Doing Democracy: Activist Art and Cultural Politics

Chapter 4 The Moral Economy

75 Chapter 4 The Moral Economy “Doing Democracy” via Public Day of the Dead Rituals Regina Marchi Introduction The 1960s and 1970s marked a pivotal period in U.S. history, when Latinos and other people of color were collectively engaged in struggles to gain civil rights, public recognition, and respect within mainstream Anglo society. Blossoming in the 1970s (with roots going back to the 1930s), the Chicano1 Movement began in California and the American Southwest as a political and cultural movement that worked on a broad cross-section of issues affecting the Mexican American community.These included farm workers’ rights; Native American land rights; efforts to improve educational opportunities; voting and political rights; and the public celebration of cultural traditions. Emerging at a time of widespread activism by disenfranchised populations, the Chicano Movement was influenced by black civil rights struggles, the American Indian Movement, the women’s liberation movement, and the anti–Vietnam War Movement.2 Chicano activists identified strongly with anticolonial struggles around the world (for example, in Puerto Rico, Cuba, Vietnam, and Africa) and proclaimed solidarity with these movements for self-determination. They supported the struggles of elderly Filipinos in San Francisco trying to avoid eviction from affordable Some material from this essay originally appeared in Regina Marchi, Day of the Dead in the USA: The Migration and Transformation of a Cultural Phenomenon (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2009). 76 / regina marchi housing; striking coal miners in Kentucky; and the boycott of Nestlés because of that company’s aggressive promotion of infant formula to nursing mothers in Africa.3 At home in the United States, Chicanos were waging multipronged political battles to improve the segregated and substandard schooling provided to Latino children (who were typically tracked into vocational rather than university paths). They also worked to increase Latino voter registration and representation in the U.S. political system and combated the labor abuses, substandard housing, and environmental contamination facing Latino and other minority neighborhoods. In discussing how cultural traditions can provide the moral force and infrastructure needed to critique the dominant society, cultural critic E. P. Thompson argued that the popular food riots of eighteenth-century England were not merely compulsive responses to economic stimuli. Rather, they were a “moral economy” form of social protest—“self-conscious behavior modified by custom, culture and reason” in which people used moral indignation to defend community rights and challenge official descriptions of reality.4 The grievances expressed by the common people, he explained, were grounded in traditional views of norms and obligations that “operated within a popular consensus as to what were legitimate and what were illegitimate practices” among various sectors of society, such as workers, consumers, business, and government.5 This was a community or class response to crisis that expressed resistance to exploitation and challenged the authorities, on moral grounds, to attend to the common good. Tracing the origins of the highly organized eighteenth-century English working class to long-standing social traditions of mutual aid, he argued that the widespread participation of common folk in communal rituals and ceremonies sustained collectivist values that, in turn, allowed the working class to maintain solidarity under difficult political conditions . Chicano Day of the Dead celebrations frequently operate along a moral economy model of protest, encouraging moral reflection on issues of political importance and revealing dimensions of repression too often overlooked by the dominant culture. As we shall see, they illustrate Thompson’s view that cultural ritual is not merely an extraneous variable but a political necessity in struggles for justice. Political Art as Alternative Media In order to combat the long-standing injustices facing Latinos in the United States, Chicanos felt it was crucial to communicate with the the moral economy / 77 public—both Latino and non-Latino—to increase consciousness and encourage political organizing. But how could this be accomplished when so few Latinos occupied positions in the mass media, and both the news and popular media routinely portrayed Latinos via negative stereotypes? Historically, U.S. news coverage depicted Mexicans and other Latinos as lazier, less intelligent, less moral, and more prone to crime than AngloAmericans .6 The same patterns of representation existed in magazine and television advertising.7 In Hollywood films, Latinos were stereotyped as bandits, gang bangers, over-sexed Latin lovers, dangerous and flirty temptresses , or doltish buffoons.8 Mainstream U.S. news portrayed Latinos primarily within “problem” and “social disadvantage” frames, as people...