ABSTRACT
The circulation of cultural and media products and the social conditions that allow or encourage it among countries in the region, is a most relevant topic in current Inter American media scholarship. Regional film flows within Latin America have usually very significant, except in the late 1930s and early 1940s, when Mexican films were widely exported to most Latin American countries. The flow of television programs and other audio-visual products from Latin America to the United States could also be considered an example of an audio-visual counter-flow. One of the most successful television contents in these three Spanish-language networks in the United States is without a doubt the telenovela, a genre dependent on three elements: its industrial production, its intertextuality and the expectations of its audience. The case of Canada, a market with strong cultural and linguistic similarities to the United States, illustrates precisely the strength of this cultural discount hypothesis.
