As of 10:40pm, I have not yet read the Gomez-Pena topography piece.  While I plan to have it done by class tomorrow, I will only focus on the Roman-Velazquez and Beltran readings in this post.

I found the Roman-Velazquez reading on salsa to be particularly interesting in part because I am in UBC’s Latin Dance club and have been taking beginner salsa classes this term.  From this experience, I think that there is a lot to be said for music and dance as a point of entry into a culture.  As Roman-Velazquez comments on page 121, the initial biases associated with ethnicity often vanish quickly in salsa; evaluations of talent and level of integration are instead based on capability.  Thus, while salsa follows “Latin” rhythm and instrumental patterns, neither performance of the music nor dance is restricted to those of Latin American backgrounds (except in the area of vocals, where language and native level of fluency in Spanish still presents a barrier to entry for singers).  In my salsa class, neither of my teachers are Latin American.  Sebastian, the lead, is a caucasian man no taller than 5’3″.  Yuki, the follower, is a heavy set woman with an accent I would guess is from Southeast Asia.  I would not peg either one of them as a salsa dancer if I saw them walking down the street, yet their sense of rhythm, style, and familiarity is immediately apparent the instant you dance with them.  Also, amongst the other students in the class, it is very clear that a Latin background in no way implies an inherent salsa talent; the male lead who can out-salsa most of the other guys in the class is from Eastern Europe, while one guy who grew up in Mexico as a kid often struggles to stay on top of his feet.

The lack of obstacles involved in creating music and dancing make them two elements of culture that are fairly universally accessible and thus make them transportable, as seen in Roman-Velazquez’s example of salsa culture in London.  However, different locations have distinct styles, exemplified in the story of Colombian Roberto Pla, who had to alter his percussion style so those in Britain could “digest it” (p.122).  On page 120, Roman-Velazquez writes that “places are important sites for the meeting and exchange of different cultural practices and possible cultural transformations.”  This made me curious about a hypothetical situation: what if mestizaje mixture of White, Latin, and African cultures took place in a location other than South America.  If Portugal and Spain had decided to bring natives from South America to labor on settlements in Africa, would the resulting culture be radically different from what was created in Latin America??

I didn’t intend to write for that long on salsa.  The one thing I will say on Jennifer Lopez is that it would be interesting to compare the construction of her “cross-over” stardom to the construction of male Latin-American cross-over stars, mainly in terms of the emphasis placed on physicality vs. personality and talent.

From the introduction, I was reminded a lot of Roger Keesing’s “Theories of Culture Revisited” in that hybridization could provide an angle through which anthropologists could still maintain their field of study.  Canclini describes that “The emphasis on hybridization not only puts an end to the pretense of establishing ‘pure’ or ‘authentic’ identities; in addition, it demonstrates the risk of delimiting local, self-contained identities or those that attempt to assert themselves as radically opposed to national society or globalization” (xxviii).  In this way, hybridization deals with both the issue of the coral reef approach to cultural identity as well as the concept of radical alterity that Keesing was concerned with.

The concept of “audiovisual democracy” from page 211 resonated with me.  Canclini defines audiovisual democracy as a phenomenon in which “the real is produced by the images created in the media” (211).  In the reading, Canclini uses the term in the context of electronic technologies stepping in to take the place of what he calls “urban culture,” which is created by direct in-person interactions.  He explains that “mass mediatization” (209) represents a more efficient way of organizing the public than these interactions since it allows information to be spread to from urban to rural areas (and potentially vice versa) through the television.  This causes a shift in individuals’ perceptions of reality from something to take part in and experience firsthand, to something that is to be received.  Reality thus becomes defined as something made up by public opinion polls, and “the citizen becomes a client, a ‘public consumer'” (211).

I can see two very clear applications of this phenomenon of audiovisual democracy today.  The first is in the public opinion polls during the 2016 American election.  Many public opinion polls predicted that Hillary Clinton would win.  Reports of these statistics circulated heavily on television and in the echo chambers of social media to people who wanted to hear such statistics, thus creating an illusory reality in the mind of many Americans that Clinton’s prospects were better than they really were.  Donald Trump’s election then came as a massive shattering of “reality” (granted, Clinton did win the popular vote but her lead was not significant enough to match perceptions created by polls).  The second relevant application of audiovisual democracy I see is in climate change denial.  I learned in one of my classes this past week that 97% of climate scientists agree that global warming exists and that humans are the cause of accelerated warming.  Of the 3% that disagree, 2.8% disagree with the clause that humans are the cause of accelerated warming (not with the phenomenon of global warming itself).  But due to the proliferation of political rhetoric in the media, only 47% of Americans perceive that there is consensus in the scientific community on the existence of climate change.  Both of these examples demonstrate that when the citizen is turned into a mere consumer, the media is granted reign over what is reality (kind of scary!!!).

The biggest thing I came away with from this week’s readings is the intense melodrama surrounding Latin American mass culture.

When I read the quote on the very first page of Ortega’s piece about the game of 1950 being “Our (Brazil’s) catastrophe, our Hiroshima” (43), I was put off.  When the United States bombed Hiroshima in 1945, upward of one hundred and fifty thousand people died within the first year and many Japanese civilians who survived continued to suffer the effects of intense radiation exposure for years afterward.  I’m sure the quote did not explicitly intend to downplay the gravity of Hiroshima.  I am also both Japanese and American so I think I am particularly sensitized to the issue.  But my bottom line is that I was skeptical as I started reading the first few pages.

Continuing with the reading, however, it became clear to me that in some ways there actually are odd parallels between Japan and Brazil in terms of their lasting fascination with their respective “catastrophes”.  Moving forward from the bombing, Japan viewed itself as a victim of World War II, and consequently has channeled much energy into tying it’s national identity to the concept of peace.  For Brazil, the loss of 1950 was a manifestation of Brazilian’s underlying worry that they “were naturally a defeated people”(55).  As large scale, public example of the country’s “stray dog complex”(55), the game of 1950 solidified Brazil’s national identity as one of a people destined to fight an uphill battle against their inherent bad luck.  The most painful piece for me was when I read how the Maracana stadium “gave Brazil a new soul”(46) as it attempted to establish itself in the modern world.  I don’t know if Bellos adopted some melodrama himself in assessing whether the game caused or was the cause of Brazil’s upward battle mentality, but importance of the game in Brazilian history is certainly not lost.

The Ortega reading gave me a new respect for the Telenovela.  At home, my family used to sometimes turn on Univision, and I was never able to get over my sensitivity to the cheesiness of the shows.  I was unaware of the role that Por estas calles played in shaping Venezuela’s national identity or political climate.  It was striking to me that the show was not totally censored for contributing to the volatile political climate.

Collectively from the two readings, I have realized that melodrama is not something to be seen necessarily as a negative thing, since it can play a crucial role in the development of identity in a way I did not previously recognize.

I read Ortiz and most of Millington but I just focus on Ortiz here because I have more coherent thoughts:

I did not know that Ortiz coined the term “transculturation”.  To be perfectly honest, I wasn’t totally sure what transculturation was explicitly supposed to mean until looking at this reading.  I thought that it was cool that we were looking at an examination of the word in the text in which it was first used by the person who created it since many words are assimilated into the English language over time and it can be difficult to identify their exact origins.  Ortiz defines transculturation as the process of transitioning from one culture to another that “necessarily involves the loss or uprooting of a previous culture” (102).  I was intrigued by Ortiz’s analysis of the painful process of transculturation for Africans in Cuba.  While both black and native labourers were subjected to harsh treatment under the status of slaves and both experienced cultural oppression under the newly dominant Spanish culture, the “Indians suffered their fate in their native land, believing that when they died they passed over to the invisible regions of their own Cuban world” (102).  While being forced to adapt to a new culture would be difficult under any circumstance, for the Africans it would have been many times worse, having just been “torn from another continent” and facing the prospect of having to “recross it (the ocean) to be reunited with their lost ancestors” (102).

Ortiz also nuanced that “To a greater or lesser degree whites and Negros were in the same state of dissociation in Cuba” (102).  Regardless of status in the master-slave dynamic, the process of relocating and re-establishing one’s sense of identity in a new place can be a difficult and sometimes painful process.  Obviously, having had some form of conscious say in the decision to relocate would have made things easier for the Spaniard.  The fact that some brought their families with them also would have eased the transition.  But the bottom line is that uprooting and re-rooting in a new environment where one faces an intersection of culture(s) is hard.  To an extent, I feel like many university students face a similar challenge when first arriving at school, since for many people it represents their first time not living in their family home and many travel outside their province or country.  I live in the United States which is about as close of a country to Canada as you can get.  The independence and exposure I have gained within UBC’s diverse population has been one of my favorite parts of this year.  However, even coming from somewhere as close as America, I still occasionally felt a sense of cultural isolation in the first semester and resonated with what Ortiz described (thinking about it once over, I’m not totally sure if what I experienced was culturally related or just college angst??)