Staging Culture in Totonacapan: Spaces of Recuperation/Spaces of Terr(or)toriality

Studies in Latin American Popular Culture

Volumn 15, Issue 1, 1996, Pages 200-217

  Villanueva, Margaret A ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 0347247557     PISSN: 07309139     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: None     Document Type: Review

References (31)

1. Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space (London: Basil Blackwell, 1991).
2. The Catholic festival of Corpus Cristi, celebrating devotion to the Holy Eucharist, had been the grandest event on the religious calendar of Mexico City in the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries. According to a recent analysis, the colonial ruling elite sponsored the Corpus Christi festival and encouraged indigenous participation to "entertain the populace as a reward for submission"; more so than the other ninety festivals held in the city, its procession "defined and limited the public space of the festival" and the social organization of the procession, its "unique festive space encouraged integration and identification with a larger community, beyond one's ethnicity, social status. Linda A. Curcio-Nagy, "Giants and Gypsies: Corpus Christi in Colonial Mexico City," in Rituals of Rule, Rituals of Resistance: Public Celebrations and Popular Culture in Mexico, ed. W. H. Beezley et al, (Wilmington: Scholarly Resources, 1994), 3-4.
3. Enrique Leff notes in "Marxism and the Environmental Question: From the Critical Theory of Production to an Environmental Rationality for Sustainable Development," Capitalism, Nature Socialism, 4:1, (March 1993), that "Political ecology and ecological Marxism are new areas of action and thought. . . . [that] seek the causes, roots and social effects of the processes of ecological imbalance and decay" (57), and in this sense, environmental movements are driven by the principles of participatory management, the rights of ethnic groups and peasant communities over their territory, and the reappraisal of aesthetic values in nature" (64).
4. The connection between political ecology and Lefebvre's notion is that they both analyze the dialectical interplay between the "natural," the "cultural," and "forces and relations of production": "Every social space is the outcome of a process. . . . In short, every social space has a history, one invariably grounded in nature, in natural conditions that are at once primordial and unique in the sense that they are always and everywhere endowed with specific characteristics" (110).
5. Contrary to a "folkloric" view of culture as "expression" of a people's genius, García Canclini regards culture "as a tool helpful for understanding reproducing, and transforming the social system, and for making and constructing the hegemony of individual classes." Néstor García Canclini, Transforming Modernity: Popular Culture in Mexico (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1993), viii.
6. Ibid.
7. Margaret A. Villanueva, "Region and Power: The Contested Terrains of Nature, Race, Gender, and Class in Totonacapan Gulf Coast, Mexico, 1492-1992," Ph.D. Dissertation, University of California, Santa Cruz, Dec. 1991.
8. García Canclini (1993) argues that "The fiesta prolongs daily existence to such an extent that its development reproduces society's contradictions. It cannot become a place for subversion of egalitarian free expression, or if it does it is with reluctance, because it is not just a movement of collective unification; it duplicates social and economic differences" (32). While I agree with this critique of the "social leveling" potential of fiestas, I also argue for the fragmentation of fiestas - when internal contradictions split the unity of a community-wide celebration, and even the fragments suffer further splits (as in the Feria de Corpus Cristi of 1994).
9. Néstor García Canclini, Culturas híbridas: Estrategias para entrar y salir de la modernidad (Mexico: Grijalbo/Consejo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes, 1992). This and all subsequent translations are by the author, unless otherwise indicated.
10. Adolfo Colombres in the introduction to Félix Díaz Juárez, Tlahuanapa (español) tomo I (México: Dirección General de Culturas Populares, 1983), 5-7.
11. "El Sub-Director de Turismo Inauguró la Feria Nacional de Corpus Cristi," El mundo de poza rica, 15 June 1987, 1.
12. Daniel H. Levine, "Constructing Culture and Power," in Constructing Culture and Power in Latin America (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993) 18.
13. José Luis Melgarejo Vivanco, Los calendarios de Zempoala (Xalapa: Universidad Veracruzana, Cuadernos del Instituto de Antropología, 23, 1966).
14. Curcio-Nagy, 2.
15. Villanueva, 1991. For a thorough analysis of the relationship among heat, light, authority, and mature masculinity among Mayan peoples see Gary H. Gossen, Chamulas in the World of the Sun: Time and Space in a Maya Oral Tradition (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1974).
16. Victor Manuel Toledo, Naturaleza, producción, cultura: Ensayos de ecología política, (Xalapa, México: Universidad Veracruzana, 1989), 106.
17. "El Sub-Director de Turismo . . .," El Mundo de Poza Rica, 15 June 1987.
18. Toledo, 51.
19. Isabel Kelly and Angel Palerm, The Tajín Totonac (Washington,DC: Smithsonian Institution, 1952).
20. Domingo García García and José Luis Blanco Rosas, "Daños y perjuicios por PEMEX a 13 comunidades de Papantla, Veracruz," Report by Direccín General de Culturas Populares, Unidad Regional de Papantla, and Instituto Nacional Indigenista, Centro Coordinador Totonaco, Papantla, 1984.
21. Twenty-four communities are listed in the Censo Ganadero, 1982, by the Fideicomiso para la Campaña Nacional contra la Garrapata (FCNCG).
22. Narciso Barrera Bassols, Benjamin Ortiz Espejal and Sergio Medellin, "Un reducto de la abundancia: El caso excepcional de la milpa en plan de Hidalgo, Veracruz," in Restructuración económica y subsistencia rural: El maíz y la crisis de las ochenta, ed. C. Hewitt de Alcantara, (México: El Colegio de México, 1992).
23. I.N.I.P. Diagnóstico, 1982. Report from the regional office of Secretaria de Agricultura y Recursos Hydraulicos (SAHR).
24. Kelly and Palerm, 1952.
25. "Glorioso el Pasado de Papantla," El Mundo de Poza Rica, 15 June 1987.
26. Luis Velásquez Rivera, Bamba Violenta (México: Ediciones Oceano, SA, 1986).
27. William Roseberry, "The Language of Contention," in Everyday Forms of State Formation: Revolution and the Negotiation of Rule in Modern Mexico, ed. G.M. Joseph and D. Nugent (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1994).
28. José Velasco Toro, "Indigenismo y rebellión totonaca de Papantla, 1885-1896," América Indígena 39,1 (1979): 81-105.
29. Jose Velasco Toro, "Legislación e indigenismo en Veracruz durante el Siglo XIX," México Indígena 23,9 (1979): 1-8.
30. García Canclini, 1993, 103.
31. Ibid., 8.