Media in Twentieth- and Twenty-First-Century Latin America

As reflected in the newly established Mass Media and Popular Culture Section within the Latin American Studies Association and a plethora of new publications, scholarship on Latin American media has expanded significantly in recent years.¹ These studies are particularly germane in a world increasingly hyperconnected by communications technologies and social media. This review considers five books that focus predominately on electronic mass media and cover a wide range of topics, regions, and times, exemplifying the diversity of current research. Media, Sound, and Culture in Latin America and the Caribbean, edited by Alejandra Bronfman and Andrew Grant Wood, is a collection of essays that looks not only at media but at sound itself. Culture of Class by Matthew B. Karush discusses Argentine radio and cinema in the years preceding the presidency of Juan Perón. Broadcasting the Civil War in El Salvador is the memoir of revolutionary radioman Carlos Henríquez Consalve, aka “Santiago.” Citizens’ Media against Armed Conflict, by Clemencia Rodríguez, examines “citizens’” radio in twenty-first-century Colombia, and in “Muy buenas noches,” Celeste González de Bustamante explores the first twenty years of Mexican television.

Media, Sound, and Culture in Latin America and the Caribbean contains much of the breadth of current research in one slim edited volume. This excellent multi-disciplinary collection of essays explores electronic mass media but also hearing “as a critical sense in which to decipher issues of social and cultural change” (xi, emphasis in the original). The authors correctly point out that scholars, and people generally, have long privileged sight over other senses, and their book begins to offset that bias by emphasizing things heard. Bronfman and Wood separate the book into three parts: “Embodied Sounds and the Sounds of Memory,” “The Media of Politics,” and “The Sonics of Public Spaces,” a loose compartmentalization that brings a measure of coherence to the wide array of contributions. Although the articles vary significantly, together they successfully make the book’s argument that “soundscapes, music, noise, and silence reveal to us something about prevailing worldviews, technologies, epistemologies, and aspiration past and present” (x). The most original bestowal of the volume is its inclusion of little-explored topics on the impact of sound outside of common media. Nevertheless, for those interested in more traditional studies of media in politics and culture, the volume does not disappoint. Essays by Gisela Cramer, Alejandra Bronfman, and Alejandro L. Madrid are well argued and cover international politics, rebellion and control, media spectacle, and democracy across Latin America.

One of the strengths of the volume is that it uses sonic themes and sources to inform other prominent topics in Latin American studies. Christine Ehrick’s “Radio Transvestism and the Gendered Soundscape in Buenos Aires, 1930s–1940s” examines radio broadcasting’s role in the creation of gender identity, arguing that “radio vocalizations represent a projection and performance of the body in an exclusively sonic way, which in turn highlights the fact that the voice is critical in coding the body along presumed racial, class, and gendered lines” (xi–xii). Ehrick contributes a refreshing...