Cultural practices and rough sociality in Mexico’s midsize cities: Tijuana, Puebla and Monterrey

Leandro Rodriguez-Medina, María Emilia Ismael Simental, Alberto Javier López Cuenca and Anne Kristiina Kurjenoja
Additional contact information
Leandro Rodriguez-Medina: Universidad de las Américas Puebla, Mexico
María Emilia Ismael Simental: Benemérita Universidad Autónoma de Puebla, Mexico
Alberto Javier López Cuenca: Benemérita Universidad Autónoma de Puebla, Mexico
Anne Kristiina Kurjenoja: Universidad de las Américas Puebla, Mexico

Urban Studies, 2022, vol. 59, issue 10, 1998-2017

Abstract: It is frequently claimed that cultural agents are necessary to sustain and strengthen the social fabric, to guarantee economic growth and social development and to consolidate knowledge economies based on innovation. These arguments tend to avoid inquiring what kind of sociality these cultural actors are enacting. To address this point, we researched three Mexican midsize cities: Puebla, Tijuana, and Monterrey, between 1984 and 2017. Sociality produced by cultural dynamics, sponsored either by the public (cultural policy) or the private sector (cultural market), is generally characterised by a focus on social order, the construction of local identity, a hygienic view of public space and disempowerment of local actors. Differing from these views, our research has found a new form of sociality that we call ‘rough sociality’, produced by cultural agents from civil society. This sociality is conflictive, ephemeral, spatially bounded and affective, which has implications not only for the cultural work but, most importantly, for the social relations and the being/doing-togetherness that such work may enact and reproduce.

Keywords: culture/arts/creativity; displacement/gentrification; infrastructure; Mexico; sociality; 文化/艺术/创æ„; é©±é€ /绅士化; 基础设施; 墨西哥; 社会性 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/00420980211026544 (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:urbstu:v:59:y:2022:i:10:p:1998-2017

DOI: 10.1177/00420980211026544

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Urban Studies from Urban Studies Journal Limited
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().