What you can learn in an old colonial prison.

            Why don’t you do real history? Don’t you want to see our well indexed collection of colonial documents? Routinely when I have visited the archives in Mexico City and explained to the man or women behind the desk, in the colonial prison re-purposed as an archive that I work on comic books from the 1970s they tried to convince me to change my dissertation topic right then and there. It seems to be that much like the bias in the academy that Barbra Kirshenblatt-Gimblett and Jeannie B. Thomas make note of I too am not taken seriously in my field. The basis and assumptions made of folklorists, and the stigmas or assumptions that made it difficult for some to find a job, can be expanded to anyone working on modern Mexico on a topic that might also be construed as “vernacular” or too close to the “low others.” Having just come from a seminar yesterday on the role of popular culture in the creation of Mexico popular identity it seems to be that the connections between popular culture and folklore are tenfold, as is the struggle in being taken seriously within academia when you lack the tenure of Geertz but nevertheless has significant contributions to offer. Perhaps it is because of a fear held my the majority of realities that lay outside of their clearly established cultural boundaries and class constructions, or perchance it is the unappealing concept of giving serious powers of cultural production to the poor or marginalized, but it seems that a sense of fear is being masked by the ‘accepted’ historical community by trivializing the work of folklorists. Nevertheless, as Thomas explains, the true passion of the historian of popular culture, and the folklorist, should be to “go beyond the monolithic perspectives on cultural products and productions into an awareness of their defiant variance, difficulty, complexity, fecundity, and contrariness” (42). 

At the conclusion of her article, Thomas leaves her reader with two points that she implores folklorists, and academics in general, to keep in mind at all times: 1) that there is a vast and seemingly never-ending variety of things to study, and 2) that there is importance to all levels of culture (p 42). It is Thomas’s second point that I find to be her most important contribution because she gives folklorists the privileged position to be able to break out of the elite focused, class blinded, realm of cultural studies and allows them to contribute in new and exciting ways if they are willing. In a way, I find Thomas’s definition of the roll and importance of the folklorist encouraging for my own studies and I feel like the next time that I trudge the long route from the metro to the archivo nacional in Mexico City that I have the beginnings of a wonderful retort to the naysayers behind those intimidating desks. 

Sarah Howard