Viva la historieta: Mexican Comics, NAFTA, and the Politics of Globalization

Conclusion

212 CONCLUSION Ariel Dorfman and Armand Mattelart read Donald Duck in order to expose the imperial cultural model at work. Their critical reading operated at a parallel to a productive project aimed at launching a nationally oriented cultural model, grounded in the authentic needs and sensibilities of popular sectors, and subtending a “true” national sovereignty. Their reading was a critical market intervention—a guide for consumption, and an opening of cultural space for imagining an alternative symbology and discourse in the cultural market. Their argument also presented the rationale for a state policy that would favor Chilean production. Such a policy is rejected today—hence the common rejection of the Dorfman and Mattelart mode of critique—because of the dominance of neoliberalism in policy circles, but also because of the highly variegated, multimedia , and multidirectional transnational diet of symbolic goods that comprises popular culture, almost anywhere on the planet. An “authentic” national identity becomes difficult to construct or defend when the component parts are manufactured in, or recycled from, elsewhere. The Virgin of Guadalupe—the emotionally and spiritually charged standard of mobilization for conquistadors, national liberation fighters, Zapatista revolutionaries, Chicano activists in the United States, and neo-Zapatista rebels, spanning five centuries of colonial and postcolonial history in Mexico—is an image now mainly reproduced for Mexican consumption by the People’s Republic of China, as Thomas Friedman merrily observes in his The Earth Is Flat. In this “global era,” critical reading of the cultural field requires greater attention to the intertextuality and dialogism of contemporary cultural production, Conclusion 213 to local uses of cultural materials made elsewhere. Most everyone is familiar with Donald Duck, and while we might agree with Dorfman and Mattelart’s 1971 diagnosis of the ill-effects of too much Duck in a nation’s cultural diet, we can also recognize that to an important degree, Donald has already been digested and redigested, integrated to innumerable globalized local cultural environments . One of the ways in which Donald Duck has been culturally metabolized , thanks in part to Dorfman and Mattelart’s reading, is as synecdoche for empire, the part taken for the whole. But Donald, and other elements and symbolic representatives of the U.S. cultural model, are also metabolized in other ways. The radical nationalist premise of Dorfman and Mattelart’s work was a binary proposition—it’s the Duck or us, the empire or the nation. Without the nationalist critique, in other words, the Duck’s consumption would irreparably poison national identity with imperialist false consciousness. While any reader of Antonio Gramsci’s writings about hegemony will recognize here the cultural activist’s engagement with the politics of culture, a good Gramscian will also recognize that Dorfman and Mattelart’s critique of the imperial duck is only one of numerous existing and possible positions staked out around the affable feathered adventurer from the metropole. There is more than one optic with which to consume the comic book, and, in fact, more than one possible national lens for interpretation. There is more than one way to eat the Duck. Importantly, part of the cultural work of consumption occurs in the process of production of other artifacts of the cultural field, other comics, for example. One can best grasp the politics of comic book culture not by pitting nation versus empire in a bipolar battle to the death, but by mapping out the multiple claims on the nation, and the competing construals of its relationship to the U.S. model, as they appear in the images and narratives of present-day comic book production. There is an intriguing constellation of ideological positions discernible in the Mexican comics under discussion in the preceding chapters. The domestic comic book is uniquely positioned within Mexican society to provide a map of many of the ideological fault lines that underlie the political dominance of neoliberalism. As a well-established, if declining, national culture industry, Mexican comics cannot be simply dismissed as imperialist imports. As a popular cultural medium, they cannot solely reflect the doctrinal consensus of elites or the individual sensibilities of the graphic artist. Visualizing the globalization problematic in comic book form, even in the case of neoliberal propaganda vehicles like the Vicente Fox administration’s “A mitad del camino,” Conclusion 214 requires mediation through appeals to popular sentiment, desire, and aesthetic taste. It is tempting to assume for comic books in Mexico a special kind...