Popular Culture and Reconstructing Multi-Tiered Reality: Gender, Latino, Subaltern, and Criminal Studies.

Paul Rich and Guillermo De Los Reyes

University of the Americas-Puebla, Mexico

Popular culture is at an awkward stage, rather like an ungainly teenager looking towards adulthood. The associations are no longer small, but they are not large enough yet in numbers nor international enough in scope to reap the real benefits of size and universality. The future of popular culture requires looking carefully at subject areas which could produce growth, globalization and intellectual stimulation. More discussion is needed about the possibility of popular culture providing the major academic home for some of the new academic disciplines, including criminal, gender, and subaltern scholarship.

Minority gender studies are a prominent example and an area where popular culturists have much to give in the way of support. Those who are studying popular culture cannot avoid studying gender. The increased inclusion of gender minority studies as part of the popular culture movement, including ethnic, lesbian, gay and other topics, deserves serious thought. If these now fast growing disciplines centering on gender were to find a principal home in the popular culture movement, popular culture would be immeasurably strengthened. But gender studies are only part of the opportunity. An aim of the following discussion, which is proemic in nature, is to suggest reasons why popular culture has to be more aggressive in seeking helpmates, citing various Latino women's studies as among the gender interests that belong within the popular culture framework.

Of course, there are never going to be hard-and-fast lines of demarcation between academic fields, and good-natured acceptance of an interdisciplinary stance is one of the main characteristics of the popular culture movement. There have been gender-related papers at American Culture Association and Popular Culture Association meetings for many years, while at the same time similar papers have been presented at sociological and American studies gatherings. There are always going to be papers at the American Political Science Association and American Historical Association meetings on Native American women and black gays, and the various anthropological and language associations undoubtedly will continue to offer panels on women in the Polish American community and Old Order Amish use of surnames. But a few papers do not make an association or society into the major watering hole. Which group will achieve the critical mass necessary to make its conferences and publications the recognized principal meeting ground? Who is going to get 'the bulk of the business'?

By no means are the fortunes of academic societies static. Jockeying for position is always taking place. Disciplines caught flatfooted by the growth of knowledge can lag behind for decades. The fate of mineralogy should be kept in mind. While it's professional societies still exist, they were not ecumenical enough to compete with geological and geophysical associations. The subject itself has remained a backwater. In contrast, there has been a recent resurgence of geography as a discipline, partly because professional movements such as the American Association of Geographers have redefined the field to include considerably more territory (pun not intended). The geographers realized that they were losing out to anthropology and political science, and they successfully exerted themselves to make geography more inclusive. So far the popular culture movement has been extremely inclusive, but that does not preclude more efforts to attract those working on subjects such as gender which have shown growth and promise. The affinities between gender studies and popular culture studies are numerous. Popular culture meetings could be attracting far more gender specialists than have been attending. The simple fact is that many working on gender don't know about the popular culture associations and their activities.

Yet both subjects need the reinforcement of numbers. The fight for academic recognition is not over. Some members of the academy persist in questioning whether gender studies, let alone minority gender studies, deserve a separate category. They also question the validity of popular culture - one reason being that after all, both popular culture and gender are subsumed in respects by social history.

Popular culture supporters know that while perhaps popular culture could be subsumed by social history and thus by history in general, in practice unless the subject is treated distinctly and in its own right it doesn't get attention. That is the same rationale behind the pressure for the formalization of gender studies, and the logic is unassailable.

If the matter of empathy comes into discussions of the academy's treatment of minority gender studies, popular culture scholars should be among the more sympathetic to new fields since theirs is itself a field which has had to struggle for recognition. Gender studies in general face the same difficulties that popular culture has faced in winning a place in the curriculum. Like popular culture, gender scholarship runs smack against a number of self-imposed constraints that academics have masochistically adopted.

This reticence when it comes to subject matter is not for lack of problems to probe and questions to answer. Latino women's studies involve enormous numbers of lives. There are an estimated 17,000,000 Hispanic women in the United States, and study of their cultures is just beginning to win academic recognition. Quite simply, "Not many people in the United States know much about the history of one, much less most, Latino groups."

As an example, Mexican-American women's studies have had to face an almost deliberate ignorance of the considerable influence of Mexican-American women on American history. Theirs is a history that is ironically that of one of the oldest racial groups in the United States while at the same time being one of the youngest 'histories' in the sense of receiving serious academic attention. The fact that minority women were left embedded and one might say, vulgarly, undigested in the history of the United States means that there is an enormous amount of research to be done. Mexican women who found themselves inadvertently Mexican-Americans after the war of 1848, to take just one group, were like sheep, largely shorn of their property and dignity. After Mexico lost much of its territory to the United States, lynchings and murders kept Mexican-Americans in their place and they became aliens in their own country. A racist regime put them in their place. Mexican-Americans had no more opportunities in such a situation than did blacks. Many Mexican-Americans believed that the only way to get along was to become "Angloized". This process included the forgetting of their past. Like the fledgling study of the history of Puerto Rican women and of Cuban American women, the topic has lacked the usual attentions and amenities which the academy gives to a subject, including learned societies and professorships.

This is not denying that women's studies in general in the last two decades have become popular; few academic conventions these days lack a section on women's and gender studies. But gender scholarship is a relatively recent phenomenon and whatever place it has achieved has come after considerable struggle. When, metaphorically, two new kids on the block are combined, as in the study of Mexican-American women which combines ethnic and gender studies, the result is not likely to be the favorite pursuit of the university Establishment.

So the various minority gender studies are fields which are still fighting for recognition. The struggle to be included in the tertiary catalog is not the only similarity shared with popular culture studies. Another important similarity with popular culture is that these minority gender studies deal with "the common folk", with banjos getting just as much or more attention than cellos. There is thus a close relationship between gender studies of minority groups and the so-called 'subaltern' movement.

The affinities of popular culture studies are not only with gender studies, including those devoted to Mexican and Mexican-American women, but with developments such as subalternism, one of a number of additional movements which need to be invited into the popular culture tent.

Subaltern studies are in vogue, "subaltern" having been enlarged in meaning since its origins in Asian studies and its original description as history-from-below. Its proponents now view it as "A word sufficiently elastic to embrace the [various] subordinated peoples of popular culture...". Whether social history or popular culture studies were sufficiently descriptive terms and subaltern studies is simply a more flashy way to describe such investigations could be argued. In any event, in regards to the study of "minorities" (Is any group really a majority? ) subaltern scholars encounter similar problems to those that face gender and popular culture scholars.

Then there is the new "criminal school", if it may be called that, one offshoot in a way of subalternism. It is concerned with social relationships among the marginalized whose past is hard to recover other than through legal records. Latin Americanists now working in this field are akin to such pioneer French scholars as Yves Castan and Nicole Castan and to innovative British scholars such as J.S. Cockburn, J.A. Sharpe, and Douglas Hay. The criminal studies school is still "a minor subfield of social history" but it is making a considerable contribution to understanding of the evolution of Latin American society.

Although the mention of legal cases conjures up thoughts of tables and statistics, criminal records are not the primary property of quantitative researchers. The number of cases that can practically be studied are usually a dangerously small base when it comes to quantitative conclusions, but such a sampling is an extremely strong base for the qualitative scholar. Neither members of the emerging criminal studies school nor popular culture proponents are noticeably overwhelmed with the notion that quantitative studies can replace qualitative studies. Criminal scholars share with popular culture scholars an interest in qualitative approaches: "Their ability to generate sociologically meaningful data for statistical analysis, while useful, is only a secondary part of their appeal....The main attraction of these records lies in the extremely rich quality of the depositions and testimonies given by poor women and men, including Indians and castas."

Much of the current foment, whether labeled as popular culture, subaltern, the criminal school or gender-oriented, is over the subject matter of academic study. Regardless of particular specialization, we are all acquainted with past studies preoccupied with treaties and the high life in which the complexity of society was ignored. The challenge now is to reconstruct a multi-tiered reality, which is really what popular culture is all about. Study of the so-called gender minorities is a necessary part of that process.

Popular culture has a global and ecumenizing mission, with the potential to help give proper due to the growing pluralism and ethnocultural mixing of the world. The need for the new scholarship is clear in regions like Latin America where history-making is not the activity solely of an élite as it has too often been but, as Margaret E. Keck points out is "the interaction between ...two processes: one a highly conservative process in which traditional forms of élite dominance have been maintained and even reinforced, and one in which new forms of political and social organization have arisen to challenge the status quo."

There is a tremendous amount of work to be done because, when new disciplines emerge as they have, it is not only current history that needs the insights and revisions that the fresh outlook provides. So does everything written in the past. It would be a mistake to think that the new scholarship only is concerned only with recent events. For example, it hard to have Mexican women's studies without investigating the past condition of Mexican women. The fact is that almost all past historical scholarship is probably going to have to be reinterpreted.

This is evident in a number of recent works about colonial Latin America, notably by Steven Stern, director of Latin American programs at The University of Wisconsin at Madison. Stern is concerned with interjecting discussion about gender relationships among the marginalized in the highly formalized canon of Latin American history. He did several studies of Andean peasants before turning to Mexico. His newest and highly influential work deals with Mexico's late colonial period, 1760-1821. With this and his other books he has made a significant contribution to Latin American subaltern studies, a term he constantly employs..

The research that he conducted in the original criminal record sources on which his Mexican book, The Secret History of Gender, is prodigious, useful to all those interested in recovering the lost history of Mexican women. He refers to this as "archival immersion", and that is an apt description. Moreover, added to this energetic combing of the archives is a vast bibliography of printed works which would gladden the heart of any popular culturist and that runs the gamut from Henry Abelove's The Lesbian and Gay Reader to Kersti Yllo's Feminist Perspectives on Wife Abuse.

Stern is an example of what the popular culture movement has been preaching, that significant scholarship does not have to be on huge subjects like the Westward Movement or Reformation. Still, there persists a view that subaltern studies or criminal studies or gender studies or popular culture studies are per se not important. It is time that popular culture advocates reached out more strenuously to other victims of the academy and made common cause in asserting the value of the subject matter with which these several disciplines deal. Gender, subaltern and criminal studies have the same promise that popular culture studies do as far as potential for revising the picture of a society. The work going on in these fields strengthens the arguments of social historians made years ago that apparently private stories of the working class which are described by more hidebound academics as trivial or even prurient are actually highly significant.

Despite the obstacles, popular culture has a bright future. It has potential allies that will enable it to grow for more than it already has. An ingredient of success is going to be to do all that can be done to reach out to the other new disciplines and assure them that there is a place for them in the associations, meetings and journals of the popular culture community.