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125 The slogan of a famous shopping center in San Salvador is, “Metrocentro: El corazón de la ciudad y tú lo haces latir” (“the heart of the city and you make it beat”). Shopping malls seem ubiquitous—always a potential detour for everyday errands and the social interactions of many people in contemporary San Salvador. Growing up in San Salvador, I spent time in Metrocentro, and over the course of my research (especially since 2004) I have visited this and other malls frequently when I am in the city. The reasons vary—to meet friends, for errands, or to renew essential government identification documents. To spend time, observing, at different points in this project. To wait. I have also attended plays and other cultural functions in the evenings, since one of the malls has a theater. Relatives and friends would join me for lunch—we like each other’s homes, but on some occasions the coffee shops and restaurants at the malls seemed more convenient. During my fieldwork and research, some respondents chose to meet with me at a mall for coffee and the interview. Of course, on certain afternoons my visits to the malls were simply to socialize, observe, and window-shop for a few hours. I am certainly not alone in being a flâneuse—many people are walkers, leisurely wanderers of the malls of the San Salvador metropolitan area and its neighboring municipalities. The activities I have listed do not seem extraordinary in contemporary San Salvador or many other Latin American cities. The parking lots and corridors of the shopping malls look similar in their layout and are almost always full of people who are going about their everyday errands or shopping for a special occasion. The congestion of San Salvador’s streets leads to the parking lots and mall corridors, where the crowds echo the street traffic—ever-changing, coming and going from the shops, food courts, kiosks, and movie theaters. 5 “Heart of the City” Life and Spaces of Consumption in San Salvador 126 SALVADORAN IMAGINARIES I trace the emergence, representation, and significance of the shopping mall in San Salvador, developing the idea of an imaginary of citizenship and consumption within the constraints of insecurity, common understandings of safety, poverty, and economic exclusion. Consumption, leisure, and socialization spaces have gained salience as new and recently remodeled shopping malls have altered San Salvador’s physical and social landscape. The shopping mall is a creative space, one that can sustain certain, multiple practices that give the sometimes “too real” illusion of public space. This illusion is limited, however, since the use of the mall as a space for the public is shaped and created by tastes, status, economic opportunity, and fear of crime in actual public spaces. I specifically focus on this idea of created spaces of consumption, in the sense that these are private spaces made to stand for a public space—for example, the street. In a consideration of the sites of consumption, the shopping mall is situated as a space of imagination of the national and the global, where Salvadoran consumers are presented with a world of goods and choices that simultaneously constrain and liberate. Consumption is a cultural, social, and economic practice, something that is part of a larger cycle of materials; it becomes concrete and meaningful in relation to how consumers are able to interact and participate in it (Conroy 1998; García Canclini 2001; Park 2005; Zukin 2004). The literature on consumption and commodities is extensive, a sign of the importance of this practice across cultures, borders, and disciplinary perspectives.1 Consumption permeates everyday life and is intertwined with questions of social status, race, class, and taste, questions that have been pursued widely across academic disciplines. Consumption also raises questions of gender and socioeconomic status. Shopping—for groceries , for gifts, for clothes—seems like an ordinary activity in the everyday lives of women. It is both a repetitive chore and a welcome recreation. Sometimes shopping provokes anxiety and indecisiveness, while on other occasions it is viewed as an activity of considerable therapeutic value (Lears 1983). Shopping spaces are often linked to women and to feminized ideas of consumption and gender roles. Many scholars critique the long-standing view of shopping as a frivolous or impulsive activity of women, a way for women to publicly display the wealth of their husbands or other male relatives. Noting this form of display in his analysis of the leisure class, economist...

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