Cultural Producers and Social Change in Latin America

Kenneth A. Loparo, Felipe Cala Buendía

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781137465375
• eBook ISBN: 9781137462237
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: American Government
• Index: Politics & International Relations

In Argentina, Colombia, and Peru, there has been an out-pouring of popular-performative activities that have asked citizens to pose questions about the social order and about the memories of recent atrocities. Cala Buendía looks at ways in which cultural producers adapted or developed strategies as resources for social actors to use for change.

CHAPTER 1

The Happiness of Pursuit

“The happiness of pursuit.” I take the phrase from Albert Hirschman, whose well-recognized passion for language led him to pose this simple wordplay on the famous passage of the United States Declaration of Independence to signal the motivations that lie behind some forms of collective action for political and social advancement. Perhaps he was thinking of his own Getting Ahead Collectively: Grassroots Experiences in Latin America, a wonderful book—half essay, half travelogue—in which he records his observations about a series of collective initiatives throughout Latin America and raises important questions regarding the existence of a correct sequence for economic development, or about the actual undesirability of unforeseen effects of developmental actions. Hirschman emphasizes the importance of the processes that lead to and follow collective engagement over the actual effects or results that it might yield. And this is what the happiness of pursuit is all about: “The felicity of taking part in collective action,” as he puts it (“Trespassing” 103).

This book is about the happiness of pursuit in more than one way.

More often than not, it deals with examples of collective action, radiating from both civil society and government, and with the processes that led to, and followed, their implementation. But moreover, it deals with that type of felicity which is so peculiar to these examples, being as they are of an artistic, creative, and cultural nature, heavily reliant on language and its symbolic potentialities. It examines Bogotá’s experience in dealing in the mid-1990 with widespread citizen disaffection and urban violence through a series of artful and creative initiatives that were part of a public policy package known as cultura ciudadana; the Peruvian transitional justice movement in the early 2000s, where cultural activists, such as Colectivo Sociedad Civil and Grupo Cultural Yuyachkani, not only voiced their rejection of Alberto Fujimori’s regime, but also played a fundamental role in the subsequent efforts of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission to deal with the massive human rights violations that took place between 1980 and 2000; and the Argentine publishing house Eloísa Cartonera, which emerged in the wake of the 2001 economic turmoil, and has ever since been engaged in proposing an alternative production and circulation of cultural goods in opposition to the neoliberal economic policies that were implemented in Argentina throughout the previous decade.

The underlying question I address is: How have different instances of cultural activity throughout Latin America imagined alternative understandings of citizenship, in the wake of the so-called Third Wave of democratization and amidst its multiple shortcomings? To tackle this question I study the way in which the aforementioned cultural initiatives have actively addressed and proposed alternative approaches to what I consider three paradigmatic problems of Latin American democracies that in one way or another have hindered the realization of substantive citizenship in the region, namely, urban violence, massive human rights abuses, and neoliberalism’s whiplashes.

In this sense, this book examines the cultural dimensions of political and social debates about citizenship in these Latin American countries, where an efflorescence of artistic, creative, and performatic activity in the late 1990s and early 2000s asked citizens to pose basic questions about the political and social orders in which they lived, and about the memories of recent atrocities, crises, and upheavals.¹ I look at the ways in which cultural producers adapted and developed products and strategies that held a mirror up to society, thereby placing culture in the political realm. Shifting the conventional framing of scholarship on citizenship and social movements, I focus on the producers and the production processes, illuminating different ways in which cultural activity yields resources for political and social actors to either use or suppress.

But this book is also about the felicity that lies in “trespassing”— a word that in the Hirschmanian lexicon is stripped of its negative connotations to indicate a pursuit that goes beyond disciplinary boundaries or crisscrosses between disciplines without rigidity.² In this case, this trespassing leads to that murky space where cultural policy and cultural politics converge; a space where artful, creative, and symbolic actions advance a given moral economy or moral politics, amidst conjunctures of crisis in the political economy and in public life, and in pursuit of a change in the understanding and exercise of citizenship or in the formulation or implementation of public policy. This is what I call culture-based advocacy, a phrase I use to group these different instances in which voice was exercised through the appropriation of art and creativity, in order to make the case for or against something, in spite of the cultural, economic, political, and social contradictions of the Third Wave of democratization and neoliberalism.

Citizenship in the Land of Disjunctions

From the mid-1970s and all the way through the 1980s, political change swept the world as authoritarian regimes tumbled and gave way to democracy—a phenomenon to which Samuel Huntington referred as the Third Wave of democratization, as opposed to two other historical moments when transitions from nondemocratic to democratic regimes outnumbered transitions in the opposite direction. In the case of Latin America, one could say that this process could be more accurately deemed a democratizing monsoon, as an unprecedented number of countries experienced either a transition from authoritarianism to democracy, or a consolidation of their semi-democratic regimes.

During these two decades, the region also experienced a profound change in its economic thinking.³ Amidst a generalized perception of the exhaustion of a model based on a high degree of protectionism, government-led industrialization, and a broad involvement of the state in the economy, its leaders implemented a series of shock therapies tending toward deregulation, fiscal responsibility, macroeconomic stability, privatizations, and trade liberalizations. These measures were so widely regarded as common sense that they constituted what Sebastián Edwards calls a “Latin American consensus” among not only the economic and political elites but also significant sectors of the population, whose underlying factors include the failure of the so-called heterodox programs in Argentina, Brazil, and Peru; the experience of the Chilean and East Asian economies; and the advice of (and pressures from) the Bretton Woods institutions and transnational networks of think tanks of global and regional reach.⁴

The implementation of these economic reforms constitutes an expression of a shifting temporality in the political economy, whereby the pachydermic time of the state was progressively replaced with the fast-paced time of the market, and a much higher premium was placed on the contingences of the present than on the uncertainties of the future. To this respect, Javier Santiso argues that as capitalism, globalization, and the market economy flattened temporal horizons, states were forced to adapt their reactions to the imperatives of achievement, efficiency, real-time delivery, and speed. According to Santiso, the region’s recent economic history is but the story of the adjustment of an entire continent to this accelerated global time.⁵

However, in the wake of these processes of democratization and neoliberalization, Latin American economic and political regimes fell short of their promises. Despite some success stories, most countries failed to attain economic growth and stability, alleviate overwhelming inequality and poverty, address rampant crime and violence, or curb corruption. The undeniable fact is that 30 years later a lot promises were still unfulfilled and most citizens’ aspirations and dreams continued to be truncated. As Ricardo Ffrench-Davis so categorically states, by the turn of the twentyfirst century, “the distribution of opportunities and of productivity [had] become even more skewed than before this sort of reforms” (6).

In this context, citizen disaffection and disillusionment led to the emergence of a political economy of impatience. Indeed, neoliberalism’s alteration of the temporal horizons in the policy and political realms entailed a sort of degradation of Hirschman’s famous tunnel effect—a metaphoric explanation of citizens’ endurance in the face of present hardships due to the expectations of a better future. As a wide array of scholarship on the 1980s and 1990s shows, this impatience manifested itself in the upsurge of crime and violence, especially in urban contexts; in increased expressions of citizen discontent, through protests and other forms of collective action; in the proliferation of informal economies; and in the reemergence of authoritarian regimes and/or populist forms of government.⁶ As I will elaborate in the corresponding chapters, Colombia, Peru, and Argentina—and their capital cities—experienced to a greater or lesser extent all of these phenomena.

Furthermore, the Colombian, Peruvian, and Argentine experiences analyzed in this book are all linked to conjunctures of crisis, whether in the political economy or in public life. In Bogotá this crisis stemmed from a sharp and sustained increase in its violence rates, and a concomitant degradation of its urban imaginary. All this led to a crisis in the way citizens interacted with each other, the authorities and the city, and prompted a series of theoretical reflections—which were later put into practice—about the underlying causes of and probable remedies for this situation. In Peru the crisis originated in the multisided armed conflict that afflicted the country between 1980 and 2000, but also in the way in which the Fujimori regime leveraged on its authoritarianism, populism, and spectacularity in order to put in place a percepticidal system that prevented the citizenry from acknowledging the dimensions and magnitude of the said conflict.⁷ In the public sphere, the process that follows knowledge before it circulates with meaning was seriously hampered. Finally, in Argentina the crisis grew out of an economic model that was grafted from neoliberal ideology, which eventually proved untenable and quickly segued into political instability. Public life and social capital were seriously affected by the shortened timeframes and widespread commodification, which, according to many observers, follow suit to the implementation of these adjustment policies.

These conjunctures of crisis in the political economy and in public life contributed to a deepening of what Teresa P. R. Caldeira and James Holston deem as “disjunctive democracy.” By labeling it disjunctive, these authors call attention to the fact that democracy “comprises processes in the institutionalization, practice, and meaning of citizenship that are never uniform or homogeneous. Rather, they are normally uneven, unbalanced, irregular, heterogeneous, arrhythmic, and indeed contradictory.” Fundamentally, as they explain, the concept means “democracy’s distribution and depth among the population of citizens in a given political space are uneven” (717). And while all democratic regimes are to a certain extent more or less disjunctive, the truth is that these crises have the potentiality of making disjunctions even more acute, and certainly more acutely felt by citizens on the losing end of the equation.

The notion of disjunctive democracy implies that citizenship and democracy are inherently and necessarily interconnected.⁸ In discussions about this relationship, citizenship is more often than not defined as a bundle of rights and, as of more recently, responsibilities (political, civil, social, or cultural), through which the legal status of an individual is negotiated within a political community—typically, but not necessarily, the nation-state.⁹

However, this conception seems to me rather static. As Néstor García Canclini argues, citizenship should be regarded

not only in relation to rights accorded by state institutions to those born within their territorial jurisdiction, but also as social and cultural practices that confer a sense of belonging, provide a sense of difference, and enable the satisfaction of the needs of those who possess a given language and organize themselves in certain ways.

(Consumers 20)

Indeed, citizenship is more than a bundle of rights and responsibilities accumulated through time, as individuals and collectivities can also be the subjects of a series of aspirations regarding their individual and collective futures, which they articulate as part of their own political strategies. The way in which citizenship is exercised and realized depends on how private and public actors— other individuals and collectivities, corporations, nongovernmental organizations, the state, etc.—actually enforce and recognize these aspirations, rights, and responsibilities. The interactions and practices that emerge among them and its enforcers are an essential aspect of citizenship, it being a relational concept in which a private or public other plays a fundamental role.

I contend that citizenship is constituted through the dynamic network that these aspirations, rights, and responsibilities, and their enforcers form. The flow of citizenship through this network is determined by the way in which its nodes are switched on and off at different times and in different places, producing disjunctions and conditioning much of the moral economies and moral politics that circulate within it—understood as the different notions of what the legitimate and illegitimate economic and political practices are, and of what enforcers (private and public) should and should not do.¹⁰ This model, I believe, can be useful in giving meaning to the actions undertaken by the cultural activists portrayed in this book, as they can all be regarded as ways to reclaim or redefine their status as citizens.

The Colombian, Peruvian, and Argentine crises hampered the flow of citizenship through this network, as private and public actors failed to enforce, to a greater or lesser extent, citizen rights and responsibilities across their civil, cultural, economic, and social dimensions. But what is so particular about these initiatives—from the cultura ciudadana policy to the Colectivo, from Yuyachkani to Eloísa—is that they attempted to affect the civil, political, and social dimensions from the specificity of the cultural one, by enacting and performing a series of values that ran against the grain of the prevailing ethos in these situations of decline. In every case there is an explicit intent to reconstitute social capital—to shift citizens’ beliefs and judgments about the quality of their affiliation to that particular network of aspirations, rights, responsibilities, and their respective private and public enforcers—by rekindling lost forms of cohesion, communal identity, and solidarity.¹¹ In the following chapters, I will explore the way in which these initiatives, as responses to crises in the political economy or in public life, exhibit a concern with questions of citizenship, proposing alternative understandings and practices, and reactivating social capital from the ground-up or through a more horizontal relationship between the citizenry and the state.

What’s Culture Got to Do with It?

Explaining democratic endurance in these disjunctive contexts and conjunctures of crisis, Scott Mainwaring and Aníbal Pérez-Liñán counter-intuitively show that structural and governmentperformance variables do not play such a predominant role, while in contrast political variables are powerful contributing factors to the unfolding, and the aftermath, of the Third Wave of democratization in the region. While Latin American democracies, to different extents, have managed to endure in the past three decades, it is also true that if they are to thrive and not merely survive, governments must not only generate jobs, guarantee public security, and provide infrastructure and public services, but the ties that bind citizens to democratic institutions—an affect that could be related to what Peter Evans calls “embeddedness”—should also be strengthened.¹² It is thus my contention that the political variable can be affected by cultural initiatives that actively engage in citizenship reactivation processes. For just as disjunctions are characteristic of contemporary democracies, so is expediency—to use George Yúdice’s term—characteristic of contemporary cultural activity. As Yúdice argues, culture has recently gained an instrumental valence in the advancement of economic, political, and social agendas, in order to claim some sort of legitimacy—one might say, relevance— in the circuits of global capitalism. In this context, the definition of culture has become a much-contested issue, as the concept has been used so prolifically that it has somehow become devoid of meaning.

Three decades ago, Raymond Williams defined the term at hand as a “realised signifying system” (Culture 209). In this sense, culture is contrived as a network where meanings are socially constructed, circulate, and are appropriated or contested. Signification, according to Williams, is present in all human activities, of which only some are manifestly cultural. Despite its contradictors, I believe this initial definition to be inclusive enough but not so broad as to preclude the possibility of distinction.¹³ That is, to be analytically useful to explore the interrelations between and yet differentiate what is primarily about signification and symbolic exchange (that is, manifestly ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgments
• 1. The Happiness of Pursuit
• 2. The Cultura Ciudadana Policy in Bogotá: Out-of-the-Box Governance in a Violent City
• 3. The Cultural Resistance of Colectivo Sociedad Civil in Peru: Performing Citizenship in the Time of Fear
• 4. Grupo Cultural Yuyachkani and the Peruvian Truth and Reconciliation Commission: In a Very Imperfect World
• 5. The Eloísa Cartonera Initiative in Buenos Aires: The Poetics of Labor
• Conclusion: The Art of Voice
• Notes
• References
• Index