Friday December 5, 2025 |  1:45PM-3:30PM

Greenleaf Conference Room  (Jones Hall, 1st Floor)

Session Abstract

Among the many accomplishments of Ana M. López, of beloved memory, was the ability to navigate and forge scholarly pathways between Latin American and Latinx Studies as interdisciplinary fields harboring media studies. Notably, López co-edited the groundbreaking volume Mediating Two Worlds: Cinematic Encounters in the Americas (1993), and The Ethnic Eye: Latino Media Arts (1996), and she authored influential essays, “Are All Latins from Manhattan? Hollywood, Ethnography, and Cultural Colonialism” (1991), “Greater Cuba” (1996), “Of Rhythms and Borders” (1997), and “Facing Up to Hollywood” (2000), all of which favored a transnational approach to the study of popular music and film. It is in the spirit of these endeavors that we propose a panel on transnational media as they have been conceived and influenced by Latinx creators and audiences since the 1960s. The pressing need to consider Latinx media from a transnational perspective, we argue, stems from the transnational expansion of Hispanophone and Lusophone media enterprises, crossborder production itineraries undertaken by Latinx filmmakers, the growth of digital media, transborder regional consciousness, and the expansion of Latinx diasporic audiences in the U.S.

Presenters

• Jossianna Arroyo-Martínez (University of Texas at Austin), “Caribes 2.0: Race, New Media and the Afterlives of Disaster”

Ethnic impersonation, tone, and voice, circulate in traditional and new media, and it is the core of many transnational media representations. At the same time, they create violent forms of closeness and distance in visual and media echochambers. In my book Caribes 2.0: Race, New Media and the Afterlives of Disaster, I argue that these echochambers have constituted Caribbean mediascapes and that they built a spectacle of ethnicity which incorporates blackness and racialization. This spectacle is what I describe as necroimages or imaginaries in certain moments and conditions, as they made these others a spectacle in relation to tourism, scenery, landscapes, or protest. Mediascapes a term coined by Appadurai in the 1990s during the emergence of the internet and way before the creation of digital content platforms, would be used as a point of departure to analyze these scenes that touch what I define as Caribes 2.0; a cross of traditional and digital content that creates Caribbean ethnoscapes of diverse forms and kinds. After summarizing my book, and looking at some uses of blackface and brownface, my reading will analyze some critiques of these traditional forms, in the performances of Helen Ceballos, Eva Margarita, and Javier Cardona, as well as its continuation in the recent film “La Bachata de Biónico” (Yoel Morales, Dominican Republic 2024) to discuss the use of Blackness, racialization, migration, and the necroimage in social-creative spaces. I will finalize with a meditation of the uses of race in transnational media spaces in the Caribbean.

•  María Elena Cepeda (Williams College), “Listening Entre Líneas: Transnational Colombiana Crip Memory and Diasporic Reverb”

During one of the garage sales that my mother held prior to my Colombian immigrant parents’ move to Florida some decades ago, I uncovered a small collection of their vintage vinyl records. Included in the stack were Colombian albums dating back to 1960, alongside scattered mainstream English-language hits and past Latin diasporic music. I recently rifled through the records again, thinking that they somehow might help me better comprehend my enigmatic parents. I told myself: If I can just listen carefully enough, if I can just listen to the music but also listen in between the lines of the songs; in between the fragmented memories; in between the United States and Colombia; and above all, in between the expanses of silence that have underwritten much of our familial connections.
Interweaving memoir, sonic analysis, and transnational Latinx musical histories, my presentation narrates listening to my parents’ vintage records as it exemplifies the practice of “listening entre lineas.” This practice can entail listening in between the fragments of competing familial memories, internalized self-narratives, and above all amid the gaps in knowledge provoked by unrelenting familial silence. Listening entre lineas draws on historical, cultural, and political context in its assessments of sound and the “not-sounds” of actual sound objects. This method further grapples with what I term the “diasporic reverb” of Colombian and Latinx music, or the transnational sonic ripples that Latinx popular music creates via the emotional entanglements, transnational histories, and the social and cultural politics attached to Latinx diasporic musical memories.

• Yeidy M. Rivero (University of Michigan-Ann Arbor), “Considering Place: Mini: El Angel del Barrio, New York City, and Genre Shifts”

On March 8, 1965, the United States deployed its first troops to Vietnam. A few months later, Robertino—a young Italian American living in New York City’s El Barrio Latino—was also sent to war. While the deployment of young men that year was common, what makes Robertino’s case remarkable is that he is a fictional character in Mini: El Ángel del Barrio, a radionovela written by Cuban exile María Julia Casanova and broadcast on New York’s Spanish-language radio station WHOM. The inclusion of such a politically and socially charged storyline is notable, given that Latin American radionovelas of the time—despite addressing class differences and tensions between modernity and tradition—typically avoided overtly political themes.
Relying on Edward Soja’s (1996) theorization of secondspace as an imagined representation of a space that is discursively produced (p. 67), this paper examines how New York City is envisioned in Mini: El Ángel del Barrio. Through a close reading of the radionovela’s portrayal of the city’s social, cultural, and political dynamics during the 1960s, I argue that Casanova developed a space for storylines that were previously absent from Cuban and Latin American radionovelas and telenovelas. The author’s geographic location (the United States), the target audience (Spanish-speaking listeners in New York), and broader thematic changes in the U.S. soap opera genre since the early 1960s, likely shaped the themes in the radionovela. Although Mini retains elements of the radionovela/telenovela rosa cubana, it brought significant thematic innovation. The author and audience’s geographical place was a key factor behind these transformations.

• Catherine L. Benamou (University of California-Irvine, chair and moderator), “Latinx Mediamakers Look South: New Initiatives in the Age of Disrupted Migration”

This paper will explore the ways in which independent Latinx filmmakers, independent film exhibitors, Spanish-language television, and low power radio stations have variously worked to articulate transnational relations while messaging Latinx communities located mainly in the U.S. The first portion of the paper will draw on interviews conducted with two filmmakers, Peruvian-American Alex Rivera and Chilean-American Cecilia Cornejo, who, through empathetic relations with Mexican migrants, have created films that speak to the disruption of Latinx communities by U.S. immigration enforcement and effectively facilitate crossborder communication. Special emphasis is placed on the filmmakers’ foregrounding of translocal ties. Then, a conversation with Carlos Gutiérrez, co-founder and executive director of the nonprofit exhibition project Cinema Tropical, will provide insight into how independent exhibition and promotion of Latin American and Latinx-directed films can open channels for transnational circulation and awareness of socially committed cinema that are often stymied by the difficulty of access to studio distribution and the uneven, selective exposure granted by commercial streamers. The last portion of the paper draws upon field research conducted in the Los Angeles metropolitan area to analyze news coverage by local Spanish-language television stations (Telemundo 52 and KMEX34) of immigration enforcement and protests, thereby facilitating awareness of ICE tactics, the legal and political response, and individual and collective acts of resilience. I close with a consideration of how low-power bilingual radio, in the example of Radio Santa Ana in Orange County, expands coverage of the local Latinx community while building transnational ties to communities inside Mexico.