A Myth of Authentic Folklore and Crafty Mexicans

            There seems to be a common theme throughout all the chapters in this week’s readings: the positioning of lay folklorists against or in contrast to academia. Many of the fields developers and those which Regina Bendix focuses her work chose to highlight their particular take on folklore as authentic (ballad, performance, oral traditions, hand written sources, grammatically traceable work, scientifically authenticated items), yet I contest that they have all seemed to miss the large pink elephant in the room so to speak. In each case, academics and laypeople alike, a choice of authenticity is made by the folklorist him/herself. This means that it is a flawed human, complete with flaws, social conceptualizations, and political understandings that has chosen to make a determination between real and fake. While some would like readers to conceive of folklore in a scientific way and claim that there is only true or fake folklore, it seem much more plausible that like much of the work done on identity construction and culture in general, the importance, authenticity, and understanding of folklore is socially constructed and dependent upon historical and political realities. I guess what I am saying is that this study of the interaction between scholars and folklorists and the ever-changing definitions of what it means to be authentic had led me further down the road of questioning if any folklore can be considered authentic. Can a performance staged for an audience, such as those as Tucson Meet Yourself, be any more authentic than oral sources that may have been edited by its teller for the folklorist or folklore being interpreted outside of the historical time and place in which it was created. Is authentic folklore a possibility?

            One another note, once again my Monday afternoon grad course (Modern Mexican cultural history) has seemed to have intersected with our readings. We read a book by Rick A. Lopez, Crafting Mexico. 

The book’s focus was on the use of a crafted indigenous identity as a point of national identity construction within the nation after the armed revolution until 1945. Focusing on such things and an indigenous beauty contest, a night dedicated to “Mexican Art” for the public, and handicrafts, Lopez shows how elite reformers and museum curators and the like develop a diluted image of an ingenious Mexico that could be extended to a consumer audience as an authentic identity. Yet the key here is that it was anything but authentic. The goal of most reformers was to construct symbols of the nation and generate a sense of industry that supported the ideals they found honorable and downplayed unwanted characteristics. This process, nevertheless, left the artists underpaid, the prices artificially maintained, and taxes were created to favor the nation not the artists. Amidst changing influences of international commerce, political discourses, and relationships between economics and artistic production, López highlights that handicrafts and the indigenous character ascribed upon them by reformers and politicians provide a tool in which to study the process of national identity construction. The politics and social constructions of the period allowed these reformers, and the state that soon embraced and furthered the projects, to claim the identity as authentic despite its synthetic nature.

Which is authentic Mexican handicraft?/Folklore? One the top is a bowl purchased by diplomat Dwight Murrow, the image on the bottom is something you might find in a market today? Are either of these part of an authentic nation's folklore?