Local networks/global systems: The location of postnational culture in Mexico.

摘要

In this study, I explore Mexican culture based on the transformation of global economy and the reconfiguration of social identities. My approach shows how network systems have become the new morphology in Mexican society. Through the application of communicational, cultural, and social studies theory, I see how cultural industry and mass communications considerably modify cultural production and social relations. Although societies have been imagined systematically for quite some time, my study argues that the current paradigm of information technology claims to include the fullness of the community within its networks and circuits. My hypothesis states that Mexico's economic partnership with the United States and Canada in what is known as NAFTA, accelerates the shift from national, corporatist society to global, transnational network society. The reconfiguration of the social is based on consensus among agencies of the state financial and industrial sector, both domestic and foreign media and mass communications and consumers. Nonetheless, there are groups who resist the expansion of the new hegemonic order. These groups include old-guard politicians and bureaucrats, intellectuals committed to defend the rights of the subaltern, and local communities that defy global change.By looking at relations between the global and the local, my project reveals how the network society has become inclusive and tolerant of difference and criticism. The advancement of global capitalism depends on direct negotiation, respect, and tolerance for the local. However, the global allows diversity and dissent only when its goals are being accomplished. Homogeneity is perceived not through synthetic uniformity but by increasing participation of local communities in a variety of transnational markets.I focus on the cultural shifts that take place parallel to the presidency of Carlos Salinas de Gortari (1988-1994). I have chosen a list of themes by which to study changes in the relation between state and civil society in the re-reading of history by cultural elites in the transition from national identity to postnational identities in the mediations between mass communications and social audiences and in the formation of transnational resistance to global mass homogenization. My analysis includes texts by Hector Aguilar Camin, Fernando del Paso, Coco Fusco, Guillermo Gomez-Pena, Carlos Monsivais, Paco Ignacio Taibo II, Rafael Tovar y de Teresa, Juan Villoro and rock bands Cafe Tacuba and La Maldita Vecindad.