Citizenship in the Latin American Upper and Middle Classes

Ethnographic Perspectives on Culture and Politics

Fiorella Montero-Diaz, Franka Winter

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780367729967
• eBook ISBN: 9781351134293
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

The problem of citizenship has long affected Latin America, simultaneously producing inclusion and exclusion, division and unity. Its narrative and practice both reflect and contribute to the region's profound inequalities. However, citizenship is usually studied on the margins of society. Despite substantial public interest in recent mass mobilizations, the middle and upper classes are rarely approached as political agents or citizens. As the region's middle classes continue to grow and new elites develop, their importance can only increase.

This interdisciplinary volume addresses this gap, showcasing recent ethnographic research on middle- and upper-class citizenship in contemporary Latin America. It explores how the region's middle and upper classes constitute themselves as citizens through politics and culture, and questions how these processes interact with the construction of difference and commonality, division and unity. Subsequently, this collection highlights how elite citizenships are constructed in dialogue with other identities, how these co-constructions reproduce or challenge inequality, and whether they have the potential to bring about change.

Citizenship in the Latin American Upper and Middle Classes will appeal to scholars, advanced undergraduate and postgraduate students interested in fields such as Latin American Studies, Citizenship Studies, Political Science and Cultural Studies; and to a general readership interested in Latin American politics and society.

Part I

Culture

Chapter 1

From spectators to consumers

Citizenship in the Latin American illustrated press (1880s–1930s)

Maria Chiara D’Argenio

This chapter examines the ways in which fin de siècle Latin American illustrated mass press contributed to the construction of citizenship and the role played by visual technology and vision in this process. I focus on two specific Peruvian illustrated magazines, El Perú Ilustrado (1887–1892) [The Illustrated Peru; hereafter, EPI] and Variedades (1908–1931) [Varieties], and trace some comparisons with other Latin American periodicals from the same period.¹ I argue that the illustrated press fabricated ideas and models of modern citizens, of their identities, values and behaviours, thus contributing, from the realm of commercial cultural production, to processes of citizenship (and nation-) making that were taking place through the governments’ policies concerning work, education, immigration, leisure and sport. The magazines used visual technology and images to display the values that should shape a modern citizenry while instructing their readership on ways of seeing. They operated a “pedagogy of spectatorship” (Labanyi 2005), training the readers’ practices of looking. Moreover, they participated in what Tony Bennett (1988) has called the “exhibitionary complex” and, due to their respective historical periods and formats, they articulated different relationships between vision, knowledge and power.²

EPI, Variedades and the other publications that will be mentioned were published between the 1880s and the 1930s, and belong to the field of illustrated press, which developed around the mid-nineteenth century in France and Britain following technological advances and rising literacy rates. Illustrated press presented a greater number of images and visual detail, new combinations of text and images, hence offering a new sensorial experience to their readers; as written in the Illustrated London News, “the public will have henceforth under their glance, and within their grasp, the very form and presence of events as they transpire, in all their substantial reality, and with evidence visible” (King and Plunkett 2005, 380). While different in terms of format, content and explicit aims, these periodicals shared important elements. Unlike previous publications, they were not addressing a small lettered community, but rather a wide anonymous readership, which, while gradually expanded to include larger social sectors, was still made up mostly of middle- and upper-class subjects. Funded by both subscriptions and advertising, these magazines followed the logics of market and capitalism in their policy and insistence on prices and sales, but were also deeply concerned with the processes of modernization and nation building, something that was evident in the choice of the editors and journalists and in their contents.³

Magazines were sites of modernity: they were indexical signs of modernization, products as well as makers of capitalism, and symbolic artefacts that familiarized modernity for their readers by offering them ways to make sense of epistemological, political, conceptual and material transformations. Modernity, in this chapter, will be understood as an “experience” of time, place, the self and the other (Berman 1983) that is a response to modernization (the physical, technological, political, cultural and conceptual changes); furthermore, modernity is also a discursive formation which elaborates modernization, textually and visually. I draw also on Nicola Miller’s (2008) idea of “technocratic modernity” and on William Rowe’s argument (2007, 121) on Peruvian modernity as a set of “moments” and “declarations” and not as a sequential and linear experience. In fact, I propose to understand magazines such as EPI and Variedades as heterogeneous spaces that hosted specific, even conflictive, “declarations of modernity”.

The role played by print media in crafting nation-ness was signalled long ago by Benedict Anderson in his seminal study about nationalism: according to him, print capitalism “laid the basis for national consciousness” (Anderson 1983, 44) by creating “unified fields of exchange and communication” which articulated specific power relations through language; newspapers allowed to “create an imagined community among a specific assemblage of fellow-readers” (1983, 62) to whom the objects and people commented in the periodicals belonged. However, as pointed out by recent studies in visual culture (Mallart 2015), Anderson’s work failed to acknowledge two important ways in which periodicals engaged with nation making: first, the visual element and, second, those “routine forms” and “little ways” that fall within Michael Billig’s (1995, 8) notion of “banal nationalism”. As Billig claims, “citizenry are daily reminded of their national place in a world of nations. However, this reminding is so familiar, so continual, that it is not consciously registered as reminding” (1995, 8). Another key notion is the “everyday”: as Tim Edensor (2002, 1) noticed: “the nation has been subject to very little critical analysis in terms of how it is represented and experienced through popular culture and in everyday life”. Printed serially for a mass readership, published weekly, resuming, illustrating and commenting on the main events of the week and other actualities, illustrated magazines have the “everyday” at the core of their content. Placed at the crossroads of high and popular culture, art and commerce, instruction and entertainment, politics and the “apolitical”, they are examples of the many “trivial” ways in which feelings of collective belonging and shared values can be articulated through “beliefs, assumptions, habits, representations and practices” (Billig 1995, 6).

Like nationhood, the notion of citizenship evokes feelings of collective belonging and shared values and behaviours. Unlike nationhood, however, citizenship defines legal status, rights and responsibility, it evokes hierarchies, issues of recognition and rules of inclusion and exclusion; it suggests verticality and prescription. This is even more true in historically heterogeneous countries, such as Peru, where definitions of citizenship have expressed specific “semantics of domination” and depended on real “social conflicts and relations of power”, as Andrés Guerrero argues in relation to Ecuador (Guerrero 2003, 272). In Peru, the issue of who were citizens and who would acquire the right to vote was central in the postcolonial political debate (Del Águila 2014). Legal citizenship, however, does not exhaust the debate on this topic. Recent scholarship has called for expanding the notion and study of citizenship beyond the political, focusing “less on legal rules and more on norms, practices, meanings, and identities” (Isin and Turner 2002, 4). Drawing on such scholarship, I discuss how graphic printed media crafted an “imagined citizenship” – by which I mean ideal images (visual and metaphorical) of citizens, of their values and behaviours – whether this was shaped around specific class identities and narratives of otherness, and how it was articulated visually and through vision.

El Perú Ilustrado

The political and legal transformation of Peru from a colonial dualistic system to “one free and united republic of national citizens” entailed the construction of a genealogical historical narrative to narrativize “pasts for the civico-political task of turning “ex-colonial” subjects into republican citizens with a national future” (Thurner 2003, 141). The official national genealogy created in the post-independence period might be thought of as one aspect of the broader task of “educating” the republican citizens, a key endeavour of the newly formed Peruvian state. As Carmen McEvoy (1997) maintains, the process of state formation required a “cultural revolution” to create a legitimizing discourse around the new political entity and the republican ethos, a task to be carried out particularly through education. In the second half of the nineteenth century, the political discourse of the dominant civilista party, for example, imagined the ideal citizen as illustrated and valorous, participative and a productive worker and implemented these values through tools such as the school text Manual of the Citizen’s Duties and Rights. In the aftermath of the War of the Pacific (1879–1883), which left Peru destroyed physically, politically and morally, the notions of strength and regeneration became crucial in the discourse on citizenship: the moral and physical weakness of Peruvians was considered a main cause of the national defeat. During the post-war National Reconstruction (1886–1894), the ruling group’s positivist ideology identified science, education, European immigration and foreign capital as tools of political order and economic development (Cueto 1989); state policies promoted racial improvement and corporeal and social control. Despite the different governments that guided Peru from the National Reconstruction to the 1930s, the notion of modern citizens as rational, moral, healthy, strong and devoted to work and productivity was dominant and informed specific policies and laws from the realms of work to those of immigration and leisure.

EPI was a “semanario para familias” [weekly aimed at families] founded by the Italian-American entrepreneur Peter Bacigalupi in 1887 and directed by Peruvian intellectual Clorinda Matto de Turner between 1889 and 1892. Like other late-nineteenth-century illustrated magazines, such as the Colombian El Papel Periódico Ilustrado (1881–1889) [The Illustrated Periodical Paper] or the Venezuelan El Cojo Ilustrado (1892–1915) [The Illustrated Cripple], EPI gave centrality to visual technologies as demonstrated by their titles. By intertwining the meanings of “illustrated” (through images) and “enlightened” (through rationality), the word ilustrado links a visual tradition of knowledge to a Cartesian conception of reality (González Stephan 2009, 138). The second meaning of the Spanish word meant both “to make someone illustrious” and “to instruct” people (González Stephan 2009; Silva Beauregard 2006). Mirroring these meanings, magazines such as El Cojo Ilustrado or EPI hosted galleries of “illustrious” people, educated the citizenry on the values of the modern nation and operated as agents of national progress.

Reflecting the ideology of Andrés Avelino Cáceres’ government and espousing Latin American elites’ ideology of “technocratic modernity” (Miller 2008) – the “promotion of an ideology of progress defined primarily in economic terms, driven by instrumental reason and technology, and implemented by a knowledge elite” (2008, 14) – EPI placed progress at the core of its editorial project: in its first issue, it claimed to be “an agent of advancement for the nation … to offer its humble contribution to the great deposit of universal progress” (EPI 1 1887). By including the word Peru in its title, the magazine establishes a stronger link between the notions of progress and education and that of nation, thus revealing its role in the process of national reconstruction. This national(ist) concern within the post-war context informs the ways in which the magazine constructed citizenship. In its texts and images, the magazine exposed and supported the Presidential policy of material progress, immigration and productivity. The new Peruvians needed to be, according to Cáceres, “robust, useful men, able to work for twenty hours like Edison” (EPI 156).

EPI implemented specific visual strategies to mould Peruvian citizens: it displayed an “iconography of national heroes and types” (Silva Beauregard 2006, 373) which established examples to emulate (through portraits), as well as specific narratives of difference (through types); it visualized the values that constituted citizenship through images of Peruvian territory; it trained modern citizens in ways of looking at their country. In terms of race and class, the imagined citizenship was shaped around the criollo/mestizo middle and upper classes that would constitute most of its bourgeois readers (and writers), who were educated, healthy and devoted to work. Classes, as several scholars argue (Parker 1998; Adamovsky 2014), are not to be understood as rigid socio-economic categories, but rather as relational categories that vary according to the specific contexts and are defined by a variety of elements from education, origin and surname to “race” and by acts of naming and self-identification. EPI addresses specifically criollo/mestizomiddle and upper sectors as the makers of Peruvian modern citizenry, whose “class” identity appears to be an a priori assumption that precedes the elaboration of a notion of citizenship in the public sphere. While bonded to certain social and racial sectors, however, it must be noted that citizenship in EPI appears also as a set of values that can be exported to and acquired from “other” sectors, a posture that is in line with the dominant positivist reformist ideology embodied by intellectuals such as Manuel González Prada and also with contemporary political projects such as the colonization of the Amazonian jungle.

The gallery of national heroes consisted of portraits of illustrated subjects embodying the values that modern citizens needed to acquire. Each cover hosted a portrait of an important individual, and additional portraits were included in the other pages (Figure 1.1). In line with the dominant ideology, which saw commerce and productivity as the foundation of a new Peru, the magazines hosted portraits of politicians, lettered women and men, and individuals from the realm of industries. Furthermore, confirming the importance of economy in nation building, the magazine presented itself as a publication that aimed to combine the arts and commerce. Within the gallery of national heroes, a special role was played by the war heroes; through a patriotic rhetoric, EPI rewrote the defeat of the war as a moment of heroic regeneration.⁴

The making of modern citizens would happen not only through emulation, but also through specific narratives of difference articulated in the visual genre of the type. By type images, I refer to a visual genre that seeks to depict ideal subjects, “models” of larger groups of people (West 2004) as opposed to the search for individuality that characterizes the portrait; this typification mirrors the existing racial and social hierarchies between dominant and subaltern sectors. An examination of this visual genre in EPI would require a deeper discussion; however, for this essay, it is important to signal, first, that the use of type responds to a technical device of the perio...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of contributors
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part I Culture
• Part II Politics
• Index