ABSTRACT
Latin America was the first large region of the world to be controlled by European invaders. The search for intellectual independence has led in many directions, from the reconsideration of the local past in Octavio Paz's famous meditation on Mexico, The Labyrinth of Solitude, to the dependency school's rethinking of the structure of the world economy. How to Read Donald Duck is at one level an empirical study of mass media content, based on a close reading of about 100 issues of Disney's comic books. Far from innocent childhood fantasy, Ariel Dorfman and Armand Mattelart show that the stories construct a world of a definite social, cultural and political character. One reason for the sense of greater social complexity noted by Garreton and Martín Hopenhayn is the multiplication of identities and the arrival of new social actors. Perhaps the most important—certainly the most difficult to fit into any of the familiar social science paradigms—is the Latin American women's movement.
