The us uses economic engagement as a disguise to hide their colonialist efforts towards Latin America

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Culture exchange is a neoliberal attempt for the US to control the revolutionary figure; the depiction of the new Anglicized Zorro is a response to Subcomandante Marcos’ Zapatista revolutionary movement

Lie 01 (pronounce Lee-ye) [Nadia Lie, “Free Trade in Images? Zorro as Cultural Signifier in the Contemporary Global/Local System,” Nepantla: Views from the South 2.3 489-508, 2001, professor of Spanish and Spanish-American literature at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven in Louvain, Belgium. She is the author of Transición y transacción: La revista cubana "Casa de las Américas" (1996) and coeditor, with Theo D'haen, of Constellation Caliban: Figurations of a Character (1997). She is currently working with colleagues on a volume on postcolonial popular heroes provisionally titled "Postcolonial Legends: Stories Children Live By."]

It would be tempting to relate the film's censorship of anti-American sentiments to its North American origin and to present Spielberg as the champion of cultural imperialism, as Debray and other European intellectuals have done. We should take into account, however, the possible interest of the Mexican state in the recycling of the mythical Zorro figure, not only because the film was shot in Mexico—and, according to the publicity surrounding it, proudly so—but also because Mexican organizations were involved in its production (particularly the Mexican Ministry of Culture and Estudios Churubusco Azteca).14 If the new state of accelerated globalization we are said to have entered teaches us anything, it is that the old [End Page 499] center-periphery model in power analyses no longer holds (Walters 1995, 296) since new, cross-border alliances between the rich and the powerful have come into being. As an agreement between "rich, capitalist" countries (the United States, Canada) and a "poor, underdeveloped" one (Mexico), NAFTA is a clear expression of this new situation (Roncagliolo 1996, 41; Yúdice 1996, 93). In this sense, Spielberg's production might very well be addressed to both sides of the border, translating and channeling not only subaltern frustrations, but also Mexican and U.S. upper-class obsessions with possible gains and losses in the new socioeconomic configuration. For one, Spielberg could have avoided in a more radical way any reference to the above-mentioned episodes in U.S. imperialism, but his specific though anachronistic allusions to it show that he rather preferred to simultaneously arouse and control a social phantasy of possession and dispossession. Likewise, the taming and training of the bandit Murieta by the Spanish, anglicized Zorro-Hopkins into a system of law and order, might be considered the expression of a common neoliberal obsession with controlling new groups of subalterns. As Gareth Williams (2000 [1997], 19) puts it, the denationalized labor market "produces a populace on the one hand subsumed by market forces yet on the other with a potential for ungovernability that the neoliberal state constantly needs to control, manage and, when necessary, dominate, though not necessarily incorporate."15 In this context, the current Zorro boom created by Spielberg's film (reeditions, new releases of old videos, Sandra Curtis's popularizing study, etc.) could also be read as indicating the increasing importance of this "populace" as a social group (a reading that parallels the original Zorro's success during the Depression).¶ Thus we find on both sides of the border an obsession with the symbol of the bandit, a symbol linked to unruly political times in which there is a "decline, or even a break-up and dissolution of state power" (Hobs\-bawm 2000 [1969], 17). It is this political context which makes Hobsbawm conjecture that we might be reentering a phase of banditry, though now in a modified form:¶ Insofar as the myth of the bandit represents not only freedom, heroism and the dream of a general justice, but more especially personal insurgence against personal injustice, the righting of my individual wrongs, the idea of the individual justicer survives, particularly among those who lack the collective organizations that are the main line of defense against such wrongs. There are plenty of people on the underside of modern [End Page 500] urban society who feel this. Perhaps, as the state becomes more remote and such bodies as unions contract into sectional self-defense organizations (as happens in some countries), the appeal of such dreams of private insurgence and private justice will grow. (Hobsbawm 2000 [1969], 189)¶ As my analysis has demonstrated, it is precisely the inscription of personal sentiments of frustration in the Zorro-noble robber figure that characterizes the Spielberg production and allows it to update the bandit motif for our "global" times. At the same time, the renewed stress on our hero's cultural identity—Spanish or Mexican—can be regarded as another logical outcome of the globalization process: "As power moves upwards from the nation-state towards larger international units… so there is a countervailing pressure, whose roots are various, for it to move downwards…. There is a new search for identity and difference in the face of impersonal global forces" (Martin Jacques, quoted in Tomlinson 1991, 178).¶ It is remarkable that precisely these two features distinguish the updated Zorro as a model of resistance from its contemporary Mexican counterpart, a figure who—at least until now—has lived in the Lacandona jungle as an outlaw and presented the mask as a key symbol of his movement: Subcomandante Marcos.16 Indeed, though Marcos defends his country's indigenous people, his green eyes behind the mask make it clear that he is not one of them; moreover, Marcos explicitly dissociates himself as a symbol of resistance from any particularist identity.17 In addition, his enemy is not a specific, individual adversary—nor even a nation—but a worldwide system called globalism or neoliberalism, a system that should be fought in order to achieve a more just and dignified Mexican society.18 Alejandro Murieta, on the other hand, describes himself as "a man in search of a vision," incapable as he is of providing one of his own. In this sense, as Banderas asserted, the new Zorro does turn out to be a singularly important role model, "especially today, and especially in Mexico." More precisely, his fusion with the noble robber figure, who is not a revolutionary or a reformer, helps to domesticate the subversive potential of the Zorro icon as a clear reply (or alternative) to the Zapatista symbol.

Western culture works as a quid pro quo with the Mexican state to manipulate identity politics- the new platform is Hollywood

Lie 01 (pronounce Lee-ye) [Nadia Lie, “Free Trade in Images? Zorro as Cultural Signifier in the Contemporary Global/Local System,” Nepantla: Views from the South 2.3 489-508, 2001, professor of Spanish and Spanish-American literature at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven in Louvain, Belgium. She is the author of Transición y transacción: La revista cubana "Casa de las Américas" (1996) and coeditor, with Theo D'haen, of Constellation Caliban: Figurations of a Character (1997). She is currently working with colleagues on a volume on postcolonial popular heroes provisionally titled "Postcolonial Legends: Stories Children Live By."]

"We must again stress the importance," urges Carlos Fuentes, "from the beginning, from the classroom and, if possible, from the home, of submitting [End Page 501] the audiovisual image to the same critique that we have always subjected literature and the plastic arts" (quoted in Fell 2000, 23). I have tried to undertake such a critique here by analyzing the recoding of an older Zorro model, designed for Anglo-American, working-class readers as a symbol of heroism and exoticism, into an updated version of the Mexican American subaltern who, trained into the codes of neoliberal citizenship, is able to stand up for his rights. The translation of the rhetoric of Otherness into that of particularist identity, I have argued, is a function of a wider shift in the target audiences. Inscribing the evolution of the Zorro figure in its context of global, imperialist politics allows us to read the blank in both discourses, McCulley's and Spielberg's, regarding, respectively, the Mexican phase in Californian history and the U.S. expansionist one.¶ The Mask of Zorro, then, participates both in the new language of hybridity and borderlessness that is currently linked to the NAFTA discourse, and in the at first glance more traditional procedures of ideological selectivity and censorship once considered to be the typical strategies of "cultural imperialism" (as exemplified in McCulley's and Spielberg's erasure and distortion of historical facts). This conclusion might warn us against a too easy dismissal of the cultural imperialism thesis in favor of a new "globalization concept" in cultural studies, a model that insists on creativity and chaos rather than on power and resistance (Walters 1995, 3; Golding and Harris 1997, 5). For indeed, "Relations of power and hegemony are inscribed and reproduced within hybridity for whenever we look closely enough we find the traces of asymmetry in culture, place descent. Hence hybridity raises the question of the terms of the mixture, the conditions of mixing and melange. At the same time it's important to note the ways in which hegemony is not merely reproduced but refigured in the process of hybridisation" (Jan Nederveen Pieterse, quoted in Barker 1999, 44).¶ On the other hand, it is true, as the new globalization discourse holds, that those who benefit from these kinds of procedures are no longer easy to identify, since transnational agreements distribute wealth and misery in more diffuse ways than before. In the specific case of Zorro, the possible interest of the Mexican state in domesticating the discourse of social banditry revived by the Zapatista movement must be taken into account before putting all the blame for the censorship on the U.S. side of the border. And, finally, we must acknowledge what Peter Golding and Phil Harris (1997, 5) have described as a shortcoming of the former cultural imperialist model in cultural criticism, namely, the "assumption that audiences are passive, [End Page 502] and that local and oppositional creativity is of little significance." In the last instance, the readers or spectators will decide what to make of the Zorro symbol, and among them may be found middle- or upper-class spectators (not only "subalterns") who discover in the Zorro product an imaginary way of reliving and countering the risks of future neoliberal engagements (risks I have evoked in my allusions to the gold rush) or even something completely different. This unpredictable element in the interpretation process opens the door to other kinds of analysis of this film, critiques that, by turning to matters of actual reception, might shift from considering Zorro as a cultural "signifier" within the general (and useful) interpretative code of the overall global/local system to conceiving it as "currency" in the unpredictable negotiations carried out between subject and text. Perhaps the combination of these two approaches (the historical-contextual one and the reception study), together with scrupulous text analysis, will provide the most interesting way of dealing with the new importance of audiovisual images alluded to by Carlos Fuentes. If it is true, as García Canclini holds, that "in the new generations identities are organized not so much around historical-territorial symbols—those of the memory of the nation—but rather around Hollywood, Televisa or Benetton" (quoted in Williams 2000 [1997], 30), the stakes in this kind of cultural criticism might be much higher than one would first expect.