A POSTCAPITALIST PARADIGM: THE COMMON GOOD OF ...

Almost all subjugated cultures have been exclusively relegated to rural
areas: their own symbolic space has been defined as rural. Accordingly,
development projects always aim at building so-called interculturality in
the rural areas. This makes the place and its inhabitants exotic, while
fostering the sale and promotion of cultural expressions as goods - like,
for example, the Andean markets, that are now being included in the
tourist circuits. However reality cannot be pinned down and always occurs
outside the established dictates.
And the reality is that urbanization is mushrooming in the whole of Latin
America. In former times, migration was used to explain the presence
of indigenous cultures outside their ‘real’ territories, as a phenomenon
that would inevitably lead to mestizaje or acculturization. In Europe, in
certain contexts, it led to the ghetto. Povera Vieira (1994) has shown,
for example in the case of the Royal Audience of Quito (1563-1822), that
migration, far from facilitating cultural assimilation, became a strategy
for cultural expansion simply using another kind of space. At the present
time the persistence of cultural differences in urban areas shows that a
change in space does not in fact necessarily involve breaking with the
original culture.
The continued presence of different cultures in the urban areas is a challenge
to imagining co-existence among different social practices. In fact,
we see that urban life enables cultural expansion in a constantly changing
dynamic (not surprisingly, since cultures are living things). But at the
same time, urban life promotes encounters that overcome cultural differences.
The impoverishment suffered by those who live in the great
urban sprawls is undiscriminating: it does not respect religious or symbolic
differences. Nevertheless, this is also the place where culture as
a non-capitalist process of signification is exercising a fundamental role.
Breaking the spatial boundaries between cultures encourages learning,
questions stereotypes and dispels the idea of cultural expressions as
merchandise for tourism. However, it is also true that in the urban areas
there is a constant risk for any culture: consumerism. Since consumerism
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