What really sucks is that some Argentines (some dear friends of mine even, *sigh*) love to use Halloween as an excuse to complain about cultural imperialism and homogenization. They don't LIKE Halloween, they don't WANT Halloween and they don't want our stupid American holidays getting in their way of having no fun. That's the real bummer for me.
That is because the Halloween celebration is very very very recent here, like from mid 90s, when we had a friendly and 100% pro US government that in some ways via globalization imposed the American way of life, when McDonalds boomed and was the trendy restaurant for upper middle class families, when the life in a house in the suburbs explode (we had only San Isidro but not the huge country phenomena), when we started to see all these strange stuff from the american eating industry, like M&Ms, or Coca Cola in a can, or even when the tv cable started, with 90% of channels from the US, with even the ads, like those "llame ya" so made in the US that came here to stay. It happened with lots of stuff.
So a lot of we argentines, with our big love and tradition for europe, a distinctive mark from Latin America, started to live like americans, like started to use car a lot more, highways were built, etc, but all these, with huge complaining for that, well complaining is a national sport so, but my point is celebrating Halloween is a good example of this. An author talks instead of globalization, glocalization, because as a defense for all these new culture invasion, people found a shelter in local stuff. For instance, the mate, it was something almost marginal, from the poor, the working class and some middle class. In the upper classes was not so very well seen. And in the 90s it started to be popular in the upper classes, mostly in the middle class also. Mate is popular in Argentina only since 1995 or so. Before was something related to the campo, to the gauchos, and to the poor.
I dont know why I write all these stuff. Anyway, what happens with Halloween happens also with San Valentin. For example, the celebration of the mothers day is from the 60s, the kids day, later, and like this so on. But those are not americans, those are commercial argentine.
