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Why the Virgin of Zapopan
Went to Los Angeles:
Reflections on Mobility and Globality
Every October in Guadalajara,
Mexico, a city of around 4 million in the western state of Jalisco, and
the second largest city in Mexico, close to two million people converge
on the city center to accompany the Virgin of Zapopan on her annual journey
from the cathedral of Guadalajara to her home in the basilica of Zapopan,
8 kilometers away.* For a good nine hours, following a pre-dawn mass,
a river of people moves steadily up the long avenue accompanied by the
drums, flutes and metal clogs of over two hundred teams of young danzantes
from pueblos and barrios throughout the region, costumed in images of
Indians - they have practiced their routines for months. Near the end
of the procession comes the virgin herself, a rather plain-looking, doll-like
figure about a foot high in large glass case atop a flower festooned car.
It must be a new - virgin-car, one whose engine has never been started
(!). It is pulled along by ropes held by hundreds of her devotees, and
an official guard dressed in Spanish colonial costumes. Behind her come
huge castle-like birdcages full of songbirds to entertain her as she makes
the journey. After the Virgin of Guadalupe, she is the most powerful virgin
in Mexico. She is 450 years old, and she has her own website.
The Virgin of Zapopan came into being in the 1530s during the process
of evangelization of the local indigenous population, merging, according
to some accounts, with a local deity named Tepozintl, whose shrine she
took over. She began developing divine powers, especially around matters
concerning water - floods, droughts -- and later around disasters of all
sorts. In 1653 the church officially declared her milagrosa, capable of
miracles, raising her credibility with the non-indigenous population -
Spaniards, mestizos, criollos. By the 1730s, when she was nearing 200,
the demands on her powers had become so great, especially in the neighboring
the city of Guadalajara, that she created a second version of herself
called la peregrina, the pilgrim. La peregrina's job was, and still is,
to move around. She spends the rainy season rotating among the 172 parishes
of Guadalajara helping to prevent flooding, a constant problem in its
lowland location. She also supports the ecological movement trying to
save the rapidly shrinking Lake Chapala -familiar to readers of Lawrence's
The Plumed Serpent. Processions and fiestas accompany her from parish
to parish, where hosting her is an honor and a serious obligation.
So since 1734 there have been two of her, la original who remains at home
in Zapopopan and la peregrina, who travels. These practices distinguish
the Virgin of Zapopan from most other virgins, whose practice is not to
travel themselves, but to appear as images in secular spaces like the
walls of a house or the trunk of a tree. (Mexican anthropologist Renée
de la Torre reports that in recent months these appearances have begun
occurring in transitional spaces, or what she calls non-places such as
freeway underpasses and airports.) The mutations of the Virgen de Zapopan
trace the regional consolidation that from the 1500s led toward Mexico's
self-definition as a rural-based pluri-ethnic nation-state with strong
regional cultures.
I invoke the Virgin of Zapopan not for divine protection ( though I wouldn't
say no) but because she subsumes several of the themes I propose to take
up in these pages-mobility, modernity and citizenship as they play themselves
out in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. I join those who are reflecting
on what is being called globality by thinking through mobility. Particularly
intriguing in this respect is the Virgen de Zapopan's strategy of self-duplication-
desdoblamiento in Spanish - which enables her to be in more than one place
at once, and to both go and stay at the same time. Though she exists in
statue form, this ability to move and self-multiply makes her a kind of
anti-monument, a genuine roving signifier-which may be why, though no
icon could be more profoundly and complexly Mexican, the Virgin of Zapopan
has never been incorporated into Mexico's official iconography or patrimony.
She is part of local, popular religiosity and for many generations has
been repressed or unwillingly tolerated by the official church. My title
promises that we will get the Virgin of Zapopan to Los Angeles, and so
we will. But I propose to get there, thinking through mobility, by considering
some of the ways unofficial or vernacular imaginaries render processes
that official parlance subsumes as globalization.
Thinking through mobility
One of the things that has made people want to call the world "post-modern"
-and post almost everything else--are vastly altered patterns and scale
of human mobility, two of its most conspicuous forms being mass labor
migration and mass tourism. The latter is now the largest industry in
the world after the drug trade. The former has produced, among other things,
a reversal of modernity's diffusion from center outwards - large scale
movement of ex-colonial subjects into the metropoles. In the U.S. today
one person in 10 was born in another country, and another one in 10 have
a parent who was. In California half the children entering school speak
languages other than English (a fact stupidly viewed as handicap rather
than a huge national resource). There are 75,000 Russians in Sacramento.
Every city in Europe and North America has sizeable diasporic communities
from several parts of the globe, often from the country's ex-colonies,
and these have impacted every aspect of institutional and everyday life.
Fifteen percent of the population of Guyana lives in New York City, half
of Surinam is in the Netherlands.
The metropole is a self-interested host to this reversed diaspora, but
not necessarily a hospitable one. As a scholar of travel literature, it
was fascinating for me in the 1990s to find that the dramatic tales of
suffering and survival, monsters and marvels, which 300 years ago came
back to Europe from faraway shores. Towards the end of the 90s they began
to reappear daily at the metropole's own borders. The last shipwreck story
I heard, for example, was of the 900 Kurds who ran aground not in Tierra
del Fuego but in Southern France. Today's stowaway stories tell of not
of European boys hiding under decks heading for the South Seas, but of
African boys and young men found usually frozen to death in the wheel
casings of jets landing in European airports (for a telling analysis see
Ferguson 2001), or Eastern European families clinging under trains in
the chunnel. The castaway tale was revived in the story of Elián
González, washed up on the shores not of Tahiti, but of Florida.
It was not Polynesians but Floridians - Republicans! -- who decided he
was a reincarnation of the Baby Jesus and had been helped ashore by dolphins.
Today's outlaws and pirates are the coyotes or polleros cruising borders
all over the planet. Death and rescue tales are back, reaching us not
from the Sahara but from the Arizona desert, like the story in summer
2000 of the baby miraculously rescued from the arms of its dead mother,
a young Salvadoreña trying to cross into the United States. It
was not passing Bedouins who saved the baby but the Border Patrol, whose
usual role is hunting down such people. Captivity narratives surface today
in Beverley Hills where domestic workers from Asia tell of indentured
servitude and forced confinement, or from sweatshops and brothels in San
Francisco and New York. The suffocating nightmare of the slave ship resurged
in 1999 in the port of San Francisco where 18 Chinese laborers emerged
mad with suffering from a cargo container in the depths of a freighter
where seven companions had died. The following spring England was shaken
by the story of 43 other Chinese men who perished from carbon monoxide
poisoning in the back of a truck smuggling them in from the Netherlands.
A few weeks later it was on the banks of the Rio Bravo not the Niger or
the Amazon, that frantic crowds on a riverbank watched two people drown
trying to swim to Texas. The drama was broadcast live on television, as
it might have been read aloud in a town square in 1620. In April 2001,
reports of white on black lynchings reappeared, not from the annals of
the Old South, but from ultra-modern Southern Spain. At the same time
U.S. newspapers waxed smug about the "rescue" of the "Lost
Boys of Sudan," some 12,000 orphaned Dinka survivors of the civil
war in Sudan, a handful of whom were brought from refugee camps to communities
in the United States where, it was obvious, they were going to be no less
lost. The echoes were of Voltaire's L'Iroquois, or Pocahontas in London,
the label borrowed from Peter Pan.1 The boys were indeed rescued from
slavery, discovered to have made a comeback in parts of Africa due to
falling commodity prices and the collapse of traditional agriculture.
In Abidjan, the London Daily Telegraph reported, girls cost five pounds.
The reporter deemed it a "spectacle from the 19th century."
In turn abolitionism has dusted itself off and come down from the shelf.
In fall of 2001 Europe discovered itself host to thousands of captive
female sex slaves, many of them Russian and East European. Albanians,
it turned out, had been selling their young women to Western Europe in
droves. Trafficking in people is probably a bigger industry now than it
was in the time of the slave trade - though the two are not the same thing.2
In the 90s the metropole's borders became theaters, and as with the death
and survival literature of the past, the dramas appearing in our newspapers
every day are doing the work of staging the new planetary order, a newly
mutating imperial order, creating its subjects, creating us as its subjects
(as I too am doing in this essay). In one important way, this contemporary
recycling of the 17th and 18th century travel archive turns the old one
inside out, for its prevailing focus is not the living but the dead. The
earlier genres - captivity tales, shipwrecks, castaways and the like -were
usually produced by the survivors themselves, those who, providentially
(a key term), lived to tell the tale. By definition there was always a
happy ending that affirmed the viability of an emergent metropolitan global,
and often imperial, subject. Today's recyclings are chiefly about nonsurvivors.
Driven by a different desire, these stories perform dramas not of departure
and return, but of denial and exclusion. Now, and how well we know it
after September 11, it seems to be death dramas that grip and resonate,
though many success stories could be told.3 In a key of pain and guilt,
does the metropole in this literature contemplate itself as a kind of
fortress sustained by violent exclusion and assailed by desperate people
no less deserving than ourselves? Is it displaying to itself its intensifying
legitimation crisis? Or is the effect rather to remind those on the inside
of the fortress how lucky they are and how deeply the world is divided
between "us" and "them"? Either way, the dramas of
death and despair enact an alternative register to the dehumanized economist
narratives of globalization that occupy the news and business pages. They
underwrote the sense of hubris that seemed to lie just behind the shock
and disbelief at the attack on the fortress September 11. Part of the
shock was the familiarity of the scene, already imagined multiply by Hollywood.
Late 20th century mobility has been driven by processes of decolonization
set in motion after World War II, but also by imperatives and possibilities
created by technological advance, the communications revolution, and above
all the new and ruthless phase of empire, neoliberalism or late capitalism
if one prefers, that we are now living. This was not as obvious in the
early 90s as it was at the end. In the early 90's the academic talk on
globalization had an outright utopian character among scholars across
the ideological spectrum. In one early anthology (Featherstone 1990) the
authors spoke of a new "cosmopolitan ideal" of a "dream
of a secular ecumene," "the crystallization of the entire world
as a single place" and the "emergence of a global human condition"
(Robertson); a "world culture" that is an "organization
of diversity" (Hannerz). "Humankind," said Ulf Hannerz
in that heady moment, "has finally bid farewell to the world which
could with some credibility be seen as a cultural mosaic". Today
it is hard not to hear in these joyous phrases a revised, and ever innocent,
imperial narrative, and a failure on the part of metropolitan scholars
to seek correctives to the inevitable blindness of privilege. (The acerbic
John Kenneth Galbraith was clearer: "Globalization," he said,
"is not a serious concept. We North Americans invented it to disguise
our program of economic intervention in other countries.")
Early on, the metropolitan discourse of globalization established its
preferred metaphor, a metaphor of mobility, and innocence, that is still
very much with us. The metaphor is flow. The image is of a planet traversed
by continuous, multidirectional, commensurate flows of people, goods,
money, information, languages, ideas, arts, images. If one is in the "local"
the idea is to find ways to tap into the flow, through an assembly plant,
say, or a cash crop, a tourist attraction, a workforce sent abroad, or
by a satellite dish, a boom box, a downloaded CD. But, thinking through
mobility, the asphyxiated Chinese workers were not flowing in the back
of the truck. The Rio Bravo was flowing but not the young men who drowned
trying to cross it. As the work of Teresa Caldeira (2001) reminds us,
the wealthy do not flow either.. At home they retreat increasingly behind
the walls of gated, guarded communities; abroad they are walled up in
resort enclaves designed to give the illusion of place. (Even the Pope,
in a statement issued on International Tourism day in 2001, condemned
the proliferation of affluent resorts cut off from the societies around
them (NY Times 6/20/2001).) Thinking through mobility, it is perhaps worth
spelling out more analytically some of the confusions and evasions that
follow from the flow metaphor, if only because that metaphor is surely
worth preserving for some purposes:
1. The flow metaphor doesn't distinguish one kind of movement from another
-- the movement say of domestic laborers from the Philippines to the Middle
East from the movement of sex tourists from Europe or Japan to Thailand
or Cuba. Tourists, as tourists, must return to their countries of origin,
while transplanted workers often must not because home depends on their
earnings. (The Philippines is one of a number of countries, including
most of Central America, in which remittances from workers abroad are
the chief source of external revenue.)
2. "Flow" bypasses the question of directionality. "Dallas"
is seen in South Africa but South Africa's fascinating multiracial, mutilingual
soap operas do not reach North America, to its loss. Half of Mexico's
hydroelectric power flows out of Chiapas, where much of the resident population
has no electricity. Money, I'm told now changes hands 100 times more often
than goods do, but that flow in the end also has a direction. In early
2001 Kofi Anan announced that when all forms of exchange were taken into
account, there was a net "flow" the previous year of $450 billion
from the poor countries to the rich ones, three quarters of it to the
US. (To put this into perspective, the entire U.S. foreign aid budget
in 2000 was a paltry $22 billion, a fraction of what Argentina alone paid
the U.S. in debt servicing. Debt service payments to rich countries hve
lately been taking up fully half of Ecuador's national budget - hence
the outward "flow" of 4% of Ecuador's population in 2 years.)
3. "Flow" naturalizes. It makes it easy to ignore the state
policies, transnational arrangements, and structured institutions that
create these possibilities and impossibilities of movement -- notably
our legitimate villains, the World Bank and IMF, but also the kleptocratic
national business classes empowered in the name of the free market. The
spread of Hollywood films across the planet is not a natural dispersion
of culture. It is a business proposition aimed, as a business matter,
at stamping out national cinemas, and authorized by trade deals imposed
by rich countries on poor ones. The result so far has been that cinema
has shrunk. Fewer films are being made and distributed, many fewer people
in the world have access to cinema at all, because local moviehouses have
disappeared. So much for the new ecumene.
4. "Flow" obliterates human agency and intentionality - it's
an intransitive verb. This is very handy. To depict money as flowing obscures
the fact that it is sent and received. People who "flow" are
people who have decided to go or return, who have been sent or sent for
by others as part of a considered strategy. By eliminating agency, flow
takes the existential dimensions of human movement off the table, from
excruciating choices forced upon people to the emancipatory possibilities
to which mobility gives rise. .
5. Flow perversely suggests a natural, gravity-driven process which will
automatically reach a tranquil horizontal equilibrium -so the market is
imagined as a leveler, as inherently democratizing. But, as critique of
the late 90s underscored, the world of unfettered neoliberalism seems
to have no gravity. Its forces have proven to be resolutely vertical,
and top and bottom seem to recede before our eyes as wealth concentrates
in some places and immiseration proliferates in others. Workers in Mexico
today have one seventh the earning power they had in 1970, and their wages
are half what they were in 1980. At least a third of the population has
virtually nothing at all; people are shorter on average than they were
30 years ago. And Mexico is a rich poor country. But the rich, rich countries
have experienced the verticalization too. We hear it over and over: the
bottom 40% of U.S. households now control 0.2% of the national wealth
while the top 10% controls 71%. This verticality needed to be acted upon,
and on September 11, it was.
"Flow" exemplifies the official, legitimating language of globalization.
It is not a value neutral term, but a postively valenced term (contrast
'drain') used detached from any ethical dimension. Language with no top
or bottom, as when doubled working hours, child labor, reduced food intake,
infanticide or (as recommended by the Oregon Welfare Department) scavenging
dumps and dumpsters become "coping strategies" (see De la Rocha,
2000). Or when and any form or degree of jobless immiseration is called
the "informal economy." Or when any interaction, can be described
as an "exchange" regardless of how asymmetrical, unequal or
forced it might be. It is surely the task of humanists to denounce such
language, to insist on an ecology of public discourse and an ethical component
in policy talk. If not us, then who?
In imaginative literature, at least the recent Latin American fiction
I have been reading, this newly predatory world is being expressed precisely
by the opposite of flow, in narratives of isolated survivors trying to
create meaningful spheres of action in claustrophobic indoor spaces to
which they have withdrawn from a social world that has become a holocaust,
or in terms of violent delinquency, in which the absence of a livable
future means nobody has anything to lose.5 In vernacular culture it is
registered the way it was in predatory stages of earlier empire, by the
appearance of monsters. In the 1980s, for example, the diaspora into the
US that was underway did not turn up directly in the national imaginary.
It registered indirectly, in the drama of the killer bees. These were
a species of bee transported from Africa to Brazil as part of a breeding
project. The bees acquired their killer label when they turned out to
be much more aggressive than the resident species. As the bees began to
spread throughout the Americas, their spread was interpreted from the
U.S. as a relentless northward march toward the Mexican border. In the
1980s, as the country moved into the largest wave of immigration in its
history, the approach of the bees became a national obsession. Year after
year the country told itself the bees were about to arrive. Attempts were
made to create a pesticide barrier at the border. Scientists working on
the Star Wars missile project invented a tiny chip that could be installed
in the back of a killer bee to track its whereabouts. Suspected swarms
were hunted down and destroyed, to no avail .6
In the mid 90s, in the wake of NAFTA, Mexico and the Caribbean witnessed
the appearance of the chupacabras or "goatsucker." This was
a large winged, batlike creature about four feet tall that came out at
night and attacked the corrals of goats that exist throughout rural regions
of Mexico. Humans and other domestic animals were also vulnerable. Newspapers
published pictures of corrals strewn with goat corpses and women with
neckwounds; drawings of the creature appeared first in the papers and
then on t-shirts; the inevitable corridos turned up, and the chupacabras
made a few cameo appearances on the X-Files. A friend in Mexico City stopped
going out on his patio at night. The goat-sucker's origins, so the story
unfolded, were in a secret laboratory on a U.S. military base in Puerto
Rico where the creature was produced by a failed genetic engineering experiment.
The chupacabras seemed to comment richly on the assault on rural and agricultural
life signified by the 1994 NAFTA agreement. Collective landholdings (ejidos)
were privatized. Subsistence agriculture was told to disappear; goats
and corn should be replaced by kiwi fruit or snow peas. Peasants were
under enormous pressure to use genetically altered crop strains to compete,
and even then it was obvious that U.S. agribusiness was going to suck
the blood out of small-scale Mexican farming. Why goats? The monster targeted
the non-commodified relations between people and their animals that are
at the heart of rural life. (In rural Mexico goat - birria-is the standard
ritual food at weddings, the locus of social reproduction.) By spring
of 2001, the chupacabras looked prophetic of the wholesale holocaust of
farm animals underway in Britain in response to a foot and mouth epidemic
caused by the profit-driven transporting of livestock by transnational
agribusiness. As with the killer bees, it seems the monster myth got there
first.
In rural Peru and Bolivia, the neoliberal era was marked by a resurgence
of the pishtako. This was a monster who first appeared among indigenous
Andeans in the 16th century, out of the violence of the Spanish invasion.
The pishtako put people to sleep with magical powders, and then sucked
the fat out of their bodies so that they wasted away. Not surprisingly
the pishtako was sometimes envisioned wearing a sackcloth tunic reminiscent
of Spanish friars. In the late 1980s, while the killer bees pressed forth
their northward invasion, the pishtako made a series of appearances in
the Andes in response to the depredations of neoliberalism (Wachtel 1994).
This time it was seeking human fat for export to the U.S. to lubricate
machines - cars, planes, computers. Traffickers were also understood to
be selling human flesh to fancy restaurants in Lima. Anthropologists reported
a widespread panic in 1987 when a story circulated that an army of five
thousand pishtakos wearing lab coats had been sent to Ayacucho province
in Peru to collect human fat to be sold to pay off the national debt.
Andeans were not out of the loop. The image captured with impressive exactitude
the nature of the forces bearing down upon them. Readers tempted to think
of the pishtako in overly mythical terms, might want to ponder its relation
to the metropolitan practice of liposuction. (Could American fat be sold
to pay off Peru's debt? No, because American fat IS Peru's debt, the ripped
off resources converted into cheap food and northern hyperconsumption.)7
Around the same time the pishtako was abroad in the Andes, in neighborhoods
of Lima rumors spread about the sacaojos ('ojos'=eyes), predators who
kidnapped children to steal their eyes for export, returning them blind.
This was just one of a huge range of stories of organ theft which since
the 1980s have become powerfully meaningful in places where the integrity
and continuity of communities and identities have been threatened. By
the mid '90s these stories had become widespread enough that the United
States Information Agency set up a website to disclaim them. The most
common seems to be the tale of the stolen kidney. In its most common version,
a man in a bar is seduced by an attractive woman with whom he goes to
a hotel, awaking next day to find he has been drugged and one of his kidneys
removed for sale in Europe or the United States. The story has many variants,
but its frequency and distribution has been astonishing. Again from a
place of fear and vulnerability the story registers the permutations of
the global order quite precisely, particularly new forms of industrial
production which assemble things out of parts made anywhere in the world.
Third world bodies become manufacturers of parts to be exported and inserted
into sick but wealthy first world bodies. Communities are fragmented --
pieces of themselves have had to be sold abroad and are lodged in the
belly of the beast. American versions of the story, which have spread
among truckers, for example, likewise seem to register newly unprotected
bodies/identities. Are these the realities that have given rise recently
to the term"posthuman"?
A "legitimate" international market in organs does exist (is
it legitimate for a poor person to finance a child's education by selling
a kidney?) But this is only part of the reason the organ theft story has
such reach in the world today. Its resonance is also psychic and symbolic.
In spring of 2000 in an old Guatemalan town popular as a tourist stop,
a busload of Japanese tourists was violently attacked by townspeople and
two members of the group were killed. The townspeople had become convinced
that the outsiders were Satanists who had come to steal their children
and sell their organs on an international market. This was not the first
such incident in Guatemala, yet this was a town accustomed to receiving
tourists and producing itself as a tourist site. The tourist pact, the
protocol of the receptor, broke down. Several aspects of contemporary
Guatemalan history will have contributed to this tragedy. Guatemala does
not have a functioning justice system, and in its absence communities
resort to lynching. In the 1980s, as most readers will know, rural communities
in Guatemala were targets of an unspeakably violent genocidal military
campaign in response to a guerrilla movement. Some 200,000 Guatemalans
were killed by their national army, another million were displaced into
refugee camps for years, and virtually everyone witnessed traumatizing
atrocities that included the dismemberment of children. Today the elected
head of their congress is the general who orchestrated the campaign. Imagine
the psychic dissonance of being asked by your national tourist industry
to perform yourself as a timeless exemplar of indigenous authenticity
when this is your lived history.
Finally, whether or not Guatemalan children are being stolen for their
body parts, a brisk traffic in Guatemalan babies certainly does exist.
Between one and two thousand of them are exchanged each year for money
on the international adoption market. These babies are among the new global
travelers - there were four of them on the last plane I took from Guatemala
City to Houston. Their one-way journeys result from the web of factors
that calculatedly produce maximum vulnerability, disponibility, insecurity
in urban and rural working populations. A thousand to fifteen hundred
dollars, the amount the birth mother receives, is a fortune for a peasant
or working class family in Guatemala, the chance of a lifetime, provided
one succeeds in producing a healthy, defect-free baby.
The resurgence of monsters and dismemberment is not a third world phenomenon.
In the United States it has taken place in film and television, most notably
in the hugely successful program "X-Files," now in its 9th (and
last) television season. Most of the horrors mentioned above have made
appearances on the program, which draws heavily on referents harking back
to the cold war, including 1950s fears of nuclear contamination and invasion
from outer space. The updating of these referents in the 1990s reflected
and created a first world subject of the new world order, one that likewise
saw itself at the mercy of unknown and possibly state-sponsored predatory
forces.
Like the recycling of death and survival literature, the resurgence of
monsters and dismemberment perhaps signal processes of what one might
call "demodernization" dished up by the fake protagonist, globalization.
Many note the Dickensian quality of the resurgence of child labor, while
news of the return of slavery in Ivory Coast and Benin, blamed on uncontrollably
falling prices, has revived abolitionism. Supposedly postcolonial countries
are finding themselves recolonized by the former masters as international
finance organisms force them to privatize their resources. Zambia's copper
industry is today back in the hands of the company that owned it in colonial
times, a sale forced upon it by international lenders who controlled balance
of payments support. In New Guinea, the press tells us, the Dayaks have
returned to headhunting in context of invading lumber industry bringing
an immigrant labor pool. The western United States, the New York Times
reported in May 2001, is reacquiring the characteristics of a frontier,
as the century-long effort to turn it into an agricultural zone is deemed
a failure. While Euro-Americans migrate out, the Native American population
grows, the land reverts to an uncultivated state, and the buffalo makes
a comeback - decolonization in the form not of modernization but something
more like its reveral. The erosion of national and international health
care systems has brought tuberculosis back. Hypermobility means that the
place you are most likely to catch it is on an airplane. The spread of
AIDS invokes the earlier depredations of smallpox in the Americas, especially
in the calculated indifference of official power.
Health care is just one of a range of modern apparatuses which, in the
imaginary of modernity, took the form of a grid blanketing national territories,
intended to reach all citizens. Electricity was perhaps the modern grid
par excellence, along with rail and road transportation, telegraph, telephone
and television, education, electoral and judicial systems. When grids
fail, that is, then the trunk lines are not maintained, these formations
become nodal,8 that is, non-inclusive. The territories between nodes can
be bypassed. So cell phones replace unsustained national phone systems,
and it becomes easier in highland Peru to call Florence or Bombay than
the next village over - provided you have a cell phone. In many countries
the state's inability or refusal to maintain the transportation grid means
farmers have no way to get produce to market, and their products are replaced
by imports from abroad which arrive easily through a center to center
nodal system. Zambia, an agricultural country, imports corn, unbelievable
as it seems, from the U.S. and South Africa because the demise of passable
roads - a state responsibility - means Zambian farmers cannot sell what
they grow to anyone at all. Educational grids suffer similar fates. In
1991 the Zambian government spent $60 a year on each primary school pupil;
in 2000 it was $15, and 20% fewer children were enrolled. Rich countries
are hardly immune to the effects resulting from the destruction of those
regulatory, redistributive and custodial functions that states and international
apparatuses used to performThe corporate aggression that drives agricultural
prices down in Zambia does the same within the United States, making all
but large scale farmers superfluous.9 My home country, Canada, has become
a first class international business predator abroad, but its rural areas
are being colonized by German and Swiss farmers after free-market governments
suspended ecological controls and rules on foreign ownership. Tenant farming
(which 19th century immigrants came to escape) has turned up, for the
first time.
What I am identifying here are both processes of demodernization and stories
of demodernization. The stories point to the creation on a global scale
of subjects for whom the expectation of modernity (Ferguson 2000) exists
as a thing of the past. This is an irreparable loss for the mature and
a failure of futurity for the young. Since its January 1994 uprising Mexico's
Zapatista movement has insistently refused that loss. In the spring of
1999 the Zapatistas reaffirmed the expectation of modernity through an
experiment in mobility erected, precisely, on architecture of the grid.
Hemmed in and harrassed in Chiapas by the Mexican army, the Zapatista
movement invoked its citizens' claim to the national space by launching
a "consulta ciudadana," a citizens consultation. Delegations
of one man and one woman, members of the popular movement (not the guerrilla
army), would travel to each of Mexico's 2,500 electoral districts where
they would spend a week meeting with citizens groups, students, officials,
anyone open to dialogue with them. A call went out for local host committees
to establish themselves, organize the visits, and raise the money. Miraculously,
they did. The consulta was to culminate in a national plebiscite on a
set of Zapatista demands for citizenship, self-determination, and a cessation
of state violence. So it was that in March of 1999 five thousand adults,
plus another 1,000 or so children, virtually all indigenous Mexicans many
of whom spoke no Spanish at all, set out on a collective journey not from
margin to center, as Mexico's state-based optic would require, but from
one place in the nation to everywhere else, in a grid reproducing the
national electoral grid. It was a powerful intervention in a national
imaginary already in the process of reinventing itself. Space does not
allow here for an account of the dramatic encounters that ensued, though
if it did, the registers for the telling would range from the marvelous
to the grotesque: the have-nots seeing for the first time all that the
haves actually have, yet physically sickened by their polluted milieu
and their alien ways; mayors, impresarios, workers sitting down for the
first time with indigenous people they had been taught to see as subhuman
and dangerous, or not to see at all, listening to their languages for
the first time, struggling to relate.10 The Zapatistas' gesture was modern
in its demand for liberty, equality and fraternity but dramatically postmodern
in interrupting modernity's colonial form which holds indigenous peoples
in a symbolic space of radical otherness and economic, political and social
marginality. The favored term "hybridity" is not particularly
illuminating of the gesture.11
The Zapatista's experiment in mobility and citizenship, like their writings,
asserted the interpretive and political powers of the marginalized. In
a contrasting response neoliberalism's critics have introduced a vocabulary
of immiseration, suffering, despair, vulnerability, entrapment, a language
that seeks to be more factually and ethically grounded. Other scholars,
with the Zapatistas, warn however against substituting the ungrounded
language of flow with an ethically grounded language of despair. To opt
for despair is to acquiesce to the whole scenario, even as one denounces
it, from a position of privilege.12 J. K. Gibson-Graham, the collective
author of The End of Capitalism (as we knew it) (1996) argue against accounts
of globalization, laudatory or critical, rendered in "a language
and an image of noncontradiction." In particular they caution against
explanations that give capitalism an interpretive monopoly so that "everything
comes to mean the same thing." Such accounts, as we know, will seem
coherent and plausible but will remain oblivious to a set of things which,
Gibson-Graham argues, cannot be subsumed into the narrative of neoliberalism
or late capitalism: the continuing co-existence of capitalist and noncapitalist
modes of production (especially households and self-employment), the workings
of disharmonies, unintended consequences, formations Spivak would call
"dysfunctional for capitalism," and processes of emancipation
such as that of women, or Zapatismo (a movement profoundly shaped by women).
Or perhaps, as Gibson-Graham says, such things can be subsumed into a
narrative of despair if the interpreter - we - chooses to do so. The dystopic
narrative will be plausible and will lead to paralysis. But, they argue,
intellectuals are accountable for creating the world as well as for describing
it. They are called upon to identify in the existing world the elements
of the worlds they would like to come into being. Gibson-Graham outline
a practice of choosing to seek to tell the story otherwise, so that one
attends to disharmonies, unintended consequences, emancipatory processes,
however trivial they might seem. The apparent triviality may itself be
an effect of the workings of the dominant narrative in the analyst.
For example (my example, not theirs), in the imaginary of globalization
there is a tendency to see the global consumer order as a grid - a planetary
blanket of Starbucks, Nikes and MacDonalds. But this imagined picture
is radically untrue, a fact that becomes hugely apparent the minute one
travels to almost anywhere outside the metropole. Consumption, and the
ability to consume, is heavily nodal. Markets have no need to be inclusive
-- it does not matter who is doing the consuming as long as enough of
it is going on (indeed if consumption is concentrated, overhead goes down).
The world is now full of people, places, whole regions and countries which,
far from being integrated into a planetary Walmart, are and know themselves
to be, entirely dispensable with respect to what is seen as the global
economic and political order, to be nonparticipants in any of the futures
that order invites people to imagine for themselves. This is particularly
true of agricultural societies, whose lifeways are being decimated everywhere.13.
This means that the neoliberal order creates not necessarily conditions
of its own demise (those are probably ecological), but certainly conditions
it can't make sense of: vast sectors of organized humanity who have only
the tiniest access to either cash or consumption, and whose task is to
make livable, meaningful lives by other means. How do people in the marginal
places of the post-progress world -inhabitants of Kincaid's "small
places," delinked rural areas or the huge improvised subsistence
neighborhoods that ring many cities - make life viable and worth living?
What succeeds and what does not? (Why do the analyses of the new world
order elide the role of drugs in making immiserated lives liveable?) If
people lack even the prospect of economic security, a job or of building
and supporting a family, what alternative sense of futurity can be found
or created (Balliger 2000)? And if none, what forms of substance and transcendence
can one achieve in the present ?14 . Through the pishtako monster, Andeans
incorporate the predatory phase of the debt crisis into existing historical
memory anchored in a place, in what you might call a cosmos. There is
considerable power in this gesture, for the Andeans retain control of
meaning, situating the new dynamics in a narrative of which they remain
the protagonists and the authors, even when what they are narrating is
their own victimization.
Lifeways geared to ecological and human balance and continuity are, again
to use Spivak's term, "not functional for [late] capitalism,"
which operates by a kind of roving flexibility: the assembly plant is
here today, gone tomorrow. Predatory capitalism is hostile to cosmos in
the sense of an integrative universe where meaning is anchored in practice
and place. Such formations require and produce continuity and interconnectedness.
They "get it together." So it is that in the presence of capitalism's
disaggregating momentum, formations that produce continuity and interconnectedness
persist and find new ways to install themselves alongside stories of organ
theft that we have stories where new mobilities and access to information
are used to reassemble bodies and recover stolen body parts, ancestral
remains, commoditized sacred objects. In 2000, the brain of Ishii, the
famed last member of his California tribe, was sought out and recovered
from a storeroom of the Smithsonian Institute. The bones of the native
Greenlanders that Franz Boas brought to New York a century ago were recovered
in 1993 by their descendants for reburial. By 1998 such processes had
become common enough for the US congress to pass a Repatriations Act .<15>
In these processes of reassembling, getting it together, the things recouped
are perhaps less significant than the acts of recouping them, which affirm
the power to seek wholeness or fullness in a place. Of course, as Gibson-Graham
would remind us, we interpreters have the power to decide that such processes
are insignificant, but we are accountable for that choice and for the
world it implies. (In the last year or two, academic conversation has
recycled the term "romantic" as an epithet for any analysis
affirming resistance, hope or transformative possibilities. This dismissive
gesture, a clear example of making everything mean the same thing, endorses
the narrative of despair and irresonsibility as "realistic".
)
Apparently, getting it together is what brought the Virgin of Zapopan
to Los Angeles. Around 1995 the Virgin multiplied herself again, this
time in response to calls from followers in California, whom she now visits
annually. (In 2001 she made it all the way to Hawaii.) This third self,
significantly for my purposes, is called la viajera, the traveler. So
now there are three of her, la original, la peregrina, la viajera. Her
power of mobiity and desdoblamiento bring her into the orbit of diasporic
community. IN this context her strategy of self-doubling echoes the new
forms of identity, belonging and citizenship being worked out by mobile
workforces and social movements all over the planet. As most readers will
know, it is common now for pueblos in Mexico and Central America to have
full-fledged satellite communities in the United States from which people,
commodities, money, and cultural practices are sent continuously back
and forth. As Roger Rouse's pioneering study showed, part of Redwood City
(Rouse 1991), California is a suburb of Apatzingan, Michoacan. Victor
Montejo reports that there are Tzotzuhil speaking villages in Florida,
and apartment buildings reorganized according to Mesoamerican socio-spatial
relations. The Mixteco of Oaxaca now have a transnational network extending
from Puerto Escondido to Anchorage, and Fresno to New Jersey. Every June
in the airport in San Jose, California Mexicana Airlines takes unaccompanied
children by the dozens to spend summers with grandparents in ranchos and
pueblos. Towns and villages reschedule and redesign local fiestas to accommodate
their migrant populations (a pattern that, incidentally, re-emphasizes
religious calendars over national holidays). In short, great effort, creativity,
and commitment are going into making and sustaining these connections
- to keeping it together. The American myth of the immigrant in search
of a new life and eager to leave origins behind still exists, but it coexists
alongside this other immigrant story whose project is sustaining the place
of origin, often through processes of self-duplication like those of the
Virgin of Zapopan. Working abroad to sustain home often implies dual citizenship
in both the literal sense (more and more countries are allowing it) and
the existential sense of a kind of doubling of the self into parallel
identities in one place and the other. This can be both a fragmenting
and an empowering experience.
In economic terms, you could say that with the demise of the mechanisms
that used to redistribute wealth from north to south -national development
programs, protection of local markets, international aid-émigré
workers are redistributing it "by hand." (The International
Development Bank says Latin American workers send $20 billion a year home
from the US.) This function was recognized by Bush the Younger when, following
the disastrous earthquakes in El Salvador in 2001, he gave permission
for 150,000 undocumented Salvadorans to remain in the U.S. earning money
to send back to help their families recover. Though the economic motivations
are obvious, Gibson-Graham would tell us to look at the ways this doubling,
this mobilization of the here to sustain the there, this project of keeping
it together is in other respects, again to use Spivak's term, not functional
for capitalism. It does not obey the dictates of consumerism or acquisitive
individualism or the self-maximizing individual. In important respects
it is life by other means. Fears of nostalgia should not prevent us from
attending to the mechanisms people, all of us, are using to get it together
and keep it together in the face of the intensified disaggregations which
are functional for capitalism. The current hero of this story, and not
just in the metropole, but in places like highland Guatemala too, is the
cell phone. But te mobil virgins are important too because they can show
up, to offset the monsters.
The inability of neoliberalism to create belonging, colletivity and abelievable
sense of futurity produces, among other things, crises of existence and
meaning that are being sorted through by the nonconsumers and consumers
of the world alike, in ways neoliberal ideology neither predicts nor controls.
The roving virgins are its symptoms and its inscrutable agents..
*I am indebted to colleagues
at the Centro de Investigación y Estudios Superiores de Antropología
Social (CIESAS-Occidente) in Guadalajara, Mexico for conversations and
suggestions that have enriched this work, and for the privilege of a sabbatical
year in their midst. For consultations on the Virgin de Zapopan I am particularly
thankful to Gabriel Torres, María de la O Castellanos and Renée
de la Torre. For thoughts and analysis on globalization, immiseration
and their existential dimensions, I thank Mercedes de la Rocha and Rossana
Reguillo. This text was completed under the auspices of a fellowship at
the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University,
2000-2001, where I benefited from stimulating discussions with James Ferguson,
Liisa Mallki and Jean Lave. I also thank colleagues in the Border Studies
seminar at the University of Wisconsin, the Women's Studies center at
Rutgers University and the Department of Spanish at New York University
for their suggestions and the opportunity to present this work.
NOTES:
1 The rescue operations in
the Sudan, carried out by international Christian charities, have been
sharply criticized for exacerbating the problems they are trying to solve
(see for example NY Times, Editorial page 4/27/01). The money paid to
purchase enslaved Dinka in order to set them free has increased incentives
for the government sponsored militias who are primarily responsible for
Dinka slavery in the Sudan.
2 The London-Based Anti-Slavery
International reports that by its definition some 27 million people today
are enslaved; the transatlantic slave trade is estimated to have transported
15 million individuals over 150 years. In the US, estimates that some
100,000 girls and women were being trafficked into the country yearly
in the sex trade led congress to pass a Trafficking and Violence Victims
Protection Act in 2000. The mail order bride business has also revived
in the US, and today involves large numbers of Russian women seeking a
way out of hopeless circumstances.
3 The exception seems mainly
to be children, who in the contemporary corpus do seem to appear as survivors.
The rest seem to be corpses.
5 At the same time, metropolitan
literatures have become diasporic. Contemporary French and English fiction
are dominated by ex-colonialwriters writing for metropolitan audiences
about non-metropolitan places and times. To a great degree it is a literature
of storytelling.
6 When the bees actually arrived
in the early to mid 90s, as the story played out, they did what immigrants
to the U.S. have always been supposed to do. They interbred with the local
bees, producing new strains resistant to mites that were destroying the
resident population. As of this writing, the most recent killer bee story
in the US press (September 2001) was about the misidentification of an
apparently aggressive colony in Connecticut as "Africanized"
when they were really homegrown "European" bees.
7 In July 2001 Mexico was rocked
by news of the capture of "La Rana" 'the frog', a notorious
hit man employed by one of the country's most powerful narco cartels.
Unbeknownst to police he had been in custody for some time in a Tijuana
jail. Plastic surgery and the removal of 40 pounds of fat by liposuction
had made him unrecognizable.
8 Bruno Latour mentions the
idea of trunk lines and the effects of their severing in We have never
been modern (1991; trans. 1993). Ferguson discusses nodality in Expectations
of Modernity (1999).
9 Half the potato farmers in
the U.S. were forced out of business between 1995 and 2000, and the picture
is about the same for US producers of other crops from corn and soybeans,
to pigs and cranberries.
10 It is important to recognize
the sheer originality of the act: from a position of utmost marginality
and subalternity to make a utopian claim on citizenship, setting in motion
a process which with the collaboration of the privileged required all
to experience the historical limitations imposed on citizenship by colonial
modernity. One must recognize also the courage it took for the people
to embark on this journey in a world unknown but known to be dangerous
to them. It was a remarkable episode in the search for what Mignolo calls
a "politics of cultural transformation" (Mignolo 159).
11 Exactly two years later,
drawing on lessons of the consulta ciudadana, the Zapatistas made a second
march which seemed to revert from the geography of the secular, national
grid, to geography of pilgrimage and the state geography of margins and
center. They converged on Mexico City, intent on addressing the national
congress and demanding approval of peace accords which had been on the
table for years. One of the biggest crowds in the history of the city
converged on the Zocalo (the central plaza) to welcome them. But the center
retained its powers of repudiation. The Zapatista delegation addressed
a congress whose majority absented itself; the peace accords were approved
in a watered down version that did not grant the self-determination they
had demanded; the status of the movement remained, as of this writing,
in limbo.
12 Gayatri Spivak makes a related
point when she rejects the discourse that creates the third world as the
place where wrongs occur, and assigns the first world the task of righting
wrongs (Presidential Lecture at Stanford University, March 2001).
13 The 70,000 inhabitants of
the valley of Tambogrande in northern Peru, for example, find that their
$110 million a year crops of mango and limes is entirely dispensable in
the eyes of the Manhattan Minerals Corporation who wants to turn their
land into an open faced mine that would employ at the most 500 of them.
Ironically, the fruit growing enterprise, for whose survival they are
now fighting, was itself made possible 50 years ago by a World Bank irrigation
project. Neither Manhattan Minerals nor President Fujimori who approved
the mine presented a proposal for the tens of thousands who would be economically
displaced by the mine (Lima: Noticias Aliadas 38:13, 4/16/01). Some theorists
are using the category of the "abject" to describe these huge
sectors of organized humanity-"abject" in its etymological sense
of being expelled, thrown out or down (see for instance, Ferguson 1999).
Doubts about the connotations of the term have kept me from using it.
14 Here the written sources
are ethnographers. Ferguson 1999 discusses the emergence in Zambian urban
migrant culture of styles that cannot be analyzed as expressions of an
underlying code. Anthropologist Robin Balliger (2000), working in Trinidad
studies youth culture and the globalized music scene from a related point
of view. Music and dance, and a whole set of practices linked to them
turn out to be the mechanisms for creating a meaningful, nearly cashless,
communal cosmos.
15 On repatriation, see Clifford
1997, esp. chapters 5 and 7. Clifford (2000) has also dealt extensively
with the Ishii case. On the Greenlanders and Boas, see Harper (2000)
REFERENCES
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Gibson-Graham, J. K. The End of Capitalism (as we knew it):A Feminist
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Wachtel, Nathan. Gods and Vampires: Return to Chipaya. U Chicago Press,
1994.
When I heard about this new
self-duplication, I speculated that la viajera came into being because
the militarization of the border by Clinton's "prevention through
deterrence" policy of 1994 had made it more difficult and dangerous
for the Virgin's American devotees to get to her. But I will have cause
to question this explanation a little later on.
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