The new team at the Jalisco Culture Department is undertaking a period of analysis before making key decisions about policy, including the future of the Jalisco Philharmonic Orchestra and Jalisco Ballet, Giovana Jasperson Garcia, the state’s new secretary of culture, told Mural newspaper this week.
Jasperson said no decisions will be taken until a “full diagnosis” of the agency’s reach has been carried out. Jalisco has much cultural infrastructure that is not being fully taken advantage of, she said, and for this reason a “decentralization” plan needs to be elaborated. She added that the state does not need to add any new infrastructure, but improve what already exists.
Jasperson said her department would reexamine the agency’s “agenda” and most likely augment the support given to disciplines mostly ignored by previous administrations, such as promoting the language and literature of the state’s indigenous peoples and “popular culture.”
Young for such a post at 34, Jasperson has worked previously as the director of the Museo Palacio Canton in Merida and at the Centro Peninsular de Humanidades y Ciencias Sociales de UNAM. She is a graduate of the University of Guadalajara, where she studied gestion cultural (cultural affairs), and the Western Mexico Conservation and Restoration School.