Of Toys, Cultural Heritage and Globalization: The Collective Narrative Identity of Traditional Mexican Toys

Handcrafted toys have had a rich tradition as cultural products in Mexican
cultural heritage. As such, they are cultural artifacts associated with specific
years, defined periods, as well as precise geographic regions; in other words,
they respond to a social function in the community. Drawing on Lotman’s
concept of text, Greimas’s notion of isotopy and Ricoeur’s narrative identity,
this paper aims to analyze traditional Mexican handcrafted toys as cultural
texts, based on two examples: kitchen clay toys and wooden truck toys. Of
special interest is the exploration of how handcrafted toys lose their relationship
to social reality and become museum pieces (Benjamin 1928), as well as
how globalization has influenced the making of toys. Each layer of meaning,
each repetition, is added to its cultural memory and condensed in the text.
In this case, handcrafted toys shape the way a specific collective narrative
identity emerges within the continuum of cultural dynamics.