Consumer Culture in Latin America

European Review of Latin American and Caribbean Studies, 2019

of the post WWII period, a moment of expansion and consolidation of consumption in the region. Delgado Moya's objective is to examine the conditions of art and literary production in consumer societies. He focuses in four concepts -distraction, fascination, replication, and homemaking-which for him can allow us to reinterpret the functions of art and language in consumer culture. Centering each chapter in one of those concepts and using it as a tool to examine the work of one of his subjects, he argues that the selected artists and writers used signs and materials produced by a consumer society to resist it. Their artistic productions make the consumer a productive force. The underlying theoretical framework is a rethinking of how a riposte takes the form of replication; that is, how replication can be more than passive mimicking.

Doctoral Thesis Columbia University Department of Spanish and Portuguese 2009 This dissertation explores how contemporary Latin American cultural producers have transformed resistance and marginality into valuable commodities within their own unique spheres of influence. Mexican film directors Alfonso Cuarón, Alejandro González Iñárritu, and Guillermo del Toro, for instance, have exploited a conjoined marginal identity within Hollywood as a springboard to international success, utilizing their collective difference as a key character trait in their creation of a hugely successful real-life cinematic narrative for themselves. Meanwhile, in the case of Argentine novelist César Aira, an ambivalence toward (and at times a venomous critique of) monumental modern authors and the literary works that sustain their personal grandeur constitutes an iconoclastic stance that has ironically helped him win publishing contracts worldwide. In present-day Venezuela, Hugo Chávez's multi-media effort to steer national discourse permeates every possible level of communication, feeding from the symbolic defiance of existing forms of popular media like graffiti writing and radical community television while co-opting them into an ever-expanding official apparatus. Finally, in contemporary Cuba, a region frequently considered "off the map" in terms of the effects of globalization, change is nevertheless happening through the efforts of clandestine bloggers and YouTube fanatics, connecting the necessarily marginalized interventions of illegal participants in banned technologies with an international audience eager to hear their tales of isolation and resistance. Each of these authors of contemporary Latin American culture has utilized a resistant stance and a marginal position as a platform for greater self-promotion and as a vehicle for reaching a more diversified audience of readers, investors, spectators, or citizens. Thus it is not strictly the traits of resistance and marginality that steer contemporary cultural production in Latin America, but rather the conversion of these traits into marketable commodities.

http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13688790.2014.966417 Latin American popular music continues to reinvent itself, evolve, cross-ferment, seduce and spread throughout the region. Music exhibits an amazing plasticity, its range of meanings may not be infinite but it is highly diverse and dynamic. Popular genres capture the imagination and energize the bodies of people from all walks of life. Yet this plasticity is constrained by aesthetic regimes that attempt to co-opt and fix its meanings. The media, marketing and advertising industries contribute to categorizing music and associating it with very precise groups of people (target populations defined according to demographic, psychographic and behavioral criteria), using but also reinforcing existing hegemonic social understandings of music texts. This paper analyzes how particular popular music genres like Vallenato and Reggaeton are used in Colombian commercial radio stations targeted to specific social groups using criteria that reflect not only strategies of distinction but the coloniality of power.

Comunicação e Sociedade, 2021

Mediatic gambiarras are alternative and improvised forms of media consumption. They emerge in adverse or restrictive contexts. Signal the need for connection on the part of those who use them. In the island of Cuba, paquetes, sets of files containing pop culture content, music, series, US blockbusters, among others, not shown in Cuban media systems, are the most established cultural form of mediatic gambiarra on the socialist island. The article presents the result of a research project carried out between the years 2015 and 2017, based on an ethnographic-inspired methodology, with field interviews and participant observation in the city of Havana, with the purpose of debating different uses of the paquetes by consumers and fans of pop culture in the Cuban context. Contradictions about the practices of paqueteros-subjects who sell paquetes in online and offline network creations-are mapped from the emergence of traces of capitalism in Cuba that pass through the always conflicting relationship between residents in Havana and migrants in Miami in symbolic disputes on the island. The questions raised in the field signal for different matrixes around transnationalism in Latin America, geopolitical issues and point to understandings about the singularities and challenges of contemporary Cuba.

Bulletin of Latin American Research, 2014

This book covers a broad period and a fascinating array of topics in Latin America's cultural history. It is therefore a welcome addition to the burgeoning historiography on popular culture, now prevalent among scholars of the western hemisphere. Popular Culture in Latin America serves as a good introduction for anyone wishing to learn more about the region's history, beyond traditional economic and political analyses.

This article is a result of the research project "Secondary public spaces and the emergence of an absent country: mediatic experiences and symbolic expressions from the social movements in Chile (1810-2010)" (project: UI-01/13) financed by the Vice Rector's Office of Research and Development (VID, in Spanish) of the Universidad de Chile, 2014-2015. Abstract Re-elaborating the categories of representation of the popular in Sunkel (1985), the concept of absent popular culture is proposed, whose foundation arises from the articulation of 3 theoretical matrices: Latin American communicology of social change, cultural studies and decolonial thinking. The hypothesis is that the illustrated rational matrix was introduced into urban Latin American popular culture during the nineteenth century and its gradual institutionalization as a worker culture generated a process of internal divergence of the popular in the process of modernization, where popular culture-that were not massive or worker-was politically invisible. The well-founded identification of 12 expressions of absent popular culture in Chile from the beginning of the nineteenth century onwards allows us to conclude that there is a third way of existence of urban popular culture in the Latin American context, with an internal consistency despite historical transformations, whose discourses and representations should be analyzed thoroughly. Resumen Re-elaborando las categorías de representación de lo popular en Sunkel (1985), se propone el concep-to cultura popular ausente, cuya fundamentación surge de la articulación de 3 matrices teóricas: comunicología latinoamericana del cambio social, estudios culturales y pensamiento decolonial. La hipótesis es que la matriz racional ilustrada fue in-troducida en la cultura popular urbana latinoame-ricana durante el siglo XIX: su paulatina institucio-nalización como cultura obrera generó un proceso de divergencia interna de lo popular en el proceso de modernización, donde la cultura popular que no es masiva ni obrera quedó políticamente invi-sibilizada. La identificación fundamentada de 12 expresiones de la cultura popular ausente en Chile desde principios del siglo XIX en adelante permite concluir que hay una tercera vía de existencia de la cultura popular urbana en el contexto latinoa-mericano, con una consistencia interna a pesar de las transformaciones históricas, cuyos discursos y representaciones deben ser analizadas en profun-didad. Palabras Clave: Historia de Chile; Cultura Popular ; Modernidad; Comunicación popular 65 The concept of absent popular culture and its application to the Chilean case from a historical perspective

Westminster Papers in Communication …, 2011

Usingthetheoryofmigratorynetworksandthelegacyofthecriticaltheoryofthe developmentalist models, this article puts forward a critical approach of the deficiencies of certain cultural consumption analyses in Latin America. It aims to develop an understanding of the production of high culture and distribution and reception processes in the transversal logic behind the constitution of migrating multitudesandtheirappropriationofthemediacontentofglobalsociety.Thiswork analysestheLatinAmericanmassmediaandmigrationswiththeaimofconsidering currentinterculturalandtransculturalcommunicationfromthecriticalperspective of cultural consumption and reception in the Latin American field of communicology.

Journal of Cultural Economics, 2002

One of the best-known visual manifestations of nineteenth-century Latin America is costumbrismo, a genre that describes social types and popular subjects. Scholarship has usually understood this genre as an illustration of early Republican times produced by the gaze of European artists, proposing a hierarchical structure in relation to the production and consumption patterns of these images. Following the path opened in the last decade by new studies, this paper contributes to the ongoing debates on costumbrismo, by examining the role played by a South American network of historians and collectors modeling identity narratives throughout the twentieth-century.