Cultures of the City: Mediating Identities in Urban Latin/o America

Abstract

Cultures of the City: Mediating Identities in Urban Latin/o America, edited by Richard Young and Amanda Holmes, Pittsburgh: The University of Pittsburgh Press, 2010. 262 pp., US$25.95 (paperback), ISBN: 978-0-8229-6120-8 Richard Young and Amanda Holmes' ambitious volume brings together variety of scholars and disciplines, all united in their interest in the city as site of Latino/a cultural expression. Young, emeritus professor of Spanish and Latin American Studies at the University of Alberta, and Holmes, associate professor in the Department of Hispanic Studies at McGill University, were obviously faced with the dilemma of city selection and Buenos Aires, Mexico City, and Havana are covered in two chapters each, using film, music, photography, art, and literature, to illustrate particular events, conditions, and practices of urban (p. 2). The rest of the chapters are devoted to Bogota Salvador, Recife, Lima, and Asuncion, and contributions on Los Angeles and Detroit complete the panorama. The editors deliberately draw on contributions from the humanities and social sciences (from scholars in Latin America, North America, and the UK) to underscore the diversity of cultural expressions of Latinos/as in Latin and the United States. As snapshots that portray what for given time and under given circumstances are some of the salient characteristics of urban life in Latino/a America (p. 11), the volume provides succinct examples of space-time compression and thus the continuous confluence of the global and the local. For instance, in the chapter on Bogota's mass transit project, Hector Fernandez L'Hoeste explains TransMilenio as template for the consolidation of Colombia's modern national identity. Cultural is addressed in the reimaging of Lima as a whole city transformed into scenographic, exotic, and touristic object of consumption (p. 200). Similarly, Latino nouvelle cuisine in Los Angeles is easily consumable, in essence, edible multiculturalism, digestible for Los Angeles' elites, as Rodolfo Torres and Juan Buriel convincingly argue, with a certain postcolonial desire ... to possess the Other by symbolic measures in lieu of territorial and geopolitical expansion (p. 76). Andrea Noble's chapter on the Zapatistas' highly symbolic visit to Mexico City in 1999 (including stops at the National Museum of Anthropology, the Zocalo, and Templo Mayor, all must-see destinations for Mexicans and international visitors alike) highlights the Other within, given the failed attempts at integrating Mexico's indigenous population. …