Culture Works: Space, Value, and Mobility Across the Neoliberal Americas

Introduction

 Introduction Culture is on the rise. In most contemporary cities, there is not a project or policy without a “cultural” component, as discussion intensifies over the role culture plays in urban development projects. Tourism and shopping and entertainment based-developments are growing, while cultural workers and “creative classes,” including architects , entertainers, artists, and opinion makers, are increasingly recognized to be central to the economic vitality of modern cities.1 In this context, cultural initiatives take center stage, though not all manifestations of culture and creative workers benefit equally from this cultural turn. It is the work that culture is increasingly asked to do in neoliberalism , and the debates that ensue from the reduction and instrumentalization of culture into economic policies, projects, and frameworks, with which this book is concerned. Specifically, the rise of neoliberal and privatizing governmental reforms are well known to have fueled disparities and struggles over cultural equity, representation, and citizenship throughout U.S. and Latin American cities. Skewed to middle-class and upwardly mobile sectors, representations of “culture” favored in urban investment projects exclude many cultural workers from access to economic investment while altogether bypassing many urban residents as consumers and beneficiaries of these initiatives.2 At stake are issues of space, in regard to who and what should be at the center or at the margin of cultural initiatives, and questions of value around what representations are considered more or less valuable or worthy of promotion—all of which reverberate on people’s social and physical mobility. In this book, I aim to expose and challenge the taken-for-granted assumptions around questions of space, value, and mobility that are sustained by neoliberal treatments of culture, by exploring some of the hierarchies of cultural work and workers that these treatments engender . I draw from ethnographic research, carried out in Puerto Rico,   Introduction Latino/a New York, and Buenos Aires to highlight dynamics that underlie different instances when culture is put to work, whether as anchor of urban development, tourism, or other creative economies that sustain neoliberal reforms throughout many cities across the Americas. The case studies place different emphasis on issues of space, questions of value, and the mobility of peoples because these elements are more salient in the cases chosen for this study, not because they are mutually exclusive to these locations. My goal is that readers will appreciate how similar dynamics of space, value, and mobility are brought to bear in each location, inspiring particular cultural politics with repercussions that are both geographically and historically specific but that are ultimately global in scope. I argue that the contradictions that come about in representations and definitions of culture cannot be understood unless we take account of the different kinds of work that culture is increasingly asked to do, as well as of the constraints faced by those who seek livelihoods in the realm of cultural production. The work that culture is asked to do in neoliberal contexts ranges from producing “added value” to shopping malls to representing “authentic” views of national identity, to promoting tourism, to even becoming a decoy solution to massive unemployment . These uses point to the growing “expediency” of culture and its use as resource for local, national, and global projects, while demanding more careful ethnographic examinations of culture-based developments , of the dynamics that accompany culture’s instrumentalization , and of the cultural policies that are launched therein (Comaroff and Comaroff 2009; Carman 2006; Yúdice 2003). I further argue that the work of culture cannot be fully ascertained without foregrounding larger dynamics of political economy and how they may be affecting creative workers and industries within particular locations, or without accounting for the hierarchies of evaluation that invariably pervade most institutionalized cultural endeavors. The book’s title reflects on some of the different work that culture does and is additionally inspired by a critical view of the new guiding principle of the National Endowment for the Arts: “Art Works,” a declarative statement of the more expansive meanings that “work” takes whenever art, and for our purposes culture, is involved. In this motto, “work” designates the products created by cultural creatives, the actions that are brought about through arts and culture, whether it is to inspire, to represent, to brand, or to instill change; and it points to the fact that arts and culture Introduction   jobs represent real...