of a particular modality of Catholicism in which a mestiza motherly figure plays a larger role than Christ himself. For while Jesus, particularly a baby Jesus (el niño Jesús), and the name Jesús is common today in our societies (unlike in the United States, where no one names a child Jesus), is at the center of the Mexican and Central American variety of Catholicism, the Virgen de Guadalupe is the ubiquitous presence in Mexico. IS:
I wonder if the Virgen de Guadalupe (frequently dubbed the Virgen Morena, the Brown Virgin) is not a late manifestation in the Viceroyalty of New Spain of the so-called Black Madonnas of the European Middle Ages. Black images of the Virgin Mary are found all over Europe in this period, and they seem to be linked to ancient (so-called a pagan) traditions. Perhaps the relation is there, perhaps not, and perhaps we shall never know. FA:
Father Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla, our George Washington, who led Page 35 → the march for independence in Mexico in 1810, carried along a flag with the Virgen de Guadalupe. So did César Chávez during the Chicano Movement. IS:
It's a historical fact that the Virgen de Guadalupe—as figure and symbol—has been used since the very beginning as a political instrument. The Catholic Church used it for the mass conversion of native populations. Hidalgo, along with my ancestors Juan and Ignacio Aldama, as well as other leaders of the Mexican war of independence, used it to rally the peasants and the middle classes against the gachupines (Spanish-born Spaniards and locally born people of Iberian ancestry). The group of Mexican monarchists who, with the backing of Napoleon III, appointed Archduke Maximilian of Austria emperor of Mexico used the Virgen de Guadalupe in their efforts to obtain support for the new Empire from the general population. And we must not forget that the Virgen de Guadalupe has been the political banner of some of the most conservative and militant sectors of Mexican society since the twenties. Some eighty years ago they launched an armed rebellion against secular local authorities and the national government calling themselves the Cristeros, later they grouped mostly within the Partido de Acción Nacional, and today they rule the country, its Parliament, and its highly centralized government. Fleeing reality and determined to impose their views on all social matters, from the outlawing of abortion and the undermining of secular education to the limiting of freedom of speech and FA:
the fight against independent trade unions, they use a symbol almost five centuries old to try to bring society back to the Middle Ages, while preserving all the comforts and privileges and wealth of a First World contemporary ruling class. IS:
You express much frustration on this subject.
When it comes to talking about the Church, my initial reaction is always to think about the criminal side of its functions and activities. It really takes an effort for me to remember how close and mostly beneficial the Church is to popular creativity in art and culture. And yet this is so very visible in places like Los Angeles or San Francisco when you walk down certain streets and you see one mural after another representing religious scenes and symbols, painted by Chicano artists. Indeed, the Catholic Church is constantly present in popular culture. Take the Cross, for instance. For musicians and actors it's almost an obligation to wear one as a signifier of being Latino. FA:
Perhaps because I am not a Catholic, I see the religious manifestations Page 36 → connected with the Catholic Church less perniciously. Not that I do not recognize that destructive aspect, as you call it. But one way or another, all institutions are destructive. The synagogue is too, of course. IS:
In Sacramento, one of my best friends in childhood and early teens was a Chicano who went to Mass every Sunday. He was subjected to a very strict curfew and to the double moral standards akin to those then still enforced in retrograde towns in the Mexican countryside. There were words he could never use in the presence of a girl or a woman. There were chores in his home (like making the bed, doing the dishes, ironing) that were to be done exclusively by his mother or his sisters. He was allowed to do some grocery-shopping and some other errands. His father was a blue collar worker who ruled the household as a little despot. My friend learned to oppose and antagonize his father when he realized that, far from being made of a single piece of granite, he had a double personality: on the one hand, his father was meek and subservient in the small tractor repair shop where he worked; on the other hand, he was tyrannical at home as well as omnipresent in every aspect of the life of the family. My friend's rebelliousness increased every year. In my teens, I left to live in London to be raised by my madrina. During this same period, I learned that Miguel had held up the 7-Eleven down the street from my old house in Sacramento. He ended up in Juvenile Hall. A strict Catholic observant, his father would have been called a mocho in Mexico. FA:
IS:
I am frightened of the mochos. You know why?
FA:
Why?
Because to this day they portray Jews—and I am Jewish—as Christ killers. I am afraid I'll meet a mocho at one point and he'll say I myself was right there, at the Cross, and maybe that I was a co-conspirator with Judas Iscariot. IS:
Mochos would be the derogatory characterization, but in a way that is double-pronged. I do not know where the word mocho comes from, but it is used quite commonly in Mexico City to designate ostentatiously strict (and actually hypocritical) Catholic individuals. It's used frequently in the rest of Mexico and I believe in the United States. What the dictionary says about the word is sociologically interesting. It not only means prudish but also maimed, shorn, blunt. When Mexicans and Chicanos call someone mocho or mocha they are not only calling him or her a prig (which in a quirky manner Page 37 → would acknowledges some sort of superiority), but also a mutilated person that implicitly demeans. Perhaps it would be fitting for you to include the term in a new edition of your Spanglish: The Making of a New American Language (2003), even though it's not at all a Spanglish word commonly used in conversations in Chicano communities all over the country. You might consider including it as a sort of “honorary Spanglish” term. FA:
IS:
One of the gorgeous popular manifestations of Catholicism in Mexico and Central America are the exvotos.
Yes, are not they amazing? These offerings that are at the same time pictorial expressions of gratitude and testimonies of miracles that have taken place to fulfill a vow, are certainly among the most creative works of FA:
popular art. Exvotos would easily fit within the category of what the French call art brut, a form of self-taught and naive art. It's naive art in miniature, sometimes capable of generating profound emotions and aesthetic reactions. Last time I went to the Cathedral by the Zócalo, Mexico City's central plaza, I spent about an hour just marveling at its collection of exvotos. IS:
In a sense, the exvotos are a kind of lexicon as well.
Yes, because they can be classified according to criteria such as the nature of the miracle or of the vow fulfilled, according to the illness cured or the bodily part concerned, or the kind of accident that the testimony talks about, and so on. FA:
Among devotions, there is the crucifixion that takes place each year in Iztapalapa, on the outskirts of Mexico City. IS:
Catholic devotions are very varied and are not regulated as such by the Church. In Mexico one of the most famous devotions is the re-enactment in Iztapalapa of the Stations of the Cross and the crucifixion itself. Every year, on Thursday and Good Friday, more than one million people participate as spectators and hundreds as actors. All take their roles very seriously, but nobody as much as the man who plays Jesus Christ, who has to drag a heavy cross along a three kilometer road and eventually has to bear the crucifixion (with ropes, not nails, of course). Some among the audience approach the actor to ask for miracles. Others do penitencia dragging themselves on their knees, whipping their own backs, or carrying crosses like the officially appointed Christ. Indeed, it is a very formal event, where a local council elects the actors who portray Jesus Christ, Mary, the apostles, Judas, the Romans, and so on. The Passion of Jesus Christ is famously enacted in Puebla (a state Page 38 → with a very Catholic reputation) and the Yucatán with their massive street processions. Last but not least, every Easter there are blissful denouncements of official politics and politicians, who appear in the guise of papier-mâché Judas figures. Strips of firecrackers are placed in strategic places on the figures, which are hoisted in the air and exploded. The Judas figures are very recognizable caricatures of people like the president of Mexico or even on occasion some member of the Church hierarchy. They represent concepts, such as “corruption,” “repression,” “police brutality,” etc. The Judas figures are meant to be enjoyed especially when they explode. FA:
Let us talk about Día de los Muertos as acarnaval. Because the carnaval serves a fundamental function, especially in Hispanic civilization. IS:
FA:
So much has been said about this celebration that takes place in Mexico every year on the first of November.
And yet, whenever I participate in Día de los Muertos celebrations, I feel as if all those things that have indeed been said haven't even scratched the surface, so complex and multifaceted is the phenomenon. IS:
In general terms, the Mexican Día de los Muertos is a carnivalesque occasion as famous as the New Orleans Mardi Gras and the Brazilian carnivals. Indeed, it's at the center of Malcolm Lowry's novel Under the Volcano (1947) and it is a controversial chapter in Octavio Paz's contentious book The Labyrinth of Solitude. The Día de los Muertos reminds me of Mikhail Bakhtin, the Soviet Union critic and theorist made famous in the West in the late sixties and early seventies and now rarely even mentioned. Analyzing the role of the carnival in the Middle Ages and the way François Rabelais represented and modified its perception in Gargantua and Pantagruel, Bakhtin pointed out that the carnival is a two-pronged phenomenon: it uses popular humor, parody, and mockery to vilify the feudal hierarchy and to take revenge on the Catholic Church's brutal intolerance and intimidation; and at the same time it's a popular staging of joyous moments of change and renewal, of death and revival. FA:
IS:
Yes, the carnival is a way for the lower social strata to release psychological pressure.
To put it in a nutshell, the carnival is a brief subversion of both the established order and its religious shield; also, it is a brief moment of hope that such an order will disappear and shall give birth Page 39 → to something FA:
new and better. All this, of course, takes place only in the imagination of the participants. The chaos of carnival is actually controlled and follows rules. It begins in a perfectly predictable way at a preordained date, and it ends in a predictable orderly fashion. A carnival is not a material revolution, a radical change in material reality. It's somewhat like a mock revolution that turns things upside down and enacts renewal but only to leave everything the same. IS:
I like the idea of a mock revolution!
Let's say its like a mock revolution—with by-products. In the preparatory period and in the interval between the beginning and the end of this Día de los Muertos carnivalesque celebration, there is a flurry of activity, some innovative, other prepackaged, to make sugar-candy skulls, tissue-paper skulls, costumes, toys, papier-mâché and wire skeletons, fireworks, skeletons strung with fireworks, bread in the shape of bones, colored candles, tequila and many other alcoholic drinks, all kinds of food, more candy, huge bottles of soda, fruit, new dresses for women and sharp accoutrements for men, festive, multicolored decorations, songs and music—live and recorded. Frenzied and hot bodily encounters happen—some even ending in pregnancies. FA:
Malcolm Lowry gets the gist of it in Under the Volcano, and John Houston approximates it in his cinematic version with Albert Finney as the British consul Geoffrey Firmin. Not long ago, I finished an illustrated book about searching for my Jewish roots in downtown Mexico City. As I wandered through the Centro Histórico, the capital's historic district, I was flabbergasted by the recurrence of Día de los Muertos paraphernalia on everyday life: calavera masks, ubiquitous images of La Muerte, devils and demons, and so on. The nation has an obsession with death. IS:
What can I say? Día de los Muertos is usually fun. And it was even more so with my parents' generation. That is why I believe Paz is so far off the mark when he ends his chapter on this celebration with the following dictum: “the Mexican shuts himself off from the world: from life and from death.” FA:
IS:
I cannot agree with you more. The Labyrinth of Solitude is psychoanalytic babble delivered in belletristic form.
Alongside the Catholic Church there are all the other Christian churches vying for the Latino support and adherence. FA:
Protestantism has been making enormous inroads in Hispanic civilization. So has Islam. Not to talk about Evangelicals, Unitarians, Page 40 → and other Catholic theisms. It is a misconception to continue to perceive our society as monolithically Catholic. Not long ago, I watched a news segment on CNN en Español about a glass skyscraper in a Southwestern metropolis—was it Dallas?—where devout people apparently saw the image of Jesus reflected on several windows. This visual manifestation was more emphatic after the rain, when the silhouette became more tangible and—get this!—Jesus' eye appeared to be shedding tears. It would be easy to dismiss the whole things as rubbish. To me, once again, it's an expression of faith. The TV reporter, probably a believer herself, did not approach the subject through ridicule. On the contrary, she seemed to be as perplexed by it as everyone she interviewed. And here's my point: the interviewees were not only Catholics; they were Jews, Muslims, and Buddhists. These three groups might not believe in Jesus, but they were at awed by the miracle. IS:
FA:
A TV miracle.
Well, yes and no. Everyone on site, the reporter included, described it as a miracle. It could be argued that the TV network—Univisión, I think—concocted the news piece. But I doubt it. TV is neutral in these circumstances. For believers, miracles occur in the natural world. The only thing TV is able to do, they say, is describe them. It's the same thing with Hollywood. IS:
FA:
How so?
Hollywood loves miracles. It gets fried if it invents one. But whenever it re-creates a miracle that people are convinced took place, it is saluted as realistic. Remember when Selena was killed and there were tons of flowers IS:
placed in Corpus Christi where she died? The same Princess Diana appeal, although on a much smaller scale. Since then I have seen altares, exvotos, and prayers to Santa Selena for her to perform miracles. Does it not strike you as astonishing that a tejana singer would be turned into a santa. Yes, definitely so. But in a way the same thing happened with figures such as Elvis Presley and John Lennon. I saw recently Fellini's La Dolce Vita (a film made in 1960, a decade before I was born), and, to my surprise, I found that already then the Catholic Church was capable of using to its advantage the modern medium of television and so-called reality TV. If you remember, there is a moment in the film when reporters, photographers, radio and television people, surrounded by a huge crowd of believers somewhere near Rome, have come to cover the story of two children who have claimed that they Page 41 → have seen the Madonna under a tree. It's all a serious and hopeful moment for the crowd, particularly those that are sick or maimed, and in a way for the children, who nevertheless act like children; when the media people ask them to show where exactly the Virgin Mary appeared, they keep running playfully and haphazardly from one corner to another of the lot, followed blindly by the growing crowd that is becoming a danger to itself and eventually tramples a sick child. Popular culture is propelled by mass media. So are miracles, and saints. FA:
IS:
How about San Maradona in Argentina?
Yes, the great football player Diego Maradona is a case in point. But more generally the spotlight by itself confers a state of sainthood or something akin to it. Who could imagine Frida Kahlo, the Communist become Trotskyist turned Stalinist painter, would become a semi-religious icon after her death? Or that a labor leader such as César Chávez would follow that same path? If we look at the phenomenon chronologically since Selena up to today, we see that every popular musician and actor undergoes the same “transubstantiation” from ordinary mortal to “star” and even sometimes “saint.” FA:
I want to go back to Hispanic religious iconography. It has been said that our depictions of Jesus on the Cross are far more graphic than those in Europe. IS:
Yes, it has been said that our representations are stronger, starker, even crueler. But I wonder where this reputation came from. Christ is certainly the most depicted character in all Western art since the beginning of our era. Museums in Europe are so full of depictions of Jesus on the Cross that walking room after room after room you often get the feeling of satiation—perhaps even catch the so-called Stendhal syndrome. All styles and manners, all colors and shapes are used. In some paintings Jesus is entirely naked until, that is, the Church prudishly decided to cover him with a fig leaf. Sometimes he is flexing sculpted muscles and tensing a six-pack or, on the contrary, he's a bag of bones. Sometimes his face shows great suffering or, on the contrary, he looks serene. Two great categories stand out: sadism in the depiction of facial expression and bodily wounds, and repose and peacefulness. FA:
Also, our variant of Catholicism in the Americas, and in Hispanic America in particular, has more saints than even Iberian Catholicism does. This might be the result of the transculturation we underwent during the colonial period, in which the idol-worshiping aboriginal Page 42 → religions inserted their multiple deities into the prearranged Catholic structure. IS:
I like to think instead that the proliferation has more to do with our penchant for the Baroque and its incessant multiplication of entities. We Latinos have been enamored with the Baroque since the sixteenth century, since Luis de Góngora, in literature, and since the ultra-Baroque Churrigueresque style in architecture in the eighteenth century. Perhaps the Baroque idiom seeped into religious belief in the guise of a multiplication of saints, just as today the media make saints proliferate? That said, I wonder if anything similar can be detected with respect to the Jewish religion among Latinos? FA:
IS:
Ay, mano, we're few and far between. Do you know the numbers?
FA:
No.
The Hispanic world has a population of some 450 million. Jews in Latin America are not even half a million. Maybe closer to 250,000? Meaning that most people south of the Rio Grande have never seen a Jew en carne y hueso, in real life. Our role, therefore, is mostly symbolic. Or better, iconoclastic. IS:
FA:
What do you mean?
People invent stories about us. Yet because there were scores of conversos that arrived in the New World escaping the Inquisition, Judaism is in the hemispheric DNA. IS:
I love that thought. You have written about your Jewish upbringing in your memoir On Borrowed Words. I like the imagery of the High Holidays. FA:
Since El pesaj, Yiddish for Passover—with a Spanish twist—is about to take place, I recently wrote a brief evocation—for Fox News Latino, mind you—of the holiday in Distrito Federal, which was an opportunity for us to insert our Jewish identity in the larger national and global sphere. The gathering place for El seder—the Seder, in our Spanyiddish jargon—was always the house of one of our abuelas. Invariably, the Bobe would perform a miracle, finding a surprising symmetry between our Ashkenazi and Mexican sides, putting flavors on the menu that were a feast to the senses: huevos duros con mole, in remembrances of the Israelites crossing the Red Sea (among children, the joke de rigueur was “Where did the water reach the slaves as they made their way to the other side?” Los cojones, which explains why we eat eggs); matzah balls in caldo de pollo; huachinango en salsa ranchera; and, for dessert, half-fruit jelly candy. The game Page 43 → of finding the afikoman made listening to the Hagadá a bit more bearable, especially since the person finding it could be rewarded with a visit to the Estadio Azteca to see a soccer match. Over the years, I have thought of rewriting the Haggadah to allow others to experience the same emotions. For it was in the improvisational nature of the story, at least in the way it was read by the adults, where the pasión of the festival was palpable. In telling the story, slavery in Egypt would be compared to the oppression of indígenas, the aboriginal population in Mexico under Spanish rule during the colonial period. Moisés was portrayed as a forerunner of Father Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla, the leader along with Los Bros Aldama of the country's war of independence in 1810, who was instrumental in liberating the mestizos from el yugo trasatlántico. And when the part came of discussing why is the night of El pesaj different from all other nights, someone would say that Moisés gave El grito de Dolores, a reference to the moment when Hidalgo rang the bells of Dolores, a town in the state now named after him, and screamed ¡Viva México!, ¡Viva la Independencia!Yes, we, Mexican Jews, visualized the Israelites, after the plagues, hearing a similar chant, after which God told them: arriba y adelante, on to the Promised Land. Another image lives in my mind: I have a vivid memory of a play—una forshelung—in elementary school in which we dressed like esclavos veracruzanos, slaves from Veracruz. In fact, there is a photo of me and a few classmates on stage and the expression on my face says it all: absolute fright. “What am I doing here?,” I am probably asking myself. “Why am I in these ridiculous costumes? And what on earth is an esclavo veracruzano?” The answer to these questions is that El pesaj was a performance, an invitation to partake in an ancestral show. IS:
FA:
Did these performances have any impact beyond your immediate circle?
All of it, needless to say, was a most private affair. The Jewish community was an island, an appendix—the secret garden. IS:
FA: IS:
I have seen no trace of Muslim religion in Latino popular culture, have you?
I sure have.
FA:
Would you say Latino popular culture has become more and more secular?
No, I do not believe it. My impression is the opposite: popular culture massages the religious message in a way that becomes disinstitutionalized, Page 44 → less about a creed, a doctrine, and more about genuine collective emotions. IS:
And yet there is one very visible domain where we can measure the drop in prestige and authority of the Catholic Church: the battlefield of same-sex unions or partnerships and marriage. Since 2008 in Venezuela, Nicaragua, Brazil, Panama, Ecuador, Colombia, Bolivia, Chile, Uruguay, Argentina, Cuba (yes, even Cuba), and Mexico the authorities have had to recognize one way or another the legitimacy of the demand for equal rights for gays and lesbians, bisexual and transgender people, in all social institutions, which in a few cases now includes marriage. Yes, the Catholic Church has actively fought this demand everywhere, but now it is clear it has lost its power to stop the wheels of progress from turning in Latin America. Uruguay legalized same-sex civil unions in 2007. Argentina, in 2010, became the first Latin American country and eighth nation worldwide to legalize gay marriage. Now Brazil has granted equal legal rights to same-sex civil unions as those enjoyed by married straight couples, including retirement benefits and child adoption. Only a little over two decades ago these three countries were ruled by murderous military regimes with the full support of the Catholic Church. Today, despite the Vatican's open interference and formidable opposition, and despite the threats of excommunication against legislators, the Catholic Church was unable to stop the legalization of same-sex civil unions in Mexico City. This situation, as a whole, marks a major turning point in the decline of the Catholic Church's power over people in Latin America, after its swift fall in the United States in connection with the pedophilia scandals of the last two decades. FA:
Page 45 →
[2] Cartooned!!! ILAN STAVANS:
Tell me about the role of Latino popular culture in your childhood in California.
There were of course the reruns of the I Love Lucy show and the Addams Family—who I always thought were Latinos as a kid. And, our mother liked to play lotería with us; the El Diablito and La Calavera cards were my favorites. I absorbed my dad's passion for the Lone Ranger and Rius comics—and his love of Orson Welles films like Touch of Evil (1958). I was intrigued by my abuela's smuggling Juan-Diego/Virgin Mary casts into the garden shed where she had one of those framed velvet Jesus posters nailed to a 2 × 4—my Irish-American gramps forbade this in the house, along with speaking Spanish. FREDERICK LUIS ALDAMA:
Ah, the culture wars. Just like mine: Jewish vs. Hispanic. As a Mexican, it took me years to realize that these two realms are not opposites. IS:
I fully agree with you. Look how deeply enmeshed people of Jewish ancestry are with the rest of the population in Mexico. There is no opposition at any level today between one and the other. I believe the same happens here, in the United States. For me, the injection of Latino pop was like a drug. It came on those Sundays when we would skip church and go to the Folsom flea market by my abuelos' place, or later the Roseville Swap Meet, closer to our home. I saved quarters from doing odd jobs around the house in anticipation of those resplendent sounds, sights, and smells that hit me when I ticket-punched through the gate. While I had a rather mixed bag of cultural influences—a Guatemalan abuela who lived in Boyle Heights and worked the factories in Los Angeles and an Irish-American grandpa, her husband who forbade her to speak Spanish to the kids—it was the trips to the Swap Meet that I remember most. This was the one place where we could let ourselves float back to Mexico City, to the sights and smells of my early years in Distrito Federal, before my Guatemalan–Irish American mom decided to return us all to the family branch established in California. I would save for those luchador masks—not just the straight-up Page 46 → kind that featured Blue Demon and El Santo, but those with Batman symbols. Without articulating it as such, I liked the hybrid superhero luchador wear—and not so much the soccer jerseys and gaucho gear. I liked the defiance involved in my abuela's behavior. As I mentioned before, without the watchful eye of grandpops, if abuela was with us, she would buy her JuanDiego-at-the-feet Virgin Mary ceramic casts and votive candles, keeping them hidden till she could smuggle them into the garden shed at the back of the house. So my earliest total somatosensory absorption of Latino popular culture came with my visits to the Swap Meet. I still find myself pulled toward its center. In Columbus, with its rapidly swelling Latino population, we have La Michoacana—an indoor meat, produce, and flea market; and when in the San Francisco Bay Area visiting family, I always make it at least a couple of Sundays to the Oakland Swap to breathe up the pan dulce, churros, and fresh baked cookies that fill the air. The smells and the old practice of the art of the haggle are the surefire way to get me back to these childhood times. FA:
Ah, to me also: Mexico entire is in a bowl of pozole. Or in a childhood custom I cherished because it had a cape: wearing it, I could be a magician, or else I could become a superhero. Anyway, have you ever imagined yourself as a cartoon character? IS:
If you are talking about the animated kind, those cartoons almost always shown before the movies and broadcasted by some TV channels, in what now seems to be another era and another world, the answer is yes. Cartoons of this sort are an extraordinary phenomenon from many points of view. I used to love them, and I still do—a lot. When I was a kid the world around me was sometimes very puzzling and somewhat hostile, and it was such a great relief and satisfying mental reward to be able to dream at night that I was a character in a cartoon. Because then I could fantasize with all my might and my full control that no aggression, no trap, no chase, no insult, no quandary, no trouble, and no disturbance I found in my social and material world would be resilient to a FA:
conclusion that I would steer in whatever direction I wished, and be imbued with whatever emotional intensity I chose. This was so gratifying, I sometimes wished not to wake up in order for me to continue spinning story after story in which I always ended up being the triumphant hero. Like Speedy Gonzales on speed. In fact, when I was little, whenever I watched Speedy on TV on Sunday morning, I would connect it with Page 47 → someone agitated after a drug trip. The neighborhood of Copilco, in the southern part of Mexico City, went through a rapid process of modernization when I was a child. A Metro station, the supermarket chains Aurrera and DeTodo, and countless stationary stores, mechanic shops, photography studios, and Xerox copy businesses replaced the empty lots I remember playing soccer every afternoon. In particular, I remember an abandoned factory where a couple of drug users would occasionally spend some nights. One of them looked to me as if in a constant state of frenzy: like Speedy. IS:
What a fantastic coincidence! You see, Ilan, my older brother, Arturo, was born in that exact same neighborhood, in an apartment building on Avenida Universidad. Soon after his birth, we moved to a place near the historically famous park known as Bosque de Chapultepec, in the very different neighborhood of Polanco. And two years later we moved once again to another neighborhood, the one where I was born, called Colonia Nápoles. You see, you and I have been close to each other far longer than we imagined. To take us back to the subject of cartoons, what I find mesmerizing about them is that they may show the most extreme forms of violence and aggression, where heads and bodies are severed along with limbs, where characters are flattened into a “two” dimensional shape, where their limbs are pulled and stretched to ten times their size, where they explode and burn and fall from inordinate heights, where they run in the void and fly, and so on. In short, where the characters go through extraordinary ordeals and always, absolutely always return to their original wholesome state. You can beat them to an unrecognizable shape, and they always bounce back. And yes, they outguess, outsmart anyone. They are extraordinary because they are the only creatures on earth that are absolutely, freely, anarchically not obedient to any law of nature or to any rule of (good) taste and manners. Violence in cartoons may reach levels not even the Spanish Inquisition could imagine for the tortures it inflicted on so-called heretics. But it's a violence that doesn't affect ultimately the (mental and physical) integrity of their victims nor the integrity of the character(s) delivering it. All changes and all stays the same, except that the “good” characters always ultimately avoid peril and definitive harm. Cartoons build a world of constant danger where all (good Page 48 → and bad) characters are safe. It is not only a world where the laws of physics are absent. It's an amoral world, a world where ethics has no role and yet the good always prevails. FA:
IS:
I like the title of one of your books: Your Brain on Latino Comics (2009).
It's a book I felt I had to write, an obligation to myself. Before I even realized comics existed, I was obsessed with cartoons. In fact, I was so into cartoons that I did not identify with any cartoon character in particular: in my sleep and in my daydreams I myself was one, and I held all the powers evinced by all the cartoon characters I had ever known. Life within the boundaries of my skull was beautifully free. Free of danger and unencumbered by social constraints, embodied in mother, grandparents, schoolteachers, principal, police officers—the adult world as a whole. In their turn, comic books gave shape to my wish for a better existence and for a more secure life. I owe to cartoons my first impulses to be free and to be generous with my freedoms. Later, comics were—and psychologically remain—a blueprint for a peaceful and wholesome future. Comics brought a new sort of empathy into my life. FA:
A peaceful and wholesome future, eh? But we Latinos have warmer blood. The future never looks too rosy for us. Maybe that is why cartoons are attractive: they are an escape from the emotional roller coaster we regularly find ourselves in. IS:
FA: IS:
Like a telenovela, which should be the topic of the next chapter.
Well, let me anticipate something, if it doesn't become cumbersome to the structure of our argument. In my
case, I often see myself as a character in a telenovela. I can't tell you how many soaps I have watched—countless! Not complete, of course, because they drag on for years that have the feeling of being centuries. In part, my passion is the result of my upbringing: not only did I grow up watching telenovelas, but my father has acted in a dozen soap operas for Televisa, Mexico's TV monopoly. When I was little, I frequently accompanied him to the studio, where I would watch episode after episode being made. Having the feeling I live—or better, I am trapped—in a telenovela makes me think of life, my life, your life, the life of others, as a hurricane of emotions. And that is the way it is in the Hispanic world. Maybe other cultures are similarly overwrought but I doubt any one of them reaches our levels of melodrama. Page 49 → FA:
Warmer blood or warmer cultural environments? Maybe the latter, don't you think?
No, I am talking about warmer blood, which might be a result of the hot climate. In the second act of the Broadway musical In the Heights (2008), written by Linn-Manuel Miranda, in a song called “Carnival del Barrio” that is set against a blackout in Manhattan taking place during a hot summer night, one of the characters wonders if Latin people have ever been scared of heat. Yes, carnival and not carnaval, as it is spelled in Spanish. In any case, it's a stereotype, of course, but popular culture is built on stereotypes. Maybe it is our Mediterranean ancestry. Other people from the region are equally restless: the Italians, the Greeks, the Portuguese, and so on. In any case, in my early family life we had emotions a flor de piel, emotions galore. We were all melodramatic in our responses to the world, some more, some less. The only thing missing during the family dinner was intense music syncopating our dialogue. Don't get me wrong: I loved telenovelas as much as I loved comic strips. Just before I watched El amor tiene cara de mujer, I would walk to the corner newsstand in Copilco and buy copies of Kalimán and La familia Burrón. IS:
Please save your comments on telenovelas for the next chapter. We must give a semblance of order, of coherence to these conversations. Otherwise, they will be deprived of denouement. That is, readers will have no interest in reading them chronologically. FA:
IS:
You mean sequentially?
FA: IS:
Maybe progressively…Be that as it may, let me ask you: who is your favorite superhero?
Probably Kalimán. I dream of writing a comic strip about a superhero in Ciudad Juárez.
Let's return to Kalimán a bit later in this conversation. Meanwhile, let me ask: you have written about comic books and comic-book characters, but I have never even dreamt of writing a comic strip. As our readers know, you have written a graphic novel, Mr. Spic Goes to Washington (2008), which is really a tribute to comic strips. And you're the author of Latino USA (2000), a cartoon history of Latinos illustrated by Lalo Alcaraz. What brought you to these projects? Academics usually shy away from embarking on endeavors that inhabit the realm of popular culture. FA:
All expressions of that love I was talking to you about. As for the Page 50 → spark, my model is the semiotician Umberto Eco. He likes to get his hands dirty with comic-strip ink. Although Eco, I believe, is a second-rate novelist. His only good fictional narrative is The Name of the Rose (1981). IS:
FA:
Yes, I hear the Eco in your work, but tell me more about how these projects came about.
If memory serves me well, Alcaraz and I met at a book fair in Los Angeles. Or else, I simply wrote him an admiring note. I love his irreverent style, his mordant approach to ethnicity, his attacks on political rhetoric. Working with him is not easy (he consistently misses deadlines) but it is invariably fun. I laid out the whole book before him. He liked it and proceeded to draw it one page at a time. It took a year, maybe more. The original publisher who signed us gave up on the project because of how late we were with the manuscript. It took a couple IS:
of months to reposition it with another editor. The 15th anniversary edition came out in 2012. FA:
It has not been fifteen years since it was published, right?
You are right! That is a joke I make in the Note to the 15th Edition: please do not trust anything here…The publisher was just eager to bring out an expanded Latino USA with fanfare. Not everyone is a fan, though. I know Los Bros Hernandez see it as too didactic. Maybe…As for Mr. Spic Goes to Washington, it is set during the 2008 presidential elections and is designed—à la Don Quixote—as a parody of the movie Mister Smith Goes to Washington. I collaborated with a talented Venezuelan illustrator, Roberto Weil, whom I never met until many years later. Everything was done electronically. IS:
FA:
As in Latino USA, in Mr. Spic Goes to Washington you, or an Amherst College professor, show up peeing.
You are quite observant. By the way, Lalo and I are talking about doing a similar history of the United States, that is, to take a look—through cartoons—at how American history has been misconstrued by “official” historians. IS:
Plus, you've written a third Latino pop cultural artifact: a thriller in the form of a graphic novel titled El Iluminado (2012). FA:
It's a collaborative effort with Steve Sheinkin, creator of the Rabbi Harvey series. It is a thriller that focuses on the plight of crypto-Jews in the New World, especially in the Southwestern parts of the United States. At the center is Luis de Carvajal the Younger, a mystic in Mexico in the late sixteenth century. Carvajal was a marrano who became convinced he was Jewish. He was burned at the stake by the Page 51 → Inquisition in one of the last autos-da-fé in Mexico City. He died a very public death. I have been obsessed with Carvajal for decades, rereading his correspondence, his last will and testament, visiting sites where he lived, researching documents about the historical period he belongs to. IS:
FA:
But you yourself are the protagonist, a kind of Indiana Jones looking into the past.
Yes, El Iluminado is a play on The Da Vinci Code (2006). It's a campus novel of sorts. It makes fun of academic politics, my own identity as a Latino Jew, my work on Spanglish. IS:
FA:
You're a passionate reader of fiction.
I am certainly, although I must confess that, as I get older, I'm less patient with lengthy narratives. Now I prefer short stories. In any case, fiction is essential in my life. Without it, I would die. IS:
I too am drawn of late to the shorter fictional forms, especially the flash fiction of Ana María Shua and Alberto Ríos. In a paragraph or less sometimes, their flash fiction stories allow me to explore many of my emotional and reasoning capabilities as they reflect and sometimes even inform my actions and ethical views, dilemmas, and options. What is the appeal of fiction, short or otherwise, for you? FA:
To dream alternative universes, to imagine different characters is a form of nourishment. We tell stories in order to find meaning, to explain to ourselves and the world who we are, what we're doing here, what we want to accomplish in life. IS:
I too have a long interest in many subjects, all of which seem to converge into the enjoyment of fiction in its many guises, the puzzling over what makes fiction tick and what makes humans in all times and places so keenly absorbed by fictional narratives, and lastly, the development of a realist, materialist worldview that encourages me to look for explanations in experience and science. This has led me to pose questions about fiction; each time I've felt I found answers, I felt I have many more questions to explore. So each of my books represents a stage in this questioning and answering that seems to never end. Each is a chunk of my life and, to that extent, it's autobiographical, or very intimately related to my personal biography, to my specific itinerary. I am forty-three FA:
years old. IS:
You're young: I'm fifty.
Getting back to the comics, I love them as much as novels. In my experience, besides lessons in empathy one assimilates the zeitgeist and a particular ethos by following the adventures of heroes and Page 52 → superheroes, including not only the likes of The Lone Ranger (El Llanero Solitario), passed down from my dad, but Batman (dubbed El hombre murciélago) and Iron Man (Hombre de Hierro). In this sense, among my favorite tutors were unlikely heroes such as the Mexican luchadores, particularly El Santo (the white-masked wrestler who fought not only mad-doctor criminals but zombies and vampires). I found my Mexican comic books while visiting relatives in Mexico City and at the Swap Meets in Sacramento. After taking a long break during high school, I finally returned to comics in college when I was introduced to the comics of Los Bros Hernandez and Ivan Velez Jr.'s Blood Syndicate. This experience was so fulfilling that years later it became the impulse for me to write Your Brain on Latino Comics. FA:
IS:
But does each of these national popular cultures have its own metabolism?
This is a difficult one to answer. In a way it harks back to the old discussion about the specific traits of Hispanic or Latino peoples and our culture and the opposite opinion about our psychological and social traits not being specific at all, but simply part of human, universal psychology and civilization. I will not say more about this discussion for now, but I will just add that Latinos share the same neurophysiology as the rest of the folks walking the planet, so it would be a very surprising finding indeed if the popular culture we make in each Latin American country and in the United States is governed by a metabolism not at work in other humans. FA:
In your estimation, has a Latino comic artist reached a degree of decantation whereby his art might be considered sublime? IS:
My comic books are clearly not in the same league as my Carlos Fuentes novels, for instance, or as my collection of Rius—whose socially and politically critical comic books, as you know, first started coming out in the sixties and are still widely read by college kids in Mexico today. Nonetheless, it's a very rough (and therefore often shaky) distinction. For instance, it tells us nothing about the way cultural elements flow from low to high culture, and vice versa. A hundred years ago you would never find so-called dirty words in a Mexican novel. Today, it's difficult to find a Mexican novel without dirty words. In fact, those linguistic barriers started to dissolve sometime in the fifties and sixties, when many words only used in prisons and the underworld generally started travelling to the upper spheres and became quite common among students and the middle class. Page 53 → Also, think about marijuana, or mota. A century ago only soldiers and pimps and other denizens of the underworld smoked pot in Mexico. Then, some sixty years ago, the middle classes started smoking mota like mad. Likewise, poor folks' staple food such as antojitos (street-prepared snacks), tortilla (flat maize bread), mole (thick chile sauce), and pulque (drink from the agave plant) underwent a swift social rise. Last, I would like to mention how some highbrow vocabulary and some phrases in English and French (and even Latin) are now of common use among people who do not know those languages at all. You hear some people say things like “a priori no lo rechazo, aunque no me gusta,” or “me lo dijo en un tête-à-tête,” or “life is good” or the now universal “okay.” Expressions such as these are usually first heard on television and the radio. FA:
There is a difference between the role of the artist—or, in French, artiste—in so-called highbrow culture. Popular culture emphasizes repetition. It's not obsessed with uniqueness. Or is it? IS:
Maybe the French got it right when they equated style with idiosyncrasy; that is, with “a mode of behavior or way of thought peculiar to an individual,” as the dictionary explains. In his inaugural address to the Académie Française, entitled “Discours sur le style” (1753), Comte de Buffon famously wrote that “le style, c'est l'homme”—the style is the man. It would be difficult to recognize most Romance novel authors from their style as one can recognize stylistically idiosyncratic authors such as a Julio Cortázar or a Fernando del Paso or a Jorge Luis Borges from the way they write, don't you think? And filmmakers such as Alfred Hitchcock, Robert FA:
Rodriguez, and Quentin Tarantino are rather easily recognizable by the peculiarities of their style, right? Well, we find the same thing today in people like Junot Díaz and Dagoberto Gilb, and way before them in Oscar “Zeta” Acosta. This is just to name a few Latino writers off the cuff. Each one is distinctively unique, wouldn't you say? In all such cases the artist is driven by a will to style, that is, by the desire to bring into existence a result, a product, a process that will be unique and by that same token will show its creator as unique. IS:
Uniqueness as a synonym of authenticity.
Let us take a look at a few examples in popular culture. When Shakira shakes it, she wants her shaking and therefore herself to be unique. By achieving this, she also engages in repetition (she repeats over and over again the same or very similar moves). Now, let us think about Jennifer Lopez. Her elevated status or degree of celebrity Page 54 → in popular culture and beyond is signaled by the fact that she no longer has to be identified by her full name; she is now somewhat akin to a trademark, she is simply J-Lo. In this case, in a very strict sense of the term, “the style is the woman.” Perhaps, it's not so farfetched to say that “the woman is the style.” Which means she, as a public persona or as an actress in a film, is shaped by repetition. In public and in her movies, J-Lo is always J-Lo, that is, the wholesome, good natured, moral Latina sweetheart, even when she kicks ass. No moviegoer expects to see her as a villain, as a truly evil person. It's just not in her trademark, in her style. So in a way she has to be always herself, she has to repeat herself. In the literary domain, this is not very different from what certain authors do. When Michael Nava and Alisa Valdés-Rodríguez apply the repetitive formula of genre and romance fiction they therefore create formulaic novels because, as such, they will not cause any discomfort to the reader. On the contrary, they will furnish the reader exactly what the reader expects. Nothing in their work will extract the reader from her or his narrow comfort zone. Most of Isabel Allende's fiction follows a similar pattern. FA:
Popular culture is indeed defined by generic formulas. Formulaic might appear to be a derogatory adjective yet there is originality in repetition. I say derogatory because we're taught to avoid repetition. For instance, how many times in a writing assignment is a would-be author told not to repeat the same adjective? However, repetition is what makes us creatures of habit. A child learns from mimicking her parents, a student from imitating his teacher's actions. To repeat is to adapt, to be fit in a society that depends on predictable patterns of conduct. Still, we exhort individuality in culture. Having someone disappear in the act of repetition is allowing that person to hide, to obscure the self. For the self depends on having a quality of distinctiveness. IS:
I use the word repetition to mean expected procedures and events. It applies to songs and to films. Take J-Lo again in films: we expect her to be a good character; we never see her as an assassin, or mugging innocent people. One way or another, she too repeats herself over and over again. To put it in a nutshell, yes, popular culture is moved by people who thrive on repetitiveness. At the same time, they are doing their utmost to be singled out from the herd. This means that popular culture is obsessed with uniqueness, in this sense and within this context just mentioned. FA:
Page 55 → I like your idea of style as content: we are not what we say, but how we say it. Yet style is a difficult word to define: everyone possesses a distinctive manner of expression, yet some manners, as you suggest, are more distinctive than others. Or better, for certain artists, style is not content but form. IS:
Actually, my view is rather old-fashioned here, too. Content and form are inseparable, in the sense that the content dictates the form, and the form delimits the content. At present I'm writing a series of short stories, and each time I develop an idea I find that the form (what, in the twenties, the Russian scholar Viktor Shklovsky called “the device” or “the technique”) necessarily has to fit the content if the story I want to tell is to materialize the way I imagined it. And the other way around: sometimes I have in mind a shape, but it will not turn into a narrative if it doesn't become a story consonant with that form. Also, if one cannot separate content and form (except for analytic purposes), one cannot separate them from style, and therefore from “author.” FA:
I want to pursue the idea of imitation a bit further. In my youth, I was a devoted reader of thrillers, detective stories, and crime fiction. I would read dime novels in an afternoon, then dispose of the copy—my own—by leaving it in the library stacks or on a park bench. All these genres are built around a formula. In detective fiction, the tension between order and chaos defines the entire narrative. A crime is committed, meaning that disorder has suddenly crept in. A detective—e.g., the order-maker—is called in to find out who the perpetrator is. There are various ways of getting to the solution, for instance, using an armchair sleuth à la Sherlock Holmes or Hercules Poirot. Another route is to call in a hard-boiled detective like the ones invented by Dashiell Hammett or Raymond Chandler. In Latin America, these two types of detectives have been mimicked. Borges and his friend and collaborator Adolfo Bioy Casares created H. Bustos Domecq. And Borges himself came up with Erik Lönnrot, the protagonist of his story “Death and the Compass.” There's the hard-boiled tradition personified by Manuel Vázquez Montalbán in Spain and Paco Ignacio Taibo II in Mexico. IS:
Let's not forget the mystery and noir fiction spilling over north of the border. Think of Rudolfo A. Anaya, Lucha Corpi, Carolina García-Aguilera, Rolando Hinojosa, John Lantigua, Michael Nava, and Manuel Ramos. Nava creates the first queer Chicano detective, Abella give us as much whodunit as Cuban history (Marielito boat lifts) and culture Page 56 → (Santería, for instance), and Alicia Gaspar de Alba's lesbian Chicana academic-cumgumshoe (Desert Blood) takes us deep into a very real sexist, violent, murderous world of the U.S./Mexico borderlands where children and women have little chance of survival. Of course, we have Gilbert Hernandez's recent streak of stand-alone graphic novels—Chance in Hell (2007), Speak of the Devil (2008), Troublemakers (2009)—which all take the form of the fatalistic noir. In Speak of the Devil, for instance, Hernandez establishes this fatalistic worldview at the outset: “The world's going to hell,” announces the protagonist Val to her friend Zed. If all has gone to hell, then, why preserve life; why should Val and her young friends bother imagining a future—and doing what it takes to realize this future? Hernandez chooses to envelop their stories in the noir fictional mode—a mode with its social-Darwinist, behaviorist, fatalistic worldview—as a way to comment on a world ripped apart at the seams and where characters are fated to live a life in a world that offers no real options. The genre is determined—formulaic even—and so too is the content. There's fatalism in both… FA:
Yes, and I would add that in the Latino noir and detective fiction we mention, what becomes apparent is the idea of repetition. A writer of detective fiction isn't as free in the act of creation as a novelist who doesn't embrace a particular genre. Yet there is much to do by way of improvisation in a formulaic plot, so perhaps a writer inserting himself in a tradition uses a different kind of freedom, one defined by its own limits. IS:
FA:
How do you define freedom?
An excellent question, Fede. Freedom isn't the opportunity to do whatever we want because that is impossible. You and I talked about the limits of the impossible in the preface to these conversations. The impossible is what cannot exist. The world in which we exist is the real of the possible. In that realm, our freedom is defined by the confines of the world. In other words, we cannot do whatever we want but whatever is possible for us to do. Isaiah Berlin, the twentieth-century Russian-born British thinker, elaborated on the concept of “negative liberty,” which he took from Kant. We are free only to the extent that we're defined by forces outside us that define our actions. IS:
Hmm, “we can't do whatever we want but whatever is possible” intrigues. In the work I do drawing on the brain sciences (especially that which keeps our social nature centrally in mind), I find that our Page 57 → growing from infancy of a capacity to causally and counterfactually (and probabilistically) map our physical (objects and functions) and social (people and institutions) worlds allows us to modify our natural, personal, and social environs. Since we grow in this capacity to formulate or perceive relations of causality, we therefore automatically possess the capacity to perceive and formulate counterfactual hypotheses, arguments, and thoughts generally. We also grow and sharpen our capacity to create maps—of the human (e.g., social) and physical (natural) world—learning thereby to create new maps within the chain that allow us to consider new possibilities and formulate plans with probabilistic outcomes for what our situation will be in the world in the future. This might be another way of formulating your statement. We are born with certain biological equipment—language, memory, causal faculties, among many others—that grow in the social. This social—and we see this ever more clearly in today's world where the social is ripping apart at the seams—can constrain (deaden, even), or healthily express, these capacities. I think of a film I often teach, Fernando Sariñana's Amar te duele (2002)… FA:
IS:
We went to school together.
In the movie we see the struggle of two vital young people, Ulises and Renata, to live the good life, one where they can fully satisfy their curiosity about themselves and the world and where they can realize imagined (counterfactual) ways of adding to this world. The tragedy is not one fashioned after Romeo and Juliet (1591–1595) as the critics proclaimed, but one where such youths live in a world that is more and more filled with other youths who lack the capacity for imagining and transforming the world in new, positive ways. The younger sister Mariana is not just cynical but mentally and emotionally rotten at the core, and this long before she has left her youth. She's an alcoholic, and her behavior is rigidly dictated by all the prejudices and nearsightedness of the most retrograde members of her class—the Mexican upper class, which is more and more fortified and isolated from the rest of the people in places like the Santa Fe district, at the outskirts of Mexico City. FA:
This information gives me a better sense of what I've seen expressed intuitively in literature, Fede. Borges, in his prologue to Bioy Casares's novel The Invention of Morel (1940), celebrated the qualities of detective fiction—even though, strictly speaking, Bioy Casares's book isn't a traditional detective novel—while criticizing the Russian novelists (mainly, he's talking about Dostoevsky, whom Page 58 → he thoroughly disliked) as capable of creating a psychological novel where anything might happen. I italicize the word because that openended quality is something Borges cannot muster: to kill out of love, in his view, is illogical. What he finds admirable in The Invention of Morel (1940) is precisely that: its embrace of the logical. IS:
While Borges didn't have the neuroscience discoveries we have today, he was onto something here. We create something vitally new—whether it be a novel or a film or a table or a chair—precisely because we can take a step back, assess the situation, determine which materials, tools, and devices are necessary to materialize this idea. If we were not able to take that step back—to consider the thing with our causal and counterfactual (and probabilistic) processes—we would never see the trees for the forest. This is what authors like Toni Morrison and many others talk about when they say creative writing requires a certain bloodless approach to the material. If there is too much sentiment attached to the idea or materials, then the creator will not see all the possible ways this idea or materials can be transformed into something new—something that awakes perceptually (sensorially) us readers, viewers, chair-sitters, desk-writers to its presence. Recall Cortázar's famous speech in Havana, Cuba, just after the Revolution. Many wanted to know how to write the great novel of the Cuban Revolution. He told them in so many words—you're too close to the experience. FA:
IS:
Yet, detective fiction, like other popular genre fiction, is logical and can be flat and tired.
Excellent point, Ilan. Anything can become tired and flat—even that which is self-fashioned as vitally new. You might recall the famous proclamation of the Modernists: to Make New! Certainly, Baudelaire, Apollinaire, H.D., Ezra Pound, and Mayakovsky made new. However, once the devices were used over and over again, they became formulaic. When Borges was a young poet and had formed an avant-garde group, in several of his essays and in interviews he insisted that humankind has only invented a handful of metaphors and that what poets (and writers in general) do to make something new is to organize this material in different ways. Of course, if the way to organize becomes a dictum, well then the making new goes out the window. Alfonso Reyes read voraciously all of world literature to learn of techniques and devices that he would recombine and smelt anew to organize his material to engage us in new ways. Reyes, Borges, Cortázar, Elena Garro, Arturo Islas, Junot Díaz,Page 59 → Salvador Plascencia, Cecile Pineda, Giannina Braschi are all authors who ceaselessly search for the new. They are Latino authors propelled by this aspiration to establish an aesthetic relationship with their readers—and in this ambition to create an aesthetic object that triggers new perceptual, emotional, and cognitive relations between object and us, they are constantly fighting against habituation. FA:
It's true that the masses read standard literary genres because they find solace in what is expected. Arbitrariness, in that sense, is unappealing to them: it's anarchic, without rhyme or reason. Logic is satisfying insofar as it makes sense. When we see a James Bond movie, we know what will happen in the end: Bond will capture the criminal. Why then do we enjoy the movie? The answer is simple: we are interested in the how. How will things fall into place? That is, we're not attracted to the solution but to the process. IS:
Ah, yes, the pleasure of settling into that comfort zone of a Bond flick where good guys vanquish bad guys and Martinis are shaken not stirred. We could say the same of Westerns and many other comfort-zone fictions. Formula doesn't equal boredom or lack of enjoyment. You mentioned at the outset of our conversation Wittgenstein. This great pensador loved his Westerns. However, because Bond flicks, Westerns, and other forms of generic fiction rely so heavily on one ingredient—that of suspense, or the how as you mention—once we've seen it, that is, once we know how it ends, then we're done with it. When I do watch a Bond film for a second time, it's because I've forgotten how it ends. Of course, there are other packaging tricks played to hold our attention, like casting beautiful people and stuffing the film with special effects that stun. No matter, we are not likely to go back for more; to read then reread, as they say. FA:
The same happens with fast food. A McDonald's hamburger tastes the same in Times Square or Tiananmen Square. People who buy it buy a ticket to the expected. Popular culture in general does that: it gives you a formula, it offers you what you want in a new package. IS:
FA:
Why in a new package?
Australian-born American art critic Robert Hughes has a fascinating book called The Shock of the New (1991). His argument is connected to the art world but it might be used for culture in general. He argues that our advanced capitalist, technology-driven culture is driven by the tyranny of youthful revolution. What we're attracted to is the constant drive that makes the present an ever-nervous time: everything happening today needs to have a quality of state-of-the-art Page 60 → finiteness. A generation that comes on the scene needs to reject the previous one. In doing so, it is reestablishing the principle that only what happens today is attractive, the past being outmoded, disposable, its legitimate place being the museum, e.g., the temple where the past is celebrated, where the past is no longer seen as the present. IS:
This tyranny of youthful revolution is another iteration of this making new turned into a formula. Another way to look at it might be to consider how García Márquez's making it new withOne Hundred Years of Solitude (1967) becomes a mechanical application of magical realism. His novel device becomes a new form of habituation. The innovation that surprised and gave great satisfaction and pleasure to readers—that gave beauty—turned into a cookie cutter, a new form of habituation, from which boredom and the destruction of any aesthetic relation ensue. When I read Isabel Allende, I have the same experience as Roberto Bolaño. In his posthumously published collected essays, he remarks: “Asked to choose between the frying pan and the fire, I choose Isabel Allende. The glamour of her life as a South American in California, her imitations of García Márquez, her unquestionable courage, the way her writing ranges from the kitsch to the pathetic and reveals her as a kind of Latin American and politically correct version of the author of The Valley of the Dolls (1966)…It won't live long, like many sick people, but for now it is alive. And there is always the possibility of a miracle. Who knows?” FA:
IS:
Let's think of science fiction.
FA: IS:
Another formulaic genre.
No doubt.
We aren't the first to notice this, but for a genre that is supposed to be imagining ways of knowing and being radically different to our present day, it certainly falls short. From Flash Gordon (1934) comics to films such as Star Wars (1977), Blade Runner (1982), Terminator (1984), and Avatar (2009) the future that is imagined is simply an extrapolation of our present day social relations—one filled with irrationalism and greed. (While never a big fan of Superman comics, at least their representation of sadistic opponents, capitalist greed, and the like is all taken from the present as it is.) I hope for more and so keep returning to the genre, but every time I constantly ask myself: how is it that the creators can imagine modifying our biology and developing mind-blowing technology and yet not imagine a future world filled with radically different social relations with their Page 61 → growing of radically new emotions and thoughts and the making of radically new cultural objects? FA:
IS:
I don't know how much people in Latin America read science fiction. I doubt the genre has legs in the region.
While there's a notable absence of “Latino” or “Latin American” categories in Brian Stableford's The A to Z of Science Fiction Literature (2005), there appears to be enough to merit the publication of Latin American Science Fiction Writers: An A-to-Z Guide (2004), by Darrell B. Lockhart, a book on my shelves I have yet to really take a good look at. In the film industry, I can imagine why we don't have many sci-fi flicks. The technology for the CG (computer graphics) and special effects still requires a lot of money—and movies today in Mexico are made with an average of a mere million dollars. (Compare this to James Cameron's Avatar that cost 300 million to make.) In any case, there is of course Santo vs. the Martian Invaders (1966) and more recently Carlos Salces's Zurdo (2003), Alex Rivera's Sleep Dealer (2008), and Francisco Laresgoiti's 2033 (2009). Of course, in comic books there was Héctor Germán Oesterheld and Solano López's ever popular El eternauta (1957–1959) with its, say, Latin American (or Argentinean) perspective. And in those comics north of the border, there's Mario and Gilbert Hernandez's Citizen Rex (2009)—a series that was collected and published in book form by Dark Horse Comics in 2011. In the preface Mario (writer) makes explicit that this is science fiction as well as a critical commentary on our present day society separated by the class divide of the haves and the have-nots—the exploited and oppressed. The story is largely filtered through the point of view of the alternative news reporter (blogger) and historiographer, Sergio “Bloggo” Bauntin. This counter-intelligence character, along with the cybernetic Citizen Rex, galvanize resistance—human and robot alike—to corporate capitalist and underworld bosses along with their goons: the gas mask and hazmat suit wearing Truth Takers who patrol the streets for resistance and who disappear the city's citizens. And there is Frank Espinosa's Rocketo: Volumes I & 2 that is set in another New World, the earth 2000 years in the future. The story follows Rocketo Garrison who is born on Kova, one of the few fragments of earth left after an apocalypse. He comes into his own as a Mapper, one of a select few who have a memory of place and therefore know how to navigate the planet. Along the way we meet a variety of new hybrid species: Dogmen like Spiro, and Fishmen, among many others. Page 62 → In any case, you're right, Ilan: our science fiction making and consuming are far and few between if you compare them to other cultures. Maybe we just have better taste. FA:
Or worse…Anyway, there have been practitioners for decades, maybe even a century. Anyway, I used to love science fiction as much as I loved dime novels. For some reason, nowadays I find the genre trite, uninspiring. Perhaps it's because science fiction writers are seldom able to make fully dimensioned characters. Their protagonists aren't people but mere types. Anyway, I'm attracted to the genre because I have an ingrained curiosity about the future. What is that time, that dimension we call el futuro? IS:
Curiosity and el futuro—yes, these are important counterfactual processes of a healthy mind. Without this counterfactual capacity to imagine that which is not there in our present, we can't project our selves hypothetically toward the future. I just wish there was more of this exploratory ingredient in science fiction itself. FA:
IS:
The present is the time in which the future crashes, then vanishes to become the past.
Perhaps it's a time when we thread together a past and future in constituting a continuous sense of self that in turn leads to our sense of self in the future. The “I” or “me” now is formed by my capacity to recall events that happened in the past and to use that recollection to project myself toward the future. Good fiction brings me to the edge of this presentness. FA:
IS:
But the past is never dead, as William Faulkner suggested. It isn't even the past.
It's our capacity to bring our causal and counterfactual reasoning together with our memory function (short and long term) that revivifies the past, making it present in our distinctively different autobiographies that reach toward a future that has yet to conclude. FA:
Science fiction speculates on what the future might bring. Yet the future keeps on changing. In fact, it changes far more often than the present and the past combined. The future as seen in the late eighteenth century is quite different from the future of the twenties and, obviously, from our future. Look at women's magazines as an example. The ads about the kitchen of the future mutate as technology introduces cutting-edge appliances. Thus, if IS:
you watch the Hanna-Barbera cartoon show The Jetsons today, you can't but find its futuristic vision childish. The Flintstones, in contrast, is far more Page 63 → current, simply because in our view the past—the prehistoric past—hasn't changed as much. Yes, there is no science in science fiction. Part of the problem has always been that science fiction authors are not scientists; most have little knowledge of the workings of physics, for instance, and therefore, the things they imagine are in general much inferior products than the products actually imagined by real scientists who aim to develop a unified theory of universe. But there is a deeper problem that we find in science fiction—and the reason why I myself find it so lackluster. I'm not a maker of science fiction anything, but I can imagine a future where we have a very deep scientific knowledge of the world and have developed the most moving forms of artistic expression; I can imagine a world where we have mastered our social relations to the point where there is no exploitation and oppression—and developed new emotion systems. This future world would be one where all of us on the planet have the means and instruments for our non-stop, uninterrupted, unobstructed realization of our fullest capacities. Science fiction can go beyond its historical situatedness and its generic limitations. We see glimmers of this in Stansilaw Lem's Solaris and Edwin A. Abbott's novel Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions (1884), which he dedicates to “The Inhabitants of SPACE IN GENERAL.” These fictions do pry open our perception, cognition, and emotion systems to something genuinely new. I've mentioned before that fiction (and art generally) is created out of the building blocks of reality. However, we know that we are not constrained in our counterfactual capacity to imagine only those present (or past) referents. FA:
I said to you that I doubted science fiction was a popular genre in Latin America. The reason, in my eyes, is that Hispanic civilization has a long-standing love affair with the past, yet is allergic to the future. Verbally, we have numerous ways to conjugate verbs in the past (the preterit, the imperfect, the pluperfect, etc.), whereas whenever we're supposed to use the future tense, we replace it with the present: rather than saying iré al mercado, people in the Spanish-speaking world (with the exception of the Iberian Peninsula) say voy a ir al mercado. IS:
Ah, the language game. I'm with Chomsky and the recent neuroscientific research on this score. While we grow brains from infancy Page 64 → through childhood that create web interfaces between our thought and language (and orthography), they are separate concentrations of networks. That is, we can and do think and imagine sans language. It's simply that we know better than to spend our money on fictions that don't really take us very far from the harsh, brutal material reality that we face every time we leave our front door. FA:
Science fiction as a tradition is popular in industrialized nations: the United States, Europe, Japan, even Russia. It has a weaker foothold in Africa and, as I said, among us. IS:
FA:
Clearly, those in Africa and the Latino Americas have better taste.
Borges wrote science fiction. Carlos Fuentes authored Christopher Unborn (1989), which isn't really a science fiction novel. Instead, it's a dystopian narrative in the tradition of Aldous Huxley's Brave New World (1931) and George Orwell's 1984 (1948). IS:
Oh, the magnificence of “El Aleph”—and our arrival at the “the ineffable center of my tale!” The Aleph is a sphere whose center is everywhere and circumference nowhere. It is infinity. It is God. It is the author. Just as the Aleph can contain every moment in time and everything in space and can see and know all, so too can the author of fiction. The author can be omniscient and know in minute detail all things concerning the inner life of any character. The narrator can simultaneously be omnipresent. The author can choose to interpenetrate different ontological realities. I think of the masterful “Continuity of Parks” where we meet our protagonist who is reading a novel that has as its contents other characters that step from the page, so to speak, and penetrate his reality. The author is not only omniscient like God but can and does invent a world where several different ontological planes interpenetrate. When I think of the characteristics ascribed to the aleph, I think of the making and consuming of literature as it FA:
should be conceived: not as a local or even national or international activity, but as a world activity. Nothing is alien to literature—an art form where past, the present, the future can and do coexist. It can even make us weep, as it does the narrator of “El Aleph” at the sight of “the inconceivable universe.” “The inconceivable universe”—I've always loved the line! It reminds me of a couple of lines by W. H. Auden in his poem “The More Loving One”: “I should learn to look at an empty sky / and feel its total darkness sublime.” “Total darkness sublime”—astonishing! Anyway, following my trend of thought, I ask: is our future as a civilization—I'm Page 65 → talking about Latin America—less original than the future of industrialized nations like the United States and Europe? IS:
Less original or more innovative and possible? From history we know well that if you push people too far, they will push back. The imprint we have been leaving on our planet and all its inhabitants, including us humans, since about a century ago, has been judged harshly by history. And that judgment is even more poignant when the balance sheet of the last hundred years is compared with the myriads of opportunities we did not seize that would have allowed us to realize more fully our potential as a species. The twentieth century is now remembered for its two world wars, the Holocaust, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the expulsion of the Palestinians from their homeland, and the massacre of millions during the subsequent state of permanent military conflicts that in practice became a warfare against civilian populations in most of the planet. On this score, things have not improved. The twenty-first century was only in its third year when the formidable power of destruction of the American armed forces was aimed at Afghanistan and Iraq, shattering the social tissue and the material bases of civilization of both countries, particularly Iraq, and killing hundreds of thousands of their children, women, men, and elderly people. Also, a whole continent, Africa, is being obliterated along with its population since the seventies. During those long, dark years, the working people in Mexico, Central America, and South America have gropingly sought to resist and struggle against a further slip. Everywhere we have seen in this most difficult of battles a deep aspiration for a world of peace, prosperity, and freedom, where authentic democracy may flourish and exploitation and oppression have become no more than a painful memory. This battle continues today. We have the numbers. We have the poverty. We have the capacity. This is what is needed if we are to radically transform our world and by doing so, transform ourselves, that is, transform our human nature—for the betterment of all. FA:
IS:
Let me ask another question: will the time come when Hispanic civilization is no longer allergic to the future?
Only if that future is no longer seen as only and exclusively and deterministically an extrapolation of our present-day socioeconomic system. FA:
My own answer is that Latinos in the United States, through assimilation, are becoming less Hispanic and more Anglo. Thus, a revamping Page 66 → of our epistemological qualities is under way. There are more Latino scientists today than ever before. And through Hollywood movies, we are exposed to a wider variety of futuristic images than past generations. IS:
I would go so far as to say that assimilation itself has changed. We are no longer assimilating into a disquieting, alien Leave-It-To-Beaver mainstream. Rather, we are assimilating into a mainstream that is itself transformed by the influence of Latino culture. Our food, sounds, gestures, bodies, literature, films, comics, art, music have become interwoven into the mainstream culture. Our demographic weight is huge (fifty-one million on the 2010 U.S. census, plus twelve million undocumented). Our presence is manifold. Our tastes for all variety of cultural products are abundant. The threads and topics of our conversation show well that today Latinos are everywhere in entertainment media: television, film, music, literature, web narratives, comic books, video games, and much more. Animated bilingual figures like Dora now teach all sorts of American kids their numbers, shapes, letters—in English with sprinkles of Spanish. Latino actors play outer-galactic saviors of migrating alien populations (the TV miniseries remake of Battlestar Galactica and its prequel, Caprica). We now have an Afro-Latino Spiderman, Latino Blue FA:
Beetle, and “Hispanic” Batman—and playable video game avatars. Latinas are moving on up in fashion magazine corporate worlds (Ugly Betty). Latinas have moved up in suburbia (Desperate Housewives). Latinos are now surfing tubes, skateboarding half-pipes, and going off to music camps (Blue Crush, Wassup Rockers, and Camp Rock, respectively). We even have a Latino for a U.S. president (The Event). Directly related to the explosion is the inescapable presence of Latinos in some of the following: sports (not just pro-baseball, but now pro-quarterbacking, pro-surfing, pro-snowboarding, pro-skateboarding, among others); entertainment (film, television, music, ballet, dance, among others); the academy in all disciplines (sciences and humanities); and politics (representation at the highest juridical and executive branches). We still face huge obstacles. While many more of us are in the professional classes, our high school graduation rates are dismal. We have the demographic weight, but have yet to see a landscape where all of us have the possibility of becoming a professor, doctor, artist, Page 67 → comic book author, quarterback, pro-skateboarder, biologist, and more. Aside from literature, what aspects of Latino popular culture addressed the future? IS:
Some episodes of Chespirito, for instance. A few installments of Kalimán. A handful of movies of El Santo.
I would like to return to the subject of the imagination that we have touched on several times. We as Latinos can point to our making of architecture as unique as that of New Mexico—or even the Schomburg Plaza. We have brought into reality the new and original in the form of all things not furnished by nature: from low-riders, to piñatas, to buildings. In each instance, we imagine then build mental blueprints to explore and transform reality. We blend and connect distant and different aspects of reality to build new mental blueprints. That is to say, to paraphrase Aristotle, the table exists in the mind before it exists in reality; we can't build a table without first having the image of the table in our head. This means that the images or the imaging faculty of the human mind is essential for our interventions or actions within the actual world. Before the products of our ideas are materialized in the real world in the form of low-riders and so forth, they have had another existence: an existence as images. FA:
I like your view of low-riders as things not furnished by nature. I would add a few colleagues of mine to that category. IS:
This leads me to another important topic. What do we do with this debate about Barbie, or toys that represent Latinos generally? It's interesting that mainstream and academic thinking in this area is still stuck in a pre-fifties moment—a time when B. F. Skinner Behaviorism was the common doxa. That somehow there is a one-to-one correspondence between what children see and play with and how they self-identify. The imagination—and especially the child's imagination—isn't so straightjacketed. While Barbie (Anglo, Latina, or otherwise) is clearly a fixed object, the child's imagination is not. It can transform the Barbie into all variety of things—rocket ships, bridges, transportation vehicles—even headless monsters. Children are extraordinarily creative and re-creative. Of course, if the child is locked away in a lab with only one Barbie to play with—Latina or otherwise—or is fed only a constant stream of television—Dora or otherwise—where the content is predetermined and leaves little Page 68 → room for a child's imagination and creativity to grow, then yes, we would have a problem. Poor B. F. Skinner's daughter, whom he literally grew in a lab, is a case in point. FA:
I like the Latina Barbie. In fact, I recommend expanding the offering: a Sonia Sotomayor Barbie, a Celia Cruz Barbie, a Sandra Cisneros Barbie . . IS:
In Robert Rodriguez's film Machete (2010), the eponymous hero survives what would otherwise be a fatal bullet to the head because it ricochets off a metal plate in his skull—put there because of an earlier accident. Michelle Rodriguez's character Shé is shot in the eye, then reappears with a patch and a machine gun performing superheroic deeds. In Speedy Gonzalez cartoons characters defy the laws of physics and even biology, flattening on the ground but never dying. In the three cases, we experience something akin to the extraordinary causal possibilities of imaging in our dream state. FA:
Is popular culture ephemeral in a way that so-called highbrow culture is not? In other words, is it meant not to last? Art, of course, is a manifestation of the human spirit that seeks to overcome the erasing nature that death IS:
brings to all of our affairs. Art survives: it is as much a statement of who we are as it is a proclamation of how we read the past and the way we look at the future. Popular culture, on the other hand, thrives in instantaneous images, e.g., in seeking a reward in the present without concern for the past or the future. Popular culture is generally circumstantial, in the sense that it always carries an expiration date like the way fashion does. But at the same time all creative efforts are circumstantial in the way Goethe and other Romantics saw all lyrical poetry as being the product of specific (and always personal) circumstances. Many artistic products of highbrow culture can (and have) become as ephemeral as many products of popular culture are. I am thinking now of Alfonso Reyes because I have been reading the autobiography of the endearing and highly acclaimed Mexican writer Sergio Pitol (you were among the first to write about him back in the nineties, on his unusual—for him—authoring of a detective novel). Pitol fondly acknowledges the great influence Reyes had on him and his writing. As you have said in several of your books, Reyes was considered the master, the prototype, the absolute literary and scholarly model and reference in Mexican and Latin American literature for decades. And then, after he died in 1959, he became a black hole. Present but invisible. Nobody reads him anymore. His collected works in twenty-six volumes (published in Mexico by Fondo de Cultura Económica) Page 69 → are a grave, a white mausoleum, a tomb so deep nobody feels the strength or the need to dig into it. The master simply vanished in thin air. Yet his influence had been profound and wide. Among his many intellectual debtors was Jorge Luis Borges, who described the prominence of Reyes in his poem “In Memoriam A.R.” published in 1960 in his collection El hacedor (in English, The Maker). The most relevant strophe is this from Dreamtigers, by Borges, translated by Harold Morland: FA:
Reyes, la indescifrable providencia que administra lo pródigo y lo parco nos dio a unos el sector o el arco, pero a ti la total circunferencia. Reyes, meticulous providence That governs the prodigal and the thrifty Gave some of us the sector or the arc, But to you the whole circumference.
Today everyone in academia, and many others beyond its walls, knows at the very least that Borges was, and remains, an important writer. But nobody among the younger generation knows who Alfonso Reyes was or what he did. Which is quite unfortunate, since Reyes is one of the most accomplished stylists ever to write in the Spanish language. Borges himself considered Reyes superior to him. They were friends, of course, as great minds often are. (By the way, the Morland rendition is lousy.) IS:
The history of the comic strip in Latin America is linked to the graphic nature of pre-Columbian civilizations, which were not alphabet-centered. IS:
Like several other modern artistic forms developed in Latin America, such as dance and music, painting and sculpture, our comics have deep roots in pre-Columbian arts and crafts. FA:
IS:
In Nahuatl codexes, for instance, images drive the story.
One of the enticing aspects is that there was an accretion of sorts, in the sense that to the pre-Columbian largely pictorial codexes was added in early colonial times a written narrative layer in Classical Nahuatl, Spanish, and even sometimes Latin. FA:
Guillermo Gómez-Peña did the enchanting Spanglish codex in which he juxtaposed Nahuatl iconography with Spanglish. IS:
He is a talented performance artist and writer as well as a charismatic Page 70 → individual. In 1999 I interviewed him for Frontera magazine. He wanted the interview to take place at a bar. Let's put it this way, I'm glad I had a tape recorder. He has written ten books, several of them quite creative. His Codex Espangliensis: From Columbus to the Border Patrol (1998), coauthored with Enrique Chagoya and Felicia Rice, is a resplendent readerly romp. It's forty-five-page centerfold of sorts opens out in accordion fashion displaying a rich montage of languages, poetry, prose, pre-Columbian drawings, colonial representations of Indians, and comic book superheroes. The collaborative effort—performance texts by Gómez-Peña, montages by Rice, and collages by Chagoya—results in a dazzling achievement of three artists blending their creativity to a point of utter fusion. FA:
In general, I too enjoy Gómez-Peña's art. But I find him repetitive to the point of banality. He belongs to a nineties moment of politically outspoken Latino performeros. But he is stuck there…Maybe I say this because what I fear the most is repetition. IS:
Yes, I agree. After a bright beginning and several important pieces, Gómez-Peña has become a caricature of himself. Notice, Ilan: we're again in the realm of hero-worship. FA:
Fine by me, since, as I suggested before, much of popular culture rotates around the premise of celebrating masculine courage. Thus, let us talk about some autochthonous superheroes. IS:
FA:
Kalimán, for instance.
I mentioned him before. I used to read Kalimán on a weekly basis when I was a teenager in Mexico. The fact that he was a Mexican superhero was inspiring to me. In the media, certainly in the English-language media, Mexicans were always represented as passive. Or maybe passive aggressive. In my eyes, Kalimán was an antidote. IS:
As you know, Kalimán as a radio play started in Mexico City in 1963, and as a comic book in 1965. It's important to keep these dates in mind because the character Kalimán is part of a New Age worldview that was developing in the United States, France, Mexico, and probably many other countries. Kalimán is a hero who fights against evil using no other weapons than his brain and his spirituality, including the Third Eye. FA:
IS:
Ah, the Third Eye…I was mesmerized by it!
I was too, and by his white turban pinned with a red jewel. Kalimán has mastered all spiritual capacities already present in all human beings but only developed and perfected by the very few. Kalimán is proficient to the utmost degree in mastering his bodily functions, Page 71 → to the point that he can fake death and no doctor could detect the deceit. At the same time, he controls his muscles to the extent that he can be superhumanly strong and fast; he has the power of shape-shifting and rapid healing. He has acquired all knowledge held in store by all the sciences, including the esoteric ones. He can achieve instant hypnosis and is capable of telepathy, and nobody is better than him in the martial arts. How can anyone top that? It's his whole worldview that dictates not only his behavior toward his enemies, but and more importantly toward himself (his body and his mind and his spiritual faculties.) It's a worldview that was being shared by an increasing number of people in California and other parts of the United States who would create the hippie subculture that spread like wildfire to other countries as well. The idea that there were many alternative states of consciousness to be explored in order to reach the upper echelons of what the mind could do was fostered by the use of psychotropic drugs such as LSD and Peyotl and the magic mushrooms that grew in Mexico. Not only people in their teens and early twenties adopted the hippie worldview. High-octane intellectuals such as the Chilean-Mexican-French-Jewish writer Alejandro Jodorowsky, the unruly and extremely talented Spanish playwright, movie director, screenwriter, novelist, and poet Fernando Arrabal, together with the variedly creative FA:
French-Jewish-Polish illustrator, filmmaker, and writer Roland Topor formed the collective called Panic Movement. They were the prototypes of later developments. Their view of the world (what the Germans called the Weltanschauung) was nourished by the New Age conception of the universe, and they in turn nourished it and energized it with their work. Together (and each one separately) they made films and comic books and staged happenings and performances thematically inclined toward mysticism, alchemy, Zen Buddhism, and psychedelic experiences. All these ingredients are found in the hippie movement. Jodorowsky, for example, published his first comic strip, Aníbal 5 (1966), and his film Fando y Lis (1967), while doing performance art with Arrabal. The comic strips, the film, and the performance art were a deep radicalization of surrealism, Western and Eastern mysticism, and the portrayal of psychedelic experiences, as was later the case of the feature film El Topo, the acid Western he directed and starred in 1970. Fábulas Pánicas, the weekly comic strips Jodorowsky published in a journal in Mexico City, made converts to the Page 72 → Panic Movement and more generally created a larger audience for his other varied work. Ideologically, though, Fábulas Pánicas are a close kin to Kalimán. Lastly, we must not forget the filmic versions of the first Kalimán comic books. They are hilarious. The first was made in 1972 and entitled Kalimán, El hombre incredíble(“Kalimán, the Incredible Man”). It was based on the first story of our New Age superhero entitled Los profanadores de tumbas (“The Tomb Desecrators”), and the Canadian actor Jeff Copper (with an Asian or “oriental” makeover) played the role of Kalimán. The Spanish actor Niño del Arco played the role of his boy-wonder sidekick, Solín. This movie was followed by blockbuster, Kalimán: El siniestro mundo de Humanon/Kalimán: The Sinister World of Humanon. IS:
What is your take on the Citlali character?
As you know, I write about this in Your Brain on Latino Comics in the context of scholars who idealize the role of the Latino comic book figure generally. That said, Tejana Deborah Kuetzpalin Vasquez grew this Citlali out of the soil of political struggle. Women's rights, particularly Chicanas' rights, in San Antonio, Texas, are challenged every day, and the need to protect them, to gain them anew or to gain them for the first time, is a constant struggle. D. K. Vasquez created Citlali, La Chicana Super Hero as a comic strip series and as a largescale mixed media art installation as weapons in this struggle. The comic strip first appeared in newsprint in 2002, the same year that the art installation was first featured in the gallery of the Esperanza Peace and Justice Center in San Antonio. Citlali speaks in both English and Spanish without translation. Her name, according to Vasquez, is an Aztec term of reverence meaning “to reach for the stars.” Vasquez seeks to inscribe Citlali into a transnational aesthetics and politics. Unfortunately, Citlali, La Chicana Super Hero is very much a thing of the past, an outdated form of artistic creation. I have this same feeling when in the presence of Guillermo Gómez-Peña's present work. And like Gómez-Peña (albeit his works have a certain postmodern abracadabra pop to them) we see in Citlali the same rehashing of concepts and actions that were tried in the Chicano nationalist Aztlán-oriented period of the sixties and seventies. Aztlán was the putative Nahuatl name of the American Southwest that the Chicano nationalist movement claimed once belonged to the Aztecs and therefore should now belong to our descendants, the Chicanos, as Page 73 → a legal and historic right. As the Chicano poet and activist Alurista wrote in 1969 in a text that became the preamble to the Spiritual Plan of Aztlán manifesto: “…we, the Chicano inhabitants and civilizers of the northern land of Aztlan from whence came our forefathers, reclaiming the land of their birth and consecrating the determination of our people of the sun, declare that the call of our blood is our power, our responsibility, and our inevitable destiny.” Already in 1969 an appeal to a myth would never bring grassroots organizations into being nor would it lead to mass mobilizations and to the building of a mass Chicano working people organization. The Aztlán symbolism was effective only within the restricted domain of academia. The attempts to connect with the real field workers movement organized by César Chávez failed. Nobody outside some small intellectual circles of writers and university professors had anything to bring to the Aztlán movement or to obtain from it. As a grassroots mobilizing concept and program it was stillborn. Today it feels even more stale. Its basic assumption that we are all helpless victims in need of myths made by artists and intellectuals to find our way out of entrapment is incompatible with historical experience. Latinos are not looking for inspiration to guide their FA:
struggles in arcane Aztlán myths nor in socially isolated self-styled superheroes. The necessary and inevitable mobilization of people by the thousands—through their traditional organizations or through immediate selforganizing, as happened in Wisconsin and elsewhere in the form of the Occupy Movement—is the only means the Latino working population has to resist the onslaughts of state authorities and national and international corporations. In my evaluation of events that took place in the seventies, frustrated human potential may be overcome only by a real social struggle, not by soporific myths and performances. Why people like Gómez-Peña or Vasquez waste their time and talent in trying to revive the Aztlán and the individualistic superhero myths I do not know and do not understand. It makes their work look much older than it is, already old-fashioned when only recently made, and irreversibly out of touch with present social means and realities. IS:
Would you say performance art can no longer create credible superheroes?
Not all circumstances are conductive to the successful creation of superheroes. In comic books, for instance, many of today's superheroes Page 74 → are only slight variations of material worked before, during or after World War II. The archetype here is of course Superman. In performance art there is the extraordinary case of a superhero who drew large crowds every time he appeared and who maintained his popularity for many years. I am talking about the Mexican Superbarrio Gómez. As performance artist and superhero, Superbarrio was costumed as a lucha libre masked wrestler backed by ordinary people, the members of the Asamblea de Barrios (Neighborhood Assembly) and the grassroots organizations that were emerging everywhere. The man behind the red and yellow wrestler's mask was an activist who helped build the Neighborhood Assembly, an organization that grew out of the bankrupt policies of the Mexican government after the September 1985 earthquake. As is well known, the tragic event affecting mainly Mexico City caused approximately forty thousand deaths, the collapse of hundreds of buildings, and serious damage to thousands of others, plus the destruction of an estimated quarter of a million homes. President Miguel de la Madrid's half-measures brought little relief and mostly exacerbated the population's distress. All help to citizens and humanitarian organizations was conditioned by their public support to the then-ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party (Partido Revolucionario Institucional, PRI). The government kept reimbursing millions of dollars to the International Monetary Fund (IMF) that were urgently needed to help people back on their feet, to renew or rebuild public housing and public services, and to develop the deeply damaged economy, in particular small businesses and national enterprises. On the polar opposite side to de la Madrid's self-centered policies, the vast majority of the population reacted with altruism, developing all forms of solidarity and grassroots organizations, including the Neighborhood Assembly—an organization born to defend poor tenants from eviction and to stop plans to expel people from their neighborhoods and relocate them in places devoid of any public facilities such as electricity, running water, sewage system, paved streets, etc. Superbarrio first surfaced in 1987, during a march organized by the Neighborhood Assembly to the offices of the National Fund for Popular Housing (Fonhapo) protesting its failure to furnish homes to poor people after the earthquake. Superbarrio Gómez appeared dressed in a red and gold wrestler's outfit with large gold SB letters Page 75 → across his chest, and was allowed to walk at the front of the demonstration. Once at Fonhapo, he announced he had made it his duty to fight the corrupt and oppressive government and defend the rights of the poor and homeless. FA:
IS:
He is a real superhero with a just-do-it attitude.
Absolutely. Playing a central role in the Neighborhood Assembly's initiatives, Superbarrio's reputation grew. Whenever police attempted to evict a poor family, three skyrockets were fired, the zone's inhabitants would assemble to block the eviction, and Superbarrio Gómez would soon arrive in his Barriomóvil to demand that the police action be stopped and negotiations begin. While working night and day against evictions in Mexico City and for housing for all, Superbarrio continued to help build the Neighborhood Assembly and a bit later the Frente Democrático Nacional (National Democratic Front), which had Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas as its presidential candidate for the elections in 1988. Cárdenas probably FA:
won those elections but through electoral fraud Carlos Salinas de Gortari, the PRI's candidate, was declared president. Using the traditional dichotomous classification of luchadores in the wrestling world, Superbarrio dramatized the electoral campaign as a wrestling match between técnicos (literally “technicians” but standing for “the good guys”) against rudos (literally “rude ones” but standing for “the bad guys”). Superbarrio Gómez used this performance tactic to galvanize resistance to all variety of sociopolitically directed forms of oppression and exploitation. In the American 1996 presidential elections, Superbarrio Gómez posted his candidacy to run for president of the United States. During his first tour inside the United States he used his performance art to promote voting as a fundamental right of citizenship that should be recognized and exercised across national borders. Mexicans should be allowed to vote for an American president, and Americans should be able to vote for a Mexican president. Superbarrio Goméz's transnational campaign posited the need to fight for the rights of workers everywhere. These included the right to move freely across borders, as well as the right to have decent housing and working conditions across nations, together with the transnational voting rights just mentioned. During his 1996 transnational presidential campaign, Superbar-Gómez displayed his performance art in many settings. One of them was Dartmouth College, in New Hampshire, were his performance Page 76 → gave voice to a widely shared appreciation of current events and a deeply felt aspiration: “We are now living with the realities of speculative non-productive capital, environmental degradation, more nuclear disasters, and a corruption of such magnitude that it exceeds national boundaries and international laws. I come to offer some simple things: integration without renouncing difference, and harmony between the global and the local. Let's make each community on this one continent of ours a space that nurtures human potential.” Fifteen years later the words of this great performance artist and superhero are entirely relevant, don't you think, Ilan? Of course, but there are different types of superheroes. Citlali and Superbarrio Gómez are not in the same line with The Avengers. Superbarrio does not defend Western values in mainstream culture. Instead, he is a folk hero, a workers' conduit, a subversive. He doesn't represent good battling evil in the traditional sense but rights versus oppression. That is why you and I are interested in this performance artist… IS:
I wrote a rather long account of Superbarrio's bold achievements because the character and his activities are not widely known. But I believe Superbarrio wanted people to realize that the real superheroes were the ordinary people struggling to solve their problems through altruism and the building of their own, independent organizations. FA:
Masked superheroes had a role to play in Mexican B-movies of the fifties, the type that featured El Santo and other lead characters. IS:
FA:
Yes, and their popularity is still strong today, many years after they retired or died.
Robert Rodriguez used this material in his spoof Machete. The movie was done with big Hollywood names. Yet it presented an alternative view of the gory avenger whose position regarding the immigration debate is decidedly outside the mainstream. I went to the theater in my hometown, Amherst, Massachusetts, to see Machete the day it premiered. The place was half empty. Most of those in attendance were college students eager to spend a couple of hours in an action movie. They failed to laugh at Rodriguez's humor. Watching it in Texas or California must have been quite different. IS:
I did not happen to watch it in California but did so a block from a the Ohio State University in Columbus, Ohio. There were many students among the audience, and one could hear and feel the energy in their amused reactions every few minutes. The shameless use of Page 77 → cartoon approaches, the chutzpa evinced by Rodriguez's script and casting, were patently recognized, acknowledged, and reacted to with glee and laughter. I arrived when the lights had already dimmed so couldn't discern the phenotypic tones and shades of the audience. It was most likely a majority of white college kids. The Latino population at OSU is small compared to the immense student body (under two thousand in a sea of fifty-odd thousand), our numbers are growing exponentially in the city. Either way, I do think he tickles the funny bone of the new generation—white or brown. Whether in FA:
Machete!, his Mariachi trilogy, his mashup road-movie/horror From Dusk till Dawn (1996), the teen high-school sci-fi/horror The Faculty (1998), or his taboo-crossing comic-book adaptation Sin City (2005), Rodríguez has a keen sense of an audience who appreciates to the fullest his playful overturning of stereotypes. I have a large collection of El Santo movies. Among my favorite is Santo contra la Momia Azteca (El Santo versus the Aztec Mummy 1957). IS:
Yes, unfortunately, this is a big gap in my education. It's a classic, I know, and yet I have still to see it. Among my favorite ones are: Santo contra los zombies (Santo versus the Zombes, 1962) and Santo contra los asesinos de otros mundos (Santo versus the Extraterrestial Killers, 1973), with the scandalously infamous Sasha Montenegro, as well as Santo y la venganza de La Llorona (Santo and the revenge of la Llorona, 1974). This very partial list of El Santo films that have been a part of my education gives a good idea of the kitsch and corny aspects of the ingredients of the films. But these ingredients are perceptible and experienced at the level of the storyboard, that is, at the level of the script. When it comes to the actual scenes of lucha libre the situation changes and all our attention is focused on the beauty of the wrestling matches, their tension and their drama. Indeed, in the El Santo movies many scenes of wrestling (lucha libre) fill the background. The massive presence of wrestling turned each El Santo film into a blockbuster, no matter the faulty script and corny nature of the story. The systematic pattern used for almost all El Santo films is that we see El Santo wrestling in an official lucha libre ring with one other official, real luchador, or sometimes with several of them (3 vs. 3) as well as in relay from one to the next in the ring tussling. So we have these long scenes of wrestling accomplished according to official rules. Then once El Santo finishes his job as a pro-wrestler, he gets into his convertible (mostly), cape swishing Page 78 → behind him and all, and drives into the city or the real world to fight criminals. Of course, he uses his luchador skills to bring down the villains. So this is yet another opportunity for the audience to see him wrestling, albeit in a more chaotic fashion than that of the ring. Visually, it's a messier affair than in the ring, of course. So what the film directors seek is to combine a more seemingly chaotic visual of wrestling with much more clear-cut, organized forms of wrestling that take place in the arena. FA:
It's perhaps this combination that makes filmgoers roar, shouting along encouragements to El Santo as he battles it out with the villains. Let's talk about El Condorito? IS:
I like that René Ríos'sEl Condorito, which started in 1949, is always structured as the visual-verbal telling of a joke. I experience the same delight in the quick, gestalt-like absorption of story and gag in Cantú and Castellanos's Baldo strip, Dave Alvarez's Yenny, and Alcaraz's Migra Mouse and La Cucaracha—all of which I talk about in Your Brain on Latino Comics. With a great economy of means (six panels typically) El Condorito takes us from A to Z mentally and emotionally. It's remarkable. For this total aesthetic effect to work so efficiently and globally, Ríos creates rather abstract circumstances and events. It's not difficult to see why the humor in El Condorito functions well in translation. We laugh whether we read the strip in Spanish or in English. Controversy aside (its sexism, for instance), we see that while the comic strip is Chilean, this origin does not create barriers to its international reception. Its humor is not dependent on local circumstances, making it easily adaptable—and massively popular in all variety of languages—in all of Latin America. It has migrated across the U.S./Mexico border where it's found a nice perch in the United States. FA:
IS:
Mafalda is an exception. She is an intellectual, and not ashamed of it. The character comes from Argentina.
Yes, Quino's Mafalda is always making wisecracks and acerbic remarks about aspects of her social environs, providing circumstances for a rich variety of themes and social interactions. (She has her U.S. Latina counterpart in Cantú's and Castellano's character, Graciela “Gracie” Bermúdez in their Baldo strip.) We never get enough of Mafalda because the events, themes, and circumstances that she observes have a sort of universal existence and the sardonic, witty comments that she offers on them are never exhausted because their Page 79 → subject matter is, so to speak, infinite. Once again, we must point out that Mafalda is not delimited by the national frontiers of Argentina and rapidly became very popular in all of Latin America—its popularity extending even to countries like France and Belgium. In different ways—the art of Mafalda appeals much more to my aesthetic sensibility than Pepo's El FA:
Condorito—these comic strips follow the same structure and are propelled by the same aesthetic mechanisms: they are driven by punch-line concepts; and they reduce events, circumstances, facts to concepts that take the aesthetic form of remarks leading to the punch line. This is why I am not surprised that both El Condorito and Mafalda are popular in all of the Americas and even Europe; there are no cultural barriers that present obstacles to their appreciation. In a nutshell, there are no linguistic or national barriers separating readers from El Condorito and Mafalda. Both comic strips read well in translation, and both have the same aesthetic effect in different countries and in different languages. It might be useful to compare these comic strips with the translated version of Dennis the Menace and its popularity in Latin America. This comic strip operates in a way that is similar to the way the other two function: the motor of the story is the punch line—one arrived at from a kid's perspective who formulates a critical view of the adult world. The translation of the title into Spanish is Daniel el Travieso, where travieso can be interpreted as “mischievous,” which is much milder than “menace.” Already the title in the Spanish translation is somewhat problematic, but the comic strip as a whole doesn't translate easily. To begin with, Dennis is a suburban youngster, whereas El Condorito and Mafalda are city dwellers, and these cities could be any cities in the world. Suburbs are still a rather limited phenomenon in Latin America (and Europe), whereas in the United States they are allpervasive. They are readily identified as being essentially an American fact and cultural environment. When Dennis directs his critical eye at suburbia, what he sees and what he judges are settings and forms of behavior that pertain predominantly to the United States. So while the comic strip has been translated into Spanish and is well known outside the Anglo-Saxon world, it never has had the same following in the Americas and Europe as Mafalda and El Condorito, even though the storytelling motor behind it is very similar in all three cases. IS:
What would your take be on the late Gus Arriola's Gordo?
Page 80 → I talk at length in Your Brain on Latino Comics about Gordo. I include the last interview he gave before he died. By the way, I like that you included Gordo in The Norton Anthology of Latino Literature. In any case, beginning in the forties, Gordo, a bean farmer and later tourist guide, was an aesthetically appealing comic strip with strong roots in the rural world. Then a radical change took place in the sixties, when Arriola moved toward a wider palette of settings (to a more, say, urban way of life in which Gordo becomes a tourist guide) and adopts a radical shift in style and thematics, now including all different layers of society—even extraterrestrials. Arriola plays a pivotal role in Latino comic strips, hugely influencing today's practicing strip-storytellers such as Dave Alvarez, Lalo Alcaraz, Cantú and Castellanos, and Peter Ramírez, among many others. In the interview I did with him, he speaks about his very rigorous working routine. He would spend one full day “thinking, and three days drawing.” He brought a high degree of professionalism to the craft among Latino artists. Indeed, he was a very skilled, dedicated author-artist who refused to settle into any one style or theme, growing both in time and place, in a disciplined way. FA:
IS:
Do you have a strong preference for a young, contemporary comic book author-artist?
Two Latino author-artists come readily to mind: Wilfred Santiago and Rhode Montijo. It's difficult to describe in a few words the enormous amount of beauty that author-artist Montijo has packed into the 18 pages of his comic book, t-t-tartamudo. In this small comic book (3 5 inches or so in size) Montijo has achieved the artistic feat of combining his black & white drawings to create an atmosphere akin to the atmosphere we find in certain surrealist paintings like those of Remedios Varo with the grotesque figures akin to the work of a Hieronymus Bosch. Montijo combines his finely wrought images with a simple story line in a way that appeals to—reaches out toward—young readers as well as adults. His t-t-tartamudo can aesthetically move a child as well as an adult. The drawings are extremely unprepossessing; they do not hit you hard over the head or across the face; they are very subtle, and yet they have a vital energy in the combination of the beautiful and the ugly—characteristic of the genre of the grotesque. The result is quite simply stunning. Put in a nutshell, t-t-tartamudo has a powerful visualverbal unity of effect. We see here at work a real master of this storytelling form. Page 81 → And Wilfred Santiago shows a great range and talent for all variety of storytelling, from the deep FA:
psychological immersion into a fictional character like Omar Guerrero in In My Darkest Hour to the two-hundredpage masterful 21: The Story of Roberto where we learn of the life of MVP (most valuable player) baseball player Roberto Clemente. In both Santiago plays with time—subtle color washes indicate a shift in time to an extended flashback—and situates in history—the former in and around 9/11 and the latter more expansively Clemente's life (Puerto Rico and the United States) as leading up to his smashing of the world record and his death in 1972. Santiago's compelling art and panel layout and various contrapuntal points of view not only give his stories rhythm and energy, but convey the complex interiority of his Latino characters—historical and fictional. IS:
You also admire, as do I, although for different reasons, Los Bros Hernandez.
It's enticing to follow the careers of Gilbert and Jaime Hernandez, or Los Bros Hernandez: the first alternative Latino comic book author-artists out of the gate in the early eighties and now as veteranos who have never settled into any formulaic groove. While my taste goes more for Gilbert's work, both are expert storytellers of this visualverbal medium. That is, they do not subordinate the visual to the textual or verbal elements in their stories, often creating complex tensions between the two as well as advancing the story as a visual-verbal unit to tell their stories. Jaime's extraordinary weekly series La Maggie La Loca for the New York Times Sunday Magazine (April 23, 2006–September 3, 2006) showed its highbrow readers just how sophisticated Latino comic-book storytelling can be. And, we see in the recent work of Gilbert's stand-alone graphic novels, a radical shift away from his earlier south-of-the-border-set, hugely abundant, character-filled Palomar series to a B-movie, exploitation-like, pulp storytelling form, including especially that of the noir, seen in Chance in Hell (2007), Speak of the Devil (2008), Troublemakers (2009), and Love from the Shadows (cover art by the famed artist of pulp fiction covers, Steven Martínez; 2011). There is present Gilbert's characteristic tweaking of reality, butnot in any obvious Latin American magical realist form such as we see in the earliest work. In Love from the Shadows, for instance, there is a break with ordinary physical reality when Fritz finds herself cutting time-space continuums as she walks through a mysterious tunnel, but this storytelling device is new and obeys its own aesthetic designs. Page 82 → Gilbert's recent spate of stand-alone graphic novels more generally asks that we place his stories less within a tropical, Latin-American magical realist setting and more alongside noir authors such as is seen in the fatalistic, hard-hitting, gritty realism of Jim Thompson (especially his genre-defining 1952 The Killer Inside Me) and David Goodis; other U.S. authors might include James Cain and Elmore Leonard. This means that we would do well to trace Hernandez's twenty-first-century stand-alones within an older tradition that includes not only Thompson's and Goodis's noir fictions, but those of authors that gave initial shape to the worldview of noir: the fatalistic, behaviorist, social-Darwinist sensibility that informs the storytelling of Theodore Dreiser, Frank Norris, and their predecessor, Émile Zola—all arguably the abuelos of the noir genre. In each we see the creating of protagonists who are fatally flawed from the get-go—fated to become alcoholics or violent or moral reprobates (Dreiser, Norris, and Zola's prostitutes) whose only motivation, behavior, and action in the world seem to spring from some sort of genetically driven social-Darwinist base. FA:
IS:
Do you see here any influence of Robert Rodriguez?
Rodriguez is another of Hernandez's self-acknowledged influences. There is in Rodriguez a creative will to style oriented toward the absorption and effective use in filmmaking of the non-mimetic spirit found in most comic books. Of course, Hernandez is already working within a medium where conventions allow everyday physical laws (gravity, say) and codes of behavior (ethics, say) to be bypassed or omitted. But it's precisely Rodriguez's attraction to this anarchy of sorts that makes his films so successfully akin to comic books; and conversely it is Hernandez's absorption of the B-movie mode that allows him to use so effectively the cinematic approach. FA:
You mention in the prologue to this volume that Miles Morales is the new Spiderman in the Ultimate Marvel series. There has been excitement about this as well as expressions of concern. Is this Marvel's move for reasons of profit alone, given that Latinos are now the largest minority, with African-Americans as the second largest minority? My own reaction is straightforward: who cares? IS:
In my study of comic books by and about Latinos, my standpoint has always been that in the last instance what matters is the presence and successful use of what I call the “will to style” of the authors-artists (and the referent here can be a vast plurality in the Page 83 → case of Marvel and DC corporations, where many people are involved in the production of a single work). The question is then, I believe, how present is the aesthetic willfulness—the will to style—in the authorsartists' (with Marvel they are legion) use of technique, imagination, and responsibility to subject matter in the making of the new Afro-Latino Spiderman? I have read the first five issues. While I appreciate much that we have an Afro-Latino Spidey, its aesthetic willfulness is also quite present. This is the genesis part of the story—in many ways, the most exciting moment in the superhero comic book tradition. Its visual-textual storytelling certainly conveys a kinetic consciousness of character. FA:
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[3] The Allure of lo cursi FREDERICK LUIS ALDAMA: ILAN STAVANS: FA: IS:
Yes, I grew up visiting him at the TV set. He has been in over fifty telenovelas. When I ask him to list them, he can't go beyond five or six.
Why?
I guess they all feel the same to him: same story line, same emotional power.
FA: IS:
We mentioned how your father, Ilan, is a soap opera star in Mexico.
How would you describe that emotional power?
Telenovelas are about the art of spilling one's emotions in the open.
FA:
You discussed it in your book What Is la hispanidad? Why is Hispanic civilization prone to being overwrought?
The telenovela is sister to the nineteenth-century serial novel and to its twentieth-century dime counterpart. Melodrama is at its core: incestuous relationships, desiring one's neighbor's wife, having murderous feelings. The very essence of the Ten Commandments is always being tested. IS:
Among the nineteenth-century ancestors we can name Eugène Sue's almost unending and hugely successful serial melodrama Les Mystères de Paris (10 volumes, 1842–1843) and even Victor Hugo's extraordinary and monumental Les Misérables (1862). Here as well as in telenovelas we have all the ingredients of clichéd characters and situations—and I do not mean this in a derogatory way at all. What is more clichéd than adultery, nevertheless Flaubert chose it as the central theme of Madame Bovary, for instance, a novel I have reread several times and always with great aesthetic pleasure. There are the ever-suffering mothers (or grandmothers, las cabecitas blancas, or some other relative supporting the young heroine), the permanent victims (always virtuous women, sometimes men), the betrayed virgin, the sudden descent into poverty and even “the gutter,” tragic family losses, mental and physical illness, catastrophic wealth or job loss, unwanted pregnancies, adulterous pregnancies, and pregnancies out of wedlock, family secrets revealed with dire consequences, blackmail, the heartless acts of the terrible villain (a woman, Page 86 → sometimes, but more frequently a handsome seducer or a horrible monster-cum-rapist), the wielding of political and/or economic wealth for immoral purposes, family or personal doom, etc. Like the mock definition of tragedy as a story that starts badly and ends worse, the telenovela is a tearjerker meant to keep you crying but hopeful, so that all along you yearn for the happy ending and the triumph of good over evil. It could be argued that telenovelas are Romance novels in a small or a big screen format. In any case, their production is largely aimed at attracting a female audience. I find it interesting that soap operas in the U.S. in the manner of Days of Our Lives have gone the way of the dodo, yet telenovelas in Latin America and the U.S. continue to have mass appeal. FA:
Mexico, Brazil, Colombia, Argentina, and even Venezuela and Chile keep churning them out at a steady pace. And an important part of their market is abroad, in Europe, Asia, and among the Latino communities in the United States (imported by Telemundo and Univisión), for instance. I recently spent a couple of weeks watching Una Maid en Manhattan, an absorbing if flawed production by Telemundo that attempts to reflect, in vivid fashion, the language of Latinos in the United States. For the first time, Spanglish plays a major role as characters engage in code-switching by going back and forth between Spanish and English. Spanish is obviously the predominant language, and the Spanish used in this telenovela is rather pure, with a heavy upper-class Mexican accent, which makes it anachronistic in New York. An attractive feature is that when a sentence, no matter how long, is delivered in English, Spanish subtitles show up. And the viewer has the option of watching the whole program in Closed Caption, either in Spanish or in English. This Spanglish game is a bit awkward, meaning it doesn't flow harmoniously in the show. But as an experiment, it is groundbreaking. Spanglish, it announces, is an essential feature of mass media in the United States. IS:
True, telenovelas are very successful. Yo soy Betty, la fea (I Am Betty, the Ugly One, 1999–2001, adapted in the United States as Ugly Betty, 2006–2010) was originally a Colombian telenovela. In the United States it ran on prime-time TV and had impressive ratings. And it has been very successful in countries as diverse as Russia or Ecuador. Other recent hits from Colombia belong to the genre known as narconovelas, of which El Cártel, El Capo (The Boss, 2009–present), and Sin Tetas No Hay Paraíso (Without Tits There Is No Paradise, Page 87 → 2006) are salient examples. The last named went through two different versions in Colombia, where it became the most-watched soap opera, and was to be adapted for NBC in the United States, a project soon abandoned. In Spain, Telecinco bought from Caracol Televisión the story line and adapted it to local conditions. All versions follow essentially the same story of a young girl (a junior-high-school student in Colombia, an 18-year-old girl in Spain) who becomes a prostitute after joining a gang of drug traffickers. The film version came out recently in Latin America. FA:
In a telenovela the main story line is usually quite straightforward. But in almost all telenovelas there are interconnected story-threads to make it more interesting and last longer. IS:
This comment reminds me of that hilarious semi-autobiographical novel by Mario Vargas Llosa, La tía Julia y el escribidor (Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter, 1977). The main characters in the book are Mario, an 18-year-old aspiring writer who works for a radio station, his love interest Aunt Julia, a 32-year-old divorcee, and Pedro Camacho, the scriptwriter in charge of writing the soap operas the station broadcasts every day. Camacho is extremely prolific and is greatly admired by Mario because he is the only person Mario knows who is entirely devoted to his art and who actually makes a living as a writer. There are detailed descriptions of the radionovelas Camacho writes, and in different chapters there are depictions of the private life (and love story) of Mario and Julia. Things become more and more fun as the different soap-stories develop, but at a certain point the stress on Camacho becomes so strong that the man starts losing his mind and forgets which characters belong in which story, so each thread begins to mesh with all the others in live broadcast, and eventually end melting into one, huge, incoherent block—or mess. In addition, by the end of the novel there is the depiction of Mario and Julia's wedding, which in itself is an act of high comedy. FA:
Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter is a delightful novel. At least it was when I first read it. Of course, it was based on Vargas Llosa's real-life experience. His first marriage was to his aunt. His second and current marriage is to a cousin. When Aunt Julia was published, the person on whom the female protagonist was based, Julia Urquidi, sued the author. When she failed, she published her own version of the events. It was called Lo que Varguitas no dijo (What Varguitas Didn't Say, 1983). IS:
I haven't read her book. I wonder what she found offensive in Vargas Page 88 → Llosa's novel. Although it contains events and anecdotes that are autobiographical, it's a work of fiction, after all, and not a biography or an autobiography. I suppose this is not the first nor the last time when a fictional work leads to FA:
breakups or the ruin of families… IS:
Telenovelas and soccer: it's our equivalent of bread and circus. They both keep the population numb.
I am biased, of course, when I reply you are right when it comes to soccer, but not where telenovelas are concerned. For me, telenovelas are stories, and as such they satisfy a very deep human need: the universal need of storytelling and listening to stories. No matter how much fun soccer can be, it is not universal. And telenovelas beat soccer any day. FA:
IS:
The face in a telenovela is always the one driving the story forward. Extreme gestures emphasize emotions.
Yes, that is one of the reasons acting in telenovelas reminds us so much of acting in silent cinema—without the sound and the dialogues, everything had to be conveyed through exaggerated facial gestures. Turn the sound off while watching a telenovela and you get the eerie feeling of watching a pantomime. One, by the way, enacted mostly by people with European features and light skin, even when they are representing humble campesinos in a Mexican hacienda. FA:
You see this happen in films, also. Antonio Banderas played Zorro. And the Mexican maid in James L. Brooks's Spanglish (2004) was Paz Vega. But I am not only talking about Spanish actors. IS:
Yes, absolutely. Most Mexican movie stars do not have so-called indio features. Think of Salma Hayek; Ana de la Reguera; Bruno, Demián, and Odiseo Bichir; Gael García Bernal, and Diego Luna—all of them, by the way, with some childhood or teenage experience in soap operas. FA:
IS:
In Hollywood the trend has been developing in the opposite direction.
Now it uses more and more Latino actors who look more like your regular mestizo or mestiza. A case in point is Danny Trejo, who plays the lead role in Machete. In the old days, this almost never happened. To play the main role in Viva Zapata! (1952), Twentieth Century Fox hired Marlon Brando, instead of a Latino actor, albeit another famous actor, Anthony Quinn, who was born in Mexico and looked quite Mexican, played Emiliano Zapata's brother Eufemio. FA:
Page 89 → IS:
Do you watch soaps? By the way, One Hundred Years of Solitude is an accomplished telenovela.
I watch them mostly when I am in Mexico on holiday or visiting family. But to be a hard-core fan of soaps you need a lot of time available and a lot of flexibility in your appointments, so they never interfere with your telenovela time slots. One I saw a couple of years ago and I liked is the Mexican HBO Latino soap Capadocia: Un lugar sin perdón (2008), with Ana de la Reguera in the lead role. But I am not sure this show would actually qualify as a telenovela. It lasted only two seasons. FA:
IS:
I did not watch it.
FA:
Before, in 2004, I started following a blockbuster of a telenovela written by the very prolific and popular writer Yolanda Vargas Dulché (among many
telenovelas and short stories and comic books she authored the famous comic book Memín Pingüínwith a black boy as the protagonist). That telenovela was Rubí (2004), and the leading character and bad, bad, person was played by the then young and enrapturing Bárbara Mori. And much more recently I watched all four seasons of Ugly Betty. I watched some episodes. And I interviewed America Ferrara for PBS, although our dialogue took place before she was cast as Betty. For a while, I thought that Ugly Betty, and perhaps The George Lopez Show (2001–2007), would foster a new age in American TV, just as The Cosby Show (1984–1992) did, enabling Latinos to enter the middle class in smooth fashion. But then came the 2008 recession and everything went to the dogs. IS:
FA: IS:
Do you really think TV soaps bring people into the middle class?
I certainly do. They create an aesthetic that makes certain social moves less dangerous, more acceptable. Soaps imitate life. But life imitates soaps just as much.
FA:
Whatever happened to America Ferrara?
She probably is in the celebrity graveyard, the place where onetime famous people are disposed. American popular culture is masterful in pushing up and bringing down talent. It has an obsession with the young. The young and the new. Once the shock of the new is over, the faces we're accustomed to are made irrelevant. It's a sad story! IS:
FA:
Going back to where we started in this chapter, you wrote a book on love through the ages, Ilan. What kind of love is promoted in the telenovela?
Page 90 → Passionate love, treacherous love. The portrait offered by telenovela scriptwriters presents the individual as manipulated—a better word is tormented—by his emotions. The intellect is always at the service of the heart and not vice versa. IS:
FA:
Love, then, as melodramatic passion.
It might be appropriate at this point to explore what we mean by melodrama. For example, what is the difference between drama and melodrama? Drama in English is a theatrical genre. The word comes from , Greek for action. Shakespeare's Hamlet is drama. However, in modern times the term not only applies to the stage but to life itself. To have a dramatic life is to be involved in endless upheavals, to be emotionally vulnerable, to act with zest. Melodrama, on the other hand, is an attribute defined by over-ripeness: to engage in too much drama, to let one's feelings lead, to place reason in the background. Octavio Paz, in The Labyrinth of Solitude, suggests that Mexicans at times lack an identity. He is wrong, terribly wrong! Mexicans might actually be described as suffering from the opposite: an overabundance of identity, if such an idea is possible. What one sees in the telenovelas is not an exaggeration of life in the Hispanic world but a realistic depiction of it. IS:
FA:
Do you know the history of telenovelas?
They are daughters of the radio serial of the twenties and thirties. The emergence of telenovelas in the Hispanic world dates back to the fifties. In Mexico, they are a brainchild of some of the producers (actors, directors, funders) behind the Golden Age of Mexican cinema. As you know, movies by Pedro Infante, Jorge Negrete, IS:
and Sara García sought to represent the full-rounded existence of all levels of society. With the arrival of TV, some of those dramas were modified for the small screen. Modification meant presenting them in installments. You are so right! I had not made the connections you clearly point out. In fact, your remark makes me think of interconnected movies made with Jorge Negrete or Pedro Infante as protagonists, where the plot and the general structure are akin to those one usually finds in telenovelas. There is, for instance that long tearjerker in three installments entitled Nosotros los pobres, Ustedes los ricos, and Pepe el toro. Tragedy and comedy and many singing interludes by protagonist Pedro Infante are the fabric of the trilogy telling the story of a poor carpenter falsely accused of several crimes and sent to jail in the first installment, morally wounded by the death of his son (El Torito) Page 91 → in a fire in the second installment, and a successful boxer tormented by the death of his childhood friend, whom he accidentally kills in a boxing match, in the third and last installment. This trilogy was a blockbuster for many years and is still selling well in its DVD-format afterlife. In fact, many films from the so called Golden Age of Mexican cinema are pure melodramas and resemble the soap operas that became so popular later on. FA:
FA: IS:
What is Hispanic kitsch?
Maybe the key word is rasquachismo, a concept most difficult to explain yet essential to any discussion of Hispanic civilization.
Among its many meanings it involves a social class distinction between the poor and the wealthy, so one can say of a person that he or she is rasquache if he or she is penniless or poorly dressed, or is one of the many wretched of the earth, for instance. Then there is the utilitarian connotation, as when an object is said to be rasquache because it is a hand-me-down item of clothing or when the object has been recycled to be used for a purpose or a function that is different than the original, for instance when a Coca-Cola bottle is filled with tap water to take to the gym. It's usually a synonym of rasca, and then it means “of inferior quality or status” or, more commonly, “tacky,” “cheap-looking.” Therefore rasquache has a long list of aesthetic (negative) connotations, such as “tawdry, loud, gaudy, flashy, garish, crass, brassy, showy, dowdy, chintzy, cheap, ridiculous, in bad taste, out of fashion, shabby, tasteless, coarse, cheaply vulgar,” and so on. FA:
Rasquache is one thing as kitsch in the sense of sentimental, pretentious art and another as a deliberate Chicano arts movement seeking to use “discards, fragments, even recycled everyday materials” for aesthetic purposes, as artist Amalia Mesa-Bains has explained. In her often quoted description, “The capacity to hold life together with bits of string, old coffee cans, and broken mirrors in a dazzling gesture of aesthetic bravado is at the heart of rasquachismo.” IS:
FA:
What about Clement Greenberg?
His view on kitsch is appealing to me, but only as a starting point. Let me say it differently: Greenberg is a thinker I love to antagonize. He saw it as the result of the rapid popularization of art, the need to satisfy large numbers of people with cheap, easy to make reproductions. Kitsch for Greenberg is a copy of a copy. In his essay “Avant-Garde and Kitsch,” published in Partisan Review in 1934, he wrote that kitsch used “the debased and academicized simulacra of genuine Page 92 → culture,” that it “welcomes and cultivates” insensibility, that kitsch is “vicarious experience and faked sensations,” changing “according to style,” although it “remains always the same.” Greenberg added that “kitsch is the epitome of all that is spurious in the life of our times,” and that it “pretends to demand nothing of its customers except their money—not even their time.” I don't agree with him. In his essay he cherishes the avant-garde while belittling kitsch, but kitsch is much more than Greenberg suggests. Actually, kitsch is often part of the avant-garde. Think of Andy Warhol, for instance. Or Quentin Tarantino. It's possible to make art of simulacra. And in the Hispanic world, that attitude, to simulate the simulacra, is widespread. IS:
FA:
You talk about that in your essay “Viva el Kitsch!,” included in The Riddle of Cantinflas (1998). In it you delve into that idea of “simulating simulacra.”
Latin America, as a colonial outpost of imperial Spain, built its identity as a replica. Everything among us is based on foreign models. That's the central tenant of “Viva el Kitsch!”: we're almost nothing if not a cheap imitation. Our system of government, our literature…There are exceptions, of course: our cuisine and our music, for instance. There's an unparalleled originality in them, a veritable degree of authenticity. IS:
FA:
The overall epigraph we use for these conversations comes from Milan Kundera's novel The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984).
I remember reading Kundera in Mexico in the early eighties, before I migrated to the United States. His use of the novel struck me as powerful. He used the genre to meditate on philosophical, theological, and aesthetic issues. I might have been in Immortality (1990), another one of his novels, where he debated the question: Did Jesus Christ defecate? Anyway, it was the Kundera of that period who got me interested in kitsch. He understood kitsch to be an essential ingredient of Western civilization at the end of the twentieth century. Kitsch, he trusted, is cheap sentimentality. It's the capacity to be self-aware of that sentimentality, to understand that our emotions, as a result of media exposure but because of our fascination with melodrama, have been demeaned and are overwrought. IS:
FA:
With our feet still in Europe, in what sense are Walter Benjamin's views useful to you?
I adore The Arcade Project, which, as you know, Benjamin left unfinished. To write a lifelong book on the nineteenth-century Parisian arcades—what a stunning idea. Equally stunning would be to write Page 93 → a meditation on the Latin American city in the twentieth century using the shopping mall as its leitmotif. For the mall, at least after World War II, is what drives modernity forward in the urban landscape. I'm talking about the American model of the shopping mall. The Modernista movement of Rubén Darío, Delmira Agustini, and Leopoldo Lugones, whose historical dates are generally accepted to be from 1885 to 1915, already reacted to the infatuation with shopping among the Latin American bourgeoisie. However, I'm not talking here of the Francophile. Increasingly after the SpanishAmerican War, it is American-type mass consumption that reshapes the taste of south-of-the-border society. In 1984, a year after his untimely death (is death always untimely?), Angel Rama's book La ciudad letrada (in English, The Lettered City) made a splash in the Spanish-speaking world. In it he explored the way the LatinAmerican city articulated its modern identity. But Rama, a left-leaning cultural critic, only paid partial attention to commerce, which in my mind is the true engine of urban change. IS:
FA:
How about Susan Sontag? You have an insightful piece about her in A Critic's Journey (2010).
I find her sharp intellect at once admirable and obfuscating. She is as much a thinker as she is a poser. Still, her essay “Notes on Camp” is invaluable, as are her reflections on the impact of photography in contemporary life. Sontag doesn't talk about kitsch per se. Instead, she ponders camp as a retro-style, an urge to be forward-looking by targeting our interest in past affairs, especially old artistic forms. IS:
FA:
In what way does all this connect with Latino popular culture?
To start with, our culture adores camp. Look at the aesthetics of the telenovela: it exposes, almost ridicules emotions. It does it by emphasizing that the melodramatic nature on the screen is a thermometer of the way we Latinos handle life in general. That is, what we see onscreen is a reflection of who we are and vice versa. Also, the concept of kitsch is the leeway to understand lo cursi. The best example I might be able to invoke is Pedro Almodóvar's cinematic career. Who else but he has put lo cursi at center stage? Almodóvar proves the degree to which Greenberg was wrong. Everything in his movies is simulacra. Everything is artificial! IS:
Let's talk about another manifestation of lo cursi: women's magazines. You mentioned them when you talked about imitation. But wait: will the fact that two older male professors engage with this topic be considered condescending? FA:
Page 94 → Do you care? I don't read Cosmopolitan. In fact, I doubt I would open a copy if I found myself stranded alone on an island. I just wouldn't find anything of interest in its pages. Perhaps I would turn those pages into paper boats and thus imagine myself sailing to freedom. IS:
FA: IS:
Because there's nothing in it for me. Women's magazines are about beauty portrayed as external.
FA: IS:
Why wouldn't you read it?
Superficial?
Of course. Skin deep!
There's much in our world that is skin deep. In fact, I would say that most narrative (fiction or factual) is written with very little “will to style”—my shorthand to identify the degree of presence of willfulness in the writer's use of technique as well as her responsibility to the subject matter in the making of the narrative. In my mind, there's not much difference in the will to style in the writing present in Cosmopolitan than in a novel such as The Dirty Girls Social Club (2004). That said, when I'm in the checkout at the grocery I do pick up Cosmopolitan among other magazines. Why? It's not just to pass aimlessly the time. It's to pass the time in specific way: to get my dose of narrative, even if a “lite” dose. And this narrative comes usually in the form of gossip. I don't know the people that are featured in Cosmopolitan—or, even better, Gente and ¡Hola—yetI'm interested in their stories. Here and elsewhere, I find that I'm a narrative junky. I want to know beginnings, middles, and ends—especially ends as this is an ontological impossibility for me. I have not reached my end. That said, the stories are skin deep. Their one or two ingredients satisfy a simple appetite: suspense and a curiosity to know another human being, perhaps laced with bit of Schadenfreude. They don't demand more complex emotional engagement, nor do they offer any aesthetic pleasure. But they can satisfy a very basic hunger for a very basic story—just as a dinner conversation about one's day at the office with a significant other might. FA:
IS:
Why are there women's magazines in the first place?
Ilan, stories are part of the air we breathe, the molecules we're made of. We are social creatures, and stories are the glue that holds us together. And we satisfy our thirst where we're able to drink, be the liquid Cosmopolitan, Gente, ¡Hola!, Alyssa Rodriguez, Bolaño, or Los Bros Hernandez. FA:
Maybe the only magazine in Spanish I would read is Playboy. But it's Page 95 → for a male audience…Ever seen the controversial issue that has a semi-naked Virgen María on the cover? IS:
FA: IS:
Why?
The writing is powerful. The best interview Bolaño ever gave was with Playboy.
FA:
You'll be grilled by Chicanas.
Nothing new in that. My opinion of Sandra Cisneros's The House on Mango Street—B-quality Young Adult stuff—has granted me a place in their Hall of Fame. Anyway, I apologize for interrupting you. IS:
With the little time I have in the day—and left in my life as a whole—I'm not going to spend it reading ¡Hola!, or any of the many Harlequin Romance-style novels churned out by Chicana authors today. No, I deliberately organize my time in ways that will allow me to get my narrative fix by reading and viewing creative products whereby the creator (authors, directors, dramatists, artists) uses formal techniques to reorganize the building blocks of reality in ways whereby I establish a new kind of relationship with the object—a new aesthetic relation. This can come in the form of a comic book, novel—even a magazine story. It could come in the form of an author who takes a rather ordinary story from the paper about a woman's suicide and uses all variety of technique and style to turn this into one of the great novels of the nineteenth century. It could be an author who takes five years to figure out how to give shape to a rather simple story told to him by his abuelita to create the great Boom novel. I'll read Cosmo at the checkout, but would never take it home to share my desk or bed. But let's get back to this idea of skin deep. Stories aside, ¡Hola!and so on feature what appear to be healthy and beautiful people. They are extremely appealing, even though we know that they are airbrushed and quite often physically transformed through plastic surgery. FA:
IS:
I'm enthralled by plastic surgery, though. In a course I teach called “Impostors,” I devote an entire section to it.
Do you teach Cecile Pineda's Face (1985)? I read it long before I knew she was Chicana. I was absorbed by her poetic style and play with point of view in the telling of the story of a Brazilian barber, Helio Cara, whose face is mutilated beyond recognition. Cara loses his job—and, more significantly, his loved ones. His loss of a face leads to a loss of subjectivity, precisely because he loses that crucial and foundational social component in his life. After a period living Page 96 → in the Brazilian interior, in a shack once occupied by his mother, he returns to the world of the living by studying Basics of Dermatologic Surgery so well that he can perform his own plastic surgery. Remade, he returns to his hometown on the coast, but with a different face—a new identity, formed as a reflection of the social mirror (how people see him!), in conflict with how he imagines himself to be, as formed in continuity with his old self. FA:
IS:
I read it, yes. I'd like to be Helio Cara.
FA:
How so?
I'd like to change faces. You know, Fede: for years, Chicano scholars have described me as an interloper. Not Latino enough!—that summarizes their claim. They're right: I'm mutable, ethereal. I see myself in the mirror. Who is there? An arriviste. Perhaps it's the nature of being Jewish. You're always on the periphery, an outsider, a guest, often uninvited. Plastic surgery attracts me precisely because it is a way to hide, to become an escape artist. I admire people like Harry Houdini, the ultimate magician. IS:
FA:
Houdini was Jewish, wasn't he?
A rabbi's son. Years ago I published a short story, “Plastic Surgery.” The entire narrative is in dialogue form. Two former lovers meet, and the woman, unrecognizable from abundant plastic surgery, asks the man to possibly donate a portion of his skin “out of love,” for her physical transformation, which she describes as a piece of art, to be completed. IS:
FA:
In your book Return to Centro Histórico (2012), there is a section—a kind of interview—called “Autobiography of My Face.”
It began as an interview in the journal Habitus. In it I sought to explain the degree to which I sometimes feel my face tells a story about myself that is at odds with the self itself. IS:
FA: IS:
You're fake!
Sure.
Elective cosmetic surgery certainly allows those with the monetary means to hold on a little longer to a look of youth—the taut, toned, and healthy—but what do we make of the fascinating cases in France and Spain of partial and total face transplants? This is remarkable science and evidence of our remarkable capacity to psychologically adapt. Like Helio Cara, Pineda's protagonist, there is a social web—family, friends, workmates, photographs, videos, you name it—that is a repository of memories of a certain image of the individual. It's that social memory that exists for all of us that continually reinforces Page 97 → our sense of a continuous self from past to present. Along with our own memory, it's this social mirror that allows us to feel a sense of a continuous, autobiographical self—even though at the molecular level we change every thirty days; I am biologically nearly completely different to myself at one or two or three years old. I do not wake up in the morning, wash my face, and ask “Who is that guy?” in any ontologically significant way. We're changing constantly, yet we take the default position: to recognize our selves and others as the same. It's this web that allows me to say that I am forty-three years old and that I'm Frederick Aldama—the same guy I cannot even remember but only have photos of when I was first born, then one, two, three, four, and so on years old. Imagine that this continuity (birth to death, actually) is radically ruptured. Imagine what this might do to one's conception of one's self? The face transplant scenario is rather extreme. However, these ruptures do take place on a smaller scale all the time. My father knows he is the same Luis Aldama of yesterday, but the onset of his diabetes, sleep apnea, and depression have altered considerably his personality. I ask: Can I always be certain that I am I? I am whom I am…Ego sum qui sum? FA:
No, I'm never sure I am who I am. The biblical sentence is ehye asher ehye: I am who I am. Identity is flaky and we're all impostors. Our personality mutates according to the needs of the environment. That is, the self is fluid… IS:
FA:
Let us talk about food.
Yes, food should be a leitmotif in analyzing the development of Hispanic civilization. Nothing like unos tacos al pastor with salsa and pineapple. Or a pozole con lechuga. But these tastes entail a varied history. For starters, maíz, corn, a grain domesticated by the peoples of Mesoamérica. Furthermore, we ascribe our own emotions to food, turning our cuisine into a topography of our inner world. IS:
If I remember well, my few readings on the subject, wild corn was submitted by the Olmec and Maya peoples to a whole series of genetic selections before it became a staple food. So we can say that today's corn and its main varieties are the result of a very careful and deliberate work of cross-fertilization, trial and error methodology, and close botanical observation that the Olmecs and the Mayans undertook hundreds of years before the arrival of the Spaniards. Perhaps, today with all the manufacture of transgenic (or GM or genetically modified) seeds the ancient varieties will rapidly disappear. Page 98 → This seems to be a general trend, encompassing all staple foods. The world of agriculture is shrinking. From possessing an abundant stock developed more than ten thousand years ago it is increasingly uniform and is becoming a much more limited botanical domain. Today there are some five or six varieties of corn. But GM turns this into FA:
one—essentially the one sold by Monsanto Food Inc.—all over the world. If this happens to an ever increasing number of botanical species selected since Neolithic times in Europe and the rest of the world, we will end up with only a handful of botanical food staples, and each item will only have one variety. This necessarily entails a considerable limitation on the possible combinations of items to cook and a massive impoverishment of natural taste experiences. Sugar should be mentioned here, too. Fernando Ortiz has an admirable book, gorgeously written, Contrapunteo cubano del azúcar y el tabaco (1940). In English, it is known as Cuban Counterpoint. IS:
Yes, this classic book, or long essay, can be read for information and for great aesthetic satisfaction. Ironically, today both sugar and tobacco (the other subject of the book) are largely condemned as massively consumed products. Indeed, Contrapunteo was published in 1940, way before their use started being avoided and people stopped singing their praises. Tobacco is still, of course, a great source of wealth for a select few, and tobacco growers in southern Mexico are still living in poverty just as they were when tobacco use was socially acceptable and commonplace. But it's true that the number of acres devoted to the cultivation of tobacco has shrunk—even in Mexico. Probably much larger areas are set aside nowadays for the growing of marijuana than for tobacco. But beyond the eventual future of sugar and tobacco, we might mention in passing that Fernando Ortiz made some important conceptual contributions to our understanding of culture. He developed a theory of social syncretism and transculturation that may very well turn out to be useful for the study not only of Cuba but of all societies. In his view, Cuban society is the product of a permanent process of cultural and racial blending (a process he named “syncretism”), particularly of the African and Iberian contributions. Thanks to this fusion and transculturation a new social reality emerged: what is known today as the Cuban society. Also, importantly, Ortiz pointed Page 99 → out that this emergence of “Cubanness” resulted from the popular culture that black slaves and poor whites developed over the centuries and gradually permeated the middle and upper strata of society; that is, it “emerged from below” and eventually became the norm of society as a whole. FA:
IS:
Tomato too is very important. The Italians might have it everywhere in their cuisine but there is no Mexican food without jitomate.
Indeed, in Mexican parlance we make the distinction between jitomates (the tomatoes with origins in Peru) and the tomates (the green, very acidic variant of the tomato sometimes known as the Mexican husk tomato with origins in Mexico and Central America). Both jitomates and tomates are used in all varieties of Mexican food. Jitomates appear in all kinds of salads and sauces in all sorts of dishes with fish, poultry, beef, and so on. It's indeed a very popular ingredient. But green tomatoes are everywhere too, for many Mexican dishes contain any one of the dozens of variants of what we call “green sauce” or salsa verde. We have red tomatoes in what are called huevos a la mexicana: diced onion mixed with diced tomatoes and chili (salsa mexicana) then added to scrambled eggs. And huevos in green sauce—a fried tortilla immersed in a green sauce and on top one or two fried eggs. Both are very popular dishes for breakfast. From breakfast through lunch, snacks, and dinner we see the omnipresence in Mexican cooking of jitomate and tomate. This is no longer the exclusive preserve of Mexico. The massive presence of Latinos in the United States has been educating the taste of mainstream Americans for some time now, so Mexican cuisine (among other Latin American cuisines) is present everywhere in the country and we can buy the salsa mexicana and salsa verde as preserved food in all sort of containers and in almost any grocery store. FA:
Carlos Fuentes once announced that salsa had replaced ketchup as the most important accompaniment in the diet of the United States. Maybe so. The fact is that the American appetite has become less placid, more adventurous. Ethnic cuisine is ubiquitous in any major American city. IS:
FA:
Asian cuisines (Chinese, Vietnamese, Thai, Japanese, and Indian, for instance), European cuisines (Italian, Spanish, German, and so on), Latin American cuisines
(Mexican, Cuban, Puerto Rican, Columbian, Argentinean, for instance)…would these cuisines in the United States be categorized as “ethnic cuisines”? Ever since the market-place Page 100 → ceased being national and has become ever more international, it is natural to find in the United States food ingredients and dishes from all over the world. Another important contributing factor is that its population is formed by citizens hailing from every country in the world, so each person's taste buds are prepared to be rapidly educated to appreciate a very large palette of taste sensations. In the Midwest there are many Nordic migrants from many generations back; if Norwegian food, for instance, can easily reach their American tables, then the satisfaction of their taste buds will find no barrier. In this sense, all or most food in the United States can be termed “ethnic cuisine.” It originates outside the country, and it is mainstreamed in the United States through supermarket chains. What is distinctive today is that the Latino population has grown considerably and has a large presence in almost every state, so it's wielding its own demographic, economic, and political influence, as well as its very distinctive cultural creativity and preferences everywhere in this land. Perhaps Fuentes was exaggerating? In any case, we know that the opposite phenomenon has taken place: nowadays we find ketchup everywhere in Mexico and Central and Latin America—it's in all supermarkets. Such is the case all over Europe. Not more than thirty or forty years ago, the French, for instance, would talk about the barbarian architecture of the American mind that was capable of eating salty-tasting french fries dipped in a sweet-tasting ketchup sauce. Over the years Americans have educated the taste buds of people from all over the world to find ketchup appealing, just as people from all over the world have educated the taste buds of Americans, including Latinos. Aguacate, known in English as avocado, is another staple of Mexican food. It was an essential ingredient among the Nahuatl people. I use it as an important element in the graphic novel El Iluminado. IS:
And it has become once again the butter of health-food-concerned Latinos and, more largely, Mexicans. Today, here as well as in Mexico many people have stopped eating butter and prepare their sandwiches (their tortas) instead with aguacate. FA:
IS:
And then there is beef.
Yes, usually very mistreated. Argentineans have a strong, healthy respect for beef; their churrascos are somewhat thin cuts of beef grilled on a fire cooked with its own grease. Whereas in Mexico, beef is cut nearly wafer-thin, pounded to flatten it out more, and then Page 101 → cooked, whether with grill or skillet, through and through. No blood pools anywhere near a Mexican steak. This mistreatment of beef has been exported with movement across the border into the United States and remains the favored way of cooking beef with Latinos. Controversy aside—that McDonald's has been importing beef from Latin America and not using meat from the United States—it is this kind of extremely processed “beef” that seems to be hitting the stomachs of Latinos more than home-cooked steaks. Fast food has replaced the home-cooked meal (steak or otherwise) and now we have 1 in 3 (Latino or otherwise) obese in the country. Argentina was the number one producer of beef in the world. Much of the industrialization in Argentina for decades took place hand in hand with the development of agriculture, forming a sort of organic unity. There was the massive exportation and the massive local consumption of beef in Argentina. Apparently, beef in and of itself, especially grilled in its own fat, is not fattening. Argentineans are not known to be an obese population. FA:
Esteban Echeverría's nineteenth-century short story, “El matadero” (1839), in English “The Slaughterhouse,” is about the season of cuaresma in Buenos Aires, and meat is scarce, in large part because tyrant Juan Manuel Rosas is using the shortage to control the Argentine people. IS:
Yes, famine is a very dreadful weapon used against the people. All famines are man-made. In the twenty-first century, how is it possible that people go hungry? But this is worse than hunger. Famine is genocide in a very cruel way. Famine is the deliberate killing of thousands, sometimes millions of people—from children to elders—by inflicting a very slow and painful death. Thomas Keneally has recently published his study on this crime against humanity in Three Famines: Starvation and Politics (2011). He focuses on Ireland, Bengal, and Ethiopia. Today, the ongoing famine taking place in Somalia is another example of this starving of thousands and even millions of people for political and/or economic reasons. The World Food Programme (the food aid branch of the United Nations) has tons and tons of wheat, flour, and other food staples stocked in huge warehouses that it cannot distribute because war and territorial control profiteering do not allow it. Those who control precious metals and diamond mines, as well as oil fields in African countries, resort to military means to halt any distribution of these foods and cause famines to instill fear and pain on a massive Page 102 → scale in order to stop or dissuade any opposition or resistance from the populations and to perpetuate their extreme oppression and exploitation. There are dozens of other examples of famines created for political and/or economic reasons and purposes, such as the one inflicted by Stalin on the Ukrainians and other peoples of the Soviet Union between 1932 and 1933. Mao Tse Tung resorted to famine genocide and with this weapon caused the deaths of more than 15 million Chinese between 1958 and 1961. There are other, less drastic forms of political control over the production and distribution of food. For example, in Mexico many subsistence farmers gained a certain autonomy and control over their lands after the 1910–1917 Revolution, when they became holders of communal lands in the terms fixed by the Constitution and a law on usufruct, which gave them the right to cultivate their allotted parcels (ejidos) and to keep the profits derived from their (exclusively agricultural) use. They did not actually own the land, but it was allotted indefinitely to them and they could even pass their rights as ejidatarios to their children. Because the North American Free Trade Agreement explicitly demanded the suppression of the ejido system, in 1992 President Carlos Salinas de Gortari had the Constitution modified to eliminate it. This made it possible to: privatize the communal (ejido) land, undermine indigenous communities' right to land entitlement, turn former ejidatorios into illegal land-squatters and their communities into informal settlements, and in general eliminate an important source of protection of farmers' rights to decent economic, social, cultural, medical, and educational conditions. The Mexican agricultural system as a whole was deeply affected, and the most marginalized populations were rendered even more vulnerable. The end result: thousands of farmers became extremely impoverished and tried to solve their problems by emigrating to the United States or to the big cities in Mexico. On January 1, 1994, NAFTA became operational. Since then, as official statistics show, migration from Mexico and Central America has increased massively. Why? Because people are literally starving by the hundreds of thousands in the countryside and there are no jobs in the cities. FA:
IS:
In Don Quixote (1605–1615), Sancho Panza is often talking of food.
Food is alluded to constantly in the whole novel, both part I and part II. Most significantly by Sancho Panza, as you mention. What's interesting is the description of the dishes served and eaten either by the commoner or the elite. There're pleasant descriptions of food Page 103 → in its regional varieties as our two heroes travel from one geographical location to another. From the novel, one could nearly write a scholarly book on sixteenth-century Spanish cuisine or perhaps even a cookbook. FA:
IS:
Lists of food and dishes are not a frequent feature in literature. Can you think of a recent example?
FA: IS:
Let me say a few things about Eric Powell's graphic novel, Chimichanga (2011). Do you know it?
No, I don't.
It's written in the aesthetic mode (or genre) of the grotesque in that it combines seamlessly the natural and the unnatural, the beautiful and the ugly, the comic and the tragic, the highbrow and the lowbrow. The story establishes the nature of its genre from the very beginning, when the first panel presents a visual of a clown holding a board that reads “Wrinkle's Travelling Circus.” Subsequently, talking fish as well as farting, wart-infested hags are commonplace. But the story is launched by the presence of food. The bearded-girl protagonist, Lula, orders a chimichanga from “Mr. Taco Man” and walks happily away. Soon after a giant, hairy, eyepopping beast is born from a magic egg, she calls it Chimichanga and introduces it as the “Circus's newest and greatest attraction!” FA:
IS:
Food as the source of a monstrous creation.
Right! Another example that comes readily to mind is María Ripoll's film,Tortilla Soup (2001). At the beginning, we see a father, Martin Naranjo (Héctor Elizondo), chop off needles from nopales, the fleshy part of the cactus that is cooked and becomes the typical Mexican dish nopalitos. He gets this ingredient from his own cactus, planted in his garden. It was the first film to confer a clean look to a middle-class Latino family. Before there had been films such as Mi Familia (1995), where family members belong to different generations that exhibit big differences in the degrees of syncretism and transculturation they have attained. In Tortilla Soup the various generations are much more homogeneous in their level of creative social fusion. There is one scene where the camera shows father and daughters sitting at the table. Before they start eating the father reminds them of the rule forbidding them to mix their languages: “Either English or Spanish. Not both,” he says. To be proficient in both languages each one has to be kept separate. He doesn't want them to speak Spanglish or to use both languages in the same sentence (code-shifting). All members Page 104 → of the family are totally fluent in English and totally assimilated to mainstream culture; at the same time they all preserve essential features of the Mexican culture, among them Mexican cuisine and the Spanish language. Also, the nopalitos dish and the cactus in the backyard garden underline the cultural perspective of a rural Mexico coexisting symbolically with an urban Los Angeles. FA:
IS:
Laura Esquivel's Como agua para chocolate (1989), translated into English as Like Water for Chocolate, uses the recipe book as a source to write a novel.
Yes, she wrote a cookbook based on the recipes, entitled An Appetite for Passion (1995). In each chapter of the novel there is a recipe connected to a particular series of events. Now this connection is usually established in the form of a causal relationship. For instance when the protagonist Tita's sister Gertrudis eats a dish of quail in rose petal sauce, she leaves the ranch, makes heated love with a soldier on horseback, and finds herself at a brothel—ultimately disowned by the family. To make this cause-and-effect mechanism credible, the author uses narrative devices conceived by authors such as García Márquez. Unfortunately, in the hands of Esquivel, these devices become cookie-cutter applications and lazy deus ex machina solutions that confer to her novel a diminished aesthetic impact. FA:
IS:
Cookie-cutter applications: a most suitable expression in this context.
On the topic of heated love, chocolate is one of the foods most universally considered an aphrodisiac. Of course, chocolate is a product of Mesoamérica (southern Mexico and Central America). The cacao tree had been cultivated long before the arrival of the Spaniards on the American continent and its seeds rapidly became popular in Europe and the rest of the world. In its travels, chocolate carried with it the reputation of being an aphrodisiac. Obviously, there is a host of Latin American foods that are considered aphrodisiacs, among them all varieties of hot and other peppers, avocado, watermelon, banana, mamey…So we must be the foodsource of love for the rest of the world. FA:
IS:
Come to the Latin tropics! Let your stomach be satisfied!
Or, come to the most varied geography of the United States and taste all the dishes (actually, just as many) you can find in Latin America and the Caribbean, plus their locally invented variants. Food is quintessential in Latino culture. I already mentioned Ripoll's film Tortilla Soup. The whole film is structured around the preparing Page 105 → and eating of identifiably Mexican cuisine. What is interesting and reflective of Latino culture here is that the father tries to maintain a series of norms for the family: the Sunday meal at a specific time that requires members of the family to be punctual, the head of the table (the father) saying “Amen” at the end of the prayer and being in charge of cutting the meat, serving the wine, and distributing (serving) the food—all this to bring the family together over food. This fundamental ingredient of the film reflects a reality most Latino people would like to preserve, even though all the present economic odds are very much against it. Indeed, this ritualized eating of food in Latino culture in the United States is dwindling. Working two and sometimes three shifts a day to make ends meet, no fixed days for rest, tending to multiple obligations with respect to offspring, long commutes, more and more family members separated by great geographical distances, and so on, make it difficult and often impossible for families to meet every Sunday and share food together with affection and personal news. I would like to rephrase all this in the following way. For a long time, eating was a formal, ritualized institution in Latino culture where the recognition of the family as an organic whole was continuously reenacted around the dining room table and the food served on it. Family members expressed gratefulness to the cook for the work invested in preparing the meal and to the deity for the food about to be eaten. They acknowledged the hierarchy in the family relations, with father being at the top rank, or in his absence, mother or elder brother. Sharing the food was a confirmation of the family bond, the affection and the joy of being together, sharing stories, plans, and so on. And if the food was scarce, then there was the opportunity to show a sense of solidarity in the distribution of whatever food there was to eat. The way we live now, this “communion” has become more and more uncommon. So eating in Latino culture in the United States has traditionally been more than just satisfying a fundamental biological need. It's a specific appointment to meet in order to confirm, in this eating together, the social liens; it re-solidifies the social glue of the family structure and institution. Within the family hierarchy the person who presides over the table (usually the father, but it can be almost anybody in his absence) is in charge of justice, fairness, and equality: whether in gratitude because of the abundance or assessing the scarcity, in either case the head of the table's function is to adjudicate Page 106 → and to be sure that all get their fair share of food—and to oversee the circulation of information, comments, and anecdotes. The figure presiding over the table can even regulate when and what is acceptable to speak about during eating time, what should be the right speed at which food is to be ingested, when and why one can be excused to leave from the table, and so on. The figure presiding continues in this function during the sobremesa, that is, the time spent lingering and chatting after the meal. It's perhaps significant that in English there is no specific word for sobremesa. Perhaps, the sobremesa as a specific form of continuation of the family gathering is not a custom outside of Latino culture—and perhaps other cultures do not value this stretch of time extending familial contact. FA:
IS:
Sobremesa: the word itself—English translation: above the table—is deliciously allegorical. Only after the meal is over does the real convivio begin…
FA: IS:
Convivio, convivial gathering.
The sobremesa is about allowing the digestive system to take its time in the company of others.
The whole ritual is becoming less and less present for all people in the United States where families are increasingly fragmented, geographically, socially, and by work. I have family in Los Angeles and several Mexican cities, my brother lives in Colorado, my sister in the Bay Area, my father in Mexico City, and I in Ohio. FA:
IS:
I remember engaging in hypnotizing sobremesas with the Taibo family in Mexico City.
FA:
Taibo, as in Paco Ignacio Taibo II, the creator of Mexican detective Héctor Belascoarán Shayne? You talked about him before.
Indeed, and his father, Paco Ignacio Taibo I, the biographer of Dolores del Río and other Mexican cinema stars, an endearing newspaper columnist as well as cultural critic. He was my editor at El Universal. Taibo Father and his wife frequently invited me to their home on Saturdays to have sumptuous meals and talk, talk, talk… IS:
As we have discussed, eating in Latino culture is an important priority. Even for Latinos with scarce means, the importance of food is materialized in the fact that systematically large percentages of income are devoted to buying food. Even among poor people, the occasional sumptuous consumption of food is not limited to Quinceañera, birthdays and other festivities, but takes place when there are guests and they are invited to share a meal. The amount of Page 107 → money spent on the meal on such an occasion could be several times the amount spent on regular days. But I want to change our topic slightly: I want to talk about pornography. FA:
Roberto Bolaño, the Chilean author of The Savage Detectives (1998), and, perhaps more fittingly, the Leviathan-like novel 2666 (published posthumously in 2004), was captivated by pornography. And so am I. In Mexico pornography is, for the most part, an imported style: the exploitation of the body for mechanical purposes. IS:
FA: IS:
Why mechanical?
The difference between eroticism and pornography is that eroticism is about desire whereas pornography is about the mechanics of sex. Do not you agree?
Some serious, extremely accomplished writers (Guillaume Apollinaire, for instance) have written raw, blatant pornography, and many lesser ones have made incursions in this genre (Henry Miller and Anaïs Nin, come readily to mind, as well as, more contemporarily, Anne Rice). Released in 1972,Last Tango in Paris, Bernardo Bertolucci's acclaimed film was rated X in the United States and banned in Italy for fifteen years (the Italian Supreme Court ordered all copies destroyed and gave Bertolucci a four-month suspended sentence in jail). The sex scenes between Marlon Brando and Maria Schneider are simulated but look very real. Only four years later, another great movie director, Nagisa Oshima, released In the Realm of the Senses, a film consisting mainly of scenes where the actors have actual, unsimulated sex. Desire occupies center stage in these two films, as well as in the pornography written by Miller, Nin, and Rice. So, the way I see it, pornography and eroticism are both about desire; the real difference between one and the other is that pornography is conceived and executed as an unadorned, immediately efficacious masturbatory device. In other terms, the difference between eroticism and pornography is one of efficacy. Eroticism is almost always less effective because it is less focused; being more diffused, it creates a lower-intensity arousal. Pornography, on the contrary, requires hyperactivity and undivided attention to the masturbatory purpose. A good pornographer proceeds in a carefully structured way, seeking step by step to build an extended and growing state of sexual arousal and, finally, a strong release. This goal is less overt and more circuitous in eroticism, which is based on the devices of the allusion, the digression, the extended metaphor and the general tone and atmosphere. Page 108 → We see this difference quite clearly in two novels written by the Peruvian-Spanish Mario Vargas Llosa. The Swedish Academy awarded him the 2010 Nobel Prize in Literature considering “his cartography of structures of power and his trenchant images of the individual's resistance, revolt, and defeat.” According to those criteria, the Swedish Academy would have never given even a glance to Elogio de la madrastra (In Praise of the Stepmother), published in 1988, or to Los cuadernos de don Rigoberto (Notebooks of Don Rigoberto), in 1997, much less a prize of any sort. All the same, in these two novels Vargas Llosa shows anew his narrative skill by deftly intertwining eroticism (for the general tone and atmosphere) and straightforward pornography. As a result, any reader following the stories may easily perceive in the long-winded, diffuse, baroque, and somewhat rambling phrases of certain passages the presence of eroticism, FA:
while the alert, sharp, speedy, short, and unembellished words, sentences, and paragraphs will highlight the presence of the pornography. We must admit—don't you think?—that our latest Latin American Nobel laureate is not only an extraordinary novelist but a brilliant and technically superb pornographer! Vargas Llosa is a superb pornographer—quite provocative! But I am not sure it cuts to the chase. I like your subtle distinction between eroticism and pornography. However, it isn't a matter of efficacy exclusively. Pornography is the mercantilization of sex, a way to look at intercourse as a mechanical act, whereas eroticism is about discovery: the discovery of another person's body and one's own. I have never been a fan of the two novels by Vargas Llosa that you have invoked. They are trite, uninspiring, more a chore to read and less a pleasure. And if a novel about sex and sexuality does not provide the reader with pleasure, then it is a failure. Still, I would not call them pornographic. Rather, I would describe them as a failed attempt at eroticism. IS:
FA: IS:
Because they did not awaken any desire in me.
FA: IS:
Why failed?
Great! It's a distinction that makes a difference. I accept it and embrace it.
Bolaño has a fine story, “Putas asesinas” (Assassin Whores), in which a prostitute takes revenge against a male star who shows up on TV.
Yes, a very disturbed young woman riding a motorcycle to pick up a young, horny man she chose because something in his eyes attracted her as a magnet when she saw them on the television screen. Page 109 → A random choice and a random murder, this last not explicitly, of that guy, called Max (or so she calls him, for there are many events and facts we are never sure about in this story). The story is told from her point of view, and at a certain point she (in my translation) says, “Women are assassin whores, Max, they are monkeys shivering with cold who stare into the horizon from a sick tree, they are princesses looking for you in the dark, crying, seeking the words they will never be able to say.” In the Spanish edition of the same book, there is another extraordinary story about the world of pornography at the time of videocassettes. It takes place in the Colombian city of Medellín and is narrated by the son of a female pornographic movie star. One of the most interesting (and hilarious) features of this story are the summaries the narrator makes of the scripts. It's literally irresistible. Bolaño had a great sense of humor, an imagination bordering on surrealism, and a great inventiveness when it came to names and nicknames. It's a pity he died young. FA:
In Japan, in Europe, and in the United States, the culture of pornography is widespread. In the Hispanic world it is equally present although it keeps a lower profile, maybe as a result of the strong fist of the Catholic Church. IS:
I'm not too sure about that. You know, Spain (along with Italy), reputed as being among the most Catholic nations in Europe (and perhaps the world), was the country where pornography became omnipresent starting in the late seventies. Franco had been the fascist ruler of the country since 1939, using the self-styled title Caudillo de España, por la gracia de Dios (Leader of Spain, by the Grace of God). After his death in November 1975, the iron-heel-, iron-fist-ruled country experienced a burst of hedonism, mental freedom, and artistic rebellion. It was a nationwide cultural phenomenon, with its two main centers in Barcelona and Madrid. Called La Movida (The Movement), it gave birth to new social viewpoints and values reflected and encouraged by the work of filmmakers such as Pedro Almodóvar and Fernando Trueba, writers such as Vicente Molina Foix and Francisco Umbral, and comic book authors such as Ana Miralles and Carlos Giménez. In 1977 the publishing house Tusquets began printing a collection called La Sonrisa Vertical (The Vertical Smile), directed by the very famous filmmaker Luis FA:
García Berlanga, specialized in erotic and pornographic stories and novels by Spanish authors and writers from other parts of the world (from Camilo José Cela, Francisco Page 110 → Umbral, Almudena Grandes, and Mario Vargas Llosa through Pierre Louys, Georges Bataille, Pauline Réage, and Marguerite Duras to John Cleland, Frank Harris, and Henry Miller, for instance. The collection ceased in 2004 because it was judged that pornographic fiction had become mainstream and no longer played a rebellious role.) Also, there was literally an explosion of pornographic magazines, openly sold in every street corner kiosk, to customers of all ages and genders. And then suddenly there were hundreds of movie houses in the country specializing in hard-core pornographic films, made nationally and internationally. It was as if Spain had suddenly made a quantum leap into another world. Only a few years before, large tour companies in many cities in Spain had been organizing daily bus trips taking people north to the French town of Perpignan (as well as other frontier towns, such as Collioure) for them to watch Last Tango in Paris (1972), a film banned by the state authorities and condemned by the Church. Imagine that, people by the thousands getting on those buses and sometimes traveling for hours to see Marlon Brando and Maria Schneider faking sex—including the famous scene of anal penetration using butter as lubricant, which changed the meaning of “pass me the butter” for a long time in ordinary exchanges. From one moment to another—the dictator finally dead after a long agony—the whole population in Spain becomes actively and passively exposed to an explosion of visual and written pornography. Around that time the same thing was happening in Italy, where Cinecittà was crumbling and a new pornographic industry began to flourish. In 1978 Italian audiences saw for the first time on live television a famous porn star bare her breasts; the actress was Ilona Staller, known as La Cicciolina, who went on to be elected to the Italian parliament in 1987 while continuing a successful career in filmic pornography. Videocassettes were an invention that made pornography spread like wildfire all over the world. This effect increased exponentially with CDs and DVDs. Now, because of the Internet, pornography has become a mainstream phenomenon. In Mexico City, a neighborhood called Tepito has specialized in the manufacturing of pirate copies of pornography made in the United States, Germany, and other European countries, as well as in Russia, India, Japan, and Korea. This business is huge in terms of profits and political power. It most certainly doesn't trail far behind drug trafficking in its capacity to Page 111 → feed the omnipresent corruption in Mexico. Every single town in the country receives truckloads of pornography weekly, sometimes daily, coming from Tepito. So it happens that one of the reputedly most Catholic countries in the world is one of the greatest consumers of pornography. The same must be said of Brazil, the biggest country in Latin America, with the biggest Catholic population—and with the biggest pornographic industry, both indigenous and international. More original pornographic films are made in Brazil than in Mexico. I do not have the hard facts; all my information comes from what I have randomly read in the press and on the Internet. But facts seem to indicate that the Church has been defeated here. “The strong fist of the Catholic Church,” to use your expression, has not been as powerful as the flock's urgent use of hands and fingers to pleasure itself. IS:
Remember: wherever the law is strictest, the act of trespassing is juiciest.
Yes, you are right. Our discussion of pornography here is linked to our previous discussion of the role of the common religious doxa among Latinos in the United States and among the various populations south of the border. In many countries pornography is a legal business. But in most countries the bulk of the business is done illegally, through unauthorized copies or by the production of child pornography, for instance. FA:
IS:
Do you think there is a particular type of pornography that belongs to Hispanic civilization?
FA:
And is it a modality of lo cursi?
IS:
I, for one, do not think all pornographies are alike. The theme and the execution vary from culture to culture, depending on what is considered gratifying.
FA:
Yes, there are more or less marked differences, but in the last instance they are essentially variations on a very small, limited theme.
Ever noticed that the flesh, la carne trémula, of the Virgen de Guadalupe is never exposed? She is a motherly figure. An asexual motherly figure. In the eighties, a museum exhibit in Mexico City became a cause célèbre when one of its artists presented La Virgen in a bikini. But why not? Why can't our religious imagery be subjected to artistic reconfiguration? You talked about the carnival in our previous conversation. Ridiculing our political leaders is a sport. Why can't the same be done with our religious iconography? IS:
I had never thought about that. In fact, now that you mention it, Page 112 → the Virgen de Guadalupe doesn't even have legs or breasts. As you say, she is totally asexual. More, she is less human than the Virgin Mary, often portrayed with a full body (limbs, bosom). I'd like to pick up on your mention of the Virgen de Guadalupe in a bikini as emblematic of just how thoroughly she is woven into our pop-culture sensibility. She's not only of central importance to Luis Valdez's Teatro Campesino productions (especially, of course, the pastorelas), but also appears in all variety of artistic expressions: from tattoo art to the Chicana feminist recuperations seen in the art of Yolanda López and Alma López. In one of Yolanda López's paintings, Portrait of the Artist (1978), which make up a series of self-portraits titled Our Lady of Guadalupe, she runs at the viewer with a dress that flies open just enough to show her muscular legs, all while smiling, holding a snake in one hand and the trademark La Virgen blue-starred cape in another. FA:
The Yolanda López image is a trademark of the Chicano Movement. Years ago, I met López in Germany. I remember her looking just like the character in the poster. IS:
The poster brings life and movement to a tradition of depicting La Virgen as paralyzed. And Alma Lopéz makes a new La Virgen by taking the tattoo of La Virgen seen more typically on Latino men's backs and, through digital photographic manipulation, placing it on the back of a Chicana. In her 1999 series Tattoo, Lupe & Sirena, a male tattoo artist needles, while a Chicana with her eyes closed and head turned to the right is leading us to take in a U.S./Mexico corrugated border fence and a Los Angeles cityscape at dusk. She stands strong above and across this landscape. FA:
This type of iconography is a step forward in Mexico's use of La Virgen. By this I mean that while Mexicans adapt the image in countless ways, the political uses Chicanos—and, especially, Chicanas—make of the religious artifact are far more daring, not to say emphatically politicized. IS:
We might even consider the character Cherry Darling (Rose Mc-Gowan) in Robert Rodriguez's Planet Terror (2007) a modern-day incarnation. Recall that Rodriguez ends the film with Cherry, comfortable in her re-created woman-warrior body (machine-gun/grenade-launching peg leg), riding on a beach south of the U.S./Mexico border (the pyramid of Tulum appears) atop a horse with her red and blue robes flowing and a child in tow. She's leading the people of Page 113 → all colors to refuge. Rodriguez's Cherry is La Virgen as a modern-day protectress, a gun peg-legged warrior mother… FA:
IS:
What would Father Hidalgo y Costilla have thought of all this?
A few paragraphs ago, I referred to how this refiguration of La Virgen appears in the digital collage work of Alma López. Importantly, in the series I mention, Tattoo, Lupe & Sirena, she has us focus on tattoo art—arguably one of the nodes where self-expression and the popular come together in Latino culture. FA:
IS:
Tattoos, it strikes me, have helped Latinas reclaim their bodies.
Indeed, the art form itself has not only evolved, but become more and more popular. In East Los Angeles, where my uncle (passed down from his dad) has an auto mechanic shop, there used to only be a few tattoo parlors. Now they seem to be everywhere, including featured on TV. I'm thinking in particular of TLC reality show LA Ink (2007–2011) that is hosted by Mexican-born tattoo artist Latina Kat Von D (aka Katherine Von Drachenberg). FA:
I follow you, although I confess never to have watched LA Ink. Still, I'm fascinating by the gender empowerment at play here. Elena Poniatowska once told me during a conversation that the difference between a Mexican woman and a Chicana woman is how feisty the later actually is. IS:
FA:
Yet we see the Latina body portrayed in hypersexual ways in mainstream culture.
Yes, the stereotype persists: black males are potent and Latina females are hot and domitable. TV variety shows like A la cama con Porcel from Telemundo hypersexualize women. On occasion Don Francisco does the same on Sábado Gigante. To see on television mujeres pechonas, women with gigantic breasts, is not rare. Yet no one ever complains of the objectification of la mujer latina on the small screen. On the contrary, it is part of our daily diet of images. IS:
FA: IS:
I used to think this objectification was due to the absence of women producers and women directors, but I no longer hold that belief to be true.
I like that confession: thought is never static.
There are now many women in executive positions in all kinds of shows, and they do not seem to challenge this pattern or to move away from it. Take the very successful Ugly Betty, famously coproduced by Salma Hayek. Five of the primary characters in this show are women and four are men. The thematic context of the story line Page 114 → is a fashion magazine produced in a place where models and other women stroll frequently in front of the camera. Now, all along since the first season to the fourth and last, the prototype of the attractive adult female is the extremely large-breasted, slim, tall, fine-featured, light-colored, and blemishlessskin woman. Supposedly, the gist of the show is that ugly is pretty (so long as you have the right clothes, the right makeup, and no braces). Betty's road from rags to riches starts at a place where she wears a Mexican poncho that hides 80 percent or more of her not slender body, horrible clothes, horrible shoes, horrible bangs, and horrible braces; it ends at a place where she is not only a honcho, but a head honcho who wears designer clothes, has left her bangs far behind along with her braces, and leaves Manhattan for Europe. Now, as all the other young women in the fashion industry depicted in the show, she is ready to flaunt bosom and derrière—in London. Salma Hayek seems to have made a lot of money with this show, which women loved. FA:
Samuel Ramos, the essayist on which Octavio Paz took part of his inspiration for The Labyrinth of Solitude, talked about Mexican women as either vírgenes or putas. IS:
This is a machista dichotomy born in Medieval Spain and later transplanted into Latin America. I do not know what place it has in the work of Samuel Ramos, a Mexican philosopher who had his fifteen minutes of fame in the thirties and was briefly revived in 1949 thanks to some mention of his work in The Labyrinth of Solitude by Octavio Paz. I lost my copy of Profile of Man and Culture in Mexico, where Ramos defines the Mexican character on the basis of the more or less orthodox psychoanalytic concept of the inferiority complex. Following Alfred Adler, co-founder with Freud and a few others of the psychoanalytic movement, Ramos considered that the main defining trait of Mexicans was their lack of self-esteem, a lack that made them simultaneously subservient and aggressive, meek and FA:
macho. Paz, of course, picked up this then modish point of view and turned it into a commonplace. It's easy to call it a machista dichotomy. The question IS: what effect does it have in culture? Or is it simply another intellectual chimera, a way for middle-class “thinking” people to reduce the society in which they live into easy-to-handle categories. My impression is that the dichotomy has dialectical traction: it both reflects what is around it and influences those surroundings. I wonder why Ramos—and Paz Page 115 → soon after—does not present a similar dichotomy related to Mexican men between machos and gays? Is it because they themselves would be enwrapped in that dichotomy? IS:
Your point is well taken. Perhaps the phenomenon is indeed more complex. And it's most likely that a similar dichotomy between the macho and the gay male would have been literally unthinkable for both Ramos and Paz. FA:
IS:
I am told that narco culture in Mexico is producing a unique type of porno movie geared toward drug traffickers.
As far as I know, it's the drug traffickers themselves who are diversifying their activities and are now lording it over human trafficking and prostitution as well as pornography in all its guises, including child pornography. This evolution has taken place in Mexico and in many other countries, including Russia and the United States. The most lucrative businesses in the world—trafficking in weapons, in people, and in drugs—are now almost always interrelated and in the hands of the same groups of criminals, the same national and international mobs. FA:
IS:
Incidentally, do you see an end soon to the war on the drug cartels in Mexico?
What a tragic situation we are living through today! Corruption has been pandemic in Mexico for most of its history, but it has acquired new features in the last fifteen years or so. When President Calderón assumed office on December 1, 2006, his election had been wholly discredited by fraud, and he had very little social support from the general population. So to bolster his extremely weak political position he put the army out in the streets. The excuse invoked was the need to launch a war on drugs and the drug cartels. The message was otherwise heard by millions of angry farmers—further pauperized by the North American Free Trade Agreement, which came into force on January 1, 1994—who saw Calderón's move as a warning for them to think twice before attempting to rebel as the Zapatista movement had done over a decade ago in Chiapas. Today the army is present all over the country, in cities and in rural areas. Meanwhile, Mexican workers are struggling with low wages, underemployment and unemployment, an ever rising cost of living, budget cuts in all social domains, particularly education and health, generalized corruption in the state, including the justice departments, the police, and the army, and a permanently increasing Page 116 → violence. Some fifty thousand people (almost all civilians) have been killed in the five-plus years since the so-called war against the drug cartels was launched. Furthermore, corruption associated with drug and human trafficking has spread from Mexico to the United States, as evinced in Arizona, where three Maricopa County police officers under the command of Sheriff Joe Arpaio (who is the self-proclaimed “America's toughest sheriff”) got busted for smuggling drugs and humans and for laundering money for the Mexican Sinaloa cartel. This, it seems, is only the tip of the iceberg of corruption in Sheriff Arpaio's office. Be that as it may, the side-effects of Calderón's war are a never-ending nightmare with serious repercussions on the daily lives of Latinos in this country. On the one hand, there is the covert profiling of Latinos by police officers in many counties and several states, as well as laws forbidding the hiring of undocumented immigrants; on the other, there is the reluctance to give legal immigrant status to millions of undocumented Latinos. FA:
IS:
To go back to our main subject here, what do you think about gay pornography among us?
It's appalling that the dynamics of sadomasochism so prevalent in heterosexual pornography are almost the rule in gay and lesbian and transsexual pornography. Sex is now universally depicted as essentially a rough and even violent endeavor. It very rarely appears as the rewarding encounter of human beings fulfilling a biological need for caress, touch, kiss, sexual arousal, and sexual satisfaction—in a safe environment where the partners involved are physically and psychologically unscathed. The myriad subgenres established in online pornography include the specifically Latino and Latina variants. And the Latino gay pornography is based, like all the others, on a belligerent dynamic that often reaches extremes of cruelty. FA:
IS:
There's the side of soft pornography that deals specifically with violence. We mentioned already Rodriguez's film Machete but I did not ask if you liked it.
Yes, I did. In fact, with the exception of Spy Kids II (2002), Spy Kids III (2003), and Once Upon a Time in Mexico (2003) Rodriguez's can do no wrong. His total control over the product, from writing to shooting, to editing, to special-effects choreographing, to music-score composing allows him to achieve consistently his aesthetic goals: to satisfyingly entertain his popcorn crowd. FA:
I thought it was superb. Rodriguez is the Latino Quentin Tarantino. Page 117 → Or maybe Tarantino is the non-Latino Rodriguez. Of course, they have collaborated on several occasions. IS:
Yes, Quentin Tarantino has been an actor in four movies directed by Rodriguez (in 1995 in Desperado and in the segment “The Misbehavers” in Four Rooms, also 1995, a year later in From Dusk Till Dawn, and then in Planet Terror) and has worked closely with Tarantino on scripts and the filming of several films, including Sin City and Grindhouse (2007). Both embrace the comic book sensibility—even casting their films with the same stock of actors that look very comicbookish. But there's a smart-aleck attitude that comes off in Tarantino films that we don't feel with Rodriguez. Tarantino's characters talk too much—and are mindnumbingly ironic. What saves his films is the lithe actress Uma Thurman. She is the punctum that lends a certain grace and gravitas to his otherwise overly selfsatisfied and self-indulgent films. One of the many things I like about Rodriguez is his proficiency in nearly all the different domains of the storytelling: from production to shooting to creating the CG special effects and animation. This is a huge display of creativity. It's the fact that he doesn't do the same film over and over again. One minute he will make the masterful made-for-cable TV fifties B-movie teen-flick Roadracers (1994) and the next a film about kids who save the world and the next a film about zombies and mutants—and to great success. He has the uncanny knack of knowing well the audience he's making his films for—and making his films to satisfy these very different audiences. FA:
IS:
Did you find the plot of Machete well structured and sufficiently intriguing to keep the audience interested from beginning to end?
Yes, I did. And at the same time, while watching the movie we are always aware that the plot can be very thin and even inconsistent without for a minute letting us down, for Machete is a perfect example of the very definition of cinema: storytelling through movement and action (bodies, camera angles, and editing rhythms). No rest for the wicked! Besides, because of its structural identity with comic book narrative, the film brings us quite frequently to a fantasy world where daydreaming and wishful thinking rule and all disbelief is suspended. The vigilantes and the politicians making fortunes out of the suffering and hardship of undocumented immigrants get their rightful punishment and the Latinos draw a final victory. What is there not to like? FA:
What would have been the cultural impact had the “wardrobe malfunction” Page 118 → that exposed Janet Jackson's boob in a Super Bowl musical special during the intermission a few years ago would have happened to a Latina musician, say Gloria Estefan? IS:
Whether expressions of sympathy, glee, or disdain—they would have been more numerous and more evident. We are, after all, large in number as this country's majority minority. FA:
IS:
Maybe.
Janet Jackson's nipple-showing was seen more as a provocation or a stunt than an accident, and many people wanted her punished for that. And of course, there's a certain amount of racism in such a reaction. FA:
Yes. As currencies, white, brown, and black skin, especially breast skin, have different cultural values. Every so often there are calls to outlaw pornography. And in several Latin American countries, pornography is indeed prohibited. But to exist, democracy and free speech depend not on legal restraint—that is, it is implausible to endorse certain types of speech and forbid others—but on morality. And the intersection of culture and morality is inhabited by taste. As long as pornography is legal yet taste defines it as unappealing, the moral principles on which society is built remain feasible. IS:
FA:
Even if pornography is rejected on moral grounds, it is incredibly lucrative.
That is exactly where I was going…Rejecting pornography on moral grounds does not mean it lacks a central place in our culture. The number of consumers is enormous. Men of all ages, single, married, divorced, or widowed, and to a lesser degree a similar range of women, make it a profitable, self-regenerating machine. If that many people drink from its waters, how can it be morally reprehensible? The answer is that Western civilization is a morally ambiguous structure. For instance, it condemns extramarital affairs yet these types of affairs are pervasive. In fact, they are a force that serves to reconfigure who we are, how our loyalties are expressed. Morality is built on the premise of a categorical NO. Seven out of the Ten Commandments are negative instructions: Do not murder, Do not commit adultery, Do not steal…Needless to say, the forbidden contains in itself a never-ending allure: we want what we cannot have. IS:
FA: IS:
Put differently, laws are written to be broken.
Or at least to be tasted. In any case, pornography is a fundamental ingredient of democracy. I do not have a problem with it, though. Do you?
Page 119 → No, not at all. As I mentioned before, what I find worrisome is the trend to turn pornography more and more into a monothematic depiction of power relations. In pornographic films you see actors actually physically hurting and humiliating other actors, and you see the exact replica of this in the so-called amateur variety. If this trend continues growing at its present pace, soon all pornography will become simply camera takes of roughness, violence, and subjugation in sexual intercourse. This is surely far from the sensuous and intellectual complexity, learning experience, enormous pleasure, and rich and varied physical feelings involved in sex. Pornography need not abandon the abundance actually found in human experience of sexual encounters. Perhaps someday it will explore more fully this insufficiently known territory and therefore become a more varied and efficient masturbatory aid. FA:
Page 120 →
Page 121 →
Epilogue: Sense and Porquería It's time for some final observations on the cultural education of senses, especially with a view toward the future, the next generation. By cultural I mean material, intellectual, and interpretive, the three dimensions I offered in the prologue to this book that encompass what I understand to be the concept of “culture.” FREDERICK LUIS ALDAMA:
ILAN STAVANS:
I am all ears, although I fear for a theoretical approach that might kill our joie de vivre.
Joking aside, Ilan, you and I have been talking about food, religion, narrative fiction, art, films, music, and a host of other subjects that seem to have little in common other than the fact that they belong to what we may term Latino culture—or more expansively Latin/o American culture. FA:
IS:
Ay, the name game again! Our discussion has mostly dealt with Mexican artifacts on both sides of la frontera.
What we've seen is how customs, habits, tastes, preferences, implicit and explicit norms, and many other cultural features, not to forget language, migrate together with the people who literally embody them and who thus bring them to their new country, to their new homeland to coexist with other cultural elements and eventually to merge with them and then reemerge as a new culture, a new creation. FA:
IS:
Are you talking about the process of assimilation?
All the cultural features brought with the first generation are usually then transmitted to the next generations in an increasingly attenuated way. Memory plays a decisive role here, but so do direct experience and many other factors that affect human behavior, such as emotions and new knowledge. Be that as it may, when migration becomes massive, the cultural heritage it carries, whether diminished or not over time, has an impact on the mainstream, just as the cultural features of the mainstream as a whole flow into the smaller ethnic components of the general population of the host country. FA:
Do you know the Hebrew word mishmash? It doesn't mean mixmatch Page 122 → but mess, confusion, chaos…Of course, chaos is an alternative form of order. IS:
With Latino culture, there is a massive two-way flow between Latino and mainstream culture. Latinos are educated by the mainstream and in their turn educate the mainstream. In this sense, we can imagine a point in time in the future where Latinos will be as much a part of the mainstream as today we consider the Irish or any other immigrant culture a component of the mainstream. FA:
IS:
Perhaps we should have titled this epilogue “How Latinos Became White.”
Already today there are hardly any borders between many ethnic minorities and the mainstream. I have to tell people that a good half of my ancestors hail from Ireland and the other half from Guatemala and Mexico for them to ascribe to me any specific ethnic origin. Culture and genes do not stay separate for long. FA:
IS:
Nothing does…Miscegenation is the rule of the universe. Ask Charley!
FA: IS:
What Charley?
Charley Darwin, the author of The Descent of Man (1871). And surely man is always on the descent.
All social contact tends toward social fusion. This is a point Fernando Ortiz made with respect to Cuba, but I believe his concepts of social syncretism and transculturation apply everywhere, most particularly in multiethnic states. In fact, what is the United States if not a “super-ethnicity,” a convergence of dozens and dozens of ethnic cultures in one common, overarching culture held together by common institutions and common laws and FA:
regulations? And this “super-ethnicity” is not static; on the contrary, it is evolving all the time, for the common institutions and laws must adapt constantly to new situations and new needs. In this sense, transculturation doesn't mean a simple transition from one culture to another. People do not switch cultures as they would shed old clothes. Ortiz was a polymath. I mentioned him not long ago. I find the style of Cuban Counterpoint hypnotic. Influenced by Polish-born British anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski, he preferred the concept of transculturation to synonyms like syncretism, acculturation, and even assimilation. IS:
Transculturation implies a process of social syncretism where it is not a matter of just acquiring another culture (acculturation) or of giving up a previous culture (deculturation), but of creating a new Page 123 → cultural reality (neoculturation). English is defined as a linguistic offspring of the Anglo-Saxon, yet today Anglos are a minority of English speakers, for English is spoken in all five continents and is the most widely spoken language in the world. This new social reality has accelerated the evolution of the English language in the United States and everywhere else. FA:
IS:
Are you talking about a post-Latino America?
Yes. But at the same time I am talking about an ongoing process of neoculturation, one that will certainly continue being bumpy and difficult. We are creating a new world, a new culture, in a situation of world crisis. We simply have to do our best now to keep these events peaceful. Our uppermost concern is our children, their present and their future. Hope cannot be lost. When in despair, we have to ask ourselves: what will help the children function better as human beings? Neoculturation's response is that, as possessors and conveyors of cultural traits that are useful everywhere, children will be able to disregard the sirens of xenophobia, racism, discrimination, oppression, and exploitation. Not just in the United States, but in every Latin American country and beyond. FA:
IS:
A utopian vision: neoculturation. I endorse it!
The most powerful tool of neoculturation is knowledge. Thus Latino parents wish to make sure their children know how to read and write: in English and Spanish. They want them to know that Spanish, the language we speak at home is fully a language that will allow them to penetrate the treasure trove of knowledge and intellectual culture generally in Latin America and Spain. So after ages five and six, Latino parents convey the importance of being able to speak, read, and write in English and Spanish—both, and not just one. Importantly, they want them to learn the principles of arithmetic and later on the principles of mathematics; to know as many scientific facts in botany, zoology, physics, chemistry, biology, astronomy, and so on. And Latino parents want their children to know not only the facts of science, but at the same time the principles and procedures of science, the theories and hypotheses behind the findings of each science. FA:
IS:
Why?
Because this cultural baggage—the learning of the findings in science and how sciences proceed to explore all aspects of reality—is a universal baggage, one that knows no frontiers and is the basis of a truly universal communication. It can be acquired, used, and further Page 124 → developed in Mumbai, just as in San Francisco, in Mexico City, or in Buenos Aires. Latino parents want their children to be as proficient in the sciences and the humanities as they are in swimming, riding bikes, playing ball, or engaging in any other physical activity that will keep them healthy and beautiful and will allow them to create beauty in the form of gymnastics, ballet, and many other ways. FA:
Ironically, what you're describing is the triumph of ethnicity that caters to its own disappearance. In other words, to succeed as a minority is to disappear as such. That is the education of the senses as well as their betrayal. Frankly, it is a worthy dream yet an impossible one. Just as the presidential election of Barack Obama in 2008 didn't bring about a post-ethnic United States, the end of the racial divide is as far away today as it has ever been. Perhaps we engage more in an open dialogue on ethnicity. However, it would be foolish to be persuaded that such a dialogue is dismantling our innermost fears. If you think I'm mistaken, take a look at the world of European IS:
soccer. More than half a century after the end of World War II, xenophobia is alive and well every time an African, Jewish, or Muslim player is on the field, no matter how good he is. FA:
Knowledge is power.
Yes, but knowledge is always fragmentary, not to say subjective. Knowledge is a machine that enables us to control others. IS:
FA: IS:
Still, it's important not to give up, to persevere.
I agree. You're talking about local change, right? Although, needless to say, all change is local.
Beauty and truth are created locally and appreciated universally. They are idiolects as well as universal means of communication. E = mc2, Einstein's famous equation, Tchaikovsky's The Nutcracker (1892), García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude, Christopher Nolan's Batman Begins (2005), Los Bros Hernandez's Love & Rockets, James D. Watson and Francis Crick's double-helix model of DNA structure, a soccer game with Pelé or Maradona, an exhibition of gymnastics or an aquatic ballet: the truth and the beauty of any of these cultural events can be appreciated in Beijing as much as Mexico City or Los Angeles or Columbus or Amherst. In this sense, the total cultural education of the senses, body, mind/brain, while taking place locally, must always aim toward the general and the universal. FA:
IS:
You sound like a biblical prophet.
We can and should teach the new generations of Latinos to appreciate Page 125 → cultural traits that are omnipresent in our country of origin, to appreciate a good spicy mole; to appreciate a tasty, creamy guacamole; or to appreciate the Mexican visual tastes that tend to use very strong, firm, contrastive colors in architecture and design, for instance. At the same time, they must learn languages and many other communication skills. They must learn to appreciate science, art, and the humanities. FA:
I believe fusion gives room to pluralism. It might be a frightening thought to many, yet natural selection is about cross-fertilization. IS:
In today's globalized planet, each generation learns new aesthetic possibilities and acquires new aesthetic tastes. Our ears were not educated to the music of, say, India. Then The Beatles bring in Ravi Shankar to play the sitar with them and they jointly introduce this musical instrument to Western audiences in the new vehicle of popular Western music. The new resulting sound within the Western mainstream educates the senses of the Western mainstream to appreciate an instrument that was before a more localized Eastern phenomenon. FA:
I understand the migratory move you describe. I rather see that migration in a more constrained environment. Think of jazz. At first it is the music of the descendants of slaves, people denied a formal education. But now it's a genre adopted by the elite and commanding enormous money. Jazz, thus, is an emblem of change. But has its oscillation from the periphery of culture to center stage allowed the voiceless to have a voice? It has given voice to African jazz musicians. But black musicians in other genres are equally marginalized today. That is because there is always someone outside the mainstream trying to get in and someone in the mainstream on his way out. Culture is never static. IS:
Let me offer another example. If one's hearing has been educated by listening to Bach in the Los Angeles of the late twentieth century, it will differ from that of a person who has never listened to Bach and has been educated only by corridos, boleros, and pop music from Mexico. However, as is obvious, from the biological point of view nothing would impede the latter individual from becoming educated by Bach, and vice versa. For thousands of years, the hearing of the Chinese has been educated by instruments and musical traditions very different from those that shaped Bach and that Bach in turn shaped. Yet today Chinese musicians such as the Chinese Page 126 → two-stringed fiddle soloist Ma Xiaohui and members of the Shanghai Quartet are among the best interpreters of Baroque music in the world, particularly of Bach. FA:
We're talking about education, about a creative process in which the educator teaches as much as he learns. The teacher becomes the student who becomes the instructor. IS:
I'm interested in transmitting my cultural baggage to the next generation. At the same time, I don't want my communication with the next generation to be provincial and parochial about what goes on in the rest of the world. I want to transmit the Latino cultural baggage of Mexico that I've transported with me in my migration; and at the same time I want the next generation to know that there are a myriad of options and that the inheriting of this baggage is only one possibility, one item in the baggage as a whole that is filled each day by incoming items created everywhere in the world. FA:
IS:
George Bernard Shaw said that those who cannot change their minds cannot change themselves.
The United States was built and continues being built by people from all over the world. Each individual brought a particular cultural baggage. There are more than 190 countries represented in the United Nations, and probably more than half of them are represented in the United States. This means an enormous cultural abundance, a huge variety of sources, and a treasure trove of cultural inheritance. FA:
IS:
Abundance also means vertigo. Each generation needs to know more than the previous one.
We can point the next generation in the direction of cultural phenomena (literature, music, art, architecture) of the Americas and beyond worth their salt. We can point them in the direction of learning in the humanities that doesn't lead to solipsistic dead ends. We can lead them to generative research programs in the sciences—their findings and methods of inquiry. FA:
Heraclitus: the only constant is change itself. I endorse this view: just when we think we know who we are, we realize we're no longer the same. Our role in life might appear small, even insignificant. We're but a speck of dust, a link in the chain of generations. Yet everything we do—every little act, every major thouught—has enormous implications: it changes the past, the present, and the future, ours and everyone else's. IS:
The sharing of our various Latino-origin cultural baggage can be transmitted in the home; it is part of the private endeavor of education Page 127 → of the next generation. The public education takes place at school and in other institutional settings. But it would be foolhardy to adopt a small-town, provincial, parochial outlook. We must underline that there are a myriad of cultural options for the next generation, so we need to educate the next generation to be open to these options, and not in an indiscriminate way; they should have a deliberate, clear-cut understanding of what those options carry in terms of content and in terms of their application. Hence the importance of knowing the facts discovered by science, as well as how all sciences proceed in their explorations of reality. And the same with all the options that are included under the umbrella we call the humanities. The next generation should know how music works—how today's music is an evolution of the music we crafted and listened to in the Middle Ages, for instance, how literature, comic books, films work. They should know the facts of history and how those facts are established. FA:
For that to happen, the nation's school curriculum needs to be far more elastic. For education needs also to be about change. IS:
In a nutshell, Latino culture is an ensemble—the sum of many cultural traditions brought to the United States by people from all over the Americas Central and South, as well as the Caribbean. Preserving that cultural baggage is absolutely legitimate. Transforming it, enriching it, renovating it are absolutely necessary. What you have called a unity and a multiplicity in the making. FA:
IS:
E pluribus unum isn't a slogan but an objective.
We need to continue to argue on behalf of this position. At the same time, our Latino baggage is only a part of the cultural baggage existing and developing out there in the whole wide world. Therefore, we should not present our cultural baggage of the Latin/o Americas as the only legitimate and valid suitcases. We want the next generations to be planetary in their cultural options, including scientific and humanitarian, when it comes to their FA:
learning, their imaginations, their languages, their inquiries, and their aesthetic tastes. Members of the next generation need to see clearly that they are at once local and worldwide creators, thinkers, doers. Your vision is laudable. Of course we should prepare our children—my two own Latino boys, Josh and Isaiah—to be internationalists while appreciating their individual roots in the various cultures converging in them. But those convergences are complicated. In fact, this is a generation in touch with the global but apathetic also about Page 128 → embracing a universal worldview. It's hooked to technology; it's also quite selfish. We might want to seek something far more modest, too: the enjoyment of the trashy. I want to end with an emulation of a term that only now becomes tangible to me: la porquerías. In Spanish, it means filth, rubbish. It seems to me that, at the dawn of the twenty-first century, culture is an accumulation of porquerías. It's increasingly impossible to distinguish between what matters and what doesn't, between the aesthetically pleasing and the intrinsically repulsive. The abundance of technological devices and the torpedo of cultural filth attacking us on a regular basis deprive us of the capacity to think clearly. In this confusion, we too become porquerías, losing direction, our sense of self. Little of what surrounds us makes sense. Yes, we're able to communicate at the speed of light. But what do we tell one another? Nothing of substance. IS:
FA:
In praise of nonsense.
Let me add, as a grand finale, a quote by Mark Twain: “A person who won't read has no advantage over one who can't read.” IS:
FA:
Are you praising ignorance?
Popular culture shouldn't be left to those seeking the forgetfulness that comes with entertainment. It should be a field in which to exercise the critical “I.” Nonsense isn't the absence of sense but its expression through other means. IS:
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Index Abbott, Edwin A.: Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions, 63 Académie Française, 53 Acosta, Oscar “Zeta,” 34, 53; Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo, 4–5, 33; The Revolt of the Cockroach People, 4 Addams Family, 45 aesthetics, 6–7, 8, 14, 15, 17, 59, 60, 72, 78, 79, 80, 89, 91, 92, 95, 103, 125; telenovela, 93; willfulness, 83 Afghanistan, 65 Agustini, Delmira, 93 Albin, Verónica, 9 Alcaraz, Lalo, 49, 50, 80; La Cucaracha, 78; Migra Mouse, 78 Aldama, Arturo, 47 Aldama, Frederick L.: Your Brain on Latino Comics, 48, 52, 72, 78, 80 Aldama, Luis, 97 A la cama con Porcel, 113 Allá en el Rancho Grande, 16, 18 Allen, Woody: The Purple Rose of Cairo, 6 Allende, Isabel, 54, 60; The House of the Spirits, 31 Almodóvar, Pedro, 93, 109 Alvarez, Dave, 80; Yenny, 78 Anaya, Rudolfo A., 55 Apollinaire, Guillaume, 58, 107 Argentina, 29, 44, 79, 86; beef industry, 101. See also Maradona, Diego Armendáriz, Pedro: La Perla, 16 Arrabal, Fernando, 71 Arriola, Gus: Gordo, 79–80 Asamblea de Barrios (Neighborhood Assembly), 74, 75 athletes, 14–15 Auden, W. H.: “The More Loving One,” 64
Augustine, Saint, 32 Aurrera, 47 authority, 8, 20, 26, 44 Avatar, 60, 61 The Avengers, 76 avocado, 100 Bach, Johann Sebastian, 125–26; Brandenburg Concertos, 7–8 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 38 Banderas, Antonio, 88 Barbies, 9, 67, 68 Basic Books, 27 Basque Ignatius of Loyola, 30 Bataille, Georges, 110 Batman, 52 Battlestar Galactica, 66 Baudelaire, Charles, 58 The Beatles, 125; “I Want to Hold Your Hand,” 13 beef, 100–101 Benedict XVI (pope), 29, 30 Benjamin, Walter: The Arcade Project, 92 Berlanga, Luis García,109 Berlin, Isaiah, 56 Bernal, Gael García,88 Bertolucci, Bernardo: Last Tango in Paris, 107, 110 Bichir, Bruno, 88 Bichir, Demián, 88 Bichir, Odiseo, 88 Blade Runner, 60 Blue Crush, 66
Blue Diamond, 46 Bolaño, Roberto, 6, 60, 94, 95, 109; “Putas asesinas,” 108; The Savage Detectives, 107 Bond movies, 59 Borges, Jorge Luis, 53, 64; “Death and the Compass,” 55; Dreamtigers, 69; In Memoriam A.R.,” 69; The Invention of Morel, 57–58 Brando, Marlon: Last Tango in Paris, 107, 110; Viva Zapata!, 88 Braschi, Giannina, 59 Brazil, 1–2, 4; films, 20; pornography, 111; same-sex unions, 44; telenovelas, 86 Brontë, Emily: Wuthering Heights, 16 Brooks, James L.: Spanglish, 88 Buffon, Comte de:“Discours sur le style,” 53 Buñuel, Luis; Abismos de pasión, 16; City of God, 20; The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, 20; La vía lactea, 20; Los olvidados, 20, 29; Simón del desierto, 20; Viridiana, 20 Cain, James, 82 California: culture, 45–46; hippie subculture, 71; Latino population, 23; Mexican-American population, 14 Camacho, Pedro, 87 Cameron, James: Avatar, 60, 61 Camp Rock, 66 Cannes Film Festival, 20 Cantinflas, 6, 7, 11–12, 13, 14, 24, 34; Allí está el detalle, 20 Page 130 → Cantú, Hector, 80; Baldo, 78 Capadocia: Un lugar sin perdón, 89 Caprica, 66 Caracol Televisión, 87 Cárdenas, Cuauhtémoc, 75 Cardona, René, 17 Carlyle, Thomas: On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History, 12 “Carnival del Barrio,” 49 cartoons, 46, 47–48, 50, 62, 68
Carvajal, Luis de, 50–51 Casares, Adolfo Bioy, 55; The Invention of Morel, 57–58 Castellanos, Carlos, 80; Baldo, 78 Catherine of Siena, 32 Catholicism, 8–9, 16, 28–29, 30, 31–32, 33, 34, 35–36, 37–38, 39; Día de los Muertos,38–39; exvotos, 37, 40; mochos, 36; Passion of Jesus Christ, 37–38; pornography, 109, 111; saints, 41–42; 54-sex unions, 44; Stations of the Cross, 37 Cela, Camilo José, 109 Central America, 65; Catholicism, 34, 37; chocolate, 104; migration, 102; tomatoes, 99 Chagoya, Enrique: Codex Espangliensis: From Columbus to the Border Patrol, 70 Chandler, Raymond, 55 Chaplin, Charlie, 12 charros (Mexican cowboys), 15, 17, 18 Chávez, César, 35, 41, 73 Chávez-Silverman, Susana: The Norton Anthology of Latino Literature, 34 Chespirito, 21, 67 Chicano Movement, 4–5, 35, 112 Chomsky, Noam, 1, 63 Cisnero, Sandra, 68; The House on Mango Street, 95 City College of New York, 24 City of God, 20 Cleland, John, 110 CNN en Español, 40 Cobo, Roberto, 20 Columbia Pictures, 20 Columbia University, 24 comic strips, 8, 9, 49; Latin America, 69, 71, 72, 78, 79, 80 Conrad, Joseph, 31 Copilco, Mexico, 47, 49 Copland, Aaron: Fanfare for a Common Man, 8
corn, 97–98 Corpi, Lucha, 55 Cortázar, Julio, 53, 58 The Cosby Show, 89 Cosmopolitan, 94, 95 Costello, Elvis, 6 Cri-Cri, 21 Crick, Francis, 124 Cristeros, 35 Cuba, 3, 44, 55–56; Revolution, 58; social syncretism, 122; society, 98–99 Cubanness, 99 culture of poverty, 22, 23, 27 Dante: The Divine Comedy, 7 Darío, Rubén,93 Dark Horse comics, 61 Darwin, Charles: The Descent of Man, 122 Dasche, Mordecai, 9 The Da Vinci Code, 51 Days of Our Lives, 86 De Fuentes, Ferando: Allá en el Rancho Grande, 17, 18 Degollado, Marcial Maciel, 29 de la Madrid, Miguel, 74 del Arco, Niño: Kalimán, El hombre incredíble, 72 de la Reguera, Ana, 88; Capadocia: Un lugar sin perdón, 89 del Paso, Fernando, 53 del Río, Dolores,19, 20, 106 Dennis the Menace, 79 Desperate Housewives, 66 DeTodo, 47
Día de los Muertos,38–39 Diana, Princess, 40 Díaz, Junot,53, 58 The Dirty Girls Social Club, 94 Don Quixote, 50, 102 Dora (the Explorer), 66, 67 Dostoevsky, Fyodor, 57–58; The Idiot, 7 Dreiser, Theodore, 82 DuBois, W. E. B., 14 Dulché, Yolanda Vargas: Memín Pingüín, 89; Rubí, 89 Duras, Marguerite, 110 Echeverría, Esteban:“El matadero,” 101 Eckhart, Meister, 32 Eco, Umberto: The Name of the Rose, 50 Economic Opportunity Act of 1964, 22–23 Einstein, Albert, 124 Eisenstein, Sergei, 17; Que Viva Mexico!, 18 El amor tiene cara de mujer, 49 El Capo, 86 El Cártel, 86 El Condorito, 78 El Santo, 46, 52, 67, 76, 77–78; Santo contra los zombies, 77; Santo contra la Momia Azteca, 77; Santo y la venganza de La Llorona, 77 Emerson, Ralph Waldo: Representative Men, 12 English language, 53, 86, 123; interface with Spanish language, 14 ephemeral culture, 9, 68 Espinosa, Frank: Rocketo: Volumes 1 & 2, 61 Esquivel, Laura: An Appetite for Passion, 104; Como agua para chocolate, 104 Page 131 → Estefan, Gloria, 118
ethnic cuisine, 99–100 The Event, 66 famine, 101–2 Faulkner, William, 62 Félix, María,18–19, 20 Fellini, Federico: La Dolce Vita, 40–41 Fernández, Emilio “El Indio,” 18; La Perla, 16–17 Fernández, Vicente, 15 Ferrara, America, 89 Figueroa, Gabriel, 18, 20; Allá en el Rancho Grande, 17 Flash Gordon, 60 Flaubert, Gustave: Madame Bovary, 85 Flintstones, 62–63 food, 39, 53, 97–106; fast, 59, 101. See also chocolate Forlán, Diego, 14 formulas, 54, 55, 56, 57, 58, 59, 60, 79, 81 Francis (pope), 29–30 Francisco, Don: Sábado Gigante, 113 Franco, Francisco, 109 freedom, 14, 65; definition of, 56; of speech, 35 French language, 2, 3, 53 Frente Democrático Nacional, 75 Freud, Sigmund, 26, 31, 114 Fuentes, Carlos, 52, 99, 100; Christopher Unborn, 64 future, 48, 56, 57, 60–66, 68, 98, 121, 122, 123, 126 García, Sara,90 García-Aguilera, Carolina,55 Garro, Elena, 58 Gaspar de Alba, Alicia: Desert Blood, 56
Gaucho, 13 Gente, 94 The George Lopez Show, 89 Gilb, Dagoberto, 53 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 68 Golden Age of Mexican cinema, 15, 17, 18, 90, 91 Gómez-Peña, Guillermo, 72, 73; Codex Espangliensis: From Columbus to the Border Patrol, 70 Góngora, Luis de, 42 Goodis, David, 82 Gracia, Jorge, J. E., 9 Grandes, Almudena, 110 Greenberg, Clement: “Avant-Garde and Kitsch,” 91–92, 93 Guízar, Tito: “Allá en el Rancho Grande?,”17 H.D., 58 Haggadah, 43 Hammett, Dashiell, 55 Hanna-Barbera, 62 Harris, Frank, 110 Hayek, Salma, 88; Ugly Betty, 113–14 Hayworth, Rita (Margarita Carmen Dolores Cansino), 20 HBO, 89 Head Start, 23 Heraclitus, 126 Hernández, Balcázar “Chicharito,” Javier, 14 Hernandez, Gilbert: Chance in Hell, 56; Citizen Rex, 61; Palomar, 81; Speak of the Devil, 56; Troublemakers, 56, 81 Hernandez, Jaime, 82; La Maggie La Loca, 81 Hernández, José: El Gaucho Martín Fierro, 13 Hernandez, Mario: Citizen Rex, 61 hero-worship, 11–44; chemistry, 22; childhood, 20–21; stars, 15; primary source, 14
Hidalgo y Costilla, Miguel, 34–35, 43, 113 highbrow culture, 6, 7, 53, 68, 81, 103 Hinojosa, Rolando, 55 Hispanic vs. Latino, as term, 1, 2, 3 Hispanic America vs. Hispanoamérica, 1–2 Hispanic kitsch, 33, 91 Hitchcock, Alfred, 53 Hitchens, Christopher, 31 ¡Hola!, 94, 95 Hollywood, 5, 19, 40, 66, 76, 88 Houdini, Harry, 96 Hughes, Robert: The Shock of the New, 59 Hugo, Victor: Les Misérables, 85 humor, 11, 12, 13, 22, 33, 38, 78, 109 Huxley, Aldous: Brave New World, 64 Ibero-America/Iberoamérica, 2 idols, 11, 41–42; Mexican matinee, 15; soccer players, 14 imitation, 55, 93 Immortality, 92 Infante, Pedro, 6, 19, 22; Dos tipos de cuidado, 18; Los tres alegres compadres, 18; Nosotros los pobres, 90; Pepe el toro, 90; Ustedes los ricos, 90 Institutional Revolutionary Party, 74 interpretations, 5, 7, 8 Iraq, 65 Iron Man, 52 Islas, Arturo, 58 Jackson, Janet, 118 Jaksić, Iván, 9; What Is ‘la hispanidad’?, 13 James Bond movies, 59 Jesuits, 29, 30
The Jetsons, 62 Jewish vs. Hispanic culture, 45 Jews: Latin America, 42; Mexican, 43 Job, 23 Jodorowsky, Alejandro: Aníbal 5, 71; Page 132 → El Topo, 71; Fábulas Pánicas, 71–72; Fando y Lis, 71; Kalimán, 49, 67, 70; Kalimán, 48, 70, 72 John of the Cross, 33 John Paul II (pope), 29 Jung, C. G., 26 Kaká, 14 Kalimán, 49, 70, 72 Kalimán, El hombre incredíble, 72 Kalimán: El siniestro mundo de Humanon, 72 Keneally, Thomas: Three Famines: Starvation and Politics, 101 ketchup, 99, 100 King, Stephen, 6 kitsch, 6, 8, 9, 60, 77, 93; Hispanic, 33, 91–92 Krall, Diana, 6 Kundera, Milan: The Unbearable Lightness of Being, 92 La familia burrón, 49 LA Ink, 113 language, 1–4, 121, 123, 125; adaptation, 12; interface between two, 14, 103; thought and, 64. See also English language; Spanglish; Spanish language Lantigua, John, 55 Laresgoiti, Francisco: 2033, 61 Lem, Stansilaw: Solaris, 63 Lennon, John, 40 Leonard, Elmore, 82 Lewis, Oscar: The Children of Sánchez, 8, 22–28; A Death in the Sánchez Family, 25; Five Families: Mexican Case Studies in the Culture of Poverty, 23, 25, 27 Llosa, Mario Vargas, 108, 110; Elogio de la madrastra La tía Julia y el escribidor (Aunt Julia and the
Scriptwriter), 87–88 Lockhart, Darrell B.: Latin American Science fiction Writers: An A-to-Z Guide, 61 lo cursi, 6–7, 9, 85–120 The Lone Ranger (comic strips), 45, 52 López, Alma: La Virgen, 112, 113; Tattoo, Lupe & Sirena, 112, 113 Lopez, Jennifer, 53 López, Solano: El eternauta, 61 López, Yolanda: Our Lady of Guadalupe, 112; Portrait of the Artist, 112 Los Angeles, CA, 104, 112; Catholicism, 35; culture, 125; East, 113 Los Angeles Public Library, 34 Los Bros Hernandez, 50, 52, 81, 94; Love & Rockets, 124 Los Legionarios de Cristo, 29 Louys, Pierre, 110 lowbrow culture, 6, 103 Lowry, Malcolm: Under the Volcano, 38, 39 luchadores, 52, 75, 77, 78 Lugones, Leopoldo, 93 Luna, Diego, 88 Mao Tse Tung, 102 Maradona, Diego, 14, 41, 124 Mardi Gras, 38 mariachis, 16 marijuana, 9, 53, 98 Marqués, María Elena:La Perla, 16 Márquez, García,104; One Hundred Years of Solitude, 60, 124 Martínez, Rubén:The Norton Anthology of Latino Literature, 34 Martínez, Steven:Love from the Shadows, 81 Marvel, 5, 83. See also Ultimate Marvel Ma Xiaohui, 126
Maximilian of Austria (Archduke), 35 Mayakovsky, Vladimir, 58 Mayans, 97 McCourt, Frank: Angela's Ashes, 28–29 McDonald's, 59, 101 McGowwan, Rose: Planet Terror, 112 Mesa-Bains, Amalia, 91 Mesoamérica, 97, 104 Mexican food, 99, 100 Messi, Lionel, 14 Mexico, 3, 5, 65, 70; aboriginal population, 43; actors and actresses, 19, 85; annexation, 2; beef, 100; butter, 100; Catholicism, 16, 34, 36, 37–38, 112; comics, 52; corruption, 115–16; culture, 14, 104, 124, 126; culture of poverty, 27; drug cartels, 115–16; education, 125–26; equal rights, 44; ethnicity, 122; family life, 22, 25, 26, 27; illegal drugs, 53, 115; independence, 35; industrialization, 11; Jews, 45; jokes, 12; ketchup, 100; migration, 102; mourning of Infante, 19; movie industry, 61; parents and music, 21; pornography, 107, 110–11, 115; psychotropic drugs, 71; ranchera movies, 16; science, 123–24; subsistence farmers, 102; telenovelas, 86, 89–90; television, 48; tobacco industry, 98; tomatoes, 99. See also U.S.-Mexico border Mexico City, Mexico, 16, 19, 39, 45, 46; Catholicism, 37; central plaza, 37; comics, 71; earthquakes, 74; family life, 23; housing, 75; Inquisition, 50; modernization, 47; same-sex civil unions, 44; slums, 24; social mobility, 24. See also Kalimán; Universidad Iberoamericana Miller, Henry, 107, 110 Miranda, Linn-Manuel: In the Heights, 49 Modernists, 58, 93 Monroe, James, 2 Monsanto Food Inc., 98 Monsiváis, Carlos, 14 Page 133 → Montalbán, Manuel Vásquez, 55 Montijo, Rhode: t-t-tartamudo, 80 Moreno, Mario, 11. See also Cantinflas Morland, Harold: Dreamtigers, 69 Morrison, Toni, 58 Morton, Carlos, 33
Moynihan, Daniel Patrick: “The Negro Family: A Case for National Action,” 23 Muslims, 43 myths, 73 naming, 1, 2 Napoleon III, 35 narconovelas, 86 National Fund for Popular Housing, 74 Nava, Michael, 54, 55 Negrete, Jorge, 90; Dos tipos de cuidado, 18–19; Los tres alegres compadres, 18 neoculturation, 123 Neoplatonists, 32 New Spain, 34 New York Times Sunday Magazine, 81 Ni muy muy, ni tan tan: Simplemente Tin Tan, 13 Nin, Anaïs,107 Nolan, Christopher: Batman Begins, 124 Norris, Frank, 82 North America, 2 North American Free Trade Agreement, 102, 115 Obama, Barack, 124 Oesterheld, Héctor Germán: El eternauta, 61 Olmecs, 97 Ortiz, Ferando: Contrapunteo cubano del azúcar y el tabaco, 98–99, 122 Orwell, George: 1984, 64 Oshima, Nagisa: In the Realm of the Senses, 107 Panic Movement, 71, 72 Partido de Acción Nacional, 35 Partisan Review, 91 Paz, Octavio: Alternating Current, 13; The Labyrinth of Solitude, 27, 38, 39, 90, 114–15
Pelé, 14, 124 Pepo. See Ríos, René Pineda, Cecile, 59; Face, 95–96 Pitol, Sergio, 68 Pixote, 30 Plascencia, Salvador, 59 plastic surgery, 95–96 Playboy, 94, 95 Plotinus, 32 pornography, 9, 107–11, 115, 118–19; gay, 116 Porphyry, 32 Portuguese language, 2, 3 Pound, Ezra, 58 poverty, 24, 28, 85, 98; culture of, 22, 23, 27; effects of, 26 Powell, Eric: Chimichanga, 103 pre-Columbian art, 69, 70 pre-Columbian civilizations, 69 Presley, Elvis, 40 Quevedo, Francisco de, 33 Quinn, Anthony, 88 Quino (Joaquín Salvador Lavado):Mafalda, 78–79 Rabelais, François, 34; Gargantua and Pantagruel, 33, 38 radionovelas, 87 Rama, Angel: La ciudad letrada, 93 Ramírez, Peter,80 Ramos, Manuel, 55 Ramos, Samuel, 114–15; Profile of Man and Culture in Mexico, 26–27 ranchera movies, 8, 16, 17, 20 Random House, 27
rasquachismo, 91 Réage, Pauline, 110 reason, 1, 5, 30–31, 90 religion, 43–44. See also Catholicism; Jews; Muslims repetition, 53, 54, 56, 70 Reyes, Alfonso, 58, 68–69 Rice, Anne, 107 Rice, Felicia: Codex Espangliensis: From Columbus to the Border Patrol, 70 Rio Grande, 1, 3, 23, 42 Ríos, Alberto,51 Ríos, René (Pepo):El Condorito, 78–79 Ripoll, María:Tortilla Soup, 103–4 Rivera, Alex: Sleep Dealer, 61 Rivera, Diego, 18–19 Roadracers, 117 Rodriguez, Alyssa, 94 Rodríguez, Luis:The Norton Anthology of Latino Literature, 34 Rodriguez, Michelle: Machete, 68 Rodriguez, Robert, 53, 82, 117; Desperado, 117; The Faculty, 77; From Dusk Till Dawn, 117; Grindhouse, 117; Machete, 68, 76–77, 116; “The Misbehavers,” 117; Once Upon a Time in Mexico, 116; Planet Terror, 112–13, 117; Sin City, 117; Spy Kids II, 116; Spy Kids III, 116 Romeo and Juliet, 57 Rulfo, Juan: El llano en llamas, 15 Salce, Carlos: zurdo, 61 Salinas de Gortari, Carlos, 75, 102 salsa, 97, 99 same-sex unions, 44 Sanchez, Mark, 14 Page 134 → Santiago, Wilfred, 80; In My Darkest Hour, 81; 21: The Story of Roberto, 81
Sariñana, Fernando: Amar te duele, 57 Sarmiento, Domingo Faustino: Facundo, 13 Schneider, Maria, 107, 110 science fiction, 61–64 Seder, 42 Selena, 40, 41 sex, 107, 108, 110, 113, 116, 119. See also pornography Shakespeare, William: Hamlet, 90 Shaw, George Bernard, 126 Sheinkin, Steve: El Iluminado, 50, 51, 100; Rabbi Harvey series, 50 Shklovsky, Victor, 55 Shua, Ana María,51 Sin Tetas No Hay Paraíso, 86 Skinner, B. F., 67, 68 social mobility, 24 Soler, Francisco Gailondo, 21 Sontag, Susan, 93 South America, 2, 65 Spain, 2, 3; Catholicism, 109; cosmetic surgery, 96; imperial, 92; language, 123; Medieval, 114; pornography, 110; secession, 18; television, 87 Spanglish, 13, 37, 69, 86, 103 Spanish-American War, 93 Spanish Inquisition, 47 Spanish language, 2, 3, 12, 27, 66, 103, 123; films, 15; history, 13; telenovela, 86 Speedy Gonzalez, 46–47, 68 Spinoza, Benedict de, 30–31 Stableford, Brian: The A to Z of Science Fiction Literature, 61 Star Wars, 60 Stavans, Abraham, 85; Chespirito, 21–22 Stavans, Ilan: A Critic's Journey, 93; El Iluminado, 50, 51, 100; The Hispanic Condition, 1; Latino USA, 49, 50;
Lengua Fresca, 29; Mr. Spic Goes to Washington, 49, 50; The Norton Anthology of Latino Literature, 34, 80; On Borrowed Words, 42; The Plain in Flames, 15; “Plastic Surgery,” 96; The Riddle of Cantinflas, 92; Spanglish: The Making of a New American Language, 37; “Viva el Kitsch!,” 92; With All Thine Heart, 31 Steinbeck, John: The Pearl, 16 Sue, Eugène: Les Mystères de Paris, 85 sugar, 98 Superbarrio Gómez, 74–76 superheroes, 9, 46, 49, 52, 68, 70, 72, 73–74, 75, 76, 83 Superman, 60 syncretism, 98, 103, 122 Taibo, Paco Ignacio, I, 106 Taibo, Paco Ignacio, II, 55, 106 Tarantino, Quentin, 53, 92, 116–17; Desperado, 117; Four Rooms, 117; From Dusk Till Dawn, 117; Grindhouse, 117; Planet Terror, 117; Pulp Fiction, 6; Sin City, 117 Tchaikovsky, Ivan: The Nutcracker, 124 technology, 8, 26, 59, 60, 61, 62, 128 Telecinco, 87 Telemundo, 86, 113 Televisa, 48 Teresa of Jesus, 32, 33 Terminator, 60 Texas: annexation, 2 Thomas, Saint, 32 Thompson, Jim: The Killer Inside Me, 82 Tin Tan, 7, 13, 14, 20 tobacco, 98 tomatoes, 99 Tort, Gerardo: De la calle, 20 Transition, 11 Trejo, Danny: Machete, 88
Tusquets, 109 Ugly Betty, 66, 86, 89, 113 Ultimate Marvel, 82 Umbral, Francisco, 109–10 United Nations, 4, 101, 126 United States: annexation of Mexico, 2; annexation of Texas, 2; parents and music, 21 Universidad Iberoamericana, 30 Updike, John, 6 Urquidi, Julia: Lo que Varguitas no dijo, 87–88 Uruguay, 44 U.S.-Mexico border, 2, 56, 78, 112 Valdés-Rodríguez, Alisa,54 Valdéz, Germán, 13. See also Tin Tan Valdéz, Luis: Teatro Campesino, 112 The Valley of the Dolls, 60 Vasquez, Deborah Kuetzpalin, 73; Citlali, La Chicana Super Hero, 72 Vega, Paz, 88 Velázquez, Diego: Las Meninas, 9 Veles, Lupe (María Guadalupe Vélez de Villalobos),20 Velez, Ivan, Jr.: Blood Syndicate, 52 Virgen de Guadalupe, 28, 31, 32, 34–35, 111, 112 Virgin Mary, 41, 112; black images, 34; Juan-Diego casts, 45, 46; statuettes, 32, 33 Von Drachenberg, Katherine (Kat Von D), 113 Washington, George, 34 Wassup Rockers, 66 Watson, James D., 124 Welles, Orson: Touch of Evil, 45 Page 135 → Wellfleet Harbor Actors Theater, 33
Western art, 41 Western audiences, 125 Western civilization, 32, 92, 118 Western Hemisphere, 2 Western mainstream, 125 Western music, 125 Western mysticism, 71 Westerns, 59 Western values, 76 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 1, 59 women's magazines, 62, 93–94 World Food Programme, 101 World War II, 65, 74, 93, 124 Yates, Donald, 9 Zola, Émile, 82