Tuesday, 24 May 2011
Thursday, 19 May 2011
Fuerza en lo Diminutivo
El barrio de Tampiquito es vivo ejemplo de cómo el poder ciudadano local puede modificar la percepción social que se tiene de ciertos núcleos poblacionales. Este antiguo barrio regiomontano se definió originalmente gracias al influjo de una población proveniente de Tampico, Tamaulipas. De este modo, el concepto de Tampiquito se entendía directamente por lo que su nombre describía, una pequeña comunidad con orígenes bien identificados. Pero el tiempo tiende a modificar las circunstancias de las cosas y, en este sentido, fue como poco a poco su reconocimiento como un barrio marginal se incrustó en la mente del sampetrino promedio. La identidad municipal de San Pedro surgía, a finales de los sesenta, como la de mayor estatus social, resultante del incremento de la urbanización y de la complejidad de la urbe denominada Monterrey. Para entonces, Tampiquito se había convertido en un islote de pobreza y el proveedor de trabajos manuales y rutinarios para las colonias vecinas de élite –como el Rosario y Bosques del Valle–, mismas que se habían erigido como resultado de la recolocación de las clases medias y altas hacia San Pedro Garza García, en esta misma época de expansión regiomontana.
Pero no podemos culpar a los nuevos colonos de haber tomado ventaja del mercado laboral que se abría a sus espaldas, dada la gran inequidad socio-cultural y económica que ha sido característica de este país. Lo relevante, para este pequeño análisis, es que la colonia Tampiquito se había convertido poco a poco en eso, una diminuta y muy diferente sección de la naciente Colonia del Valle; víctima de fuerzas sociales y económicas que continuamente la rebasaban. Y si en ese contexto el barrio había sido reformulado en sus alcances y aspiraciones por el resultado de decisiones políticas, que posiblemente no lo tomaron en cuenta, el día de hoy tenemos un ejemplo vivo de un intento real de participación ciudadana que busca ayudar a que el barrio se empodere una vez más, mediante la re-configuración de las características contemporáneas de su propio nombre, hacia uno que refleje las aspiraciones y actitudes de sus propios habitantes y ciudadanos.
El movimiento Tampiquito trabaja no sólo para eliminar el estigma que pesa sobre el barrio, sino para hacer del mismo un lugar digno de ser habitado, logrando desarrollar sus capacidades de manera local y autóctona, pero con el impulso de las visiones novedosas y eclécticas que surgen de una postura plural que existe en esta era, resultado de la sinergia que se logra con la llegada de otros grupos sociales que traen ya perspectivas y expectativas culturales propias. Es por eso que lo que ahora se presenta es una narrativa compartida y un desarrollo horizontal –que combina la población original– más la incursión de estas nuevas migraciones que han hecho del barrio también su hogar, trascendiendo los estereotipos que visualizan a ciertos grupos dentro de límites culturales, económicos y geográficos bien establecidos.
Uno de los efectos que se han logrado es el de modificar, hasta cierto punto, la apreciación de Tampiquito por parte de la gente que ha estado, directa o indirectamente, involucrada en los proyectos, ferias y demás esfuerzos que se han llevado a cabo hasta la fecha. Fundamentalmente, lo que se logra palpar –como participante directo que he sido en varios de sus eventos– es una atmósfera multi-cultural, en donde las diferencias de clase, estatus, nacionalidad o demás identificaciones sociales, son trascendidas en un ambiente de concordia cívica y de entrelazamiento público. Ulteriormente, ésta no es la descripción de una artefacto social que se ha independizado del arreglo público existente. No, esto se refiere más a una naciente autonomía como colonia. Ésta es una viva muestra de cómo no sólo es posible cambiar el significado que le ponemos a cualquier cosa, sino que es posible participar de ello, y hacer de esto una forma de vida en el camino.
Friday, 13 May 2011
Monday, 2 May 2011
The Neo-Feudal Mythological Axis
What a mediatic week!
First, we were witness to a Royal farce which main purpose is to prevent the further stultification of a society that has recently taken part in the biggest bank bailouts of the financial system in Britain’s history. The Royal Wedding takes place at a time of crisis, which is seen by Labour Lord Maurice Glasman as one that has been witness to ‘the biggest transfer of wealth from poor to rich since the Norman Conquest’, renders the marriage - to put it euphemistically - as a hypocritical anachronism. The biggest paradox is its symbolic significance. The marriage represents a public relations stunt whose latent objective is to prop up and bolster an already down-trodden and badly damaged middle class; the logical resultant of an aristocratic and plutocratic national economic policy. The discursive use and interplay of words and symbols boggles the mind. The magic of it all is displayed when a ‘Middleton’ marries a Royal, thus opening up the fantastic possibilities for a meritocratic but illusory boost to a socially mobile but moribund middle-class. What a great way to try to influence the public mind by espousing myth in the midst of uncertainty and unreason!
Next, we had the canonization of a new saint for the Catholic Church. Nothing new under the sun. In a sense this is myth as usual. But the underlying motives are very obvious for the critical mind. The intention is of giving credence and legitimacy to an institution that has come under severe criticism and loss of adepts resulting from an acute information-age scrutiny of its medieval and incongruous practices. The worldwide child abuse scandal landed a scathing blow to the organization. So what is needed is to remind the public that myth needs to survive, and that its assertions towards the transcendent are more important than contemporary reason, empirically justified claims or plain common sense. Ultimately, the canonization follows a modus operandi that tries to prove that good (and God) can still be objectified in the world, by conveniently locating HIM inside some benevolent institution and near to close-to-divine human beings. In short, the Catholic Church’s main goal is to maintain an image that is mythically tantamount to a ‘force of good’.
Last, but not least, is the death of Osama Bin Laden. What a romantic way to terminate one of history’s better groomed scapegoats! Bin Laden – the CIA’s and Washington’s Frankenstein - comes to an abrupt end in a week of symbolic victories for civilizations’ saviours –the western Anglo-American and Christian union. This representative of ‘evil’, whom paradoxically was taken out by terrorism itself, albeit state terrorism, occupies our mind at a time when the same western axis, including liberal democratic capitalism, is under threat from a civilisational transference of wealth and power from West to East (China, India, Asian Tigers, etc).
But it is in the end the media – that presumably seems invisible and non-participant - the part of the axis that in the end is the most powerful of all. It is in fact the piece that colours and occupies the whole inside of the triangle. Our television and computer monitors project a magic-mythological reality in a warped intention of modifying our consciences even further, and far away from the empirical reality that we face. The state is getting bigger, the corporation is swallowing up more tracts of land and power, and finance is lubricating the machinery by enlarging the credit servitude that the middle classes and population at large harnessed eons ago. On the other hand, organised religion just does not go away. It functions today as it did back then in the Middle Ages - as the glue that cements the whole system together - regardless of its intrinsic injustices. In the end the media is having a blast making fun of everything they can in the process.
Ultimately what is reinforced is a magic and mythical view of discourse that is manufactured by those in power -the real kind of power- to keep us all in a childish state of permanent ignorance. This takes place at a time of paradigm shifts like the aforementioned shift of influence –in many ways to the East - largely due to western power elites who took history at face value and forgot that Imperialism and sovereign wealth (including the peoples that help to amass it, and not just aristocrats at the helm who spend it) must be kept in check if you want to survive as a republic, to say the least. Imperial jousts for power keep reminding civilization - and the human race – of its fragile arrangements in the face of adversity and collective annihilation. But do not hesitate, and open your eyes wide and look at the new scapegoat in the making! It is too bad that Global-Warming and Material Resource Depletion are both unluckily very difficult to pin down to an individual person or ethnic scapegoat, like Bin Laden or a rising Islam.
Natural organic restoration is on the way…
Thursday, 28 April 2011
Thursday, 14 April 2011
Thursday, 31 March 2011
Thursday, 17 March 2011
Monday, 14 March 2011
La ObstructoCracia Mexicana
Comenzó durante el gobierno de Lázaro Cárdenas a finales de los años 30s, pero bajo los sistemas socialistas, la excesiva burocracia suele ser un resultado natural de la enorme injerencia del estado en la economía. Continuó bajo los gobiernos que estuvieron a cargo del país durante el ‘Milagro Mexicano’. Se mantuvo, obviamente, durante la subsiguiente etapa de sustitución de importaciones, que poco a poco estanco al país en el rezago económico frente al mundo. Todavía, a esas alturas, era posiblemente justificable el tener una burocracia tan grande, dado el hecho real que una economía y sociedad basada en el desarrollo interno lo ameritaba.
Pero el transito al neoliberalismo - a inicios de los 80s - exigía que esta enorme burocracia se desmantelase, dada la reducción del tamaño del gobierno que se requiere bajo este sistema e ideología política. En este se incrementa la participación de la iniciativa privada y se libera a amplios sectores paraestatales del control del Estado. La paradoja de este país en el hoy es que pone en practica un sistema neoliberal, que teóricamente requiere de gobiernos reducidos, con una de las burocracias mas grandes y costosas del mundo. Esto sin tomar en cuenta la ineficiencia de la misma, en términos prácticos, en cuestiones de cifras de crecimiento económico y eficiencia política.
¿Que esta pasando?
Primero, los burócratas son antes que nada personas con necesidades similares a los de la población común. Esto quiere decir que el mantenerse en el poder – a falta de una voluntad política que elimine lo innecesario para el correcto funcionamiento político - se vuelve una necesidad de supervivencia. En ese sentido, entre mas grande es la burocracia, mas grandes seran los compromisos políticos por mantener a cierta clase política en el poder, ya que el perder el poder seria el fin de la participación de esa clase profesional en una actividad con remuneración económica y de desarrollo profesional. En un país en donde la poca alternancia ha significado una especie de venganza hacia el partido que se va, la sustitución de los elementos burocráticos por el partido a comenzar gobierno se torna en una pesadilla para los actuales funcionarios.
Segundo, al extenderse esa necesidad de mantenerse en el poder el sistema burocrático crece aun mas en su necesidad de perpetuarse. Es por eso que entre mas burocracia, y los costos que esta conlleva, habrá mas alianzas con sindicatos y mas apoyo a monopolios. Estas se vuelven imperativas para lograrlo. El sindicato apoya al que esta en el poder y la televisora nos los vende todo por las obvias ventajas que esto conlleva para futuras expansiones. En pocas palabras, la bestia crece, y sus cabezas se entrelazan con compromisos casi sanguíneos, por las necesidades de poder que los mantenga a todos ganando. No importa lo que sea necesario. Poder por el poder. Aquí la obra publica no nadamas es populista, si no que se vuelve un negocio que mantiene a estas alianzas bien aceitadas. Todos son compadres y se ayudan a si mismos.
Tercero, siguiendo esa misma línea, la ideología - que generalmente es el constructo racional y bien intencionado que legitima a un grupo de políticos que ofrecen una visión clara de cómo ayudar temporalmente a la mejora de la nación - se convierte en una prostituta para logar cumplir con las necesidades que se han creado hasta ese momento. La ideología política y la representación era originalmente la ‘excusa’ moderna de alguien que tomaría las riendas de la nación, las cuales no les correspondían eternamente, como sí le pertenecían al monarca o al dictador. En ese sentido las alianzas ideológicas extremas - como las de la izquierda y la derecha - se hacen posibles. Uno quiere evitar perder el poder y otros las aprovechan para colarse en el mismo, aunque sea por un resquicio.
El perdedor en todo esto es el pueblo - o la ciudadanía - como ellos la llaman cotidianamente. Entonces nos toca vivir con una burocracia que se justifica a como de lugar para logar mantenerse en el poder. Y por eso las ideologías se convierten en un artífice mas de esto.
No se sorprenda, pues, estimado lector, si cada vez observa un incremental y a veces exagerado numero de reglas, normas, leyes, semáforos, mítines, reuniones, coches de lujo, y demás excesos, mas allá de los necesarios para la operación de la nación. Todo esto forma parte de la Obstructo-Cracia en que se ha convertido nuestro país.
En vez de hacer fluir, impedimos. En vez de facilitar, obstaculizamos.
Así justificamos la ‘chamba’.
Sunday, 13 March 2011
El miedo como política publica en México
Parte de la ceguera de los políticos es que sacrifican los medios para obtener los fines que se plantean con cualquier política publica. Es lógico que debe existir un sacrificio para cualquier fin - ya que las cosas requieren de esfuerzo y tiempo colectivo. Pero los medios o el camino a seguir no debe de sacrificarse al extremo en pro de ningún objetivo - que se establece como superior - aunque se trate de la supuesta sapiencia de la clase política. Existen niveles de gradación en la ecuación, pero dejar los medios a la deriva en pro de fines utópicos, como el caso mexicano lo demuestra, son características de gobiernos autoritarios e ineptos, se encuentren donde se encuentren.
Independientemente de los fines que se busquen con la guerra que México ha estado experimentando de forma permanente, lo que hay que analizar es el efecto que el miedo ha tenido sobre la población. Francis Fukuyama en su libro sobre la ‘Confianza’, nos dice que este valor humano se vuelve imprescindible para que las sociedades progresen - ya que la confianza es la base para que cualquier institucionalidad sea efectiva. El describe a México, lógicamente, como un país de bajo nivel de confianza - por la baja incidencia en la relación gobierno/pueblo. El fracaso institucional contemporáneo de nuestro país es la mejor evidencia de esto.
Pero Fukuyama se refiere al nivel del espacio publico, un lugar que debe de existir, no nadamas delimitado físicamente para las asambleas o para hacer política, si no como una realidad mental que hace a una comunidad política una efectiva. El respeto a un espacio publico es necesario para que la ley pueda sancionar a los trasgresores en los derechos de otros. También es el lugar donde se obtienen otras libertades. Este espacio se logra psicológica y socialmente mediante una educación publica que coloque a la comunidad en ese menester. El peligro con un país tan mal educado en civismo, e individualista como el nuestro, es que la desconfianza termine por erosionar ese espacio publico que se vuelve tan necesario hoy como siempre para seguir operando como país.
Pero si escarbamos por debajo de este espacio publico ingresando en la mente del mexicano promedio, nos daremos cuenta que el miedo ha lastimado la psique individual y colectiva de la sociedad - en un nivel mucho mas determinante para la operación de la comunidad - mas allá de la organización política de la cual somos participe. En pocas palabras, el miedo esta afectando nuestras relaciones sociales y personales por culpa de una política que supuestamente busca ‘armonizar’ a futuro los valores cívicos y patrióticos. Siguiendo esta línea, no hay patria que funcione si la comunidad primero no esta bien consolidada. La patria se monta sobre la comunidad, y no al revés.
El sociólogo alemán Niklas Luhmann nos dice que un mínimo de confianza es necesaria para que el mundo social funcione. El se refiere a cosas tan básicas como que la puerta del coche abra cuando se le requiere o que el vehiculo que se tiene que detener para que yo pase lo haga. En ese sentido, es que el miedo ha generado una desconfianza en niveles alarmantes, los cuales están muy por debajo de lo político. Con esto me refiero a que ya no confiamos en nadie porque este puede representar una amenaza, como rutinariamente nos vende el sistema político y mediático tan monopolizado y hegemónico como el mexicano. Abraham Maslow nos decía que es necesario trascender las necesidades mas primarias para lograr ascender en conciencia y en funcionalidad como personas y sistemas. En su versión política, esto querría decir que si queremos tener comunidad, y por consecuencia una conciencia política-publico-patriótica, es imperativo dejar detrás lo que la obstaculiza. El miedo es lo contrario a la dignidad y la civilidad. Es por eso que se debe de construir un sistema desde abajo y con inteligencia. No se debe de construir desde arriba y con ignorancia. Ni mucho menos con miedo.
Japan and its mythological intercourse with the elements
The Japanese myths speak of a fundamental relationship of its people to a ‘sacred’ land that has historically been under constant threat of external and foreign forces. The most recent Tsunami is another example of how the Japanese character has been moulded in the process of adaptation and transformation of this ‘land of the rising sun’ as the country is better known.
Having descended from the sun goddess Amaterasu, the Nippon community obtained an initial sense of honor in the fact that both their origins and agriculture were rubber-stamped and protected by a deity that would assure them continuity and success in the hands of her chosen leaders, the imperial house. The national’s flag symbol, the sun, is the projection of Amaterasu’s grace upon its people. It is then a symbol of national pride and unity.
The Shinto beliefs and religion describe a land that was created by the gods, thus reinforcing the idea that a special people were related to a divine and chosen land. It would lay in the hands of the leaders, in not only maintaining these ideas, but in expanding them to in order to establish an organized and well-controlled community that would seek progress in order to better legitimate the terrestrial but divine realm that was bequeathed for them in order to do so.
So, in this sense, the 13th century Mongol invasion that was thwarted by a sea storm must have been the intervention of some divine being. This gave birth to a concept, better known as ‘Kamikaze’ or divine wind, that describes the predestinatory salvation of ‘the chosen nation of the gods’ to have survived one of the most aggressive tribes that history has seen, the Mongolian hordes.
The Japanese are a conservative people - not just because of the obvious fact of being inhabitants of an island nation that lies under a geological fault line. Its culture has been under constant threat of ancient imperialism and the more contemporaneous forces of globalization. This has enclosed them even further within their own political bounds. It is safe to say that the nature of the Japanese land and the character of its people that has been successfully laid out as the main fact behind the astonishing discipline and work ethos of a most successful nation today.
But a most ironic reality is that Japanese imperial leaders utilized the Shinto beliefs and symbolism to justify military ventures both within and outside the nation. The aggressions of the 1940s was portrayed in the modification of the national flag, were the Sun extends its rays outwards. This symbol was deliberately made to represent the expansionism and belligerence of its military and naval forces whilst simultaneously intending to unleash the Japanese spirit, which remained dormant and well tied to domestic mores and constraints. The desperate aerial raids - kamikazes- used during the war against the allies, were justified once again in divine myths.
The fire and atomic bombs which devastated part of Japan’s geography revived once again its mythological makeup, and its greater effects - besides the most obvious deadly ones - was to put back the ultra-nationalist genie and extremist tendencies back into the bottle. On the other hand, the collective energy, which was still there, was harnessed into constructing one of the most powerful and progressive economies in the world.
Today’s tsunami is reminiscent, again, of how much this country and its people have been shaped by external events, especially the forces of nature. It remains for them only to reshape their fate once more by altering the curse of their 'special destiny' that their mythology supports. But the risk of the fire god of blowing its nuclear breath into the veins of the land has to be averted. The ‘Kamikaze’ has to make its appearance anew, but this time the task is to prevent a catastrophe of atomic proportions. Good luck to them.
Thursday, 10 March 2011
Thursday, 24 February 2011
Friday, 18 February 2011
Thursday, 10 February 2011
Wednesday, 9 February 2011
El caso Aristegui y la derechización de la política mexicana
El caso de Carmen Aristegui representa una afronta mas a los derechos y libertades civiles de los mexicanos que están siendo sustancialmente erosionados por un gobierno que gradualmente presenta mas tintes autoritarios.
Los detalles del despido de la conductora de MVS salen sobrando en este contexto; esta simple y sencillamente no se acopla al oficialismo estatal. Y la ironía detrás de todo esto es que Aristegui logro resaltar uno de los puntos fundamentales de lo que hace a cualquier país uno democrático; el poder del ciudadano común para indagar en los haberes públicos y privados de su máxima figura representativa: el Ejecutivo.
Esta tendencia reciente del estado - en cuanto a lo incuestionable de sus políticas publicas - es característico de los gobiernos autoritarios se encuentren donde se encuentren. En este caso lo democrático brilla por su ausencia, dado que la libertad de expresión es uno de lo pilares fundamentales para lograr que una democracia logre conectar los quehaceres del estado con la ciudadanía. En ausencia de un intermediario mediático transparente lo que nos queda son los discursos y enunciados oficiales, que bien sabemos que están llenos de retórica y demagogia oficial, en momentos de crisis de gobernabilidad y de posible estado fallido en muchos rubros mas allá del de la protección básica de la ciudadanía en cuestiones de seguridad publica.
La lista de los derechos civiles básicos es:
* Igual protección de las leyes
* Debido proceso de ley
* Libertad de expresión
* Libertad de asociación
* Libertad de reunión
* Libertad de prensa
* Derecho a la educación
* Libertad de culto
Queda claro que el encerron auto-impuesto por la ciudadanía –dada la inseguridad publica- es un duro golpe a las libertades de asociación y de reunión. La protección y el debido proceso de ley se lo dejo a usted estimado lector para analizar si están siendo respetadas en este país. El derecho a la educación existe en la teoría, pero en la practica este ha sido envuelto en realidades electorales corporativas con la alianza entre el sindicato de trabajadores de la educación y el estado, relación que propiamente fue comenzada por el PRI, pero que ha sido sistemáticamente reproducida y mantenida por el PAN para perpetuarse en el poder.
Y que decir de las libertades de culto en un país con gobernadores como el de Guanajuato, el de Jalisco y el de Veracruz - que están intentos en regresar a la iglesia al poder de forma indirecta de una manera medieval - limitándole la posibilidad al otro y sus creencias de participar en el espacio publico que ellos juraron defender con la constitución en la mano.
En fin, el despido de Carmen Aristegui – y por ende un golpe durísimo a la libertad de expresión - no es mas que un ejemplo vivido de la radicalización de la derecha en este país. Con una política como esta - aunado a una guerra y militarización permanente, con una economía estancada y de futuros problemas energéticos – la cuestión es en relación a donde terminaremos como sociedad organizada.
Sunday, 30 January 2011
Kalimba: Una victima mas del circo en que se ha convertido nuestra cultura
Últimamente esta muy de moda el burlarse en forma racista de algunos, gracias al episodio novelero que el monopolio televisivo que gobierna nuestras mentes esta presentando como una forma mas para robarnos nuestra atención y dinero. Perfecto ejemplo es este de la realidad que vivimos en este país y que nos evidencia como una cultura que no ha dejado atrás el racismo y clasismo institucional, producto de una colonización española en donde se gesto el desprecio por algunos.
Que bueno que todavía mantenemos el sentido del humor y la picardía mexicana ya que la estaremos necesitando mucho en estas épocas que México se viene abajo como idea funcional de nación en muchos sentidos. Nuestra educación es pésima y este hecho solo corrobora aun mas que todavía somos un país intolerante. Pero al parecer no estamos muy preocupados por eso. No se asuste estimado lector, entonces, si entre tanta inmadurez cívica y humana siguen surgiendo problemas sociales de le envergadura que usted ya bien conoce y que continuaran poniendo en entredicho la gobernabilidad y la convivencia social.
Este fenómeno nos ayuda muy bien a continuar con la cabeza metida en la arena cual avestruz, al momento en que el mundo observa con atención como México se cae en pedazos. Bendito sea el monopolio televisivo que sigue haciendo de las suyas al presentarnos narrativas como las del Kalimba y la de J.J. - que con su camisa de caballo grande – nos muestra como se puede ser como los mas ‘riquillos’. Esto no es mas que el reflejo de personas que vienen de grupos sociales marginados que han hecho de caminos ‘alternativos’ como el de la violencia la manera de subir de clase social - en su intento de ser aceptados- por una de las sociedades mas desiguales del mundo.
¡Que siga entonces el circo dando!
Friday, 28 January 2011
Thursday, 20 January 2011
Sunday, 16 January 2011
Friday, 7 January 2011
Thursday, 16 December 2010
Friday, 10 December 2010
Thursday, 2 December 2010
Friday, 26 November 2010
Thursday, 18 November 2010
Sunday, 14 November 2010
Friday, 5 November 2010
Sunday, 31 October 2010
Friday, 22 October 2010
Friday, 15 October 2010
Thursday, 14 October 2010
Excavating for a Meaning so Providential
Plato’s allegory of the cave was elaborated in an ancient context that was witness to the demise of the city-state as an operational unit for maintaining social harmony and order. Hence, if civilization were to endure beyond Athens, it would have to submit to a higher condition, much different to that of a privileged pantheon of civic gods that justified the power of a bunch of short-sighted politicians. And it was precisely Plato’s ideas about an abstract but ideal deity that was taken up by Christianity in order to justify the imposition of an ethical claim to human brotherhood under one male god as a universal creed that in a sense resolved Plato’s dilemma single-handedly.
The Christian high-god would take the place of our philosopher’s ideal, and by this stroke of genius, humankind (in the west) was now regimented under the hands of an all-encompassing father figure that curtailed our existential defeatisms. But both insiders and outsiders who had developed their own all-inclusive claims subsequently questioned Christianity’s universal affirmations. The way out of this quagmire was to invent the nation, to substitute a grand idea for another, and to sideline any previous representatives with claims to a transcendent totality. But the new leaders left intact the idea of aspiration for grandeur and of a history with meaning. So our modern claims to universality had to settle for the coalescence of big tribes under one same roof, each of them headed by a political head, who in a sense was still going to be intent on perennially emulating Plato’s ideal of the Good.
But the Nation-States claims to universality were hindered because of their inability to convey its unifying message of shared values to every citizen in each corner of its territory, principles that tend to function as the cementing units of every patriotic ensemble. And the media at this stage had not yet sided with the state, and was still the conduit of public opinion for a people that were waking up to the freedoms that were being assuaged by the novel political organization in charge.
So with this backdrop in mind we could analyze Chile’s most recent soap-opera drama of the trapped miners. The actors in this play are basically four:
First, we have the victims, which provide tangible suffering as personal narrative and social lubricant for further collective scenarios and patriotic discourses within Chile.
Second, we have the State, which epitomized by the Nation’s father, acts as the main character, and the mastermind who plans the miners release and who ultimately relieves them from their captivity and suffering.
Third, we have the media, who overall increases the tempo, drama, and narrative, and who in the end benefits from the exposure and income that is generated from it all.
Finally, the global and mediatized spectator, who not only shares in with real human calamity, but who in the end signs and seals a deal which was previously orchestrated by the State with clear utilitarian goals in mind.
So while the world entertains itself and reflects on the greatness of concerted human efforts by tuning in to a televised rescue, other forces are being played out. The State’s genius in this act was to turn around an original accident that made bureaucrats lament that the 700-meter pit may be part of their geography. On the other hand, it is very curios to know that CODELCO, the national copper extracting industrial state monopoly, and the biggest source of foreign revenue, was being fought over between the interests of both public and private sectors. This televised show of force by the state will possibly render anathema any intent of further privatizing mining.
But by discounting economic interests for the time being, this article intends to focus on identity formation in an age of pseudo-operational Nation-states. What I want to highlight is the power of the new media and the hegemonic position that it has established in collusion with the state. What we are witnessing is the articulation by the state of patriotic discourses by using a relatively unknown phenomenon (up until yesterday) that has now achieved centre stage. This means that regardless of other countless mining accidents that have ended in tragedy, this one has been harnessed in order to achieve multiple goals besides the most obvious humanistic ones. So a country that is celebrating a bicentenary (just like many other Latin American countries), takes these miners as heroes of the anniversary, by materializing a reality that serves as flesh for the bones for a symbolic event of magnitude. In similar cases of recurrent national celebration, every other leader would dream of having heroes like our miner actors in order to give their social happenings some tangible and referential political meaning, besides the already familiar but very abstract memories of historical events that have made possible whichever is designed to be re-celebrated and re-enacted for social cohesion purposes.
Any government would wish to have a similar opportunity for nation building like this - in order to re-establish themselves at the top - by rebranding a still coherent, cohesive and functioning idea of collectivity. And there is nothing wrong with this. But the case shows us how the media has moved (at a large extent) from being solely critical of the state and a delimiter of public spaces, to a player that creates and re-shapes public opinion, in order to fit this space with its powerful and monetary goals and those of the state, whatever they may be.
It is clear that what the state openly strives for is national unity behind an event that would have gone unnoticed if the media had not trusted and placed its money-hungry instincts over it. And it is in this relation with the media that the state most profits from, because the former does not only influence civil society in order to better position political candidates (and in some cases to make them outright winners) in popular elections. No, the state won with this hegemonic relationship with the media because the latter operated as the showcase for the plight of the forgotten and the dispossessed, something which is needed to heed popular calls for inclusiveness.
The media presented a very profitable human narrative that not only revealed the human side of things. It was also a symbolic way of telling the average Chilean on the fringes (which an education dictated from the centre had left out) that they too could form part of that patriotic family, and that he or she will be rescued from any situation of despair if only they would care to reunite under the protection that the umbrella of the state and its compassionate patriarch provides. So personal lives are enhanced to make us feel part of it all. We find out about someone’s existence that in most cases would be ignored if met on the street. Detail is tailored with the goal of making us feel more closely identified with their suffering, by stirring our emotions, thus we fix our attention on whatever a small quadrangular receptacle presents us.
“This has been a miracle” stated Chile’s president, whilst he took part in the whole orchestrated event. I wonder if the man ever pondered on legal claims to statehood, where a sane separation between church and state is necessary. Ultimately my answer was provided from above - God is still helpful for nation building - regardless of its inability of directly controlling the political public space. Nevertheless, the television saga offered a unique opportunity to catch a glimpse and observe that those on top still stand on religions’ shoulders for support.
In the end our main characters, the miners, which symbolically could represent the people inside Plato’s cave, emerge from it as targets of a system that utilizes them for diverse but covert purposes. The rope, that seems to be the link between real civilized life and the helpless but still hopeful group of individuals, becomes a metaphoric string that converts the miners into acting puppets of an ever more ambitious play.
Plato’s cavemen could potentially come out to light from deep inside the darkness of their confinement as free men because if they did, they would be able to understand what it means to come face to face with the ideal entity that created the life that they had played out as individuals underneath. Our Chilean miners surfaced as heroes, but of our interest-ridden and multi-purpose theatrical civilization.
Friday, 8 October 2010
Thursday, 30 September 2010
Tuesday, 14 September 2010
Thursday, 9 September 2010
Friday, 4 June 2010
Friday, 28 May 2010
Friday, 21 May 2010
Tuesday, 18 May 2010
Tuesday, 11 May 2010
Friday, 30 April 2010
Friday, 23 April 2010
Tuesday, 20 April 2010
Sunday, 18 April 2010
Friday, 16 April 2010
Wednesday, 14 April 2010
Tuesday, 13 April 2010
Friday, 9 April 2010
Saturday, 3 April 2010
The Catholic Church: A stagnant star stuck within a vibrant constellation of change
Any institution must develop a proper set of principles to define its internal operational framework, and by doing so, this will be functional in clearly identifying it within a specific set of social arrangements, and it will, by comparison, reveal what particularly it is not, if by this we take into account other existing institutions with their corresponding caracteristics.
Thus establishing an internal configuration means clarifying who is who in terms of human chain of command, and how specific elements operate in terms of roles that are accordingly ascribed, in order to lubricate social relations within that particular framework. On the other hand, and depending on their interests, institutions have to spread a set of values by efficiently conveying messages to a public that has been chosen as a target audience and which will act as recipients for them. People follow institutions for many reasons, but most are revered because they offer members possibilities that can hardly be fulfilled by individuals outside the roof that a collectivist organization provides. The only way to God is through the Catholic Church - according to them.
Institutions also stand for repetition of well-known practices and procedures. This means that in the interior of a religious organization like the Catholic Church, priests and other clerics will have to constantly behave according to established norms, rules and regulations that will constrain them within that particular composition. And this is also true for its external associates, as they must follow what the institution has prescribed for them, in order to more fully comply with the tenets that it has set apart and which distinguishes its followers from others. Behaving according to plan is also necessary in order to more efficiently convey a kind of leadership, which maintains institutional loyalty from within and from outside affiliates. What everybody wants here is constant and permanent cultural reproduction of a particular way of life.
But the fact behind every institution is that it has to compete with others for the supremacy of hearts and minds, and in some cases, for the physical bodies of subjects themselves. Monetary contributions of members, in the form of grants or taxes, upkeeps the organized infrastructure of the institution - like the State, the Army, or the Catholic Church. Whenever any organization claims that it has taken over by privatizing any idea, for example ‘God’, as the Catholic Church claims, then it will have to be extremely careful in its connection between its transcendent and human characteristics, as in the end, and regardless of the purported infallibility of its founders and contemporary leaders who are in every case mortal, it must keep in tune with the times that it inhabits in. As any business endeavour has come to understand, the only way of being completely on top without regard or recourse to anything else, is by becoming the only existing player, with no competition whatsoever, by becoming a monopoly.
It is possible to argue that the first institutions brought about by civilization could have been free of influence from any other, as the first of a series is basically at liberty to create what it wants. In spite of that, the Catholic Church was not the first institution of its kind. It could have developed a particular message of universalism that could have been inexistent prior to its inception, but it too was adapted to a structure that was not original in itself.
Today, it is virtually impossible to posit that any new institution could be created from scratch without taking into account influences from others, be it organizational, administrative or ideological. And if we travelled back in time to the establishment of Christianity as a corporate body of ethics and morals, we would have been witness to a fierce competition between it and the State, a political system and concept which finally succumbed in the end of the 5th century A.D., and which cleared the way for Christianity, who took over the private and public spaces of proto-Europeans for the following 300 years of obscurant and raw politics and society.
So the main lesson is that you become relevant as an institution if you are the only or one of the few alternatives offering any series of propositions. But in the end, people on the other side of the receptacle have to follow you all the way, in order for you to survive as an organization, in the cases in which you have successfully systematized whatever that you do. In every phase of life, institutions must transform themselves in order to successfully adapt to whatever social, political, and cultural circumstances they may be faced with. The issue with the Catholic Church is that necessary changes have not been even dreamt of because of the grandiloquent claims of its founders and actual participants. However, and in order to subscribe to the church, one must have faith not only in God, but one must build trust towards the masculine and patriarchal beings whom God has chosen (theoretically) to represent him. In this context, the repression of sexuality as celibacy was in a way of secondary importance, only a means to a higher end.
Having established celibacy as a rule since 1039 A.D., the church did not have to contend with a public that was sexually free in any way to do otherwise. The Middle Ages were still absent of a printing press that would, in due course, come to question the incongruous practice of a corporation which by then had grown enormously powerful in every sense, from otherworldly to worldly (at least European) matters. But the Church’s recalcitrance has been its main defensive weapon throughout instances where it has been doctrinally confronted - with vivid examples in the Crusades, the Counter-Reformation and its wars of religion - that ravaged Europe between 1521 and 1648, and the outright negation of the sexual sagas that have imperiously surfaced since recent times.
The Church might be experiencing a cataclysmic shift today with a public scrutiny being undertaken by an ever-increasing informed civil society, in times where television has taken by storm both public and private arenas worldwide. The last time that the Church faced an issue as contentious as the present one was the sixteenth century Reformation, a phenomenon that was only possible, not only because of the socio-economic changes (rise of middle classes) that Europe was going through, but because of a new technology that spread the event like wildfire, Gutenberg’s printing press.
The contemporary world has definitely changed into one that would have been unrecognizable throughout the initial stages of the Church. Today we live in an information age that has up to a point questioned previous modes of economic development that preceded it, the agricultural and industrial eras. Socio-cultural changes have accelerated dramatically. If industry was a giant leap from agriculture, the Internet and telecommunications of our times have catapulted our societies in quantum terms. Belief today has to compete today with countervailing versions to the transcendent offered by other religions, scientific enterprises, the media, the State, and civil society itself, who to a large extent has been kept under pressure to maintain the dogmatic values that the Church has blindly professed throughout the various periods of global transformation. The Dark Ages gave way to the Renaissance, and from there we transited into Modern waters, but the Church has remained stolid ever since.
Now, this paper is not designed with the aim of questioning the Catholic Church’s claims of being the ideal way towards the transcendent. Its only goal is to question a belief and practice that has definitely come of age, celibacy. And it has come in a time of poignant sexual behaviour from within its core, not from without it. So it has become easier to quantify claims of absurd hypocrisy from within its rank and file because of the spectatorial quality of contemporary media and events that have thrown the institution into a tailspin. With over 5000 priests, bishops, and other orders and clergy positions involved in sexual abuses,we could say we are not dealing with isolated cases of abuse (according to www.bbcworldnews.com)any more. Spanning a territory of at least sixteen countries - Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Czech Republic, Mexico, USA, Austria, Switzerland, Germany, The Vatican, Italy, England, Ireland, Netherlands, Australia, South Africa - the Catholic Church is in dire straits because of this infamous chain of sexual abuses.
And it is in trouble not because of its foundational myth, one that has nevertheless become increasingly harder to sustain in a world as rational and diverse, and that ricochets ideas more quickly. No, it is stuck as a cosmology because of its insistence in a convention that is supposedly a pillar of Catholic sacramental faith, but one whose realistic main motive is blunt social control, both internally within its structure, and externally for among its members: Celibacy. It is not easy to come to grips with the reasons (besides the obviously political) that moved the Church to impose it upon its members since the 11th century. But we today can easily understand why celibacy is not only archaic and anachronistic, but also surely cruel and inhumane, and an encumbrance for personal development. What does seem to be plausible is that sexuality and morality in the Middle Ages (to a great extent influenced by religion) more closely resembled back then what the Church still wants it to be today, the means for an end of human reproduction.
Sexuality today means many things, besides Catholicism’s monolithic version of it. In addition, this latter position can’t be defended today on the grounds that the churchmen maintain a distinct status as a corporation with speciality in other-worldly affairs. Be that as it may, this claims clash with other public contemporary social interests, like the predominance of the State, the rule of law, civil society, an informed public opinion, and a contemporary culture, which has certainly transcended the idea of a sexuality as exclusively instrumental for reproduction.
For our understanding of what Catholic suppression of sexuality could represent, we could follow Michel Foucault, in his view that ‘sexual discipline’ in turn implies control of inner drives, that is, control that takes place within the individual and of his life, and one which in the end shapes internal characteristics of human beings, which hence result as losers, in a game of power relations. But we could posit, on the other hand, Anthony Gidden’s idea of reflexivity in order to better comprehend what has taken place in the context of modernity. Individuals are using up their ‘sexual capital’ so as to say, in order to more freely express individuality and particular lifestyle choices in an age of more relative freedom for the body vis-a-vis the society they find themselves in. Essentially, sexuality is no longer an issue for the Catholic Church only, as it has become contentious for other social spheres of cultural life like family, communitarian, and State relations in an everly increasing globalized political world.
The other argument regarding the indefensibility of their celibate stance is plain and common sense. If criticism is rife it is because what it implies is social outrage, and what public discourse has branded as abuse and depravity is no misnomer. How will it be possible to conduct future Church affairs, whilst simultaneously maintaining and attracting more folk, on the grounds of congruency towards sexuality, if the main proponents of restraint have insidiously flouted the idea? Hence, there is no longer a defensible case for eschewing criticism on the grounds that sexual abuses represent isolated phenomena. The Catholic Church is drowning inside a tidal wave of empirical evidence against it.
Furthermore, what is needed is the opening up of spaces of representation for a subject that has been misunderstood for ages. Sexuality is much more than bodily intercourse, social control or self-engineering. It is also a gross, but fundamental energy that sustains the well being of the body, both personally and collectively, and certainly one that could overpower any physique if it is misunderstood or categorically repressed, as in the Catholic Church's case.
From the recent manifestations of homosexual paedophilia among the clergy, we could draw evidence to illuminate the previous claim by saying that what is really happening goes beyond confused sexual preferences and the legality of victims. Men within this hierarchically patriarchal institution and organization are faced with a reality that cannot be addressed in matters of faith and belief in God alone.
Males inside the Church are experiencing what any other gendered human being faces from his teenage years to full-blown adulthood, sexual urges which tend to surface in bursts of sexual energy. This vitality generally seeks satisfaction or at least comprehension, but it is also true that one can abstain from it, or even more, that it could be harnessed by transforming it into the essence of spiritual growth like a myriad of tantric sages have pointed out. We do not have to necessarily follow Abraham Maslow when he states that in order to access higher levels of awareness we have to satisfy the lower to begin with. But we can safely say that blocking sexuality outright by withholding it and repressing it will tend to backfire as negative consequences for the individual.
So, in the bulk of cases, sexual energy will find an outlet in physical sexual acts, be them personal/individual and or in participation with others. If those others are men, boys or children, it is because that is what is physically available inside an institution where women have been deliberately left out, not only of religious symbolism and tradition, but of the Church’s tangible location in the form of a cathedral, a church, a basilica, or whatever edifice acts as a roof for them around the world. On the other hand, there is also a relationship between this patriarchal vision of an all-male club and power relations that are established in horizontal and vertical ways within its structure, and that which to a point develop a sort of ‘cult of maleness’ that is surely unnatural. Members of the church are in a sense ‘Church property’ and young males will tend to hold respect and admiration for figures of higher standing. But vested authority has been flagrantly abused in the case of the sexual misfortunes that I am referring to, thus this alone threatens the cement that has held their internal coherence in working order for generations.
The average Catholic today has to cohabit with a large public in the contemporary world who increasingly has come to see personal development and transcendence as all-inclusive, in the sense of utilizing all available resources - especially the most intimate and personal like sexuality - as part of an action plan for humane dignity and growth. Many practicing Catholics themselves form part of this group. Moreover, sexual energy and action is impossible to repress without direct consequences for individuals, so the Catholic Church must be very careful with public reactions against it. If the priesthood is seen to be recklessly squandering the moral capital of the institution, people will shy away from it in every sense, ranging from physical absence to symbolic retraction. The Church must be especially cautious in an era were the letter, the scroll, and the book have been transcended by an information and media technologies phase of civilization which could annihilate any long held reputation in a few minutes.
Ultimately, it could be stated that what happens at the individual/personal level is mirrored at the social/collective level of any organization or collectivity. In this sense, individual repression of sexuality is replicated at the communal, thus making sex a problematic issue for the institution as a whole, including its constituency. So what is going on here is that the Catholic Church is in danger of affecting the more sublime and elevated aspects of its creed (liturgy, sacrament, theology) for failing to extinguish out a fire that is burning inside the edifice’s basement. The Catholic Church today is not the dominant institution that it once was in antiquity. It must revise its policy towards sexuality and celibacy if it wants to successfully keep its monotheistic God myth perpetuated. Modify, Change, Transform, Metamorphose, --- or perish.
Thus establishing an internal configuration means clarifying who is who in terms of human chain of command, and how specific elements operate in terms of roles that are accordingly ascribed, in order to lubricate social relations within that particular framework. On the other hand, and depending on their interests, institutions have to spread a set of values by efficiently conveying messages to a public that has been chosen as a target audience and which will act as recipients for them. People follow institutions for many reasons, but most are revered because they offer members possibilities that can hardly be fulfilled by individuals outside the roof that a collectivist organization provides. The only way to God is through the Catholic Church - according to them.
Institutions also stand for repetition of well-known practices and procedures. This means that in the interior of a religious organization like the Catholic Church, priests and other clerics will have to constantly behave according to established norms, rules and regulations that will constrain them within that particular composition. And this is also true for its external associates, as they must follow what the institution has prescribed for them, in order to more fully comply with the tenets that it has set apart and which distinguishes its followers from others. Behaving according to plan is also necessary in order to more efficiently convey a kind of leadership, which maintains institutional loyalty from within and from outside affiliates. What everybody wants here is constant and permanent cultural reproduction of a particular way of life.
But the fact behind every institution is that it has to compete with others for the supremacy of hearts and minds, and in some cases, for the physical bodies of subjects themselves. Monetary contributions of members, in the form of grants or taxes, upkeeps the organized infrastructure of the institution - like the State, the Army, or the Catholic Church. Whenever any organization claims that it has taken over by privatizing any idea, for example ‘God’, as the Catholic Church claims, then it will have to be extremely careful in its connection between its transcendent and human characteristics, as in the end, and regardless of the purported infallibility of its founders and contemporary leaders who are in every case mortal, it must keep in tune with the times that it inhabits in. As any business endeavour has come to understand, the only way of being completely on top without regard or recourse to anything else, is by becoming the only existing player, with no competition whatsoever, by becoming a monopoly.
It is possible to argue that the first institutions brought about by civilization could have been free of influence from any other, as the first of a series is basically at liberty to create what it wants. In spite of that, the Catholic Church was not the first institution of its kind. It could have developed a particular message of universalism that could have been inexistent prior to its inception, but it too was adapted to a structure that was not original in itself.
Today, it is virtually impossible to posit that any new institution could be created from scratch without taking into account influences from others, be it organizational, administrative or ideological. And if we travelled back in time to the establishment of Christianity as a corporate body of ethics and morals, we would have been witness to a fierce competition between it and the State, a political system and concept which finally succumbed in the end of the 5th century A.D., and which cleared the way for Christianity, who took over the private and public spaces of proto-Europeans for the following 300 years of obscurant and raw politics and society.
So the main lesson is that you become relevant as an institution if you are the only or one of the few alternatives offering any series of propositions. But in the end, people on the other side of the receptacle have to follow you all the way, in order for you to survive as an organization, in the cases in which you have successfully systematized whatever that you do. In every phase of life, institutions must transform themselves in order to successfully adapt to whatever social, political, and cultural circumstances they may be faced with. The issue with the Catholic Church is that necessary changes have not been even dreamt of because of the grandiloquent claims of its founders and actual participants. However, and in order to subscribe to the church, one must have faith not only in God, but one must build trust towards the masculine and patriarchal beings whom God has chosen (theoretically) to represent him. In this context, the repression of sexuality as celibacy was in a way of secondary importance, only a means to a higher end.
Having established celibacy as a rule since 1039 A.D., the church did not have to contend with a public that was sexually free in any way to do otherwise. The Middle Ages were still absent of a printing press that would, in due course, come to question the incongruous practice of a corporation which by then had grown enormously powerful in every sense, from otherworldly to worldly (at least European) matters. But the Church’s recalcitrance has been its main defensive weapon throughout instances where it has been doctrinally confronted - with vivid examples in the Crusades, the Counter-Reformation and its wars of religion - that ravaged Europe between 1521 and 1648, and the outright negation of the sexual sagas that have imperiously surfaced since recent times.
The Church might be experiencing a cataclysmic shift today with a public scrutiny being undertaken by an ever-increasing informed civil society, in times where television has taken by storm both public and private arenas worldwide. The last time that the Church faced an issue as contentious as the present one was the sixteenth century Reformation, a phenomenon that was only possible, not only because of the socio-economic changes (rise of middle classes) that Europe was going through, but because of a new technology that spread the event like wildfire, Gutenberg’s printing press.
The contemporary world has definitely changed into one that would have been unrecognizable throughout the initial stages of the Church. Today we live in an information age that has up to a point questioned previous modes of economic development that preceded it, the agricultural and industrial eras. Socio-cultural changes have accelerated dramatically. If industry was a giant leap from agriculture, the Internet and telecommunications of our times have catapulted our societies in quantum terms. Belief today has to compete today with countervailing versions to the transcendent offered by other religions, scientific enterprises, the media, the State, and civil society itself, who to a large extent has been kept under pressure to maintain the dogmatic values that the Church has blindly professed throughout the various periods of global transformation. The Dark Ages gave way to the Renaissance, and from there we transited into Modern waters, but the Church has remained stolid ever since.
Now, this paper is not designed with the aim of questioning the Catholic Church’s claims of being the ideal way towards the transcendent. Its only goal is to question a belief and practice that has definitely come of age, celibacy. And it has come in a time of poignant sexual behaviour from within its core, not from without it. So it has become easier to quantify claims of absurd hypocrisy from within its rank and file because of the spectatorial quality of contemporary media and events that have thrown the institution into a tailspin. With over 5000 priests, bishops, and other orders and clergy positions involved in sexual abuses,we could say we are not dealing with isolated cases of abuse (according to www.bbcworldnews.com)any more. Spanning a territory of at least sixteen countries - Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Czech Republic, Mexico, USA, Austria, Switzerland, Germany, The Vatican, Italy, England, Ireland, Netherlands, Australia, South Africa - the Catholic Church is in dire straits because of this infamous chain of sexual abuses.
And it is in trouble not because of its foundational myth, one that has nevertheless become increasingly harder to sustain in a world as rational and diverse, and that ricochets ideas more quickly. No, it is stuck as a cosmology because of its insistence in a convention that is supposedly a pillar of Catholic sacramental faith, but one whose realistic main motive is blunt social control, both internally within its structure, and externally for among its members: Celibacy. It is not easy to come to grips with the reasons (besides the obviously political) that moved the Church to impose it upon its members since the 11th century. But we today can easily understand why celibacy is not only archaic and anachronistic, but also surely cruel and inhumane, and an encumbrance for personal development. What does seem to be plausible is that sexuality and morality in the Middle Ages (to a great extent influenced by religion) more closely resembled back then what the Church still wants it to be today, the means for an end of human reproduction.
Sexuality today means many things, besides Catholicism’s monolithic version of it. In addition, this latter position can’t be defended today on the grounds that the churchmen maintain a distinct status as a corporation with speciality in other-worldly affairs. Be that as it may, this claims clash with other public contemporary social interests, like the predominance of the State, the rule of law, civil society, an informed public opinion, and a contemporary culture, which has certainly transcended the idea of a sexuality as exclusively instrumental for reproduction.
For our understanding of what Catholic suppression of sexuality could represent, we could follow Michel Foucault, in his view that ‘sexual discipline’ in turn implies control of inner drives, that is, control that takes place within the individual and of his life, and one which in the end shapes internal characteristics of human beings, which hence result as losers, in a game of power relations. But we could posit, on the other hand, Anthony Gidden’s idea of reflexivity in order to better comprehend what has taken place in the context of modernity. Individuals are using up their ‘sexual capital’ so as to say, in order to more freely express individuality and particular lifestyle choices in an age of more relative freedom for the body vis-a-vis the society they find themselves in. Essentially, sexuality is no longer an issue for the Catholic Church only, as it has become contentious for other social spheres of cultural life like family, communitarian, and State relations in an everly increasing globalized political world.
The other argument regarding the indefensibility of their celibate stance is plain and common sense. If criticism is rife it is because what it implies is social outrage, and what public discourse has branded as abuse and depravity is no misnomer. How will it be possible to conduct future Church affairs, whilst simultaneously maintaining and attracting more folk, on the grounds of congruency towards sexuality, if the main proponents of restraint have insidiously flouted the idea? Hence, there is no longer a defensible case for eschewing criticism on the grounds that sexual abuses represent isolated phenomena. The Catholic Church is drowning inside a tidal wave of empirical evidence against it.
Furthermore, what is needed is the opening up of spaces of representation for a subject that has been misunderstood for ages. Sexuality is much more than bodily intercourse, social control or self-engineering. It is also a gross, but fundamental energy that sustains the well being of the body, both personally and collectively, and certainly one that could overpower any physique if it is misunderstood or categorically repressed, as in the Catholic Church's case.
From the recent manifestations of homosexual paedophilia among the clergy, we could draw evidence to illuminate the previous claim by saying that what is really happening goes beyond confused sexual preferences and the legality of victims. Men within this hierarchically patriarchal institution and organization are faced with a reality that cannot be addressed in matters of faith and belief in God alone.
Males inside the Church are experiencing what any other gendered human being faces from his teenage years to full-blown adulthood, sexual urges which tend to surface in bursts of sexual energy. This vitality generally seeks satisfaction or at least comprehension, but it is also true that one can abstain from it, or even more, that it could be harnessed by transforming it into the essence of spiritual growth like a myriad of tantric sages have pointed out. We do not have to necessarily follow Abraham Maslow when he states that in order to access higher levels of awareness we have to satisfy the lower to begin with. But we can safely say that blocking sexuality outright by withholding it and repressing it will tend to backfire as negative consequences for the individual.
So, in the bulk of cases, sexual energy will find an outlet in physical sexual acts, be them personal/individual and or in participation with others. If those others are men, boys or children, it is because that is what is physically available inside an institution where women have been deliberately left out, not only of religious symbolism and tradition, but of the Church’s tangible location in the form of a cathedral, a church, a basilica, or whatever edifice acts as a roof for them around the world. On the other hand, there is also a relationship between this patriarchal vision of an all-male club and power relations that are established in horizontal and vertical ways within its structure, and that which to a point develop a sort of ‘cult of maleness’ that is surely unnatural. Members of the church are in a sense ‘Church property’ and young males will tend to hold respect and admiration for figures of higher standing. But vested authority has been flagrantly abused in the case of the sexual misfortunes that I am referring to, thus this alone threatens the cement that has held their internal coherence in working order for generations.
The average Catholic today has to cohabit with a large public in the contemporary world who increasingly has come to see personal development and transcendence as all-inclusive, in the sense of utilizing all available resources - especially the most intimate and personal like sexuality - as part of an action plan for humane dignity and growth. Many practicing Catholics themselves form part of this group. Moreover, sexual energy and action is impossible to repress without direct consequences for individuals, so the Catholic Church must be very careful with public reactions against it. If the priesthood is seen to be recklessly squandering the moral capital of the institution, people will shy away from it in every sense, ranging from physical absence to symbolic retraction. The Church must be especially cautious in an era were the letter, the scroll, and the book have been transcended by an information and media technologies phase of civilization which could annihilate any long held reputation in a few minutes.
Ultimately, it could be stated that what happens at the individual/personal level is mirrored at the social/collective level of any organization or collectivity. In this sense, individual repression of sexuality is replicated at the communal, thus making sex a problematic issue for the institution as a whole, including its constituency. So what is going on here is that the Catholic Church is in danger of affecting the more sublime and elevated aspects of its creed (liturgy, sacrament, theology) for failing to extinguish out a fire that is burning inside the edifice’s basement. The Catholic Church today is not the dominant institution that it once was in antiquity. It must revise its policy towards sexuality and celibacy if it wants to successfully keep its monotheistic God myth perpetuated. Modify, Change, Transform, Metamorphose, --- or perish.
Saturday, 13 March 2010
A piece of the Jigsaw or the Jigsaw itself? The Sociology of the ‘Cholo-Colombianos’
Introductory context
Attempting to ascertain social phenomena within the bounds of monocultural nation states tend to be intricate tasks. For whenever specific collective actions are undertaken by movements that do not subscribe to mainstream culture, these will tend to be identified as sub-cultural or countercultural, depending on the degree of deviance in which they may be incurring. Subsuming these in a qualitative fashion as counterpoised to common praxis, is typical not only of the State and its organization of the social world; it is also customary for the general public at large.
The aforementioned introductory lines are a case in point for Mexico as a country. Common knowledge is prone, both domestically and internationally, to view the land of the Aztec and the Spaniard as composed of a homogeneous Mestizo (mixed white and indigenous race) background that makes up the building blocks for the prevailing racial composition. But an uncomfortable truth has haunted the nation for decades. Racial minorities, composed of white Spanish descended peoples and that of the darker skinned Indigenous inhabitants, were left out of the unipolar mestizo blend, and they have grown apart from each other, not only in class terms, but also in the utilization of available economic and cultural resources. The playing out of their particular symbolic worldviews occurs within unevenly shared public spaces. Centuries of bloodshed and race intermingling gave way to the formation of a socio-political unit that nevertheless has endured the most severe of hardships. But in the end, Mexico is not really a monocultural nation.
And the main issue is that it has always been like this. The State has been perennially intent (since its postcolonial inception) in consolidating some sort of uniformity out of a disparaged society. In this context, we could not really say that any collectivity is concretely sub cultural, as there is no clear and definite identity for Mexicans as a whole. Despite that, it could be true that there exists common national symbols, and that whatever a few ensembles containing few peoples does not necessarily imply a threat to a vaguely understood but accepted set of values. Overall, there is not really one type of Mexican, but many of them constructing particular narratives under one same roof.
So in order to understand a phenomenon as the ‘Cholo Colombianos’ we have to take the previous backdrop into account. The second thing we have to do is to remove our prejudices from the table, because minority behaviour tends to be treated in pejorative terms, to say the least. Hence, the better way of delving into any group’s livelihood is by direct face to face in depth qualitative interviewing and participant observation. The following lines will be laid down as a result of a case study involving members of a group that has been basically referred to as an “unregenerate mass of unemployed and addicted youngsters” by the media, the State and civil society. I was personally involved in the interviewing and qualitative analysis of the data obtained, and my work was motivated, not in terms of how we could question the latter reference (that I personally find unfounded), but in how we could really comprehend how some people make their way in a contemporary world, were narratives tend to be overrun by an onslaught of en-masse directed criticisms, that tend to obscure or plainly soil minority practices.
Without trying to determine that a particular socio-economic status or class position stereotypically paves the way for specific group interests, it is still safe to pin-down the circle of individuals better known as ‘Cholo-Colombianos’ at the top-end of the lower class, if by that we understand, people who do not by themselves show any propensity to form part of a well established structure of class mobility (led by the upper classes), but who nevertheless are aware of a social world that can be transformed by the acting out of their potentialities in the acquisition of at least a partial slice of material consumption, which has in a sense established the material basis for their particular cultural habits. This by itself distinguishes the upper-lower classes from the rest of the disenfranchised bulk in this social categorization.
It is also necessary to differentiate occupations within that social echelon, to better try to tangibly locate our participants. The Mexican working class (which forms the lion’s share of the lower classes in Mexico) could well be divided in at least two forms. A first classification could include the lowest denominated of occupations, ranging from informal workers (which represents up to at least half of domestic commercial activities throughout the country and are centred around the main big metropolises of Mexico City, Guadalajara and Monterrey) who are detached from a tax-collection structure, and on the other hand, we could also include manual workers (subsistence farmers, carpenters, mason workers, et cetera) and they both tend to be people with barely or, in some cases, no education or literacy at all. The main distinction between these and our interviewed subjects (upper-lower class), is that the latter are bearers of at least a basic primary education, and, in some of the cases interviewed, holders of a basic technical education that functions as the knowledge-basis of particular lines of work. In this sense, the ‘Cholo-Colombianos’ life is centred around a working week that pays off their leisure pursuits, which only become affordable thanks to an averagely paid job. They are able to provide for their attires (that distinguish them and sets them apart from others) and can simultaneously finance any entrance fees to local clubs that harbour the ambiance, music, and dance styles that they seek. But in the end, these guys do not maintain their families or offspring of any kind. Their earnings are directly invested in their own image, both in portraying it in symbolical ways, and by reproducing it in conjunction with other members of their clan. Working classes are centred on peripheral, but nevertheless well-established working class neighbourhoods. These communities supply the majority of work force necessary to maintain an agro-industrial economy as it is played out in Monterrey, the northern industrial hub of the country.
Middle classes, on the other hand, are both more professional and educated (with at least secondary or tertiary degrees) and can be found in completely different subject positions, well placed in a class structure that is organized in a way that guarantees (at least in theory) social mobility. In this way, we could determine a kind of symbolic relation between the middle and upper classes. Aspiration for the former in this scheme, is not only portrayed by observing similarities of material uses like fashion and other elements like lifestyle options and choice of residence and consumption of automobiles, but by a whole array of symbolic choices that tend to be understood as “upper class” and which tend to be emulated because of tangible possibilities of doing so.
Essentially, the lower classes are not particularly and clearly accommodated in a position of mobile and hierarchical class structure like the one played out by the middle and upper classes, as they are far away from the scheme, as explained in the introductory context. However, as we have seen and will continue to do so throughout this paper, the ‘Cholo-Colombianos’ have found ways of giving meaning to their lives by delighting in a kind of recreation that goes beyond accepted conceptions of the term, but which in the end, harms no one. These activities require particular attention and a just explanation, not only for those involved in them, but for others who may have little or no knowledge of them and who could easily become victims of miscomprehension and of class-mongering.
Music & Dance
The ‘Cholo Colombianos’ use of music as differentiating practice is one of their most salient characteristics, as they have chosen a particular style throughout their projective phases since the 1980s. The Colombiano part of the name implies an appropriation of a Colombian cultural product - that is of their music - the cumbia Vallenata. The use of a foreign product takes place in a curious manner. Our lot does not take into account nation-specific particularities (besides music) for their enjoyment. They are attracted by the appealing rhythm of Colombian music, by its joy and simplicity of tune, and by its infectious melody that is very conducive (according to them) for effective dancing in both private and public arenas. It is also very important to say that the utilization of Colombian tunes is not something new but something that has been constantly imbibed by them since both their youth and the inception of the ‘Cholo Colombianos’ a few decades ago, in and around their own neighbourhoods. In their own words, “It was there, and we grew up with it”. So in this sense, the music being there means that it has been taken up by others in their own way of building their own group identity. In the end, it was preferred by them (contemporary members) particularly in order to conform their own bloc personality. At heart, Colombian music and dance reinforces the group’s symbolic worldview, both internally (as a mode of personal and signification) and externally, in the practice of public and social bonding processes like dancing and concert attendance in massive venues. It is important to mention that Colombian Vallenato music is not orthodox fare as Mexican autochthonous songs, which in comparison are favoured as the most conventional or popular throughout the nation.
Another final aspect that is fundamental to point out in order to more closely come to grips with the playing out of this particular group identity is dance. Cholo Colombianos have their own particular technique, but in a sense, the latter could be understood a syncretic way of dancing a foreign jingle but with a local flavour. It is a social dance style, not an individual one. This is further evidence of the bonding qualities of this the music of their choice.
Clothing & Fashion
The clothing style that characterizes the ‘Cholo-Colombianos’ is a curious blend of eclecticism. On one hand, the individuals conforming they have added to their own distinct style out of available domestic resources. On the other hand, depending on a foreign import for music does not necessarily exclude the possibility of enjoying it with a local taste. And that is specifically what has happened. Cholo Colombianos have developed their own clothing style in something that could be termed as a “fashion statement” that flaunts various elements and influences simultaneously. So following this argument, we can say that the Colombiano part of the fashion equation is represented by the use of well-established icons of Mexican extraction, but this are just utilized for symbolic motives. But be that as it may, these exclude the usage of icons, which could be understood and related to symbols of nationalism or patriotism in any way (I will come to this last point in the identity part of our account).
So the employment of icons like the Virgin of Guadalupe, cactuses (nopal) and or flowers in their attire is characteristic of them, and it tends to maintain their public use of identity within an established set of symbolic meanings that could well be understood by compatriots within Mexico. Another important thing to comment is that the ‘Cholo Colombianos’ have developed their clothing tastes and aesthetics (how they view themselves and others who share the public world) not only in counter position to others, but have developed their own motives (both internal and external) that could serve as justifications for behaving that way. Their social use of clothing is not to alarm others or to be against them. Nevertheless they definitely want to stand out from the crowd.
But in order to complete the fashion statement and eclecticism we have to completely flesh out the other part of their name and social identity, the Cholo part. Here is where we can picture the influence from the United States of America (and of television) in terms of a kind of aspirational opportunity of expansion for them as individuals and as a movement, but not as class awareness within a well-established social hierarchy (as explained before). This could be understood by the predisposition for particular brand names, which are not only related to, but which are worn by a particular circle that in a sense, and according to them, is placed above them - at least fashion wise. This latter band in question is the American gang culture of Los Angeles, which tends to leads the way in clothing matters. The interviewees questioned were clear about brand labels that are American in origin, and they were also clear in their reference of these as sort of higher placed outfits in a scale of socio-economic positions. Ironically, this usage of alternate, but well established trademarks, also serves the purpose of ‘refining’ or ‘cleansing’ their collective identity up to a point, as interviewees were clear on this as representing more austere (squared and line patterned shirts but nevertheless still colourful) but less stigmatized garments by other public peoples outside of their circle. The boys were clear about being overtly criticized whenever they wore cactuses, or representations of the Virgin of Guadalupe because of the “popular culture” feel that these symbols elicit. Overall, they believed that wearing a more Cholo-like, US influenced attire, dramatically reduced criticism and condescension. In this sense, we could safely say that (just like any other big tract of a big aspirational society that tends too look in the upper echelons of itself for solace when it comes to social mobility and distinction) ‘Cholo Colombianos’ not only revel in imports for their particular use in terms of identity formation, they also serve as safeguards or pressure relievers when it comes to manifesting themselves within a range of opposing or competing social blocs. ‘Cholo Colombiano’ fashion is not only a collective phenomena, it also stands for individual and very personal public statements that nonetheless show structural group guidance in their compounding. To sum it up, clothing style is shaped both by local and foreign influences, but has nevertheless conflated as a hybrid and healthy mix that they have incorporated in order to better represent them. Group identity is hence reinforced by dress.
Religious symbols and Identity
Now, regarding the use of religious symbolism, a few things can be stated. First, it is clear that religious icons are used because of the impact that religion not only has had on the nation (a fundamental facet of Mexican life), but on families themselves and their sense of identity within and across narratives of everyday living. But is important to state at this stage, that regardless of the fact that some nations tend to establish bonds with particular religions in order to cement national identity (excluding theocracies as obvious examples), the ‘Cholo Colombiano’ use of religious iconography is not related to patriotic issues. In our case study, the symbols are worn for particular qualities that they expound. The Virgin de Guadalupe is worn because of the maternal symbolism and her ‘protective’ characteristics. In this case, we could relate the habit of displaying this image to a wider and more commonplace use. Regardless of the fact the Virgin de Guadalupe represented (and it still does) an important milestone for a sense of national identity ever since the formation of Mexico as a nation, it also depicts ideas of protection from various eventualities. The interviewees were very clear on the protective aspects of the usage of the Virgin, but also probed on the possibility that it in itself has become an object of emulation for the bunch of members that are “not so sure of why others do certain things but nevertheless imitate them because at least those others feel like they know what they’re doing”.
Moreover, it was also intriguing to learn that the Christ as a symbol was sporadically absent, as it in a sense represents the main and patriarchal figure of Catholicism, but one who does not posses fragmented qualities that could be integrated into individual necessities. On the other hand, I was witness of the common use of images of ‘minor deities’ or saints like ‘Saint Jude Thaddeus’ that functioned as repositories for specific broken-down demands like for example pardon from petty sins, whenever they were committed by the bearer. In this sense, the Virgin and the Saints are worn because they function as intermediaries between the porter, and the qualities that he seeks in those iconic figures directly, thus bypassing an intrusive and bloated clergy. In the end, the use of iconography in a material form also represents a kind of amulet for bad vibrations that are ever present in and around social arenas.
So belief is socially catholic for the ‘Cholo Colombianos’ as they have acknowledged being religious, but have subsumed it below family, an institution that in the Mexican case is anyway a pillar of religiousness. Thus a strong religious identification is inescapable in this context, and it both serves to legitimize the group as an ontological reality versus the external social world, as it also provides an in-group psychological and symbolic synthesis.
Now in order to better understand issues of collective identity as a whole we have to take into account individual experience and narrative that form a complementary dimension. This means that the guys do not have to give up much of what they consider being their own individual personalities in order to fit in with the crowd. Nevertheless, the ensemble does function as a space of representation where they play out their personalities in a more horizontal fashion. This means that they do value their families and religions highly, and both are prized above the ‘Cholo Colombiano’ bunch, but they find themselves more comfortable in forming part of an concept which does not only function as a collective identity, but as an outlet for their particular natures. An example of this is that they generally keep their nicknames and use them throughout their unique contribution. In short, family and religion are too hierarchical, so the group gives them a kind of support that is lacking in both the former. It is fundamental to state that the movement serves as a recipient for identity and that it is also established as a means to fulfil the normal expectations of these young adults, that of entertainment in a shared environment which is tailored for that purpose. Ultimately, the ‘Cholo Colombianos’ are not interested in political claims or ideologies of any sort, and are up to a point exempt from graffiti and violence, like gang fights, militancy or social frictions.
The ‘Cholo Colombiano’ phenomenon can help us to understand how complex Mexico really is and how it keeps becoming in its transition towards a multi-cultural and globalized nation, thus morphing in its own way, and integrating itself, in an ever expanding and inter-connected world. So with this backdrop in mind, it can be better to say that the movement could represent more of a kind of ‘subtle post-modern tribalism’, one that is not archaic or regressive in any way to a derogatory pre-nation state context of irrational and uncivilized group in-fighting for supremacy in the social world, but certainly one that takes elements from a contemporary semi-coalesced idea of nation, and which should not be seen as a threat to it, and that moreover should be taken for what it is, avoiding political and or socio-cultural intents of subsuming it under an advantageous idea of a homogeneous Mexican identity.
Juan Carlos Guerra / Monterrey, Mexico - February 2010
Attempting to ascertain social phenomena within the bounds of monocultural nation states tend to be intricate tasks. For whenever specific collective actions are undertaken by movements that do not subscribe to mainstream culture, these will tend to be identified as sub-cultural or countercultural, depending on the degree of deviance in which they may be incurring. Subsuming these in a qualitative fashion as counterpoised to common praxis, is typical not only of the State and its organization of the social world; it is also customary for the general public at large.
The aforementioned introductory lines are a case in point for Mexico as a country. Common knowledge is prone, both domestically and internationally, to view the land of the Aztec and the Spaniard as composed of a homogeneous Mestizo (mixed white and indigenous race) background that makes up the building blocks for the prevailing racial composition. But an uncomfortable truth has haunted the nation for decades. Racial minorities, composed of white Spanish descended peoples and that of the darker skinned Indigenous inhabitants, were left out of the unipolar mestizo blend, and they have grown apart from each other, not only in class terms, but also in the utilization of available economic and cultural resources. The playing out of their particular symbolic worldviews occurs within unevenly shared public spaces. Centuries of bloodshed and race intermingling gave way to the formation of a socio-political unit that nevertheless has endured the most severe of hardships. But in the end, Mexico is not really a monocultural nation.
And the main issue is that it has always been like this. The State has been perennially intent (since its postcolonial inception) in consolidating some sort of uniformity out of a disparaged society. In this context, we could not really say that any collectivity is concretely sub cultural, as there is no clear and definite identity for Mexicans as a whole. Despite that, it could be true that there exists common national symbols, and that whatever a few ensembles containing few peoples does not necessarily imply a threat to a vaguely understood but accepted set of values. Overall, there is not really one type of Mexican, but many of them constructing particular narratives under one same roof.
So in order to understand a phenomenon as the ‘Cholo Colombianos’ we have to take the previous backdrop into account. The second thing we have to do is to remove our prejudices from the table, because minority behaviour tends to be treated in pejorative terms, to say the least. Hence, the better way of delving into any group’s livelihood is by direct face to face in depth qualitative interviewing and participant observation. The following lines will be laid down as a result of a case study involving members of a group that has been basically referred to as an “unregenerate mass of unemployed and addicted youngsters” by the media, the State and civil society. I was personally involved in the interviewing and qualitative analysis of the data obtained, and my work was motivated, not in terms of how we could question the latter reference (that I personally find unfounded), but in how we could really comprehend how some people make their way in a contemporary world, were narratives tend to be overrun by an onslaught of en-masse directed criticisms, that tend to obscure or plainly soil minority practices.
Without trying to determine that a particular socio-economic status or class position stereotypically paves the way for specific group interests, it is still safe to pin-down the circle of individuals better known as ‘Cholo-Colombianos’ at the top-end of the lower class, if by that we understand, people who do not by themselves show any propensity to form part of a well established structure of class mobility (led by the upper classes), but who nevertheless are aware of a social world that can be transformed by the acting out of their potentialities in the acquisition of at least a partial slice of material consumption, which has in a sense established the material basis for their particular cultural habits. This by itself distinguishes the upper-lower classes from the rest of the disenfranchised bulk in this social categorization.
It is also necessary to differentiate occupations within that social echelon, to better try to tangibly locate our participants. The Mexican working class (which forms the lion’s share of the lower classes in Mexico) could well be divided in at least two forms. A first classification could include the lowest denominated of occupations, ranging from informal workers (which represents up to at least half of domestic commercial activities throughout the country and are centred around the main big metropolises of Mexico City, Guadalajara and Monterrey) who are detached from a tax-collection structure, and on the other hand, we could also include manual workers (subsistence farmers, carpenters, mason workers, et cetera) and they both tend to be people with barely or, in some cases, no education or literacy at all. The main distinction between these and our interviewed subjects (upper-lower class), is that the latter are bearers of at least a basic primary education, and, in some of the cases interviewed, holders of a basic technical education that functions as the knowledge-basis of particular lines of work. In this sense, the ‘Cholo-Colombianos’ life is centred around a working week that pays off their leisure pursuits, which only become affordable thanks to an averagely paid job. They are able to provide for their attires (that distinguish them and sets them apart from others) and can simultaneously finance any entrance fees to local clubs that harbour the ambiance, music, and dance styles that they seek. But in the end, these guys do not maintain their families or offspring of any kind. Their earnings are directly invested in their own image, both in portraying it in symbolical ways, and by reproducing it in conjunction with other members of their clan. Working classes are centred on peripheral, but nevertheless well-established working class neighbourhoods. These communities supply the majority of work force necessary to maintain an agro-industrial economy as it is played out in Monterrey, the northern industrial hub of the country.
Middle classes, on the other hand, are both more professional and educated (with at least secondary or tertiary degrees) and can be found in completely different subject positions, well placed in a class structure that is organized in a way that guarantees (at least in theory) social mobility. In this way, we could determine a kind of symbolic relation between the middle and upper classes. Aspiration for the former in this scheme, is not only portrayed by observing similarities of material uses like fashion and other elements like lifestyle options and choice of residence and consumption of automobiles, but by a whole array of symbolic choices that tend to be understood as “upper class” and which tend to be emulated because of tangible possibilities of doing so.
Essentially, the lower classes are not particularly and clearly accommodated in a position of mobile and hierarchical class structure like the one played out by the middle and upper classes, as they are far away from the scheme, as explained in the introductory context. However, as we have seen and will continue to do so throughout this paper, the ‘Cholo-Colombianos’ have found ways of giving meaning to their lives by delighting in a kind of recreation that goes beyond accepted conceptions of the term, but which in the end, harms no one. These activities require particular attention and a just explanation, not only for those involved in them, but for others who may have little or no knowledge of them and who could easily become victims of miscomprehension and of class-mongering.
Music & Dance
The ‘Cholo Colombianos’ use of music as differentiating practice is one of their most salient characteristics, as they have chosen a particular style throughout their projective phases since the 1980s. The Colombiano part of the name implies an appropriation of a Colombian cultural product - that is of their music - the cumbia Vallenata. The use of a foreign product takes place in a curious manner. Our lot does not take into account nation-specific particularities (besides music) for their enjoyment. They are attracted by the appealing rhythm of Colombian music, by its joy and simplicity of tune, and by its infectious melody that is very conducive (according to them) for effective dancing in both private and public arenas. It is also very important to say that the utilization of Colombian tunes is not something new but something that has been constantly imbibed by them since both their youth and the inception of the ‘Cholo Colombianos’ a few decades ago, in and around their own neighbourhoods. In their own words, “It was there, and we grew up with it”. So in this sense, the music being there means that it has been taken up by others in their own way of building their own group identity. In the end, it was preferred by them (contemporary members) particularly in order to conform their own bloc personality. At heart, Colombian music and dance reinforces the group’s symbolic worldview, both internally (as a mode of personal and signification) and externally, in the practice of public and social bonding processes like dancing and concert attendance in massive venues. It is important to mention that Colombian Vallenato music is not orthodox fare as Mexican autochthonous songs, which in comparison are favoured as the most conventional or popular throughout the nation.
Another final aspect that is fundamental to point out in order to more closely come to grips with the playing out of this particular group identity is dance. Cholo Colombianos have their own particular technique, but in a sense, the latter could be understood a syncretic way of dancing a foreign jingle but with a local flavour. It is a social dance style, not an individual one. This is further evidence of the bonding qualities of this the music of their choice.
Clothing & Fashion
The clothing style that characterizes the ‘Cholo-Colombianos’ is a curious blend of eclecticism. On one hand, the individuals conforming they have added to their own distinct style out of available domestic resources. On the other hand, depending on a foreign import for music does not necessarily exclude the possibility of enjoying it with a local taste. And that is specifically what has happened. Cholo Colombianos have developed their own clothing style in something that could be termed as a “fashion statement” that flaunts various elements and influences simultaneously. So following this argument, we can say that the Colombiano part of the fashion equation is represented by the use of well-established icons of Mexican extraction, but this are just utilized for symbolic motives. But be that as it may, these exclude the usage of icons, which could be understood and related to symbols of nationalism or patriotism in any way (I will come to this last point in the identity part of our account).
So the employment of icons like the Virgin of Guadalupe, cactuses (nopal) and or flowers in their attire is characteristic of them, and it tends to maintain their public use of identity within an established set of symbolic meanings that could well be understood by compatriots within Mexico. Another important thing to comment is that the ‘Cholo Colombianos’ have developed their clothing tastes and aesthetics (how they view themselves and others who share the public world) not only in counter position to others, but have developed their own motives (both internal and external) that could serve as justifications for behaving that way. Their social use of clothing is not to alarm others or to be against them. Nevertheless they definitely want to stand out from the crowd.
But in order to complete the fashion statement and eclecticism we have to completely flesh out the other part of their name and social identity, the Cholo part. Here is where we can picture the influence from the United States of America (and of television) in terms of a kind of aspirational opportunity of expansion for them as individuals and as a movement, but not as class awareness within a well-established social hierarchy (as explained before). This could be understood by the predisposition for particular brand names, which are not only related to, but which are worn by a particular circle that in a sense, and according to them, is placed above them - at least fashion wise. This latter band in question is the American gang culture of Los Angeles, which tends to leads the way in clothing matters. The interviewees questioned were clear about brand labels that are American in origin, and they were also clear in their reference of these as sort of higher placed outfits in a scale of socio-economic positions. Ironically, this usage of alternate, but well established trademarks, also serves the purpose of ‘refining’ or ‘cleansing’ their collective identity up to a point, as interviewees were clear on this as representing more austere (squared and line patterned shirts but nevertheless still colourful) but less stigmatized garments by other public peoples outside of their circle. The boys were clear about being overtly criticized whenever they wore cactuses, or representations of the Virgin of Guadalupe because of the “popular culture” feel that these symbols elicit. Overall, they believed that wearing a more Cholo-like, US influenced attire, dramatically reduced criticism and condescension. In this sense, we could safely say that (just like any other big tract of a big aspirational society that tends too look in the upper echelons of itself for solace when it comes to social mobility and distinction) ‘Cholo Colombianos’ not only revel in imports for their particular use in terms of identity formation, they also serve as safeguards or pressure relievers when it comes to manifesting themselves within a range of opposing or competing social blocs. ‘Cholo Colombiano’ fashion is not only a collective phenomena, it also stands for individual and very personal public statements that nonetheless show structural group guidance in their compounding. To sum it up, clothing style is shaped both by local and foreign influences, but has nevertheless conflated as a hybrid and healthy mix that they have incorporated in order to better represent them. Group identity is hence reinforced by dress.
Religious symbols and Identity
Now, regarding the use of religious symbolism, a few things can be stated. First, it is clear that religious icons are used because of the impact that religion not only has had on the nation (a fundamental facet of Mexican life), but on families themselves and their sense of identity within and across narratives of everyday living. But is important to state at this stage, that regardless of the fact that some nations tend to establish bonds with particular religions in order to cement national identity (excluding theocracies as obvious examples), the ‘Cholo Colombiano’ use of religious iconography is not related to patriotic issues. In our case study, the symbols are worn for particular qualities that they expound. The Virgin de Guadalupe is worn because of the maternal symbolism and her ‘protective’ characteristics. In this case, we could relate the habit of displaying this image to a wider and more commonplace use. Regardless of the fact the Virgin de Guadalupe represented (and it still does) an important milestone for a sense of national identity ever since the formation of Mexico as a nation, it also depicts ideas of protection from various eventualities. The interviewees were very clear on the protective aspects of the usage of the Virgin, but also probed on the possibility that it in itself has become an object of emulation for the bunch of members that are “not so sure of why others do certain things but nevertheless imitate them because at least those others feel like they know what they’re doing”.
Moreover, it was also intriguing to learn that the Christ as a symbol was sporadically absent, as it in a sense represents the main and patriarchal figure of Catholicism, but one who does not posses fragmented qualities that could be integrated into individual necessities. On the other hand, I was witness of the common use of images of ‘minor deities’ or saints like ‘Saint Jude Thaddeus’ that functioned as repositories for specific broken-down demands like for example pardon from petty sins, whenever they were committed by the bearer. In this sense, the Virgin and the Saints are worn because they function as intermediaries between the porter, and the qualities that he seeks in those iconic figures directly, thus bypassing an intrusive and bloated clergy. In the end, the use of iconography in a material form also represents a kind of amulet for bad vibrations that are ever present in and around social arenas.
So belief is socially catholic for the ‘Cholo Colombianos’ as they have acknowledged being religious, but have subsumed it below family, an institution that in the Mexican case is anyway a pillar of religiousness. Thus a strong religious identification is inescapable in this context, and it both serves to legitimize the group as an ontological reality versus the external social world, as it also provides an in-group psychological and symbolic synthesis.
Now in order to better understand issues of collective identity as a whole we have to take into account individual experience and narrative that form a complementary dimension. This means that the guys do not have to give up much of what they consider being their own individual personalities in order to fit in with the crowd. Nevertheless, the ensemble does function as a space of representation where they play out their personalities in a more horizontal fashion. This means that they do value their families and religions highly, and both are prized above the ‘Cholo Colombiano’ bunch, but they find themselves more comfortable in forming part of an concept which does not only function as a collective identity, but as an outlet for their particular natures. An example of this is that they generally keep their nicknames and use them throughout their unique contribution. In short, family and religion are too hierarchical, so the group gives them a kind of support that is lacking in both the former. It is fundamental to state that the movement serves as a recipient for identity and that it is also established as a means to fulfil the normal expectations of these young adults, that of entertainment in a shared environment which is tailored for that purpose. Ultimately, the ‘Cholo Colombianos’ are not interested in political claims or ideologies of any sort, and are up to a point exempt from graffiti and violence, like gang fights, militancy or social frictions.
The ‘Cholo Colombiano’ phenomenon can help us to understand how complex Mexico really is and how it keeps becoming in its transition towards a multi-cultural and globalized nation, thus morphing in its own way, and integrating itself, in an ever expanding and inter-connected world. So with this backdrop in mind, it can be better to say that the movement could represent more of a kind of ‘subtle post-modern tribalism’, one that is not archaic or regressive in any way to a derogatory pre-nation state context of irrational and uncivilized group in-fighting for supremacy in the social world, but certainly one that takes elements from a contemporary semi-coalesced idea of nation, and which should not be seen as a threat to it, and that moreover should be taken for what it is, avoiding political and or socio-cultural intents of subsuming it under an advantageous idea of a homogeneous Mexican identity.
Juan Carlos Guerra / Monterrey, Mexico - February 2010
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