Professor Hector Perla (University of California - Santa Cruz) describes the Latin American identity as an imagined community, one that is “socially constructed through narratives, myths of origins, symbols, rituals, and collective memory…imagined by people who see themselves as part of that group…”. It is this notion of the nation as a community that gives culture, and the production of culture, its meaning amongst people with a sense of collectiveness. It is this definition that forms the basis of Latin American and Latina/o Cultural Studies.īenedict Anderson sees the nation as an ‘imagined community’ it is imagined because most members of said community will never meet or hear from other members of this community, yet each has in their minds the image of their communion. The ways and forms that this “meaning” is shared is the core of a culture, the social actors that reproduce this sense of meaning are within that culture.
Hall emphasizes the notion of ‘meaning’ and the process that comes with the production and exchange of “meaning” within a society. Stuart Hall’s definition of culture is one used by the class and is one that helps define the cultural imaginary. Alicia Camacho also expands upon the notion of the migrant community imagining their own culture, in a space neither here nor there. In order to understand what the imagined is, two concepts are put together to form a community’s cultural imaginary, the definition of culture by Stuart Hall and Benedict Anderson’s idea of the “imaginary”. The Cultural Imaginary is a theory derived from different concepts in Latin American, Latina/o, and Hispanic Cultural Studies.
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