Communication Theory ISSN 1050-3293

ORIGINAL ARTICLE

Here and There: (Re)Situating Latin America

in International Communication Theory
Aquí y allá: (re)situando a América Latina en la teoría de la
comunicación internacional

Aqui e lá: (re)situando a América Latina na teoria da

comunicação internacional

Florencia Enghel1 & Martín Becerra2

1 School of Education and Communication, Jönköping University, Jönköping, Sweden
2 Department of Social Sciences, Universidad Nacional de Quilmes, and CONICET, Argentina

Since their origins in the late 1950s, Latin American communication studies have become
increasingly institutionalized and thematically diverse. This evolution, however, has circu-
lated to a limited extent beyond borders, as noted by North American scholars in the
1990s. Attentive to this problem, this article reviews how Latin America has featured in
Communication Theory’s archive since 1992 and introduces a Special Issue that incorpo-
rates recent contributions from the region into the journal’s corpus. The analysis shows the
extremely limited presence of Latin America in Communication Theory both in terms of
substantial contributions to theory-building arising from the region, and of Latin American
authorship. We argue that this state of affairs evidences the need for explicit editorial poli-
cies aimed at addressing the gap, and for increased cross-border interaction among scholars.
The Special Issue hereby introduced contributes to resituating Latin America in interna-
tional communication theory by foregrounding situated approaches generated in the region.
Desde sus orígenes a fines de la década de 1950, los estudios latinoamericanos de
la comunicación se han expandido en términos de su institucionalización y diversidad
temática. Esta evolución, sin embargo, ha tenido una circulación limitada más allá de
la región. A fines de la década de 1990, la escasa atención prestada a la investigación
latinoamericana en Estados Unidos llamó la atención de los académicos norteamericanos.
Con esa preocupación como punto de partida, este artículo evalúa la presencia de América
Latina en Communication Theory e introduce una Edición Especial que incorpora
producción reciente de la región al corpus de la revista. Nuestro análisis demuestra la esca-
sez de contribuciones teóricas sustantivas provenientes de América Latina, y la necesidad
tanto de políticas editoriales explícitas destinadas a contrarrestar dicha ausencia, como
de mayor interacción académica transfronteriza entre investigadoras/es. Los contenidos
de la Edición Especial presentados en el artículo contribuyen a resituar a América
Latina en la teorización de la comunicación a nivel internacional, destacando enfoques
situados generados en la región.

Corresponding author: Florencia Enghel; e-mail: florencia.enghel@ju.se

Communication Theory 28 (2018) 111–130 © The Author(s) 2018. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of 111
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 (Re)Situating Latin America in International Communication Theory F. Enghel & M. Becerra

Desde suas origens no final da década de 1950, os estudos em comunicação na

América Latina têm se expandido em termos de institucionalização e diversidade
temática. Essa evolução, entretanto, teve uma circulação limitada para além das fronteiras
do continente. No final da década de 1990, a incipiente atenção dedicada à pesquisa
latino-americana em comunicação chamou a atenção de acadêmicos norte-americanos.
Tendo essa preocupação como ponto de partida, esse artigo avalia a presença da
América Latina no arquivo de Communication Theory e introduz uma Edição
Especial que incorpora contribuições recentes da região ao corpus da revista. Nossa
análise demonstra tanto a escassez de contribuições teóricas substanciais vindas da
América Latina quanto a ausência de autores latino-americanos na revista. Tal
cenário evidencia a necessidade não apenas de políticas editoriais explícitas que
preencham essa lacuna, como também de intensificação nas interações entre autores
internacionalmente. Os conteúdos da Edição Especial que introduzimos nesse artigo
contribuem para redefinir o papel da América Latina na teoria da comunicação inter-
nacional apresentado abordagens situadas com origem na região.

Keywords: Latin America, Communication Theory, Circulation, Translation, Eliseo Verón,

Rossana Reguillo.

doi:10.1093/ct/qty005

Introduction
What are we talking about when we refer to Latin American communication stud-
ies in Western academic circles? Do we mean knowledge produced in Latin
America, by Latin Americans, for Latin America? Is it those by-now-canonical
studies written by Latin American scholars that were translated to English between
the early 1970s and mid-1990s and have been widely circulated in the United
States and Europe? Do we mean theory-built based on the investigation of Latin
American specificities, regardless of where or how the knowledge was produced or
put into use? Is there a distinct Latin American epistemology pertaining to the
study of communication? If yes, in which ways is it specific, how has it changed
over time, and how does it speak to the contemporary challenges raised by the
globalization of neoliberal capitalism and its discontents?
These questions were in the background in an article entitled “Mass
Communication Research in Latin America: Views from Here and There” authored
by Steven Chaffee, Carlos Gomez-Palacio, and Everett Rogers in 1990 that examined
how “up to date” North American researchers were “in their conception of Latin
American mass communication study” by comparing three sets of data (1990,
p. 1016)1: the views of North American researchers who had published work on
Latin American communication topics in seven North American mass communica-
tion journals, the views of Latin American researchers, and the most cited authors
in a body of articles published in 10 Latin American communication journals.

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According to Chaffee, Gomez-Palacio, and Rogers, despite evidence of an inter-

est in Latin America’s “academic progress in journalism and mass communication
for at least six decades” among North American scholars, the relationship between
North and South was at the time “constrained by barriers of language and dis-
tance,” and characterized by “little direct contact between the two academic com-
munities” (Chaffee et al., 1990, p. 1015).
The article considered North American researchers as representative of the
view from “here,” i.e., the location where the study was originated and published,
and referred to them as “scholars” (Chaffee et al., 1990, p. 1020), who were sur-
veyed via mail questionnaires to establish who they considered to be the leading
scholars in Latin America. Instead, researchers from Brazil, Colombia, Mexico and
Peru, understood as representative from the view from “here” and referred to as
“practitioners” (Chaffee et al., 1990, p. 1020), were interviewed in person to deter-
mine who they considered to be the leading scholars among themselves.
Chaffee et al. noticed that “somewhat different pictures of communication
research in Latin America” emerged when the responses from “here” and “there”
were contrasted (1990, p. 1015). These pictures ran parallel, largely without affect-
ing each other. Rather than enquire into this difference as an expression of the lack
of contact between scholars in the North and the South, the authors sought to
establish why communication research in the South had departed from “its coun-
terpart field in North America” (Chaffee et al., 1990, p. 1023), taking their “here”
as the reference point for assessment.
Their conclusion was that Latin America’s differential history made for a dis-
tinct setting for mass communication, thus leading to idiosyncratic scholarship.
It was a somewhat patronizing view, since they qualified the setting as “not
advanced.”
Our study indicates that Latin American scholars are responding to the
demands of this context of underdevelopment2 with an evolving mode of
research that is unique to this region. This distinct brand of
communication scholarship differs in important ways from both the North
American and the European roots from which it originally sprung. (1990,
p. 1024)
The Latin American field was considered an offspring of its Western predeces-
sors, and a rebel offspring at that.
According to the study, critical theory predominated in the study of communi-
cation in Latin America “by any accounting” (Chaffee et al., 1990, p. 1019). This,
however, went unnoticed for the North American researchers surveyed: “the U.S.
respondents seem as yet unaware that Latin American critical scholars have come
to influence one another strongly through their own journals, rather than continue
their earlier reliance on European and North American sources.” Chaffee et al.
(1990, pp. 1022–1023) moreover, remarked that the U.S. respondents tended “to
see empirical scholars as more important than they are, and to overlook the

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influence of semioticians and critical scholars.” Misrecognition was an element of

the view from “here.”
Calling attention to the fact that “the diffusion of knowledge from the Latin
American scholarly community to North America” was slower than actual develop-
ments on the ground (Chaffee et al., 1990, p. 1020), the article noted the uneven
trajectories in the North of contributions arising from the South. The survey
responses of North American scholars revealed two influential factors in the course
of those trajectories: those academics who crossed the borders from South to
North to pursue a PhD and/or got their work translated to English did better.
Implicit in this analysis was the need for the “there” to approach the “here” for
acknowledgement to take place: “The only Latin American scholars ranked highly
by the U.S. scholars are Beltran and Juan Diaz Bordenave—both educated in the
U.S. and published in U.S. journals—and Freire, whose work is widely available in
English” (Chaffee et al., 1990, p. 1020).3 Both an elite—of scholars from the South
educated in the North—and a canon—of published works from the South trans-
lated to English—were thus identified.
Chaffee et al.’s analysis points to a disjointed pan-American field, in which a set
of positions was distributed hierarchically according to two dimensions:

1. the South’s proximity (or distance) to the North, both in terms of the educa-
tional trajectories of individual Latin American scholars in the United States
and of the translation to English of published work; and
2. a generic distinction between scholars in the North and practitioners in the
South, such that theory would be developed by the former first, and then
applied by the latter.4

From this perspective, the article can be read as an act of position-taking within
said pan-American field that was ultimately aimed at theorizing a distance between
North and South, without seeking to shorten it. In the process, the authors thought
and talked about the production of communication scholarship in both regions in par-
ticular ways (Bourdieu, 1990; Chevallier, Chauviré, & Consigli, 2011; Craig, 2006).
A few years later, building on the work of Chaffee, Gomez-Palacio, and Rogers,
but explicitly concerned with making an intervention towards shortening the dis-
tance between academic communities North and South of the Americas, Rich
(1993) published a conference paper entitled “Culture and Communication in
Latin America.” Based on an analysis of scholarship published in Journalism
Quarterly from 1931 to 1991, the paper showed that the number of articles on
Latin America featured in the journal had peaked in the 1960s and then decreased
from the 1970s, and that the range of topics and approaches covered by those arti-
cles was small, and excluded critiques of mainstream North American viewpoints.
Like Chaffee et al., Rich (1993) also pointed at the paucity of contact between
scholars from North and Latin America. He highlighted the insufficient amount of
cross-citation where similar topics were being studied,5 and acknowledged efforts

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by North American scholars to increase the flow of ideas and research from the
South to the North.6 Concerned with the diminishing interest in Latin America
identified in the publishing venue under investigation, the paper called attention to
the ways in which a widely-read, dominant journal may marginalize studies that
depart from “First World” assumptions and approaches, arguing for “a widened
view of research by […] editorial policy and by the communications academy in
general” (Rich, 1993, pp. 12–13, p. 18).
With the articles by Chaffee et al. (1990) and Rich (1993) in mind, and inspired
by Communication Theory’s intention to encourage “authors and editors to high-
light the historical, cultural, and political contexts in which theoretical approaches
are articulated,” which was made explicit in 2016 following a change of editor
(Wilkins, 2016), we decided to query the archive of this influential International
Communication Association (ICA) journal (Günther & Domahidi, 2017). The
question that guided our query was: How has Latin American communication the-
ory featured in the journal since the early 1990s, when the disconnect between
scholars and scholarship from the North and the South was flagged? What we
found was problematic: the increasing institutionalization and evolution of com-
munication and media studies that has taken place in Latin America since the late
1980s is in fact underrepresented in Communication Theory.
Based on this finding, and adopting (and adapting) Chaffee et al.’s (1990) state-
ment that Latin American scholars respond to their context with a distinctive
mode of research7 (see also Waisbord, 2016, p. 876) as our working hypothesis, we
proposed this Special Issue to the journal. Our goals were to invite recent Latin
American contributions to the theorization of communication, and to critically
consider their potential significance for global debates. Mindful of the lag between
production in the region and its international circulation, we intentionally focused
on the “recent,” not out of disrespect for history, but to foreground the present as
a neglected dimension.

A very short history of communication and media studies in Latin America

It is not the purpose of this article (nor of the Special Issue at large) to map and
historize the overall production of Latin American communication theory for
English-speaking scholars who cannot access the rich literature available in Spanish
and Portuguese. Some efforts to that purpose exist (see e.g., Atwood & McAnany,
1986; Rodriguez & Murphy, 1997; and sections of Dagron & Tufte, 2006;
McAnany, 2012; Waisbord, 2016), and producing an in-depth, updated record
would require collaborative work of a much more significant scale than allowed by
our specific contribution. That said, a very short history must be presented to the
reader in order to better contextualize this Special Issue beyond our above-stated
goal.
The origins of the academic field in the region are linked to the work of scho-
lars such as Antonio Pasquali8 and Luis Ramiro Beltrán,9 and of organizations

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such as the Centro Internacional de Estudios Superiores de Comunicación para

América Latina (CIESPAL),10 created in 1959 following a recommendation issued
at UNESCO’s X General Conference the previous year (for a brief account see
McAnany, 2012, pp. 73–74; see also Chaffee et al., 1990, p. 1018; Rich, 1993, p. 9).
It was indeed a hybrid origin, where would-be scholars who immigrated from
Europe to Latin America, and researchers who traveled frequently from the United
States to Latin America to interact with the locals, played significant roles, counter-
acting distance through mobility and cross-connection. Unlike Chaffee et al.
(1990), who described this origin as a process of legacy handed down by the North
to the South, we see it as a situation of mutual contact and interaction that was
productive, even when contested (Grimson, 2014; Waisbord, 2016). During this
initial period, characterized by attention to communication as sociopolitical, rela-
tionships and exchanges between South and North were fertile. Notably, the
Belgian scholar Armand Mattelart,11 who lived and worked in Chile from 1962
until the 1973 coup d’état, acted both as a “cultural translator” and as a “consul”
who uncovered agendas of intellectual production (Zarowsky, 2013). One of the
period’s milestones was the publication of the magazine12 Comunicación y Cultura
[Communication and Culture], which Mattelart co-directed with the Argentinian
Héctor Schmucler13 between 1973 and 1985, publishing first from Chile and then
in exile (Lenarduzzi, 2014).
Towards the mid-1980s, the simultaneous creation of graduate studies in com-
munication and journalism throughout the region marked the transition to a new
period. The Asociación Latinoamericana de Investigadores de la Comunicación
(ALAIC),14 created in 1978, and the Federación Latinoamericana de Facultades de
Comunicación Social (FELAFACS),15 created in 1981, became more established at
this time.16 Since then, the consolidation of communication studies in the region
has led to an increasing thematic diversity.
Two distinct characteristics of the Latin-American academic production are
worth highlighting here:

1. its theoretical and methodological syncretism, derived of its peripheral condition

in the planetary map; and
2. its emphasis on praxis, often times at the expense of furthering its original con-
ceptualizations in systematic and coherent ways.

These characteristics, which are visible outside the region as informally registered
in international conferences and associations, must be taken into account if Latin
America’s contribution to an international field is to be strengthened through
renewed regional and international cooperation strategies. At present, the region’s
production is uneven, and engages with knowledge generated in other parts of the
world in ways that are far from uniform (Waisbord, 2014). In our view, it is a para-
doxical effect of the consolidation of communication studies in the region that col-
laborative efforts aimed at producing distinct Latin American theory, and bringing it

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into dialogue with the work of other academic communities, have waned. In this
sense, globalization as “an invitation to join common spaces for the exchange of
ideas beyond geographic boundaries” (Waisbord, 2016, p. 869) remains unheeded.
The stark contrast between the progressive institutionalization of the field
across the region in recent decades and its scant influence beyond the Ibero-
American and Hispanic academic spaces17 is most striking. In our view, this state
of affairs raises questions about the international circulation of communication
theory produced in Latin America that go beyond well-known structural factors
such as the unequal access to resources (to attend conferences, acquire literature,
outsource translation and editing services, etc.) or the expansion of English as “uni-
versal” lingua franca (Beigel, 2014; Ortiz, 2009). What are the sociopolitical condi-
tions of possibility of South–North dialogue and collaboration towards knowledge
production? And what scholarly practices could contribute to identifying well-
founded, cross-regional collective solutions to the problem beyond militant posi-
tions regarding who’s to blame for it? (see, in this respect, the thoughtful reflections
of Waisbord, 2016; Ferron and Guevara, 2017). In the face of these questions, we
conceived this Special Issue as an intervention into the space of possibility that lies
in-between arguments about the failure of Latin American communication scholar-
ship to engage with the global field, or vice versa, about the failure of the United
States and Europe to acknowledge the value of Latin America’s distinct contribu-
tion (Barranquero, 2011; Waisbord, 2014, 2016).

Looking for Latin America in Communication Theory

In March 2016 we conducted two different searches in Communication Theory’s

online archive,18 covering the publication period from 1992 to February 2016. The
first search was done using the region and its countries as keywords: Latin
America, Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Guyana, Paraguay,
Peru, Suriname, Uruguay, Venezuela, and Mexico.19 We checked all the articles ini-
tially retrieved manually to identify those making substantial references to Latin
America in the titles and/or abstracts. This led us to a total of eight articles published
during the period under investigation: Block (2013); Ceisel (2011); Davis (2015);
Lozano (1992); Rodriguez (2001); Scholz (2016); Sypher, McKinley, Ventsam, and
Valdeavellano (2002); and Vásquez and Cooren (2013). We inventory these articles
below, in chronological order, to consider how Latin America features in them, what
literature is used, and what theoretical approaches are adopted or developed.

Substantial references to Latin America

In “The Force of Myth on Popular Narratives: The Case of Melodramatic Serials,”
Lozano (1992) looks into the tensions between education and entertainment in the
narrative structure of popular fictional television shows. Latin America appears in
the article as a variant, such that television and cultural studies from the region are

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compared with Western ones, and Latin American telenovelas, as the Spanish-
speaking expression of a worldwide popular narrative, are contrasted with
American soap operas (pp. 207–208).20 The Latin American scholarly literature
engaged includes theoretical references to Jesús Martín-Barbero,21 and empirico-
theoretical references to studies that focus on Colombia and Peru respectively (pp.
218–220). Theoretically, the article argues for convergence as an alternative
approach to the opposition between entertainment and education.
In “Shattering Butterflies and Amazons: Symbolic Constructions of Women in
Colombian Development Discourse,” Rodriguez (2001) analyzes aspects of a proj-
ect driven by the World Bank in Colombia to examine the intersection between
“Western” development discourse and Colombian “local” patriarchal discourse
(p. 473). Latin America appears in the article as background, i.e., one Third World
site among others where the West deploys development, but the focus is on
national specificities (pp. 474–475, p. 477). The article provides a rich discussion of
literature published in Spanish by Colombian and Latin American feminist scho-
lars (pp. 485–489), and includes several references to the work of Colombian-born
anthropologist Arturo Escobar. Interestingly, the author starts the article with a
first person, straightforward reference to being a native Colombian who left the
country but returned years later to conduct fieldwork (p. 472). From that position,
she engages in translation from Spanish to English and discusses political differ-
ences between both languages pertinent to her analysis (pp. 479–480, p. 482). In
terms of theory, the article demonstrates the value of two strands of the Latin
American intellectual production—postcolonial and feminist thinking—in order to
decode development discourse.
In “Fostering Reproductive Health Through Entertainment-education in the
Peruvian Amazon: The Social Construction of Bienvenida Salud!,” Sypher et al.
(2002) describe their adoption of a social reproductive approach towards under-
standing the impact of a radio program implemented in the Peruvian Amazon
(p. 195). Latin America appears in the article as a site for foreign intervention
aimed at promoting reproductive health, with Peru characterized as one among
other developing countries where entertainment-education campaigns have been
successful in the promotion of family planning in rural areas (p. 192, p. 196). Most
of the literature engaged is in English, with limited reference to Latin America
(including a passing mention to Paulo Freire in translation). Theoretically, the arti-
cle draws on a Western approach to technological causality, to which it adds an
emphasis on the need for culturally sensitive methods in order to attend to local
knowledge when evaluating development projects (pp. 192–193).
In “El rock star perfecto? Theorizing Juanes and New Directions in Cross-over
Celebrity,” Ceisel (2011) draws on the notion of cross-over in order to consider
how the representational politics of a Latin American rock star may challenge the
dominance of the English language in the wider context of “ongoing negotiations
between ‘mainstream’ U.S. society” and the growing Latino population (p. 414,
p. 416, pp. 419–420). Latin America appears, via the Colombian nationality of the

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rock star in question, as a symbolic territory where Spanish is spoken and Latinidad
can potentially be reclaimed. The literature engaged, except for a few newspaper clips
in Spanish, is all in English, but includes several references to Latino and Latin
American studies. In terms of theory, the article contributes significant questions
regarding issues of language, power and identity at the intersection between the cul-
tural industries, the U.S. market and Latino politics (p. 422–424).
In “A Culturalist Approach to the Concept of the Mediatization of Politics: The
Age of ‘Media Hegemony’,” Block (2013) puts forward a culturalist approach to
conceptualizing the mediatization of politics. Latin America appears in the article
as an empirical illustration of the author’s arguments: specifically, “Hugo Chávez’
politically mediatized Venezuela” (p. 259, p. 271). The Venezuelan case, said to
exemplify the mediatization of politics, is discussed briefly towards the end of the
article, drawing to a certain extent on work about Venezuelan politics published in
Spanish (p. 260, pp. 271–273, p. 275). Except for one paragraph devoted to Jesús
Martín-Barbero’s famous conceptualization of mediation, the theory engaged in
the article is Western, and the author’s extensive review of the mediatization litera-
ture fails to consider the significant contributions in this respect of Argentinean
semiologist Eliseo Verón.22
In “Spacing Practices: The Communicative Configuration of Organizing
Through Space-times,” Vásquez and Cooren (2013) consider what a space-time
perspective adds to the conceptualization of the constitutive role of communication
in organizations. Latin America appears here as the empirical basis for the theoreti-
cal arguments made, via an ethnographic study of a Chilean organization. Because
the Chilean case is introduced, analyzed, and used as the grounds for conceptual
elaboration without discussion of the rationale for its selection, or of the conditions
that enable the authors to proceed towards theoretical generalization (Ferron &
Guevara, 2017, p. 50), the resort to Latin America appears as arbitrary. The theory
engaged in the article is Western, including work published both in English and in
French.
In “Citizens’ Media in the Favelas: Finding a Place for Community-based
Digital Media Production in Social Change Processes,” Davis (2015) considers the
strengths and weaknesses of the concept of citizens’ media vis-à-vis a study of a
digital journalism project based in the favelas of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Latin
America appears as the site of research, via a detailed description and discussion of
a Brazilian project. In terms of theory, the article seeks to theorize the study of a
Brazilian situation through a conceptual development by a Colombian scholar
working in the United States (pp. 230–231). Notably, the author takes care to
explain to his readers why he avoids “popular and influential Brazilian theorists”
who have written about related themes in his analysis (p. 240).23 The literature
engaged is mostly in English but partly in Portuguese.
In “Beyond ‘Roaring Like Lions’: Comadrismo, Counternarratives, and the
Construction of a Latin American Transnational Subjectivity of Feminism,” Scholz
(2016) makes a critical contribution to transnational feminist theory by introducing

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the notion of comadrismo based on the analysis of a Salvadoran experience (see pp.
95–96 for a definition). The literature engaged includes texts in Spanish to some
extent (both academic and auto-biographical), and an extensive amount of work
published in English about Latin American matters. Like Rodriguez (2001), the
author makes a first person, straightforward reference to her upbringing in the
United States and Guatemala by her Guatemalan immigrant parents (Scholz, 2016,
p. 84), and from this double position she provides a rich theoretical and socio-
political contextualization for her arguments, and engages in translation across
approaches (pp. 85–88, pp. 90–95). Latin America appears in the article as a politi-
cally specific site that can contribute a distinct praxis to the theorization of transna-
tional feminism.
Combined, these eight articles speak of Latin America within Communication
Theory as multi-angled: a field of cultural practices and research that can inform
cross-regional analysis; a site for foreign intervention and fieldwork; a more or less
contextualized or arbitrary empirical example; the locus of original critical theory
and a politics of resistance to hegemonies; and a zone of material and symbolic
hybridity. Our brief account of variations in the types of scholarly literature
engaged warns against reaching simplistic conclusions based exclusively on the lan-
guage of publication of citations. In terms of theory-building, three of the eight
articles embody critical approaches that draw on, and contribute to, a Latin
American body of knowledge production, and are at the same time mindful of
debates and concerns beyond the region. Notably, these are articles authored by
women, adding much needed diversity to the male elite and canon identified by
Chaffee et al. (1990) some 30 years ago. Diversity, however, has its limits in the
small collection of articles that we analyzed. A limited amount of the Latin
American countries that we used as search keywords are represented in the articles,
and all the authors were affiliated with Western universities at the time of writing:
six in the United States, one in Canada, and one in Australia.
Beyond the substantial references to Latin America comprised in these eight
articles, the region appears in Communication Theory’s archive in yet another way.

Latin American theorists as canonical references

Chaffee et al.’s study looked into how “[g]eneral approaches to scholarly research”
were represented by individual authors (1990, p. 1015). The analysis identified dif-
ferences in how the work of two influential theorists was perceived North and
South: Armand Mattelart, and Eliseo Verón, “known as the father of Latin
American semiology” (p. 1019). These differences were left unexplained. Mattelart
stood out as “the most-cited and most influential individual” across data sets
(p. 1019) even though his influence was not fully acknowledged by North American
scholars. Challenged by the geopolitics of the professional trajectory of this traveling
scholar, Chaffee et al. (1990) noted that “as a European working in Latin America” he
did not fit cleanly in either of the two categories into which they divided critical the-
ory: European and Latin America (p. 1019; see also p. 1021). Lacking reversibility,

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they did not ask themselves the same question for the case of Verón, a Latin
American who had studied and worked in Europe for several years. Verón ranked as
influential in the survey of Latin American scholars and in journal citations, but did
not feature in the survey of U.S. researchers (Chaffee et al., 1990, p. 1019; see also
p. 1021, Table 1). These variations in citations were clearly indicative of something.
But of what?
Intrigued by this aspect of Chaffee et al.’s study, we conducted a second search
of the Communication Theory archive using the following keywords: Juan Díaz
Bordenave, Luis Ramiro Beltrán, Antonio Pasquali, Paulo Freire, Jesús Martín-
Barbero, Néstor García Canclini,24 and Eliseo Verón.25 This search allowed us to
identify a third way in which Latin America features in Communication Theory
beyond its substantive inclusion as an empirical and/or theoretical component: via
citations of Latin American scholars in the field translated to English between the
1970s and 1990s and generally acknowledged as representative of the region’s
canon. This search triggered a still small, but nonetheless larger amount of results
(listed in Appendix 1): Luis Ramiro Beltrán is mentioned in one article, Juan Díaz
Bordenave in one, Paulo Freire in nine,26 Néstor García Canclini in six,27 Jesús
Martín-Barbero in four, and Antonio Pasquali in one.
The motives that inform citation practices in the writing of scholarly articles
are complex and varied (Erikson & Erlandson, 2014),28 and a detailed analysis of
our set of findings exceeds the possibilities of this article. An initial review shows
that, rather than “actively referred to in a line of argumentation in order to support
a standpoint” (Erikson & Erlandson, 2014, p. 629), most citations are very brief,
and thus possibly included to signal familiarity with the Latin American canon of
communication studies available in translation to English: as a bibliographical com-
mon place.29 Moreover, the citations, like the translations from Spanish to English
themselves, seem to pay attention to those Latin American scholars well-known for
the originality of their theoretical production. Or in other words, interest is visible in
the form of citations for Latin American communication scholarship that is clearly
indigenous, i.e., differs greatly from Western approaches. That was the case with
Beltrán, Díaz Bordenave, and Freire initially (Chaffee et al., 1990, p. 1020), and later
with Martín-Barbero and García Canclini. In turn, citations are absent when theoreti-
cal elaborations preceded or ran parallel to concerns investigated in the North. In this
sense, the cases of Eliseo Verón and of Mexican scholar Rossana Reguillo (whose
work, reviewed in this Special Issue, has built on the contributions of Martín-Barbero
and García Canclini and significantly expanded their global appeal), represent, in our
view, paradigmatic omissions.

Can Communication Theory be de-Westernized? Or, can Latin American

contributions be translated to the West?

Situated as it is in one of the financial and political peripheries of the world, Latin
America has historically assumed a comparative perspective vis-à-vis the North30

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in the production of knowledge, be it in opposition to, or correlation with (i.e., dia-

logue and continuity), Western research agendas and debates. This incorporation
of the “other” as central, distinctive of the Third World, implies an explicit or
implicit reference to an alien reality. From this perspective, Latin American com-
munication scholarship has never been purely Latin American. Rather, it is pre-
mised on a distance from, and a reference to, a central “other” (Becerra, 2017). The
burden of engaging with this “other” tends to be perceived as resting upon the
South (perhaps because it is, for the most part). This perception may occasionally
lead scholars in the South to express their resistance in the form of theoretical or
methodological nationalisms or regionalisms, more or less explicitly justified as a
form of self-defense in the absence of cross-border intellectual kinship (Miller &
Kraidy, 2016; Waisbord, 2016). In this sense, de-Westernizing communication the-
ory is a challenging enterprise in that it requires sustained contact, constructive
interaction, and efforts to conceptualize heterogeneity from both sides: the here
and the there (Grimson, 2014).
The process of editing this Special Issue raised questions that did strike us as
illustrative of this problem, sensibly addressed by Waisbord (2016). Latin
American theory tends to be encoded in a language that differs from Northern
standards in terms of the organizational logic of arguments. The difference is not
merely idiomatic, although linguistic translation is of course an issue that merits
attention. By “organizational logic” we refer to how the theoretical and the empiri-
cal are articulated not only on the basis of the observations derived from fieldwork,
but also of a process of epistemological vigilance by which the researcher takes into
account their own condition as a political subject (Becerra, 2017). This approach,
which clearly differs from the standard writing procedures typical of high-impact
journals published in the North, and tends to manifest itself in an essayistic style,
is well exemplified by Rossana Reguillo’s studies of youth cultures, reviewed in this
Special Issue by Feixa and Figueras Maz. The difference in organizational logic and
writing style was one among others that challenged all the parties engaged in the
editorial process, as evidenced in the laborious back and forth between authors and
peer reviewers, and between peer reviewers and editors.
Whether “differences across intellectual traditions and the institutional logics of
academe” can be translated in durable ways remains, in our experience as editors
of this Special Issue, an open question (Waisbord, 2016, p. 872). Having completed
this project, we can affirm that Waisbord is right when he claims that “we still lack
a clear path to overcome different understandings about quality standards, conceptual
languages, and epistemological premises” (Waisbord, 2016, p. 881). Exceedingly aware
of how difficult it is to walk along such an unclear path, we invite the reader to bear
in mind that this Special Issue represents the effort of a collective of editors, authors,
and peer-reviewers to cultivate a much needed and largely uncharted zone of contact
(Grimson, 2014; Waisbord, 2016). We hope that the effort will be understood as a
small and imperfect yet significant contribution towards strengthening an academic
“community of interlocution” (Rivera, 2010) that is willing to reflect about its

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international practices and to take responsibility for demonstrating, to students at uni-

versity and to society and large, that productive dialogue across differences, be them
geopolitical or otherwise, is possible.

About the Special Issue: process and contents

The Call for Papers for this Special Issue was released in November 2016, with a
deadline of 1 March 2017 for the submission of full papers, and remains available
online for the reader’s reference.31 All the submissions received were read to ensure
that they fit the thematic scope of the Call for Papers, as well as the quality standards
of Communication Theory. We were careful, however, not to rush decisions to reject
submissions due to their language quality, from the standpoint that grammar and
syntax could be improved at a later stage if overall contents merited reviewing.
To invite reviewers, we considered scholars with recognized experience in the vari-
ous subjects at issue from our own extended professional networks, the journal’s data-
base, and a variety of other sources. In all cases, we made an effort to invite one
reviewer from the North and one from the South, seeking to guarantee a multi-
perspectival approach inasmuch as possible. All reviews were checked for substance
and quality, and no reviews were discarded on those grounds. However, we occasion-
ally chose to signal to authors our editorial disagreement with specific reviewer com-
ments that we found opinionated rather than well-substantiated. In the various cases
where the first round of reviews led to widely different evaluations, we invited a third
reviewer. Interestingly, differences in evaluations were not clearly aligned with
regional affiliations, which made for a perplexing but formative editorial process. We
can confidently say that each of the four articles included in the line-up of the Special
Issue has undergone careful and extensive reviewing. The two book reviews, on the
other hand, were invited, in line with Wilkins’ (2016) introduction of a new feature in
Communication Theory aimed at promoting the critical appraisal of publications not
available in English and thus facilitating dialogue across boundaries.
The outcome of this process does not represent the diversity of problems and
challenges addressed in recent years by Latin American communication scholar-
ship, nor its richness. Rather, it is a selection of the submissions received, carefully
curated in order to make a contribution towards resituating Latin America within
Communication Theory in the 21st century. This specific, limited scope stands in
the way of generalizations, but we think that the Special Issue nonetheless makes a
significant intervention in three ways. First, it addresses the shortage of articles in
the journal’s archive contributing Latin American elements to theory-building, and
featuring scholars from Latin America as authors. Second, the four articles and two
book reviews that it contains represent varied approaches to linking recent Latin
American scholarship with current Western research agendas and debates in pro-
ductive ways. And third, through this variation, the Special Issue pushes the defini-
tion of what Latin American communication theory is today, and can be in the
future, beyond the canon of well-known literature translated to English towards

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the end of the 20th century. This expanded definition should not be understood as
categorical, but rather as work in progress, to be refined through future contribu-
tions to Communication Theory and other high-impact publication venues.
In “A Latin American Approach to Mediatization. Specificities and Contributions
to a Global Discussion About How Media are Shaping Contemporary Societies,”
Carlos Scolari and Joan Ramon Rodriguez-Amat analyze the theories on mediatiza-
tion developed in Latin America vis-à-vis parallel developments in the global North.
The article traces the intellectual contribution of Eliseo Verón from his initial reflec-
tions on the semantization of violence to the evolutionary approach to mediatization
that he put forward towards the end of his life, and introduces the work of Latin
American scholars who have built on his legacy in the past decade. By carefully
considering differences and similarities between the Latin American and European
mediatization traditions, the authors outline a map for potential cross-border col-
laboration on the subject.
In “In Search of a Latin American Approach to Organizational Communication:
A Critical Review of Scholarship from 2010–2014,” Consuelo Vázquez, Lissette
Marroquin, and Adriana Angel map and analyze a body of organizational commu-
nication studies published in Latin America in recent years in order to identify
their potential distinctive traits. Combining theoretical insights from Brazilian
communication scholarship with specialized Anglo-American meta-theoretical
frameworks, they show subtle but consistent signs of a Latin American approach to
organizational communication, which they argue is characterized by two features:
theoretical miscegenation and an ethical and political commitment to understand-
ing local realities.
In “From Media to Buen Vivir: Latin American Approaches to Indigenous
Communication,” Carlos Arcila Calderón, Alejandro Barranquero and Eva González
Tanco start from a literature review in order to trace recent developments in the
conceptualization of indigenous communication in Latin American scholarship. Their
analysis of continuity and change in the problems investigated within this area leads
them to distil four outstanding topics. The article points at the increasing influence of
indigenous epistemology on the knowledge produced by Latin American scholars in
this area, calling attention to the indigenous concept of Buen Vivir.32
In “Communication Research in Argentina (2001–2015): Between Expansion
and Intellectual Intervention,” Carolina Justo von Lurzer and Mariano Zarowsky
consider the state of the art of communication and culture studies in Argentina in
the wider context of the sociopolitical conditions of their production.33 The article
links recent scholarly theorization within six substantial thematic areas to the intel-
lectual traditions and institutional and cultural formations within which those
areas took shape and evolved.
In “Emergence of (Hybrid) Youth Cultures,” Carles Feixa and Mònica Figueras
Maz introduce readers to an enduring classic of recent Latin American communi-
cation theory that remains inexplicably untranslated to English: Culturas juveniles:
Formas políticas del desencanto [Youth Cultures. Political Forms of Disenchantment],

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by Mexican scholar Rossana Reguillo. Written in 2000, and re-edited in 2012 in a

revised version that includes a new introduction, an additional chapter, and a novel
glossary, the book is widely recognized in Latin America as a must-read in order to
understand youth worlds in their complexity, and as a work of outstanding theoretical
and methodological originality.
In “A Semio-anthropological Perspective on Mediatization,” Natalia Raimondo
Anselmino introduces readers to Verón (2013), the book that represents the matu-
rity of Eliseo Verón’s mediatization theory. As is the case with Reguillo’s, the trans-
lation to English of this book would make a most significant contribution to
ongoing work on mediatization at a global level. That Verón’s rich body of work
remains largely untranslated to date is puzzling, particularly given the fact that its
significance was already recognized by Chaffee et al. (1990), and we hope that
Raimondo Anselmino’s review will contribute to redressing this omission.

In-between here and there: concluding with an opener

Some 20 years ago, Armand and Michèlle Mattelart argued that “if the notion of
communication raises problems, so does the notion of communication theory. This
also generates discrepancies” (Mattelart & Mattelart, 1997, p. 10). Editing this
Special Issue has taught us that strong, “imagined” ideas about what Latin
American communication theory has been, is, and should be, are present North
and South of what various academic tribes define as “the borders of legitimate
knowledge” (Waisbord & Mellado, 2014, p. 368). In this sense, that there will be
discrepancies among readers is a given. However, causing controversy is not our
goal. If nothing else, we hope that the various contributions foregrounded here,
and the collective effort required in order to put together this Special Issue, will
contribute to raising awareness here and there about the limited circulation of pres-
ent Latin American communication theory in Western spaces, and to fostering
intellectual curiosity, and dialogue, across both ends of a distance that has persisted
for too long.

Acknowledgments
This Special Issue was produced with the support of the Leading Research
Environment in Global Media Studies and the Politics of Mediated Communication
at Stockholm University in Sweden, and of the Universidad Nacional de Quilmes and
CONICET in Argentina. We owe special thanks to Communication Theory’s Editor,
Karin Wilkins, and to her Associate Editors, for supporting this project and making it
viable. We are most grateful towards the journal’s Editorial Assistant, Karen Lee, for
her unfailing support during the production process. Special thanks go to the anony-
mous peer reviewers for their crucial input, and to Silvio Waisbord, who suggested
that abstracts should be translated to Spanish and Portuguese, and Miyase Christensen,
who gave us constructive input on a draft version of this article. Last but not least, our

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gratitude towards our colleague Paola Sartoretto, who volunteered her translation skills
in order to make the Portuguese versions of all abstracts available.

Notes
1 Based on Gomez-Palacio (1989) doctoral dissertation and on work in progress presented
at the ICA 1990 Conference held in Dublin, Ireland.
2 Our emphasis.
3 See (McAnany, 2012, pp. 80–81) for details about Beltrán and Díaz Bordenave’s
trajectories as PhD students under Rogers.
4 This generic distinction was not fixed, however. Acknowledging to a certain extent that
social fields are dynamic, i.e., they impose certain conditions but are plastic and will
adjust to change (Chevallier et al., 2011, p. 77), Chaffee et al. (1990) categorized
academics as scholars and practitioners, but also saw their study as evidence of “a shift in
the character of communication research in Latin America […] toward intellectual self-
sufficiency built around an emerging school of Latin American critical scholars, journals,
and institutions” (Chaffee et al., 1990, p. 1023).
5 Commenting on Gomez-Palacio (1989) (Rich, 1993, p. 9).
6 Referring to O’Connor (1991) and Atwood and McAnany (1986). See Rich (1993, p. 11).
7 In our view, this distinctiveness is a significant variable that influences the current
theoretical production arising from the region, but not the only one. In this spirit, we
urge the reader to beware of essentializing generalizations about what Latin American
communication theory has been or should be.
8 Pasquali was born in Italy in 1929, emigrated to Venezuela with his family at the age of
18, became a Venezuelan citizen in 1955 and obtained his Ph.D. in France in 1957 after
having studied philosophy in Caracas. See https://www.infoamerica.org/teoria/pasquali1.
htm for an academic biography. See Rich (1993, pp. 9–10) for a brief discussion of
Beltran’s critical stand vis-à-vis Schramm and Roger’s intervention in the region.
9 See https://www.infoamerica.org/teoria/beltran1.htm for an academic biography.
10 International Center of Higher Studies in Communication for Latin America.
11 See https://www.infoamerica.org/teoria/mattelart1.htm for an academic biography.
12 We use the term “magazine” rather than “journal” to note a distinction between today’s
academic journals as mainstreamed by publishing companies as a global industry, and
the type of critical intellectual intervention that “Comunicación y Cultura” represented.
13 See Zarowsky (2016) for an academic biography.
14 Latin American Association of Communication Researchers.
15 Latin American Federation of Social Communication Faculties.
16 Besides ALAIC and FELAFACS, both the Latin American Faculty of Social Sciences
(FLACSO) and the Latin American Council of Social Sciences (CLACSO), established in
1957 and 1967 respectively, have contributed to communication studies in the region.
17 Constituted by Latin America, Spain, and Portugal, and relating to the Spanish-
speaking population in the United States respectively. Links with the Ibero-American
academic space appear here thanks to the fact that the reference to Latin America in the
Special Issue’s Call for Papers was rightly understood by submitting authors to refer
more widely to Ibero-America, thus acknowledging a commonality of language that
binds Spain and Portugal to Latin America beyond the adoption of English as the
common European language as per the Bologna process. Links with the Hispanic space

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appear in the inventory of work on Latin America previously published in

Communication Theory.
18 At http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/journal/10.1111/%28ISSN%291468-2885. Since then,
the journal has changed publisher, from Wiley to Oxford University Press.
19 Initially concerned with the Latin American South, we included all South American
countries plus Mexico (as borderline), but left out Puerto Rico and Cuba. An additional
search conducted in December 2017 using these keywords did not modify the total
amount of eight articles with substantial references to Latin America identified in the
first place.
20 Mexico moreover features in this article as an empirical case, with references to
“Mexico’s Miguel Sabido” as a producer of highly popular telenovelas with pedagogical
aims and to “the Mexican experience” in the use of melodramatic serials for family
planning (Zarowsky, 2013, pp. 213–215).
21 Born in Spain, and a long-time resident of Colombia. See https://www.infoamerica.org/
teoria/martin_barbero1.htm for an academic biography.
22 Verón receives much overdue attention in this Special Issue via the contributions of
Carlos Scolari, Natalia Raimondo Anselmino, and, more obliquely, Carolina Justo van
Lurzer and Mariano Zarowski.
23 This calls attention to the fact that, depending on the academic tribes in which their
work circulates, scholars working on Latin American issues may be expected to engage
with the regional canon by default.
24 For a recent autobiographical note, see http://www.madridganaraslaluz.com/
participantes/nestor-garcia-canclini/
25 We also searched for Armand Mattelart, with reservations, since he hasn’t lived or work
in Latin America since the early 1970s.
26 Plus a tenth article that only mentions Freire in the endnotes.
27 Mattelart is mentioned in 12 articles, of which two, interestingly, refer to his affiliation
as French (Darling-Wolf, 2008, p. 203; Zelizer, 2016, p. 216).
28 We thank Víctor Marí-Sáez (University of Cádiz, Spain) for this reference.
29 The exception in this respect is Kraidy (2002), which discusses the theoretical
contributions of Néstor García Canclini in detail.
30 As Waisbord and Mellado (2014, p. 369) have noted, it is of course “questionable to
talk about a single ‘Western’ academic culture”. Following from Chaffee et al. (1990),
we refer to the North as shorthand, aware of its limitations.
31 See http://www.icahdq.org/blogpost/1523657/262701/Communication-Theory-Special-
Issue?hhSearchTerms=%22communication+and+theory%22&terms=
32 Also known as Vivir Bien, Suma Qamaña or Sumaq Kawsay; see Parrado (2013) for a
critical discussion.
33 In line with Wilkins’ (2016) editorial policy for Communication Theory.

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