Transformations in the Map. Identities and Culture Industries

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Transformations in the

MapIdentities and Culture Industries

Jess Martn-Barbero

Translated by Zilkia Ianer

(in: Latin American Perspectives , Issue 113,Vol. 27 No.4, Sage Publications, July 2000, pp 27-48)

In its moment of greatest creativity, Latin Americansoap opera attested to the internal dynamics of a pluralcultural identity. But it is exactly this narrativeheterogeneity, revealing Latin America's culturaldiversity visible what globalization is progressivelyreducing. Paradoxically, soap opera's success, which wasits springboard to internationalization and whichcorresponded to an activation and recognition of thingsLatin American in the region's countries, also marks thebeginning of an uniformization of format that neutralizesthe signs of a plural identity. () Is it true that theglobalization of markets means the dissolution of everytrue difference or its reduction to an inventory of frozenfolklorisms? Or is not the market itself alreadyreclaiming rigorous processes of experimentation and


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innovation that allow it to introduce into the languagesof a globalized sensibility the diversity of narratives,gestures, and imaginaries in which the true richness of our peoples is expressed?

Until a few years ago, to think about culture wasto survey a clear map without creases:anthropology took care of primitive cultures, andsociology was in charge of the modern ones. Thisimplied two opposed ideas about culture. For an-thropologists culture is everything, since in theprimordial magma that primitives inhabit an ax isas much culture as myths are, and dens areculture as much as kinship and the inventory of medicinal plants or ritual dances are. Forsociologists, in contrast, culture is only a specialtype of activities and objects, products andpractices, almost all belonging to the canon of arts and letters. In the late modernity that we nowinhabit, the separation that established that dualidea of culture is blurred in part by the increasingcommunicative specialization of culture, now"organized in a system of machines whichproduce symbolic goods that are transmitted to

its consuming publics" (Brunner, 1992: 21): that iswhat schools do to their students, the press to itsreaders, television to its audiences, and thechurch to its followers. But at the same time

Transformations in the Map

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culture is experiencing another radically opposedmovement, one of anthropologization, where-bythe whole of social life becomesis transformedintoculture. As if the unstoppable machine of modernizing rationalization, which knows onlyhow to separate and spe-cialize, were spinning incircles, culture escapes all compartmentalization,irrigating life completely. Today art and health,work and violence are the subject/object of culture, and we have political culture and drug-dealing culture, organizational culture and urbanculture, youth, gender, professional, audiovisual,scientific, technological culture, and so on. Thearticulation of this dual movement is found todayin the hegemony of a communicational reasonthatconfronted by the dialogical consensus that,according to Habermas, nourishes

"communicative reason"is burdened with thediscursive opacity and the political ambi-guityintroduced by technological and mercantilemediation and whose devicesthe fragmentationthat dislocates and decenters, the flow thatglobalizes and compresses, the con-nection thatdematerializes and hybridizesimplement the

turning of society into a market. In thatmovement are now inscribed certain cultural andcommunicational industries transformed into themost efficient engine for the disengagement andincorporation of ethnic, national, or local culturesinto the space-time of the world market andglobal technologies.

Thus to think about cultural industries is not tobe confused with a return to the initial meaninggiven to that concept by the Frankfurt School: the


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desublimated "fall of art into culture" and thereduction of culture to a commodity (Horkhei-merand Adorno, 1971). That would prevent us fromrecognizing the contradictions that dynamize thecultural complexity of end-of-the-century society.Neither is industry opposed to art, as theexistence of cinema has amply demonstrated, nordoes standardization imply the total annulment of innovation, of creative tension, as E. Morin (1962)proved some time ago. Nevertheless, in theongoing operationalization of the conceptwhichmade possible its pluralization by U NESCO in thelate 1970s (U NESCO , 1982) there are persistentremnants of the erudite opposition betweenmasses and culture that manifest themselves inthe majority of cultural politics limited bycontentismculture reduced to the noble content

of the mass mediaand the diffusionism of aninstrument for cultural propagation or publicationand therefore incapable of assuming theheterogeneity of cultural production in oursocieties and the structural importance of culturalindustries in placing our peoples incommunication. For this we need to think of

cultural industries relieved of the "weight of causal gravity," that of their "chain remission tototalities" (Piccini, 1988), in order to conceivethem more as places of condensation orinteraction of multiple cultural webs, ascrossroads of different areas of social production,made up of complex devices that are not merely

technological, mercantile, or political and in whichaffiliations weigh less than alliances, heavymachines of fabrication less than sinuoustrajectories of cir-culation, and both appropriation


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stratagems and the logic of property should betaken into account.

What the cultural industries are creating todayis a complex reorganization of hegemony (Martn-Barbero, 1997), and it requires that we conceiveof them as key devices for the construction of collective identities, that is, the differentiation andrecognition of subjects who make up diversesocial groups. Breaking the circle that goes fromidentity conceived as separation or exclusionarywithdrawal to its ne-gation by integration into thecalamity of homogenization, contemporaryreflection proposes identity as a cons-tructionthat is narrated. What this new way of thinkingabo-ut identity means is the crisis of monoidentities and the emergence of

multiculturalisms that overflow at top and bottomboth ethnicity and nationality. Economic andtechnological glo-balization reduces theimportance of territoriality, devaluing thetraditional referents of identity. Contradictorilyand complementarily, local and regional culturesare constan-tly revalued, constantly demanding

greater self-determina-tionthe right to count inpolitical and economic decisions and to createtheir own images. The contemporary "discontentwith nationality" responds to dynamics of theeconomy and the world culture that mobilize notonly the heterogeneity of groups and theirreadaptation to the pressures of the global but

also the coexistence of very diverse codes withina single group, shaking the experience of identitythat we have had up to now.


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Identities: Between Multicultural Society andCommunicational Globalization

To the movement of nationalities andliberation of colonized peoples were addedmovements of women and sexualminorities, and also of ethnicities, since theincreasing economic globalizationawakened forces and forms of identityincreasingly profound, less social and morecultural, related to language, torelationships with the body, and tomemory. There is a complete change of perspective: it was considered that themodem world was unified while traditionalsociety was fragmented; today, to thecontrary, modernity seems to take us fromthe homogeneous to the heterogeneous inthought and cult, in family and sex life, indiet or clothing.

Alain Touraine

Decenterings of the National and Reconfigurations of Identity Until not many years ago the cultural map of

our countries was that of thousands of culturallyhomogeneous com-munitiesstronglyhomogeneous but isolated, dispersed, al-most notin communication with one another and veryweakly linked to the nation. Today the map isdifferent: Latin America is experiencing adisplacement of population from the country tothe city that is not merely quantitative70


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percent of those who lived in the countryside 40years ago are now in the citiesbut an indicationof the appearance of a heterogeneous urbancultural fabric that is densely multiculturalaheterogeneity of ways of living and thinking, of structures of feeling and narratingbut verystrongly communicated. This is a multiculturalitythat defies our notions of culture, nation, and city-frames of reference and comprehension built on afoundation of clear identities, strong roots, andsharp boundaries. Our cities today are theambiguous and opaque setting of something notrepresentable either from the exclusionary andexcluded difference of the autochthonous ethnicor from the unifying and dissolving inclusion of the modern. We are facing a change in thecontent of our "ways of being together" (Maffesoli,

1990: 133 ff.), that is, of experiencing belongingto a territory and of living an identity.

But multiculturality in Latin America, both indiscourse and in social experience, mobilizes oldand new contradictions. As the Chilean N. Lechner(1990: 99) asserts,

the history of Latin America could be narrated asa continuous and reciprocal occupation of territory. There is no stable demarcationrecognized by everyone. No physical frontier andno social limit grant security. In this way is bornand internalized, from generation to generation,an ancestral fear of the invader, of the other, of the different, whether coming from the top orfrom below.


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This fear is still expressed in the tendency forpoliticians to perceive difference as disintegrationand rupture of order and for intellectuals to see itas a source of contamination and deformation of cultural purities. Authoritarianism in our countries,then, would not be a perverse tendency of theirmilitaries or politicians but a response to theprecariousness of the social order, the weaknessof civil society, and the complexity of miscegenations that they contain, making thestate the figure that counterbalances societalweaknesses and the forces of dispersion. This hasmeant the permanent substitution of the state forthe people and its taking the leading role to thedetriment of civil society (Flifisch et al., 1988).

The countries of Latin America have a longexperience of the inversion of meaning through

which national identity is put at the service of thechauvinism of a state that, instead of articulatingcultural differences, has subordinated them tocentralism and destroyed them. Until veryrecently the idea of the national was, on the rightas well as on the left, incompatible withdifference: the people was one and indivisible,

society a subject without textures or internalarticulations, and political and cultural debate"shifted between national essences and classidentities" (Sa-bato, 1988).

It is this equivalence between identity andnation that the multiculturality of contemporary

Latin American society explodes. On one side,globalization is reducing the importance of theterritories and the founding events that essen-tialized the nation, and on the other the


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revaluation of the local is redefining the very ideaof the nation. Seen from the world culture, thenational seems provincial and burdened withstatist and paternalist vestiges. Seen from thediversity of local cultures, the national equalscentralist homogenization and officialist rigidity.

Thus it is the idea as well as the social experienceof identity that overflows the Manichaean framesof an anthropology of the autochthonous-traditional and a sociology of the universal-modern. Identity, then, cannot continue to bethought of as an expression of a singlehomogeneous, perfectly distinguishable andcoherent culture. The monolingualism anduniterritoriality that the first modernizationrecovered from the colony hid the densemulticulturality that makes up the Latin American

and the arbitrariness of the demarcations thattraced the boundaries of the national. Today ouridentitiesincluding indigenous onesareincreasingly multilingual and transterritorial andare constituted not only of the difference of separately developed cultures but of the variousgroups' unequal appro-priations and combinations

of elements from other societies and from theirown.

This returns us to the multiculturality of the city,where much more than in the state new identitiesare formed from national imaginaries, localtraditions, and transnational fl-ows of information

and where new forms of representation andpolitical participation, that is, new modalities of citizenship, are configured. Thus the boundariesbetween posi-tions today are not only blurred but


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mobile, moving from one field to another anddisplacing, confounding, and compounding themeanings of cultural identities-ethnicities, races,genders-and of ideological and political positions.

This should not be read either optimistically, asthe disappearance of boundaries and theemergence (at last!) of a universal community, orcatastrophically, as the "liberation of differences"that will destroy the social fabricthe elementaryforms of social coexistence. As J. Keane (1995)has pointed out, there is already an international

public sphere that mobilizes forms of worldcitizenship, as is demonstrated by internationalorganizations in defense of human rights and thenongovernmental organizations in every countrymediate between the international and the local.But there are also fundamentalisms that,

disguised as policies that modernize the economyor as labor rights of natives versus im-migrants,reinforce social and cultural exclusionand let usnot forget the perversions of the excludedcommunities and minorities that entrenchthemselves (Hughes, 1994: 95 ff.)from New

York to Paris, passing though the Colombian

Pacific coastin a perverse reconversion of racism. The challenge raised by the complexity of the imbrications between frontiers and themediations that secretly link the figures andmovements of identity can, I think, be capturedby the image/metaphor of the palimpsest: thereferents and meaning, the territories and

discourses of identity today ha-ve the fragiletexture of a palimpsest, a text in which an era-sed past emerges tenaciously, although blurred,between the lines that write the present.


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From this perspective, difference in LatinAmerica has ceased to mean the search for anauthenticity in which a form of being is conservedin its original purity to become the investigation of the deviant and decentered form of our inclusionin and appropriation of modernity: a form of dif-ference that cannot be digested or expelled, analterity that resists from within the modernityimposed universality project itself. To this dualtask are contributing sociologists andanthropologists who have placed on the agendafor analysis the double decentering suffered bymodernity in Latin America: its having less to dowith erudite doctrines and lettered aestheticsthan with the massification of schooling and theexpansion of the cultural industries and there-fore

with the formation of a cultural market in whichthe sources of cultural production, instead of thedynamic of communities or the authority of thechurch, are the logic of industry and specializedapparatuses that replace the traditional ways of life with lifestyles formed by publicity andconsumption, secularize and internationalize

symbolic worlds, and segment the people intopublics constructed by the market.

At the same time, the modern differentiationand autono-mization of culture suffers a seconddecentering: such auto-nomy is produced in LatinAmerica when the state can no longer order or

mobilize the cultural field, having to limit itself tosecuring the freedom of its actors and the accessopportunities of diverse social groups whileleaving the coordination and dynamization of that


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field to the market, and when cultural experienceshave ceased to correspond precisely to thespheres and repertories of ethnic groups or socialclasses. Still heavily laden with premoderncomponents, modernity becomes the collectiveexperience of Latin American majorities becauseof social and perceptual dislocations of a clearlypostmodern imprint, effecting strongdisplacements of the compartments andexclusions that mo-dernity has instituted in thecourse of more than a century, that is, generatinghybridizations between the popular and thecultured and between both and the mass,between vanguard and kitsch, between theautochthonous and the fo-reignall of themcategories and demarcations that are no longercapable of accounting for the ambiguous and

complex movement that dynamizes the culturalworld in socie-ties in which (Garcia Canclini, 1990:18)

modernity relocates art and folklore, academicknowledge and industrialized culture underrelatively similar conditions. The work of the artistand that of the craftsman approach each otherwhen each experiences that the specific symbolicorder that nourished it is being redefined by themarket and can less and less avoid modeminformation and iconographies, thedisenchantment of their self-centered worlds, andthe reenchantment favored by the spectacle of the media.

Dislocations of popular and Urban Cultures


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There was a time when we believed we knewwhat we were talking about with regard to therural and the urban, since the urban was thecontrary of the rural. This dichotomy is beingdissolved not only in the discourse of analysis butalso in social experience itself bydeterritorialization and hybridization. The urban isno longer identified only with what pertains to thecity (Monguin, 1995: 25 ff.) but also with what integrates us into the global and permeates withmore or less intensity the peasant worldespecially but not only by the action of the massmediaso that even the more strongly localcultures are undergoing changes that affect theway of experiencing belonging to a territory andof living an identity. We are dealing with the samemovements that are displacing the old frontiers

between traditio-nal and modem, popular andmass. These changes and movements are crucialtoday in two spheres: popular cultures and youthcultures.

The popular world is inserted in the urbandynamic thro-ugh the transformations of working

life, the identification of progress with publicservices, the cultural maladjustments producedby technological development, the merging of theinformative discourses of the media with themeans of communication that, like sayings,gossip, or jokes, refer to the persistence of an oralculture but in a secondary orality (Ong, 1987: 130

ff.) that is itself already crossed by formats of radio and soap opera. We face a cultural mapvery different from the one to which we wereaccustomed by the Manichaean rhetoric of


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developmentalism. It is a map ma-de up of discontinuities and wrong timings, of secretappro-ximations and exchanges betweenmodernity and tradition, between urban countryand rural country. It is a map with manypopulations halfway between peasant village andurban neighborhood, with villages where socialrelations no longer have the stability or elementalnature of the rural and with neighborhoods inwhich feudal authoritarianisms survive alongsidethe horizontality woven into urban illegality andinformality. These are villages that remaincentered on reli-gion while at the same timeexperiencing changes that affect not only theworld of labor and housing but also the world of subjectivity, affectivity, and sensuality. For theirpart, the suburbsour enormous squatter

neighborhoods, favelas, or callampas havebecome a strategic place for cultural recycling: forthe formation of a culture of illegalities in whichdelinquent complicity, neighborly solidarity, anddie-hard loyalties intermix, a fabric of exchangesand exclusions that speak to the moraltransactions without which it is impossible to

survive in the city, about the mix between theviolence that is suffered and the violence of resistance, about the ethnic sonorities and theurban rhythms of rock or rap (Giraldo and Lopez,1991: 260):

The marginalized that inhabits the large urban

centers of Colombia and that in certain cities hastaken on the figure of the hit man is not only theexpression of backwardness, poverty, andunemployment, the absence of state action in itsplace of residence, and a culture that sinks its


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roots in Catholic religion and political violence. Itis also, perhaps more predominantly, thereflection of hedonism and consumption, the

culture of the image and drug addiction, in aword, of the colonization of the world of life bymodernity.

Concerning the world of urban youthwhich, asmentioned before, is no longer identified with thecitychanges point toward a profoundreorganization of socialization mo-dels: neither doparents any longer constitute the pattern forbehavior nor is school the only legitimate space of learning or the book the axis that articulatesculture. As was already pioneeringly stated byMargaret Mead in the early 1970s, "Our thoughtstill ties us to the past; born and raised before theelectronic revolution, the majority of us do notunderstand what it means. The young of the newgeneration, in contrast, are like members of thefirst generation born in a new country" (Mead,1971: 105-106). Young peo-ple today areexperiencing the emergence of new sensibilitiesendowed with a special empathy withtechnological culture, which ranges from theinformation absorbed by the adolescent throughhis relationship with television to the capacity tolearn his way around the complexity of information webs. In contrast to the way in whicha great many adults resent and resist that newculture, which devalues and makes obsolete muchof their knowledge and skill and which they holdresponsible for the decay of intellectual and moralvalues that society suffers today, young peopleare experiencing a cognitive empathy arising froma great facility for relating to audiovisual and


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information technology and from an expressivecomplicity with their narratives and images, theirsonorities, fragmentations, and speeds, in whichthey find their language and rhythm. Whereaslettered cultures are associated with languageand territory, electronic, audiovisual, and musicalcultures go beyond this, producing newcommunities that respond to new ways of beingtogether, of perceiving and narrating identity. Weare facing new, less long-term identities, moreprecarious but also more flexible, capable of amalgamating ingredients from very diversecultural universes. Their best expression isperhaps Spanish rock, a language in which thedeeper generation gap and some of the morecontent-related transformations of politicalrepresentation are expressed. It is a rock that has

been transforming itself into a vehicle of aconsciousness of social disintegration, the dailypresence of death on the streets, labor deadlock,moral uneasiness, and the exasperation of aggressiveness and the macabre (Cruz Kronfly,1994: 60):

In our popular neighborhoods we have wholegroups of young people in whose heads there isroom for magic and witchcraft and for Christianguilt and pious intolerance, for messianism andnarrow and rigid dogma and for utopian dreams of equality and liberty, indisputable and legitimate,for feelings of emptiness, absence of totalizing

ideologies, fragmentations of life, and the tyrannyof the fleeting image, and for musical sound asthe only background language.


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Latin American Integration: Cultural Matrixesand Industrial Formats

A contradictory and challenging reality is thatof a mass society which, in the perverse logicof a savage capitalism, makes the new out of the old and remakes the old with the new,making coexist and merge, in a paradoxicallynatural way, the sophistication of the masscom-munication media with masses of feelingscoming from the most traditionally popularculture.

Marlyse Meyer

Suspended between the discourses of the stateand the logic of the market, the meaning of theacronyms that in multiple and compulsive ways

speak of the Latin American desire for integrationis obscured and fragmented, because theintegration of Latin American countries today isinevitably held to be its integration into a worldeconomy gover-ned by the purest and most rigidlogic of capitalist competitiveness. This isfracturing regional solidarity, especially by the

exclusionary incorporation modalities of subregional groups (the Free Trade Agreement,Mercosur) into macrogroups of the North andEurope. The technological revolu-tion, in turn,raises clear integration demands while making thenational space an increasingly insufficientframework for taking advantage of or being

protected from it (Shutz, 1980), and at the sametime reinforcing and intensifying the inequality of the exchange (Castells and Laserna, 1989). It is interms of globalized integration that thegovernments of our countries justify the


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enormous social costs of "opening up "thetechnoeconomic modernization that once againthreatens to be passed off as the socioculturalproject of modernity in our countries. Thus if thereis a powerful integration movementunderstoodas the overcoming of bar-riers and dissolution of boundariesit is the one that is handled by thecultural industries of the mass media andinformation technologies. But at the same timethese industries and technologies themselves arethe ones that most strongly accelerate theintegration of our peoples and the heterogenity of their cultures into the indifference of the market.

The cultural survival of our collective identitiesdepends today on the possibilities of understanding, without provoking oldManichaeisms and integrisms, and politically

facing the contradictions mobilized by thatparadox.

Economic Integration and Cultural Blurring

Contrary to the process that until the 1970s was

called imperialism, the globalization of theeconomy redefines cen-ter/periphery relations:what "globalization" means is no longer invasionsbut transformations produced from and within thenational and even the local sphere. It is fromwithin each country that not only economies butcultures are being globalized (Ortiz, 1992: 21 ff.).

What is at stake is not a greater diffusion of products but the rearticulation of relationsbetween countries through a decentralization that


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concentrates economic power and a dislocationthat hybridizes cultures.

In Latin America, economic globalization isperceived in terms of two scenarios: that of thenational opening demanded by the hegemonicneoliberal model and that of the regionalintegration whereby our countries seekcompetitive incorporation into the new worldmarket. Both make the "market society" an entryrequirement for the "information society." Thestage of economic opening is characterized by thesocial and political disintegration of the nationalsphere, because the rationality of neoliberalmodernization substitutes for social emancipationprojects the logic of a com-petitiveness whoserules are determined not by the state but by the

market transformed into an organizing principle of society. How are we to build democracy incountries where social polarization is increasing,placing 40 percent of the population below thepoverty level? What viability can na-tionalprojects have when transnational financial entitiessubstitute for states in development planning?

The increase in inequality atomizes society,destroying political and cul-tural cohesionmechanisms, and, since symbolic representationsare worn out, "we do not manage to form animage of the country we want, and thus politicsdoes not manage to establish the direction of ongoing changes" (Lechner, 1987: 253).

The stage of Latin American regional integrationwill perhaps be better understood in contrast withthe European one, because although both


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respond to the challenges posed by globalization,the contradictions they mobilize are verydifferent. The European Union, in spite of thehuge diversity of languages and history thatdivides the countries involved and even though itis still more an economic than a political fact,tends nevertheless to create certain conditions of social equality and to strengthen culturalexchange between and within its countries. InLatin America, on the contrary, even though it isclosely united by language and long and densetraditions, economic integration is causingdemands for competitiveness to prevail overthose for regional cooperation, and this translatesinto accelerated in-come concentration with areduction of social expenditures and adeterioration of the public scene. And while

Europe gives priority to the issue of nationswithout states, the identities diluted or devaluedin the process of integration of na-tional states,which translates into a certain publicstrengthening of its audiovisual productioncapacity (Schlesinger, 1990), in Latin America theintegration of its audio-visual production, which

serves private interests almost exclusively, isproducing an increasing neutralization and blur-ring of regional and local identities (Martn-Barbero, 1992). In the "lost decade" of the 1980sone of the few industries developed in LatinAmerica was communications: the number of television stations increased from 205 in 1970 to

1,459 in 1988, Brazil and Mexico acquired theirown satellite radio and television, global links bysatellite, infor-mation webs, parabolic antennas,and cable TV were implemented, and regional


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television channels were establi-shed (ReyesMata, 1988). But all this growth followed themovement of the market, with almost no stateintervention and, moreover, undermining themeaning of and possibility for such intervention-that is, leaving public service without a real basisand increasing monopolistic concentrations.

While during the times of populistmodernization, the 1930s and the 1950s, thecommunication industries contributed to thegestation of a powerful Latin American ima-ginarymade up of cinematographic (Maria Felix,Cantinflas) and musical (tango, bolero, ranchera)symbols, in the past few years the culturalindustries of cinema, radio, and television havebeen experiencing a paradoxical situation: the

entry of their cultural production into the globalmarket has been accompanied by a clearweakening of its capacity for culturaldifferentiation. The presence of companies likethe Mexican Televisa or the Brazilian Redeglobo inthe glo-bal audiovisual area is achieved at thecost of modeling the images of those peoples to

cater to publics that are increasingly neutral andundifferentiated. What orients such chan-ges isthe demands of the model imposed byglobalization, demands that are apparent in theprivatizing rearrangement of national televisionsystems in Europe and in the culturalcontradictions inherent in Southeast Asia's

economic opening (Richeri, 1992). The expansionof the number of chan-nels, the diversification andgrowth of cable television, and satelliteconnections have increased programming time,


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driving an intense demand for programs that evenfurther open the market to Latin Americantelevision production and creating small gaps inNorth American television hegemony and in thedivision of the world between a North identifiedwith producing countries and a South identifiedwith exclusively consuming countries. But thesedevelopments also mean the triumph of themarket experience in making cultural differenceprofitable, renovating worn-out narratives andlinking them to other sensibilities whose vitality isresemanticized in the fraudulent offer of a cultureof indifference. This is the other side of thecultural fragmentation produced by globalization.

The Latin American contradictions that sustainits globalized integration flow decisively into the

question of the importance of the audiovisualindustries in these processes. These industriesplay on the strategic ground of the images these

peoples form of themselves and by which they make themselves recognizable to others. What isthe meaning, from this perspective, of the hugeand dispersed growth of television channels and

of programming hours offered or the fact that inLatin America there are more video recorders perinhabitant than in Belgium or Italy if this isaccompanied by a reduction in the percentage of endogenous production and an increasinghomogenization of what is imported? Here cinemaand soap operas are showing the course marked

out by communicational globalization.

Cinema, caught between the abandonment of state support for producing companies, which has


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caused annual production to decline to less thanhalf in countries with mo-re tradition such asMexico or Brazil, and the decrease in audiences,for example, from 123 to 61 million in the 1980sin Mexico and from 45 to 22 million in Argentina,is trying to choose between a commercialproposal that is profitable only to the extent towhich it can escape the national sphere and acultural proposal that is viable only to the extentto which it is capable of inserting local themesinto the sensibility and aesthetic of world culture(Getino, 1989). This forces cinema to subordinateitself to video both for circulation technology andfor domestic consumption: already in 1990 therewere in Latin America 10 million video cassetterecorders, 12,000 rental video clubs, and 340million tapes rented annually (Getino, 1993). In

Mexico City, while there is one movie theater per62,800 habitants, there is a video club for every4,500. This disproves the pessimistic predictionsof the approaching demise of the cinema while atthe same time pointing to some worrisometendencies: almost 80 percent of the tapesoffered in the video clubs are North American

cinema; European cinema, including the Spanish,does not amount to 10 percent, nor does Mexicancine-ma, even in the presumably most nationalistcountry in Latin America (Garcia Canclini, 1994).But where the logics of globalization become mostexplicit is in television, and especially, because of its importance in the market and because of the

role it plays in the cultural recognition of thesepeoples, in the strategic enclave of LatinAmerican audiovisual production that is soapopera.


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Avatars of Industrialized Identities

Up to the mid-1970s, North American televisionseries devastatingly dominated fictionprogramming on Latin American televisionchannels. This means, on the one hand, that theaverage number of shows imported from theUnited Statesmostly comedies and

melodramatic or police series occupied close to40 percent of programming (Varis, 1973) and, onthe other hand, that those shows occupied primetime, at night during the week as well as all dayon weekends. At the end of the 1970s thesituation started to change, and during the 1980snational production grew and began to compete

with North American series for prime times. Veryquickly, national soap operas in various countriesMexico, Brazil, Venezuela, Colombia, Argentinaand in other countries Brazilian, Mexican, orVene-zuelan soap operas completely displacedNorth American production (Schneider-Madanes,1992). From then on until the early 1990s, not

only in the principal exporting countries of Brazil,Mexico, and Venezuela but also in Argen-tina,Chile, and Peru, soap opera occupied a dominantposition in national television productioncapability (Portales, 1987; Ortiz et al., 1985;Gonzalez, 1991; Coccato, 1985), that is, in theconsolidation of television industry, the

modernization of its processes andinfrastructures, technical as well as financial, andthe specialization of its resources: scriptwriters,directors, cameramen, sound technicians, set


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designers, editors. Soap opera production has alsomeant an appropriation of the genre by eachcountry: its nationalization. Granted that the soapopera genre involves rigid stereo-types in itsdramatic scheme and strong constraints in itsvisual grammar, reinforced by the standardizedlogic of the global television market, each countryhas made soap opera a particular area of intersections between television and other cultural fields such as literature, cinema, andtheater. Most co-untries started by copying andsome even importing scripts in the same way asthey had earlier with radio soap operas, whenthrough Colgate Palmolive scripts were importedfrom Cuba or Argentina. Dependence on the radioformat and the conception of the image as a mereillustration of a spoken drama gradually declined

as television became industrialized and humanproduction teams mastered the new mediumthat is, appropriated its expressive possibilities.

Thus soap opera became a conflictive but fertilefield of political-cultural redefinitions: while incountries like Brazil important theater actors,movie directors, and prestigious leftwing writers

were incorporated into the production of soapoperas, in other countries television in generaland soap opera in particular were rejected byartists and writers as a dangerous trap and anextremely degrading field. Gradually,nevertheless, the crisis of cinema on the one handand the overcoming of ideological extremisms on

the other have brought into television, above allthrough the soap opera, many artists, writers, andactors who contribute themes and styles that


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reflect key dimensions of national life andcultures.

In its moment of greatest creativity, LatinAmerican soap opera attested to the internaldynamics of a plural cultural identity. But it isexactly this narrative heterogeneity, revealingLatin America's cultural diversity visible whatglobali-zation is progressively reducing.Paradoxically, soap opera's success, which was itsspringboard to internationalization and whichcorresponded to an activation and recognition of things Latin American in the region's countries,also marks the beginning of an uniformization of format that neutralizes the signs of a pluralidentity. In recent years the ope-ning of the globalmarket to Latin American soap operas has also

incorporated Colombian and Argentineproduction, demonstrating the degree of development achieved by national televisioncompanies, but at the cost of an industrializationof melodrama that gradually erases the marks of the author and the signs of identity previouslyachieved. Thus the question is: Is it true that the

globalization of markets means the dissolution of every true difference or its reduction to aninventory of frozen folklorisms? Or is not themarket itself already reclaiming rigorousprocesses of experimentation and innovation thatallow it to introduce into the languages of aglobalized sensibility the diversity of narratives,

gestures, and imaginaries in which the truerichness of our peoples is expressed? This is whathas been happening in Colombia in the past fewyears with the soap opera Cafe (Coffee), which, in


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an aesthetically innovative narrative, traces theties that bind coffee haciendas with the New Yorkstock exchange and its artisanal harvestingtechniques with the technified production andmarketing of its varieties, making evident theautonomy achieved by wo-men, thedisplacements of upward as well as downwardsocial mobility, the legitimation of divorce, etc.,and whose success in Latin America has beenhuge. Or with series that, like Senora Isabel, tell of the courage of a housewife who after 20 years of marriage feels capable of demanding freedomand passion from life, unveiling the complicities of machismo with end-of-the-century moralism, andof which Mexico and Venezuela have made "theirown" versions.

Even though it is burdened with heavy narrativeschematicisms and is an accomplice to mystifyingideological inertias, soap opera is neverthelesspart of the modem re-creation devices of the LatinAmerican imaginary. This is an imaginary thatrefers, on the one hand, to the technoperceptivetransformations that allow the majorities a

peculiar interpenetration, or complicity, of theircultural orality with electronic visuality (Martin-Barbero, 1992; 1996) providing a strategic spacefor image industries in the processes of identityformation and, on the other hand, to the longexpe-rience of the market, and especially of theaudiovisual industries, of grasping the ritualized

dimensions of daily life and connecting with newpopular sensibilities to revitalize exhaustednarratives.


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Toward a Latin American Audiovisual Space

Between fundamentalist entrenchment andcommodified homogenization there is spaceto study and discuss what can be donethrough cultural policies so that economicalliances will make not only capital butcultures circulate freely. "Latin American" isnot a destiny revealed by territory or blood: ithas often been a frustrated project; today it isa task that is relatively open andproblematically possible.

N. Garca Canclini

The audiovisual scene of the 1990s in LatinAmerica is doubly burdened with contradictions.Some of these originate in the convergence of

accelerated technological change and thederegulation of markets, which at once devaluethe public sphere and displace the forms of property. Others are generated by thereconfiguration of the "social identity" of themedia, especially television and computers, whichare affected by movements producing new forms

of citizenship and new spaces in the publicsphere. Latin American cultural integration isdefinitely experiencing the ambiguities anddynamics of this stage. Nevertheless, theparticipation of the audiovisual industries insubregional integration agreements (the Free

Trade Agreement and Mercosur) is still entirely

marginal "the object of annexes or parallelagreements" (Galpering, n.d.).


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Let us start by clearing up this paradox. It is notany lack of economic importance that producesthis marginalization, as the audiovisual industriescinema, radio, disks, television (which includessatellites, parabolics, cable), telema-tics, video,video gamesare growing as is no other marketarea (Getino, 1990; 1996; Tremblay and Saint-Laurent, 1994; Entel et al., n.d.). It has more to dowith the complexity of the relations that theaudiovisual market creates be-tween economyand culture, between the deceptive zeal of businessmen regarding "the" identity of thenational and the heterogeneities mobilized byregionality. As is demonstrated by the debatebetween the European Union and the UnitedStates over "cultural exception" at the lastGeneral Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (G ATT

now OMCmee-ting, the production and circulationof cultural industries require a modicum of agreement at the political level. In Latin Americathis agreement on common cultural policies hasup to now been impossible to achieve, primarilybecause of the demands and pressures of theneoliberal pattern that has accelerated the

privatization of telecommunications anddismantled the few norms that in a way regulatedthe expansion of property. What we arewitnessing now is the formation andreinforcement of powerful multimediaconglomerates that control, at their convenience,in some cases the interested defense of the

protection of national cultural production and inother cases the defense of transnational flows.


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In the case of Mexico's entry into the Free TradeAgreement between the United States andCanada (Guevara and Garca Canclini, 1992;Garca Canclini, 1996; Yiidice, 1996), aside fromsome limitations related to the percentage of foreign investments in the audiovisual sector anda more "symbolic" than real minimum screenquota, cultural industries are excluded from theagreement. Mercosur agree-ments do not containcultural industries legislation either. In theconsiderations of the Asuncion Treaty no clearmention is made of culture, and since then therehave been several declarations of intentionsatthe technical meeting in Brasilia in 1992 and thespecialized meeting in Buenos Aires in 1995withregard to an agenda for cultural policies(Recondo, 1995; Achugar and Bustamante, 1996)

especially oriented to the standardization of legislation, the protection of patrimony, theformation of information networks, and in generalthe diffusion of "high culture." This isdemonstrated by the Cultural Integration Protocolsigned in 1996 and the "Mercosur Cultural Seal"that facilitates customs transactions for plastic

arts exhibitions, cofinanced publications,fellowships for young artists, and the writers'exchange program. The audiovisual industries donot seem to fit into that "seal," whereas the ClarinGroupa multimedia conglomerate that ranksthird in the Latin American audiovisual space,after Redeglobo and Televisadoes. Directly

economic objectivesmarket development,acceleration of capital flowsforeclose thepossibility of propo-sing at least some policiesregarding financial concentration and the


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deepening of the social division between the info-rich and the info-poor.

The other reason for the absence of culturalindustries policies from Latin Americansubregional integration agree-ments is thepredominance of a fundamentalist conception of national identity associated with ethnicity which,however, as Garca Canclini (1988) argues, isdivorced from the radical pragmatism thatgoverns the inclusion of our countries in theprocesses of economic and technological globali-zationand a conception of culture structurallyrelated to the patrimonial and the "cultured."Concentrated on preserving patrimonies andpromoting elite arts, the cultural policies of stateshave not at all acknowledged the decisive role of

the audiovisual industries in the daily culture of the majorities. Major cultural industries, on thecontrary, are achieving through the mass media apenetration of personal and family life, organizingfree time by supplying home-deliveredentertainment and the strategic management of information. Rooted in a basically preservationist

concept of identity and a disarticulation regardingwhat independent groups and industries (thatincreasingly dense "third sector") do, publicpolicies are to a great extent responsible for theunequal segmentation of consumption and theimpoverishment of endogenous production. This isso in a moment in which heterogeneity and

multiculturality can no longer be seen as aproblem but must be recognized as the basis forrenovation and democracy and in whichliberalism, while expanding deregulation to the


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world of culture, is demanding from states andinternational organisms the reconstruction of the

public sphere. This cannot be achieved without anagreement between states, major industries, andindependent groups-small mediating companies,NGOs, community associations-that helps to protectand develop irreplaceable collective interests.

But if cultural integration faces the obstacles just listed, there are other dynamics that militatetoward the integration of the audiovisual scene. Inthe first place is the deve-lopment of new actorsand modes of communication: regional (such asColombian and Mexican), municipal, andcommunity radio and television stations orpopular video production groups that constitute,as argued by Roncagliolo (1996: 53), "a public

space in gestation" because they "represent alocal upward impulse that seems destined tocoexist with the global media. Such coexistenceperhaps constitutes the clearest trend in theregion's cultural industries." Without being amongthe most advanced in that field, Colombia alreadyhas 546 community radio stations and close to

400 experiments in local and communitytelevision. All of them are part of informal webs of initiatives that relate local demands to globalsupply, via parabolic antennas, for exam-ple, andwhose "social and cultural density" should betaken into account when thinking about thepossibilities of regional integration (Rey, 1998).

Another sphere to consider is the gaps andcontradictions in the great machines of themultimedia conglomerates. Since I have already


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talked about soap opera, I will start with thepresentation of the Latin American, full of schematisms and deformations but also of polyphonies, that is being conducted by the LatinAmerican subsidiaries of CBS and CNN in countriesthat often receive very little internationalinformation, especially concerning other LatinAme-rican countries. The decontextualizationsand frivolities that make up much of theinformation disseminated by these televisionstations cannot conceal the informative openingand contrasting possibilities that they produce,because in their interweaving of images andwords imaginaries are dismantled and remadethat go beyond the local to situate us in aparticular globalized but Latin American space.

The great rock industries are also experiencingcultural integration movements of somesignificance. The Latin rock movement breakswith mere youth listening to awaken unsuspectedcreativities of miscegenation and hybridization: of culture with politics and of transnationalaesthetics with the most local sounds and

rhythms from Botellita de Jerez (Sherry Bottle) toMaldita Vecindad (Damn Neighborhood), Caifanesor Cafe Tacuba in Mexico, Charly Gar-ca, FitoPez, or Enanitos Verdes (Green Dwarves) andFabulosos Cadillacs (Cadillac Fabulous) inArgentina, to Estados Alterados (Altered States)and Aterciopelados (Velvety) in Colombia.

According to one young Colombian researcher(Rueda, 1998),

As affirmation of a space and territory, this rock isat once an aesthetic and a political proposal, one


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of the "places" where the symbolic unity of LatinAmerica is constructed, as done by RubenBlades's salsa, Mercedes Sosa and Cuban Nueva

Trova (New Song), a place from which the bordersof Latin America are seen and constructed.

That it is not about mere local/nationalphenomena but about Latin America as a specificplace of belonging, and enunciation is proved bythe existence of the Latin MTV channel, in which,along with musical creativity, audiovisualcreativity is apparent in the hybrid, global, and

young par excellence genre that is the videoclip.

The cinema industry shows changes in bothproduction and consumption not at all foreseeable10 years ago. On the one hand, as mentionedabove, the disappearance of a national cinemathen seemed unavoidable: the neoliberal des-truction of the state institutions that supported itguaranteed this. Nevertheless, in recent years,with less economic capacity but greater capacityfor negotiating with the tele-vision industry andeven with some multimedia economicconglomerates, such industries are reappearing inBrazil, Argentina, and Colombia. On the otherhand, coproductions involving Latin American andEuropean countries are increasingly drawing notonly on the financial capital but also on thecinematographic experience of Spain, France, andItaly to incorporate private enterprise into thesustenance of a cinematography that can beenjoyed by everyone without being purelycommercialthat is, that conserves somecapacity for aesthetic experimentation andcultural expression. But the sphere in which


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cinema is experiencing most change is in modesof consumption. The rapid closing of movietheatersto be used as Protestant churches orparking lotsthat we saw in the late 1980s andearly 1990s was followed by an unexpectedphenomenon: the appearance of multitheatercomplexes that dramatically reduce the numberof seats per theater but multiply the supply of films. And around the same time the compositionof the usual cinema audiences also underwent anotable change: youn-ger generationswhodevour videoclips on televisionseem to bereencountering cinema in its place of origin,public theaters. On the one hand, multi theaters,frequently located in shopping malls and offeringrenovated visual and auditory infrastructure inaddition to security and increased supply, and, on

the other hand, the growth of young audiencesare breaking down the dominant tendency towarddomestic cinema consumption on television ordomestic videocassette players. What we arefacing now is a profound diversification of cinemaaudiences, which implies changes in the way of watching movies and in the types of spectators

(Garca Canlini, Holtz, and Mantecn, 1994). Allthis has reopened the possibility of a demand for"Latin American cinema," as is demonstrated bythe increasing attendance at film festivals and atnot a few Mexican, Cuban, or Argentine movies,both those for film buffs and those that are simplyconsidered "good pictures." The biggest problem

for cinema in Latin America is distribution andcirculation monopolies. Good Latin American filmsare not scarce; what is scarce is distributionpolicies to allow for their circulation. It is absurd


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that more Latin American films can be seen in SanFrancisco, Lyon, or Barcelona than in Bogot,Caracas, or Santiago.

In the same way, the problems and possibilitiesof a Latin American audiovisual space are beinghandled by policies capable of takingresponsibility for what the media contain of anddo with people's everyday culture and of involvingthe educational system in the transformation of the school's relations with the new languages,new knowledges, and new audiovisual andinformation writings. Such policies must springfrom and center not on declarations of intentionsbut a serious recognition of the problems and aprecise analysis of the possibilities. What isneeded are policies that are diversified and

directed to governments and entrepreneurs of theaudiovisual sector, to audiences and socialorganizations, to professionals in the field andresearchers, to international agencies anduniversities, policies capable of answeringquestions like those already formulated in theearly 1990s at a conference in Mexico City ( UNESCO ,

1991):

Do we want to preserve and strengthen thehuman, technological, and cultural resources of the audiovisual space we have been generatingfor a century? Do we want to sustain and increasethe capacity for production of our own images, or

do we accept becoming mere transmitters of alienimages? Do we try to see ourselves in thesociocultural mirrors constituted by our screens,


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or do we renounce constructing our identity, ourpossibility of collective and recog-nizable being?

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Documents

Transformations in the Map. Identities and Culture Industries