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!