Marie Louise Pratt

[...] In Mexico, according to anthropologist Renée de la Torre, the Virgin of Guadalupe has begun to appear in places of transit – freeway underpasses, airports, subway stations, while since 1995 the Virgin of Zapopan has been traveling annually to the United States to attend to her followers in Los Angeles.

In the imaginary of globalization there is a tendency to see the global consumer order as a grid – a planetary blanket of Starbucks, Nikes and MacDonalds. But this imagined picture is radically untrue, a fact that becomes apparent the minute one travels to almost anywhere outside the metropole. Markets have no need to be inclusive -- it does not matter who is doing the consuming as long as enough of it is going on (indeed consumption is more efficient if it is concentrated). Globalization may have put an end to modernity’s alterities. But it has not put an end to otherness. The world is now full of people, places, whole regions and countries which, far from being integrated into a planetary Walmart, find themselves increasingly isolated and abandoned; of people who are, and know themselves to be, entirely dispensable with respect to what is seen as the global economic and political order; people who have become non-participants in any of the futures that order invites people to imagine for themselves. This is particularly true of agricultural societies, whose lifeways are being disrupted and destroyed everywhere. This means that the neoliberal order creates not necessarily conditions of its own demise (those are probably ecological), but certainly conditions it can’t make sense of: vast sectors of organized humanity who have only the tiniest access to either cash or consumption, and whose task is to make livable, meaningful lives by other means. Those other means will have little to do with the lifescripts associated with capitalism. Those who are “in the flow” are creating practices that produce continuity and connectedness in the face of capitalism’s disaggregating momentum. It is now common for pueblos in Mexico and Central America to have satellite communities in the United States from which people, objects, money, practices, meaning, styles, are sent continuously back and forth. Ethnic and indigenous groups have transnational networks that support those back home and newcomers arriving. All over the planet great effort, creativity and commitment are going into making and sustaining connections, to keeping to together, as the Virgin of Zapopan is doing when she travels to Los Angeles. Though these movements are largely economically motivated, it is important to recognize the ways in which this work of keeping it together, the mobilization of the “there” (abroad) to sustain the “here” (home) are not functional for capitalism. These commitments do not obey the dictates of acquisitive individualism or the self-maximizing individual. They are in important ways, life by other means. Neoliberalism is unable to create belonging, collectivity and a believable sense of futurity for either the consumers or the nonconsumers of the world. Fears of nostalgia or what today keeps getting called “romanticism” should not prevent us from attending to the mechanisms people are using to get it together and keep it together in the face of the intensified disaggregations which capitalism foments and imposes.