Hispanic Tele-Visions in the United States

This volume proposes a cultural reading of the Spanish-language television networks Univision and Telemundo. Drawing from semiotic and poststructuralist theory; from cultural and television studies in Latin America and the United States; and from poetry, literature and the occasional film, the author provides a setting and a cultural ground from which to explore “emergent discourses” in the Spanish-language television of the United States.

The author identifies issues such as the mythical place of “America” in the discourses of Latin America and the United States; the contradictory role of Spanish as a language of resistance and legitimation in the United States; the “modernization” of the Latin American melodramatic serial (telenovelas) and of narratives on sexuality and gender; and the symbolic re-imagining or “remapping” of the borders of the United States and Latin America.

It is argued that Hispanic television is a site where a multiplicity of cultural vectors intersect, overlap, collide, and transform one another, creating a “Third Text,” neither Latin American or United-Statian, but both and more; a discursive hybrid in which contradictory economic, ideological and social interests much mind and dispute a common ground.

The book is geared toward graduate students and scholars in the fields of communication, media studies, and Latin American and Latina/o studies, The text will be of particular relevance in courses that deal with media theory and criticism, semiotics, narrative and discourse analysis, continental philosophy, postcolonial studies, and cultural studies.