ABSTRACT
In social sciences and humanities, “popular” is inevitably linked with a certain dimension of the subaltern – or better, the subalternized. Always used as an adjective, “popular” is qualified by its absences: the dominant, the official, the cult, and the highbrow. In Latin America, to speak of cultura, popular has almost always been about speaking of something more: to speak of practices and representations that are, or could be, outside of mass media; outside of the simple reference to mass culture; and understood as the multiple modes in which symbolic goods are produced, circulated, and consumed with the mediation of the – especially electronic – cultural industries. Long into the 20th century, the rural population was more important in Latin America than in the Anglo-Saxon world. Following Peter Burke’s unparalleled study the importance of the rural was critical to the construction of the very category of popular culture.
