Cultures of the City

by Young, Richard; Holmes, Amanda

• ISBN13: 9780822961208
• ISBN10: 0822961202
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2010-12-28
• Publisher: Univ of Pittsburgh Pr

Summary

Cultures of the Cityexplores the cultural mediation of relationships between people and urban spaces in Latin/o America and how these mediations shape the identities of cities and their residents.Addressing a broad spectrum of phenomena and disciplinary approaches, the contributors to this volume analyze lived urban experiences and their symbolic representation in cultural texts. Individual chapters explore Havana in popular music; Mexico City in art; Buenos Aires, Recife, and Salvador in film; and Asuncion and Buenos Aires in literature. Others focus on particular events, conditions, and practices of urban life including the Havana book fair, mass transit in Bogotaacute;, the restaurant industry in Los Angeles, the media in Detroit, Andean festivals in Lima, and the photographic record of a visit by members of the Zapatista Liberation Army to Mexico City. The contributors examine identity and the sense of place and belonging that connect people to urban environments, relating these to considerations of ethnicity, social and economic class, gender, everyday life, and cultural practices. They also consider history and memory and the making of places through the iterative performance of social practices. As such, places are works in progress, a condition that is particularly evident in contemporary Latin/o American cities where the opposition between local and global influences is a prominent facet of daily life.These core issues are theorized further in an afterword by Abril Trigo, who takes the chapters as a point of departure for a discussion of the dialectics of identity in the Latin/o American global city.

Author Biography

Richard Young is professor emeritus of Spanish and Latin American studies at the University of Alberta. He is the editor of Popular Culture, Music, Identities and Latin American Postmodernisms, and the author, editor, or translator of numerous other articles and books.

Amanda Holmes is associate professor and department chair of Hispanic studies at McGill University. She is the author of City Fictions: Language, Body, and Spanish American Urban Space.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations	p. vii
Introduction: Mediating Urban Identities	p. 1
Imagining Urban Identities
Havana in the Nueva Trova Repertoire of Gerardo Alfonso	p. 15
Last Snapshots/Take 2: Personal and Collective Shipwrecks in Buenos Aires	p. 31
Buenos Aires and the Literary Construction of Urban Space	p. 46
Body Art and the Remaking of Mexico City	p. 59
Urban Identities and Cultures on the Periphery
Feasting on Latina/o Labor in Multicultural Los Angeles	p. 75
Mediating the Public Sphere in Latina/o Detroit: Heart and Margin of an Embattled Metropolis	p. 88
Textual Revisions of Identity: Nostalgia and Modernity in Asunción	p. 105
Northeastern Images: Recife and Salvador in Contemporary Brazilian Cinema	p. 120
Performance and the Ritualization of Urban Identities
Performing Citizenship: Migration, Andean Festivals, and Public Spaces in Lima	p. 135
The TransMilenio Experience: Mass Transit in Bogotá and National Urban Identity	p. 151
The Feria del Libro and the Ritualization of Cultural Belonging in Havana	p. 167
Zapatistas in Mexico City and the Performance of Ethnic Citizenship	p. 183
Afterword: The Dialectics of Identity in the Latin/o American Global City	p. 199
Notes	p. 217
References	p. 231
List of Contributors	p. 249
Index	p. 253
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