Escape Latin America Meme Analysis
Escapar de Latinoamérica: The Globalized Digital Culture
Latin Americans (like myself) are currently experiencing a collective desire to emigrate due to the hardships of residing in a third-world country: corruption, crime, cost of living, political and economic instability, etc. Moving to a first-world country is seen in many ways as succeeding in life. This drive is then expressed through the use of memes.
The more common examples include characters from an anime inviting you to hop in their ride to escape Latin America, or an anime videogame/visual-novel multiple endings style memes, where the good ending is escaping, the bad ending is remaining in the third world, and neutral ending something like becoming a corrupt politician yourself.
“Get in, let’s escape Latin America”
”BAD ENDING: You did NOT manage to escape Latin America and all your homies were victims of your third world country’s crime wave.”
Note that this meme is not used by Hispanic/Latino people born or residing in the US, but rather actual Latin-Americans, so you won’t find any that are not in Spanish, so I annotated translations. However, with the context out of the way, I want to explore the deeper unconscious themes in the memes.
While West Europe once conquered and controlled a big portion of the physical world, in modern times the United States of America controls the entirety of the psychic world. The engine of this globalization is the Internet; its instantaneous connectivity making us one big culture. Because the US was victorious in the race and war of ethics, morals, and technology during the 20th century, it’s their culture and language that has become the international standard. Like an inverse Tower of Babel, as we reach further down the “ethereal underground” we are forced to use a single language by God, who is now proudly American. Not German, or Russian. English is the main language of the Internet.
All youth is psychically split between the physical and digital realms, but I believe it is worse for those not originally from an Anglo-Saxon country as the physical and digital spaces are even further apart. That is why I believe that the meme of “escaping Latin-America” did not entirely emerge from the aforementioned issues in the introduction of this essay, but also the desire to abandon the physical realm, their chaotic home, and go into this perfectly ordered first world country, which is really a projection of the Internet. The grounded Dionysian homeland vs the heavenly Apollonian ether.
So that would be the end of it, except that if you notice carefully the memes are usually anime related. That’s because after being utterly devastated by the nuclear power of America, Japan became this inoffensive parasite that latched onto American (and by extension, global) culture, evident in the modern anime-related media populating the Internet. Add a deliberate effort from the Korean government, and you have k-pop infecting it, too. The Internet is now a muddy mesh of mainly American and Japanese culture, with a dash of Korean.
This is the globalized digital culture, a mixture of many societies but at the same time its own distinct thing. Competing with and offering an alternative to the local culture the youth wish to escape. In fact, they do escape it. They “escape Latin America” every day through the Internet. Yes, the more different your local culture is from the digital one, the bigger the psychic split, but at this point even if you are an American it’s still quite considerable, as any Western will experience cognitive dissonance between the Western culture they interact with outside of computers, and their Japanese/Korean media consumption.
So are you a citizen of your country, or a citizen of the Internet? Either way, you ought to remember: Memes Matter.