Tulane ESL students

Just recently I met a couple of Latin American students enrolled in the ESL program from Argentina and Peru. Although one of them could only speak very limited English, the other one, from Peru, could communicate very well in English. It was interesting just talking to him, so exciting! I told him that I learned about Vargas Llosa and Fujimori, but it was very interesting to hear him talk about Peru from his perspective. He told me how most of the population is focused around the cities and how Cuzco (sp?) was mainly a tourist spot for native american culture more than anything else. He is from Lima (go figure), and he said that there were many different types of people there, a lot of Chinese people. In fact, he was 1/4 Chinese.

One thing that struck me about our conversation. We somehow started to talk about hip hop and pop culture, and we tried to name all the Latin American names we could thing of: Shakira, Ricky Martin, Jennifer Lopez, Enrique Iglesias, Selma Hyak, etc, etc only for him to say: "Yep Enrique Iglesias and Penelope Cruz are from Spain. Selma Hyak is from Mexico. Shakira is from Colombia. Jennifer Lopez is from the Bronx (oops hehe), etc, etc." It definitely goes to show how we just place the phrase "Latin America" over any sort of pop culture icon that makes it big in the US without carefully looking at which country they come from. I think that conversation on some level deals with Latin Americans and their struggling idea of a collective sense of idea imposed from outside and from the different conflicts inside Latin America. He said that as soon as they try to make themselves marketable in United States, such pop music artists lose their touch and style that appeals to the Latin American pop culture in order to cowtow to US tastes. As a result, Latin American artists cease to be representations of Latin American artists. Interesting....