by Karina Vega, Mercedes Baltazar, Patricia López, León Ruiz and José M. Ramos
Echoing insights from critical Futures Studies (Sardar 1999), the cultural critic Mark Fisher (2014) argued that the future has been “canceled”, reflecting on our collective inability to imagine something beyond the current capitalist-industrial system. The epistemic boundaries of both action and reflection are maintained both by the political economy and the discourses in late capitalism.
Trapped in a zeitgeist of constrained imagination and the “weight of the past” (Inayatullah 2008) we are often unable to develop alternative visions of futures which we would prefer to exist in. In other words, economic, political and cultural structures all conspire in the maintenance of lifestyles and social dynamics. These structures are based on assumptions built in the past, “used futures” (Inayatullah 2008), rather than renewed visions and collective directions for futures we would prefer to live in.
It takes skill, courage and determination to work towards grounded hope and viable futures when despair, hopelessness and nihilism are not only pervasive, but are fashionable. In this essay, we critically examine one such socio-cultural construct in the context of Mexico, through the classic game Loteria (somewhat equivalent to Bingo), and reimagine it in a 21st Century context based on new assumptions that respond to the Epic Times we live in. This article proposes critical and participatory methods to explore and radically reimagine archetypes, images and personas for the futures of Mexican culture, responding to the unique challenges and opportunities of our times.
Reimagining Loteria
We propose a new form of Loteria to foster cultural imagination and renewal, integrating approaches from participatory futures (Ramos, 2019), critical futures (Slaughter, 1988) and mutant futures (Ramos 2020). Bussey (2017) argued that futures studies is, fundamentally, an exercise in culture hacking. Many cultural forms do not stand up against the challenges on our horizons, e.g. from our fossil fuel dependent lifestyles to forms of ethno-nationalism. Our proposal aims to provide an avenue to critically examine deep cultural achetypes within Mexican culture. Using a participatory futures approach, the proposal puts Mexican citizens at the center of this culture-hacking and futures inquiry, as the innovators of new selves, personas and archetypes.
For those unfamiliar with Loteria, it is a game comprising 54 cards, depicting a carácter or object representative of Mexican culture. Players receive a board with 16 randomly assigned images and mark their boards with tokens (typically pinto or black beans) as the images are called from the shuffle deck. Whoever gets all the images on their board wins.
Loteria possess a semi-ritualistic quality to it. It is a classic game that has existed for many years, is ubiquitous and is used as a kids game, inculcating youth with “heavy” archetypes for who Mexicans were, are and can be. Few question what influence and deeper significances are expressed through the game. But we know that stereotypes and attitudes toward gender, socio-economic status, and ethnicity pervade society, most of which are played out in a day-to-day fashion unconsciously. In addition, people play out the personas and archetypes given to us by our families, relations, institutions and cultures. Loteria is an artefact that expresses certain dimensions of Mexican culture.
Here are some examples:
Figure 1: Three examples in Loteria, La Dama (The Dame), El Nopal (The Cactus) and El Borracho (The Drunkard)
These three examples from Lotería – “La Dama,” “El Nopal” and “El Borracho”- offer windows into Mexican culture. “La Dama ”, (the dame), represents the idealization of European features (in color and style), reflecting a bias towards certain physical appearances. “El Nopal” (the cactus) , while seemingly unremarkable, symbolizes deeper connections to food, landscape, geography and indigenous heritage. “El Borracho” (the drunkard) is a particularly potent image. It portrays alcoholism in a stigmatized manner, but may also hint at the connection between alcoholism and historical colonization.
These images reveal deep-seated cultural assumptions, some perpetuating inaccuracies or outdated judgements, others underscoring privilege and systemic issues like racism and patriarchy. They reflect the unconscious fabric of Mexican identity.
But what if Loteria became a platform to explore this unconscious cultural fabric and to challenge old archetypes and personas, and design new ones? Using participatory futures, the objective of our cultural remix of Loteria is to generate a space for discussion and re-generation: what does it mean to think about the future for different segments of society? Mexican society is diverse, with contrasting contexts and therefore different ways of thinking about their past, present and futures. We aim to combine representatives of three contrasting populations, with different ages, origins, income levels, and locations to elicit ethnographic reflections and participatory visual products that elicit new potential for the futures of Mexican culture.
Loteria 21C
To facilitate the exchange of ideas and generation of new futures images from a common starting point, we propose to develop “Loteria 21C”.
This new version uses the traditional Loteria game to recreate images of possible futures and new archetypes among segments of the population. While Loteria images serve as archetypes of Mexicanity, society has changed since the creation of the game. New characters have emerged with it who, although they had no place in the past, could exist in the present and in the images of the future.
In this way, representatives of specific groups can reimagine the Loteria game, through four consecutive stages: past, present, future and archetypes. The proposed game dynamic is presented in detail here.
How to Play
The object of the game is to use the images and archetypes within Loteria to explore the deep past, interrogate the present, and imagine the future, and ultimately generate new archetypes and images that embody the new selves and characteristics needed for Mexico and Mexicans in the 21st century.
As discussed, the process is divided into four segments: past, present, future and archetypes. In each of these segments, Loteria cards are used as stimulants. The Loteria cards are first divided and put into the three categories: objects, flora / fauna, and characters.
Objects typically represent Mexican life.
Figure 2: Objects in Loteria
Flora / fauna reflected in Mexico’s geographies and habitats.
Figure 3: Flora/Fauna in Loteria
Characters are the different types of people.
Figure 4: Characters in Loteria
In each of the four stages to the workshop, these categories within Loteria are used in different ways.
Stage I: The Past
The objective of this stage is for participants to imagine Mexico before they were born, the Mexico in which their parents lived.
Taking one card each from the three categories or Loteria, the participants explore as many characteristics as they can to describe what Mexico’s like in the past, the Mexico in which their parents or even grandparents lived. In a group participants ask various questions to explore and reflect on:
- What was that Mexico like?
- How do you think it was like to live in that Mexico?
- What dreamed people who lived in that Mexico?
- What feared people who lived in that Mexico?
- If an exhibition were held at a museum in that Mexico, what would you think are the characteristic objects?
- What about flora and fauna? Which would be? What were they like in that Mexico?
In teams, participants then select what they think are the most meaningful, relevant or representative Loteria cards from each of the three categories and discuss why they chose them. This selection process allows participants to refine their thinking about the past and clarify the most important archetypes going forward.
Stage II: Present
The objective of this stage is to explore how Mexico has changed from the past to the present using the archetypes and images within Loteria. Different audiences, whether farmers, young people, urban professionals etc. will have their own perspectives on social change in Mexico. The purpose is to provide a grounding in an understanding of change for the participants.
The participants can draw on the archetypes and images already used or can choose new archetypes and images from the three categories. After selection, participants explore the following questions:
- What are they like today?
- Which aspects remain the same and which have been modified?
- How do you live or experience it?
Participants can explore this on their own or with the group.
Stage III: The Future
The objective of this stage is to explore possible futures based on the archetypes and images within Loteria, but also to transform those archetypes and images in a way that responds effectively to the challenges of Mexico in the 21st century.
Using the cards that have already been chosen, participants sketch and draw how these are types of images will transform in Mexico 20 to 40 years into the future. The participants don’t change the archetypes and images, they use the archetypes and images as a springboard to imagine a Mexico of the future. Participants then can discuss some of their ideas together.
Following this, participants develop scenarios using the sketches as raw material. There is no set scenario approach, and as such different strategies might be used to generate the scenarios and stories. However, in this phase the whole gamut of loteria archetypes and images can be used as elements in world building. This ensures that there is an anchor to indigenous and endogenous elements when imagining the futures of Mexico. Participants can ask the following questions for each scenario story:
What will Mexico be like?
- How do you think it will be like to live in that Mexico?
- What will the people who live in that Mexico dream of?
- What will the people who live in that Mexico be afraid of?
- What are the risks?
- What are the opportunities?
Participants can then present and discuss the scenarios together.
Stage IV: New Archetypes and Images
The objective of this stage is to reimagine the archetypes and images in a way that reflects participants preferred futures, the call long and bring forth new selves and potentialities in addressing the challenges of Mexico.
In teams, participants are asked to choose the most significant archetype and image from the three categories. The teams then reimagined the archetype, changing and transforming them into something that is better and more suited for Mexico in the 21st century. The participants can ask the following questions of the different archetypes as a group:
- What new selves and personas are present in the archetypes?
- What new types of power and agency do the archetypes indicate for future Mexicans?
- How do these archetypes change who you are and what you do in the future?
Documentation
We would like a way for people to be able to document the findings from these different workshops. For example if a group of farmers, urban professionals, students are young people go through this process, we would like to be able to put the transformed archetypes and images, and their meanings, into a publicly accessible format such as a website. The idea would be to grow a body of new archetypes and images and ideas that provide inspiration for who Mexico can be moving into the future.
Mobilizing Participation to Reimagine Mexican Culture
Reimagining cultures is both a revolutionary exercise and a difficult task. Donella Meadows argued that it is “paradigm” that represents the fulcrum for the greatest change in society (Meadows, 1999). Well-known futures methods such as Causal Layered Analysis (Inayatullah, 1998) and the Transcend Method (Galtung, 1999) address the problem of challenging established cultural patterns and their transformation.
In his book, “La increíble hazaña de ser mexicano”, Humberto Yépez (2010), reflecting on Mexican culture and society, made a distinction between two types of Mexicans: “retro” and “new.” A retro-Mexican is a conservative person who has a deep attachment to old values and stereotypes, while the new Mexican is a cultural hybrid who accepts and transforms new ideas into different lifestyles.
Yépez (2010) also believed Mexican society has an inclination toward three cultural roots: the indigenous, with pre-Hispanic past symbols and native populations, the Spanish with elements inherited from the “Old World”, and the North American turn, with elements adopted from the United States after NAFTA. While our proposal favors the “New Mexican”, we also want to value Mexico’s cultural legacy. And we wish to avoid “new” to mean “adopted from the US or Europe”. Mexico’s cultural strength is its dynamic hybridity, and how willingly it embraced the truth of this hybridity.
The existing archetypes in Loteria may restrict possible futures for people in Mexico, both in the collective and in the individual imagination, but there may also be hidden resources in Loteria from Mexico’s collective past. Reimagining Loteria should by no means be seen as a wholesale rejection of the past, but rather an exploiration between the past, present and futures – to form new alliances between diverse selves, old, new and Other – in service toward a better Mexico.
We need a decentralized and pluralistic understanding of Mexican culture, and various groups will interpret, extrapolate and reimagine Loteria archetypes differently. We see the cultural complexity expressed through different segments of the population as a resource in generating diverse narratives when thinking about the futures.
Research carried out by the Mexican Youth Institute aimed to identify how children and adolescents perceived their possible futures (Concheiro, 2014). One of the challenges faced was that it was difficult for them to relate to conventional foresight tools. This challenge is not exclusive to young people. There is a need to develop accessible futures literacy strategies and methods that put power back into peoples hands, hearts and minds – for imagining new selves, futures and possibilities for action.
Cultural transformation requires a way for many people to reflect about who they are and how they have come to be. It needs to include the ability for people to think about the future, who they could become as a collective; and who they want to become personally. It requires the possibility of new selves and personas available to the culture and to individuals. When we look for archetypes that reflect the spiritual depth of a culture, create a space for grounded hope, and recognize the power, worth and influence of every member of society, this can have a profoundly positive influence in moving toward a better future.
This can open powerful conversations about shared futures with a wide spectrum of Mexican citizens. Understanding culture is often the work of anthropologists and social-psychologists, and reimagining culture is often the domain of artists; but is the job of all people to reimagine who we are in a changing world for the common good.
Conclusions, next steps and possible adaptations
Lotería is a Mexican tradition that is bigger than the game itself. We have seen decks that include new cards being sold in foreign supermarkets, transformed into art, fashion and even memes. However, none of these updates have included the question of: What would the futures of these Mexican archetypes look like? Are they inclusive enough? Do they represent narratives from the past or can they be adapted to the future?
Reimagining culture is a revolutionary exercise. Our proposal is to start this exercise through play. Instead of designing futuristic archetypes for people (e.g. based on weak signals), the structure of the workshops allows participants to do this themselves, through a journey that creates connections, sets the tone for exploratory questions, while thinking about possible futures, and creating new narratives through collective imagination.
By using an analog process, each workshop would allow us to facilitate conversations that may not easily find space in the daily routine of society. Every participant will have the chance to have an active role in the construction of different visions of the futures and draw archetypes as diverse as the selves that coexist in our complex society.
The next step is to conduct workshops in different environments, origins and ages, starting the documentation process, including pictures from each group, to have a gallery of archetypes that could be socialized through social media. We are considering three possible groups: children, farmers (peasants / fellow citizens) and young people with access to education and high socio-economic status.
After the first set of workshops it would be valuable to explore promoting an exhibit in the community, using the exercise as part of a wider foresight process or even consider the possibility of creating a site that suggests a different board game to play with the family.
Finally, even though Loteria is rooted in Mexican culture, we believe the process can be adapted by anyone to create their own workshop, using the most typical images that represent the archetypes of their culture: characters from legends, fables or mythology.
References
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Concheiro, A. A. (2014). Jóvenes y niños mexicanos: visiones de futuro. Imágenes de futuro en la juven, 57. Revista de Estudios de Juventud, March 14, n. 104. http://www.injuve.es/sites/default/files/Documento%204%20Jovenes%20y%20ni%C3%B1os%20mexicanos.pdf
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