Media Cultures in Latin America

Key Concepts and New Debates

Anna Cristina Pertierra, Juan Francisco Salazar, Anna Cristina Pertierra, Juan Francisco Salazar

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9781032177373
• eBook ISBN:
  9780429757051
• Topic: Sciences sociales
• Subtopic: Études du développement mondial

Media Cultures in Latin America updates and expands contemporary global understandings of the region's media and cultural research. Drawing on forty years of contributions made by Latin American cultural studies to the global media research, the book connects this history to newly developing work that has yet to be given deep consideration in anglophone scholarship.

The authors emphasise themes that are key to media and cultural scholarship: distinctive from other world regions, these intellectual debates have been central to how media and communication is studied and produced in Latin America. This approach provides students and scholars with a better framework for engaging with Latin American research beyond the specificities of just one place or one kind of cultural product or technology.

The book is an essential read for upper level undergraduate and postgraduate students of media studies, anthropology, cultural studies, communication studies, and Latin American studies. It will also be of interest to students and scholars learning about human rights, environmental, indigenous and political activism.

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Media Cultures in Latin America

An Introduction

Anna Cristina Pertierra, Juan Francisco Salazar and Sebastián Martín Valdez

Figure 1.1 Chicha is a traditional fermented drink popular across Latin America.

Source: Photo by Omar Rincón.

This edited collection takes as its starting point the premise that Latin America has produced a distinctive and distinguishable form of thinking about media cultures and practices and doing cultural studies. Reading and writing in English, Spanish, or Portuguese (and, more often than not, with varying levels of comfort across all languages), there is a world of scholars whose interests intersect around questions of culture, media, identity, community, and politics, building an intellectual tradition that draws on Western thought yet is fundamentally rooted in historical and epistemological perspectives from the Latin American region. In this chapter, our goal is to briefly outline how and why Latin American media and cultural studies came to be formed in such an identifiable way and present readers unfamiliar with the Latin American region with a preparatory understanding of this body of work as an interconnected ensemble of thinkers, approaches, and interdisciplinary debates. In tracing the intellectual history of Latin American scholarship as a formation in which the relationship between media and culture is central, we foreground some key issues and themes that run through this book’s chapters. Each of these chapters illustrates the dynamics of interplay between media and culture, on the one hand, and Latin America and the broader world, on the other. None of the topics studied in each individual chapter could be fully understood without their context of the intellectual formation of Latin American media and cultural studies. The purpose in this introductory chapter, then, is to make explicit some of the underlying connections that connect the contributions to this volume to one another and to chart some of the regional intellectual concerns that underpin the logic of their shared presence.

When we speak of Latin America as a region, we do not imagine this to be a simple construction with clear or closed boundaries. Scholars of Latin America have long acknowledged that there can be no simple definition of the region, which includes overlapping terminologies for multiple continents. The very term Latin America, by highlighting the Hispanic presence, fails to incorporate the region’s many languages and cultures, which range from English-, French-, and Dutch-speaking communities of the Caribbean to the descendants of slaves and indentured laborers, and the many Indigenous communities whose relationship to the region long predated the arrival of anything Latin or the concept of the Americas. The limits of Latin America are porous—not only through the continual movement of migrants, workers, and tourists across the region’s many borders but also through the movement across and beyond the region of cultural influences after centuries of cultural hybridity and transnational (even pre-national) cultural formation. These porous borders of Latin America have also been demarcated and negotiated through centuries of profound and ongoing violence. Over the years of this volume’s production no clearer example of this violence could be found than in the symbolic and physical violence produced around the US–Mexico border, where hundreds of thousands of undocumented migrants, among them refugees and children, have endured hostile crossings and are met by policies that proclaim border protection even while countries on both sides of the border remain entirely interdependent. The challenges of pinning down an easy limit to Latin America do not only extend northwards with the United States; centuries of migration, forced relocation, and global trade have forged paths between Latin America, Africa, Asia, and Europe, paths that continue to mark everyday experiences of Latin Americans today.

This complexity of marking where Latin America begins and ends is accompanied by the challenging question of who is and isn’t a distinctively Latin American scholar. Our assertion that there is such a thing as Latin American media and cultural studies looks clearer when applied to scholarship en masse, but becomes blurrier when applied to any specific individual. Key scholars whose work has founded the tradition have often been born or trained in places other than Latin America or have moved across different parts of Latin America, and key intellectual influences have often come from outside the region, particularly from Western Europe. Certainly, today, many academic centers of Latin American studies lie in elite academic institutions of the Global North, even while their most prominent academics continue to identify as Latin American, both personally and intellectually. The formation of a Latin American intellectual world has been dialogic, constructed in conversations both within and outside the physical spaces of Latin America. The diversity of contributors to and editors of this volume reflects this spectrum of inside-outside relationships. We see our collective role in this volume as one of cultural translation, highlighting and curating some of the key themes and new debates that shape ideas in and of the region. Some of us write as protagonists of Latin American studies from within Latin America, while others occupy outsider spaces, where our study of Latin American media cultures has been brought to bear on scholarly debates elsewhere. Many of us sit in hybrid or mixed positions in between these two poles.

Latin American Critical Communication and Media Research

The stories of the development of communication, media, and cultural studies in Latin America have been told many times (Rodríguez and Murphy 1997; Murphy and Rodríguez 2006; Lugo-Ocando 2008; Fox and Waisbord 2009; Waisbord 2014; Campo and Crowder-Taraborrelli 2018). In the 1960s and 1970s, some features of critical theory—among them Marxism, structuralism, and semiotics—began to shape a Latin American analytical agenda, where communication studies developed, as Silvio Waisbord argues, as an “extension of intellectual interest in other social questions such as capitalism, socialism, class relations, ideology, identity, and consciousness” (Waisbord 2014, 58). In the 1970s, Paraguayan communication scholar Juan Díaz Bordenave was among the first to speak for the need to see communication from the perspective of the grounded realities of Latin American countries.¹ More or less at the same time, Mario Kaplún’s study of 1970s radio and television in Argentina identified a remarkable degree of foreign media influence as evidence of cultural dependency.² Such ways of thinking about communication were deeply inspired by the pedagogical approaches of Brazilian philosopher and educator Paulo Freire, presenting a vision of an alternative model of communication that was not merely about “development.” Known at the time as “alternative communication,” this model moved away from emphasizing broadcasting information from senders (big government or corporate interests) to receivers (the public, the community) and towards an emphasis on terms of dialogue and construction of meaning. The expediency of communication in this view was in the power that subjects have (or do not have) to use their own language to name and transform the world on its own terms. Besides Díaz Bordenave and Kaplún, other important figures that contributed to this perspective were the Peruvian Rosa María Alfaro,³ the Belgian/Chilean Armand Mattelart, the Bolivian Luis Ramiro Beltrán, the Argentines Marita Mata and Eliseo Verón, and two notable figures whose work we look at in some detail in the next section of this chapter: Néstor García Canclini and Jesús Martín-Barbero. All of them developed pioneering approaches to think about the future of the region from culture and communication, but, above all, from itself, that is, from the very experience of Latin American communities.

Alongside these developments in the field of communication research what came to be known in certain circles as the Latin American School of Communication (ELACOM) (Marqués de Melo 2007) was established as a rejection of both the US-inflected mass communication research tradition and European critical theory. A range of authors began to think of a communicative science that could be explicitly normative, political, and committed to social change—what Bolivian scholar Luis Ramiro Beltrán called a communicology of liberation (“comunicología de la liberación”) (1979; see also Beltrán and Barranquero-Carretero 2014; Barranquero and Sáez Baeza 2015). ELACOM’s appearance preceded several of the developments that shape the rest of this introduction and influence this volume, including the Latin American cultural studies developments of the 1980s, the Latin American communication for social change movement of the 1990s, and a plethora of work in alternative and community media since the 2000s.

The “emancipatory and antagonist” academic culture of ELACOM was a feature of a regional push to develop new thinking around communication and media, with a strong emphasis on praxis as the central axis for theoretical construction (Herrera Huérfano, Caballero, and Del Valle Rojas 2016; see also Barranquero and Sáez Baeza 2015). Latin American communication scholars associated with ELACOM were critical of diffusionist and functionalist approaches (then dominant in US academia), arguing that when applied to Latin America, such approaches failed to acknowledge the Latin American region’s deep historical and social complexities. These theories were primarily concerned with modernization and development following models that were rarely participatory in scope; subjects of studies, everyday Latin Americans in their use of different media, were rarely given a direct voice in these media studies or in the creation of media agendas. The advent of dependency theories in the late 1970s and audience research in the 1980s added more political and cultural dimensions to the analysis but did little to consider critically the question of people’s participation. Robert Huesca (2003) has described in detail how the dominant paradigm of development was challenged by Latin American scholars in the early 1970s who “deconstructed and rejected the premises, objectives, and methods of modernization and its attendant communication approaches” (209). Huesca argues that the concept of participatory communication for development is “the most resilient and useful notion that has emerged from the challenges to the dominant paradigm of modernization” (226). This early criticism from Latin American scholars was not unique; parallel critiques emerged from African and Asian scholars around the same time. However, as Huesca also acknowledges, “the Latin American challenge for scholars to embrace more appropriate, ethical, and responsive theories of development communication remains unrealized to some extent, creating a sense of conceptual and practical stagnation” (226).

By the 1990s, for many new scholars and intellectuals in the region, the mass media were discredited as a means of overcoming underdevelopment and, rather, recognized as being a major cause of dependency (Rodríguez and Murphy 1997). As has been extensively noted already (Rodríguez and Murphy 1997; see also Huesca and Dervin 1994), this theoretical quest led to a substantial body of work and critical inquiry into cultural imperialism, alternative communication, popular culture, and hybrid cultures. As Rodríguez and Murphy put it:

Two common threads characterize the theoretical development of these foci: first, ideological power (involvement, control, participation, resistance, and negotiation) as a problematic of pivotal importance; and second, the active relationship between theory and praxis which will emerge as the most noteworthy aspect differentiating Latin American communication research from US and European traditions.

(1997, 25)

It is along these lines that Latin American communication converges with cultural studies, creating what Jesús Martín-Barbero (2006) identified as an “ability to analyze communication and cultural industries as a matrix for both the disruption and reorganization of the social experience” (279). We look at this emergence of Latin American cultural studies in the following section.

The Growth of Cultural Studies in Latin America

Although cultural critique has a long and prolific tradition in Latin America—one that traces back at least to the works of José Carlos Mariátegui and Fernando Ortiz at the beginning of the twentieth century⁴—the consolidation of cultural studies in the region took place in the 1990s at a period in which, as Fox and Waisbord (2009) argue, “two parallel forces, local politics and the globalization of media markets” (ix), were shaping the development of Latin American media. This was partly due to a degree of academic and intellectual resistance towards what has sometimes been seen as a new form of cultural/epistemological diffusion from the Global North. Even some of the most prominent figures in the field expressed misgivings about the “cultural studies” label. In a series of well-known interviews conducted by the Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies, for example, Beatriz Sarlo commented that “in Argentina we do not call it ‘cultural studies’… [that] is a term that has been put into mass circulation by the US academy” (1997, 90); similarly, the Peruvian writer and literary critic Julio Ortega suggested that cultural studies were seen by many in Latin America as “another dominating Anglo-Saxon current” (1995, 224). Debates around the reception of cultural studies in Latin America and its political/epistemological implications produced a voluminous body of literature (see for example Moreiras 2001; Mato 2002; Richard 2005). Despite such initial ambivalence, by the end of the twentieth century, Latin American cultural studies was consolidated as a distinctive intellectual project, which is well reflected in the proliferation of academic publications, including specialized journals (in particular, the Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies: Travesía, founded in 1992), and in the publication of several edited volumes and compilations (see for example Moraña 2000; Hart and Young 2003; Del Sarto, Ríos, and Trigo 2005), as well as in the creation of postgraduate university programs across the region.

While the consolidation of Latin American cultural studies happened in the 1990s (Murphy 1997; Rodríguez and Murphy 1997), the field’s core themes and concepts had begun to take shape as early as the late 1970s and 1980s, against a backdrop of rapidly changing sociohistorical circumstances. These included the global expansion of mass consumer cultures, marke...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Contributors
• Lists of Figures
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Media Cultures in Latin America: An Introduction
• 2 Thinking Communications From the Perspective of Mediations: Genealogies and Contributions From a Latin American Tradition
• 3 New Tijuanologies: From Hybridity to Garbology in Border Aesthetics
• 4 Music and Popular Culture: Subjects, Spaces, and Temporalities in Twenty-First-Century South America
• 5 Citizens’ Media in Latin America
• 6 Memoria and Human Rights: 500 Years of Resistance and Memory Activism
• 7 Contemporary Social Movements and Digital Media Resistance in Latin America
• 8 Indigenous Media Cultures in Abya Yala
• 9 A Heretical Accumulation of International Capital: The Zapatista Activists’ Media Networks
• 10 Social Movements and Media Cultures in Defense of Life and Territory
• 11 Afterword
• Index