Recent Books on Latin American and Latino/a Popular Culture

Latino/A Popular Culture. Edited by Michelle Habell-Pallán and Mary Romero. (New York and London: New York University Press, 2002. Pp. 280. $55.00 cloth, $18.50 paper.)

Imagination Beyond Nation: Latin American Popular Culture. Edited by Eva P. Bueno and Terry Caesar. (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1998. Pp. 314. $50.00 cloth, $22.95 paper.)

Latin American Popular Culture: An Introduction. Edited by William H. Beezley and Linda A. Curcio-Nagy. (Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources Books, 2000. Pp. 255. $55.00 cloth, $21.95 paper.)

THe Riddle Of Cantiflas: Essays On Hispanic Popular Culture. By Ilan Stavans. (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1998. Pp. 157. $45.00 cloth, $19.95 paper.)

It is difficult to keep up with the plethora of published monographs and edited books on Latin American and Latino/a popular culture. American university, as well as independent scholarly and commercial presses, have discovered in the past decade that such books have broad appeal. This was not always the case; twenty years ago it was difficult to find a press that would give a publication proposal on popular culture serious consideration. The unspoken response to such proposals seemed to be that the topic itself did not merit serious scholarly consideration. This trend persisted despite the wide U.S. and Latin American distribution of ground-breaking works published mainly in Latin America and Europe. Happily, this situation no longer exists; one finds entire categories in university and other press catalogues devoted to popular culture and cultural studies. In fact, the arrival of cultural and popular culture studies imported from abroad (e.g., Stuart Hall, Nestor García Canclini, Armand Mattelart, and Ariel Dorfman) has given a strong boost to the acceptability of popular culture studies in the United States.

Ironically, the downside of the newfound respectability of popular culture studies in the academy has been a rush to put together monographs and collections of essays—not all of which stand up to high scholarly standards. Three of the books reviewed in this essay do in my opinion meet such standards; one fails to do so.

New authors and editors of popular culture studies owe it to their readers to introduce them to at least some of the theoretical debates surrounding the production of popular and mass culture. Eva P. Bueno and Terry Caesar, the editors of Imagination Beyond Nation, have laid out in their introduction some of the most important issues characteristic of a serious study of popular culture in general and the practice of popular culture in Latin America in particular. Using Carlos Estevan Martins' 1962 essay, "For a Popular Revolutionary Art," as representing one end of the theoretical spectrum and Beatriz Sarlo Sabajanes's 1994 book Escenas de la vida postmoderna as representing the other end, the editors identify some key issues in their introduction that individual authors raise in the essays that follow. Martins discusses in his essay questions about the nature of art as a social product, the role of intellectuals "in fostering its emancipatory potential" (2), and what he considers to be authentic popular art, namely, popular revolutionary art firmly guided by progressive intellectuals to directly influence and shape the consciousness of the masses. Sarlo, on the other hand, seems to ignore class as she posits the modern shopping mall as a site that offers "extraterritorial culture from which nobody is excluded, even those who cannot buy" (2).

The editors have assembled a variety of theoretical approaches between Martins and Sarlo, including theories associated with Mikhail Bakhtin, Jesà�s Martín-Barbero, Paul de Man, and Armand Mattelart. They briefly discuss these approaches in order to illustrate that "Latin American popular culture matters in rich and distinctive ways" (4); that is, it is compelling to argue that Latin America is fundamentally different from any other global region. The editors have set forth three points that presumably guided their...