The Political Uses Of Culture
UnpublishedSeptember/October
1994
Volume:
28
Number:
2
Article
Beatriz Sarlo
Under President Carlos Saul Menem's reactionary cultural revolution, Argentina has become more authoritarian both by way of political changes and changes in political culture.
Luis Camnitzer
For Latin Americans, it is essential to distinguish between art as a tool to create culture and achieve independence, and art as a globalizing commercial enterprise. When discussing visual arts in the underdeveloped world, two extreme approaches are possible.
Jean G. Colvin
Capirona, a small Quichua accommodate the ecotourist's community in the rainfor- desire for an "authentic" est of eastern Ecuador, sur- experience, the Capirona vil- vived over the years by grow- lagers built a small tourist ing subsistence crops and a lodge and dining area in the few acres of maize and cof- traditional grass-and-bamboo fee which it sold in the mar- style, even though most local ket towns upriver. When families aspire to live in tin- local maize prices fell in the roofed, cinder-block struc- late 'i9805, the community tures.
Glenn Switkes
The story of oil companies sacking Third World countries and then leaving their mess behind is a common one. What is unique about the saga of Texaco in Ecuador is that the company may have to clean up the waste it abandoned in the rainforest.
The Sandinistas I was happy to see NACLA give so much space to a debate over the 1993 crisis in Nicaragua (Roger Burbach's "Nicaragua: The Pot Boils Over" [January/February 1994], and subsequent letters [May/June 1994]). But I was disap- pointed that the participants didn't have more to say about what Bur- bach called the determination of "the Bush presidency, and now even the Clinton Administration, to remove all Sandinista influence within the [Nicaraguan] army and turn it into a force that will not dare to challenge U.
Cathy Schneider
The music echoed down Broadway as the salsa musicians drummed their congas, blew their horns, and sang on one of the busiest streets in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn. Men and women, old and young, grabbed other members of a growing crowd and whirled them to a sultry salsa beat.
CARDOSO CATCHES UP TO LULA IN POLLS Rio DE JANEIRO, AUGUST 8, 1994 Brazil's presidential race has been radically altered by the government's introduction on July 1 of a new economic stabilization plan- "the Real Plan," named after the new currency. Under the tight-money plan, Brazil's monthly inflation rate has dropped from 50% in June to 6.
George Priestley
The new president's success will depend on how well he can maintain the social-democratic, populist and nationalist orientation of his party while confronting the logic and power of neoliberalism.
Trade Unionists Against Terror: Guatemala City 1954-1985 by Deborah Levenson-Estrada, The University of North Carolina Press, 1994, 288 pp., $45 (cloth), $15.
F R
A critical analysis of recent media coverage of the murder of Colombian soccer star Andres Escobar on July 2 which set off a circus of semi-informed lamentation in the press about violence and chaos in Colombia
George Priestley
As the presidential campaign took shape, two candidacies emerged from the broad coalition behind incumbent president Guillermo Endara: Mireya Moscoso de Gruber of the traditionalist Arnulfista Party led a coalition called the Alianza Democritica, and Ruben Dario Carries of the conservative Nationalist Republican Liberal Movement Party (MOLIRENA) led Cambio 94. Two major candidates built their campaigns around the widespread dissatisfaction with Endara: Ernesto "Toro" Perez Balladares of the Democratic Revolutionary Party (PRD)-the eventual winnerled a coalition called Pueblo Unido, and salsa singer Rub4n Blades created his own party called PapA Egor6 ("Mother Earth" in the indigenous Embar6 language.
"When I hear the word 'culture,' I reach for my gun," said Gestapo chief Hermann Goering, a few years before hanging himself at Nuremburg.
Peter Manuel
It is now 30 years since bandleader Johnny Pacheco founded Fania Records as a fledgling Latin record company, contracting the up-and- coming New York dance bands and distributing his records to area stores from the trunk of his car. By 1970, with the input of entrepreneur Jerry Masucci, Fania had turned the New York Latin beat into the soundtrack for the Latino pride movement that spread from Spanish Harlem throughout the urban Caribbean Basin.
Jean Franco
The new technologies of communication have created a class of technocrats and new audiences for whom the printed word has lost its luster and now competes with-and is often superseded by- music and the images of television. Immanuel Wallerstein recently argued that we are now entering the Black Period "which can be said to have begun symbolically in 1989.
Deedee Halleck
Within hours of the January 1 takeover of San Crist6bal, computer screens around the world sparked with news of the uprising. The rebels' effective use of e-mail has been a powerful weapon against disinformation.