Page 130 - CULTURE IN THE COMMUNICATION AGE

CULTURAL FRONTS

obvious, taken for granted, normal, everlasting, and so on, derives tentatively
from a series of cultural confrontations. These struggles can be located in how
social agents ‘in their own way’ define and elaborate basic transclass elements:
needs, identities, values. It is upon these fundamentally human elements (Cirese
1984; González 1994: 62), that meaning – shared commonly across social
positions, but always unstable – is constructed. Only by interrogating historically
specific cultural sites can we delineate in some detail the nature of this
instability.
We can follow the sociocultural trajectory of the aforementioned Los Tigres
del Norte or Ricky Martin, for instance, by moving from their actual positions
backwards. We can see them as placed in di fferent positions in the field, and we
can get information regarding their entrance into the specialized social space of
entertainment. Both Los Tigres and Martin necessarily had to learn their
‘place’ from their interactions with other situated agents. Thus, we find, for
example, stories of their ‘discovery’ and the ways they began to gain media
visibility, and from that point, we learn of the taste of large audiences. Good
historiographies would also the trace the different stages of the musicans’
physical transformations. In the case of Martin (Figure 6.1), this includes
body-building in order to become more generally admired and sexually attract-
ive. In the case of Los Tigres del Norte (Figure 6.2), they must achieve the
stylized look of the folkloric norteño. They must really look like ‘Mexicans’. To
meet this structural requirement, the movements and bodies of Los Tigres

Figure 6.1 Ricky Martin (Max Becherer: San José Mercury News ©1999)

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