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

2. Authenticity and Space in Puerto Rico’s Culture-Based Informal Economy

   2 Authenticity and Space in Puerto Rico’s Culture-Based Informal Economy Thus the meaning of informality has changed markedly in the neoliberal era. In the past, it was the sector where those excluded from the modern economy found employment ; in the present it has become a place for those escaping the degradation of formerly secure jobs. —Miguel Angel Centeno and Alejandro Portes, “The Informal Economy in the Shadow of the State” The informal economy has long served as the refuge of the unemployed and underemployed. This flexible sector—which is never isolated from the “formal economy” and encompasses a wide range of unregulated income-generating activities, from street vending to intermittent services and casual work—can provide the bulk of jobs in many countries throughout the world (Portes, Castells, and Benton 1989). This is even more the case during neoliberal reforms, when government budgets shrink and civil sector jobs disappear, and with them job security and economic stability (Itzigsohn 2006). In Puerto Rico, which has had double-digit unemployment for decades, informality has become a way of life that straddles all sectors of the economy, from the many educated professionals who operate cashonly to hide income under the table to the smallest vendor whose income is never reported. Informality is further fueled by the local tax system, which favors foreign corporations over local businesses, a legacy of the island’s modernization program in the 1950s, and by what locals describe Authenticity and Space in Puerto Rico   as “permisología” or the bureaucracy of permits, which in the colonial context of Puerto Rican society is compounded by local municipal, state, and federal laws that often contradict each other. The result is that most locally initiated activity borders on informality, especially activity initiated by the most disenfranchised people, who are least able to access permits (Davis and Rivera-Batíz 2006; Alm 2006). In this chapter, I focus on an intriguing contradiction of neoliberalism: its praise for entrepreneurship and individual agency in economic matters at the same time that it is characterized by the growing policing and restricting of the populations that have historically been most entrepreneurial : the working poor, the unemployed, and the disenfranchised, who have long had to inventárselas, or “make do,” to make ends meet. I explore the added constraints faced by those who seek livelihoods in the realm of grassroots cultural production, particularly in crafts and artisanal work. These are activities to which many Latin Americans workers have historically turned to make ends meet and that have been additionally constrained by the multiple types of work that culture is asked to do: whether it is to provide an upscale ambiance or entertainment or to represent a national identity or to ameliorate unemployment. In particular, craft production has long been subject to a variety of interests involved in regulating matters of authenticity in ways that constrain workers’ legitimate participation in this sector. Among these interests are nationalist elites who have long marketed folk art as an embodiment of national culture and for tourist ends, and private corporations that promote craft fairs as part of their marketing and public relations campaigns, making for a highly politically loaded field of cultural production . Indeed, the linkage of crafts, artisans, and authenticity has a long history throughout Latin America, where cultural policies regulating craft production have been a central component of cultural nationalist projects. Thus, far from what modernization pundits once augured, craft production and the “traditional” never faded away with modernization but instead have been reconstituted into new forms—transformed into folk objects or nationalist or tourist symbols and reordered around new logics of production and consumption centered on museums or the market (Garcia Canclini 1993; Nash 1993). Additionally, throughout the developing world, craft production and the turn to the “traditional” have been driven by economic need and by the same processes that render “cultural” products economically profitable. Primary among these processes are unemployment in the economic sectors that once sustained “traditional”   Authenticity and Space in Puerto Rico culture and workers, as well as the new markets created by the marketing of culture, which today can span transnational networks of art dealers , nongovernmental organizations, and other intermediaries sustaining international markets for people’s traditions, be it in the form of world music or ethnic art (Grimes and Milgram 2000; Nash 2000). Consequently, it is not only nationalist elites or international dealers who manipulate or profit from...