Juan Pinon

Language and cultural identity in the new configuration of the US Latino TV industry

The gained visibility of US Latina/os as the largest social minority has resulted in the explosive growth of new media institutions within the television industry targeting Latina/ os as never seen before. Even though Spanish-language television corporations are growing and are consolidating their presence in the television landscape, the enthusiasm for the Hispanic market has opened the door for new players, such as new Spanish- and English-language Latino television networks and the incursion of mainstream and global television corporations. In this article we analyze and categorize the new configurations of the Latino-oriented television industry where language and Latina/o identity are a key source of symbolic capital for the national, regional and global players investing in this industry.

The Unexplored Challenges of Television Distribution: The Case of Azteca America

The goal of the Azteca America television network, a new arrival within the U.S. Latino field, has challenged the long-standing duopoly held by Univision and Telemundo. Because the Azteca network was launched with a limited coverage of 18 percent of U.S. Hispanic households, its economic viability depended on the expansion of its coverage through co-opting TV affiliates. The dynamics of television programming distribution remain largely understudied by media studies. The author argues that the site of distribution is a structured space that not only defines the access and future success of newcomers in the television business but also demonstrates the institutional culture and business practices in which televisual media represent acquired economic value. At the core of Azteca America’s corporate distribution efforts to reach nationwide coverage lies a process of making the network attractive and valuable to future TV station affiliates, advertising agencies, and corporate clients. The way executives add economic value by deploying Mexicanness by means of the hybrid Azteca America identity and the network institutional business culture allows for the interrogation of longstanding assumptions held by media professionals about the Hispanic market, the U.S. Spanish-language television industry, and its constituency, the Latino audience.

Reglocalization and the rise of the network cities media system in producing telenovelas for hemispheric audiences

In the context of a new economy and the new international cultural division of labor, we must recognize emerging globalization processes, triggered by the rise of a network cities media system in telenovela production comprising by the axis of Miami, Bogota, Mexico. This system has created an economic-socio-cultural production template I term reglocalization within the Spanish-language television industry. Reglocalization is a process through which Latinidad is re-crafted for regional/global consumption, through notions of traveling narratives, multinational settings, and multicultural castings, and transnational co-production agreements in which local entities produce a hybrid version of the region that includes a commodified production of a hemispheric Latinidad for global consumption.

A multilayered transnational broadcasting television industry: The case of Latin America

The transformation of the U.S. Hispanic and Latin American television industrial landscape is slowly reshaping the composition of interregional programming flows, with an increasing presence of transnational corporations competing in different modalities in national markets. While long-standing dominant Latin American media corporations still hold a disproportionately hegemonic position in their domestic markets, the production of culturally proximate products is no longer the prerogative of national networks. The transnational invites us to reflect on the new sets of collaborations and transnational industrial structures of production, distribution, exhibition, and consumption resulting from the interrelated institutional relationships among television corporations across the region.

Webnovelas: Branding Interactivity in Hispanic TV

The Latino television industry has transformed in order to adapt to a new technological environment, and such changes have had a deep impact on their long-standing strategies of production, marketing, distribution, and consumption of media commodities. Because of changing demographics, such companies have moved to reach new audiences. Given the technological sophistication of those audiences, corporations that sell televisual goods have put branding at the forefront. Webnovelas have become a powerful techno-cultural device that achieves the dual goal of becoming a preferred site for brand entertainment through sponsorship, while at the same time triggering audiences interaction in different mobile platforms producing data over audiences conceived as more “valuable consumers.” Through data available to companies via audience interaction, these preferred audiences are even more susceptible to further commercial exploitation.