Artículos de revistas sobre el tema "Mexican American actors"

AbstractHistorical studies of the War on Poverty have overwhelmingly focused on its consequences in African American communities. Many studies have grappled with how War on Poverty innovations co-opted a thriving African American social movement. This paper explores the impact of War on Poverty programs on the development of a political cadre of Mexican American grassroots leaders in Oakland, California. It investigates how coordinated 1960s protests by Mexican American organizations reveal Oakland's changing racial/ethnic conditions and shifting trends in the state's relationship to the urban poor. It demonstrates how a national shift to place-based solutions to poverty devolved the “problem of poverty” from the national to the local level and empowered a new set of actors—community-based organizations—in the fight against poverty. This essay argues that the devolution of federal responsibility for welfare provided the political and institutional opening for the rise of powerful Mexican American organizations whose goal was the recognition of a “Mexican American community” meriting government intervention. This essay also demonstrates how Mexican American organizations mobilized in relation to African American social movements and to geographies of poverty that were deemed exclusively Black.

This paper examines the dynamics of racialized securitization for transnational migrants across multiple borders—from Central America toward Mexico and the United States. Rather than a singular process where US policies, funding, and attitudes toward border security direct Mexican immigration enforcement, I argue that Mexican state collaboration redirects US xenophobia away from Mexican migrants and toward Central American migrants. Migrants’ testimonies point to the ways that US and Mexican discourses are mobilized in different—but complementary—ways that shape them as racialized subjects with differential life chances. This is clearest through a crude mapping of people onto nationalities for deportation based on hair, language, and tattoos. Beyond legal violence, deported migrants describe their vulnerability as constructed within tacit networks of collaboration between actors in the US and Mexico, both licit and illicit, in an effort to extort migrants and their families. While race is a key signifier in border securitization, the differences between these racial states have material consequences in the differential state violence in immigration enforcement.

This article addresses the memories of 28 filmgoers between the ages of 64 and 95 in Laredo, Texas – a city located on the border between the United States and Mexico. It explores respondents’ memories of US and Mexican films, actors and local venues against the historical background of a fluid and complex border. In particular, it examines the negotiation of cultural identities among residents with strong connections to Mexican heritage but who are also influenced by the structural characteristics of the American political, economic and educational systems.

AbstractIf Latin America's public universities are considered part of the state, then it seems plausible to characterise them as similar to the state, i.e. as clientelistic. However, this plausible hypothesis has never been examined by the literature on twentieth-century Mexican social sciences. Just like clientelism, science patrons such as US philanthropic foundations have similarly been neglected. In this article I argue that, as an alternative to what the Rockefeller Foundation perceived as clientelism and amateurism at Latin American universities, it claimed to patronise liberal scholarship, practised according to formal rational criteria. While foundations have been frequently considered part of a US imperialistic drive towards cultural hegemony in Latin America, they were not unitary actors and frequently failed to predict the actual impact of their grants. In Mexico in the 1940s, the Rockefeller Foundation boosted the humanities, but missed the opportunity to support a local take on social science teaching and research.

This article presents research from an ethnographic investigation of the role of the men and women who facilitate clandestine border crossings (known colloquially as coyotes) in the Mexico-Guatemala northern borderlands. A significant portion of the fieldwork took place at La 72, a renowned migrant shelter in the Mexican border city of Tenosique, in the state of Tabasco. Findings suggest that the daily exchanges between migrants and their crossing facilitators constitute constant social negotiations through which these actors enrich their agency and profit from each other’s well-being.

This paper analysed the processes of technology transfer 4.0, its conditions and the main transferable technological trends in Latin America. The complexity approach in the ecosystem allowed to explain how the actors or subsystems are (re)adapted or (re)learned based on their interaction without being managed by any specific entity or component. The methodological process consisted of a scientometric analysis, a thematic analysis based on the projects financed with public resources from 2002 to 2018, and an analysis of the innovation ecosystem in the emerging region of the Mexican Bajío. The findings showed the relevance of intermediate organisms in social leadership for technology transfer; big data, IoT and cloud computing are the main technologies 4.0 that are potentially transferable to respond to territorial heterogeneous conditions.

Multicultural discourse has reached Latin American higher education in the form of a set of policies targeting indigenous peoples. These policies are strongly influenced by the transfer of European notions of 'interculturality', which, in the Mexican context, are understood as positive interactions between members of minority and majority cultures. In Mexico, innovative and often polemical 'intercultural universities or colleges' are being created by governments, by NGOs or by pre-existing universities. This trend towards 'diversifying' the ethnocultural profiles of students and curricular contents coincides with a broader tendency to force institutions of higher education to become more 'efficient', 'corporate' and 'outcome-oriented'. Accordingly, these still very recently established 'intercultural universities' are often criticised as being part of a common policy of 'privatisation' and 'neoliberalisation' and of developing curricula particular to specific groups which weakens the universalist and comprehensive nature of Latin American public universities. Indigenous leaders, on the contrary, frequently claim and celebrate the appearance of these new higher education opportunities as part of a strategy of empowering actors of indigenous origin or African descent.Going beyond this polemic, this paper presents the first findings of an activist anthropological and ethnographically-based case study of the actors participating in the configuration of one of these new institutions of higher education, the Universidad Veracruzana Intercultural (UVI), located on the Mexican gulf coast. This article examines the way UVI has appropriated the discourse of interculturality on the basis of fieldwork conducted in the four indigenous regions where the UVI offers a B.A. in Intercultural Management for Development. The study focuses on the actors' teaching and learning practices, which are strongly shaped by an innovative and hybrid mixture of conventional university teaching, community-oriented research and 'employability'-driven development projects.

This article includes evidence on equity, governance and health financing outcomes of the Mexican health system. An evaluative research with a cross-sectional design was oriented towards the qualitative and quantitative analysis of financing, governance and equity indicators. Taking into account feasibility, as well as political and technical criteria, seven Mexican states were selected as study populations and an evaluative research was conducted during 2002-2010. The data collection techniques were based on in-depth interviews with key personnel (providers, users and community leaders), consensus technique and document analysis. The qualitative analysis was done with ATLAS TI and POLICY MAKER softwares. The Mexican health system reform has modified dependence at the central level; there is a new equity equation for resources allocation, community leaders and users of services reported the need to improve an effective accountability system at both municipal and state levels. Strategies for equity, governance and financing do not have adequate mechanisms to promote participation from all social actors. Improving this situation is a very important goal in the Mexican health democratization process, in the context of health care reform. Inequality on resources allocation in some regions and catastrophic expenditure for users is unequal in all states, producing more negative effects on states with high social marginalization. Special emphasis is placed on the analysis of the main strengths and weaknesses, as relevant evidences for other Latin American countries which are designing, implementing and evaluating reform strategies in order to achieve equity, good governance and a greater financial protection in health.

The present work objective is to understad the changes in the planning and administration of land uses in Mexico and to explore its possible relationship with the current environmental crisis, this is carried out within the context of the complex relations between society and environment and politics. The work hypothesis assumes that Mexico, like other Latin American countries, has based its planning of land uses on the recommendations of international organizations for the benefit of society as a whole and this has eroded their natural capital. It presents in general the panorama of the biodiversity at world-wide level and the antecedents in the investigation of the factors influecing the changes of land use of the soil in Latin America. The results describe the complex of changes in the administration of land use and the state of natural resources in the period analyzed. Finally, we discuss international contexts and the role of social actors in landscape transformation in Mexico. Our approach to the analysies will provide feedback of the successes and errors in the design of Mexican public policies in land use, hopefully providing a gateway to opening-up a more honest debate on the subject.

Abstract The shopping center sector has been growing steadily over the last years in Latin America. Many countries such as Chile, Mexico, and Brazil lead the industry in the region, with so many projects still under development and different companies with international expansion perspectives in their portfolio. The purpose of this paper is to identify which are the most recommendable entry mode strategies for Latin American countries and which are the essential resources and capabilities that a shopping center company needs to develop to increase the likelihood of success in the sector. Thus, different factors, such as political, economic, and social factors, which impact the industry operation, are analyzed to create a high-level overview of this industry’s most important subjects. For this purpose, primary and secondary data are used, based on a literature review and an empirical qualitative study, giving information of the Chilean Commercial Real Estate company, and interviewing its top managers. Thereby, the results lead to an entry strategy proposal into the Mexican market, identifying the most important shopping centers in the country, the main actors, and the best opportunities to enter.

This article examines internal processes that helped Alinskyism become a hegemonic style of organizing among Chicanos in Texas over New-Left and Marxist styles. I argue that Alinskyite Chicanos outmaneuvered rival activists through what I call tactical dexterity. Tactical dexterity illuminates how actors transpose cultural schemas with organizational knowledge to craft tactics that build political power, negotiate status, and expunge rivals to control resources. The Mexican American Youth Organization (MAYO) and Raza Unida Party illustrate the political maneuverings of activists to organize Chicanos in Texas. Sewell’s framework of structuration illuminates how activists use creative flexibility in adopting tactics to prevail over rivals. This article illustrates the creativity of Alinskyite organizers in leveraging cultural schemas and institutional knowledge to force recognition of Chicanas and to remove Marxists from conventions. These moments provide an opportunity to reveal processes through which one style of organizing prevailed over others.

In an increasingly globalized world, border control is continuously changing. Nation-states grapple with ‘migration management’ and maintain secure borders against ‘illegal’ flows. In Mexico, borders are elusive; internal and external security is blurred, and policies create legal categories of people whether it is a ‘trusted’ tourist or an ‘unauthorized’ migrant. For the ‘unauthorized’ Central American woman migrant trying to achieve safe passage to the United States (U.S.), the ‘border’ is no longer only a physical line to be crossed but a category placed on an individual body, which exists throughout her migration journey producing vulnerability as soon as the Mexico–Guatemala boundary is crossed. Based on policy analysis and fieldwork, this article argues that rather than protecting ‘unauthorized’ migrants, which the Mexican government narrative claims to do, border policies imposed by the state legally categorize female bodies in clandestine terms and construct violent relationships. This embodied illegality creates forced invisibility, further marginalizing women with respect to finding work, and experiences of sexual violence and abuses by migration actors. The analysis focuses on three areas: the changing definition of ‘borders’; the effects of categorization and multiple vulnerabilities on Central American women; and the dangers caused by forced invisibility.

Las reflexiones de este trabajo buscan analizar el impacto de las tecnologías de la información y comunicación (TIC) en la educación superior, especialmente en la educación superior a distancia (ESaD) en su fase virtual, en las universidades públicas mexicanas de la zona centro sur del país, en el contexto de la universidad latinoamericana. No obstante se estudia el comportamiento de las condiciones económicas, sociales y culturales, los actores y sujetos sociales que tienen que ver con esta modalidad educativa, pese a prever distintos escenarios como hipótesis de realidades para un futuro probable y deseable. Realmente se ofrecen más argumentos para fortalecer la explicación de un escenario probable, posible y deseable para imaginar la vida universitaria en ese tiempo. Como escenario central dela ESaDen las universidades mexicanas en la sociedad del conocimiento, se observa lo siguiente: no obstante habrá una fuerte oferta de cursos de ESaD por grandes universidades extranjeras y nacionales, las universidades públicas estatales no todas alcanzarán una globalización educativa interactiva para el fortalecimiento de sus funciones sustantivas. Debido a sus grandes limitaciones de inversión en infraestructura electrónica y de capacitación docente, se contará con una Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia exprofesa para apoyar a las universidades pequeñas y con dificultades de financiamiento para la incorporación de programas académicos virtuales. Palabras clave: Educación a distancia, información, tecnología y comunicación, universidad virtual, planeamiento, previsión y globalización educativa. Summary The reflections of this paper analyzes the impact of information technology and communication (ICT) in higher education, especially in higher education distance (ESADE) in virtual stage in Mexican public universities of the south central region of the country, in the context of Latin American university. However studies the behavior of the economic, social and cultural, social actors and subjects that deal with this type of education, despite the hypothesis predict different scenarios for future realities probable and desirable. Actually provide more arguments to strengthen the explanation of a likely scenario, possible and desirable to imagine college life at that time. As the center stage of the ESAD in Mexican universities in the knowledge society, there is the following: however there will be a strong offering courses ESADE large foreign and domestic universities, the state's public universities do not all reach an interactive educational globalization strengthening its substantive functions. Due to its large investment in infrastructure constraints and teacher training electronically, there will be a National University of Distance Education especially for it to support small universities and funding difficulties for the integration of virtual academic programs.Keywords: Distance education, information technology and communication, virtual university, planning, forecasting and educational globalization.

This issue of Arts and Humanities in Higher Education focuses on innovative initiatives which are emerging in different Latin-American university contexts as well as a few other experiments in traditionally established universities. Sometimes these initiatives are newly created higher education institutions that are rooted inside indigenous regions, in other cases conventional universities start to “interculturalize” their student population, their teaching staff, or even their curricular contents and methods. Despite certain criticisms, community leaders frequently claim and celebrate the appearance of these new higher education opportunities as part of a strategy of empowering ethnic actors of indigenous or afro-descendant origin. After an interview to Boaventura de Sousa Santos, Laura Selene Mateos Cortés, and Gunther Dietz, analyze the different ways in which the Mexican intercultural education subsystem conceives “interculturalidad.” The next article, by Guillermo Williamson, also “expresses interculturality polyphonically from the Latin-American perspective” and reports “the nature and condition of the academic reflection on interculturality carried out in universities, in supposedly intercultural contexts.” Then, Carlos Octavio Sandoval brings the focus back to Mexico and the Intercultural University of Veracruz; in the article that follows, Isabel Dulfano explores the relationship between antiglobalization, counterhegemonic discourse, and indigenous feminist alternative knowledge production. She bases her article on the autoethnographic writing of some Indigenous feminists from Latin America that questions the assumptions and presuppositions of Western development models and globalization, while asserting an identity as contemporary Indigenous activist academic women. Christine D. Beaule and Benito Quintana’s article adds to the topic of this special issue with the argument of interdisciplinarity bringing together both an archaeological and anthropological perspectives of indigeneity to the higher education classroom. And finally, Catherine Manathunga focuses on the issue of intercultural doctoral supervision.

Purpose This research investigates the introduction of accounting practices into small family businesses, based on socioemotional wealth theory. Design/methodology/approach A multiple-case study was conducted gathering data through interviews and documents (proprietary and public). The sample included six businesses (five Mexican and one American) from different manufacturing and service industries. Findings It was found that, although owners control the implementation of accounting practices, others (including family employees, non-family employees and external experts) at times propose practices. The owner’s control can be relaxed, or even eliminated, as the result of proposals from some family employees. However, the degree of influence of family employees is not linked to the closeness of the family relationship, but rather to the owners’ perceived competence of the family employee, indicating an interaction between competence and experience on one side, and family ties on the other. Research limitations/implications First, the owners chose which documentary data to provide and who was accessible for interviews, potentially biasing findings. Second, the degree of influence family employees can exert might change over time. Third, the study included a limited number of interviews, which can increase the risk of bias. Finally, all firms studied were still managed by the founder. It is possible that small family businesses that have undergone a succession process might incorporate accounting practices differently. Practical implications Organizations promoting the implementation of managerial accounting practices should be aware that, in addition to the owner, some family employees and external experts could influence business practices. Accountants already providing accounting services to small family business are also a good source for proposing managerial accounting practices Originality/value This study contributes to theory in four ways. First, it expands socioemotional theory to include the perceived competence of the family employee as a potential moderator in the decision-making process. Second, it categorizes the actors who can influence managerial accounting practices in small family businesses. Third, it further refines the role of these actors, based on their degree of influence. Fourth, it proposes a model that describes the introduction of managerial accounting practices in small family business.

This work examines the role of local stakeholders in managing transboundary and irrigation water in the Mexicali Valley. The analysis focuses on the impacts of institutions as they relate to two transboundary water conflicts, the salinity problem, and the All-American Canal lining divergence. The views of farmers and water managers show that farmers have lost social cohesion and economic and political power during the period in between these two episodes, which in turn reduced their role and influence in water management issues. During the salinity problem, unified and strong leadership and widespread participation were credited with influencing bene ficial outcomes. On the other hand, the existence of opposing views regarding the All-American Canal lining conflict and weak leadership seem responsible for ineff ective participation in solutions. The research illuminates the complexities of water management in transboundary se ings and the role that local actors may play in increasing cooperation and regional integration. Spanish Este artículo revisa el papel de los actores locales en la gestión y manejo de recursos hídricos transfronterizos y el riego en el Valle de Mexicali. El análisis enfatiza los impactos de los arreglos institucionales relacionados con dos conflictos por aguas transfronterizas, el problema de la salinidad del río Colorado y el revestimiento del Canal Todo Americano. Las percepciones de los agricultores y los gestores del agua indican que los agricultores han ido perdiendo cohesión social y poder económico y político lo cual ha reducido su papel e influencia en aspectos relacionados a la gestión de aguas transfronterizas. Durante el episodio de la salinidad, fue notoria la unificación y fortaleza de liderazgos que indujeron una significativa participación social. En contraste, la prevalencia de opiniones diversas respecto al conflicto del revestimiento conjugado con el frágil liderazgo redundó en una inefectividad de los usuarios para lograr impactos positivos. El artículo muestra la complejidad de la gestión transfronteriza del agua así como el papel clave que los actores locales pudieran tener para alcanzar la cooperación e integración regional. French Ce travail examine le rôle des acteurs locaux dans la gestion des eaux transfrontalières et d'irrigation dans la Vallée de Mexicali. Ce e analyse se concentre sur l'impact des institutions dans la mesure où elles ont pris part à deux conflits sur l'eau, et traitent du problème de la salinité et des divergences sur le tracé du canal All-American. Les opinions des fermiers et des gestionnaires de l'eau révèlent que les fermiers ont perdu toute cohésion sociale ainsi que tout pouvoir politique et économique durant la période entre ces deux épisodes. Il en a résulté qu'ils ont de fait perdu leur rôle et leur influence dans les domaines de la gestion de l'eau. Au cours du problème de salinité, un leadership unifié et fort et une vaste participation ont été récompensés par d'excellents résultats. Mais de l'autre côté, l'existence de vues opposées dans le cadre du conflit sur le tracé du Canal All-American ainsi qu'un pauvre leadership ont vraisemblablement entraîné une participation inefficace lors de la recherche de solutions. Ce e étude met en lumière les complexités de la gestion de l'eau dans des cadres transnationaux, et le rôle que peuvent jouer les acteurs locaux dans l'augmentation de la coopération et de l'intégration régionale.

Over recent years, several theoretical and empirical research projects (from developed countries) have studiedinnovation as a complex process involving participation, interaction and interrelationship of actors (organizations, individuals, businesses) and institutions (government, education, research centres) as elements of a collective system that contribute and influence the innovation process. In addition, such research shows how innovation has impacted positively on the economic growth of nations.In order to understand the functioning of the National Innovation Systems in emerging countries (Mexico, Brazil and Chile), we performed a critical analysis of the approach, examining their application limitations and recognising the characteristics and interests of Latin American countries. Furthermore, we analysed the impact of innovation on economic growth in these countries. The aim of this paper is to analyse whether the differences in economic growth among Mexico, Chile and Brazil, are explained by gaps in levels of innovation.

The purpose in this study was to compare the reasons that individuals provided for their own academic performance outcomes and the outcomes of others of differing nationalities. For American self, as well as American other, Mexican, Canadian, English, Russian, and Japanese others, participants rated the influence of internal and external causal factors on both successful and unsuccessful examination outcomes. Predictions drawn from the integration of the actor-observer effect (Jones & Nisbett, 1971) and ego-serving bias theory (Miller & Ross, 1975) were tested. Results provided support for an extended overall actor-observer effect in that as the nationality of other became more dissimilar, individuals ascribed increasingly greater internal causation for the behavioral outcomes of others (as compared to self). Additionally, results provided support for the operation of a self-serving, self-other comparison process in that the actor-observer tendency emerged quite differently in successful, as compared to unsuccessful, performance outcome situations.

This article contributes to the literature on social movements and on transnational collective action by analyzing the roles of brokers in processes of coalition building. Brokerage is defined as bridging initiatives that link actors that are separated by geographical distance, lack of trust, lack of resources, or because they are unaware of each others' existence. This study is based on network data and qualitative research about networks of challengers of trade agreements in the Americas in the past two decades. Findings suggest there are different types of mediating roles and tasks that specific actors are expected to play in enduring coalitions. The experiences of Mexican and Brazilian brokers show that the roles of translators and coordinators are more easily accomplished and sustained through time than the roles of articulators and representatives. Paradoxically, it is when mediating skills are most needed that they seem to be hardest to accomplish.

AbstractIn this paper we approach a current issue related to the so-called concept of narcoculture. Several works in Latin America and the United States have addressed this matter and not only accept the term narcoculture, but also stress both the symbolic and aesthetic perspectives. In order to rethink the concept of narcoculture from different angles, we appeal to Juri Lotman and Boris Uspensky’s proposals regarding the concepts of culture, non-culture and anticulture. Rather than accept and reproduce the concept of narcoculture, by means of linking Lotman and Uspensky’s approach with the standpoint of complexity thinking and transdisciplinarity, we propose the treatment of drug trafficking as a semiosphere of anticulture. We emphasize the contradictions inherent in the actors dwelling in this semiosphere, incorporating reflections from chaotic and barbaric processes designed to wreak havoc in Mexican society. The common acceptance of the concept of narcoculture does not acknowledge the current devastation and bloodshed produced by narco-traffickers and others in cahoots with the Mexican government and its militarized drug war strategy. During the last few decades, drug trafficking has inspired organized crime and their actors, spurring the representation of everyday societal features such as music, fashion, architecture, or traffickers’ social status.

This essay analyzes citizenship in Latin America, providing both comparative context and a schema for the phenomenon in Mexico. It identifies a region-wide “century of citizenship” that ran from the rise of liberal regimes in the 1850s to the eclipse of populist government in the 1960s, using concepts from historical sociology to discuss the common outlines of citizenship and the extent to which they apply or fail to apply to Mexican history. Key among those outlines are the prevalence of the ideas and practices of citizenship, both inside and outside of the state’s formal structures, and the spaces and places where those ideas and practices are developed and perpetuated. It concludes with the exploratory typology of the “four Bs,” the processes through which historical actors build, form boundaries, bicker over, and break citizenship.

Recent increases in the prevalence of non-medical prescription drug use across the United States have prompted national concern about the sources of these drugs. The focus of this study is the process by which prescription drugs enter the United States from Mexico through “drug tourism.” Drug tourism refers to the phenomenon by which persons become attracted to a particular location because of the accessibility of licit or illicit drugs and related services. A loophole in U.S. Customs laws enables Americans to legally bring pharmaceutical drugs into the United States when accompanied by a Mexican prescription. Using ethnographic field methods, this study (1) describes the acquisition process, (2) develops a typology of consumers, and (3) explores the interaction between the actors in this process. This study provides a better understanding of the social dynamics of a “gray market” in prescription drugs, and identifies a hidden population of drug users.

Third-party adolescents (those aware of peer conflict as neither aggressors nor victims) can help shape their peers’ emotional responses to perceived victimization. Emotion regulation promotes resilience for those who have been victimized, and heightened anger can exacerbate negative outcomes. This study sought to understand how ethnically diverse victimized adolescents described third-party actions that amplified their anger and calmed their emotions—and whether there were gender, racial/ethnic, or school-level patterns. Data were drawn from 264 structured interviews using a multi-method, repeated measures design. Participants were 66 African Americans, 57 European Americans, 64 Mexican Americans, and 77 Native Americans from the Northwest United States. Open- and process-coding identified 16 themes that described third-party actions, and pattern coding provided insight into why particular actions may be perceived as anger-amplifying or calming. Wilcoxon Signed Rank tests on action frequencies revealed five actions (e.g., co-ruminating) that were associated with amplifying victims’ anger and eight actions (e.g., reassuring) that were associated with calming victims’ emotions. Group patterns were examined using chi-square and Mann-Whitney tests. Programs and interventions may draw on these qualitative accounts of victimized adolescents’ experiences to illustrate how third-party actions might differentially impact peers during or after aggressive incidents.

El propósito es atender la influencia de los modelos europeos en la construcción del sistema denominado enseñanza técnica, que derivaría en la educación superior tecnológica mexicana. Se trata de una aproximación al contacto que tuvieron algunos actores con la experiencia educativa internacional, antes y durante la reorganización de la Escuela Nacional de Artes y Oficios para Hombres (ENAOH), la cual fue incentivada por los procesos de industrialización del sistema productivo, el avance de los conocimientos científico tecnológicos y la demanda de educación por parte de la sociedad, movilizada por la Revolución Mexicana. Luego de la consulta de archivos históricos como el de la Secretaría de Educación Pública (SEP), de la Escuela Superior de Ingeniería Mecánica y Eléctrica (ESIME), de la Secretaría de Relaciones Exteriores (SRE) y de documentos producidos por la SEP y por algunos de los actores durante la época, se encontró que el interés del grupo Constitucionalista por la educación técnica, fue favorable a la ENAOH en particular, de tal manera que la administración del presidente Venustiano Carranza la transformó en 1915 en Escuela Práctica de Ingenieros Mecánicos y Electricistas (EPIME), organizando en ella las carreras de ingeniería mecánica y eléctrica, y que fue la Ciudad de México el laboratorio donde se definió el tipo de educación que constituiría la enseñanza técnica nacional. Se concluye que la reorganización de la enseñanza técnica representada por la transformación de la ENAOH en escuela profesional de ingeniería, formaba parte de un proceso de larga duración –el desarrollo de la educación superior tecnológica en el mundo industrial–, inscrito en la modernización emprendida por los Estados Nacionales en el siglo xix, tardía para el caso mexicano y en general para Latinoamérica. La experiencia internacional en materia de enseñanza técnica, fue conocida y valorada por los ideólogos de la educación en México, donde alcanzaría gran resonancia el modelo francés y la primera Ecole Poly-Technique creada en 1795, que organizó carreras fundamentadas en los conocimientos en ciencia y tecnología, ingenierías valiosas para los proyectos del Estado. Dicha experiencia cedería el paso durante la década de 1920, a la atención prestada al modelo norteamericano.O modelo europeu na modernização da Escuela Nacional de Artes y Oficios para homens, 1915-1932. O objetivo é abordar a influência dos modelos europeus na construção do sistema denominado ensino técnico, que derivaria na educação superior tecnológica mexicana. Trata-se de uma aproximação ao contato que tiveram alguns atores com a experiência educativa internacional, antes e durante a reorganização da Escuela Nacional de Artes y Oficios para Hombres (Enaoh), q qual foi incentivada pelos processos de industrialização do sistema produtivo, ao avanço dos conhecimentos científicos e tecnológicos e da demanda de educação por parte da sociedade, mobilizada pela Revolução Mexicana. Pela consulta realizada em arquivos históricos, como o da Secretaría de Educación Pública (SEP), da Escuela Superior de Ingeniería Mecánica y Eléctrica (Esime), e da Secretaría de Relaciones Exteriores (SRE), e de documentos produzidos pela SEP e por outros atores à época, constata-se que o interesse do grupo Constitucionalista pelo ensino técnico foi favorável à Enaoh, de tal maneira que a administração do presidente Venustiano Carranza a transformou, em 1915, na Escuela Práctica de Ingenieros Mecánicos y Electricistas (Epime), organizando as carreiras de engenharia mecânica e elétrica, sendo a Cidade do México o laboratório onde se definiu o tipo de educação que se constituiria no ensino técnico nacional. Conclui-se que a reorganização do ensino técnico representada pela transformação da Enaoh em escola profissional de engenharia formava parte de um processo de longa duração – o desenvolvimento da educação superior tecnológica no mundo industrial –, inscrito na modernização empreendida pelos Estados Nacionais no século XIX, tardia para o caso mexicano e, em geral, para a América Latina. A experiência internacional do ensino técnico foi conhecida e valorizada pelos idealizadores da educação no México, onde alcançaria grande ressonância o modelo francês e a primeira Ecole Poly-Technique, criada em 1795, que organizou as carreiras fundamentadas nos conhecimentos em ciência e tecnologia, engenharias valiosas para os projetos do Estado. Essa experiência daria lugar, durante a década de 1920, à atenção dada ao modelo norte-americano. Palavras-chave: Ensino técnico; Educação superior tecnológica; Escuela Nacional de Artes y Oficios; Engenharia; Modernização.

Categoría: Comunicado Fecha de recepción: 28 de mayo de 2012 Fecha de aprobación: 11 de julio de 2012 Resumen Se explora el impacto de las políticas de migración y seguridad implementadas por el Estado mexicano en los derechos humanos de los migrantes y sus defensores. Nos apoyamos en información arrojada en ejercicios de grupos focales con miembros de las Organizaciones Civiles (OC) en los años 2010 y 2011, en documentos elaborados por ellos mismos, así como en entrevistas a sus líderes más representativos. Encontramos que en la estrategia de seguridad del gobierno ha estado ausente un enfoque de seguridad humana, esa carencia ha permitido la proliferación de distintas violaciones a los derechos humanos así como la criminalización de los migrantes y sus defensores. De igual forma se detectó la existencia de fisuras que obstaculizan el desempeño de las políticas mencionadas; así como la proliferación de actores que acentúan la vulnerabilidad de los sujetos en cuestión, al menos 63 defensores de derechos humanos han sido asesinados, otros 158 están bajo medidas cautelares. Palabras clave: seguridad, migrantes, derechos humanos, organizaciones civiles, defensores. Summary The impact of migration and security policies implemented by the Mexican State on the human rights of migrants and their defenders is explored. Support is gained from information yielded by the focus groups exercises carried out with members of Civil Organizations (COs) during 2010 and 2011 (1), both in documents of the COs themselves, or in interviews carried out with their most prominent leaders. We found that in the government’s security strategy a human security approach is absent, whereby such lack has resulted in various human rights violations and the criminalization of migrants and their advocates; it has also lead to the existence of fractures that hinder the performance of such policies, and to the proliferation of players that stress the vulnerability of the players subject matter herein: 63 human rights defenders have been slain, and the Inter-American Human Rights System has issued 158 precautionary measures. Key words: security, migrants, human rights, civil organizations, defenders.

Categoría: Comunicado Fecha de recepción: 28 de mayo de 2012 Fecha de aprobación: 11 de julio de 2012 Resumen Se explora el impacto de las políticas de migración y seguridad implementadas por el Estado mexicano en los derechos humanos de los migrantes y sus defensores. Nos apoyamos en información arrojada en ejercicios de grupos focales con miembros de las Organizaciones Civiles (OC) en los años 2010 y 2011, en documentos elaborados por ellos mismos, así como en entrevistas a sus líderes más representativos. Encontramos que en la estrategia de seguridad del gobierno ha estado ausente un enfoque de seguridad humana, esa carencia ha permitido la proliferación de distintas violaciones a los derechos humanos así como la criminalización de los migrantes y sus defensores. De igual forma se detectó la existencia de fisuras que obstaculizan el desempeño de las políticas mencionadas; así como la proliferación de actores que acentúan la vulnerabilidad de los sujetos en cuestión, al menos 63 defensores de derechos humanos han sido asesinados, otros 158 están bajo medidas cautelares. Palabras clave: seguridad, migrantes, derechos humanos, organizaciones civiles, defensores. Summary The impact of migration and security policies implemented by the Mexican State on the human rights of migrants and their defenders is explored. Support is gained from information yielded by the focus groups exercises carried out with members of Civil Organizations (COs) during 2010 and 2011 (1), both in documents of the COs themselves, or in interviews carried out with their most prominent leaders. We found that in the government’s security strategy a human security approach is absent, whereby such lack has resulted in various human rights violations and the criminalization of migrants and their advocates; it has also lead to the existence of fractures that hinder the performance of such policies, and to the proliferation of players that stress the vulnerability of the players subject matter herein: 63 human rights defenders have been slain, and the Inter-American Human Rights System has issued 158 precautionary measures. Key words: security, migrants, human rights, civil organizations, defenders.

Abstract Education in International Relations requires continual evolution. One approach is the use of negotiation simulations for complex issues. Despite the extensive literature on the subject, there is a lack of qualitative research on this approach, particularly in Latin America and Mexico. This paper presents the findings of a qualitative research on five simulations with Mexican students. The five exercises were characterized by the application of elements that are not usually included in traditional simulations, such as a multiweek phase of prior negotiations, the use of Twitter, the introduction of nonstate actors, a gala dinner, and a continuous feed of real world news. We investigated 118 participants through 30 in depth interviews analyzed with NVivo, a systematized analysis of 118 reports, documents and tweets, and a pre-post questionnaire applied to the fifth group. The results in the five simulations were highly positive. The students reported a greater awareness of the complexity of international negotiations. Such awareness can present both a risk and an opportunity: a risk because those circumstances caused discouragement and frustration in many participants, and an opportunity because those same circumstances, properly channeled, triggered parallel skills, and creative thinking. Therefore, the role of the facilitation team was fundamental.

Abstract Indigenous people are often seen as static recipients of transatlantic encounter, influencing the Atlantic world only in their parochial interactions with Europeans, but the reality is that thousands of Native Americans crossed the ocean during the sixteenth century, many unwillingly, but some by choice. As diplomats, entertainers, traders, travelers, and, sadly, most often when enslaved, Indigenous people operated consciously within structures that spanned the ocean and created a worldview that was framed in transatlantic terms. Focusing on purposeful travelers of “Aztec” (Central Mexican) origin, this article uses the distinctive context of the 1500s to rewrite our understandings of the Atlantic world. In the turbulent waters of early empire, we can more easily see Native people as purposeful global actors who created and transformed social, economic, political, and intellectual networks, forging not one but many “Indigenous Atlantics.” This is about more than “looking east from Indian country,” or recovering the transatlantic journeys of Native people, important though both those things are. To find a truly “Indigenous Atlantic,” we must reimagine the history of the ocean itself: as a place of Indigenous activity, imagination, and power.

Executive Summary Anti-immigrant rhetoric and constricting avenues for asylum in the United States, amid continuing high rates of poverty, environmental crisis, and violence in Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador, have led many migrants from these countries to remain in Mexico. Yet despite opportunities for humanitarian relief in Mexico, since the early 2000s the Mexican government, under growing pressure from the United States, has pursued enforcement-first initiatives to stem northward migration from Central America. In July 2014, Mexico introduced the Southern Border Program (SBP) with support from the United States. The SBP dramatically expanded Mexico’s immigration enforcement efforts, especially in its southern border states, leading to rising deportations. Far from reducing migration or migrant smuggling, these policies have trapped migrants for longer in Mexico, made them increasingly susceptible to crimes by a wide range of state and nonstate actors, and exacerbated risk along the entire migrant trail. In recognition of rising crimes against migrants and heeding calls from civil society to protect migrant rights, Mexico’s 2011 revision to its Migration Law expanded legal avenues for granting humanitarian protection to migrants who are victims of crimes in Mexico, including the provision of a one-year humanitarian visa so that migrants can collaborate with the prosecutor’s office in the investigation of crimes committed against them. The new humanitarian visa laws were a significant achievement and represent a victory by civil society keen on protecting migrants as they travel through Mexico. The wider atmosphere of impunity, however, alongside the Mexican government’s prioritization of detaining and deporting migrants, facilitates abuses, obscures transparent accounting of crimes, and limits access to justice. In practice, the laws are not achieving their intended outcomes. They also fail to recognize how Mexico’s securitized migration policies subject migrants to risk throughout their journeys, including at border checkpoints between Guatemala and Honduras, along critical transit corridors in Guatemala, and on the Guatemalan side of Mexico’s southern border. In this article, we examine a novel set of data from migrant shelters — 16 qualitative interviews with migrants and nine with staff and advocates in the Mexico–Guatemala border region, as well as 118 complaints of abuses committed along migrants’ journeys — informally filed by migrants at a shelter on the Guatemalan side of the border, and an additional eight complaints filed at a shelter on the Mexican side of the border. We document and analyze the nature, location, and perpetrators of these alleged abuses, using a framework of “compassionate repression” (Fassin 2012) to examine the obstacles that migrants encounter in denouncing abuses and seeking protection. We contend that while humanitarian visas can provide necessary protection for abuses committed in Mexico, they are limited by their temporary nature, by being nested within a migration system that prioritizes migrant removal, and because they recognize only crimes that occur in Mexico. The paradox between humanitarian concerns and repressive migration governance in a context of high impunity shapes institutional and practical obstacles to reporting crimes, receiving visas, and accessing justice. In this context, a variety of actors recognize that they can exploit and profit from migrants’ lack of mobility, legal vulnerability, and uncertain access to protection, leading to a commodification of access to humanitarian protection along the route.

RESUMENEl objetivo de este artículo es reflexionar sobre los mecanismos de financiación y de control de las instituciones religiosas por los laicos en las primeras décadas de la conquista y colonización de Hispanoamérica. Investigar sobre la inversión laica en lo sagrado supone en un primer lugar aclarar la historiografía sobre laicos, religión y dinero en las sociedades de Antiguo Régimen y su trasposición en América, planteando una mirada desde el punto de vista de las motivaciones múltiples de los actores seglares. A través del ejemplo de restituciones, donaciones y legados en losAndes, se explora el papel de los laicos españoles, y también de las poblaciones indígenas, en el establecimiento de la densa red de instituciones católicas que se construye entonces. La propuesta postula el protagonismo de actores laicos en la construcción de un espacio cristiano en los Andes peruanos en el siglo XVI y principios del XVII, donde la inversión económica permite contribuir a la transición de una sociedad de guerra y conquista a una sociedad corporativa pacificada.PALABRAS CLAVE: Hispanoamérica-Andes, religión, economía, encomienda, siglos XVI y XVII.ABSTRACTThis article aims to reflect on the mechanisms of financing and control of religious institutions by the laity in the first decades of the conquest and colonization of Spanish America. Investigating lay investment in the sacred sphere means first of all to clarifying historiography on laity, religion and money within Ancien Régime societies and their transposition to America, taking into account the multiple motivations of secular actors. The example of restitutions, donations and legacies inthe Andes enables us to explore the role of the Spanish laity and indigenous populations in the establishment of the dense network of Catholic institutions that was established during this period. The proposal postulates the role of lay actors in the construction of a Christian space in the Peruvian Andes in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, when economic investment contributed to the transition from a society of war and conquest to a pacified, corporate society.KEY WORDS: Hispanic America-Andes, religion, economics, encomienda, 16th and 17th centuries. BIBLIOGRAFIAAbercrombie, T., “Tributes to Bad Conscience: Charity, Restitution, and Inheritance in Cacique and Encomendero Testaments of 16th-Century Charcas”, en Kellogg, S. y Restall, M. 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e4849150In this work, Elinor Ostrom's ideas on common goods (1990, 1996) are recovered with the aim of analyzing her contributions to the co-production of scientific knowledge. From a descriptive and analytical approach based on two of his research works, his notions of institutional management are analyzed, which allow him to establish a relationship with the themes of science, technology and society when conceptualizing scientific knowledge committed to social well-being; at the same time, it allows us to establish a possible relationship with extra-academic sectors (NAIDORF; VASEN; ALONSO, 2016) that it is intended to highlight. In conclusion, an outline of the co-production process is presented as the crystallization of a model that starts from the notion of collaborative and relational science. Likewise, a change in the conception of scientific knowledge in the region is advocated and a paradigmatic case in Argentina that incorporates the role of the so-called extra-academic actors is exposed: the Scientific and technological development projects.ResumenEn este trabajo se recuperan las ideas de Elinor Ostrom sobre bienes comunes (1990, 1996) con el objetivo de analizar sus aportes a la coproducción del conocimiento científico. Desde un enfoque descriptivo y analítico basado en dos de sus trabajos de investigación, se analizan sus nociones de gestión institucional que permiten entablar una relación con las temáticas de ciencia, tecnología y sociedad a la hora de conceptualizar un conocimiento científico comprometido con el bienestar social; al mismo tiempo, nos permite entablar una posible relación con sectores extraacadémicos (NAIDORF; VASEN; ALONSO, 2016) que se pretende destacar. Como conclusión, se presenta un esbozo del proceso de coproducción como la cristalización de un modelo que parte de la noción de ciencia colaborativa y relacional. Asimismo, se propugna por un cambio en la concepción del conocimiento científico en la región y se expone un caso paradigmático en Argentina que incorpora el rol de los llamados actores extraacadémicos: los Proyectos de desarrollo científico y tecnológicos.ResumoNeste trabalho, as ideias de Elinor Ostrom sobre bens comuns (1990, 1996) são recuperadas com o objetivo de analisar suas contribuições para a coprodução do conhecimento científico. A partir de uma abordagem descritiva e analítica baseada em dois de seus trabalhos de pesquisa, são analisadas suas noções em gestão institucional que lhe permitem estabelecer uma relação com os temas da ciência, tecnologia e sociedade ao conceber o conhecimento científico comprometido com o bem-estar social; ao mesmo tempo, permite estabelecer uma possível relação com setores extra-acadêmicos (NAIDORF; VASEN; ALONSO, 2016) que se pretende destacar. Em conclusão, é apresentado um esboço do processo de coprodução como a cristalização de um modelo que parte da noção de ciência colaborativa e relacional. Da mesma forma, defende-se uma mudança na concepção do conhecimento científico na região e expõe-se um caso paradigmático na Argentina que incorpora o papel dos chamados atores extra-acadêmicos: os Projetos de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico.Palabras claves: Bienes comunes, Coproducción, Conocimiento científico, Proyectos de desarrollo científico y tecnológico (PDTS).Palavras-chave: Bens comuns, Co-produção, Conhecimento científico, Projetos de desenvolvimento científico e tecnológico (PDTS).Keywords: Common goods, Co-production, Scientific knowledge, Scientific and technological development projects (PDTS).ReferencesARZA,V.; FRESSOLI, M. Ciencia abierta en Argentina: experiencias actuales y propuestas para impulsar procesos de apertura. En: CIENCIA ABIERTA PARA LA INNOVACIÓN EN ARGENTINA. Buenos Aires: Centro de Investigaciones para la Transformación (Cenit), 2006. Disponible en: http://www.ciecti.org.ar/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/CIECTI-Proyecto-CENIT.pdfMINISTERIO DE CIENCIA Y TECNOLOGÍA. PDTS: Documento II. Buenos Aires, 2013. Disponible en: https://www.argentina.gob.ar/ciencia/banco-pdts. Acceso 7 de mayo 2020.BOURDIEU, P. Homo academicus, Siglo XX Editores, 2012.BUSANICHE, B. LAS IDEAS Y LAS COSAS: LA RIQUEZA DE LAS IDEAS Y LOS PELIGROS DE SU MONOPOLIZACIÓN. En: VILLARREAL, J.; HELFRICH, S.; CALVILLO, A. (eds.). ¿Un mundo patentado? La privatización de la vida y del conocimiento. El Salvador: Ediciones Böll. Disponible: https://www.vialibre.org.ar/2005/10/02/un-mundo-patentado/ENCABO, J. V. Ciencia privada, conocimiento público. Algunas determinantes de las controversias políticas en la era de la tecnociencia. Revista Isegoría, N.º 25, p. 247-261, 2001.ESTÉBANEZ, M. E.. Ciencia, tecnología y políticas sociales. Revista Ciencia, docencia y tecnología, N.º 34, p.13- 63, 2007.GONZÁLEZ ALCAIDE G.; GÓMEZ FERRI, J. La colaboración científica: principales líneas de investigación y retos de futuro. Revista Española de Documentación Científica, Vol. º 37, N.º 4, 2014. Disponible en: http://dx.doi.org/10.3989/redc.2014.4.1186KREIMER, P. La ciencia como objeto de las ciencias sociales en América latina: investigar e intervenir. Cuadernos de pensamiento crítico latinoamericano. Buenos Aires: CLACSO, 2015.HARDIN, G. The Tragedy of the Commons. Revista Science 13. Vol. 162, N°. 3859 pp. 1243-1248, 1968. [en línea]. <http://www.sciencemag.org/content/162/3859/1243.full> Acceso: 6 de mayo 2020.HESS, CH.; OSTROM, E. Introduction: An Overview of the Knowledge Commons. En: Understanding Knowledge as a Commons From Theory to Practice, Cambridge MAS: MIT PRESS, p.3-24, 2007.HURTADO D; ZUBELDÍA L. Políticas de ciencia, tecnología y desarrollo, ciclos neoliberales y procesos de des-aprendizaje en América Latina. Ciudad de México UDUAL - Unión de Universidades de América Latina y el Caribe, vol. 5, 2018.LARA RIVERO, A. Introducción. En: Comprender la diversidad institucional. México DF: Fondo de Cultura Económica, p. 9-35, 2014.NAIDORF, J. La privatización del conocimiento público en universidades públicas. En: Espacio público y privatización del conocimiento. Buenos Aires: CLACSO, p. 101-162, 2005.NAIDORF, J. Los cambios en la cultura académica de la universidad pública. Buenos Aires: Eudeba, 2015.NAIDORF, J., & PERROTTA, D. La privatización del acceso abierto. Nuevas formas de colonización académica en América Latina y su impacto en la evaluación de la investigación. Revista Universidades, N.º 73, p. 41-50, 2017.NAIDORF, J.; VASEN,F.; ALONSO, M. Evaluación académica y relevancia productiva. Los Proyectos de Desarrollo Tecnológico y Social como política científica, Brazilian Journal of Latin American Studies (PROLAM/USP), N.º 27, p. 2015.OLMOS-PEÑUELA, J.; CASTRO-MARTÍNEZ, E. y D’ESTE P. 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This paper analyses the ways transfer of the discourse on interculturality and intercultural education, as it has been coined and shaped by European anthropologists and pedagogues, towards educational actors and institutions in Latin America. My ethnographic data illustrate how this intercultural discourse is currently transferred through intellectual networks to different kinds of Mexican actors who are actively “translating” this discourse into the post-indigenismo situation of “indigenous education” and ethnic claims making in Mexico. On the basis of fieldwork conducted in two different institutions in the state of Veracruz, the appropriation and re-interpretation of, as well as the resistance against, the European discourse of interculturality are studied by comparing the training of “intercultural and bilingual” teachers through the state educational authorities and the notion of intercultural education, as applied within the so-called “Intercultural University of Veracruz”.

In October 2019, the Mexican government reformed its General Health Law thus establishing the warning approach to front-of-pack nutrition labeling (FOPNL), and in March 2020, modified its national standard, revamping its ineffective FOPNL, one preemptively developed by industry actors. Implementation is scheduled for later in 2020. However, the new regulation faces fierce opposition from transnational food and beverage companies (TFBCs), including Nestlé, Kellogg, Grupo Bimbo, Coca-Cola, PepsiCo through their trade associations, the National Manufacturers, American Bakers Associations, the Confederation of Industrial Chambers of Mexico and ConMéxico. Mexico, as a regional leader, could tip momentum in favor of FOPNL diffusion across Latin America. But the fate of the Mexican FOPNL and the region currently lies in this government’s response to three threats of legal challenges by TFBCs, citing international laws and guidelines including the World Trade Organization (WTO), Codex Alimentarius, and the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA)/US-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA). In this perspective, we argue that these threats should not prevent Mexico or other countries from implementing evidence-informed policies, such as FOPNLs, that pursue legitimate public health objectives.

A historiographical overview is presented in this work, in relation to two key issues in Mexican rural history: the hacienda and the social actors that moved the agricultural sector, particularly the rural elites. This analysis begins with the classic works of François Chevalier and Charles Gibson, then provides an overview of different approaches (functionalist, sectorial, regional, neo-institutional, business and environmental) to analysing the hacienda. The study focuses on the historiography of rural (or agrarian) elites and its remarkable presence in recent academic works. The authors contend that Mexican agrarian historiography has overflowed its regional geographic scope to become a reference for Latin American historical studies. The development of agrarian studies in Mexico, especially in relation to the hacienda system, stems from the interest in explaining the agrarian nature of the Revolution of 1910. Diverse and even contradictory interpretations have been proposed, which in perspective have allowed huge historiographical advances.

This article explores the identification patterns of South American immigrants to the United States, as measured via Hispanic/Latino ethnicity and ancestry reporting on the US Census. Using data from the 2006–2010 and 2011–2015 American Community Survey, my analysis reveals four main findings. First, I show significant heterogeneity in identity patterns and in sociodemographic, immigration, and geographic characteristics between South American and Mexican immigrants in the United States. Second, I find that Southern Cone immigrants opt not to report Hispanic/Latino ethnicity and “birth-country” ancestry (ancestry that is concordant with birth country, such as Colombian or Chilean) to a greater extent than Andean immigrants and, instead, report more distal “ancestral-origin” ancestries (i.e., Spanish, Japanese, etc.). Third, I show that those immigrants who do report Hispanic/Latino ethnicity are more likely to report “birth-country” ancestry than “ancestral-origin” ancestry, net of other factors. Finally, my analysis demonstrates that Brazilian immigrants chart a different path of identification among South American immigrants and almost unanimously do not report Hispanic/Latino ethnicity while overwhelmingly reporting “Brazilian” ancestry. Taken together, variation in Hispanic/Latino ethnicity and ancestry reporting across South American immigrant groups has implications for their incorporation into US society, as well as for the degree to which these immigrants see themselves as racialized actors in the United States. Some South American immigrant groups (Southern Cone immigrants) appear to be incorporating as “New White ethnics,” and others (Andean immigrants) appear to be incorporating as “New Latinos.” Researchers of international migration should carefully consider these identification differences and their implications for the measurement and study of “Hispanic/Latino” immigrants and their descendants in the United States.

Resumen: En 1999 se cumplen cinco años de vigencia del Tratado de Libre Comercio (TLC) de América del Norte. Antes de su puesta en marcha, el tratado fue cuestionado o defendido por los distintos actores sociales que, podían resultar afectados o beneficiados por él. Hoy, a cinco años de vigencia, el debate gira alrededor de los resultados visibles del TLC. En esta discusión, sin embargo, los acontecimientos que emergieron a la escena política y económica mexicana cuando iniciaba el TLC -y que modificaron radicalmente las condiciones en las que inicialmente se planeó el convenio-, provocaron que su puesta en marcha efectiva se aplazara en muchos de sus ámbitos potenciales. A cinco años de su arranque, es de esperar que las acciones del TLC se intensifiquen paulatinamente. En este sentido, es indispensable reanudar el debate pendiente, en especial en aquellas materias en donde los efectos del tratado pueden ser profundos. La polémica debe tomar en cuenta la existencia de los amplios procesos mundiales de globalización observados a partir de la Segunda Guerra Mundial, entre los cuales los tratados comerciales son sólo elementos adicionales. Esto es especialmente importante para evaluar el impacto del convenio comercial sobre variables cuya temporalidad se inscribe en plazos mucho mayores o en arreglos institucionales que tienen dinámicas propias y que están inmersos en procesos que anteceden en el tiempo y exceden en el espacio al TLC. En el primer caso, se encuentran los aspectos relacionados con la salud de la mujer, y en el segundo, los procesos que tienen que ver con los sistemas de salud. Este trabajo inicia con una visión panorámica del proceso de globalización y sus consecuencias, para continuar con un análisis de las condiciones específicas que, al iniciar el TLC, guardaban la salud de la mujer y los sistemas de salud de los tres países firmantes. Al final del texto, se comentan las esferas que ya han sufrido modificaciones por efecto directo del TLC. Abstract: By 1999 The North American Free Trade Agreement will have undergone five years. Before its enforcement the treaty was questioned or defended by different social actors, which, could be affected or b e n e fitted by it. After five years the debate concerns the trade?s visible results. In this discussion, the circumstances that emergenced in he political and Mexican economics scene as NAFTA began (and that radically modified the conditions with which it was initially planned), provoked a setback in many potential fields. Therefore, it is necessary to renew the debate again, especially in those areas in which the treaty profounds. The controversy should take into consideration the globalization processes observed since World War II, in which the commercial treaties are only considered as aditional elements. This is very important while evaluating the commercial impact upon variables whose temporarity is enrolled in much bigger time limits or institutionalized arrangements that have their own dynamics and are inmersed in processes that precede the time and space that the NAFTA has. First of all there are some aspects relating women?s health and secondly the processes that have to do with health systems. This article begins with a global view of the globalizing process and its consequences, continuing with an analysis of specific conditions which when starting the NAFTA had to do with women?s health and health systems in the three signing countries. At the end of the paper there is a comment concerning the spheres which suffered modifications due to the NAFTA?s direct effect.Palabras clave: Health, Women, Globalization, NAFTA, Health systems.

The word “prosthetic” has its origins as a mathematical term. According to scholar Brandon W. Hawk, Plato uses the words prosthesis and prostithenai in Phaedo to mean "addition, add to, to place", and Aristotle uses it in a similar, algebraic sense in the Metaphysics. Later, as the word appears in classical Latin, it is used as a grammatical and rhetorical term, in the sense of a letter or syllable that is added on to a word, usually the addition of a syllable to the beginning of a word, hence pro-thesis (Hawk). This is the sense of the word that was “inherited … by early modern humanists”, says Hawk, but when it appears in Edward Phillips's The New World of English Words: Or, a General Dictionary (1706), we can see how, with advances in technology, it changes from a grammatical/linguistic term into a medical term. What was once word is now made flesh:Prosthesis, a Grammatical Figure, when a Letter or Syllable is added to the beginning of a Word, as Gnatus for natus, tetuli for tuli, &c. In Surgery, Prosthesis is taken for that which fills up what is wanting, as is to beseen in fistulous and hollow Ulcers, filled up with Flesh by that Art: Also themaking of artificial Legs and Arms, when the natural ones are lost.Hawk also points to P. Dionis in Course Chirurg (a 1710 textbook detailing the art of chirurgy, or surgery, as it’s known now), who uses the word to denote one type of surgical operation; that is, prosthesis becomes not a word, but an act that “adds what is deficient”, an act that repairs loss, that “fills up what is wanting”, that fills up what is “hollow”, that “fills up with flesh”. R. Brookes, in his Introduction to Physic and Surgery (1754), is the first to define prosthesis as both an act and also as a separate, material object; it is “an operation by which some instrument is added to supply the Defect of a Part which is wanting, either naturally or accidentally”. It is not until the twentieth century (1900, to be exact), though, that the word begins to refer solely to a device or object that is added on to somehow “supply the defect”, or fill up what which is “wanting”. So etymologically we move from the writer creating a new literary device, to the scientist/doctor acting in order to fix something, then back to the device again, this time as tangible object that fills a gap where there is lack and loss (Hawk).This is how we most often see the word, and so we have the notion of prosthetic used in this medicalised sense, as an "instrument", in relation to people with missing or disfunctional limbs. Having a prosthetic arm or leg in an ableist society instantly marks one as "missing" something, or being "disabled". Wheelchairs and other prosthetic accoutrements also serve as a metonymic shorthand for disability (an example of this might be how, on reserved parking spots in North America, the image on the sign is that of a person in a wheelchair). In the case of deaf people, who are also thought of as "disabled", but whose supposed disability is invisible, hearing aids and cochlear implants (CIs) serve as this kind of visible marker.* Like artificial limbs and wheelchairs, these "instruments" (they are actually called “hearing instruments” by audiologists) are sometimes added on to the purportedly “lacking” body. They are objects that “restore function to” the disabled deaf ear. As such, these devices, like wheelchairs and bionic arms, also serve as a shorthand in American culture, especially in film and visual media, where this kind of obvious, material symbolism is very helpful in efficiently driving narrative along. David L. Mitchell and Sharon T. Snyder call this kind of disability shorthand "narrative prosthesis". In their 2001 book of the same name, they demonstrate that disability and the markers of disability, far from being neglected or omitted (as has been claimed by critics like Sarah Ruiz-Grossman), actually appear in literature and film to the point where they are astonishingly pervasive. Unlike other identities who are vastly underrepresented, Mitchell and Snyder note, images of disability are almost constantly circulated in print and visual media (this is clearly demonstrated in older film studies such as John Schuchman's Hollywood Speaks and Martin Norden's Cinema of Isolation, as well). The reason that this happens, Mitchell and Snyder say, is because almost all narrative is structured around the idea of a flaw in the natural order, the resolution of that flaw, and the restoration of order. This flaw, they show, is more often than not represented by a disabled character or symbol. Disability, then, is a "crutch upon which literary narratives lean for their representational power, disruptive potentiality and analytical insight" (49). And, in the end, all narrative is thus dependent upon some type of disability used as a prosthetic, which serves not only to “fill in” lack, but also to restore and reinforce normalcy. They also state that concepts of, and characters with, disability are therefore used in literature and film primarily as “opportunist metaphorical device(s)” (205). Hearing aids and CIs are great examples of "opportunist" devices used on television and in movies, mostly as props or “add-ons” in visual narratives. This "adding on" is done, more often than not, to the detriment of providing a well rounded narrative about the lived experience of deaf people who use such devices on a daily basis. There are countless examples of this in American television shows and films (in an upward trend since 2000), including many police and crime dramas where a cochlear implant device-as-clue stands in for the dead victim’s identity (Kincheloe "Do Androids"). We see it in movies, most notably in 2018’s A Quiet Place, in which a CI is weaponized and used to defeat the alien monster/Other (as opposed to the deaf heroine doing it by herself) (Kincheloe "Tired Tropes"). In 2019's Toy Story 4, there is a non-signing child who we know is deaf because they wear a CI. In the 2019 animated Netflix series, Undone, the main character wears a CI, and it serves as one of several markers (for her and the viewer) of her possible psychological breakdown.It seems fairly obvious that literal prostheses such as hearing aids and CI devices are used as a form of media shorthand to connote hearing ideas of “deafness”. It also might seem obvious that, as props that reinforce mainstream, ableist narratives, they are there to tell us that, in the end, despite the aesthetic nervousness that disability produces, "things will be okay". It's "fixable". These are prosthetics that are easily identified and easily discussed, debated, and questioned.What is perhaps not so obvious, however, is that American Sign Language (ASL), is also used in media as a narrative prosthetic. Lennard Davis' discussion of Erving Goffman’s idea of “stigma” in Enforcing Normalcy supports the notion that sign language, like hearing aids, is a marker. When seen by the hearing, non-signing observer, sign language "stigmatizes" the signing deaf person (48). In this sense, ASL is, like a hearing aid, a tangible "sign" of deaf identity. I would then argue that ASL is, like hearing aids and CIs, used as a "narrative prosthesis" signifying deafness and disability; its insertion allows ableist narratives to be satisfyingly resolved. Even though ASL is not a static physical device, but a living language and an integral part of deaf lived experience, it is casually employed almost everywhere in media today as a cheap prop, and as such, serves narrative purposes that are not in the best interest of realistic deaf representation. Consider this example: On 13 April 2012, Sir Paul McCartney arranged for a special event at his daughter Stella McCartney’s ivy-covered store in West Hollywood. Stars and friends like Jane Fonda, Gwyneth Paltrow, Chris Martin, Quincy Jones, and Reese Witherspoon sipped cucumber margaritas and nibbled on a spread of vegetarian Mexican appetizers. Afterwards, McCartney took them all to a tent set up on the patio out back, where he proudly introduced a new video, directed by himself. This was the world premiere of the video for "My Valentine", a song from his latest (some might say oddly titled) album, Kisses from the Bottom, a song he had originally written for and sung to new wife Nancy Shevell, at their 2011 wedding.The video is very simply shot in black and white, against a plain grey backdrop. As it begins, the camera fades in on actor Natalie Portman, who is seated, wearing a black dress. She stares at the viewer intently, but with no expression. As McCartney’s voiced-over vocal begins, “What if it rained/We didn’t care…”, she suddenly starts to mouth the words, and using sign language. The lens backs up to a medium shot of her, then closes back in on a tight close up of just her hands signing “my valentine” on her chest. There is then a quick cut to actor Johnny Depp, who is sitting in a similar position, in front of a grey backdrop, staring directly at the camera, also with no expression. There is a fade back to Portman’s face, then to her body, a close up of her signing the word “appear”, and then a cut back to Depp. Now he starts signing. Unlike Portman, he does not mouth the words, but stares ahead, with no facial movement. There is then a series of jump cuts, back and forth, between shots of the two actors’ faces, eyes, mouths, hands. For the solo bridge, there is a closeup on Depp’s hands playing guitar – a cut to Portman’s face, looking down – then to her face with eyes closed as she listens. here is some more signing, we see Depp’s impassive face staring at us again, and then, at the end, the video fades out on Portman’s still figure, still gazing at us as well.McCartney told reporters that Stella had been the one to come up with the idea for using sign language in the video. According to the ASL sign language coach on the shoot, Bill Pugin, the choice to include it wasn’t that far-fetched: “Paul always has an interpreter on a riser with a spot for his concerts and Stella loves sign language, apparently” ("The Guy Who Taught Johnny Depp"). Perhaps she made the suggestion because the second stanza contains the words “I tell myself that I was waiting for a sign…” Regardless, McCartney advised her father to “ring Natalie up and just ask her if she will sign to your song”. Later realizing he wanted another person signing in the video, Paul McCartney asked Johnny Depp to join in, which he did. When asked why he chose those two actors, McCartney said, “Well, they’re just nice people, some friends from way back and they were just very kind to do it”. A week later, they all got together with cinematographer Wally Pfister, who filmed Inception and The Dark Knight, behind the camera. According to the official press release about the video, posted on McCartney’s website, the two actors then "translate[d] the lyrics of the song into sign language – each giving distinctly different performances, making ... compelling viewing" ("Paul McCartney Directs His Own"). The response to the video was quite positive; it immediately went viral on YouTube (the original posting of it got over 15 million views). The album made it to number five on the Billboard charts, with the single reaching number twenty. The album won a 2013 Grammy Award for Best Traditional Pop Vocal album, and the video Best Music Film (“Live Kisses”). McCartney chose to sing that particular song from the album on the award show itself, and four years later, he featured both the song and video as part of his 31 city tour, the 2017 One on One concert, in which he made four million dollars a city. All told the video has served McCartney quite well.But…For whom the sign language? And why? The video is not meant for deaf eyes. When viewed through a deaf lens, it is not, by any stretch of the imagination, “compelling”; it isn’t even comprehensible. It is so bad, in fact, that the video, though signed, is also captioned for the deaf and hard of hearing. To the untrained, “hearing” eye, the signing seems to be providing a “deaf translation” of what is being sung. But it is in fact a pantomime. The actors are quite literally “going through the motions”. One egregious example of this is how, at the end of the video, when Depp thinks he’s signing “valentine”. it looks like he's saying “fuck-heart” (several media sources politely reported that he’d signed “enemy”). Whatever he did, it’s not a sign. In response to criticism of his signing, Depp said nonchalantly, “Apparently, instead of ‘love' I might have said, ‘murder'” ("Johnny Depp Says"). That wasn’t the only point of confusion, though: the way Portman signs “then she appears” was misunderstood by some viewers to be the sign for “tampon”. She actually signed it correctly, but media sources from MTV.com, to the Washington Post, “signsplained” that she had just gotten a bit confused between ASL and BSL signs (even though the BSL for “appears” bears no resemblance to what she did, and the ASL for tampon, while using the same classifier, is also signed quite differently). Part of the problem, according to sign coach Pugin, was that he and Depp “had about fifteen minutes to work on the song. I signed the song for hours sitting on an apple box under the camera for Johnny to be able to peripherally see me for each take. I was his “human cue card”. Johnny’s signing turned out to be more theatrical and ‘abbreviated’ because of the time issue” ("The Guy Who Taught").Portman, perhaps taking more time to rehearse, does a better job, but “theatrical and abbreviated” indeed; the signing was just not good, despite Pugin's coaching. But to hearing eyes, it looks fine; it looks beautiful, it looks poignant and somehow mysterious. It looks the way sign language is “supposed” to look.Remember, the McCartney website claimed that the actors were “translating” the lyrics. Technically speaking, “translation” would mean that the sense of the words to the song were being rendered, fluently, from one language (English) into another (SL), for an audience receptive to the second language. In order to “translate”, the translator needs to be fluent in both of the languages involved. To be clear, what Depp and Portman were doing was not translation. They are hearing people, not fluent in sign language, acting like signers (something that happens with dismaying regularity in the entertainment industry). Depp, to his credit, knew he wasn’t “translating”, in fact, he said "I was only copying what the guy showed me”. “But”, he says, "it was a gas – sign language is apparently very interpretive. It's all kind of different" (italics mine) ("Johnny Depp Passes the Buck"). Other than maybe being an embellishment on that one line, “I tell myself that I was waiting for a sign…”, the sentiments of McCartney’s song have absolutely nothing to do with ASL or deaf people. And he didn’t purposefully place sign language in his video as a way to get his lyrics across to a deaf audience. He’s a musician; it is fairly certain that the thought of appealing to a deaf audience never entered his or his daughter’s mind. It is much more likely that he made the decision to use sign language because of its cool factor; its emo “novelty”. In other words, McCartney used sign language as a prop – as a way to make his song “different”, more “touching”, more emotionally appealing. Sign adds a je ne sais quoi, a little “something”, to the song. The video is a hearing person’s fantasy of what a signing person looks like, what sign language is, and what it does. McCartney used that fantasy, and the sentimentality that it evokes, to sell the song. And it worked. This attitude toward sign language, demonstrated by the careless editing of the video, Depp’s flippant remarks, and the overall attitude that if it’s wrong it’s no big deal, is one that is pervasive throughout the entertainment and advertising industries and indeed throughout American culture in the U.S. That is, there is this notion that sign language is “a gas”. It’s just a “different” thing. Not only is it “different”, but it is also a “thing”, a prop, a little exotic spice you throw into the pot. It is, in other words, a "narrative prosthesis", an "add-on". Once you see this, it becomes glaringly apparent that ASL is not viewed in mainstream American culture as the language of a group of people, but instead is widely used and commodified as a product. The most obvious form of commodification is in the thousands of ASL products, from Precious Moment figurines, to Baby Signing videos, to the ubiquitous “I LOVE YOU” sign seen on everything from coffee mugs to tee shirts, to Nike posters with “Just Do It” in fingerspelling. But the area in which the language is most often commodified (and perhaps most insidiously so) is in the entertainment industry, in visual media, where it is used by writers, directors and actors, not to present an accurate portrait of lived deaf experience and language, but to do what Paul McCartney did, that is, to insert it just to create a “different”, unique, mysterious, exotic, heartwarming spectacle. Far too often, this commodification of the language results in weirdly distorted representations of what deaf people and their language actually are. You can see this everywhere: ASL is a prominent narrative add-on in blockbuster films like the aforementioned A Quiet Place; it is used in the Oscar winning The Shape of Water, and in Wonderstruck, and Baby Driver as well; it is used in the indie horror film Hush; it is used in a lot of films with apes (the Planet of the Apes series and Rampage are two examples); it is displayed on television, mostly in police dramas, in various CSI programs, and in series like The Walking Dead and Castle Rock; it is used in commercials to hawk everything from Pepsi to hotel chains to jewelry to Hormel lunchmeat to fast food (Burger King, Chik Fil A); it is used and commented on in interpreted concerts and music videos and football halftime shows; it is used (often misused) in PSAs for hurricanes and police stops; it is used in social media, from vlogs to cochlear implant activation videos. You can find ASL seemingly everywhere; it is being inserted more and more into the cultural mainstream, but is not appearing as a language. It is used, nine times out of ten, as a decorative ornament, a narrative prop. When Davis discusses the hearing perception of ASL as a marker or visible stigma, he points out that the usual hearing response to observing such stigma is a combination of a Freudian attraction/repulsion (the dominant response being negative). Many times this repulsion results from the appeal to pathos, as in the commercials that show the poor isolated deaf person with the nice hearing person who is signing to them so that they can now be part of the world. The hearing viewer might think to themselves "oh, thank God I'm not deaf!"Davis notes that, in the end, it is not the signer who is the disabled one in this scenario (aside from the fact that many times a signing person is not in fact deaf). The hearing, non signing observer is actually the one “disabled” by their own reaction to the signing “other”. Not only that, but the rhetorical situation itself becomes “disabled”: there is discomfort – wariness of language – laughter – compulsive nervous talking – awkwardness – a desire to get rid of the object. This is a learned response. People habituated, Davis says, do not respond this way (12-13). While people might think that the hearing audience is becoming more and more habituated because ASL is everywhere, the problem is that people are being incorrectly habituated. More often than not, sign language, when enfolded into narratives about hearing people in hearing situations, is put into service as a prop that can mitigate such awkward moments of possible tension and conflict; it is a prosthetic that "fills the gap", allowing an interaction between hearing and deaf people that almost always allows for a positive, "happy" resolution, a return to "normalcy", the very purpose of the "narrative prosthetic" as posited by Mitchell and Snyder. Once we see how ASL is being employed in media mostly as a narrative prosthesis, we can, as Mitchell and Snyder suggest we do (what I hope this essay begins to do), and that is, to begin to “undo the quick repair of disability in mainstream representations and beliefs; to try to make the prosthesis show; to flaunt its imperfect supplementation as an illusion” (8). In other words, if we can scrutinize the shorthand, and dig deeper, seeing the prosthetic for what it is, all of this seemingly exploitative commodification of ASL will be a good thing. Maybe, in “habituating” people correctly, in widening both hearing people’s exposure to ASL and their understanding of its actual role in deaf lived experience, signing will become less of a prosthetic, an object of fetishistic fascination. Maybe hearing people, as they become used to seeing signing people in real signing situations, will be less likely to walk up to deaf people they don’t know and say things like: “Oh, your language is SO beautiful”, or say, “I know sign!” (then fingerspelling the alphabet with agonising slowness and inaccuracy while the deaf person nods politely). However, if the use of ASL as a prosthetic in popular culture and visual media continues to go on unexamined and unquestioned, it will just continue to trivialise a living, breathing language. This trivialisation can in turn continue to reduce the lived experiences of deaf people to a sort of caricature, further reinforcing the negative representations of deaf people in America that are already in place, stereotypes that we have been trying to escape for over 200 years. Note* The word "deaf" is used in this article to denote the entire range of individuals with various hearing losses and language preferences, including Deaf persons and hard of hearing persons, etc. For more on these distinctions please refer to the website entry on this published by the National Association of the Deaf (NAD).ReferencesDavis, Lennard. Enforcing Normalcy. New York: Verso, 1995."The Guy Who Taught Johnny Depp and Natalie Portman Sign Language." Intimate Excellent: The Fountain Theater Blog. 18 Mar. 2012. <https://intimateexcellent.com/2012/04/18/the-guy-who-taught-johnny-depp-and-natalie-portman-sign-language-in-mccartney-video/>.Fitzgerald, Roisin. "Johnny Depp Says Sign Language Mishap Isn't His Fault." HiddenHearing Blog 14 Apr. 2012. <https://hiddenhearingireland.wordpress.com/2012/05/29/johnny-depp-says-sign-language-mishap-isnt-his-fault/>.Hawk, Brandon W. “Prosthesis: From Grammar to Medicine in the Earliest History of the Word.” Disability Studies Quarterly 38.4 (2018).McCartney, Paul. "My Valentine." YouTube 13 Apr. 2012.McGinnis, Sara. "Johnny Depp Passes the Buck on Sign Language Snafu." sheknows.com 10 May 2012. <https://www.sheknows.com/entertainment/articles/959949/johnny-depp-passes-the-buck-on-sign-language-snafu/>.Miller, Julie. "Paul McCartney on Directing Johnny Depp and Natalie Portman." Vanity Fair 14 Apr. 2012. <https://www.vanityfair.com/style/2012/04/paul-mccartney-johnny-depp-natalie-portman-my-valentine-music-video-gwyneth-paltrow>.Mitchell, David T., and Sharon L. Snyder. Narrative Prosthesis: Disabilities and the Dependencies of Discourse. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P. 2000.Norden, Martin. F. The Cinema of Isolation: A History of Physical Disability in Movies. Rutgers UP: 1994."Paul McCartney Directs His Own My Valentine Video." paulmccartney.com 14 Apr. 2012. <https://www.paulmccartney.com/news-blogs/news/paul-mccartney-directs-his-own-my-valentine-videos-featuring-natalie-portman-and>.Ruiz-Grossman, Sarah. "Disability Representation Is Seriously Lacking in Television and the Movies: Report." Huffington Post 27 Mar. 2019. <https://www.huffpost.com/entry/disability-representation-movies-tv_n_5c9a7b85e4b07c88662cabe7>.Schuchman, J.S. Hollywood Speaks: Deafness and the Film Entertainment Industry. U Illinois P, 1999.

AbstractIn this article several heteroglossic expressions of language regimes will be presented. To this end, I will succinctly discuss a series of (socio) linguistic issues related to the use of one of the major Indigenous languages in Mexico – namely, Mexicano (Nahuatl) – in its political, ideological and pragmatic arenas. This includes a consideration of Mexicano political economies, entailing a dispute over the politics of representation of Mexicano verbal culture in different ambits in which language plays an outstanding role. Comparing different linguistic politics of interpretation will allow an understanding of antagonistic voices regarding competing (e.g., ethnographic, linguistic) approaches, including different linguists’ and anthropologists’ descriptions vis-à-vis varying actors’ contradictory perspectives on the same or similar facts. These will encompass political, ideological and pragmatic uses and ideologies, in both historical and contemporary domains, including the written and oral worlds.

AbstractLittle is known of how intergenerational acculturation discrepancy relates to communication skills differences that may influence relationship quality among parents and adult children. Mexican–American mother–daughter dyads (n = 59) were studied using the Actor Partner Interdependence Model to examine dyadic associations of acculturation and communication competence with family functioning and mediation analysis to determine the indirect effect of acculturation discrepancy on family functioning through communication competence differences. Communication competence of mothers exerted significant actor and partner effects on daughter-perceived cohesion and closeness. Higher acculturation discrepancy predicted greater communication competence difference which in turn was associated with lower cohesion and closeness. There was a significant indirect effect of acculturation discrepancy on daughter-perceived cohesion through communication competence difference. Communication competence of mothers impacts their own as well as their daughters’ perceptions of dyad cohesion and closeness. Intergenerational discrepant acculturation contributes to discordant communication skills that impair family functioning, which has implications for psychological well-being.

America Latina tiene importantes insuficiencias en sus sistemas de evaluacion gubernamental y de participacion, Mexico no escapa de esta situacion. El presente articulo tiene por objetivo analizar el proceso de evaluacion de la accion publica y la participacion social mexicanas, en el contexto de la gerencia publica. Se analizan 31 programas sociales evaluados, para ello se emplea el metodo de analisis documental complementado con entrevistas a diferentes actores involucrados. Las variables estudiadas fueron: organizacion del sistema de evaluacion, recursos utilizados, fuentes de informacion y tratamiento de datos, contenido de la evaluacion y participacion de los beneficiarios y de organizaciones sociales. Se concluye que Mexico esta muy lejos de contar con el nivel de evaluacion y participacion que pregona el enfoque de la gerencia publica, se han hecho importantes avances en la evaluacion de programas gubernamentales, pero aun presenta problemas por resolver y no ha desarrollado mecanismos efectivos de participacion social.

Geney Beltrán Félix propone en Adiós, Tomasa una revisión a los patrones de violencia que son inculcados desde la niñez y que afectan a los seres más vulnerables como las mujeres y los niños. En un área serrana, donde las comunicaciones y la presencia del gobierno se caracterizan por su ausencia, impera la proliferación de actividades ilícitas que están promovidas por la presencia del narcotráfico y la corrupción del Estado, lo que va convirtiendo el Triángulo Dorado mexicano en un espacio geográfico donde abundan experiencias trágicas provocadas por las violaciones, los crímenes y los actos delictivos de esta zona de clivaje. En este trabajo se analizará la irrupción de la violencia en el seno familiar y social que prevalece en el pueblo de Chapotán derivado del machismo cultural y que, junto a las amenazas intimidantes del crimen organizado, trastocan la vida de las personas que intentan subsistir pese al peligro y de otros que desisten y se aferran al sueño americano optando por la aventura migrante. El elemento autobiográfico y la focalización infantil serán los recursos con los cuales el autor nos sumergirá en un México con un escenario crudo y grotesco de la realidad contemporánea que finca su territorio imaginario sobre el desasosiego y la violencia de la sociedad mostrando cómo la violencia y el odio generado por el negocio del narco han cambiado gradualmente la dinámica social del norte del país.

The American Broadcasting Company (ABC) Family Network show Switched at Birth tells two stories—one which follows the unique plot of the show, and one about the new openness of television executives toward integrating more people with a variety of visible and invisible physical embodiments, such as hearing loss, into television content. It first aired in 2011 and in 2017 aired its fifth and final season.The show focuses on two teen girls in Kansas City who find out they were switched due to a hospital error on the day of their birth and who grew up with parents who were not biologically related to them. One, Bay Kennish (Vanessa Marano), lives with her wealthy parents—a stay-at-home mom Kathryn (Lea Thompson) and a former professional baseball player, now businessman, father John (D.W. Moffett). She has an older brother Toby (Lucas Grabeel) who is into music. In her high school science class, Bay learns about blood types and discovers her parents’ blood types could not have produced her. The family has professional genetic tests done and discovers the switch (ABC Family, “This Is Not a Pipe”).In the pilot episode, Bay’s parents find out that deaf teen, Daphne Vasquez (Katie Leclerc), is actually their daughter. She lives in a working class Hispanic neighbourhood with her hairdresser single mother Regina (Constance Marie) and grandmother Adrianna (Ivonne Coll), both of whom are of Puerto Rican ancestry. Daphne is deaf due to a case of meningitis when she was three, which the rich Kennishes feel happened because of inadequate healthcare provided by working class Regina. Daphne attends an all-deaf school, Carlton.The man who was thought to be her biological father, Angelo Sorrento (Gilles Marini), doesn’t appear in the show until episode 10 but becomes a series regular in season 2. It becomes apparent that Daphne believes her father left because of her deafness; however, as the first season progresses, the real reasons begin to emerge. From the pilot onwards, the show dives into clashes of language, culture, ethnicity, class, and even physical appearance—in one scene in the pilot, the waspy Kennishes ask Regina if she is “Mexican.” As later episodes reveal, many of these physical appearance issues are revealed to have fractured the Vasquez family early on—Daphne is a freckled, strawberry blonde, and her father (who is French and Italian) suspected infidelity.The two families merge when the Kennishes ask Daphne and her mother to move into their guest house in order get to know their daughter better. That forces the Kennishes into the world of deafness, and throughout the show this hearing family therefore becomes a surrogate for a hearing audience’s immersion into Deaf culture.Cultural Inclusivity: The Way ForwardShow creator Lizzy Weiss explained that it was actually the ABC Family network that “suggested making one of the kids disabled” (Academy of Television Arts & Sciences). Weiss was familiar with American Sign Language (ASL) because she had a “classical theatre of the Deaf” course in college. She said, “I had in the back of my head a little bit of background at least about how beautiful the language was. So I said, ‘What if one of the girls is deaf?’” The network thought it was wonderful idea, so she began researching the Deaf community, including spending time at a deaf high school in Los Angeles called Marlton, on which she modelled the Switched at Birth school, Carlton. Weiss (Academy of Television Arts & Sciences) says of the school visit experience:I learned so much that day and spoke to dozens of deaf teenagers about their lives and their experiences. And so, this is, of course, in the middle of writing the pilot, and I said to the network, you know, deaf kids wouldn’t voice orally. We would have to have those scenes only in ASL, and no sound and they said, ‘Great. Let’s do it.’ And frankly, we just kind of grew and grew from there.To accommodate the narrative structure of a television drama, Weiss said it became clear from the beginning that the show would need to use SimCom (simultaneous communication or sign supported speech) for the hearing or deaf characters who were signing so they could speak and sign at the same time. She knew this wasn’t the norm for two actual people communicating in ASL, but the production team worried about having a show that was heavily captioned as this might distance its key—overwhelmingly hearing—teen audience who would have to pay attention to the screen during captioned scenes. However, this did not appear to be the case—instead, viewers were drawn to the show because of its unique sign language-influenced television narrative structure. The show became popular very quickly and, with 3.3 million viewers, became the highest-rated premiere ever on the ABC Family network (Barney).Switched at Birth also received much praise from the media for allowing its deaf actors to communicate using sign language. The Huffington Post television critic Maureen Ryan said, “Allowing deaf characters to talk to each other directly—without a hearing person or a translator present—is a savvy strategy that allows the show to dig deeper into deaf culture and also to treat deaf characters as it would anyone else”. Importantly, it allowed the show to be unique in a way that was found nowhere else on television. “It’s practically avant-garde for television, despite the conventional teen-soap look of the show,” said Ryan.Usually a show’s success is garnered by audience numbers and media critique—by this measure Switched at Birth was a hit. However, programs that portray a disability—in any form—are often the target of criticism, particularly from the communities they attempting to represent. It should be noted that, while actress Katie Leclerc, who plays Daphne, has a condition, Meniere’s disease, which causes hearing loss and vertigo on an intermittent basis, she does not identify as a deaf actress and must use a deaf accent to portray Daphne. However, she is ASL fluent, learning it in high school (Orangejack). This meant her qualifications met the original casting call which said “actress must be deaf or hard of hearing and must speak English well, American Sign Language preferred” (Paz, 2010) Leclerc likens her role to that of any actor to who has to affect body and vocal changes for a role—she gives the example of Hugh Laurie in House, who is British with no limp, but was an American who uses a cane in that show (Bibel).As such, initially, some in the Deaf community complained about her casting though an online petition with 140 signatures (Nielson). Yet many in the Deaf community softened any criticism of the show when they saw the production’s ongoing attention to Deaf cultural details (Grushkin). Finally, any lingering criticisms from the Deaf community were quieted by the many deaf actors hired for the show who perform using ASL. This includes Sean Berdy, who plays Daphne’s best friend Emmett, his onscreen mother, played by actress Marlee Matlin, and Anthony Natale who plays his father; their characters both sign and vocalize in the show. The Emmett character only communicates in ASL and does not vocalise until he falls in love with the hearing character Bay—even then he rarely uses his voice.This seemingly all-round “acceptance” of the show gave the production team more freedom to be innovative—by season 3 the audience was deemed to be so comfortable with captions that the shows began to feature less SimCom and more all-captioned scenes. This lead to the full episode in ASL, a first on American mainstream television.For an Hour, Welcome to Our WorldSwitched at Birth writer Chad Fiveash explained that when the production team came up with the idea for a captioned all-ASL episode, they “didn’t want to do the ASL episode as a gimmick. It needed to be thematically resonant”. As a result, they decided to link the episode to the most significant event in American Deaf history, an event that solidified its status as a cultural community—the 1988 Deaf President Now (DPN) protest at Gallaudet University in Washington. This protest inspired the March 2013 episode for Switched at Birth and aired 25 years to the week that the actual DPN protest happened. This episode makes it clear the show is trying to completely embrace Deaf culture and wants its audience to better understand Deaf identity.DPN was a pivotal moment for Deaf people—it truly solidified members of a global Deaf community who felt more empowered to fight for their rights. Students demanded that Gallaudet—as the premier university for deaf and hard-of-hearing students—no longer have a hearing person as its president. The Gallaudet board of trustees, the majority of whom were hearing, tried to force students and faculty to accept a hearing president; their attitude was that they knew what was best for the deaf persons there. For eight days, deaf people across America and the world rallied around the student protestors, refusing to give in until a deaf president was appointed. Their success came in the form of I. King Jordan, a deaf man who had served as dean of the College of Arts & Sciences at the time of the protest.The event was covered by media around the world, giving the American Deaf community international attention. Indeed, Gallaudet University says the DPN protest symbolized more than just the hiring of a Deaf president; it brought Deaf issues before the public and “raised the nation’s consciousness of the rights and abilities of deaf and hard of hearing people” (Gallaudet University).The activities of the students and their supporters showed dramatically that in the 1980s deaf people could be galvanized to unite around a common issue, particularly one of great symbolic meaning, such as the Gallaudet presidency. Gallaudet University represents the pinnacle of education for deaf people, not only in the United States but throughout the world. The assumption of its presidency by a person himself deaf announced to the world that deaf Americans were now a mature minority (Van Cleve and Crouch, 172).Deaf people were throwing off the oppression of the hearing world by demanding that their university have someone from their community at its helm. Jankowski (Deaf Empowerment; A Metaphorical Analysis of Conflict) studied the Gallaudet protest within the framework of a metaphor. She found a recurring theme during the DPN protest to be Gallaudet as “plantation”—which metaphorically refers to deaf persons as slaves trying to break free from the grip of the dominant mastery of the hearing world—and she parallels the civil rights movement of African Americans in the 1960s. As an example, Gallaudet was referred to as the “Selma of the Deaf” during the protest, and protest signs used the language of Martin Luther King such as “we still have a dream.” For deaf Americans, the presidency of Gallaudet became a symbol of hope for the future. As Jankowski attests:deaf people perceived themselves as possessing the ability to manage their own kind, pointing to black-managed organization, women-managed organizations, etc., struggling for that same right. They argued that it was a fight for their basic human rights, a struggle to free themselves, to release the hold their ‘masters’ held on them. (“A Metaphorical Analysis”)The creators of the Switched at Birth episode wanted to ensure of these emotions, as well as historical and cultural references, were prevalent in the modern-day, all-ASL episode, titled Uprising. That show therefore wanted to represent both the 1988 DPN protest as well as a current issue in the US—the closing of deaf schools (Anderson). The storyline focuses on the deaf students at the fictitious Carlton School for the Deaf seizing one of the school buildings to stage a protest because the school board has decided to shut down the school and mainstream the deaf students into hearing schools. When the deaf students try to come up with a list of demands, conflicts arise about what the demands should be and whether a pilot program—allowing hearing kids who sign to attend the deaf school—should remain.This show accomplished multiple things with its reach into Deaf history and identity, but it also did something technologically unique for the modern world—it made people pay attention. Because captioning translated the sign language for viewers, Lizzy Weiss, the creator of the series, said, “Every single viewer—deaf or hearing—was forced to put away their phones and iPads and anything else distracting … and focus … you had to read … you couldn’t do anything else. And that made you get into it more. It drew you in” (Stelter). The point, Weiss said, “was about revealing something new to the viewer—what does it feel like to be an outsider? What does it feel like to have to read and focus for an entire episode, like deaf viewers do all the time?” (Stelter). As one deaf reviewer of the Uprising episode said, “For an hour, welcome to our world! A world that’s inconvenient, but one most of us wouldn’t leave if offered a magic pill” (DR_Staff).This episode, more than any other, afforded hearing television viewers an experience perhaps similar to deaf viewers. The New York Times reported that “Deaf and hard-of-hearing viewers commented by the thousands after the show, with many saying in effect, “Yes! That’s what it feels like” (Stelter).Continued ResonancesWhat is also unique about the episode is that in teaching the hearing viewers more about the Deaf community, it also reinforced Deaf community pride and even taught young deaf people a bit of their own history. The Deaf community and Gallaudet were very pleased with their history showing up on a television show—the university produced a 30-second commercial which aired within the episode, and held viewing parties. Gallaudet also forwarded the 35 pages of Facebook comments they’d received about the episode to ABC Family and Gallaudet President T. Alan Hurwitz said of the episode (Yahr), “Over the past 25 years, [DPN] has symbolised self-determination and empowerment for deaf and hard of hearing people around the world”. The National Association of the Deaf (NAD) also lauded the episode, describing it as “phenomenal and groundbreaking, saying the situation is very real to us” (Stelter)—NAD had been vocally against budget cuts and closings of US deaf schools.Deaf individuals all over the Internet and social media also spoke out about the episode, with overwhelmingly favourable opinions. Deaf blogger Amy Cohen Efron, who participated in 1988′s DPN movement, said that DPN was “a turning point of my life, forcing me to re-examine my own personal identity, and develop self-determinism as a Deaf person” and led to her becoming an activist.When she watched the Uprising episode, she said the symbolic and historical representations in the show resonated with her. In the episode, a huge sign is unfurled on the side of the Carlton School for the Deaf with a girl with a fist in the air under the slogan “Take Back Carlton.” During the DPN protest, the deaf student protesters unfurled a sign that said “Deaf President Now” with the US Capitol in the background; this image has become an iconic symbol of modern Deaf culture. Efron says the image in the television episode was much more militant than the actual DPN sign. However, it could be argued that society now sees the Deaf community as much more militant because of the DPN protest, and that the imagery in the Uprising episode played into that connection. Efron also acknowledged the episode’s strong nod to the Gallaudet student protestors who defied the hearing community’s expectations by practising civil disobedience. As Efron explained, “Society expected that the Deaf people are submissive and accept to whatever decision done by the majority without any of our input and/or participation in the process.”She also argues that the episode educated more than just the hearing community. In addition to DPN, Uprising was filled with other references to Deaf history. For example a glass door to the room at Carlton was covered with posters about people like Helen Keller and Jean-Ferdinand Berthier, a deaf educator in 19th century France who promoted the concept of deaf identity and culture—Efron says most people in the Deaf community have never heard of him. She also claims that the younger Deaf community may also not be aware of the 1988 DPN protest—“It was not in high school textbooks available for students. Many deaf and hard of hearing students are mainstreamed and they have not the slightest idea about the DPN movement, even about the Deaf Community’s ongoing fight against discrimination, prejudice and oppression, along with our victories”.Long before the Uprising episode aired, the Deaf community had been watching Switched at Birth carefully to make sure Deaf culture was accurately represented. Throughout season 3 David Martin created weekly videos in sign language that were an ASL/Deaf cultural analysis of Switched at Birth. He highlighted content he liked and signs that were incorrect, a kind of a Deaf culture/ASL fact checker. From the Uprising episode, he said he thought this quote from Marlee Matlin’s character said it all, “Until hearing people walk a day in our shoes they will never understand” (Martin). That succinctly states what the all-ASL episode was trying to capture—creating an awareness of Deaf people’s cultural experience and their oppression in hearing society.Even a deaf person who was an early critic of Switched at Birth because of the hiring of Katie Leclerc and the use of SimCom admitted he was impressed with the all-ASL episode (Grushkin):all too often, we see media accounts of Deaf people which play into our society’s perceptions of Deaf people: as helpless, handicapped individuals who are in need of fixes such as cochlear implants in order to “restore” us to society. Almost never do we see accounts of Deaf people as healthy, capable individuals who live ordinary, successful lives without necessarily conforming to the Hearing ‘script’ for how we should be. And important issues such as language rights or school closings are too often virtually ignored by the general media.In addition to the episode being widely discussed within the Deaf community, the mainstream news media also covered Uprising intensely, seeing it as a meaningful cultural moment, not just for the Deaf community but for popular culture in general. Lacob wrote that he realises that hearing viewers probably won’t understand what it means to be a deaf person in modern America, but he believes that the episodeposits that there are moments of understanding, commonalities, and potential bridge-building between these two communities. And the desire for understanding is the first step toward a more inclusive and broad-minded future.He continues:the significance of this moment can’t be undervalued, nor can the show’s rich embrace of deaf history, manifested here in the form of Gallaudet and the historical figures whose photographs and stories are papered on the windows of Carlton during the student protest. What we’re seeing on screen—within the confines of a teen drama, no less—is an engaged exploration of a culture and a civil rights movement brought to life with all of the color and passion it deserves. It may be 25 years since Gallaudet, but the dreams of those protesters haven’t faded. And they—and the ideals of identity and equality that they express—are most definitely being heard.Lacob’s analysis was praised by several Deaf people—by a Deaf graduate student who teaches a Disability in Popular Culture course and by a Gallaudet student who said, “From someone who is deaf, and not ashamed of it either, let me say right here and now: that was the most eloquent piece of writing by someone hearing I have ever seen” (Emma72). The power of the Uprising episode illustrated a political space where “groups actively fuse and blend their culture with the mainstream culture” (Foley 119, as cited in Chang 3). Switched at Birth—specifically the Uprising episode—has indeed fused Deaf culture and ASL into a place in mainstream television culture.ReferencesABC Family. “Switched at Birth Deaf Actor Search.” Facebook (2010). <https://www.facebook.com/SwitchedSearch>.———. “This Is Not a Pipe.” Switched at Birth. Pilot episode. 6 June 2011. <http://freeform.go.com/shows/switched-at-birth>.———. “Not Hearing Loss, Deaf Gain.” Switched at Birth. YouTube video, 11 Feb. 2013. <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F5W604uSkrk>.Academy of Television Arts & Sciences. “Talking Diversity: ABC Family’s Switched at Birth.” Emmys.com (Feb. 2012). <http://www.emmys.com/content/webcast-talking-diversity-abc-familys-switched-birth>.Anderson, G. “‘Switched at Birth’ Celebrates 25th Anniversary of ‘Deaf President Now’.” Pop-topia (5 Mar. 2013). <http://www.pop-topia.com/switched-at-birth-celebrates-25th-anniversary-of-deaf-president-now/>.Barney, C. “’Switched at Birth’ Another Winner for ABC Family.” Contra Costa News (29 June 2011). <http://www.mercurynews.com/tv/ci_18369762>.Bibel, S. “‘Switched at Birth’s Katie LeClerc Is Proud to Represent the Deaf Community.” Xfinity TV blog (20 June 2011). <http://xfinity.comcast.net/blogs/tv/2011/06/20/switched-at-births-katie-leclerc-is-proud-to-represent-the-deaf-community/>.Chang, H. “Re-Examining the Rhetoric of the ‘Cultural Border’.” Essay presented at the American Anthropological Association Annual Meeting, Philadelphia, Dec. 1988.DR_Staff. “Switched at Birth: How #TakeBackCarlton Made History.” deafReview (6 Mar. 2013). <http://deafreview.com/deafreview-news/switched-at-birth-how-takebackcarlton-made-history/>.Efron, Amy Cohen. “Switched At Birth: Uprising – Deaf Adult’s Commentary.” Deaf World as I See It (Mar. 2013). <http://www.deafeyeseeit.com/2013/03/05/sabcommentary/>.Emma72. “ABC Family’s ‘Switched at Birth’ ASL Episode Recalls Gallaudet Protest.” Comment. The Daily Beast (28 Feb. 2013). <http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/02/28/abc-family-s-switched-at-birth-asl-episode-recalls-gallaudet-protest.html>.Fiveash, Chad. Personal interview. 17 Jan. 2014.Gallaudet University. “The Issues.” Deaf President Now (2013). <http://www.gallaudet.edu/dpn_home/issues.html>.Grushkin, D. “A Cultural Review. ASL Challenged.” Switched at Birth Facebook page. Facebook (2013). <https://www.facebook.com/SwitchedatBirth/posts/508748905835658>.Jankowski, K.A. Deaf Empowerment: Emergence, Struggle, and Rhetoric. Washington: Gallaudet UP, 1997.———. “A Metaphorical Analysis of Conflict at the Gallaudet Protest.” Unpublished seminar paper presented at the University of Maryland, 1990.Lacob, J. “ABC Family’s ‘Switched at Birth’ ASL Episode Recalls Gallaudet Protest.” The Daily Beast 28 Feb. 2013. <http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/02/28/abc-family-s-switched-at-birth-asl-episode-recalls-gallaudet-protest.html>.Martin, D. “Switched at Birth Season 2 Episode 9 ‘Uprising’ ASL/Deaf Cultural Analysis.” David Martin YouTube channel (6 Mar. 2013). <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JA0vqCysoVU>.Nielson, R. “Petitioned ABC Family and the ‘Switched at Birth’ Series, Create Responsible, Accurate, and Family-Oriented TV Programming.” Change.org (2011). <http://www.change.org/p/abc-family-and-the-switched-at-birth-series-create-responsible-accurate-and-family-oriented-tv-programming>.Orangejack. “Details about Katie Leclerc’s Hearing Loss.” My ASL Journey Blog (29 June 2011). <http://asl.orangejack.com/details-about-katie-leclercs-hearing-loss>.Paz, G. “Casting Call: Open Auditions for Switched at Birth by ABC Family.” Series & TV (3 Oct. 2010). <http://seriesandtv.com/casting-call-open-auditions-for-switched-at-birth-by-abc-family/4034>.Ryan, Maureen. “‘Switched at Birth’ Season 1.5 Has More Drama and Subversive Soapiness.” The Huffington Post (31 Aug. 2012). <http://www.huffingtonpost.com/maureen-ryan/switched-at-birth-season-1_b_1844957.html>.Stelter, B. “Teaching Viewers to Hear with Their Eyes Only.” The New York Times 8 Mar. 2013. <http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/09/arts/television/teaching-viewers-to-hear-the-tv-with-eyes-only.html>.Van Cleve, J.V., and B.A. Crouch. A Place of Their Own: Creating the Deaf Community in America. DC: Gallaudet University Press, 1989.Yahr, E. “Gallaudet University Uses All-Sign Language Episode of ‘Switched at Birth’ to Air New Commercial.” The Washington Post 3 Mar. 2013 <http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/tv-column/post/gallaudet-university-uses-all-sign-language-episode-of-switched-at-birth-to-air-new-commercial/2013/03/04/0017a45a-8508-11e2-9d71-f0feafdd1394_blog.html>.

For seven months in 1999/2000, six-year old Cuban Elián González was embroiled in a family feud plotted along rival national and ideological lines, and relayed televisually as soap opera across the planet. In Miami, apparitions of the Virgin Mary were reported after Elián’s arrival; adherents of Afro-Cuban santería similarly regarded Elián as divinely touched. In Cuba, Elián’s “kidnapping” briefly reinvigorated a torpid revolutionary project. He was hailed by Fidel Castro as the symbolic descendant of José Martí and Che Guevara, and of the patriotic rigour they embodied. Cubans massed to demand his return. In the U.S.A., Elián’s case was arbitrated at every level of the juridical system. The “Save Elián” campaign generated widespread debate about godless versus godly family values, the contours of the American Dream, and consumerist excess. By the end of 2000 Elián had generated the second largest volume of TV news coverage to that date in U.S. history, surpassed only by the O. J. Simpson case (Fasulo). After Fidel Castro, and perhaps the geriatric music ensemble manufactured by Ry Cooder, the Buena Vista Social Club, Elián became the most famous Cuban of our era. Elián also emerged as the unlikeliest of popular-cultural icons, the focus and subject of cyber-sites, books, films, talk-back radio programs, art exhibits, murals, statues, documentaries, a South Park episode, poetry, songs, t-shirts, posters, newspaper editorials in dozens of languages, demonstrations, speeches, political cartoons, letters, legal writs, U.S. Congress records, opinion polls, prayers, and, on both sides of the Florida Strait, museums consecrated in his memory. Confronted by Elián’s extraordinary renown and historical impact, John Carlos Rowe suggests that the Elián story confirms the need for a post-national and transdisciplinary American Studies, one whose practitioners “will have to be attentive to the strange intersections of politics, law, mass media, popular folklore, literary rhetoric, history, and economics that allow such events to be understood.” (204). I share Rowe’s reading of Elián’s story and the clear challenges it presents to analysis of “America,” to which I would add “Cuba” as well. But Elián’s story is also significant for the ways it challenges critical understandings of fame and its construction. No longer, to paraphrase Leo Braudy (566), definable as an accidental hostage of the mass-mediated eye, Elián’s fame has no certain relation to the child at its discursive centre. Elián’s story is not about an individuated, conscious, performing, desiring, and ambivalently rewarded ego. Elián was never what P. David Marshall calls “part of the public sphere, essentially an actor or, … a player” in it (19). The living/breathing Elián is absent from what I call the virtualizing drives that famously reproduced him. As a result of this virtualization, while one Elián now attends school in Cuba, many other Eliáns continue to populate myriad popular-cultural texts and to proliferate away from the states that tried to contain him. According to Jerry Everard, “States are above all cultural artefacts” that emerge, virtually, “as information produced by and through practices of signification,” as bits, bites, networks, and flows (7). All of us, he claims, reside in “virtual states,” in “legal fictions” based on the elusive and contested capacity to generate national identities in an imaginary bounded space (152). Cuba, the origin of Elián, is a virtual case in point. To augment Nicole Stenger’s definition of cyberspace, Cuba, like “Cyberspace, is like Oz — it is, we get there, but it has no location” (53). As a no-place, Cuba emerges in signifying terms as an illusion with the potential to produce and host Cubanness, as well as rival ideals of nation that can be accessed intact, at will, and ready for ideological deployment. Crude dichotomies of antagonism — Cuba/U.S.A., home/exile, democracy/communism, freedom/tyranny, North/South, godlessness/blessedness, consumption/want — characterize the hegemonic struggle over the Cuban nowhere. Split and splintered, hypersensitive and labyrinthine, guarded and hysterical, and always active elsewhere, the Cuban cultural artefact — an “atmospheric depression in history” (Stenger 56) — very much conforms to the logics that guide the appeal, and danger, of cyberspace. Cuba occupies an inexhaustible “ontological time … that can be reintegrated at any time” (Stenger 55), but it is always haunted by the prospect of ontological stalling and proliferation. The cyber-like struggle over reintegration, of course, evokes the Elián González affair, which began on 25 November 1999, when five-year old Elián set foot on U.S. soil, and ended on 28 June 2000, when Elián, age six, returned to Cuba with his father. Elián left one Cuba and found himself in another Cuba, in the U.S.A., each national claimant asserting virtuously that its other was a no-place and therefore illegitimate. For many exiles, Elián’s arrival in Miami confirmed that Castro’s Cuba is on the point of collapse and hence on the virtual verge of reintegration into the democratic fold as determined by the true upholders of the nation, the exile community. It was also argued that Elián’s biological father could never be the boy’s true father because he was a mere emasculated puppet of Castro himself. The Cuban state, then, had forfeited its claims to generate and host Cubanness. Succoured by this logic, the “Save Elián” campaign began, with organizations like the Cuban American National Foundation (CANF) bankrolling protests, leaflet and poster production, and official “Elián” websites, providing financial assistance to and arranging employment for some of Elián’s Miami relatives, lobbying the U.S. Congress and the Florida legislature, and contributing funds to the legal challenges on behalf of Elián at state and federal levels. (Founded in 1981, the CANF is the largest and most powerful Cuban exile organization, and one that regards itself as the virtual government-in-waiting. CANF emerged with the backing of the Reagan administration and the C.I.A. as a “private sector initiative” to support U.S. efforts against its long-time ideological adversary across the Florida Strait [Arboleya 224-5].) While the “Save Elián” campaign failed, the result of a Cuban American misreading of public opinion and overestimation of the community’s lobbying power with the Clinton administration, the struggle continues in cyberspace. CANF.net.org registers its central role in this intense period with silence; but many of the “Save Elián” websites constructed after November 1999 continue to function as sad memento moris of Elián’s shipwreck in U.S. virtual space. (The CANF website does provide links to articles and opinion pieces about Elián from the U.S. media, but its own editorializing on the Elián affair has disappeared. Two keys to this silence were the election of George W. Bush, and the events of 11 Sep. 2001, which have enabled a revision of the Elián saga as a mere temporary setback on the Cuban-exile historical horizon. Indeed, since 9/11, the CANF website has altered the terms of its campaign against Castro, posting photos of Castro with Arab leaders and implicating him in a world-wide web of terrorism. Elián’s return to Cuba may thus be viewed retrospectively as an act that galvanized Cuban-exile support for the Republican Party and their disdain for the Democratic rival, and this support became pivotal in the Republican electoral victory in Florida and in the U.S.A. as a whole.) For many months after Elián’s return to Cuba, the official Liberty for Elián site, established in April 2000, was urging visitors to make a donation, volunteer for the Save Elián taskforce, send email petitions, and “invite a friend to help Elián.” (Since I last accessed “Liberty for Elián” in March 2004 it has become a gambling site.) Another site, Elian’s Home Page, still implores visitors to pray for Elián. Some of the links no longer function, and imperatives to “Click here” lead to that dead zone called “URL not found on this server.” A similar stalling of the exile aspirations invested in Elián is evident on most remaining Elián websites, official and unofficial, the latter including The Sad Saga of Elian Gonzalez, which exhorts “Cuban Exiles! Now You Can Save Elián!” In these sites, a U.S. resident Elián lives on as an archival curiosity, a sign of pathos, and a reminder of what was, for a time, a Cuban-exile PR disaster. If such cybersites confirm the shipwrecked coordinates of Elián’s fame, the “Save Elián” campaign also provided a focus for unrestrained criticism of the Cuban exile community’s imbrication in U.S. foreign policy initiatives and its embrace of American Dream logics. Within weeks of Elián’s arrival in Florida, cyberspace was hosting myriad Eliáns on sites unbeholden to Cuban-U.S. antagonisms, thus consolidating Elián’s function as a disputed icon of virtualized celebrity and focus for parody. A sense of this carnivalesque proliferation can be gained from the many doctored versions of the now iconic photograph of Elián’s seizure by the INS. Still posted, the jpegs and flashes — Elián and Michael Jackson, Elián and Homer Simpson, Elián and Darth Vader, among others (these and other doctored versions are archived on Hypercenter.com) — confirm the extraordinary domestication of Elián in local pop-cultural terms that also resonate as parodies of U.S. consumerist and voyeuristic excess. Indeed, the parodic responses to Elián’s fame set the virtual tone in cyberspace where ostensibly serious sites can themselves be approached as send ups. One example is Lois Rodden’s Astrodatabank, which, since early 2000, has asked visitors to assist in interpreting Elián’s astrological chart in order to confirm whether or not he will remain in the U.S.A. To this end the site provides Elián’s astro-biography and birth chart — a Sagittarius with a Virgo moon, Elián’s planetary alignments form a bucket — and conveys such information as “To the people of Little Havana [Miami], Elian has achieved mystical status as a ‘miracle child.’” (An aside: Elián and I share the same birthday.) Elián’s virtual reputation for divinely sanctioned “blessedness” within a Cuban exile-meets-American Dream typology provided Tom Tomorrow with the target in his 31 January 2000, cartoon, This Modern World, on Salon.com. Here, six-year old Arkansas resident Allen Consalis loses his mother on the New York subway. His relatives decide to take care of him since “New York has much more to offer him than Arkansas! I mean get real!” A custody battle ensues in which Allan’s heavily Arkansas-accented father requires translation, and the case inspires heated debate: “can we really condemn him to a life in Arkansas?” The cartoon ends with the relatives tempting Allan with the delights offered by the Disney Store, a sign of Elián’s contested insertion into an American Dreamscape that not only promises an endless supply of consumer goods but provides a purportedly safe venue for the alternative Cuban nation. The illusory virtuality of that nation also animates a futuristic scenario, written in Spanish by Camilo Hernández, and circulated via email in May 2000. In this text, Elián sparks a corporate battle between Firestone and Goodyear to claim credit for his inner-tubed survival. Cuban Americans regard Elián as the Messiah come to lead them to the promised land. His ability to walk on water is scientifically tested: he sinks and has to be rescued again. In the ensuing custody battle, Cuban state-run demonstrations allow mothers of lesbians and of children who fail maths to have their say on Elián. Andrew Lloyd Weber wins awards for “Elián the Musical,” and for the film version, Madonna plays the role of the dolphin that saved Elián. Laws are enacted to punish people who mispronounce “Elián” but these do not help Elián’s family. All legal avenues exhausted, the entire exile community moves to Canada, and then to North Dakota where a full-scale replica of Cuba has been built. Visa problems spark another migration; the exiles are welcomed by Israel, thus inspiring a new Intifada that impels their return to the U.S.A. Things settle down by 2014, when Elián, his wife and daughter celebrate his 21st birthday as guests of the Kennedys. The text ends in 2062, when the great-great-grandson of Ry Cooder encounters an elderly Elián in Wyoming, thus providing Elián with his second fifteen minutes of fame. Hernández’s text confirms the impatience with which the Cuban-exile community was regarded by other U.S. Latino sectors, and exemplifies the loss of control over Elián experienced by both sides in the righteous Cuban “moral crusade” to save or repatriate Elián (Fernández xv). (Many Chicanos, for example, were angered at Cuban-exile arguments that Elián should remain in the U.S.A. when, in 1999 alone, 8,000 Mexican children were repatriated to Mexico (Ramos 126), statistical confirmation of the favored status that Cubans enjoy, and Mexicans do not, vis-à-vis U.S. immigration policy. Tom Tomorrow’s cartoon and Camilo Hernández’s email text are part of what I call the “What-if?” sub-genre of Elián representations. Another example is “If Elián Gonzalez was Jewish,” archived on Lori’s Mishmash Humor page, in which Eliat Ginsburg is rescued after floating on a giant matzoh in the Florida Strait, and his Florida relatives fight to prevent his return to Israel, where “he had no freedom, no rights, no tennis lessons”.) Nonetheless, that “moral crusade” has continued in the Cuban state. During the custody battle, Elián was virtualized into a hero of national sovereignty, an embodied fix for a revolutionary project in strain due to the U.S. embargo, the collapse of Soviet socialism, and the symbolic threat posed by the virtual Cuban nation-in-waiting in Florida. Indeed, for the Castro regime, the exile wing of the national family is virtual precisely because it conveniently overlooks two facts: the continued survival of the Cuban state itself; and the exile community’s forty-plus-year slide into permanent U.S. residency as one migrant sector among many. Such rhetoric has not faded since Elián’s return. On December 5, 2003, Castro visited Cárdenas for Elián’s tenth birthday celebration and a quick tour of the Museo a la batalla de ideas (Museum for the Battle of Ideas), the museum dedicated to Elián’s “victory” over U.S. imperialism and opened by Castro on July 14, 2001. At Elián’s school Castro gave a speech in which he recalled the struggle to save “that little boy, whose absence caused everyone, and the whole people of Cuba, so much sorrow and such determination to struggle.” The conflation of Cuban state rhetoric and an Elián mnemonic in Cárdenas is repeated in Havana’s “Plaza de Elián,” or more formally Tribuna Anti-imperialista José Martí, where a statue of José Martí, the nineteenth-century Cuban nationalist, holds Elián in his arms while pointing to Florida. Meanwhile, in Little Havana, Miami, a sun-faded set of photographs and hand-painted signs, which insist God will save Elián yet, hang along the front fence of the house — now also a museum and site of pilgrimage — where Elián once lived in a state of siege. While Elián’s centrality in a struggle between virtuality and virtue continues on both sides of the Florida Strait, the Cuban nowhere could not contain Elián. During his U.S. sojourn many commentators noted that his travails were relayed in serial fashion to an international audience that also claimed intimate knowledge of the boy. Coming after the O.J. Simpson saga and the Clinton-Lewinsky affair, the Elián story confirmed journalist Rick Kushman’s identification of a ceaseless, restless U.S. media attention shift from one story to the next, generating an “übercoverage” that engulfs the country “in mini-hysteria” (Calvert 107). But In Elián’s case, the voyeuristic media-machine attained unprecedented intensity because it met and worked with the virtualities of the Cuban nowhere, part of it in the U.S.A. Thus, a transnational surfeit of Elián-narrative options was guaranteed for participants, audiences and commentators alike, wherever they resided. In Cuba, Elián was hailed as the child-hero of the Revolution. In Miami he was a savior sent by God, the proof supplied by the dolphins that saved him from sharks, and the Virgins who appeared in Little Havana after his arrival (De La Torre 3-5). Along the U.S.A.-Mexico border in 2000, Elián’s name was given to hundreds of Mexican babies whose parents thought the gesture would guarantee their sons a U.S. future. Day by day, Elián’s story was propelled across the globe by melodramatic plot devices familiar to viewers of soap opera: doubtful paternities; familial crimes; identity secrets and their revelation; conflicts of good over evil; the reuniting of long-lost relatives; and the operations of chance and its attendant “hand of Destiny, arcane and vaguely supernatural, transcending probability of doubt” (Welsh 22). Those devices were also favored by the amateur author, whose narratives confirm that the delirious parameters of cyberspace are easily matched in the worldly text. In Michael John’s self-published “history,” Betrayal of Elian Gonzalez, Elián is cast as the victim of a conspiracy traceable back to the hydra-headed monster of Castro-Clinton and the world media: “Elian’s case was MANIPULATED to achieve THEIR OVER-ALL AGENDA. Only time will bear that out” (143). His book is now out of print, and the last time I looked (August 2004) one copy was being offered on Amazon.com for US$186.30 (original price, $9.95). Guyana-born, Canadian-resident Frank Senauth’s eccentric novel, A Cry for Help: The Fantastic Adventures of Elian Gonzalez, joins his other ventures into vanity publishing: To Save the Titanic from Disaster I and II; To Save Flight 608 From Disaster; A Wish to Die – A Will to Live; A Time to Live, A Time to Die; and A Day of Terror: The Sagas of 11th September, 2001. In A Cry for Help, Rachel, a white witch and student of writing, travels back in time in order to save Elián’s mother and her fellow travelers from drowning in the Florida Strait. As Senauth says, “I was only able to write this dramatic story because of my gift for seeing things as they really are and sharing my mystic imagination with you the public” (25). As such texts confirm, Elián González is an aberrant addition to the traditional U.S.-sponsored celebrity roll-call. He had no ontological capacity to take advantage of, intervene in, comment on, or be known outside, the parallel narrative universe into which he was cast and remade. He was cast adrift as a mere proper name that impelled numerous authors to supply the boy with the biography he purportedly lacked. Resident of an “atmospheric depression in history” (Stenger 56), Elián was battled over by virtualized national rivals, mass-mediated, and laid bare for endless signification. Even before his return to Cuba, one commentator noted that Elián had been consumed, denied corporeality, and condemned to “live out his life in hyper-space” (Buzachero). That space includes the infamous episode of South Park from May 2000, in which Kenny, simulating Elián, is killed off as per the show’s episodic protocols. Symptomatic of Elián’s narrative dispersal, the Kenny-Elián simulation keeps on living and dying whenever the episode is re-broadcast on TV sets across the world. Appropriated and relocated to strange and estranging narrative terrain, one Elián now lives out his multiple existences in the Cuban-U.S. “atmosphere in history,” and the Elián icon continues to proliferate virtually anywhere. References Arboleya, Jesús. The Cuban Counter-Revolution. Trans. Rafael Betancourt. Research in International Studies, Latin America Series no. 33. Athens, OH: Ohio Center for International Studies, 2000. Braudy, Leo. The Frenzy of Renown: Fame and Its History. New York and Oxford: Oxford UP, 1986. Buzachero, Chris. “Elian Gonzalez in Hyper-Space.” Ctheory.net 24 May 2000. 19 Aug. 2004: http://www.ctheory.net/text_file.asp?pick=222>. Calvert, Clay. Voyeur Nation: Media, Privacy, and Peering in Modern Culture. Boulder: Westview, 2000. Castro, Fidel. “Speech Given by Fidel Castro, at the Ceremony Marking the Birthday of Elian Gonzalez and the Fourth Anniversary of the Battle of Ideas, Held at ‘Marcello Salado’ Primary School in Cardenas, Matanzas on December 5, 2003.” 15 Aug. 2004 http://www.revolutionarycommunist.org.uk/fidel_castro3.htm>. Cuban American National Foundation. Official Website. 2004. 20 Aug. 2004 http://www.canf.org/2004/principal-ingles.htm>. De La Torre, Miguel A. La Lucha For Cuba: Religion and Politics on the Streets of Miami. Berkeley: U of California P, 2003. “Elian Jokes.” Hypercenter.com 2000. 19 Aug. 2004 http://www.hypercenter.com/jokes/elian/index.shtml>. “Elian’s Home Page.” 2000. 19 Aug. 2004 http://elian.8k.com>. Everard, Jerry. Virtual States: The Internet and the Boundaries of the Nation-State. London and New York, Routledge, 2000. Fernández, Damián J. Cuba and the Politics of Passion. Austin: U of Texas P, 2000. Hernández, Camilo. “Cronología de Elián.” E-mail. 2000. Received 6 May 2000. “If Elian Gonzalez Was Jewish.” Lori’s Mishmash Humor Page. 2000. 10 Aug. 2004 http://www.geocities.com/CollegePark/6174/jokes/if-elian-was-jewish.htm>. John, Michael. Betrayal of Elian Gonzalez. MaxGo, 2000. “Liberty for Elián.” Official Save Elián Website 2000. June 2003 http://www.libertyforelian.org>. Marshall, P. David. Celebrity and Power: Fame in Contemporary Culture. Minneapolis and London: U of Minnesota P, 1997. Ramos, Jorge. La otra cara de América: Historias de los inmigrantes latinoamericanos que están cambiando a Estados Unidos. México, DF: Grijalbo, 2000. Rodden, Lois. “Elian Gonzalez.” Astrodatabank 2000. 20 Aug. 2004 http://www.astrodatabank.com/NM/GonzalezElian.htm>. Rowe, John Carlos. 2002. The New American Studies. Minneapolis and London: U of Minnesota P, 2002. “The Sad Saga of Elian Gonzalez.” July 2004. 19 Aug. 2004 http://www.revlu.com/Elian.html>. Senauth, Frank. A Cry for Help: The Fantastic Adventures of Elian Gonzalez. Victoria, Canada: Trafford, 2000. Stenger, Nicole. “Mind Is a Leaking Rainbow.” Cyberspace: First Steps. Ed. Michael Benedikt. Cambridge, MA: MIT P, 1991. 49-58. Welsh, Alexander. George Eliot and Blackmail. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1985. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Allatson, Paul. "The Virtualization of Elián González." M/C Journal 7.5 (2004). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0411/16-allatson.php>. APA Style Allatson, P. (Nov. 2004) "The Virtualization of Elián González," M/C Journal, 7(5). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0411/16-allatson.php>.

Cuando uno de nosotros se enteró (alrededor del año 2002) que en Estados Unidos —país que casi siempre nos lleva la delantera y al que muchos mexicanos buscan imitar y agradar—, se manufacturó una crisis de la educación pública desde ciertas esferas del propio gobierno, no pudo menos que asombrarse y conseguir el libro que reportaba las indagaciones respectivas: The Manufactured Crisis: Myths, Fraud and Attack on America's Public School, escrito por David Berlinger y Bruce Biddle y publicado en 1995 por Perseus Publishing, en Cambridge, Massachusetts.A manera de reseña, presentamos algunos fragmentos del prólogo:Este libro fue escrito con indignación.Durante un buen periodo de nuestra historia reciente, el gobierno federal ha parecido estar dispuesto a promover los intereses de la educación pública. Los políticos que favorecían a las escuelas públicas aparecieron regularmente en la Casa Blanca y en el Congreso; varios programas que apoyan las necesidades de nuestras escuelas pasaron por una revisión extensa durante años; y aunque sabíamos que esas escuelas continuaban teniendo muchos problemas, nuestros líderes políticos parecían estar al tanto de esos problemas y se disponían a respetar los resultados de las declaraciones de la investigación en educación. De este modo, como muchos otros americanos, comenzamos a creer que en sus discusiones sobre la educación, nuestros líderes federales fueron, dentro de ciertos límites, personas honestas y bien intencionadas.Los eventos de las últimas décadas, ciertamente, han desafiado esas creencias. En 1983 la Casa Blanca de Reagan comenzó a hacer reclamos insistentes, atacando la conducta y los logros de las escuelas públicas de los Estados Unidos —reclamos que fueron objetados con las evidencias que teníamos. Al principio pensamos que era un error, pero estos y otros reclamos falsos y hostiles fueron pronto repetidos por varios líderes de las administraciones de Reagan y Bush. Los reclamos también fueron adoptados en muchos documentos emitidos por líderes industriales y empresariales y fueron infinitamente repetidos y exagerados por la prensa. Conforme pasó el tiempo, inclusive algunos líderes de la comunidad educativa —incluyendo algunas personas que conocíamos— comenzaron a asumir estas declaraciones como hechos.Entonces, comenzamos lentamente a sospechar que algo no estaba del todo bien, que una estrategia malévola podría estar en progreso. Sin embargo, éramos gente ocupada y nos tomó tiempo comenzar a actuar de manera acorde con nuestras sospechas. Aunque habíamos sido amigos por algunos años, nuestros primeros actos fueron independientes. David [Berlinger] comenzó a dar discursos en los que cuestionaba algunas afirmaciones falsas hechas sobre las escuelas y sus efectos. Bruce [Biddle] comenzó a escribir ensayos acerca de varias formas en las que los políticos federales y sus aliados boicotearon la investigación y malversaron evidencias sobre la educación.Eventualmente, descubrimos que nos preocupaban las mismas cosas y decidimos hacer juntos un libro; entonces comenzó verdaderamente nuestra educación. Entre más hurgábamos en nuestra historia, más mentiras asquerosas desenterrábamos sobre la educación; más sabíamos acerca de cómo los oficiales de gobierno y sus aliados ignoraban, suprimían y distorsionaban evidencias; y más descubríamos cómo los americanos eran engañados sobre las escuelas y sus logros. Este fue el origen de nuestra indignación. Comenzamos también a preguntarnos por qué estaba pasando esto: ¿Por qué algunas personas en Washington estaban tan ansiosas en hacer pagar a los maestros? ¿Qué era lo que realmente tramaban? ¿Qué problemas trataban de ocultar? ¿Qué acciones querían promover o prevenir?Aprendimos también que las respuestas a estas preguntas no eran tan simples. Algunos de los que habían aceptado los mitos hostiles acerca de la educación habían estado genuinamente preocupados por nuestras escuelas; algunos habían malinterpretado las evidencias, algunos habían sido engañados y otros habían tenido un fundamento comprensible para sus acciones. Sin embargo, muchos de los mitos parecían también haber sido dichos por personas poderosas, quienes —a pesar de sus declaraciones— perseguían una agenda política diseñada para debilitar a las escuelas públicas de la nación, redistribuir el apoyo para las escuelas, de manera que los estudiantes privilegiados fueran favorecidos por sobre los estudiantes necesitados, o inclusive abolir todas estas escuelas. Con este fin, los políticos han estado preparados para decir mentiras, suprimir evidencias, hacer pagar a los maestros y sembrar un sinfín de confusiones. Consideramos esta conducta particularmente despreciable.Este libro, pues, está diseñado para establecer un registro de estos eventos; examinar la evidencia y corregir los mitos hostiles que han sido dichos sobre nuestras escuelas; explorar por qué fueron dichos y qué tramaban los cuenta-mitos; examinar los problemas reales de la educación, que han sido enmascarados con frecuencia; y explorar lo que efectivamente se podría hacer respecto de esos problemas.Hoy, en el México de finales de 2008, no puede uno más que pasmarse por lo que sucede con la educación pública (sobre todo, aunque no exclusivamente, en la Educación Básica): las mismas autoridades afirman que ya no hacen falta más maestros; y entonces proponen convertir las Escuelas Normales en escuelas técnicas orientadas al sector turístico. Las mismas autoridades federales (o sea, la SEP) tienen como programa principalísimo la aplicación de la prueba ENLACE (en todos los niveles) y el de las becas del programa Oportunidades (más por futuros votos que por beneficiar realmente a la gente). Fuera de esos programas y de miles y millones de palabras huecas, no existe en México un plan de acción ni acciones reales y efectivas contra los muchos rezagos educativos acumulados durante décadas. Lo más triste es que, evidentemente, no existe la intención de tomarlas, por parte de los funcionarios que tienen la obligación de hacerlo. Mientras los mexicanos, es decir, los ciudadanos, no podamos, por así decirlo, "tomar de una oreja a los funcionarios" y ponerlos a trabajar y a producir resultados (o correrlos e impedirles que asuman cualquier otro cargo público de manera vitalicia, por modesto que sea), evidentemente la situación del país no cambiará.Por su parte, las evaluaciones han mostrado no ser la panacea: tomemos como indicadores los resultados de la prueba PISA (aplicada a jóvenes de 15 años, que terminan la secundaria o inician la preparatoria). Obsérvese en el cuadro siguiente una síntesis de los resultados de México en Español: MÉXICOPISA 2000PISA 2003PISA 2006Puntaje promedio422400410Lugar ocupado35 de 4239 de 4143 de 56Rango total327-546375-543285-556 Si en seis años la evaluación no rindió sus supuestos frutos, ¿cuántos años más estaremos entretenidos con este circo de cifras, esperando a ver cuándo mejoran los puntajes? Los libros, folletos, talleres, pláticas y carteles orientados a los maestros y a los padres de familia no han faltado, y no han servido ni servirán... Lo podemos asegurar porque los puntajes que los estudiantes obtienen en estas pruebas no dependen sólo de su maestro ni de su escuela: dependen, y quizá mucho más nítidamente, de la localidad en que viven, de las exigencias que esa localidad le impone a la gente con relación a los conocimientos y "habilidades" promovidos por la escuela (y ni el arado con bueyes, ni la pizca del maíz ni el corte de café se aprende a hacer con instructivos; no los hay tampoco para migrar pa'l norte en forma segura); influye también la entidad en que se viva (no es lo mismo asistir a la escuela en Coyoacán, Distrito Federal, en Monterrey, Nuevo León o en La Tinaja, Veracruz). Todas las condiciones de contorno (socio-culturales y económicas) que rodean al niño, al maestro y a la escuela modulan los aprendizajes y, por tanto, los puntajes obtenidos. Algo largamente sostenido y fundamentado en los debates que se han tenido en este país sobre la educación intercultural, que cuenta, además, con un profuso marco normativo-legal que lo respalda y sostiene.Entonces, es injusto proponer que el aumento salarial de los maestros esté condicionado por los resultados de los niños en las evaluaciones, porque no es lo mismo atender a niños de Coyoacán que a niños de La Tinaja: en un sentido importante, no son los mismos niños. Las condiciones de contorno de las escuelas en México se dejan comparar mejor, al menos en algunos aspectos, con escuelas de Madagascar que con las de Finlandia: un etnógrafo en Madagascar reporta como increíble que el maestro de una localidad pequeña deba suspender clases el día de cobro. De lo más común en Veracruz. Contrástese ese dato con el del sueldo: un maestro gana 2,300 euros mensuales en Finlandia y unos 380 euros mensuales en México (como un dato muy general que varía según muchas circunstancias).Se podrá objetar que existe el proyecto de Reforma Integral de la Educación Básica. Sin embargo, sabemos bien que no es aceptado por muchos de los profesores (y eso nos permite prever, con bases científicas, que aunque logren terminarla e imponerla, no llegará a las aulas, es decir, a los niños), que se está haciendo al vapor y de la mano de una Alianza que es abiertamente repudiada por muchos (y en silencio por otros).También sabemos que retoma pasadas reformas, como la de Secundaria (aprobada al vapor a finales del sexenio trágico, el "del cambio") y la de Preescolar (sabemos que enfatiza el desarrollo de “competencias”, término que ni siquiera se ha discutido ampliamente desde el 2004 y que en opinión de un experto en currículum como lo es Díaz Barriga, no existen elementos claros para desarrollar programas de estudio basados en competencias). Esas reformas no han sido evaluadas a profundidad: no se ha preguntado a los maestros cómo se sintieron (aquellos que sí decidieron seguirla), qué dificultades encontraron; tampoco se ha investigado con los estudiantes de secundaria qué obstáculos enfrentaron en el día a día tomando clases.Se trata, en resumen, de un nuevo Plan de Estudios cuya aplicación, viabilidad de ser llevado a cabo (en las condiciones reales de las escuelas reales de México) y su eficiencia no se han probado. La ACE es tan repudiada que ha tenido que aliarse con Televisa para organizar un Campeonato Escolar de futbol a nivel nacional, a ver si a través de él, es decir, del deporte más popular y practicado (por divulgado y apoyado), logran aceptación.Sin embargo, todos estos hechos, es decir, las prioridades gubernamentales y las acciones efectivas nos hacen sospechar, justamente, que pueda estarse fabricando una crisis de la educación pública en México, orientada a permitir la inserción de la iniciativa privada en la educación pública. Así como se pretende abrir las puertas de PEMEX a la iniciativa privada, se están abriendo las puertas de la SEP a Televisa, por ejemplo.Podríamos imaginar algunos de los argumentos: no hay recursos suficientes para verdaderamente arreglar las escuelas y convertirlas en espacios no sólo dignos, sino apropiados para que todos los alumnos y estudiantes del país reciban una educación de calidad: así pues, vendamos las escuelas (los edificios) y que ellos inviertan en su remodelación; como las escuelas privadas son las que mejores puntajes obtienen, significa que ellas sí saben y pueden hacer bien las cosas: dejemos pues a la iniciativa privada que las haga, que contrate a los maestros que quiera, por el sueldo que quiera y bajo los flexibles contratos que quiera; como ya no necesitamos construir más escuelas, ya no harán falta más maestros: cerremos, pues, las Escuelas Normales.Tenemos que considerar que las discusiones al respecto están en su clímax, las acciones emprendidas en otros estados nos muestran que las protestas pueden degenerar en actos de violencia, los cuales aún cuando provengan de argumentos válidos no serán la mejor vía para entablar un diálogo reflexivo y productivo, en el que podamos mostrar disposición de escuchar para exigir ser escuchados, donde forcemos (sin fuerza física) a la revisión de las propuestas y a la construcción de otras nuevas, organizándonos, discutiendo y proponiendo sin que cada sector involucrado quiera “jalar agua para su molino”, definiendo cada uno su postura y tomando conciencia de cuál es el objetivo que se desea alcanzar.Ciertamente no hay que ser ingenuos y creer que por la vía del diálogo todo se resolverá; no será así, pero si queremos mostrar que deseamos un cambio en otra dirección, hay que ser lo más congruentes que se pueda con nuestras demandas y nuestras acciones. Sólo así podremos unirnos para decirles a las autoridades: vean las investigaciones, los resultados, los trabajos de los maestros, los logros que se obtienen a pesar de las carencias económicas e institucionales y la poca eficacia de las evaluaciones masivas y constantes. La vía no es el cierre de las escuelas normales sino la preparación de más y mejores maestros que atiendan con esmero a las escuelas y a los grupos más vulnerables.Sin embargo, esperamos estar rotundamente equivocados en nuestras sospechas. No obstante, vigilemos y consideremos esa posibilidad. Por eso abramos espacios de discusión con profesores y padres de familia, con miembros de escuelas normales y facultades de pedagogía y ciencias de la educación, con dirigentes estatales de sindicatos, con los que repudian las reformas y manifiestan su rechazo, con los funcionarios y todos aquellos que quieran y deban dialogar en torno al tema.Desde hace al menos 30 años, el CONACyT ha aportado una enorme cantidad de recursos públicos para la formación de investigadores mexicanos de todas las áreas del saber, y también para complementar sus salarios, mediante el SNI. Hoy, existe un gran corpus de investigación educativa en el país y un conjunto muy grande de investigadores en el campo. Entonces, hay en México personas formadas que pueden realmente reorientar la educación básica nacional, no sólo por formación académica, sino por haber caminado por muchos años en el campo. Sería absurdo (como lo es) prescindir de sus aportaciones y creer que un grupúsculo de funcionarios-investigadores de la SEP tienen el conocimiento en sus manos. ¿Para qué, entonces, se invierten recursos en formar investigadores y en sostener una plataforma de investigación nacional si, al momento de las decisiones, son los políticos (y sólo ellos, en comparsa con algunos, muy pocos funcionarios-investigadores) quienes toman las decisiones, sin considerar lo que sabemos y lo que no sabemos de la educación nacional?

In a media saturated world, doodles have recently received the kind of attention usually reserved for coverage of racy extra marital affairs, corrupt governance, and product malfunction. Former British Prime Minister Blair’s private doodling at a World Economic Forum meeting in 2005 raised suspicions that he, according to one keen graphologist, struggled “to maintain control in a confusing world," which infers he was attempting to cohere a scattershot, fragmentary series of events (Spiegel). However, placid-faced Microsoft CEO Bill Gates, who sat nearby, actually scrawled the doodles. In this case, perhaps the scrawls mimicked the ambience in the room: Gates might have been ‘tuning’–registering the ‘white noise’ of the participants, letting his unconscious dictate doodles as a way to cope with the dissonance trekking in with the officialspeak. The doodles may have documented and registered the space between words, acting like deposits from his gestalt.Sometimes the most intriguing doodles co-exist with printed texts. This includes common vernacular graffiti that lines public and private books and magazines. Such graffiti exposes tensions in the role of readers as well as horror vacui: a fear of unused, empty space. Yet, school children fingering fresh pages and stiff book spines for the first few times often consider their book pages as sanctioned, discreet, and inviolable. The book is an object of financial and cultural investment, or imbued both with mystique and ideologies. Yet, in the e-book era, the old-fashioned, physical page is a relic of sorts, a holdover from coarse papyrus culled from wetland sage, linking us to the First Dynasty in Egypt. Some might consider the page as a vessel for typography, a mere framing device for text. The margins may reflect a perimeter of nothingness, an invisible borderland that doodles render visible by inhabiting them. Perhaps the margins are a bare landscape, like unmarred flat sand in a black and white panchromatic photo with unique tonal signature and distinct grain. Perhaps the margins are a mute locality, a space where words have evaporated, or a yet-to-be-explored environment, or an ambient field. Then comes the doodle, an icon of vernacular art.As a modern folklorist, I have studied and explored vernacular art at length, especially forms that may challenge and fissure aesthetic, cultural, and social mores, even within my own field. For instance, I contend that Grandma Prisbrey’s “Bottle Village,” featuring millions of artfully arranged pencils, bottles, and dolls culled from dumps in Southern California, is a syncretic culturescape with underlying feminist symbolism, not merely the product of trauma and hoarding (Ensminger). Recently, I flew to Oregon to deliver a paper on Mexican-American gravesite traditions. In a quest for increased multicultural tolerance, I argued that inexpensive dimestore objects left on Catholic immigrant graves do not represent a messy landscape of trinkets but unique spiritual environments with links to customs 3,000 years old. For me, doodles represent a variation on graffiti-style art with cultural antecedents stretching back throughout history, ranging from ancient scrawls on Greek ruins to contemporary park benches (with chiseled names, dates, and symbols), public bathroom latrinalia, and spray can aerosol art, including ‘bombing’ and ‘tagging’ hailed as “Spectacular Vernaculars” by Russell Potter (1995). Noted folklorist Alan Dundes mused on the meaning of latrinalia in Here I Sit – A Study of American Latrinalia (1966), which has inspired pop culture books and web pages for the preservation and discussion of such art (see for instance, www.itsallinthehead.com/gallery1.html). Older texts such as Classic American Graffiti by Allen Walker Read (1935), originally intended for “students of linguistics, folk-lore, abnormal psychology,” reveal the field’s longstanding interest in marginal, crude, and profane graffiti.Yet, to my knowledge, a monograph on doodles has yet to be published by a folklorist, perhaps because the art form is reconsidered too idiosyncratic, too private, the difference between jots and doodles too blurry for a taxonomy and not the domain of identifiable folk groups. In addition, the doodles in texts often remain hidden until single readers encounter them. No broad public interaction is likely, unless a library text circulates freely, which may not occur after doodles are discovered. In essence, the books become tainted, infected goods. Whereas latrinalia speaks openly and irreverently, doodles feature a different scale and audience.Doodles in texts may represent a kind of speaking from the ‘margin’s margins,’ revealing the reader-cum-writer’s idiosyncratic, self-meaningful, and stylised hieroglyphics from the ambient margins of one’s consciousness set forth in the ambient margins of the page. The original page itself is an ambient territory that allows the meaning of the text to take effect. When those liminal spaces (both between and betwixt, in which the rules of page format, design, style, and typography are abandoned) are altered by the presence of doodles, the formerly blank, surplus, and soft spaces of the page offer messages coterminous with the text, often allowing readers to speak, however haphazardly and unconsciously, with and against the triggering text. The bleached whiteness can become a crowded milieu in the hands of a reader re-scripting the ambient territory. If the book is borrowed, then the margins are also an intimate negotiation with shared or public space. The cryptic residue of the doodler now resides, waiting, for the city of eyes.Throughout history, both admired artists and Presidents regularly doodled. Famed Italian Renaissance painter Filippo Lippi avoided strenuous studying by doodling in his books (Van Cleave 44). Both sides of the American political spectrum have produced plentiful inky depictions as well: roughshod Democratic President Johnson drew flags and pagodas; former Hollywood fantasy fulfiller turned politician Republican President Reagan’s specialty was western themes, recalling tropes both from his actor period and his duration acting as President; meanwhile, former law student turned current President, Barack Obama, has sketched members of Congress and the Senate for charity auctions. These doodles are rich fodder for both psychologists and cross-discipline analysts that propose theories regarding the automatic writing and self-styled miniature pictures of civic leaders. Doodles allow graphologists to navigate and determine the internal, cognitive fabric of the maker. To critics, they exist as mere trifles and offer nothing more than an iota of insight; doodles are not uncanny offerings from the recesses of memory, like bite-sized Rorschach tests, but simply sloppy scrawls of the bored.Ambient music theory may shed some light. Timothy Morton argues that Brian Eno designed to make music that evoked “space whose quality had become minimally significant” and “deconstruct the opposition … between figure and ground.” In fact, doodles may yield the same attributes as well. After a doodle is inserted into texts, the typography loses its primacy. There is a merging of the horizons. The text of the author can conflate with the text of the reader in an uneasy dance of meaning: the page becomes an interface revealing a landscape of signs and symbols with multiple intelligences–one manufactured and condoned, the other vernacular and unsanctioned. A fixed end or beginning between the two no longer exists. The ambient space allows potential energies to hover at the edge, ready to illustrate a tension zone and occupy the page. The blank spaces keep inviting responses. An emergent discourse is always in waiting, always threatening to overspill the text’s intended meaning. In fact, the doodles may carry more weight than the intended text: the hierarchy between authorship and readership may topple.Resistant reading may take shape during these bouts. The doodle is an invasion and signals the geography of disruption, even when innocuous. It is a leveling tool. As doodlers place it alongside official discourse, they move away from positions of passivity, being mere consumers, and claim their own autonomy and agency. The space becomes co-determinant as boundaries are blurred. The destiny of the original text’s meaning is deferred. The habitus of the reader becomes embodied in the scrawl, and the next reader must negotiate and navigate the cultural capital of this new author. As such, the doodle constitutes an alternative authority and economy of meaning within the text.Recent studies indicate doodling, often regarded as behavior that announces a person’s boredom and withdrawal, is actually a very special tool to prevent memory loss. Jackie Andrade, an expert from the School of Psychology at the University of Plymouth, maintains that doodling actually “offsets the effects of selective memory blockade,” which yields a surprising result (quoted in “Doodling Gets”). Doodlers exhibit 29% more memory recall than those who passively listen, frozen in an unequal bond with the speaker/lecturer. Students that doodle actually retain more information and are likely more productive due to their active listening. They adeptly absorb information while students who stare patiently or daydream falter.Furthermore, in a 2006 paper, Andrew Kear argues that “doodling is a way in which students, consciously or not, stake a claim of personal agency and challenge some the values inherent in the education system” (2). As a teacher concerned with the engagement of students, he asked for three classes to submit their doodles. Letting them submit any two-dimensional graphic or text made during a class (even if made from body fluid), he soon discovered examples of “acts of resistance” in “student-initiated effort[s] to carve out a sense of place within the educational institution” (6). Not simply an ennui-prone teenager or a proto-surrealist trying to render some automatic writing from the fringes of cognition, a student doodling may represent contested space both in terms of the page itself and the ambience of the environment. The doodle indicates tension, and according to Kear, reflects students reclaiming “their own self-recognized voice” (6).In a widely referenced 1966 article (known as the “doodle” article) intended to describe the paragraph organisational styles of different cultures, Robert Kaplan used five doodles to investigate a writer’s thought patterns, which are rooted in cultural values. Now considered rather problematic by some critics after being adopted by educators for teacher-training materials, Kaplan’s doodles-as-models suggest, “English speakers develop their ideas in a linear, hierarchal fashion and ‘Orientals’ in a non-liner, spiral fashion…” (Severino 45). In turn, when used as pedagogical tools, these graphics, intentionally or not, may lead an “ethnocentric, assimilationist stance” (45). In this case, doodles likely shape the discourse of English as Second Language instruction. Doodles also represent a unique kind of “finger trace,” not unlike prints from the tips of a person’s fingers and snowflakes. Such symbol systems might be used for “a means of lightweight authentication,” according to Christopher Varenhorst of MIT (1). Doodles, he posits, can be used as “passdoodles"–a means by which a program can “quickly identify users.” They are singular expressions that are quirky and hard to duplicate; thus, doodles could serve as substitute methods of verifying people who desire devices that can safeguard their privacy without users having to rely on an ever-increasing number of passwords. Doodles may represent one such key. For many years, psychologists and psychiatrists have used doodles as therapeutic tools in their treatment of children that have endured hardship, ailments, and assault. They may indicate conditions, explain various symptoms and pathologies, and reveal patterns that otherwise may go unnoticed. For instance, doodles may “reflect a specific physical illness and point to family stress, accidents, difficult sibling relationships, and trauma” (Lowe 307). Lowe reports that children who create a doodle featuring their own caricature on the far side of the page, distant from an image of parent figures on the same page, may be experiencing detachment, while the portrayal of a father figure with “jagged teeth” may indicate a menace. What may be difficult to investigate in a doctor’s office conversation or clinical overview may, in fact, be gleaned from “the evaluation of a child’s spontaneous doodle” (307). So, if children are suffering physically or psychologically and unable to express themselves in a fully conscious and articulate way, doodles may reveal their “self-concept” and how they feel about their bodies; therefore, such creative and descriptive inroads are important diagnostic tools (307). Austrian born researcher Erich Guttman and his cohort Walter MacLay both pioneered art therapy in England during the mid-twentieth century. They posited doodles might offer some insight into the condition of schizophrenics. Guttman was intrigued by both the paintings associated with the Surrealist movement and the pioneering, much-debated work of Sigmund Freud too. Although Guttman mostly studied professionally trained artists who suffered from delusions and other conditions, he also collected a variety of art from patients, including those undergoing mescaline therapy, which alters a person’s consciousness. In a stroke of luck, they were able to convince a newspaper editor at the Evening Standard to provide them over 9,000 doodles that were provided by readers for a contest, each coded with the person’s name, age, and occupation. This invaluable data let the academicians compare the work of those hospitalised with the larger population. Their results, released in 1938, contain several key declarations and remain significant contributions to the field. Subsequently, Francis Reitman recounted them in his own book Psychotic Art: Doodles “release the censor of the conscious mind,” allowing a person to “relax, which to creative people was indispensable to production.”No appropriate descriptive terminology could be agreed upon.“Doodles are not communications,” for the meaning is only apparent when analysed individually.Doodles are “self-meaningful.” (37) Doodles, the authors also established, could be divided into this taxonomy: “stereotypy, ornamental details, movements, figures, faces and animals” or those “depicting scenes, medley, and mixtures” (37). The authors also noted that practitioners from the Jungian school of psychology often used “spontaneously produced drawings” that were quite “doodle-like in nature” in their own discussions (37). As a modern folklorist, I venture that doodles offer rich potential for our discipline as well. At this stage, I am offering a series of dictums, especially in regards to doodles that are commonly found adjacent to text in books and magazines, notebooks and journals, that may be expanded upon and investigated further. Doodles allow the reader to repopulate the text with ideogram-like expressions that are highly personalised, even inscrutable, like ambient sounds.Doodles re-purpose the text. The text no longer is unidirectional. The text becomes a point of convergence between writer and reader. The doodling allows for such a conversation, bilateral flow, or “talking back” to the text.Doodles reveal a secret language–informal codes that hearken back to the “lively, spontaneous, and charged with feeling” works of child art or naïve art that Victor Sanua discusses as being replaced in a child’s later years by art that is “stilted, formal, and conforming” (62).Doodling animates blank margins, the dead space of the text adjacent to the script, making such places ripe for spontaneous, fertile, and exploratory markings.Doodling reveals a democratic, participatory ethos. No text is too sacred, no narrative too inviolable. Anything can be reworked by the intimate graffiti of the reader. The authority of the book is not fixed; readers negotiate and form a second intelligence imprinted over the top of the original text, blurring modes of power.Doodles reveal liminal moments. Since the reader in unmonitored, he or she can express thoughts that may be considered marginal or taboo by the next reader. The original subject of the book itself does not restrict the reader. Thus, within the margins of the page, a brief suspension of boundaries and borders, authority and power, occurs. The reader hides in anonymity, free to reroute the meaning of the book. Doodling may convey a reader’s infantalism. Every book can become a picture book. This art can be the route returning a reader to the ambience of childhood.Doodling may constitute Illuminated/Painted Texts in reverse, commemorating the significance of the object in hitherto unexpected forms and revealing the reader’s codex. William Blake adorned his own poems by illuminating the skin/page that held his living verse; common readers may do so too, in naïve, nomadic, and primitive forms. Doodling demarcates tension zones, yielding social-historical insights into eras while offering psychological glimpses and displaying aesthetic values of readers-cum-writers.Doodling reveals margins as inter-zones, replete with psychogeography. While the typography is sanctioned, legitimate, normalised, and official discourse (“chartered” and “manacled,” to hijack lines from William Blake), the margins are a vernacular depository, a terminus, allowing readers a sense of agency and autonomy. The doodled page becomes a visible reminder and signifier: all pages are potentially “contested” spaces. Whereas graffiti often allows a writer to hide anonymously in the light in a city besieged by multiple conflicting texts, doodles allow a reader-cum-writer’s imprint to live in the cocoon of a formerly fossilised text, waiting for the light. Upon being opened, the book, now a chimera, truly breathes. Further exploration and analysis should likely consider several issues. What truly constitutes and shapes the role of agent and reader? Is the reader an agent all the time, or only when offering resistant readings through doodles? How is a doodler’s agency mediated by the author or the format of texts in forms that I have to map? Lastly, if, as I have argued, the ambient space allows potential energies to hover at the edge, ready to illustrate a tension zone and occupy the page, what occurs in the age of digital or e-books? Will these platforms signal an age of acquiescence to manufactured products or signal era of vernacular responses, somehow hitched to html code and PDF file infiltration? Will bytes totally replace type soon in the future, shaping unforeseen actions by doodlers? Attached Figures Figure One presents the intimate graffiti of my grandfather, found in the 1907 edition of his McGuffey’s Eclectic Spelling Book. The depiction is simple, even crude, revealing a figure found on the adjacent page to Lesson 248, “Of Characters Used in Punctuation,” which lists the perfunctory functions of commas, semicolons, periods, and so forth. This doodle may offset the routine, rote, and rather humdrum memorisation of such grammatical tools. The smiling figure may embody and signify joy on an otherwise machine-made bare page, a space where my grandfather illustrated his desires (to lighten a mood, to ease dissatisfaction?). Historians Joe Austin and Michael Willard examine how youth have been historically left without legitimate spaces in which to live out their autonomy outside of adult surveillance. For instance, graffiti often found on walls and trains may reflect a sad reality: young people are pushed to appropriate “nomadic, temporary, abandoned, illegal, or otherwise unwatched spaces within the landscape” (14). Indeed, book graffiti, like the graffiti found on surfaces throughout cities, may offer youth a sense of appropriation, authorship, agency, and autonomy: they take the page of the book, commit their writing or illustration to the page, discover some freedom, and feel temporarily independent even while they are young and disempowered. Figure Two depicts the doodles of experimental filmmaker Jim Fetterley (Animal Charm productions) during his tenure as a student at the Art Institute of Chicago in the early 1990s. His two doodles flank the text of “Lady Lazarus” by Sylvia Plath, regarded by most readers as an autobiographical poem that addresses her own suicide attempts. The story of Lazarus is grounded in the Biblical story of John Lazarus of Bethany, who was resurrected from the dead. The poem also alludes to the Holocaust (“Nazi Lampshades”), the folklore surrounding cats (“And like the cat I have nine times to die”), and impending omens of death (“eye pits “ … “sour breath”). The lower doodle seems to signify a motorised tank-like machine, replete with a furnace or engine compartment on top that bellows smoke. Such ominous images, saturated with potential cartoon-like violence, may link to the World War II references in the poem. Meanwhile, the upper doodle seems to be curiously insect-like, and Fetterley’s name can be found within the illustration, just like Plath’s poem is self-reflexive and addresses her own plight. Most viewers might find the image a bit more lighthearted than the poem, a caricature of something biomorphic and surreal, but not very lethal. Again, perhaps this is a counter-message to the weight of the poem, a way to balance the mood and tone, or it may well represent the larval-like apparition that haunts the very thoughts of Plath in the poem: the impending disease of her mind, as understood by the wary reader. References Austin, Joe, and Michael Willard. “Introduction: Angels of History, Demons of Culture.” Eds. Joe Austion and Michael Willard. Generations of Youth: Youth Cultures and History in Twentieth-Century America. New York: NYU Press, 1998. “Doodling Gets Its Due: Those Tiny Artworks May Aid Memory.” World Science 2 March 2009. 15 Jan. 2009 ‹http://www.world-science.net/othernews/090302_doodle›. Dundes, Alan. “Here I Sit – A Study of American Latrinalia.” Papers of the Kroeber Anthropological Society 34: 91-105. Ensminger, David. “All Bottle Up: Reinterpreting the Culturescape of Grandma Prisbey.” Adironack Review 9.3 (Fall 2008). ‹http://adirondackreview.homestead.com/ensminger2.html›. Kear, Andrew. “Drawings in the Margins: Doodling in Class an Act of Reclamation.” Graduate Student Conference. University of Toronto, 2006. ‹http://gradstudentconference.oise.utoronto.ca/documents/185/Drawing%20in%20the%20Margins.doc›. Lowe, Sheila R. The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Handwriting Analysis. New York: Alpha Books, 1999. Morton, Timothy. “‘Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star’ as an Ambient Poem; a Study of Dialectical Image; with Some Remarks on Coleridge and Wordsworth.” Romantic Circles Praxis Series (2001). 6 Jan. 2009 ‹http://www.rc.umd.edu/praxis/ecology/morton/morton.html›. Potter, Russell A. Spectacular Vernaculars: Hip Hop and the Politics of Postmodernism. Albany: State University of New York, 1995. Read, Allen Walker. Classic American Graffiti: Lexical Evidence from Folk Epigraphy in Western North America. Waukesha, Wisconsin: Maledicta Press, 1997. Reitman, Francis. Psychotic Art. London: Routledge, 1999. Sanua, Victor. “The World of Mystery and Wonder of the Schizophrenic Patient.” International Journal of Social Psychiatry 8 (1961): 62-65. Severino, Carol. “The ‘Doodles’ in Context: Qualifying Claims about Contrastive Rhetoric.” The Writing Center Journal 14.1 (Fall 1993): 44-62. Van Cleave, Claire. Master Drawings of the Italian Rennaissance. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 2007. Varenhost, Christopher. Passdoodles: A Lightweight Authentication Method. Research Science Institute. Cambridge, Mass.: Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2004.

All critics declare not only their judgment of the work but also their claim to the right to talk about it and judge it. In short, they take part in a struggle for the monopoly of legitimate discourse about the work of art, and consequently in the production of the value of the work of art. (Pierre Bourdieu 36). As it becomes blindingly obvious that ‘cultural production’, including the cinema, now underpins an economy every bit as brutal in its nascent state as the Industrial Revolution was for its victims 200 years ago, both critique and cinephilia seem faded and useless to me. (Meaghan Morris 700). The music’s loud, the lights are low. I’m at a party and somebody’s shouting at me. “How many films do you see every week?” “Do you really get in for free?” “So what should I see next Saturday night?” These are the questions that shape the small talk of my life. After seven years of reviewing movies you’d think I’d have ready answers and sparkling rehearsed tip-offs to scatter at the slightest quiver of interest. And yet I feel anxious when I’m asked to predict some stranger’s enjoyment – their 15-odd bucks worth of dark velvet pleasure. Who am I to say what they’ll enjoy? Who am I to judge what’s worthwhile? As editor of the film pages of The Big Issue magazine (Australian edition), I make such value judgments every day, sifting through hundreds of press releases, invitations and interview offers. I choose just three films and three DVDs to be reviewed each fortnight, and one film to form the subject of a feature article or interview. The film pages are a very small part of an independent magazine that exists to provide an income for the homeless and long-term unemployed people who sell it on the streets of Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane, Adelaide and Perth. And no, homeless people don’t go to the movies very often but our relatively educated and affluent city-dwelling readers do. The letters page of the magazine suggests that readers’ favourite pages are the Vendor Portraits – the extraordinary and sobering photographs and life stories of the people who are out there on the streets selling the magazine. Yet the editorial policy is to maintain a certain lightness of touch amidst the serious business. Thus, the entertainment pages (music, books, film, TV and humour) have no specific social justice agenda. But if there’s a new Australian film out there that deals with the topic of homelessness, it seems imperative to at least consider the story. Rather than offering in-depth analysis of particular films and the ways I go about judging them, the following diary excerpts instead offer a sketch of the practical process of editorial decision-making. Why review this film and not that one? Why interview this actor or that film director? And how do these choices fit within the broad goals of a social justice publication? Created randomly, from a quick scan of the last twelve months, the diary is a scribbled attempt to justify, or in Bourdieu’s terms, “legitimate” the critical role I play, and to try and explain how that role can never be fully defined by an aesthetic that is divorced from social and political realities. August 2004 My editor calls me and asks if I’ve seen Tom White, the new low-budget Australian film by Alkinos Tsilimidos. I have, and I hated it. Starring Colin Friels, the film follows the journey of a middle-aged middle-class man who walks out of his life and onto the streets. It’s a grimy, frustrating film, supported by only the barest bones of narrative. I was bored and infuriated by the central character, and I know it’s the kind of under-developed story that’s keeping Australian audiences away from our own films. And yet … it’s a local film that actually dares to tackle issues of homelessness and mental illness, and it’s a story that presents a truth about homelessness that’s borne out by many of our vendors: that any one of us could, except by the grace of God or luck, find ourselves sleeping rough. My editor wants me to interview Colin Friels, who will appear on the cover of the magazine. I don’t want to touch the film, and I prefer interviewing people whose work genuinely interests and excites me. But there are other factors to be considered. The film’s exhibitor, Palace Films, is offering to hold charity screenings for our benefit, and they are regular advertising supporters of The Big Issue. My editor, a passionate and informed film lover himself, understands the quandary. We are in no way beholden to Palace, he assures me, and we can tread the fine line with this film, using it to highlight the important issues at hand, without necessarily recommending the film to audiences. It’s tricky and uncomfortable; a simple example of the way in which political and aesthetic values do not always dance so gracefully together. Nevertheless, I find a way to write the story without dishonesty. September 2004 There’s no denying the pleasure of writing (or reading) a scathing film review that leaves you in stitches of laughter over the dismembered corpse of a bad movie. But when space is limited, I’d rather choose the best three films every fortnight for review and recommendation. In an ideal world I’d attend every preview and take my pick. They’d be an excitingly diverse mix. Say, one provocative documentary (maybe Mike Moore or Errol Morris), one big-budget event movie (from the likes of Scorsese or Tarantino), and one local or art-house gem. In the real world, it’s a scramble for deadlines. Time is short and some of the best films only screen in one or two states, making it impossible for us to cover them for our national audience. Nevertheless, we do our best to keep the mix as interesting and timely as possible. For our second edition this month I review the brilliant documentary Metallica: Some Kind of Monster (Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky), while I send other reviewers to rate Spielberg’s The Terminal (only one and a half stars out of five), and Cate Shortland’s captivating debut Australian feature Somersault (four stars). For the DVD review page we look at a boxed set of The Adventures of Tintin, together with the strange sombre drama House of Sand and Fog (Vadim Perelman), and the gripping documentary One Day in September (Kevin MacDonald) about the terrorist attacks at the 1972 Munich Olympic Games. As editor, I try to match up films with the writers who’ll best appreciate them. With a 200-word limit we know that we’re humble ‘reviewers’ rather than lofty ‘critics’, and that we can only offer the briefest subjective response to a work. Yet the goal remains to be entertaining and fair, and to try and evaluate films on their own terms. Is this particular movie an original and effective example of the schlocky teen horror thriller? If so, let’s give it the thumbs up. Is this ‘worthy’ anti-globalisation documentary just a boring preachy sermon with bad hand-held camera work? Then we say so. For our film feature article this edition, I write up an interview with Italian director Luigi Falorni, whose simple little film The Weeping Camel has been reducing audiences to tears. It’s a strange quiet film, a ‘narrative documentary’ set in the Gobi desert, about a mother camel that refuses to give milk to her newborn baby. There’s nothing political or radical about it. It’s just beautiful and interesting and odd. And that’s enough to make it worthy of attention. November 2004 When we choose to do a ‘celebrity’ cover, we find pretty people with serious minds and interesting causes. This month two gorgeous film stars, Natalie Portman and Gael Garcia Bernal find their way onto our covers. Portman’s promoting the quirky coming of age film, Garden State (Zach Braff), but the story we run focuses mainly on her status as ambassador for the Foundation of International Community Assistance (FINCA), which offers loans to deprived women to help them start their own businesses. Gabriel Garcia Bernal, the Mexican star of Walter Salle’s The Motorcycle Diaries appears on our cover and talks about his role as the young Che Guevara, the ultimate idealist and symbol of rebellion. We hope this appeals to those radicals who are prepared to stop in the street, speak to a homeless person, and shell out four dollars for an independent magazine – and also to all those shallow people who want to see more pictures of the hot-eyed Latin lad. April 2005 Three Dollars is Robert Connelly’s adaptation of Elliot Perlman’s best-selling novel about economic rationalism and its effect on an average Australian family. I loved the book, and the film isn’t bad either, despite some unevenness in the script and performances. I interview Frances O’Connor, who plays opposite David Wenham as his depressed underemployed wife. O’Connor makes a beautiful cover-girl, and talks about the seemingly universal experience of depression. We run the interview alongside one with Connelly, who knows just how to pitch his film to an audience interested in homelessness. He gives great quotes about John Howard’s heartless Australia, and the way we’ve become an economy rather than a society. It’s almost too easy. In the reviews section of the magazine we pan two other Australian films, Paul Cox’s Human Touch, and the Jimeoin comedy-vehicle The Extra. I’d rather ignore bad Australian films and focus on good films from elsewhere, or big-budget stinkers that need to be brought down a peg. But I’d lined up reviews for these local ones, expecting them to be good, and so we run with the negativity. Some films are practically critic-proof, but small niche films, like most Australian titles, aren’t among these Teflon giants. As Joel Pearlman, Managing Director of Roadshow Films has said, “There are certain types of films that are somewhat critic-proof. They’ve either got a built-in audience, are part of a successful franchise, like The Matrix or Bond films, or have a popular star. It’s films without the multimillion-dollar ad campaigns and the big names where critics are far more influential” ( Pearlman in Bolles 19). Sometimes I’m glad that I’m just a small fish in the film critic pond, and that my bad reviews can’t really destroy someone’s livelihood. It’s well known that a caning from reviewers like David Stratton and Margaret Pomeranz (ABC, At the Movies), or the Melbourne Age’s Jim Schembri can practically destroy the prospects of a small local film, and I’m not sure I have the bravery or conviction of the value of my own tastes to bear such responsibility. Admittedly, that’s just gutless tender-heartedness for, as reviewers, our responsibility is to the audience not to the filmmaker. But when you’ve met with cash-strapped filmmakers, and heard their stories and their struggles, it’s sometimes hard to put personal compassion aside and see the film as the punter will. But you must. August 2005 It’s a busy time with the Melbourne International Film Festival just finishing up. Hordes of film directors accompany their films to the festival, promoting them here ahead of a later national release schedule, and making themselves available for rare face-to face interviews. This year I find a bunch of goodies that seem like they were tailor-made for our readership. There are winning local films like Sarah Watt’s life-affirming debut Look Both Ways; and Rowan Woods’ gritty addiction-drama Little Fish. There’s my personal favourite, Bahman Ghobadi’s stunning and devastating Kurdish/Iranian feature Turtles Can Fly; and Avi Lewis’s inspiring documentary The Take, about Argentine factory workers who unite to revive their bankrupt workplaces. It’s when I see films like this, and get to talk to the people who bring them into existence, that I realize how much I value writing about films for a publication that doesn’t exist just to make a profit or fill space between advertisements. As the great American critic Jonathan Rosenbaum has eloquently argued, most of the worldwide media coverage concerning film is merely a variation on the ‘corporate stories’ that film studios feed us as part of their advertising. To be able to provide some small resistance to that juggernaut is a wonderful privilege. I love to be lost in the dark, studying films frame by frame, and with reference only to some magical internal universe of ‘cinema’ and its endless references to itself. But as the real world outside falls apart, such airless cinephilia feels just plain wrong. As a writer whose subject is films, what I’m compelled to do is to come out of the cinema and try to use my words to convey the best of what I’ve seen to my friends and readers, pointing them towards small treasures they may have overlooked amidst the hype. So maybe I’m not a ‘pure’ critic, and maybe there’s no shame in that. The films I’ll gravitate towards share an almost indefinable quality – to use Jauss’s phrase, they reconstruct and expand my “horizon of expectation” (28). Sometimes these films are overtly committed to a cause, but often they’re just beautiful and strange and fresh. Always they expand me, open me, make me feel that there’s more to the world than expected, and make me want more too – more information, more freedom, more compassion, more equality, more beauty. And, after all these years in the dark, I still want more films like that. Endnotes As of August 2005, the role of DVD editor of The Big Issue has been filled by Anthony Morris. According the latest Morgan Poll, readers of The Big Issue are likely to be young (18-39), urban, educated, and affluent professionals. Current readership is estimated at 144,000 fortnightly and growing. References Bolles, Scott. “The Critics.” Sunday Life. The Age 10 Jul. 2005: 19. Bourdieu, Pierre. The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature. Ed. Randal Johnson. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1993. Jauss, Hans Robert. Toward an Aesthetic of Reception. Trans. Timothy Bahti. Minnesota: U of Minnesota P, 1982. Morris, Meaghan. “On Going to Bed Early: Once Upon a Time in America.” Meanjin 4 (1998): 700. Rosenbaum, Jonathan. “Junket Bonds.” Chicago Reader Movie Review (2000). 2 Sept. 2005 http://www.chicagoreader.com/movies/archives/2000/1000/00117.html>. The Big Issue Australia. http://www.bigissue.org.au/> 10 Oct. 2005. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Siemienowicz, Rochelle. "Diary of a Film Reviewer: Intimate Reflections on Writing about the Screen for a Popular Audience." M/C Journal 8.5 (2005). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0510/01-siemienowicz.php>. APA Style Siemienowicz, R. (Oct. 2005) "Diary of a Film Reviewer: Intimate Reflections on Writing about the Screen for a Popular Audience," M/C Journal, 8(5). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0510/01-siemienowicz.php>.

IntroductionCirque du Soleil, the largest live entertainment company in the world, has eight standing shows in Las Vegas alone, KÀ, Love, Mystère, Zumanity, Believe, Michael Jackson ONE, Zarkana and O. Close to 150 million spectators have seen Cirque du Soleil shows since the company’s beginnings in 1984 and it is estimated that over 15 million spectators will see a Cirque du Soleil show in 2014 (Cirque du Soleil). The Cirque du Soleil concept of circus as a form of theatre, with simple, often archetypal, narrative arcs conveyed without words, virtuoso physicality with the circus artists presented as characters in a fictional world, cutting-edge lighting and visuals, extraordinary innovative staging, and the uptake of new technology for special effects can all be linked back to an early form of circus which is sometimes termed illegitimate circus. In the late 18th century and early 19th century, in the age of Romanticism, only two theatres in London, Covent Garden and Drury Lane, plus the summer theatre in the Haymarket, had royal patents allowing them to produce plays or text-based productions, and these were considered legitimate theatres. (These theatres retained this monopoly until the Theatre Regulation Act of 1843; Saxon 301.) Other circuses and theatres such as Astley’s Amphitheatre, which were precluded from performing text-based works by the terms of their licenses, have been termed illegitimate (Moody 1). Perversely, the effect of licensing venues in this way, instead of having the desired effect of enshrining some particular forms of expression and “casting all others beyond the cultural pale,” served instead to help to cultivate a different kind of theatrical landscape, “a theatrical terrain with a new, rich and varied dramatic ecology” (Reed 255). A fundamental change to the theatrical culture of London took place, and pivotal to “that transformation was the emergence of an illegitimate theatrical culture” (Moody 1) with circus at its heart. An innovative and different form of performance, a theatre of the body, featuring spectacle and athleticism emerged, with “a sensuous, spectacular aesthetic largely wordless except for the lyrics of songs” (Bratton 117).This writing sets out to explore some of the strong parallels between the aesthetic that emerged in this early illegitimate circus and the aesthetic of the Montreal-based, multi-billion dollar entertainment empire of Cirque du Soleil. Although it is not fighting against legal restrictions and can in no way be considered illegitimate, the circus of Cirque du Soleil can be seen to be the descendant of the early circus entrepreneurs and their illegitimate aesthetic which arose out of the desire to find ways to continue to attract audiences to their shows in spite of the restrictions of the licenses granted to them. BackgroundCircus has served as an inspiration for many innovatory theatre productions including Peter Brook’s Midsummer Night’s Dream (1970) and Tom Stoppard’s Jumpers (1972) as well as the earlier experiments of Meyerhold, Eisenstein, Mayakovsky and other Soviet directors of the 1920’s (Saxon 299). A. H. Saxon points out, however, that the relationship between circus and theatre is a long-standing one that begins in the late 18th century and the early 19th century, when circus itself was theatre (Saxon 299).Modern circus was founded in London in 1768 by an ex-cavalryman and his wife, Philip and Patty Astley, and consisted of spectacular stunt horse riding taking place in a ring, with acts from traditional fairs such as juggling, acrobatics, clowning and wire-walking inserted to cover the changeovers between riding acts. From the very first shows entry was by paid ticket only and the early history of circus was driven by innovative, risk-taking entrepreneurs such as Philip Astley, who indeed built so many new amphitheatres for his productions that he became known as Amphi-Philip (Jando). After years of legal tussles with the authorities concerning the legal status of this new entertainment, a limited license was finally granted in 1783 for Astley’s Amphitheatre. This license precluded the performing of plays, anything text-based, or anything which had a script that resembled a play. Instead the annual license granted allowed only for “public dancing and music” and “other public entertainments of like kind” (St. Leon 9).Corporeal Dramaturgy and TextIn the face of the ban on scripted text, illegitimate circus turned to the human body and privileged it as a means of dramatic expression. A resultant dramaturgy focusing on the expressive capabilities of the performers’ bodies emerged. “The primacy of rhetoric and the spoken word in legitimate drama gave way […] to a corporeal dramaturgy which privileged the galvanic, affective capacity of the human body as a vehicle of dramatic expression” (Moody 83). Moody proposes that the “iconography of illegitimacy participated in a broader cultural and scientific transformation in which the human body began to be understood as an eloquent compendium of visible signs” (83). Even though the company has the use of text and dramatic dialogue freely available to it, Cirque du Soleil, shares this investment in the bodies of the performers and their “galvanic, affective capacity” (83) to communicate with the audience directly without the use of a scripted text, and this remains a constant between the two forms of circus. Robert Lepage, the director of two Cirque du Soleil shows, KÀ (2004) and more recently Totem (2010), speaking about KÀ in 2004, said, “We wanted it to be an epic story told not with the use of words, but with the universal language of body movement” (Lepage cited in Fink).In accordance with David Graver’s system of classifying performers’ bodies, Cirque du Soleil’s productions most usually present performers’ ‘character bodies’ in which the performers are understood by spectators to be playing fictional roles or characters (Hurley n/p) and this was also the case with illegitimate circus which right from its very beginnings presented its performers within narratives in which the performers are understood to be playing characters. In Cirque du Soleil’s shows, as with illegitimate circus, this presentation of the performers’ character bodies is interspersed with acts “that emphasize the extraordinary training and physical skill of the performers, that is which draw attention to the ‘performer body’ but always within the context of an overall narrative” (Fricker n.p.).Insertion of Vital TextAfter audience feedback, text was eventually added into KÀ (2004) in the form of a pre-recorded prologue inserted to enable people to follow the narrative arc, and in the show Wintuk (2007) there are tales that are sung by Jim Comcoran (Leroux 126). Interestingly early illegitimate circus creators, in their efforts to circumvent the ban on using dramatic dialogue, often inserted text into their performances in similar ways to the methods Cirque du Soleil chose for KÀ and Wintuk. Illegitimate circus included dramatic recitatives accompanied by music to facilitate the following of the storyline (Moody 28) in the same way that Cirque du Soleil inserted a pre-recorded prologue to KÀ to enable audience members to understand the narrative. Performers in illegitimate circus often conveyed essential information to the audience as lyrics of songs (Bratton 117) in the same way that Jim Comcoran does in Wintuk. Dramaturgical StructuresAstley from his very first circus show in 1768 began to set his equestrian stunts within a narrative. Billy Button’s Ride to Brentford (1768), showed a tailor, a novice rider, mounting backwards, losing his belongings and being thrown off the horse when it bucks. The act ends with the tailor being chased around the ring by his horse (Schlicke 161). Early circus innovators, searching for dramaturgy for their shows drew on contemporary warfare, creating vivid physical enactments of contemporary battles. They also created a new dramatic form known as Hippodramas (literally ‘horse dramas’ from hippos the Attic Greek for Horse), a hybridization of melodrama and circus featuring the trick riding skills of the early circus pioneers. The narrative arcs chosen were often archetypal or sourced from well-known contemporary books or poems. As Moody writes, at the heart of many of these shows “lay an archetypal narrative of the villainous usurper finally defeated” (Moody 30).One of the first hippodramas, The Blood Red Knight, opened at Astley’s Amphitheatre in 1810.Presented in dumbshow, and interspersed with grand chivalric processions, the show featured Alphonso’s rescue of his wife Isabella from her imprisonment and forced marriage to the evil knight Sir Rowland and concluded with the spectacular, fiery destruction of the castle and Sir Rowland’s death. (Moody 69)Another later hippodrama, The Spectre Monarch and his Phantom Steed, or the Genii Horseman of the Air (1830) was set in China where the rightful prince was ousted by a Tartar usurper who entered into a pact with the Spectre Monarch and received,a magic ring, by aid of which his unlawful desires were instantly gratified. Virtue, predictably won out in the end, and the discomforted villain, in a final settling of accounts with his dread master was borne off through the air in a car of fire pursued by Daemon Horsemen above THE GREAT WALL OF CHINA. (Saxon 303)Karen Fricker writes of early Cirque du Soleil shows that “while plot is doubtless too strong a word, each of Cirque’s recent shows has a distinct concept or theme, that is urbanity for Saltimbanco; nomadism in Varekai (2002) and humanity’s clownish spirit for Corteo (2005), and tend to follow the same very basic storyline, which is not narrated in words but suggested by the staging that connects the individual acts” (Fricker n/p). Leroux describes the early Cirque du Soleil shows as following a “proverbial and well-worn ‘collective transformation trope’” (Leroux 122) whilst Peta Tait points out that the narrative arc of Cirque du Soleil “ might be summarized as an innocent protagonist, often female, helped by an older identity, seemingly male, to face a challenging journey or search for identity; more generally, old versus young” (Tait 128). However Leroux discerns an increasing interest in narrative devices such as action and plot in Cirque du Soleil’s Las Vegas productions (Leroux 122). Fricker points out that “with KÀ, what Cirque sought – and indeed found in Lepage’s staging – was to push this storytelling tendency further into full-fledged plot and character” (Fricker n/p). Telling a story without words, apart from the inserted prologue, means that the narrative arc of Kà is, however, very simple. A young prince and princess, twins in a mythical Far Eastern kingdom, are separated when a ceremonial occasion is interrupted by an attack by a tribe of enemy warriors. A variety of adventures follow, most involving perilous escapes from bad guys with flaming arrows and fierce-looking body tattoos. After many trials, a happy reunion arrives. (Isherwood)This increasing emphasis on developing a plot and a narrative arc positions Cirque as moving closer in dramaturgical aesthetic to illegitimate circus.Visual TechnologiesTo increase the visual excitement of its shows and compensate for the absence of spoken dialogue, illegitimate circus in the late 18th and early 19th century drew on contemporaneous and emerging visual technologies. Some of the new visual technologies that Astley’s used have been termed pre-cinematic, including the panorama (or diorama as it is sometimes called) and “the phantasmagoria and other visual machines… [which] expanded the means through which an audience could be addressed” (O’Quinn, Governance 312). The panorama or diorama ran in the same way that a film runs in an analogue camera, rolling between vertical rollers on either side of the stage. In Astley’s production The Siege and Storming of Seringapatam (1800) he used another effect almost equivalent to a modern day camera zoom-in by showing scenic back drops which, as they moved through time, progressively moved geographically closer to the battle. This meant that “the increasing enlargement of scale-each successive scene has a smaller geographic space-has a telescopic event. Although the size of the performance space remains constant, the spatial parameters of the spectacle become increasingly magnified” (O’Quinn, Governance 345). In KÀ, Robert Lepage experiments with “cinematographic stage storytelling on a very grand scale” (Fricker n.p.). A KÀ press release (2005) from Cirque du Soleil describes the show “as a cinematic journey of aerial adventure” (Cirque du Soleil). Cirque du Soleil worked with ground-breaking visual technologies in KÀ, developing an interactive projected set. This involves the performers controlling what happens to the projected environment in real time, with the projected scenery responding to their movements. The performers’ movements are tracked by an infra-red sensitive camera above the stage, and by computer software written by Interactive Production Designer Olger Förterer. “In essence, what we have is an intelligent set,” says Förterer. “And everything the audience sees is created by the computer” (Cirque du Soleil).Contemporary Technology Cutting edge technologies, many of which came directly from contemporaneous warfare, were introduced into the illegitimate circus performance space by Astley and his competitors. These included explosions using redfire, a new military explosive that combined “strontia, shellac and chlorate of potash, [which] produced […] spectacular flame effects” (Moody 28). Redfire was used for ‘blow-ups,’ the spectacular explosions often occurring at the end of the performance when the villain’s castle or hideout was destroyed. Cirque du Soleil is also drawing on contemporary military technology for performance projects. Sparked: A Live interaction between Humans and Quadcopters (2014) is a recent short film released by Cirque du Soleil, which features the theatrical use of drones. The new collaboration between Cirque du Soleil, ETH Zurich and Verity Studios uses 10 quadcopters disguised as animated lampshades which take to the air, “carrying out the kinds of complex synchronized dance manoeuvres we usually see from the circus' famed acrobats” (Huffington Post). This shows, as with early illegitimate circus, the quick theatrical uptake of contemporary technology originally developed for use in warfare.Innovative StagingArrighi writes that the performance space that Astley developed was a “completely new theatrical configuration that had not been seen in Western culture before… [and] included a circular ring (primarily for equestrian performance) and a raised theatre stage (for pantomime and burletta)” (177) joined together by ramps that were large enough and strong enough to allow horses to be ridden over them during performances. The stage at Astley’s Amphitheatre was said to be the largest in Europe measuring over 130 feet across. A proscenium arch was installed in 1818 which could be adjusted in full view of the audience with the stage opening changing anywhere in size from forty to sixty feet (Saxon 300). The staging evolved so that it had the capacity to be multi-level, involving “immense [moveable] platforms or floors, rising above each other, and extending the whole width of the stage” (Meisel 214). The ability to transform the stage by the use of draped and masked platforms which could be moved mechanically, proved central to the creation of the “new hybrid genre of swashbuckling melodramas on horseback, or ‘hippodramas’” (Kwint, Leisure 46). Foot soldiers and mounted cavalry would fight their way across the elaborate sets and the production would culminate with a big finale that usually featured a burning castle (Kwint, Legitimization 95). Cirque du Soleil’s investment in high-tech staging can be clearly seen in KÀ. Mark Swed writes that KÀ is, “the most lavish production in the history of Western theatre. It is surely the most technologically advanced” (Swed). With a production budget of $165 million (Swed), theatre designer Michael Fisher has replaced the conventional stage floor with two huge moveable performance platforms and five smaller platforms that appear to float above a gigantic pit descending 51 feet below floor level. One of the larger platforms is a tatami floor that moves backwards and forwards, the other platform is described by the New York Times as being the most thrilling performer in the show.The most consistently thrilling performer, perhaps appropriately, isn't even human: It's the giant slab of machinery that serves as one of the two stages designed by Mark Fisher. Here Mr. Lepage's ability to use a single emblem or image for a variety of dramatic purposes is magnified to epic proportions. Rising and falling with amazing speed and ease, spinning and tilting to a full vertical position, this huge, hydraulically powered game board is a sandy beach in one segment, a sheer cliff wall in another and a battleground, viewed from above, for the evening's exuberantly cinematic climax. (Isherwood)In the climax a vertical battle is fought by aerialists fighting up and down the surface of the sand stone cliff with defeated fighters portrayed as tumbling down the surface of the cliff into the depths of the pit below. Cirque du Soleil’s production entitled O, which phonetically is the French word eau meaning water, is a collaboration with director Franco Dragone that has been running at Las Vegas’ Bellagio Hotel since 1998. O has grossed over a billion dollars since it opened in 1998 (Sylt and Reid). It is an aquatic circus or an aquadrama. In 1804, Charles Dibdin, one of Astley’s rivals, taking advantage of the nearby New River, “added to the accoutrements of the Sadler’s Wells Theatre a tank three feet deep, ninety feet long and as wide as twenty-four feet which could be filled with water from the New River” (Hays and Nickolopoulou 171) Sadler’s Wells presented aquadramas depicting many reconstructions of famous naval battles. One of the first of these was The Siege of Gibraltar (1804) that used “117 ships designed by the Woolwich Dockyard shipwrights and capable of firing their guns” (Hays and Nickolopoulou 5). To represent the drowning Spanish sailors saved by the British, “Dibdin used children, ‘who were seen swimming and affecting to struggle with the waves’”(5).O (1998) is the first Cirque production to be performed in a proscenium arch theatre, with the pool installed behind the proscenium arch. “To light the water in the pool, a majority of the front lighting comes from a subterranean light tunnel (at the same level as the pool) which has eleven 4" thick Plexiglas windows that open along the downstage perimeter of the pool” (Lampert-Greaux). Accompanied by a live orchestra, performers dive into the 53 x 90 foot pool from on high, they swim underwater lit by lights installed in the subterranean light tunnel and they also perform on perforated platforms that rise up out of the water and turn the pool into a solid stage floor. In many respects, Cirque du Soleil can be seen to be the inheritors of the spectacular illegitimate circus of the 18th and 19th Century. The inheritance can be seen in Cirque du Soleil’s entrepreneurial daring, the corporeal dramaturgy privileging the affective power of the body over the use of words, in the performers presented primarily as character bodies, and in the delivering of essential text either as a prologue or as lyrics to songs. It can also be seen in Cirque du Soleil’s innovative staging design, the uptake of military based technology and the experimentation with cutting edge visual effects. Although re-invigorating the tradition and creating spectacular shows that in many respects are entirely of the moment, Cirque du Soleil’s aesthetic roots can be clearly seen to draw deeply on the inheritance of illegitimate circus.ReferencesBratton, Jacky. “Romantic Melodrama.” The Cambridge Companion to British Theatre 1730-1830. Eds. Jane Moody and Daniel O'Quinn. Cambridge: Cambridge University, 2007. 115-27. Bratton, Jacky. “What Is a Play? 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