¡Muy Pop!: Conversations on Latino Popular Culture

Epilogue: Sense and Porquería

[121] Epilogue: Sense and Porquería frederick luis aldama: It’s time for some final observations on the cultural education of senses, especially with a view toward the future, the next generation. By cultural I mean material, intellectual, and interpretive, the three dimensions I offered in the prologue to this book that encompass what I understand to be the concept of “culture .” ilan stavans: I am all ears, although I fear for a theoretical approach that might kill our joie de vivre. fa: Joking aside, Ilan, you and I have been talking about food, religion, narrative fiction, art, films, music, and a host of other subjects that seem to have little in common other than the fact that they belong to what we may term Latino culture—or more expansively Latin/o American culture. is: Ay, the name game again! Our discussion has mostly dealt with Mexican artifacts on both sides of la frontera. fa: What we’ve seen is how customs, habits, tastes, preferences, implicit and explicit norms, and many other cultural features, not to forget language, migrate together with the people who literally embody them and who thus bring them to their new country, to their new homeland to coexist with other cultural elements and eventually to merge with them and then reemerge as a new culture, a new creation. is: Are you talking about the process of assimilation? fa: All the cultural features brought with the first generation are usually then transmitted to the next generations in an increasingly attenuated way. Memory plays a decisive role here, but so do direct experience and many other factors that affect human behavior, such as emotions and new knowledge. Be that as it may, when migration becomes massive, the cultural heritage it carries, whether diminished or not over time, has an impact on the mainstream, just as the cultural features of the mainstream as a whole flow into the smaller ethnic components of the general population of the host country. is: Do you know the Hebrew word mishmash? It doesn’t mean mix- [122]¡Muy Pop! match but mess, confusion, chaos . . . Of course, chaos is an alternative form of order. fa: With Latino culture, there is a massive two-way flow between Latino and mainstream culture. Latinos are educated by the mainstream and in their turn educate the mainstream. In this sense, we can imagine a point in time in the future where Latinos will be as much a part of the mainstream as today we consider the Irish or any other immigrant culture a component of the mainstream. is: Perhaps we should have titled this epilogue “How Latinos Became White.” fa: Already today there are hardly any borders between many ethnic minorities and the mainstream. I have to tell people that a good half of my ancestors hail from Ireland and the other half from Guatemala and Mexico for them to ascribe to me any specific ethnic origin. Culture and genes do not stay separate for long. is: Nothing does . . . Miscegenation is the rule of the universe. Ask Charley! fa: What Charley? is: Charley Darwin, the author of The Descent of Man (1871). And surely man is always on the descent. fa: All social contact tends toward social fusion. This is a point Fernando Ortiz made with respect to Cuba, but I believe his concepts of social syncretism and transculturation apply everywhere, most particularly in multiethnic states. In fact, what is the United States if not a “super-ethnicity,” a convergence of dozens and dozens of ethnic cultures in one common, overarching culture held together by common institutions and common laws and regulations? And this “super-ethnicity” is not static; on the contrary, it is evolving all the time, for the common institutions and laws must adapt constantly to new situations and new needs. In this sense, transculturation doesn’t mean a simple transition from one culture to another. People do not switch cultures as they would shed old clothes. is: Ortiz was a polymath. I mentioned him not long ago. I find the style of Cuban Counterpoint hypnotic. Influenced by Polish-born British anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski, he preferred the concept of transculturation to synonyms like syncretism, acculturation, and even assimilation. fa: Transculturation implies a process of social syncretism where it is not a matter of just acquiring another culture (acculturation) or of giving up a previous culture (deculturation), but of creating a new [123] Epilogue cultural...