This particular reading was immensely long. However, the language used here was definitely easier to understand than Borges, Keesing, and Williams. To me, I feel like this is the first real reading for this course. Mainly because for the previous readings, we mainly focused on “what is the people” and “what is culture”. With this reading, we finally focused on “what is popular culture in Latin America”. That isn’t to say the previous readings didn’t help me better understand what this course was focusing on.

The first part of the chapter of this article talks about how the Andean region, Mexico, and Brazil have given rise to specific forms of popular culture. With the age of colonization, Europeans, specifically Portuguese and Spanish came to the America’s to colonize. They destroyed the native civilizations through their superior weaponry, and disease. However, one thing remained intact. Something the settlers eventually took in and called their own. And that was the culture. The native cultures of the Andean region, Mexico and Brazil blended with the cultures of the respective settlers and gave rise to their own specific form of popular culture. Each distinct in its own way.

The second part of the chapter talks about urban popular culture. In “Studies in Latin American Popular Culture” the only academic journal dedicated to Latin America Popular Culture, defines “popular” as urban mass culture. However, personally, I believe that popular culture shouldn’t be confined to a specific region. I think that within one large area, there are numerous forms of popular culture. Of course, through the advancement in technology, popular culture has somewhat become standardized as more people have access to the same content. The reading also stresses how the media has been vital to a consolidated single national identity.

Although this reading was long and somewhat tiresome to read, it had tons of good information in it.