I am only interested in what is not mine. Law of man, law of the anthropophagist. 

—Oswald de Andrade

Act I: Aleph

I was there, 3,000 years ago, when television was the center of the world.

“Center,” but in the way of Borges´s Aleph: It was the window to everything. In those days, before the famous media convergence and the internet, there were no different services and different screens, just the one service and the one screen—with two or three channels.

That one screen was my anchor: Although I was born in Caracas, Venezuela, in the mid ‘70s, my family is from Colombia and we went back and forth between the two countries for a while, to the rhythm of my father’s lousy decisions. One day, he was, kind of, a big shot in the Colombian police on the frontier. The next day he was employed by some factory on the Venezuelan side. Then he would try to restart his career in the judiciary, in Bogotá, before informing us that actually he wanted to go to live with his brother, who was quite well-installed in the Venezuelan south. (Of course, he was not.)

The movement was destabilizing, but television remained constant. I counted on a small set of shows, no matter the country in which I lived. If I was a kind of nomad, then television was my tent.

My beloved television had detractors from several directions. In Latin America, left-wing militants and intellectuals hated it, but so did the Catholic church, conservative politicians, the schools, the other media, and even the military. It was an agent of “transculturation,” some of them said, and to fight “transculturation” was actually a state doctrine, even if Venezuela back then had a liberal, multiparty regime. In those clean but poor public schools, where flocks of children dressed in white shirts and blue pants and skirts, the official xenophobic party line was present many years before the rise of the new militarism. Hugo Chávez’s anti-Hollywood or anti-comics rants were nothing new to me.

Only in college would I learn that transculturación was a concept developed by the great Cuban anthropologist Fernando Ortiz, who sought to explain how culture circulated in the Caribbean. For Ortiz, no one, not even enslaved Africans, was “a-cultured.” Rather, people were “trans-cultured”—receiving and giving traces and fragments from which new cultures are born, with everyone “appropriating” everyone. Latter antillean thinkers like Eduard Glyssant called the process creolite—a melting pot from which emerges something unexpected, such as Manga, which emerged from the Japanese creolization of American comics and animation, or Brazilian jiu jitsu, from the Brazilian creolization of Jigoro Kano´s judo.

It was the same thing that in Brazil Oswald de Andrade called devoração—devouring—or more provocatively, anthropophagi. Glissant even raised Ortiz’s bet and said that, in the globalized world, every culture was to become creole, even if the process would be slow and painful. 

When I was 9, we moved from cold misty Bogotá to Ciudad Guayana, a Venezuelan industrial town bordering a maze of tropical forest that stretches continuously from the Caribbean to northern Bolivia.

Venezuela and Colombia are both part of La Tierra Firme—the continental part of the Caribbean, and as such have strong cultural bonds. During the Independence Wars they were a single country, La Gran Colombia, which gloriously defeated the Spanish empire in a series of battles that—evoking  Gandalf’s fight with the Balrog—started in the Orinoco Plains and ended in the top of the Andean Mountains.

The rest of our history has been less majestic, and tragedies and banal dynamics alike have ushered migrants to and fro, first in the ‘70s and ‘80s when Colombians migrated to Venezuela, and now with millions of Venezuelans flooding Colombia.

I was a tiny particle in the former migration, and during the trip, in a series of buses (disgracefully, we don’t have railroad lines) I spent days reading comics (Teen Titans, Batman, Justice League and Metal Men) before arriving at a kind of Mesopotamia in the jungle.

Ciudad Guayana is divided between colonial San Felix and modern, industrial, Puerto Ordaz—and between two colossal rivers, the Orinoco and the Caroni. Its iron and aluminum industries drove an active port and made the city a center of migration in the east of the country. It was common to see foreign sailors in the streets, and in high school my classmates were the sons of Syrian, Lebanese, Chilean, Peruvian, Spanish, Druze, Italian migrants. Like William S. Burroughs’s “Interzone,” the place admitted almost any human possibility…

I mostly hated it. I only liked that there were traces of the jungle everywhere, living ruins of a death world. I eventually lost hope of seeing wild animals; some people claimed to encounter ocelots and mountain lions in some parts of the city.

But I remember clearly that, as a teenager, in a library some afternoon I started to read The Magnificent Orinoco of Jules Verne, and slowly I realized that I lived there, in the exotic land explored by Raley, populated by enormous crocodiles, where the Spanish searched for El Dorado and where things happened that made Salgari and Conrad novels seem tame.

Like many kids in boring towns, I would eventually yearn to leave. But in those first days I was dazzled by the contrast between the gray and cold Andes and this new hot burning place. At first we lived in the poorest barrios, full of puddles, broken streets, and death lizards.  Later I would live in middle class neighborhoods, with yards full of huge mango trees that perfumed the air and conferred a sense of unbridled abundance.

In the meantime, while adapting, I lived in the world of the enlatados—the canned programming that was basically the same in any country on the continent: Spaghetti westerns, kung fu movies. Such media was supposed to be an appetizer, but for us was the main dish, our first aesthetic education.  In that sense I was kind of a junkie.

I was there when the Latin American craze for Japanese animation began. I was into cartoons, above all, and then the Japanese live action tokusatsu series: Ultraman, Specterman, Sankuoikai and Ambassador Magma. While clueless intellectuals pontificated about how American media was colonizing our minds we—the kids—lived in a kind of delirious Japan, projected into our third world like augmented reality.

I don’t think that anything can ever impress me like anime aesthetics did in those days…their depiction of speed (with a slow motion movement, or a white bright line that showed the gleam of a blade)…the sound effects, the ideograms, the funky themes, the use of the still-images, of hand painted backgrounds…the epic songs. When we got a color TV set, I could appreciate Gekko Kamen in all its psychedelic glory. Even now I can’t hear the intro without feeling a rush of adrenaline.  We received signals from another world.

Without knowing it, I became an otaku—an obsessive fan. I watched Oni no Kick, about   a legendary Japanese Muay Thai fighter; I watched Mazinger Z  and Festival de los Robots (in English, Force Five). Anime brought a continuous shock and awe. It was aesthetically fascinating, a window to a world not found in American pop culture. The television stations didn’t bring all the titles (I missed Gundam, for example). But I knew that they existed because of the Japanese toys, called chogokin, that have now become collection pieces.

And then there were the American cartoons, which introduced an entire generation to bebop jazz and classical music. Of course, music figured prominently in Japanese animation too. But the American cartoons were different. They were genuine symphonies in which accidents and mishaps were driven by rhythm and melody—canned dreams of people of a far country in the North whose history emerged through jokes and references. Later, to better understand those references, I researched the history of that country. It was the beginning of a complicated relationship.

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Act II: South American Rockers

We Gen Xers  were, by far, the most “Americanized” generation of Latin Americans up to that point. Many of us grew up to become grunge, punk, metalero, alternativo. But this did not mean we held the U.S., as a political entity, in high regard.

In the ‘60s Latin American rock was made up mostly of cover bands knocking off U.S. rock. In the ‘80s, Latin American rock became a thing of its own. A massive one.  In Mexico, Chile, Brazil and Argentina, bands like El Tri,  Sepultura, and Soda became the soundtrack of democratization. The parodic, self-deprecating-but-proud songs of Los Prisioneros reflected an era in which American democratic values were thrown against U.S. sponsored tyrannies: Democracy had to be robbed, in the way of Prometheus, from a global power that didn’t think we deserved it. 

At first the Old Left, as conservative as the Christians, could not make sense of the youngsters who listened to Kurt Cobain and Mano Negra, who claimed to be anarchist, Marxist—whatever the revolutionary flavor of the day. Was that noise not the music of imperialism?

In my coming of age, the traditional folk songs and the cringe melancholy of the state sponsored Trova Cubana, which hegemonized the protest song, gave way to ska, hard core and hip-hop.  Bands, like the Fabulosos Cadillacs, whose style changed violently from album to album, from song to song, expressed that zeitgeist just as well as Aeon Flux, with its nihilistic rebelliousness, or the strange Zapatista revolt that happened in a very specific place—but mostly in the media—in the minds of people and without a claim to power: We  didn’t know if it was a game changer, or simply a form of hopelessness.

When Subcomandante Marcos emerged, dramatically as the latest masked man of Mexico, I was a college student in Caracas, a city in a valley in the middle of the mountains, but very close to the Caribbean sea. I had much less time to watch television—sometimes I didn’t even have a TV—but I was healthier, maintaining a social and political life on the beautiful campus. 

I was not disconnected though. I watched cable television in the homes of friends or on vacation, and eventually they put a TV set in a cafe of my faculty, which became a kind of media laboratory. In those times, the crazy multiplication of channels brought some novelties: The Latin American channel Locomotion specialized in animation. People spent hours debating the puzzles of the X-Files. One vacation, seeking to understand what my friends were always talking about, I got a bunch of VHS tapes and I submerged myself: The first binge watching session of my life.

Meanwhile, it was the Golden Age of Japanese animation, seeded with great talents, nurtured with enormous investments. If not for the robust emergent VHS market, we may never have found the new classics like Akira—and yes, hentai too, like the Blue Girl. As I moved through my teenage years, shows like Super Agent Cobra and Robotech had indicated that anime was maturing with us, becoming kinky, romantic, political, hyper-violent.

Needless to say, it blew my mind. But it was not until I saw the legendary sequence of Ghost in the Shell, in which a traditional Japanese wedding song underlays a gorgeous portrayal of Hong-Kong, that I realized, now explicitly, that this was an art form in every sense of the word, and that I could cultivate my taste for for it over the rest of my life.

It was after leaving behind the awe of childhood that I started to understand more precisely why Japanese animation had that power, and in particular, the power to connect the archaic past with the distant future.

The art wasn’t naive folklorism; it was rooted deep in their culture, their history. In fact those mutant psychics, cyborgs, bounty hunters and urban magicians of Golden Age Anime living in their megazones or geofronts were like the patron saints of the cyberpunk world in which we were just beginning to live—even more cyberpunk for us, in the Third World, where the high tech met the lowest standard of life. (The narco, for example, is totally cyberpunk.) A few years later, everyone would have a cell phone and favelas would be covered in a forest of satellite dishes.

When cable TV, cell phones and the internet became common, we synchronized with the rest of the world. We no longer waited months or years to receive shows from other parts of the planet. The internet, which I didn’t know about until I was 21, became my new addiction.

The Great Stream had begun: Enormous markets of pirated CDs and DVDs sprung on our cities, bearing hard core pornography and packages from the Criterion Collection. This media arrived, of course, amid an oil boom that gave us decent jobs, and I could buy all the otaku-nerdy things that I wanted.

Still, it was a fleeting and final period of youth, and for me it ended between September 11, 2001 and April 11th of the next year, with the failed coup in Venezuela. The paradoxical hopes of the ‘90s ended, and we entered a period of successively deeper crises. The mad years of the oil boom produced several disasters, giving way to the collapse, especially in my country, which began long before the global media noticed it.

I worked many jobs. One of them was with a prestigious Venezuelan publisher adapting Latin American literary classics into comics. I saw how young artists drew from manga or American comics to cultivate their own style.

In my 40s, I became a guest professor in my university, at last capable of explaining pop culture and transculturation to a generation that had lived it even deeper than mine. I was kind of popular, which is not a feat, if you know that in the 2010s, students were receiving mostly the same old washed-up theories from the ‘70s and ‘80s.

I enjoyed teaching for a while, before I had to leave my country, realizing that the cyberpunk saga was giving way to a post-apocalyptic one.

Now we live the same planetary existence, unable to go back to the past. But the world is much more fragmented, and this atavism had produced its own striking transculturation dynamics: A synthesis of a chauvinistic militarism, conservative Christianity, and the old-style leftism sprung together in my country, and took it over.

In the meantime, I can avoid indulging in the stories that I started to put together in the ‘90s, in the simmering of my youth, but still wonder if there remains time to pull from it something unexpected, a Great—or at least decent—Latin American novel that has something of the manga, the sci-fi, a stylized comic flair. This would be nothing new: Graft the world onto our republics, but let the trunk remain our own. José Martí said that, long ago. It is our way, but only because it is the human way. ▩

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