GUANAJUATO: WALK, WRITE, READ THE CITY.
This blog is dedicated to experimental city explorations. Its purpose is to provide a multimedia flânerie around the provincial Mexican city of Guanajuato with posts that offer a provocative look at this complex little locale. We hope to slowly develop a range of representations that question, push further, and even resist the usual tourist imagery about one of Mexico’s most beloved cities.
English versus Spanish.
Our audiences, or addressees, are multiple and multilingual. While much of what appears is directed to a US-based audience of students, international education professionals, and other parties with an interest in the Study Center itself, we are also keenly aware of the politics of language choice, and we hope to maintain a robust range of Spanish language entries in order to address our local readership as well.
The digital medium and its possibilities.
The digital medium offers a visual metaphor for the complexity and fluidity of cultural identity. It permits (and invites) constant updating as we learn new things and change through our interactions with other people and places. How can we deploy digitality in the service of interculturality? This blog does not pretend to answer the question, but it does aim to experiment with some tentative representations of the learning that occurs as we move through the local space and culture of Guanajuato.
To this end, we hope to display some mildly radical juxtapositions of images, sounds, and experiences in order to invite writerly readings of our blog (à la Barthes), which in simpler terms implies that the reader-spectator should enter into the material and the gaps between the posts to ask critical questions about the city and about intercultural experiences in general. We encourage readers to remember that one representation never fully captures the whole of a situation, and that for every seemingly viable cultural statement, there are a million variations and a good many outright exceptions.
City mapping.
How many layers of this place can we map? While we tend to think of maps as visual, the other senses can also come into play, so some our maps are aural, and we hope to add others related to smell, taste, and touch. Affective and social mapping provide still other ways to think about what and how spaces mean to both individuals and the larger collective community. Where do people love, learn, give back to others? We begin with a fledging effort to map volunteerism and community service, but will be adding other areas as well. Home to the Universidad de Guanajuato, the city also has its intellectual side, and we are working on literary mappings too. At the moment, then, please explore our student-plotted points (work created by CIEE students), as well as our literary, sonic, and community service mappings.
All that said, Guanajuato is not the easiest place to map. Nineteenth century intellectual Lucas Alamán called it a “wrinkled paper” of a city, which is exactly what it looks like. A fortuitous name indeed as we trace our tentative mappings onto paper or its digital equivalent…
