Reframing Latin America: A Cultural Theory Reading ... - BGSU Blogs

334 reframing latin america
refuses to essentialize it. Once we have identifi ed and labeled ourselves
and acknowledged that our place of residence is perhaps different from that
of many, if not most, other people, we are equipped to shed all or part of
it when presented with information that makes it necessary to do so. At
that point we will begin to reconstruct our identity anew, as we maneuver
through the shifting sands and fl oating icebergs of discursive construction.
The irony here, ultimately, is that postmodernity asks us to see security
and life-affirming values in transition and temporality. The challenge is to
embrace that irony and live with it, to “live with difference.” 8 That should
make us no less committed to fi ghting for what we believe to be right
and against worldviews that promote themselves as all-knowing, all-seeing,
and all-truthful.
In the preface to this book we said we would use a cultural theory approach
to look at modern Latin American history in a different way. Sometimes,
at the end of our seminar upon which this book is based, our students
comment that they feel as if they learned everything and nothing about
Latin America. This irony is, of course, precisely the point, and it takes us
back to Daniel Mato’s claim that “Latin America doesn’t exist.” If students
enter the seminar or approach this text expecting to have Latin America
defi ned for them, to have its identity and meaning spread out before them—
to have Latin American reality constructed—it will feel as though Latin
America is somehow missing from the experience. What we showed were
the processes and patterns by which Latin American identities were constructed,
both by Latin Americans and by foreigners. In other words, we
adopted a position of constant criticism, showing that whenever someone
defi ned the real Latin America, someone or something was being excluded.
In this process of exclusion, the identities of both the included and the excluded
were being created simultaneously and in mutual dependence upon
one another. Furthermore, this constitutive process also carried within it
the seeds of repression and hierarchy. So, throughout our term together,
Latin America was at once ever-present but always being looked at from a
position of what was happening behind the scenes, around the corner, and
in the unconscious of those people who historically have described/defi ned/
pinpointed the supposedly true situation.
As we dismiss our students on the last day of the seminar, we suggest
they practice the interpretive skills we have studied throughout the course.
They already had been doing so, but now they would be leaving the reinforcing
confi nes of the seminar. We tell them to go out into the world and
see how identities are being made everywhere, every day, all the time; how
identity is not a matter of awakening oneself to a true, ontological essence.