Destroyers of compasses, noses pressed to the glass: A political economic analysis of Argentine creatives now living and laboring in Mexico City
Written as a talk for CASCA-Cuba 2018
I realized that searching was my symbol, the emblem of those who go out at night with nothing in mind, the motives of a destroyer of compasses (Julio Cortázar 1963).
I don’t think that fish ever want to get out of their bowls; they almost never press their noses to the glass (Ibid.).
Edie is a Mexico City-based, Argentine model and sometimes actress who spends most of her time in lines or atop her motorcycle en route to lines, where she waits to learn if her fisonomía meets directors’ needs. She likes to paint, is learning to play the guitar, and also takes improv classes.
“You’re in a bar and somebody asks you what you do. How do you answer?”
“That question makes me uncomfortable,” Edie says; “I try to say any old thing.”
“Okay, you’re in a bar and somebody asks you how you grew up to be an artist. How do you answer?”
“Because I can’t be anything else.”
Later: “I fail at fitting into every other social segment or milieu. I need a routine that’s changing and to live a little bit of a rush. Also, the people who work in [the arts] I generally find more interesting, fun, and inspiring.”
With current average earnings of 1,000 USD per month, Edie is less financially secure than her divorced, still-Argentina-based parents, but she predicts that she will earn more ten years from now. She dreams of a life closer to nature, would like to earn more money in order to buy land somewhere, her own green space, but otherwise her ideal life is one that is tranquil and with few economic demands.
“Any fears or doubts, with respect to the future?”
“Yes. Uncertainty,” Edie answers. But she doesn’t mean financial uncertainty. “I don’t know how to unite what I have done in the cities during my life with my aspirations toward slower rhythms of life, away from the social masses,” she explains.
CASCA organizers might call Edie “entangled,” and to be clear, hers is an entanglement historically informed, interactive, evolving, and politically and economically reinforced. In this paper, as in my research, I use ethnographic study of Argentine labor migrants (like Edie) who arrived to Mexico City in the decade and a half following Argentina’s 2001/2002 economic crisis. My desire, in conducting that research, is to explore new modes of production and new social relations that have accompanied neoliberal capitalist shift.
Here specifically, I am interested in how a class analysis of the contemporary creative class might look. Further, I am interested in the particularities, those unique to space and time, that arise when examining class in Mexico City in the present. I take, as my point of departure, the current anthropological understanding of class as a dynamic set of daily relationships which are exploitative as well as extractive. In the words of Don Kalb, “These then are the proverbial and fast changing relationships that people have to enter into, willy-nilly, in order to reproduce their lives, live and give life, and do so day to day in situated habitats…” (2017). Understood as a “shifting field of forces” the class system, therefore, remains as essential to understanding the social today as it was in the past.
My thinking about class relations and with Argentines in Mexico invites further questions: how do we think with and about an increasingly transnational population of individuals who choose adventure and possibilities for fame along with economic precarity and, almost always, poverty? For example. In what ways are such decision-makers agentive and to what extent are they constrained? Because it is especially pressing in the case of Argentines in Mexico City, I ask: how does racism function in a political economic context in which immigrants bring with them social and cultural capital? More generally: are there new, not yet described risks that accompany the expansion + normalization of a global gig economy? For whom (singular, plural, and in all of their complexities) are these risks?
Lastly, and for a later paper: how do we best respond to evolving, ever more insidious mechanisms for the devaluation of labor, mechanisms that encourage global academics, just like Argentine creatives, to see innovation, advancement, freedom, and previously-impossible opportunities in their own exploitation?
Why Argentines in Mexico?
Official estimates of a mostly unofficial population suggest that as many as 50,000 Argentines now live in Mexico. This is nearly four times the INEGI census bureau findings for 2010. The individuals with whom I work are rockers and fashionistas, chefs and restaurateurs, actors, activists, advertisers, directors, painters, photo-/filmo-graphers, and more. They are labor migrants — have left Argentina for Mexico with beliefs that they will find better and more opportunities for work in Mexico — who bring with them race as well as middle and upper middle class privileges including liberal arts and/or technical degrees from institutions of higher ed and a whole lot of confidence.
Q: How do you recognize an Argentine in a stationary store?
A: He’s the only one who asks for a world map of Argentina.
The Argentines’ motivations for moving vary, even while they all talk of finding better opportunities. They include backpackers who never went home, self-seekers still searching, do-what-you-love mantra believers, and there’s-no-work-in-Argentina pragmatists, and unlike the “Argenmex” political exiles who preceded them in the 1970s, members of this more recent wave of Argentine expatriates spend much of their time debating to whom they will sell their labor and at what prices.
Q: Cómo se llama (how do you call) an Argentine in the trendy bars-and-restaurants-dense Mexico City neighborhood of Condesa?
A: Mesero (waiter).
[This was a favorite joke of my many other-than-Argentine friends in Mexico City from 2006 to 2010 or 11, though it has since gone out of style, as Argentines find more permanent positions in the creative sector or choose to go home, and as new waves of 20-something year olds, this time from Spain in particular, show up to explore their options and start out with bar gigs.]
Unlike their parents and grandparents, the Argentines in my study work across industries and from one contract to the next. They are often rich in education and travel experience, and even while they might at first glance remind us of the “mainly British, American, and Dutch” hippies Roland Barthes described while residing in Goa, India in 1969 — “contradictory” hippies whose poverty was performance — the individuals with whom I work are, in most cases most of the time, cash strapped and unsure of future earnings.
A note on methods
In 2006 Danielle Groleau, et al from the McGill Medical School designed an interview intended to illicit narratives — causal narratives, prototypic narratives, chain complexes that linked past events to present symptoms — from individuals with [in quotes] “health problems.” This was in fitting with what we might label the ongoing “narrative turn” in the social sciences. Groleau, et al were looking for ways to identify the meaning-making practices of individuals making sense out of their illnesses and illness related experiences. Narratives are shaped by memory and emotion. Narratives are socially situated, told by someone to someone, each occupying a particular space in the social field. They are polysemous and palimpsestic, and they invite us to focus on content and/or form, Groleau and friends, citing the narratives matter lit, reminded their readers.
Last year, Jean Hunleth of the Medical School at WashU took this, the McGill Illness Narrative Interview or MINI, and made it the Ma-FINI, an interview tool designed to study financial “illness” as experienced, as narrated, by individuals being treated for cancer who were living in and around St. Louis, Missouri.
I then took both of these interviews to create my own interview, not perfect, but designed to solicit narratives about being an artist or creative from 25 to 45 year old Argentines living and working in Mexico City. That what was a study of illness experience became a study of artist experience is significant. While Howard Becker would no doubt instruct good anthropologists to ask, “How did you become an artist?” I asked instead, “What caused you to become an artist?” It became important to include questions such as: “Do you have family members who are artists?” and “Are there others (friends, colleagues, etc.) in your daily life whose lifestyles are similar to your own? In what ways are they similar? In what ways are they different? Can you think of any artists in books or in movies whose lives are like your own? Please explain…
“How has being an artist changed how you think about yourself?” I asked.
I tried as best I could to try on the logics and borrow the curiosities of medical anthropologists.
One more note on methods: I designed my modified MINI-Ma-FINI mash-up interview with the mostly rhetorical question, “What class is the creative class?” in mind, and thus I added a series of questions intended to unpack artists’ senses (or not) of belonging to a community of laborers, of juxtaposition to others based on consumption practices or financial (in)security. Speaking financially, how do you view yourself in relation to others? I asked. How have your earnings changed in the past 5 years? To those (100 percent of respondents) who imagined their financial earnings improving ten years from now, I asked about strategies for achieving improved earnings.
What would Freud say, or: Am I doing mythology?
I talk to artists about their labor and earnings in and understandings of “cultural and creative industries.” These industries are defined by UNESCO in 2018 as “sectors of organised activity whose principal purpose is the production or reproduction, promotion, distribution and/or commercialisation of goods, services and activities of a cultural, artistic or heritage-related nature” (from UNESCO website, emphasis my own). Painters, like advertisers, and maybe even wine sales reps are now frequently albeit uncomfortably conflated as “creatives.” As a result, I find myself asking often: Is what I am doing myth analysis?
In 2008, Morten Ougaard suggested that the explosion of neologisms such as “new economy,” “network society,” and “information age” along with the transformation of laborers into “symbolic analysts,” “information workers,” and a “creative class” is not accidental but rather indicative of the increased importance of brain-work and, relatedly, new relationships between labor and the means of production in today’s economy. Ougaard wrote that [quote] “there is real foundation for information fetishism and hype about the new economy and notions of a new, ‘creative class.’ Not in the sense that the hype accurately reflects contemporary economic realities, but in the sense that there are real causes for the rise of such misconceptions and mystifications” (350).
At what point do our neologisms become sacred narratives? How many generations must these narratives transcend to qualify as mythic? One hundred percent of the Argentine creatives I interviewed and/or surveyed in Mexico City in the past six months identified as less financially secure than their parents. One hundred percent answered “improve” to the question, “Do you think your socioeconomic status will improve, worsen, or stay the same in the next ten years?” And this was just after 68 percent of them responded that their monthly earnings had stayed the same or decreased in the previous five years.
I close my eyes, briefly, to consider if here is where Freud would chime in about human false consciousness and strategies of denial as self-preservation. Elizabeth Baeten, no doubt, would cite German idealist Ernst Cassirer, to say something about how Spirit — capital s — drives human progress and how spirit can only be seen as culture and how culture is what myths are all about anyhow. Turned around that runs: myths allow us to see culture and culture allows us to see Spirit — capital s — and Spirit drives human progress. Mythmaking, thus understood, becomes the process by which humans find and create meaning, and dare I say it … value. Are the artists with whom I am working creating value in their imaginations of future value? — of the future value of their labors? And then: are we tricking ourselves onto/along this particular path of “progress”?
I was already in this muddle when I whatsapped a mostly incoherent set of “audios” to Dr. Don Kalb while looking for direction. To which he replied:
“Very recognisable [British spelling]. In the end, collusion with capitalism because it might as well solve all problems you have with it. Creative class mythologies. Gambling a legit way to stay poor like everyone else because some always do get lucky. Proven.”
I had asked in one of the audios if art might function as contemporary religion, “a soul for soulless conditions,” if you will.
I will come back next year with better formulated thinking about artists’ myth-making. For now:
The Mexico-based Argentine artists with whom I have worked to date earn, on average, 1,000 to 1,500 USD per month. While they identify as middle class and lower middle class members, and talk easily about having no average monthly earnings, working differing numbers of hours and selling their labors for anywhere from zero to 1000 USD per day, and while they bemoan their socioeconomic instability, swear they do not know what projects will be theirs and thus what they will earn one month from the present, they maintain average monthly earnings that are two to three times the average earnings in Mexico, and they do so while working a self proclaimed average of 20–30 hours per week. They talk about freedom and their commitments to not being godínes — a classic Mexican term for anyone working a 9 to 5 (or now more famously a 9 to 9) office job. They talk, too, of the historic instability (dating back to the 1950s) of an Argentine economy which has prepared them to live in the present with no emotional attachments to future financial aspirations or outcomes.
All the while they find motivation in movies like “8 Mile,” in which rapper Eminem dedicates himself to writing the lyrics he wants to write, authentic lyrics, in a society that may not understand those lyrics. They note that through his dedication to himself and what he wanted, he “got to the top.”
Or they say, “I can’t think of any one character or movie, but basically every story about someone who starts with nothing, does what he/she loves, and gets to the top and lives happily ever after” is a story with which I associate myself.
Conclusions
Ougaard, in his exploration of the “real causes” of so many new words for laborer, for economy, for capital, took as his point of departure the fact that modern technological shifts have “changed the composition of the labor force so that mental or intellectual labor” — including the ideation and innovation in the arts and creative sectors — is now more important than ever before. He then used Marx’s work on the value composition of capital to conclude, mathematically, that “this segment of the labor force … tends to be less exploited, better paid, offered better working conditions, to have more job autonomy and be subjected to less discipline and less work intensity than average wage labor.”
Q: What do you call an Argentine who mopes around all day, watches sports on t.v. each night, and sleeps almost all weekend?
A: Normal.
Edie’s life is like the lives of her artist and creative friends and colleagues in that “self-management is key,” as is the “home office,” plus everyone is working “as an independent” and “from project to project.” All the while factors such as nationality, culture, where and in what one lives, as well as recreational tastes and hobbies ensure that everyone’s daily life is not the same but rather his/her own, she clarifies.
An advantage to being an artist or creative today? “That I can perceive society and the world as a being who is evolving despite the violence of each day” was Edie’s answer.
Edie’s life is like the lives her parents and before them her grandparents who likewise took responsibility for themselves and who migrated from the towns in which they were born to find something better. But Edie’s life is also unlike the lives of her parents and grandparents: [quote] “The paradigm has changed, the economy has changed, [my] style of life [living] in a mega-city and my way of incorporating myself into the system [are different]. The premise of sacrifice,” she concludes, “no longer rules working life.”
Ougaard concluded: [quote] “It remains an open question how long such conditions [those of less work, lighter work, more desirable work] can persist.” What seems especially likely is that the lengths of the working day for artists, creatives, innovators, brain-workers, symbolic analysts, whatever we wish to call them, will continue — as they already are — to get longer, even while appearing “cush.”
Luckily — and here I am thinking with Miya Tokumitsu who wrote an analysis of Do What You Love Mantras for Jacobin Magazine in 2014, an analysis in which she unpacked the insidious ways in which the mantra encouraged one segment of laborers in the neoliberal present (the creative segment) to work for free or little pay (real artists are poor; but you love animating and I can get you exposure) while completely ignoring that segment of laborers not positioned to “do what they love” — humans have big brains. We are adaptive. And so who knows:
We might, someday, and born of necessity, at long last, learn to eat discourse. If so, our artists — our creatives — are certain to be among the best fed.
(Words: 2786; Read time: 15:08 mins.)
