The radiated tortoise and Aldabra giant tortoise were used as ecological replacements for the extinct Mauritian tortoise Cylindraspis inepta. Aldabra giant tortoises were better adapted as seed dispersers and grazers, and have become the species of choice. It is intended to remove the radiated tortoises from Round Island. It is suggested there was an open grazing climax plant community maintained by tortoises with heliophilous native plants that have adaptations to avoid being grazed or browsed and respond to grazing with prostrate growth form. The Aldabra giant tortoises fed on fallen fruits and spread the seeds of hardwood trees, screw-pines and palms in their droppings that subsequently demonstrated enhanced germination and growth rates. Preliminary work was done on Ile aux Aigrettes before the release on Round Island. The tortoises have established grazed areas colonised by the native tussock grass Chrysopogon argutus that the tortoises do not graze and is benefiting from reduced competition from the fast-growing non-native grasses.

Newspapers, magazine and literary supplements, dates of analysis and archive information.

Parameters of Analysis

The intention in undertaking this analysis was to gain an understanding of how the British press has discussed and used magical realism in relation to Latin America. As the general search term ‘Latin America’ returned far too many results to permit a close analysis of articles within the time frame of this project, however, search terms were restricted to specific terms such as ‘magical realism’, ‘magic realism’ and ‘lo real maravilloso’, in addition to the names of prominent Latin American magical realist authors and closely related authors of fantastic literature. Search terms therefore also consisted of: ‘Isabel Allende’, ‘Miguel Ángel Asturias’, ‘Jorge Luis Borges’, ‘Alejo Carpentier’, ‘Cortázar’, ‘José Donoso’, ‘Laura Esquivel’, ‘Carlos Fuentes’, ‘García Márquez’, ‘Juan Rulfo’ and ‘Vargas Llosa’. Forenames were included if surnames alone once again generated too many results to permit a close analysis within the time frame of the project, or if surnames alone returned articles relating to figures who were not the author. If too many results were still generated by these search terms (for example, more than fifty articles for one search term in one decade and one newspaper alone), and thereby threatened to impede the process of analysis, the search was narrowed by including additional terms alongside authors’ names, such as ‘magic’ and/or ‘Latin America’. In the case of the London Review of Books, search terms were entered into the Review’s website to find relevant articles, and then read using the University of Manchester’s hard copy archive.

Post-Screening Questionnaire

Dear Sir/Madam, I would be most grateful if you could answer a couple of brief questions for me as part of my research (please continue overleaf if you need more space):

• 1) What did you like/dislike about this film?

• 2) What did the film tell you about Latin America?

Please circle as appropriate: I am male/female aged 20 or below / 21–30 / 31–40 / 41–50 / 51–60 / 61–70 / 71+

If you would be willing to discuss ¡Viva! and Latin America in more depth with me, please provide a contact email address or telephone number: ________________________________________________________

Thank you very much for your time, Nicola Jones, School of Arts, Languages and Cultures, University of Manchester.

Post-Screening Questionnaire Respondent Profile (Sex/Age)

List of Interview Questions

Part One: ¡Viva!

• 1) Why do you go to ¡Viva!?

• 2) What do you like/dislike about the festival?

• 3) How often have you been to the festival?

• 4) How do you choose what films to see?

• 5) Are there any films you particularly liked/disliked this year? What did they tell you about Latin America?

• 6) Were there any films you particularly liked/disliked in previous years? What did they tell you about Latin America?

• 7) Has ¡Viva! changed over the years?

• 8) What do the lead images of the festival say to you? Do they appeal to you, and why?

• 9) How does ¡Viva! portray Latin America? Do you think ¡Viva! offers an authentic portrayal of Latin America?

• 10) If you could organise ¡Viva!, what would you like to see?

Part Two: Latin America in General

• 11) How would you describe Latin American culture?

• 12) How else do you experience Latin American culture in Manchester? In general?

• 13) Have you ever been to Latin America? If so, tell me about it. Was your experience what you were expecting?

• 14) Are you familiar with the concept of magical realism? There is an idea that this is reflective of Latin American culture. Do you agree with this based on your knowledge and experience of Latin American culture?

• 15) How does Latin American culture compare/contrast with Spanish culture? With British culture?

Culture plays a fundamental role in the development and promotion, both national and international, of twenty-first-century Manchester. As Sir Richard Leese, leader of Manchester City Council since 1996, stated in the 2010 prospectus for Manchester’s cultural ambition: ‘The past decade has seen culture transform the experience of living and working in the city. As a consequence, culture now matters more than ever to Manchester’s many communities ….The city’s cultural potential is now fundamental to its future economic and social potential and to our ambition as a world-class city’ (Manchester Cultural Partnership, 2010, p. 4).. In this chapter, I examine how the specific notion of culture promoted by city officials, which was encouraged through a programme of culture-led urban regeneration in Manchester during the 1980s and 1990s, has centred on the development of high-brow cultural institutions and events, such as museums and arts festivals, as well as the formation of cultural quarters. While some of these, particularly the latter, incorporate local immigrant culture into the cultural landscape of the city, such inclusion only occurs when the culture of local immigrants is deemed to contribute significantly to the city’s economy and/or cosmopolitan image. Moreover, it is a formulaic and exoticised production of this culture that is visible within Manchester. Such a construction presents the consumer with a familiar Other, one they recognise from cultural stereotypes and which has also been hybridised with British cultural norms to enable its easier consumption. Despite Manchester’s long history of immigration and its reputation as one of the most multicultural cities in the UK (University of Manchester, 2013), the production and consumption of local immigrant culture coincides with studies of cosmopolitan consumption discussed in chapter 1, in which consumers seek to perform ‘safe’ and ‘uncomplicated’ cosmopolitan identities. Such identities centre on a temporary engagement with a cultural Other which bestows cultural capital but entails minimal interaction with immigrants themselves and requires little transformation or self-reflection on the part of the consumer (see Buettner, 2008; Delanty, 2009; Gilroy, 2004; Tanaka, 2008; Torres and Buriel, 2010).

In contrast to other local immigrant cultures, such as Chinese or South Asian, which benefit from a history of substantial migration to the city, Latin American culture has only emerged in Manchester in the last few decades.

In order to examine one way in which Latin America has been encoded in the UK at a discursive level during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, this chapter presents an analysis of Latin American magical realism in the British press from 1940 to 2015. Prior to the 1990s, Latin American culture, through mediums such as film, food, music and sport, was much less globalised than it is today. Travel to the region remained expensive for the majority of the British public and Latin America constituted an unpopular destination due to the region’s growing association with revolutions, dictatorships, guerrilla warfare and drug barons throughout the second half of the twentieth century. Literature was therefore a primary way in which Latin America was consumed in the UK and, during the second half of the twentieth century, magical realism became the foremost literary style associated with the region. In this chapter, I trace how magical realism became synonymous with the idea of Latin America in the British national press and how, over several decades, this association was mediated into a set of complementary codes, themes and journalistic narrative techniques that similarly came to exemplify Latin America. I begin by highlighting how the idea of Latin America and its literature in the press during the 1940s and 1950s was one of exoticism. The literature of the region then became associated with the surreal and unconventional in the 1960s as a result of the work of the Boom writers. Following the worldwide success of Gabriel García Márquez’s Cien años de soledad (1967) (One Hundred Years of Solitude, 1970), and the global expansion of Latin American magical realism, similar notions of strangeness and surrealism were gradually transferred to Latin America itself. For example, from 1967 and throughout the 1970s, academics and journalists in the press began to use words and themes concerning magic, mystery and unreality to describe the region. By the end of the twentieth century, despite the many scholars, literary journalists and Latin American writers who had begun to vociferously critique the association, these codes and themes deriving from magical realism had become a ‘primary interpretation’ (Hall et al., 1978) when describing Latin American cultural reality in the British press.

Celebrating its twentieth anniversary in 2014, the annual ¡Viva! Spanish and Latin American Film Festival has been a long-standing feature of Manchester’s cultural scene. Inaugurated in 1995, ¡Viva! – initially a Spanish film festival – was held every March at Cornerhouse cinema and centre for contemporary visual arts on Oxford Road until 2015, after which it moved to HOME, Manchester’s new international centre for contemporary visual art, film and theatre. As Latin American film was incorporated into the festival in 2004, the festival allows for a focused and in-depth examination of the contemporary production and consumption of Latin American culture in Manchester. In chapter 2, I analysed the development of Latin American magical realism in the British press (1940–2015) and demonstrated how magical realism became, and is still used as, a primary prism through which Latin America is interpreted in the UK. In order to assess the extent to which such an interpretation exists within the contemporary cultural production of Latin America in the UK beyond the press, in this chapter I examine the encoding of Latin America through ¡Viva!. The chapter analyses festival brochures, podcasts, programming, imagery, advertising, film reviews and press articles, as well as Q&A sessions with film directors and personal interviews conducted with festival organisers.

I begin with a history and overview of ¡Viva! and note how, as for many film festivals worldwide, it has become increasingly difficult for ¡Viva!’s organisers to secure regular funding and sponsorship. In an effort to appeal to and attract larger paying audiences, lead festival images have repeatedly foregrounded aspects of Latin American geography, ethnicity, culture and society that the White middle-class majority of the ¡Viva! audience, living in the UK, would find markedly different to their own, even though this has, in fact, been largely unrepresentative of the films in the festival programme. As part of the general discourse of difference encoded into the festival (which complies with the ethos of Cornerhouse, and now HOME, as a space of ‘alternative’ cinema and art), films, as well as festival brochures and film reviewers, have encoded Latin America with the notion of ‘quirky’ and ‘offbeat’ characters and situations.

During the summer of 2017, one song dominated the UK charts, spending eleven non-consecutive weeks at Number One. That song was Despacito, a reggaeton-Latin pop fusion by Puerto Rican singer Luis Fonsi and Puerto Rican rapper Daddy Yankee. The version which hit Number One in the UK contained lyrics in English and Spanish by Canadian singer Justin Bieber remixed with the original Spanish-language song. The original and remixed versions achieved unprecedented worldwide success. In October 2020, the music video for the original Spanish-language version became the first video to hit seven billion views on YouTube, making it the video-hosting website’s most viewed upload to date.

Whether you are sick and tired of hearing the opening bars to Despacito by now or not, the fact that a song almost entirely in Spanish spent eleven weeks at the very top of the UK chart was and remains both a little surprising and intriguing. In a country that a year earlier had voted to leave the European Union, projecting an isolationist and increasingly nationalistic image to the world, the popularity of Despacito with the British public clearly demonstrated that the Latin American, and the consumption of Latin American culture in particular, remains highly attractive for many British consumers. While some might attribute the popularity of Despacito to a catchy rhythm and the illusive promise of sun, sex and sensuality amidst a dreary British summer, it is undeniable that Latin American culture more broadly has become increasingly popular and prevalent within mainstream British society over the past few decades.

Since the 1980s, for example, mainstream British audiences have developed a keen interest in salsa, beginning with the salsa clubs opened by Latin American migrants in major UK cities and expanding to encompass the vast array of salsa classes held in fitness centres, dance studios, bars and nightclubs up and down the country today. The late 1990s and early 2000s saw Latin music becoming popular in the UK beyond salsa, evidenced by the success of the Buena Vista Social Club, the rise in popularity of tango and the success of international recording artists such as Jennifer Lopez, Ricky Martin and Shakira in the UK pop charts.

Latin America has gained a much larger cultural presence in the UK in recent decades, particularly in terms of cultural consumption. The introduction to this book began with the UK chart success of Despacito as an example of the unwavering interest in the Latin American amongst the British public, succeeding decades of increasing consumption of Latin American music, dance, food, sport, literature and film. This increase has occurred at a time when the UK is undergoing a perceived crisis in identity as a result of contemporary processes of globalisation. Since the 1990s, successive British governments have tried to accommodate higher levels of immigration within social policies of multiculturalism and community cohesion yet have struggled to reconcile increasing immigration with traditional notions of White British culture and identity. This has led to a growing discourse that the UK is losing its traditional culture and identity in the face of increasing cultural pluralism (Nagle, 2009, p. 92). Owing to these tensions, there has been an increase in rhetoric against immigrants and ethnic minorities within the UK and a growing concern regarding the future of British culture and identity. This book has examined one way in which contemporary consumers in Manchester are reconciling issues of cosmopolitanism and identity at a local level through their consumption of Latin American culture and ¡Viva!.

I have demonstrated how non-Latin American consumers are able to form a sense of connection with the Latin American Other through ¡Viva!. Building on Dina Iordanova’s (2010) application of imagined communities to film festivals and diaspora, I have extended her framework to include audiences beyond diaspora and demonstrated how, through ¡Viva!, Latin American culture can equally come to form part of the non-Latin American’s experiences and identity. Both post-screening questionnaire respondents and interviewees emphasised social and cultural differences between Latin America and the UK. However, interviewees such as Ian and Lee also identified a sense of commonality and shared values between themselves and the Latin American Other, values which they believed they cannot and do not share with wider British culture and society. Through participating in ¡Viva!, non-Latin American consumers were able to imagine themselves to be connected to people whom they perceived to share their beliefs, values and attitudes. Through identifying with the on-screen characters and bolstered by the very real sense of cosmopolitan community engendered by a foreign language film festival – one which here brings Latin Americans (and Spaniards) together with non-Hispanic consumers – non-Latin American audience members were able to imagine a shared connection with Latin American culture beyond the film festival screen. ¡Viva! thus created not merely a sense of imagined community, but rather a sense of imagined cosmopolitan community between the non-Latin American and the Latin American. Non-Latin American audience members were subsequently able to use this sense of connection to incorporate a Latin American identity within their notion of self-identity.

Latin America has always held a unique place within the British cultural imagination. This chapter begins with an examination of the historical construction of the foreign Other by European nations, in particular the Latin American Other. While Latin America comprises many diverse nations, cultures, experiences and histories, this book examines the overarching Latin American Other as constructed and consumed by western audiences. I trace Kevin Foster’s (2009) argument that Latin America has traditionally been used as a foil for the development of British self-identity, culminating in Jon Beasley-Murray’s (2003) theory that, rather than an external contrast, the contemporary Latin American Other is produced and consumed as the internal unconscious of the British Self, the consumption of which enables British consumers to live out unconscious anxieties and desires. I then position this theorisation in relation to the perceived crisis in the UK’s contemporary multicultural identity, assessing state policies of multiculturalism and community cohesion since the late 1990s and examining the ways in which these policies have struggled to reconcile traditional notions of White British identity with increasing levels of immigration. While the contemporary Latin American Other may be being constructed as the internal unconscious of the British Self for the purposes of consumption, elsewhere, scepticism and negative rhetoric surrounding multiculturalism, immigration and ethnic minorities are increasing. State policies, and the scepticism and rhetoric they have inspired, frame the wider context in which the production and consumption of ¡Viva! take place. Yet state policy, while offering an insight into changing attitudes towards multiculturalism at a governmental level, cannot tell us how individuals in the UK might deal with issues of identity and cultural difference in their everyday lives. Theories of cosmopolitanism are more informative in this regard.

Cosmopolitanism champions openness to and acceptance of cultural difference and contests the intercultural conflict that multiculturalism can engender through entrenching notions of insurmountable difference, as well as the assimilation underlying policies of community cohesion. Theories of cosmopolitanism can help to understand the attitudes and beliefs that audiences may bring to their consumption of Latin American culture through a foreign-language film festival such as ¡Viva!. The discussion of cosmopolitan theory in this chapter identifies a key component of cosmopolitanism that will be fundamental in my analysis of ¡Viva!; in addition to openness towards the cultural Other, cosmopolitanism demands a transformation in self-understanding (Delanty, 2009).