Between lettered, popular, and mass cultures: Intellectuals and the public sphere in Mexico and Puerto Rico. A reading of the works of Carlos Monsivais, Cristina Pacheco, Edgardo Rodriguez Julia and Ana Lydia Vega

Both Mexico and Puerto Rico went through industrialization processes in the 1940s: the Mexican Miracle and Operation Bootstrap. In that context, I argue, a sector of the intelligentsias of both countries redefined the structure and scope of their interventions in their respective cultural fields, as a reaction, in part, to what they saw as the lost of their past influence in society. With the emergence of mass-media there where yet other producers of social discourses to compete with. Later, after the 1960s in Mexico, and the 1970s in Puerto Rico, the children of these projects adapted to modernity, referring to mass media in their written texts and even appropriating them in their particular intellectual projects. They also based their work on different degrees of observation of, and dialogue with the popular sectors, who where being incorporated into civil life and the public sphere. In my dissertation I perform careful readings of the works of two Mexican (Carlos Monsivais, and Cristina Pacheco), and two Puerto Rican writers (Edgardo Rodriguez Julia, and Ana Lydia Vega) to show the diverse implications that can be extracted from these particular projects. I propose that these authors, up to different degrees, produce alternative re-conceptualizations of culture and the rituals that produce it. Rodriguez Julia, for example, incorporates products and strategies of mass media, and representations of the popular sectors with the objective of controlling them and therefore recuperating lost authority. On the other extreme, Cristina Pacheco reshapes the working rituals of the lettered culture to an extreme that her work is not solely based on writing, since she uses television and radio as tools for producing her work. She also allows subaltern subjects to speak for themselves, and even though their discourse is mediated, the place of origin of the written word is a conversation instead of the subjectivation of the self, typical of Western written discourse.