Well, well, well. After three months, we have finally approached the end of this course. During this time, I can honestly say that I learned a lot. It got to the point where I telling my girlfriend about Peronism in Argentina. I’m not a big culture guy so for me to enjoy this course speaks a lot about this course. Looking at the title I can see that we have come full circle in regards to the topic. From “what is culture” to the “theories of mixture” and now to “the end of popular culture?”.

When reading Guillermo Gomez-Pena’s “In Search of a New Topography”, the first thing that came to mind was Big Foot. Big Foot came up first because of all the mystery surrounding it. Like Marco, Big Foot is something that became engrained in popular culture even though no one really knew what it looked like. Furthermore, if Big Foot was actually revealed, the mysticism surrounding Big Foot would disappear and the intrigue would disappear, just like what happened to Marco after he revealed himself to be just an ordinary citizen from Northern Mexico. For me, it just goes to show that once the mystery gets answered, interest surrounding this elusive object subsides.

When reading Mary C. Beltran’s “The Hollywood Latina Body as Site of Social Struggle: Media Constructions of Stardom and Jennifer Lopez’s ‘Cross-Over Butt’”, I found this article particularly interesting because it talks about how Hollywood is a white-dominated industry. “It also is notable that direct mention of Lopez’s ethnicity appears to have been downplayed in the English-language press during this period, while it unsurprisingly was emphasized in the Spanish-language press” This sentence perfectly resembles what it is like to be a minority in Hollywood. Hollywood would normalize Lopez by emphasizing her upbringing in the Bronx, as opposed to her Puerto Rican heritage. Although Hollywood has incorporated more minorities in recent years, it has largely stayed a white industry.

And with this, I conclude my last blog. LAST 201 has been a pleasant surprise not only in terms of the class but also the material. It’s been real guys and I wish everyone the best of luck on the finals!

When I first signed up for this course, I thought that we were going to talk about Latin American pop artists, football, and movies. But low and behold, we ended up talking about something almost completely different from what I thought we were going to study. That’s not to say I didn’t enjoy learning about the history of Latin America and what it has gone through to become the region it is today. For this week’s readings, we finally touch upon popular culture as mass culture. To be honest, if you were to ask me before the start of this class on the difference between mass culture and popular culture, I would probably not have been able to come up with an answer. In my mind, I thought that what was popular must have appealed to the masses as well. However, throughout the course, I have been proven wrong time and time again.

In Nelson Hippolyte Ortega’s “Big Snakes on the Street and Never Ending Stories: The Case of Venezuelan Telenovas”, I found it interesting how something predominantly Latin American was able to be popular in many places elsewhere. In the first sentence, Nelson sums up what the telenova means to Latin America. “The telenova is an important expression of Latin American popular culture not only because of its success with the public, but also because it reflects the public’s symbolic and affective world. I am informed on how that the difference between North American soap opera and traditional telenova is the motive. In North American soap operas, the central motivations are money and sex whereas in traditional telenovas, the motivation is to fall in love, marry and have children. During my readings, it occurred to me that for the first half of this course, we talked about how Latin America borrowed elements of different cultures in order to make their own. However, with telenovas, we see how North America drew inspiration from Latin America and tried to recreate it for their own audiences.

I wasn’t able to finish “Futebol: The Brazilian Way of Life” by Alex Bellos, but I am excited to talk about it in class and learn more about it!

Part two of Theories of Mixture! So, in the first part, we talked about mestizaje and its implications. What it meant, how it was achieved and how it was important to Latin American culture. Now, in the second part, we are introduced to a somewhat new topic. Transculturation. We somewhat touched upon this topic in class in which we said transculturation was how two cultures (e.g. indigenous and Spanish) assimilated various elements of each other’s culture to make something fresh.

In Mark Millington’s readings, he mentioned how mestizaje has now become generally confined to discussions of racial mixing while transculturation and hybridization where more in favor nowadays. However, he drew a clear distinction on how while transculturation and hybridization are similar, they mean different things. Transculturation, he said had a distinct Latin American identity and was rarely employed outside that context. On the other hand, hybridization had a more global reference to it. Although I have yet to fully unpack the difference of the two meanings in a way that I can understand, I definitely find this area of topic interesting. Maybe because the length of the readings were a bit more manageable.

I found that this reading had a few similar ideas that Rowe & Schelling talked about in their “The Faces of Popular Culture”. For example, Rowe & Schelling talked about how Mexico had their process of acculturation be more complete. I will need to reread the two readings but this is what I have for now! Thanks for reading guys!