Recent Books on Latin American and Latino/a Popular Culture

Abstract

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 Garcia Canclini, Armand Mattelart, and Ariel Dorfman) has given a strong boost to the acceptability of popular culture studies in the United States.