Reflections on two aspects of popular culture

Abstract

This article explores the fundamental aspects of Guatemalan popular culture from a theoretical and methodological perspective, highlighting its relationship with the dominant culture and its role in the configuration of a national State. Through the analysis of poetic, narrative and linguistic folklore, it examines how subaltern sectors generate cultural production that responds to their needs and conditions of existence. Following the ideas of Gramsci and García Canclini, popular culture is considered as a process of appropriation and transformation of symbolic resources in contexts of social and economic conflict. The interaction between popular and official culture is highlighted, as well as the way in which marginal groups adapt and reinvent elements of literate culture, creating a popular literature that reflects their ideology and social reality. This study offers a comprehensive view of popular culture as an expression of the consciousness and resistance of subaltern sectors in Guatemala.