Page 171 - Contemporary Cultural Theory 3rd edition

ContCultural Theory Text Pages 4/4/03 1:42 PM Page 162

Contemporary Cultural Theory

Latin music history and a participant–observer’s eye for complex-
ity and tension, Flores draws a cultural map of Puerto Rico, a
‘national imaginary’, sensitive to the nuances of these struggles
over identity and representation, both on the island and in the
United States itself.
Stubbornly unfashionable, Flores insists on the colonial char-
acter of relationships between the United States and Puerto Rico,
and on the continuing relevance of popular culture and its links
to ‘supposedly outmoded forms of vernacular, community, and
“folk” culture’ (Flores, 2000, p. 14). Community-based cultural
practices are the lifeblood of ethnic minorities like the New York
Puerto Ricans, in their rearguard action against submersion in an
amorphous pan-Latino identity that will obscure the specificities
of their class position and national origin, both of which are unre-
solved problems for most Hispanics. Puerto Ricans are second
only to Mexican-Americans in terms of both numbers and the
duration of their settlement in the United States, yet they are still
the Hispanic group ‘most characteristically cast as the bottom
rung, the “exception” to the Hispanic rule’ (p. 8). Despite all the
rhetoric of ‘commonwealth status’ or ‘free association’, the most
obvious explanation for this peculiarity of the Puerto Rican exper-
ience is that their identity derives not from an independent
nation-state, but from ‘a colony by all indicators of international
relations’ (p. 9). This relationship is mirrored on the mainland by
the structured social inequalities that construct the ‘racialized,
stigmatized, inner-city Puerto Rican’ as the ‘spic’, whose ‘only
cultural cousin has been the similarly placed “pachuco” and the
“greaser” from the cities of the Southwest’ (pp. 8–9).
One important object of Latino cultural critique has been
their stereotyping in Hollywood film, television and popular
culture generally. Writing in 1993, Guillermo Gómez-Peña
objected to the way American multiculturalism conceptualised
Latinos as ‘objects of desire’ within a ‘meta-landscape of Mac
Fajitas, La Bamba craze, MTV border rock, Pepsi ads in Spanish,
and Chicano art without thorns’. ‘[O]ur art is...“colorful”,
“passionate”, “mysterious”, “exuberant”, “baroque”’, he contin-
ued, ‘all euphemistic terms for irrationalism and primitivism’
(Gómez-Peña, 1993, p. 51). Latino cultural studies has coined

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