¡VIVA!: Community Arts and Popular Education in the Americas

PART II. Transforming Urban Spaces:From Postcolonial Neighborhoods to Public Squares

Introduction An evolving analytical framework Fromthestart,wemeanttousethecreativetensionsfirstelaborated by VIVA! partners, and introduced in Part I, not as dichotomies but as dialectics to be understood in dynamic relationship to each other. At our second annual gathering in Panama, however, we began to question whether our framework of creative tensions ultimately reproduces the dichotomous thinking that we claim to challenge. We seemed caught between the linear and dualistic thinking of Western Enlightenment worldviews and Indigenous cosmovisions that were more cyclical, holistic, and integrated. After three days of hearing about and analyzing the local projects, we engaged in a process of sistematización; out of this grounded theorizing emerged a new model in the form of a spiral, which resonated more with non-Western visions that most inspire us.1 We proposed two interrelated spirals, one to synthesize the core substantive focus of our research and the other to synthesize the methodology; in other words, we reframed both the “what” and the “how” of our project in the form of spirals. After a year of engagement in our projects, it had become clear that our central substantive interest was transformation: historical and cultural recovery that uses art as a transformative process to represent peoples’ stories, ultimately feeding popular education for social change; this is illustrated in the first spiral. In a second spiral, we identified the key features of our methodology: one that was integrated and holistic (ecological and interdisciplinary), that PART II From Postcolonial Neighborhoods to Public Squares was built on intergenerational dialogue (engaging young artists with elders), and that was explicitly intercultural, addressing issues of equity both within our projects and within own transnational collaboration. While the spiral allowed us to revisit our original framework, we didn’t abandon the creative tensions altogether, in fact, many projects kept identifying their own particular tensions as a way of engaging the more difficult questions and sticky moments that are all grist for learning in popular education. The fact that these two approaches straddle the line between critical social thought and postmodern challenges and cautions perhaps represents a murky reality—that we find ourselves in the fertile interstices of the two. Transformative possibilities in urban spaces We live in an era of the “global city.” The increasing migration to urban contexts all over the world—whether a result of war and displacement, corporate globalization and neoliberal trade, political or environmental exile, the industrialization of agriculture and economic desperation —has dramatically changed the populations of cities. Recent projections in Toronto paint a picture of a population in 2031, for example, made up of 67 percent visible minorities.2 Several of the VIVA! projects in our exchange unfolded in cities with populations ranging from five million (Toronto) to thirty-five million (Mexico City). As Maggie Hutcheson, VIVA! partner, videographer, researcher, and participant in the Toronto-based Jumblies Panama City viewed from the old city Theatre project, suggests in her doctoral work on placebased public art in the “displaced city”: Underwritten in the ecological and architectural landscapes of cities, as well as in the untold stories of past and present inhabitants are histories of displacement, migration, settlement, social struggles , and ideological and material cultural shifts.3 Hutcheson’snotionof“displacement”referstomyriad historical processes: the colonial ravaging of Indigenous lands and cultures; the arrival of migrants for political, economic, and cultural reasons; the gentrification of neighborhoods that destroys and displaces low-income and racialized communities; the emergence of a “creative cities”discoursethatfavorsthosewithsocialandeconomic capital,4 and so forth. She cites Jane M. Jacobs in suggesting that cities and neighborhoods are ideal lenses through which to examine “the (post)colonial politics of identity and place.”5 As we suggested in the introduction to this volume, communities are neither monolithic nor fixed in time or place, so an examination of community arts projects in transnational cities must engage the constant reconstruction of community and identities, including the hybrid forms of representation they create out of the cauldron of diverse intersecting cultures. In the next three chapters, the integrated, interdisciplinary , and intercultural processes of community-engaged art projects in urban contexts (Toronto and Guadalajara ) are examined by VIVA! partners. As reflected in the second spiral, there are new dialogues across differences of race/ethnicity, age, gender, and class; these encounters are facilitated by art-making practices that embrace diverse ways of knowing and a wide range of cultural expression . The deeper aims of the three projects vary, if examined around the...