ABSTRACT
Since the end of the twentieth century, cultural studies has spread in the Americas, first via the Atlantic and then radiating north to south, announcing a series of epistemic and methodological transformations in the study of culture. As a reaction to elitist conceptions of art and culture, the Birmingham researchers locate the popular classes—and in particular the English proletariat—at the center of their field of analysis. At least in its early stages, the irreverent expansion of cultural studies clearly imposed upon disciplinary fields, whose already blurred boundaries were opening in order to give way to new phenomena that were impossible to take on within the protocols of knowledge established in the nineteenth century. There is no doubt that the tradition of cultural study constructs and consolidates the criollo archive, the heritage of knowledge, and fundamental analyses of Latin American cultural history elaborated from within the region.
