Friday December 5, 2025 | 9:00AM – 10:45AM

Greenleaf Conference Room  (1st Floor, Jones Hall)

• Juan Llamas-Rodríguez (University of Pennsylvania), “Poder Prieto, Racial Activism, and Streaming Platforms in Mexico”

Poder Prieto was an online campaign and social movement aimed at showcasing and advocating for Mexican artists of color. Following an international groundswell to address racial injustice through the #BlackLivesMatter movement, in summer 2021 the Poder Prieto collective began posting educational videos on YouTube about how racism pervades popular culture in Mexico. Several of the movement’s campaigns were spearheaded by actors, such as Tenoch Huerta and Maya Zapata, known for starring in original series for Netflix and Amazon Prime.

In this paper, I analyze the emergence and decline of Poder Prieto in relation to the affordances and limitations of streaming media as viable platforms to engage in racial equity activism. First, through close textual analysis, I examine the educational content created by the campaign leaders, particularly how they negotiate between media critique and advocacy work on behalf of creatives of color. Second, I use discourse analysis to explore the social media attacks on individual celebrities as representatives for the movement and the broader public resistance to address social disparities as racial hierarchies. Examining the fragmentary successes of Poder Prieto illuminates the negotiations of digital media usage in racial equity struggles: (1) how streaming series offer opportunities for artists of color historically excluded from the telenovelas of legacy media titans (e.g. Televisa) while stereotypical depictions and racial hierarchies persist; and (2) how user-generated content both allows social campaigns to instigate peer-to-peer conversations and offers new avenues for reactionary backlash and harassment.

• Luisela Alvaray (DePaul University), “Latin American Stories for the World: Producing for Streamers”

In the 1990s, scholars like Arjun Appadurai and John Tomlinson and Robert Stam and Ella Shohat anticipated the deterritorialization of culture through emerging media technologies. Today, streaming platforms have brought these visions to life, distributing multidirectional audiovisual content across borders. Latin American creators are capitalizing on this shift: in 2022, HBO pledged 100 regional shows over two years, and by mid-2023, Netflix had funded over 350. Local services like Brazil’s Globoplay and Mexico’s Vix also compete through original content.

This project investigates how corporate strategy and market forces have elevated regional production houses like Colombia’s Dynamo. Founded in Bogotá in 2006, Dynamo now operates in Madrid, Mexico City, and New York. Since 2014, Netflix and other streamers have fueled growth in Latin American content, with Netflix opening a Bogotá office in 2021 after successful partnerships with local producers. I will analyze how transnational investments, co-production models, and national regulations have shaped Dynamo’s trajectory.

Key questions include: How extensive are Dynamo’s partnerships with U.S.-based streamers? Who benefits from these collaborations? Can national regulations empower local producers, or do they reinforce global hierarchies? What themes define Dynamo’s streaming-era output?

Dynamo’s notable projects—Los 33 (2015), Monos (2019), Goles en contra (2022), La cabeza de Joaquín Murrieta (2023), and Cien años de soledad (2025)—reinterpret Latin American histories and myths for global audiences. Through interviews, archival research, and discourse analysis, this study will explore how companies like Dynamo mediate between local storytelling and global entertainment markets.

• Joaquín Serpe (Emerson College, chair and moderator), “Pop Populism: Public TV, Hipness, and intellectuals of Argentina´s Cultural Wars”

Cristina Kirchner’s administration (2007-2015) strongly invested in new media technology and content as part of her confrontation with Argentine corporate media, which persistently attacked the government’s progressive economic and social agenda. One of the landmarks of this era was Mentira la verdad (Truth Lies or MLV), a public broadcasting show dedicated to disseminate Western philosophical thought and to persuade its audience of the righteousness of Kirchner’s policies. With a total of 5 seasons, MLV not only was one of the most popular publicly-funded programs, it also launched the career of its host, the young philosopher Darío Sztajnszrajber (pronounced shtein-shraiber).

In this paper, I place Sztajnszrajber within Argentina’s larger history of television intellectuals. I claim that MLV and Sztajnszrajber are paradigmatic of the Kirchner government effort to transform the relationship between intellectuals and the Argentine public. I analyze the celebrity traits fostered by Sztajsznrajber to appeal to a more popular taste and to build parasocial relations with his audience. Furthermore, I analyze the style and discourse of MLV, a show that repeatedly promotes a message of inclusion and acceptance of “the Other,” while, paradoxically, working according to a divisive populist logic, in line with the government’s political strategy. Ultimately, I show how Sztajsznrajber’s public persona and his show foreshadows the style and tone of platform-based content creators in the contemporary global struggle between progressive and reactionary forces.

• Julia Nava (University of California, Irvine), “Transborder Piracies: An Exploration of Pirate Internet Television Protocol Services and Latinx Communities”

Pirated media has played a significant role in making media more accessible. Traditional methods of media piracy distribution, such as pirated VHS and DVD vendors, have historically relied on localized, in person exchanges. The development of the internet and digital technologies, however, have enabled new methods of piracy distribution and consumption, circumventing traditional, place-based modes of distribution.
In this paper, I explore the consumption of unauthorized Internet Protocol Television (IPTV) services by Mexican-American communities in East Los Angeles. Pirated IPTV allows users to access live television broadcasts and video content without authorized licensing agreements. Relying on participant observation, I argue that unauthorized IPTV has not only changed media piracy distribution models and made media more accessible worldwide, but have also facilitated the digitization of the diasporic bootleg. Lucas Hilderbrand defines the diasporic bootleg pirated media that keeps consumers connected to contemporary media from their home countries (Hilderbrand, 30). IPTV similarly serves as a tool for connecting diasporic, immigrant communities to their distant communities by providing access to hyperlocal and geographically limited media from their home countries at an affordable price compared to sanctioned streaming platforms like Netflix and Televisa’s ViX. This paper contributes to the field of Latinx media studies by analyzing pirated IPTV services as a socially and culturally significant tool for the formation of a diasporic Latinidad.