Cultures of the City: Mediating Identities in Urban Latin/o America (review)

The authors in this edited volume draw from diverse critical approaches to explore the relationship between material and symbolic urban spaces and cultural practices in Latin/o America. The essays examine the constant negotiation of identities, meanings, memories, and subjectivities through human interactions with and within urban space, and the imagined “sense of place” attributed to these spaces and represented through cultural production. The interdisciplinary nature of contributions from both the humanities and social sciences results in an important collection of analyses that constitute what the editors (citing Beatriz Sarlo) call instantáneas, momentary “snapshots” of the dynamic construction of cultural identity in urban environments.

The essays are organized into three interrelated sections that reflect the need to examine “real” and “imagined” space together, as both inform our interpretations of the city. The first section, “Imagining Urban Identities,” includes essays that examine representations of urban identity through song lyrics of nueva trova in Cuba; the narrativization of material and symbolic spaces in Argentine films and novels; and performance art and the body in Mexico City. These varied analyses speak to the multitude of cultural “texts” that can be used to examine the contentious negotiation of identities and meanings within urban spaces and the projection of conflicting cartographic imaginaries of the city. The contributions of Richard Young and Geoffery Kantaris are particularly noteworthy for their use of critical spatial theory to examine the ways that Cesar Aira’s novels (Young) and some Argentine films (Kantaris) trace the interstitial urban spaces and “haptic blind spots” (40) of postdictatorial, neoliberal Buenos Aires. The imagined meanings assigned to these locations are constantly being mediated by what Andreas Huyssen would call “palimpsests” of spatial memory—the multiple, contradictory uses and perceptions of urban space from both the past and the present that inform human interaction with and within the urban environment—contributing to the “ambiguity inherent in any social space” (52) in both individual and collective imaginaries.

The second group of essays, “Urban Identities and Cultures of the Periphery,” engage either lesser-known areas of research (e.g. Latino/a identity in Detroit and Eurocentric national identity formation in Asunción) or new approaches to established areas of analysis (e.g. Latino/a chefs and psuedo-multiculturalism in Los Angeles). Angela Prysthon offers an intriguing examination of films portraying urban Northeastern Brazil (Recife and Salvador) that serves to disrupt the dominant images of Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo as “urban” and the Northeast as the impoverished “rural” sertão. She argues that films such as Amarela manga and Cidade Baixa suspend the increasing aestheticization of poverty and violence (what Silviano Santiago calls “o cosmopolitismo do pobre”) in Brazilian “NGO Cinema” (e.g. Cidade de Deus), as well as expectations of a Cinema Novo style “aesthetics of hunger” typically associated with rural experiences in Northeastern Brazil. Prysthon concludes that these films offer a reformulation of the meaning of “periphery” in contemporary Brazilian cultural studies that points towards “both the impossibility and urgency of the appropriate representation of subalternity” (130) while highlighting “uncommon, if not completely new perceptions of Brazilian urban life” (131).

In the final section, “Performance and the Ritualization of Urban Identities,” the authors examine the construction of notions of citizenship, belonging, and identity through human interventions in the material urban environment and the meanings of these “performances” in the social imaginary. This includes analyses of festival performances by rural indigenous groups in Lima; the consolidation of power and national identity in Colombia through the Trans-Milenio urban bus system; and the formation of an inclusive and local ciudad de letrados (in contrast with Ángel Rama’s ciudad letrada) through popular participation in férias del libro in Havana. Andrea Noble’s impressive analysis of the physical and symbolic spatial intervention of the Zapatistas in Mexico City in 1999 examines the actions of a group of indigenous Mexicans to assert a political subjectivity and insert themselves as “coeval citizens” of modern...