The Search for Kitsch: A Review of the Riddle of Cantinflas: Essays on Hispanic Popular Culture
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The Search for Kitsch: Review of The Riddle of Cantinflas Essays on Hispanic Popular Culture by Ilan Stavans (University of New Mexico Press, 2012, Revised and Expanded Edition) The Riddle of Cantinflas: Essays on Hispanic Popular Culture is a thick, colorful knot of essays--essays that map where intellectual and immigrant intersect. If readers focus on this junction and avoid searching for the book is enlightening. Author Ilan Stavans claims kitsch, an infatuation and reproduction of the past, explains the chaotic pinboard beauty of Hispanic culture. For Stavans, Hispanic culture is a copy of a copy. In the preface to The Riddle of Cantinflas, Stavans makes his case for this simulacrum of society, swinging through a maze of Spanish and Latin American history to prove his point. However, the thread of kitsch in his essays is as thin as a burnt corn tortilla. The trouble begins when Stavans warns the reader to beware of looking for sequence and cohesiveness in his essays. He even advises against looking for some sort of conclusion. This left me confused. If kitsch explains Hispanic culture, according to Stavans, why shouldn't I look for this theme in his articles? At times his essays, often sprawling and itinerant, failed to connect with kitsch at all. But this book is more than kitsch. Many essays plunge lucha libre style into rascuache, a term Stavans uses to describe popular and organic Hispanic culture. Stavans uses all his fingers to untangle rascuache with poetic and academic engrossment, sketching sense and significance into everything from the colorful pastel cards of loterta, the old game of chance, to the rags and rakishness of Cantinflas. The essay on the movie star from the mid-twentieth century known simply as Cantinflas captivated me. Stavans believes Cantinflas served as a Mexican collective self, acting as therapy for a country in hurried transition from an agrarian to industrialized nation. Similarly, he argues the confusion Cantinflas caused was symbolic. Stavans claims Cantinflas's pun-filled promenades, the actor's verbal strolls that always ended in confusion, exposed the growing communication gap between classes. Some of Stavans's other rascuache explorations include El Sup's role in Chiapas and Jose Guadalupe Posada's street art. For Stavans, the super glue of rascuache is that it is subversive, honest, and a product of a labyrinthine history and culture, a culture that must be cherished not relegated by a dominant art intelligentsia. Stavans's recent essays on society slosh through the bog of the immigration debate. In Mother of Exiles, he deconstructs the message and significance of the Statue of Liberty. In A Dream Act Deferred, he explores one undocumented student's rise to a PhD in America and ultimate immigration to Canada. Finally in Immigration and Authenticity, he reflects on the significance of dominant cultural expectations, both in biblical history and modern immigration (e.g., camels in the Bible, sombreros for immigrants). This book is an Olympic-sized swimming pool of thoughts, stretching with depth as it meanders from street art to author Sandra Cisneros to Latino civility. It would be difficult to find a book on Hispanic culture that extends itself so far with so few pages to create such an elegant and colorful dialogue. Stepping back, letting go, and appreciating this dialogue took time. …
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".