Análisis de anuncios

I.El análisis semiótico
Texto:
*Autor/es o director (la función autorial)
*Género
*Forma
*Estilo (irónico, impresionista, directo, etc.)
*Recursos (cromatismo, oscuridad, etc.)
*Función caracterológica
*Contenido

Contexto/s:
*¿Cómo se desarolla el contenido?
*¿A base de qué especificidad histórica?
*El contexto explica cómo el texto se relaciona con la historia
*¿Con cuáles otros textos dialoga el texto en cuestión?


Interpretación/es:
*A base del texto y el contexto, ¿cuáles son las interpretaciones del texto más probables?
*Tensión entre el texto y el contexto y cómo estos ofrecen una/s interpretación/es lógica/s y verificable/s
*¿Qué significa el texto y cómo? ¿Qué quiere decir el texto dentro y fuera de la presencia autorial?


II. Vean los siguientes anuncios para comentarlos en relación a la lectura de Nestor García-Canclini, "Las industrias culturales". Tomen en cuenta la función caracterológica (según Robert Rushing) de "los protagonistas", tanto como la materia semiotizable que se encuentra en los anuncios publicitarios.











III. Califas: Meg Whitman, aspirante al puesto del gobernador Arnold Schwarzenegger, se ha distanciado de Bob "I'm a proud racist" Kellar.



IV. Análisis de Sleep Dealer (2008)
Trama

El futuro en el presente


Personajes
Leonor Varela ... Luz Martínez
Jacob Vargas ... Rudy
Luis Fernando Peña ... Memo
Giovanna Zacarías
Marius Biegai ... cámara
Emilio Guerrero ... Ricky
Jake Koenig ... el gerente
Ursula Tania ... la prostituta


La frontera digital

Industrias Culturales: La función caracterológica de la "latinidad"

La frontera en la imaginación popular

I.HISTORY'S AFTERLIVES
A. MAPS AND MEMORY

MEXICO CITY (Reuters) - The distillers of Sweden's Absolut vodka have withdrawn an advertisement run in Mexico that angered many U.S. citizens by idealizing an early 19th century map showing chunks of the United States as Mexican.

The billboard ad has the slogan "In an Absolut World" slapped over a pre-1848 map showing California, Arizona and other U.S. states as Mexican territory. Those states were carved out of what had been Mexican lands until that year.

Although it was not shown in the United States, U.S. media outlets picked up on the ad, and after a barrage of complaints, Absolut's maker said on Sunday the ad campaign would cease.

Defending the campaign last week, Absolut maker Vin & Spirit said the ad was created "with a Mexican sensibility" and was not meant for the U.S. market.

"In no way was this meant to offend or disparage, nor does it advocate an altering of borders, nor does it lend support to any anti-American sentiment, nor does it reflect immigration issues," a spokeswoman wrote on Absolut's Web site.

"Instead, it hearkens to a time which the population of Mexico may feel was more ideal," she wrote.

Absolut's blog cite has received more than a thousand comments since the ad campaign was launched a few weeks ago, with many calling for boycotts of the Swedish company.

"I have poured the remainder of my Absolut bottles down the sink," one blogger wrote.

A war between Mexico and the United States from 1846 to 1848 started with Mexico's refusal to recognize the U.S. annexation of Texas and ended with the occupation of Mexico City by U.S. troops.

At the end, Mexico ceded nearly half of its territory to the United States, forming the states of California, Nevada, Utah and parts of Colorado, Arizona, New Mexico and Wyoming.

Mexicans remain sensitive about the loss and the location of the border. At the same time, the United States is fortifying barriers to keep out undocumented Mexican migrants.

Some Mexicans use the term "Reconquista" (reconquest) to refer to the growing presence in California of Mexican migrants and their descendants.

France's Pernod Ricard is taking over Absolut vodka, one of the world's top-selling spirit brands, after buying Vin & Spirit from the Swedish government at the end of March.

(Reporting by Noel Randewich, editing by Philip Barbara)

B. Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo


On January 4, 1848, almost four weeks before the signing of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, Senator John Calhoun (1782-1850) of South Carolina appeared on the Senate floor to state his disdain for the annexation of Mexican territories to the United States. Calhoun, though an expansionist, vehemently expressed his disdain for the Mexican people in a last ditch effort to prevent the signing of the treaty:

"We have never dreamt of incorporating into our Union any but the Caucasian race—the free white race. To incorporate Mexico, would be the very first instance of the kind of incorporation of the Indian race; for more than half of all Mexicans are Indians, and other is composed chiefly of mixed tribes. I protest against such a union as that! Ours, sir, is the government of a white race. The greatest misfortunes of Spanish America are to be traced to the fatal error of placing these colored races on an equality with the white race. That error destroyed the social arrangement which formed the basis of society. . . .
Sir, it is a remarkable fact, that in the whole history of man, as far as my knowledge extends, there is no instance whatever of any civilized colored races being found equal to the establishment of free popular government, although by far the largest portion of the human family is composed of these races."

Quote from: The Congressional Globe, United States Congress, Senate, 30th Congress, first session, 1848, 98-99.





II. STOP THE HATE CAMPAIGN

Lou Dobbs attributes pseudo-rise in leprosy (Hansen's Disease) to immigration. His "source," Madeline Cosman, can be seen below.



Lou Dobbs "source" on health source and immigration said, as quoted on Lou Dobbs' show:




This is Madeline Cosman, Dobbs' source. Yes, source, Did you get that?:





III. THE LATINO BODY POLITIC

José Antonio Gutierrez

(Duke students: These sources require updating. Please forward updates to me at the email address on the top right hand corner of this media blog.)

Myth: Immigrants don’t pay taxes

Fact: Immigrants pay taxes, in the form of income, property, sales, and taxes at the federal and state level. As far as income tax payments go, sources vary in their accounts, but a range of studies find that immigrants pay between $90 and $140 billion a year in federal, state, and local taxes. Undocumented immigrants pay income taxes as well, as evidenced by the Social Security Administration’s “suspense file” (taxes that cannot be matched to workers’ names and social security numbers), which grew by $20 billion between 1990 and 1998. Source

Myth: Immigrants come here to take welfare

Fact: Immigrants come to work and reunite with family members. Immigrant labor force participation is consistently higher than native-born, and immigrant workers make up a larger share of the U.S. labor force (12.4%) than they do the U.S. population (11.5%). Moreover, the ratio between immigrant use of public benefits and the amount of taxes they pay is consistently favorable to the U.S. In one estimate, immigrants earn about $240 billion a year, pay about $90 billion a year in taxes, and use about $5 billion in public benefits. In another cut of the data, immigrant tax payments total $20 to $30 billion more than the amount of government services they use. Source: “Questioning Immigration Policy – Can We Afford to Open Our Arms?”, Friends Committee on National Legislation Document #G-606-DOM

Myth: Immigrants send all their money back to their home countries

Fact: In addition to the consumer spending of immigrant households, immigrants and their businesses contribute $162 billion in tax revenue to U.S. federal, state, and local governments. While it is true that immigrants remit billions of dollars a year to their home countries, this is one of the most targeted and effective forms of direct foreign investment. Source

Myth: Immigrants take jobs and opportunity away from Americans

Fact: The largest wave of immigration to the U.S. since the early 1900s coincided with our lowest national unemployment rate and fastest economic growth. Immigrant entrepreneurs create jobs for U.S. and foreign workers, and foreign-born students allow many U.S. graduate programs to keep their doors open. While there has been no comprehensive study done of immigrant-owned businesses, we have countless examples: in Silicon Valley, companies begun by Chinese and Indian immigrants generated more than $19.5 billion in sales and nearly 73,000 jobs in 2000. (Source: Richard Vedder, Lowell Gallaway, and Stephen Moore, Immigration and Unemployment: New Evidence, Alexis de Tocqueville Institution, Arlington, VA (Mar. 1994), p. 13.

Myth: Immigrants are a drain on the U.S. economy

Fact: During the 1990s, half of all new workers were foreign-born, filling gaps left by native-born workers in both the high- and low-skill ends of the spectrum. Immigrants fill jobs in key sectors, start their own businesses, and contribute to a thriving economy. The net benefit of immigration to the U.S. is nearly $10 billion annually. As Alan Greenspan points out, 70% of immigrants arrive in prime working age. That means we haven’t spent a penny on their education, yet they are transplanted into our workforce and will contribute $500 billion toward our social security system over the next 20 years. Source

Myth: Immigrants don’t want to learn English or become Americans

Fact: Within ten years of arrival, more than 75% of immigrants speak English well; moreover, demand for English classes at the adult level far exceeds supply. Greater than 33% of immigrants are naturalized citizens; given increased immigration in the 1990s, this figure will rise as more legal permanent residents become eligible for naturalization in the coming years. The number of immigrants naturalizing spiked sharply after two events: enactment of immigration and welfare reform laws in 1996, and the terrorist attacks in 2001. Source

Myth: Today’s immigrants are different than those of 100 years ago

Fact: The percentage of the U.S. population that is foreign-born now stands at 11.5%; in the early 20th century it was approximately 15%. Similar to accusations about today’s immigrants, those of 100 years ago initially often settled in mono-ethnic neighborhoods, spoke their native languages, and built up newspapers and businesses that catered to their fellow émigrés. They also experienced the same types of discrimination that today’s immigrants face, and integrated within American culture at a similar rate. If we view history objectively, we remember that every new wave of immigrants has been met with suspicion and doubt and yet, ultimately, every past wave of immigrants has been vindicated and saluted. Source

Myth: Most immigrants cross the border illegally

Fact: Around 75% of today’s immigrants have legal permanent (immigrant) visas; of the 25% that are undocumented, 40% overstayed temporary (non-immigrant) visas. Source

Myth: Weak U.S. border enforcement has lead to high undocumented immigration

Fact: From 1986 to 1998, the Border Patrol’s budget increased six-fold and the number of agents stationed on our southwest border doubled to 8,500. The Border Patrol also toughened its enforcement strategy, heavily fortifying typical urban entry points and pushing migrants into dangerous desert areas, in hopes of deterring crossings. Instead, the undocumented immigrant population doubled in that timeframe, to 8 million—despite the legalization of nearly 3 million immigrants after the enactment of the Immigration Reform and Control Act in 1986. Insufficient legal avenues for immigrants to enter the U.S., compared with the number of jobs in need of workers, has significantly contributed to this current conundrum. Source

Myth: The war on terrorism can be won through immigration restrictions

Fact: No security expert since September 11th, 2001 has said that restrictive immigration measures would have prevented the terrorist attacks—instead, the key is effective use of good intelligence. Most of the 9/11 hijackers were here on legal visas. Since 9/11, the myriad of measures targeting immigrants in the name of national security have netted no terrorism prosecutions. In fact, several of these measures could have the opposite effect and actually make us less safe, as targeted communities of immigrants are afraid to come forward with information. Source:Associated Press/Dow Jones Newswires, US Senate Subcommittee Hears Immigration Testimony, Oct. 17, 2001.)


IV. STRATEGIES

Reading: Susan Bibler Coutin, "Being En Route."

Topics:
Thinking through "immigration," as a category of analysis, requires us to think less about the location of the subject and more about the location of knowledge about the Latino subject (always seemingly in question).

Take for instance popular renditions of the immigration problem: Heather Mac Donald, et al., The Immigration Solution

PRODUCT DESCRIPTION: "Heather Mac Donald describes how an epidemic of crime, gangs, and illegitimacy is creating a new Hispanic underclass, and how the Mexican government aids and abets illegal immigration to the United States and thwarts state and local attempts to resist it. Steven Malanga shows how, despite much argument to the contrary, Hispanic immigrants produce a net cost to the American economy, not a net benefit, and he goes on to outline the kind of immigration policy that would be both liberal and in America's interest. Victor Davis Hanson writes about his own experience growing up in California's farm country and watching the Hispanic immigrant influx transform his state for the worse. The Immigration Solution proposes the same kind of policy in place in other advanced nations, one that admits skilled and educated people on the basis of what they can do for the country, not what the country can do for them."

What are the factual errors related to the book's description? What is elided in the description? How are "Hispanics" blended into the category of "Mexican"? How does the national signifier "Mexico" become associated with "illegality" itself?

Heather Mac Donald's other recent work can be found in "Is the Criminal-Justice System Racist?"

Lázaro Lima, “Sleep Dealer and the Promise of Latino Futurity”

Lázaro Lima

Sleep Dealer is set on the U.S.-Mexico border where high-tech factories allow the protagonist, Memo, and other migrant workers, to plug their bodies into a network to provide virtual labor for the North. Sleep Dealer constitutes one of the first instances of “Latino Sci-Fi” film and genre making and this is significant. Why? Because there is no tradition of Latino science fiction writing or film to speak of. There are no Octavia Butlers or Samuel Delanys, as in the African American tradition, no Laurence Yeps or S. P. Somtows, as in the Asian American tradition, to engage in a sustained critique of the ideology of genre as it pertains to a future subject position yet to be imagined; an ideation of Latino futurity that has not yet achieved an ideology of form in the present. What are we to discern from the absence of science fiction writing in Latino literary and cultural studies? What are we to make of this and how should we read this absence?

As I’ve noted in The Latino Body and elsewhere, from “the American 1848” to the present, Latino literary and cultural interventions have been surprisingly consistent in making their relationship to the state historical. From one the earliest “Mexican American” novelist like Maria Amparo Ruiz de Burton writing in the XIX century to the extreme contemporary of Latino memoir, literary production has sought to create a logic of presence in the past, anticipating one of the fundamental conundrums raised by Fred Jameson’s recent work; namely, how to own the "inevitable failures" of the past without making defeatism the foregone conclusion of their inheritance. Understood from the confines of a "Latinocentric" perspective, Jameson’s observation might be rendered in the form of a question: By haunting the cultural sphere of the past, do we depoliticize the possibility for a viable Latino future? Or, even better, Why have we allowed the very futures of Latinidad to be colonized through an insistence on the narrative renderings of our stories, our lives, our Latinidades, in the preterite and imperfect tense of the historical imagination?

Exile, diaspora, loss, memory, trauma, history, U.S. military campaigns in our countries, language barriers and borders, all emblematic of the Latino experience in the U.S. and carved into niche marketing strategies for publishers, only tell, retell, and package part of historical desire. What those stories can’t imagine is the possibility of making our relationship to the state anything other than historical. In the process, I believe we run the risk as cultural agents in the academy of allowing majortitarian political actors to colonize the very futures of Latinidad.

One of the fundamental questions of Latino studies, then, should be: How do we decolonize the future? If following Jameson, “History is what hurts,” then how might, say, Latinos in space redress that hurt by imbricating our “ethno-racial” particularisms in a future imagined from our present as owners of that future before it is wrested from us like our seemingly unwritten past? I believe that such a decolonizing move, both in the theoretical gesture of investigating why this is so as well as the creation of futurity projects, might have us instantiate the emancipatory potential of a Latino studies project for our moment. A paradigm shift within our inherited race and ethnic studies models would require a recognition that what is at stake is not the location of the known but, rather, how the location of the knower dictates what counts as a legitimate object of study.

Ethnic studies, after all, exists because other disciplinary formations aren’t doing their job. Yet the move requires that our students learn to ask more than how they can identify as social and political beings in a racist culture, but how the unequal distribution of social and material resources is in part managed through understanding the ethnic subject as a fractured subject who must answer the inevitable “Who am I?” before being allowed — if at all — to state the declarative “I will be.” And we, all of us in the academy, are imbricated in this impasse. Being able to move away from just such navel gazing makes it more difficult to substitute culture for the state, thereby preventing us from confusing culture with the politics of the state. As when Memo's father in the movie asks, "Is our future a thing of the past?," Sleep Dealer, along with the histories it haunts, admonishes us not to sleepwalk through history lest we be tempted to dream somebody else's dream.

The Lone Ranger (1949)

Asignaturas:
Border Battles Organization



Angela Davis en UCLA

Género, sexualidad y nación en la frontera


Aventurera (1950)

"Cabaret or brothel? If only poor Elena had known the difference!"

BY GARY MORRIS

In the late 1940s, Mexico experienced an economic boom that shifted the cultural and artistic energy from country life — the worn-out world of rancheras and haciendas — into the cities. Movies were inevitably affected by this trend, and Mexican filmmakers quickly responded by creating a new genre to bring the city and its multiple temptations to the masses. This genre was the cabaretera, a bizarre amalgam of music and melodrama and noir, with liberal doses of sex (especially sadism) and what we now would call high camp, set in the squalid whorehouses, cheap bars, and dark glistening streets of "sin towns" like Ciudad Juarez. Not that these were the exclusive backgrounds of the cabaretera; there’s a strong element of class conflict that also demanded contrasting wealthy environments, typically populated by hypocrites, that were just out of reach of the fallen singers and dancers who dominated these films.

The cabaretera became a staple of postwar Mexican cinema and yielded many stars, but none as popular as Ninón Sevilla, a Cuban rhumba dancer who became an international success on the basis of her spirited performances in films with sleazy titles like Victims of Sin, Sensuality, I Don’t Deny My Past, and the unquestioned masterpiece of the genre, Alberto Gout’s Aventurera (1950). Sevilla is not a typical beauty but has ferocious vivacity as both dancer and actress in a persona that dazzlingly combines innocence and sensuality.

The opening scenes of Aventurera ("adventuress") in Chihuahua show a happy-go-lucky Elena Tejero (Sevilla) with her loving parents in their cozy bourgeois home. When shady admirer Lucio (sexy Tito Junco) tries to lure her on a date, she refuses, saying "I won’t lie to Mama." Mama, however, has no such compunction. When Elena returns, she discovers her mother in a lustful embrace with a family friend. Dazed and disheartened, she wanders through the streets, and discovers when she returns that her father has shot himself.

The plot of Aventurera kicks into byzantine mode almost immediately, as Elena goes to Ciudad Juarez and tries to find a respectable job. Instead, she’s drugged and forced into prostitution by her admirer Lucio, who supplies young girls to Rosaura (the thrilling Andrea Palma), a crime queenpin who runs a lucrative whorehouse fronted by a cabaret. Elena, as it happens, is a fine dancer and singer and becomes a popular star of the nightclub. She is less successful as a whore, however, refusing to go to bed with the customers and getting into catfights with men and women on the dance floor. Rosaura, of course, won’t stand for such stuff and threatens her with disfigurement or worse.

Sevilla
Ninón Sevilla
Elena’s musical numbers display Sevilla’s charms to lurid advantage. The splashiest is "In a Persian Market," and her body is almost entirely visible through her Arabian "costume" (really just a few threads) as she energetically thrusts at the camera, predating Elvis by several years. This and her other routines combine elements of Busby Berkeley choreography, Maria Montez otherworldly kitsch, and even Carmen Miranda fruit hats. Some of the songs also serve an important dramatic function, particularly the title tune sung by Agustín Lara, which reminds Elena of the price of being a fichera (trashy B-girl) and stops her in her tracks when she hears it: "Sell your love dearly, it’s the price of your past. And he who wants the honey from your lips must pay the price in diamonds for your sin."

This bittersweet reminder of the "wages of sin" can’t compete with Elena’s hunger for revenge against Rosaura and Lucio. Her conversion from goody two-shoes to immoral slut continues when Rosaura instructs a scarred, mute killer named El Rengo (Miguel Inclán) to carve up her face. Lucio arrives to rescue her from El Rengo and the "club," and she becomes an accomplice in a failed bank robbery that lands Lucio in jail. Ever on the move, Elena flees to Mexico City, where she again becomes a star. She meets a respectable lawyer Mario (Ruben Rojo), from "one of Guadaljara’s oldest families." At this point, the film begins to play its highest cards, with a breathtaking new plot twist about every three minutes.

Aventurera will surprise viewers who associate the ‘40s with repression and conventionality. The film’s attitudes, particularly toward Elena, have a distinctly modern feel, in spite of the many period trappings in the form of the musical numbers, the location settings, and especially the cautionary and redemptive aspects of the story. The film unfalteringly supports Elena’s tortured odyssey through the lowest realms of Mexico’s urban nightlife, reveling in scenes of her power as artist and woman even when she’s using it seemingly beyond reason to punish those who have betrayed her. The feminist subtext here is rich and often blatant — really as much text as subtext.


With its velvety black-and-white photography, parts of Aventurera look like film noir or Italian neo-realism, connections confirmed by the film’s fixation on crime and class struggle. At other times, it looks like a Hollywood musical with its transporting environments and camp-erotic suggestiveness. Evident too are aspects of classical narrative, too — particularly in the singers in the nightclub, a kind of Greek chorus whose songs comment obliquely on Elena’s moral struggles; and in the character of El Rengo, the silent killer who represents implacable fate but emerges with his own peculiar pathos. Aventurera brilliantly manipulates these diverse elements.

In addition to the riveting Ninón Sevilla, watch for wonderful, classic musical performances by Perez Prado and his Orchestra, Pedro Vargas, Ana Maria Gonzalez, El Trio Los Panchos, Los Angeles del Infierno, and Ray Montoya and his Orchestra.

Devaluación humana fronteriza: Border Patrol