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. 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. Hugo Chávez’s anti-Hollywood or anti-comics rants were nothing new to me. ![]() 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. 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 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. My beloved television had detractors from several directions. If I was a kind of nomad, then television was my tent. I counted on a small set of shows, no matter the country in which I lived. The movement was destabilizing, but television remained constant. ![]() 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. The next day he was employed by some factory on the Venezuelan side. One day, he was, kind of, a big shot in the Colombian police on the frontier. ![]() 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. 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. “Center,” but in the way of Borges´s Aleph: It was the window to everything. I was there, 3,000 years ago, when television was the center of the world. I am only interested in what is not mine.
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