Colectivo DRICO Short Essays in English (project 8)

Is 'Machuca' an accurate expression of social identity?

Field: Popular culture in Latin America Full essay: 6 pages

Is 'Machuca' (Andrs Wood, 2004) an accurate expression of social identity?

Colectivo Drico http://colectivodorico.blogspot.com/ June 8th, 2012

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Popular culture is a term used to refer to a very broad and diverse array of forms and practices such as salsa, samba, religious ritual and magic, carnivals, telenovelas (television soaps), masks, pottery, weaving, alternative theatre, radio, video and oral narrative as well as the 'wholeway of life', the language, dress and political culture of subordinate classes and ethnic groups. It covers a whole spectrum of cultural practices, which are seen as lying outside the institutionalized and canonized forms of knowledge and aesthetic production generally defined as 'high' culture. These practices have in turn been studied within different disciplinary frameworks and variously defined as 'folk culture', 'mass culture', 'the culture industry', and 'workingclass culture'. To gain an understanding of popular culture in Latin America is therefore a challenge to our sociological imagination: it entails examining particular cultural manifestations while simultaneously being aware of how the very object of study, and hence our knowledge of it, is framed in a certain way by a given intellectual tradition or disciplinary framework. (Vivien Schelling) This definition of popular culture by Vivien Schelling can be the point of departure of a reflection about the limits, the complexity, and the underlying conflicts which come out when studying popular culture in the context of Latin America. In this definition, various forms of expression and genres have already been identified (samba, carnivals, alternative theater). After having a look at what popular culture is not, we will present an overview of social and national identities related to popular culture and art, which will be discussed deeply throughout the case of the film Machuca. Popular culture is defined in contrast to other forms of institutionalized culture which belong to the establishment and the ruling class, such as opera, ballet, military parades, CEOs speeches, etc. A pink modern T-shirt made in China by a famous international brand, for instance, can be sold in Chile, can be worn by part of its society, but it will no way become a part of popular culture because it has nothing to do with the national identity, neither the singularity of the culture in Chile. The same enterprise, though, can sell a Che Guevara T-shirt and it will enrich popular culture as an icon, a myth in many Latin American societies and worldwide, in fact, and this happens because this image has its historical roots and, the most important, a cultural meaning even though it does not have to be the same for every subculture.

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This is the first paradox: some items of popular culture are provided by the elite, by the establishment. These items have a popular taste, but its source is not that popular. This is simply the consequence of capitalism itself, a system in which everything becomes commodity and a source of profit. The fact that the ownership of the production chain is held by the elite does not prevent popular culture from being part of the economic system, as products with a popular taste will have a widespread selling success. The meaning and the values kept behind the manifestations of popular culture are more important, thus, than the specific channels they are distributed through. The roots of popular culture remain in the specific history of a nation and its traditions. For all Latin American countries, this history is the history of colonization, independence wars, class struggle, and in some cases ethnic conflicts. This is why it is harder for the North American culture to wriggle into the traditions of Latin America, a process that is much easier in cultures with a colonialist heritage, such as many European countries. To put it in other words, history is a process of social construction. The collective memory is as important as its outcomes, because those cannot be understood without taking the past events into account. In Latin American countries ruled by neoliberal economic policies, like Chile, this memory will tend to be erased by the government, and the cultural institutions which are supported economically by the government. This leads to a conflict when dealing with popular culture, which is solved through the lack of political content and social criticism in many artistic products, specifically those that appear in mainstream media (modern censorship). We have to take a look at the notions of power and ideological conflict when studying the process of national and social identity, because they highly influence how culture and art are developed. Reggaeton, for example, expresses through its music and lyrics not only the rivalry between reggaeton and hip-hop, but also the tension between the rethoric against immigration and production of the music. The Power will select those songs that deal with love, daily life or other issues, trying to make reggaeton empty from the values expressed in its origins, which shaped, in fact, this musical style as a

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whole. Music is just an example of how Power can deny ideological conflicts and try to influence the alternative and popular expressions, whose purpose is to stand for the powerless, the unprivileged, and to bash the power-bloc. This process of emptying is the same in every genre of popular culture, and it perpetuates the division between underground and commercial. This process does not occur only in culture and art, but also in struggles such as those for equality, for the rights of women or the homosexuals, etc. Sophisticated repression achieves portraying those struggles as something funny or outdated through a process of trivialization. Reacting to this, popular culture will tend to express the persistence of class antagonisms, the lack of democracy, demands for land, work, wages and housing, gender inequalities, human rights abuses, the debate on private property, etc. That is to create consciousness about issues such as oppression and emancipation, which remain in the collective memory we have mentioned before. As censorship is much more indirect in Latin America at these days instead of banning, the Power finds a way of taking advantage of popular culture, films and other cultural genres with social criticism can be easily promulgated. This is the case of Machuca (Andrs Wood, 2004), a film that deals with class antagonisms, lack of freedom, and radical justice. This film is set in the last days of the government of Salvador Allende, but the directors aim when it comes to the audience is not being a passive spectator of some historical events, but to face reality, gain consciousness and apply the story to the present days. Issues like poverty, discrimination and class antagonism are still present, and are part of the popular culture. So we consider his piece of art as a struggle against the amnesia of the modern times, and a criticism of class discrimination. The plot is developed around the life of two kids from Santiago de Chile during that revolutionary period (1973). Gonzalo Infante is a shy kid from a bourgeois background and family, and studies in an English school. In the school, only upper-class kids attend classes, until some kids from the shantytowns are brought together with the rich kids from the wealthy neighborhoods as a part of a social experiment. One of them is Pedro Machuca. This case can be seen as a metaphor of all the socialist and integrating

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policies that the government began to implement in Chile, as they led to new conflicts and confrontation. The class conflict in Machuca is showed from the very outset, as Gonzalo dresses up. The differences between both are not only expressed by clothing, but also by family relationships and social behavior. The film states Gonzalos loneliness and his boring life without strong family human bonds, based on respect for authority, appearance and the correction of the upper-class lifestyle. So nothing is left at random in the film, and his spacious and quiet house is not only pictured in contrast of Machucas neighborhood, but as the reason of his shyness and his whole identity. Machucas life is completely different in every aspect. He comes from the slums, where life conditions are much worse from an economic perspective, but not when it comes to family affection and closeness, or trust between friends. On the other hand, we get to know the context of class struggle through the story of the kids and their emotions. Political demonstrations and rejection in school by upperclass parents are the two best examples of how the on-going events affect directly the life of the two kids before the military coup and the military repression and control over the school and the shantytowns. Machuca became part of the popular culture in Chile because of his rough and accurate portrait of inequality and discrimination. The masses of people are Woods target audience, as they might share, over three decades later, the same feelings of rejection and incomprehension within a class society. In the film, collective identity is described in detail through clothes the contrast with the uniforms of the upper-class kids, songs and slogans chanted during the popular demonstrations, names some people find slum kids names funny, flags and colors the kids were selling little flags during the protests, language specific terms for high class young people, race, etc. All these elements build the collective identity and leave the individuals in the background. There are individual stories but they are used to express the collective identity; there are no heroes in this story. Class antagonism is expressed in popular culture in every single country in which one socioeconomic class rule over its counterpart the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, in

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Marxs theory. This is the reason why a film from Chile and other one from France can share a lot of features. We take as an example the French film Romuald et Juliette (Coline Serreau, 1989; in English Mama, theres a man in your bed). Even if the story is actually about love in peaceful days, instead of friendship in troubled times, we find a lot of similarities when describing the contrast between economic class and race. The first scene of this film is specially illuminating: short cuts of everyday routine of a black femme de mnage (cleaning woman), single with 5 children in a small indebt apartment, and the same routine for a white CEO, married with 2 children in a huge house with his own cleaning woman and a private chauffeur. Despite the class differences, in both films a strong bond is created between two individuals from opposite class status, and also in both films this bond leads to awareness about a hidden reality: the other class everyday problems and rituals. To sum up, Machuca is an accurate expression of social identity because: the film became part of the popular culture; it deals with social conflicts that are in the very heart of the shared reality of a whole nation; it does not go through topics or value judgments, but describe meticulously the class differences, the shared culture and the dichotomy between an elite and a socialist education which is a very present topic with the huge student movement taking place in Chile nowadays; and because it disassembles a whole national identity so Chileans can think over it, and foreigners can understand it better, portraying its most important outcomes on values, behavior and its contradictions in society. Even though the film goes back to past events in order to present those contradictions, that cultural and historical heritage is actually glowing in present days and represents the ambitions of a majority of the population that cannot forget its oppressed working-class status behind the curtain of democracy.