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important relationship to hegemony. Quoting from Bernay, he argues, “Democracy itself
advances through spectacle, style and consumption” (my emphasis) (1995:4). Leticia’s
export/import business, which registers profound transformations in social relations to
material culture, is thus integrally tied—albeit in dialectical tension—to changing
relations of exchange in the emergent political economy (sic neoliberalism).
Leticia, her trade, and the goods that she carries back and forth speak directly to
the relationship between technologies of communication (transportation and information)
and mass migrations posed by Appadurai in his general theory of global cultural
processes. Leticia’s clientele is by and large made up by rural and small-town folk—be
they in Santa Elena or Los Angeles—who choose her service over the likes of a Western
Union, a DHL or Gigante Express. They so do so not because they lack access to these
services. Indeed, right at the entrance to Santa Elena, a red, white and blue sign for “Los
Angeles Express” hangs from the wooden eave of an old colonial stucco structure, its
bullet riddled walls still bearing traces of the civil war. And one can drive by the same
sign in Los Angeles itself, on the border between Pico-Union and Korea Town.
Moreover, Santa Elena is only a five-minute bus ride away from Usulután City, where
there is even greater access to this worldwide network. All this is to say that Santa Elena
is not “out of range,” whatever the dial face of that young boy’s cell phone might have
read. Nor are Leticia’s fees necessarily cheaper although she does offer more room for
maneuver and negotiation, and will carry things that will spoil if not delivered quickly
and that do not meet international standards of regulation. But there is still more at issue.
I would suggest the confianza (trust) borne of face-to-face communications in and
between the viajera’s living room in Santa Elena and in Los Angeles is on the one hand
Convention