Cultural Policies and Cultural Rights

In Latin America, culture is not an ornament or an entertainment industry: it is a form of resistance, a way of inhabiting the commons, a space where the political is negotiated. However, in recent decades, cultural policies have tended to reduce that complexity to a language of management, measurement, and utility. Culture, rather than a right, has become a resource.

George Yúdice (1947) warned of this at the beginning of the 21st century: we live in a time when culture is instrumentalized as a tool for development, urban marketing, or soft diplomacy. His book The Expediency of Culture is, in that sense, an X-ray of how governments, international organizations, and corporations began to understand culture not as symbolic expression, but as economic investment. What was once valued for its aesthetic power or its capacity to imagine worlds is now measured in statistics, audiences, and returns.

This shift has profound consequences. When culture becomes a resource, its value no longer lies in experience or thought, but instead depends on its ability to produce “impact.” Cultural policies are then designed according to criteria such as efficiency, innovation, or productivity, as if creating, researching, or preserving could be evaluated through market logic. But the problem is not only technical; it is political. Treating culture as a tool risks emptying it of conflict and stripping away its critical dimension. Yúdice did not deny the need for cultural policies, on the contrary, he considered them essential—but he warned of the danger of depoliticizing the cultural field under the guise of neutral management.

In Latin America, this tension becomes especially visible. Our states, shaped by structural inequalities, tend to approach culture from two poles: either as an identity emblem for export (a nation brand, a folkloric showcase), or as a secondary expense in the face of economic urgencies. In both cases, culture becomes subordinated.

Meanwhile, community practices, self-managed projects, and territorial expressions continue to form the most vital foundation of our symbolic production. From the pontos de cultura in Brazil to Indigenous radio stations in Bolivia or neighborhood collectives in Argentina, there are hundreds of experiences that expand the very meaning of culture. Yet they rarely appear on institutional maps, and when they do, it is through temporary programs, without continuity or real recognition. Néstor García Canclini (La Plata, 1939) argued that a democratic cultural policy cannot be limited to funding events, but must redistribute access to the production and circulation of meaning. Ticio Escobar (Asunción, 1947) translated this into ethical terms: guaranteeing cultural rights means guaranteeing the right to imagine, to speak, and to exist symbolically. In this sense, thinking of culture as a right implies understanding it as an essential dimension of citizenship, not as a luxury of leisure time.

The challenge, then, is twofold. On one hand, to recover the political dimension of culture in the face of its instrumentalization. On the other, to expand the concept of cultural policies to include what has historically been considered “outside the system”: collective practices, oral memories, and traditions that persist without subsidies or institutional frameworks. The Latin American cultural field is full of examples of community-based management that sustain symbolic life far beyond ministries and grant systems, yet these projects need policies that support them, not normalize them. It is about recognizing that culture is not only produced in museums or theaters, but also in the streets, in rituals, and in the affective networks that create community.

To think about cultural rights today ultimately means asking who has the right to produce culture, and under what conditions. It means defending diversity not as a slogan, but as a structure of power. If the future of culture in Latin America depends solely on its utility, we risk losing what makes it irreplaceable: its capacity to imagine, to question, and to create shared worlds.

In the face of this, a critical perspective is urgently needed—one that restores to art and culture their political force. Because culture is not a resource: it is a territory of meaning, a field of dispute, and above all, a right that sustains the very possibility of being human.