Thursday December 4, 2025  | 1:45PM-3:30PM

Diboll Gallery, The Commons

Session Abstract:

Recent years have seen a growing interest in distribution as a distinct sphere of media studies that extends beyond and intersects with production studies, audience and reception studies, and textual and aesthetic analysis. In 2017, Joshua Braun and Ramon Lobato organized a pre-conference for ICA (International Communication Association) devoted to distribution and have since developed a book series at MIT Press, “Distribution Matters,” while important edited volumes have also been published on the topic (Brannon Donoghue, McDonald, and Havens 2021; Holt, Sanson, and Curtin 2014). This emerging subfield of media distribution is timely and to a large degree prompted by new technological developments. An exciting emerging body of literature, for instance, is addressing how streaming platforms are transforming the distribution of movies, television, and music around the world in the twenty-first century (Lobato 2019; Kang and Lotz 2023), including within Latin America (Straubhaar et al 2021).

Yet digital technologies transform distribution in distinct ways between the Global South and Global North as well as by region, while contemporary digital distribution also often builds from as much as it departs from earlier modes of distribution. Laura Serna tracks the distribution of silent films in the Caribbean and demonstrates how the resulting network disturbs narratives of national cinema. Alejandra Bronfman shows how the circulation and archiving of LP and digital recordings of Puerto Rican Nationalist Party President Pedro Albizu Campos’s orations reveals Cold War colonialities and solidarities. LZ Humphreys tracks clandestine analog video circulation in Cuba, demonstrating how the networks formed in this era were tied to television, shaped by women’s labor and media consumption, and laid the foundations for later offline digital media circulation, including the paquete. Mike Levine examines how reparto fans rely on practices of lending copying and trading content from the paquete in ways that depend on and complicate the paquete’s consumer logic. Together, these papers explore how a focus on distribution sheds new light on the social and political consequences of media in the Caribbean, and how a focus on the Caribbean reveals new dynamics and histories of media distribution.

• Laura Isabel Serna (University of Southern California), “Moving Films: Silent Film Distribution in the Caribbean”

In the Caribbean, silent films passed from port to port on the same ships that brought imported goods, migrants, and entrepreneurs or took away agricultural products. The relay of films before the establishment of distribution offices affiliated with American studios depended on regional business, migration, and transportation networks. These circuits exceeded the boundaries of any given nation disturbing (in a provocative and positive way) histories of national cinemas that focus on the production of films, give scant attention to exhibition, and neglect distribution almost entirely. This paper uses material from the trade press and daily newspapers to trace the trade in film across the Caribbean, with a focus on Cuba and Mexico’s eastern coast. I identify. connections between film entrepreneurs in the region forged via business ties, shared migrant identities, or experience in theater or other types of entertainment. The Caribbean is an ideal site for exploring these circuits because of the proximity of one island to another, the connections of those islands to metropolitan centers such as New York, and connections to specific regions of larger countries such as Mexico’s eastern coast. This analysis suggests that while the nation continues to be an important analytic framework for film history, regional analyses illuminate connections the nation obscures. Specifically, the nation becomes less salient in a context in which film distribution rather than film production was the primary film related activity, an activity in which nation states had limited investment but through which individuals sought profits.

• Alejandra Bronfman (SUNY Albany), “Afterlife of a Voice: Cold War Echoes of Puerto Rican Nationalists”

This paper explores the political afterlife of Puerto Rican Nationalist Party President Pedro Albizu Campos’ voice. While the extensive and rich literature on Albizu notes the power of his voice and oratory practices, it rarely extends beyond his death to the posthumous. Yet his voice was remediated and reproduced in a variety of settings for distinct purposes, creating what I argue is a haunted history. Rather than listening through archival traces, my project understands this archive, created between 1948 and 1980, as an object of analysis. I trace Albizu’s recorded voice through archives assembled by the FBI and Puerto Rican police (1950), Discos Coqui in Puerto Rico (1970), Paredon Records of Brooklyn NY (1975), and Casa de las Americas in Havana, Cuba (1980). Each of these operated and was created with distinct logics of repression, reproduction, dissemination, commemoration, and mobilization. Considered together they uncover a series of Cold War colonialities and solidarities, bringing the entertainment and recordings industries in conversation with emergent surveillance and policing practices.

• LZ Humphreys (Tulane University, chair and moderator), “Analog Video as Domestic Labor in Cuba”

Streaming services are transforming television around the world, and yet much of the world cannot access this content by official means due to limited internet services, prohibitive cost, and lack of credit and debit cards. This contradiction demands an on-the-ground exploration both of how television content circulates in regions where access to paid services is limited, and of how such contemporary distribution builds on earlier modes. In this presentation, I take on this project by providing a historical account of the circulation of analog video in Cuba. Studies in both the Global North and the Global South have often equated analog video with movies—most famously, U.S. action films—and have centered the experiences of the men who controlled these networks. In this paper, I instead draw on oral histories and archival research to make two key interventions. First, I show how analog video was closely tied to the rise of satellite delivery systems and Global South television industries (specifically, Mexican television). Second, I show how women’s paid and unpaid labor and media consumption fueled illegal analog video distribution. In Cuba as in many Global South contexts, I conclude, analog video served as an early example of media convergence that both presaged and laid the groundwork for later digital video and media distribution, including, in the case of Cuba, offline circulation and the paquete.

• Mike Levine (Christopher Newport University), “Technological Disobedience in Offline Cuba: Packaging and Sharing Music Through El Paquete Semanal”

El paquete semanal (the weekly package) dominates Cuba’s musical landscape. The one terabyte collection of digital material traded weekly between subscribers provides a viable alternative to a nation-wide lack of internet access. Its USB-based file structure is simple, yet comprehensive and ever changing. Curators who determine the network’s content are organized within a hierarchical structure, yet this content becomes democratized after fans purchase the paquete and trade its music with one another on privately owned USB sticks. I regard these material exchanges (and the social tensions they incubate) as an example of what Ernesto Oroza terms “technological disobedience.” Using ethnographic observations and methods of digital archaeology, I reflect on these tensions; positioning practices of prestar (lending), copying, and trading conducted between fans against the capitalist concerns of the hierarchy of paqueteros (deliverers of the package), promoters, and artists that profit from the paquete’s unique mode of categorization and curation. By elaborating on the paquete’s role as a container for digital music traded through in-person encounters, this paper likewise provides an entry point to study the strategies of reparto fans as they seek representation in Havana’s competitive public spaces. I argue that the frictions this network embeds—its mix of hierarchical and egalitarian structures within an online/offline form of trade—provides a viable method to dilute both the power of the Cuban state and “Big Tech’s” marginalizing algorithms. In doing so, this paper highlights what simple digital technologies can achieve when developed and traded by a committed community of artists and fans.