Susana Distancia: memes and popular culture during the COVID-19 pandemic

Abstract

Between the end of March and June 2020, COVID-19 quickly spread in Mexico. As a response, the Mexican government announced its national prevention campaign, called ‘Susana Distancia,’ a set of measures, recommendations, conferences, educational resources, and a chatbot. At the centre of the campaign was Susana Distancia’s character, a young woman designed in a comic-book-style, echoing the Mexican lucha libre heroes, who recommended keeping 1.5 m (6 feet) of physical distance to prevent contagion. In the following visual essay, we analyse Susana Distancia’s role, from its institutional origins to its later transformation as a popular culture meme. Based on the Latin American theory of the popular, we argue that the Susana Distancia, as a meme, used various mechanisms to support and challenge the institutional discourse. In this sense, Susana Distancia can be considered a meme that embraces the popular: a cultural artefact that travels across different languages, spaces, and rituals, from cyberspace to the streets, from governmental intentions to everyday performativity. When we use lo popular as a category, we refer to the possibility of enacting subaltern narratives in aesthetic and ethical terms. Multiple readings and manifestations of Susana Distancia demonstrate popular culture as a means of travelling through diverse semantic appropriations. Various forms of popular culture: the politised, the artistic, the erotic, the authentic, the mainstream, and the political, converge in the translation of meaning, from the institutional discourse to the lived experiences of the Mexican population.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Latin American scholars favour the concept of ‘popular’ or ‘lo popular’, which means ‘of the people’, to counteract functionalist and media-centric approaches (Stephansen and Treré 2019). It is not exactly equivalent to popular culture. “Popular” can refer simultaneously to mass culture, folk culture, indigenous cultures, political expressions, or any form of subversion or festive opposition to the institutions of power. (Rincón and Marroquín 2019).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Anna Lee Mraz Bartra

Anna Lee Mraz Barta is a writer, journalist, and sociologist. CEO of Peninsula 360 Press, a cross-cultural digital communication studio.

Eloy Caloca-Lafont

Eloy Caloca-Lafont is a postdoctoral researcher at PUEDJS, and lecturer at FCPyS, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM), Mexico.

Paola Ricaurte

Paola Ricaurte is associate professor at Tecnológico de Monterrey and faculty associate at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society, Harvard University.

Eduardo Paz

Eduardo Paz is Lecturer at Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana-Azcapotzalco (UAM-AZC).

Nelly Marina Elizalde

Nelly Marina Elizalde is a PhD Student in Humanities at Tecnológico de Monterrey, Mexico.

Mariel Zasso

Mariel Zasso is a PhD Student in Humanities at Tecnológico de Monterrey, Mexico.

Luis Angel Escobar Loera

Luis Angel Escobar Loera is researcher, programmer and data analyst at PUEDJS (UNAM).