Shopping Town: U.S. Culture Seen through a Mexican Lens

Returning recently to the U.S. from Mexico and staying at a hotel in a suburb of Chicago, I was struck at a visceral level by the dramatic contrasts between that world and the world where I now live in Mexico. That is, I not only saw but felt the differences in my body. I was acutely aware of how the humanly constructed environment, el medio ambiente, communicates the primary cultural values of a society and shapes our experience, actions, values and world-view.

Cultural Environment

Our cultural environment is not something separate from us. It is like the air we breathe, we aborb it; it becomes indistinguishable from our very selves. The relationship is symbiotic, mutually self-sustaining. This post is an effort to illustrate, through one example, some of the differences in cultural environment betwen Mexico and the U.S., and communicate how they shape who we are. I use photos from both worlds, both cultures, to convey the contrasting experiences.

Mexico is rooted in two what may be called "classical" cultures, the Mesoamerican culture that developed in the center of what is now the Americas over more than three thousand years, and the Spanish culture that developed in Europe on a foundation of millenial-old Mediterranean cultures. While there are great differences between the two, traditional Mexican culture is a fusion of the two.

Cultural Space and Time: History

The most basic elements of cultural environment are those that define where we are in cultural time and space, that is, our location in a particular history. In Mexico, both its indigenous and Hispanic cultures have organized cultural space around a clearly defined centro, defined by structures that embody the religious and political powers at the heart of the culture. In Mesoamerican culture, these centros are public gathering spaces dominated by pirámides. In the Hispanic culture of colonial Mexico, el Centro is a public plaza ususally bounded by the town's principal Catholic iglesia and the offices of el gobierno. In such a space, you always know where you are, both physically and culturally.

Pirámides de los Purépecha 
 Ihautzio, Michoacán, México

Plaza Vasco de Quiroga o Plaza Grande

Pátzcuaro, Michoacán, México

En los Estados Unidos, es otra cosa. In suburban United States, the only centro is the shopping center. In fact, in the suburban town I was visiting, one of several shopping centers is called, "Shoppingtown." 

Shoppingtown would like you to believe that you are in the center of some ideal small town, but in no particular time or place. It´s main street is decorated with various cultural symbols that refer to a number of historical places and times. 

 

A French fountain with Egyptian sphinx-like lions       A sundial with Greek symbols of the zodiac                           

Other historical cultural referents include nineteenth century style steet lamps and columns imitating those of the Egyptian Temple of Dendur. The "town" also sponsors a summer classical music festival in its "town square."

Space and Time in Mesoamerica

Mesoamerican cities were intentionally designed as cultural environments according to a plan. That plan was a cosmic one, enabling all community member to locate themselves in relation to the center of their cultural universe. This center was determined by two dimensions.  A vertical axis, centered in the piramide, connected the everyday, horizontal, terrestial world to the gods in the heavens and the underworld. The four cardinal directions, radiating out from the center, located people within the horizontal plane of the earth.  Each direction was identified by a color and associated with a particular god who ruled over it.

Mayan World Tree, 

rising from the underworld, 

passing through the plane of the earth 

to reach the heavens. 

The cardinal directions are marked by their colors: 

red for the east where the sun rises, 

yellow for the south where the sun resides, 

black for the west where the sun passes into the night 

 white for the north

(Note how the movement of the sun marks, and thereby creates, both time and space.)

Space and Time in Shoppingtown

The builders of Shoppingtown want to be sure that you know not so much where you are as how to get to where you (and they) want (you)to go. 

A map both helps visitors to find their way and presents the overall design of this cultural space.

Eerily, the design of Shoppingtown mirrors the design of Mesoamerican cities. The Center is occupied, not by a temple of the gods, but by a "temple of commerce," Macy's. The four cardinal directions (more or less) are marked with colors, this time identifying four parking garages, the entrance gates through which visitors must enter this '''town,'' and which they must be able to find when they want to leave. 

Other reknown ''temples of commerce'' also mark the four cardinal directions: Bloomingdale's to the North, Lord and Taylor to the East and Nordstrum's to the South.

And as Shoppingtown has no real cultural location, it also does not exist in any continuous historical time. Yes, it is in the contemporary, late twentieth to early twenty-first century United States, but nothing appears in Shoppingtown that connects it with any real past. The Main Streets of small U.S. towns show their history, even if it is only to the nineteenth century. The Main Street of Danbury, Connecticut, where I last lived, retains its Victorian character in its ornate, orange-brick facades.

The pseudo historical references decorating Shoppingtown's Main Street are overridden by the shopping center's architecture. Its geometric modernism presents space and time as mathematical, ahistorical abstractions. Straight lines, angles, squares, and cubes of steel, stone and glass create an anonymous, timeless space.

The stores, themselves, are equally impersonal, communicating a freedom from time and place. 

 

Compare this timeless, impersonal anonymity with what might be called the ''shopping center" of Pátzcuaro,  el mercado. 

 

El Mercado is a place where things are for sale, but it is also a place of people, vendedores who are often familia y parientes, relatives, or compañeros y amigos, who have known one-another all their lives and who help one-another - with cambio, change, for a cliente or to find an item in another puesto stall when they don't have it in their own.  

Compare this to the response that I received when I took a picture inside of Macy´s. 

I was told by this man that no one was allowed to take pictures inside of the store.  I asked, "Why?" He responded, "Because of the competition."

As I left, he also came outside, for a smoke - by himself. 

In Pátzcuaro's mercado, going out by yourself for a smoke, or anything else, would hardly ever happen.

In Pátzcuaro, in Mexican culture, place, time and people, el pueblo, are always inseparable, interrelated, interconnected. El pueblo is both people and place, located within a continuous, acknowledged history.

In Shoppingtown, there are no connections to any of these concrete, cultural, historical, human realities. So as you leave this place that is No Where and of No Time, where No One lives, your are reminded: