Technologies, transnational migration, mass tourism, trade and mediatized communication have generated intense social flows that we call global. From them derives the circulation of cultural goods that, in addition to deterritorializing and reterritorializing traditions, generate exchanges that engender novel hybridizations. Some of them are the result of mixtures of elements from societies that were previously distant and alien. There are different hybrid cultural products represented in "in-between-medium", ambivalent identity aesthetics. Homi Bhabha recognizes as hybrid that (object or subject) which arises from the exchange between two traditions and which generates something different (which is no longer one or the other). Hybrid products are, then, those that arise from the fusion of two or more aesthetic traditions and that make explicit the presence of both referents as allusive components.

Through socio-digital networks, Encartes invited academics, students, visual artists, filmmakers, collectives and photographers to participate in a photographic contest with images that capture objects, subjects, places, landscapes, rituals recreated by the aesthetics of hybridization. We were interested in receiving images showing features that generate hard, unusual, antagonistic, paradoxical or ambivalent mixtures. Hybrid products show the creativity to create alternative identities such as, for example, body marks of youth cultures, recreations of products generated by diasporic strategies of relocalization, emblems of ambivalent national, religious or ethnic identities; cult objects that transgress religious or spiritual traditions; fusion in food, costumes, regional dance choreographies, architecture, crafts, redesign of transgender bodies, and so on.

We received dozens of photographs and an evaluation committee selected the ones that complied and adhered, both in quality and affinity, with the theme of the call on hybrid identities.

By reading the winning photographs as if they were parts of a text, we can recognize that hybridity is transversal. It is present both in traditional contexts, such as religious festivals, in which the selfie accompanies the representation of a Roman centurion during a Staging of the Stations of the Crossas in ancient archaeological sites that today are the site of ceremonies of invented ancestralities (as is the case of Stonehenge), or in different places and urban territories. Hybridity articulates spaces, memories, traditions, representations and actors.

The dances of conquest are currently stagings of memory in which the history of evangelization is kept alive, but they also function as anchors of new representations. This conjugation generates realities, fictionalities and fictions turned reality. A chinelo embodies the traditional Old Man of the dance acting as a being of terror in the Halloween style, without having to give up being guadalupano. The masks are a characteristic element of the baroque tradition, but in the present they not only simulate cultural resistance under the appearance of the assimilation of European faces, but they also place, in the same mask, the symbolization of opposing faces that fight in the Guerrero dance: the chinelo (representation of the white and bearded European conquistador) with the tecuani (the daredevil jaguar). In contrast, tattooing has conquered a new support for the baroque iconic act: the body. In the photograph entitled "When you're not around, I paint!" the body of a woman, presumably Mexican, can be seen, with an enchanted garden tattooed on her body and, between the space of her blouse and skirt, the face of a Thai-style deity can be seen.

Hybridity is first and foremost a glocal phenomenon, energized by global technologies, markets and migratory dynamics, but embodied in bodies rooted in local traditions. Technology through cell phone cameras appears to co-create the images of cultural hybridity by assembling different temporalities that take place in the same performance. The cameras also deterritorialize and resituate practices. In the image taken during the feast of Epiphany in the city of La Paz, Bolivia, shows that the same scene is captured and projected simultaneously by different cameras, whose projection in socio-digital networks deterritorializes the ritual act. Cell phones are also gadgets of catrinas and the deceased that superimpose planes of existence that parody between fantasy and the cultural heritage the Day of the Dead.

Another hybridizing vector present in the photographs is that of migration. In an image recreates St. Nicholas of Bari practicing the yoga posture bhujangasana, printed on the wall of a street in Bari. This photo captures the syncretism between the devotional aesthetics of the Catholic saints and the asanas of Buddhist yoga practice. Immigration is also a generator of surprising hybridizations such as the following the Ganesha-Guadalupewhich inscribes the mother of Mexicans as a deity in a Hindu temple in the border city of Tijuana.

Diaspora is also taken into account in the cultural goods that circulate in the electronic mass media. These are the new producers of imaginaries that are embodied or placed in other landscapes, generating exchanges between fiction and reality. Here we show a traditional cylinder maker in the streets of Mexico City masquerading as an abominable Grinch who hates Christmas, but at the same time disguises himself as Santa Claus, the patron saint of commodified Christmas. On a wall in BoliviaThe graffiti places the fantastic Spiderman -a famous American comic book hero- cleaning the shoes of Chapulín Colorado -a Mexican humor antihero produced by one of Mexico's most famous television networks, Televisa, through Canal de las Estrellas. The creativity in this graffiti generates an image that can be read under the keys of the Latin American imaginary and the discourse of decolonization. For this reason, this photo was chosen for the cover of the magazine. The cultural industries also promote shows and massive sporting events. The soccer World Cup is experienced as national recognition and encourages people to take the public square and to wearing the colors of the uniform with a sculpture of the DavidThe building is a prototype of classical art and Greek beauty, in a place as remote as the city of Montevideo.

Hybridization also generates moral transgressions that operate in the blurring between the private and the public, the religious and the profane. This hybrid landscape is achieved through the photographic exercise of placing sexual diversity in the light of day, of setting up an altar in a popular lingerie store in a traditional city such as San Luis Potosi, where the visual creator of the image saysIt's not fiction, it's not reality. It is a combination: we create realities, accepting what surrounds us".

In sum, the photographs show us that hybridity goes hand in hand with decontextualization and its new creative assemblages capable of transforming meanings. The best example of this can be appreciated in the photo of the burqas put into operation by a collective of feminist women to cover their faces in a March 8th demonstration; in this new political assembly, the burkas, far from signifying female submission, manifest a dissident political expression.

Renée de la Torre Castellanos and Arturo Gutiérrez del Ángel

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