Tijuana: Hybridity and Beyond: A Conversation with Néstor García Canclini

Abstract

In this dialogue anthropologist and artist Fiamma Montezemolo invites public intellectual and anthropologist Néstor García Canclini to reflect on the conceptual work that emerged during the 1980s out of his encounter with the border city of Tijuana, a city which he famously labelled the ‘laboratory of post‐modernity’ in his classic book Hybrid Cultures: Strategies for Entering and Leaving Modernity (1995). Canclini's past and ongoing theoretical work is brought to bear upon a city that since the 1990s has transformed not only into a major hub for contemporary artists and curators but also a political nightmare of narcotraffic‐related warfare that has shed serious doubts on its hybrid and binational futures. With his usual elegance and lucidity, Canclini clarifies his position and proposes an alternative conceptual and interpretive framework to evaluate the futures of Tijuana (in particular) and the relationship between contemporary art and anthropology (in general).