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V.17 - Nº 3 set./dez. 2023 São Paulo - Brasil SIMONSON | POOLEY | PARK p. 189-216 189
DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.11606/issn.1982-8160.v17i3p189-216
189
The history of communication studies
across the Americas: A view from
the United States
A história dos estudos de comunicação
nas Américas: uma visão dos Estados Unidos
PETER SIMONSONa
University of Colorado Boulder. Boulder, CO – USA
JEFFERSON POOLEYb
Muhlenberg College. Allentown, PA – USA
DAVID PARKc
Lake Forest College. Lake Forest, IL – USA
ABSTRACT
is essay reects on the potential for scholarship that sensitively treats the histories of
media and communication research across the Americas. Writing from the contexts of
U.S. communication studies, we begin by reexively considering some of the bases of U.S.
hegemony within the history and historiography of the eld. We suggest the importance
of work that provincializes and decenters the U.S. and also traces transnational ows
and cross-regional dynamics that have constituted communication studies in all its
versions across the Americas. We then illustrate what a transnational history of U.S.-
Latin American entanglements might resemble, oering a provisional periodization
from the early twentieth century to the present.
Keywords: Transnational history of communication research, the Americas, geopolitics,
knowledge dynamics
RESUMO
Este ensaio reete sobre o potencial de estudos que tratem com sensibilidade as
histórias da pesquisa em mídia e comunicação nas Américas. Iniciando a escrita
a partir dos contextos dos estudos de comunicação dos EUA, reetimos sobre
algumas das bases da hegemonia norte-americana na história e historiograa desse
campo. Destacamos a importância do trabalho que, por um lado, descentraliza e
a Professor Emeritus,
Department of
Communication, University of
Colorado Boulder, USA. Orcid:
https://orcid.org/0000-0001-
7156-467X. E-mail: peter.
simonson@colorado.edu
b Professor of Media &
Communication, Muhlenberg
College, USA. Orcid: https://
orcid.org/0000-0002-3674-
1930. E-mail: pooley@
muhlenberg.edu
c Professor of Communication,
Lake Forest College, USA.
Orcid: https://orcid.org/0000-
0001-7019-1525. E-mail: park@
lfc.edu
V.17 - Nº 3 set./dez. 2023 São Paulo - Brasil SIMONSON | POOLEY | PARK p. 189-216190
A história dos estudos de comunicação nas Américas
coloca em perspectiva os EUA e, por outro, mapeia os uxos transnacionais e as
dinâmicas inter-regionais que moldaram os estudos de comunicação em todas
as suas variações nas Américas. Em seguida, exemplicamos como poderia ser
uma história transnacional das relações entre EUA e América Latina, fornecendo
uma periodização preliminar desde o início do século XX até os dias atuais.
Palavras-chave: história transnacional da pesquisa em comunicação, Américas,
geopolítica, dinâmica do conhecimento
WILLIAM F. EADIE’S (2022) recent book, When Communication
Became a Discipline, tracks the emergence of U.S. communication
research. Eadie, however, never specifies the geographic scope
of his history: the object of the book is the discipline of communication.
It is easy enough to pick up that he is writing about the U.S. and nowhere
else—that the “we” the book addresses is fellow U.S. scholars. Still, there is
something jarring about the definite article (“the discipline”) in a study that
so relentlessly localizes its coverage. The project’s stated scope is universal,
but the history itself is provincial.
When Communication Became a Discipline is, of course, no outlier. It is
merely the most recent affirmation of a patterned framing unique to writing on
the history of U.S. media and communication studies. That historiography has
been built on systemic erasures of other traditions around the world, as well as
internal erasures of the contributions made by women, members of minoritized
groups, and lower-prestige institutions in the U.S. Those erasures are in turn
reflections of much broader ideological and geopolitical dynamics that have
favored well-placed white men in the United States, confident in their rights
to benefit from the labor of Others within the hegemonic orders of unearned
privilege they were born into.
The limitations of these unmarked, U.S.-centric stories are well known to
those in other areas of the world, particularly in Latin America. Not only do
they erase the robust traditions of communication studies in the region but they
are also part of a too-familiar geopolitical pattern of U.S. attempts to control the
region while remaining blithely unaware of the cultures and peoples who live
in it. As authors, we are attentive to these patterns, even as we are concerned
about unintentionally reproducing them in our own work.
In this essay, we propose to repurpose the definite article of Eadie’s book.
The urgent task for historians of U.S. communication studies is to provincialize
and particularize the field as it has developed in that country and situate it
within international movements of ideas, institutions, and people that have
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constituted the field globally. We believe that working with a pan-American
frame is a particularly promising piece of that broader project, one that allows
us to investigate South-North entanglements within the hemisphere. That is a
large, multi-dimensional project that calls for new international collaborations.
We need much more careful primary research, as well as efforts to connect
pieces of the story that exist in the current literature. The aim is not some
kind of new master narrative but rather a pluralistic collection of stories that
reflect both South-North entanglements and the particularities of the different
locations that each of us inhabits. With this essay, we hope to contribute to
that larger effort.
Writing from the contexts of U.S. communication studies, we begin
by reflexively considering some of the bases of U.S. hegemony within the
history and historiography of the field. That sort of reflection, which Latin
American critical scholars have been doing since the late 1960s, is an essential
part of the project, which in full form would call for a historical sociology of
knowledge analyzing the dynamics that produced the unmarked universalism
that has characterized the field and its histories in our country. The project
would also call for intensive investigation of lines of exclusion around race,
gender/sexuality, indigeneity, language, and geopolitical location that have
marked the field in all of its national manifestations, most certainly including
the U.S. A recently published special section of the journal we edit, History
of Media Studies, is part of our efforts to do this sort of critical reflective
work (Simonson et al., 2022a, 2022b). The first section of this essay is an
extension of that project.
The second broad task is reconstructive: writing new histories that, on
the one hand, provincialize and decenter the U.S. and, on the other, trace
transnational flows and cross-regional dynamics that have constituted
communication studies in all its versions across the Americas. We return
to the need for new collaborations, which are represented in this issue of
MATRIZes and in the parallel special sections in Comunicación y Sociedad
(Mexico) and History of Media Studies (the U.S.). Our contribution to that
effort involves exploring what a history of communication studies might
look like if it focused on transnational entanglements between the U.S. and
Latin America. That project carries risks associated with the long history
of U.S. imperialism beyond our southern border. We acknowledge and try
to address them directly while doing two kinds of reconstructive work:
1. offering a heuristic for investigating the transnational forces that have
produced the field over time and 2. using it to sketch three historical eras
of Latin American-U.S. entanglement from the early twentieth century to
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A história dos estudos de comunicação nas Américas
the present. Our accounts of those three eras cannot be exhaustive but we
hope they are illustrative of the potential of a transnational frame across
the Americas.
U.S. HEGEMONY FROM WITHIN
For more than one hundred years, the U.S. literature has rested on an
audacious conflation of the national tradition with that of the world. As a matter
of unquestioned routine, books and articles on U.S.-specific developments
were cast as the history of media and communication studies
1
. Even critics
of triumphalist accounts, such as William Eadie’s, have tended to leave their
counter-stories unmarked2.
The U.S. historiography’s masked particularity is a reflection, more or less,
of the same thought-style in the U.S. field itself—at least since the World War II
era—embrace of the “communication research” label and the subsequent (and
multi-stranded) institutionalization of the field. As the published historiography
unwittingly documents, U.S. communication scholars have tended to describe
their findings in universal terms and to treat their fellow U.S. colleagues as their
only significant peers.
A more speculative point (one that can be neither drawn out nor defended
here) is that the arrogant universalism of the U.S. discipline was itself conditioned
by the hegemony of the postwar United States. In a striking echo of the U.S.
share of the global economy at the time, more than half of the world’s social
scientists were based in the U.S. in the early postwar period. As discussed
briefly below, an elite cadre of U.S. communication researchers—most of whom
identified with mainline social science disciplines—helped form a forward
position in the early Cold War. Historians of social science have repeatedly
stressed the postwar blend of collective self-confidence, professed objectivity,
and international evangelism that characterized U.S. social scientists in this
period, especially self-identified members of the behavioral sciences vanguard
(Heyck, 2015). The point is that the geopolitical position of the country as an
unrivaled “free world” hegemon was reflected in its enormous and well-funded
university system. The penchant of U.S. scholars—within communication
and beyond—to universalize their particulars was, in this period at least,
underwritten by Pax Americana.
Seen in this light, the embrace of the definite article by historians of U.S.
communication research is a kind of double echo—of the affluent hubris
of the field, itself predicated on that of the country. This reading helps to
explain, at least, the peculiar global imaginary at play in much of the published
1 Jesse Delia’s (1987) inuential
account, published in e
Handbook of Communication
Science and among the rst
to lay synoptic claim to the
whole “communication” eld,
illustrates the point: a universal
title with a near-exclusive focus
on the particular U.S. case.
Likewise for Everett Rogers’s
(1994) widely cited book-
length account.
2 Todd Gitlin (1978), for
example, gave his critique of
mid-century media sociology
at the Bureau of Applied Social
Research an unmodied,
geography-free title: “Media
Sociology: e Dominant
Paradigm.” Likewise with
Christopher Simpson’s (1994)
exposé of U.S. Cold War
communication research.
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literature, which mixes indifference with imperialism. The indifference is
more straightforward: the U.S. case is treated as a center with no periphery.
It is far simpler to conflate the nation with the world if there is no world to
speak of. Our view, though, is that this insularity, almost willful in character, is
predicated on and continues to be sustained by the implied overspread of the
U.S. model. There is an unstated presumption in the historiography, in other
words, that all the significant developments occurred in the United States,
so much so that the international story is one of emanation. In one strand
of the literature, that means the travels and adventures of Wilbur Schramm
(e.g., McAnany, 2012). Either way, the unarticulated belief is that the action
that mattered—the bits worth writing down—happened in the U.S. first, then
diffused around the world. If we are right, this shared imaginary has licensed a
lack of interest in, and outright ignorance of, the rest of the world—including
Latin America.
U.S-LATIN AMERICA ENTANGLEMENTS: TOWARD A HISTORY
As Maria Löblich and Stefanie Averbeck-Lietz (2016) write, “transnational
connections have been a part of Communication Studies since its beginnings”
(p.25). Those connections have often been made invisible by the national
frames within which much of the history of the field has been written—some
but not all of which is connected with postwar U.S. hegemony. The result
has been an unbalanced pattern of recognizing South-North entanglements
in the Americas. Latin America is nearly invisible in the U.S.-focused
literature, as ignominiously reflected in the “American” shorthand for the
United States
3
. Outside the field of development communication, it has
been rare for historical accounts of the field in the U.S. to acknowledge the
significance of engagements with Latin America or to discuss traditions
across the regions comparatively. U.S. approaches, by contrast, loom large in
the growing English-language scholarship on the history of Latin American
communication research, often tracked as an explicit foil in the development
of homegrown alternatives.
Here we ask what would be required to write a fuller history of the
entanglements of U.S. and Latin American communication studies. We raise
that question cognizant of the troubled colonial origins of the term “Latin
America,” its connections to a southward facing version of U.S. imperialism,
and the heterogeneity of a vast region with more than 600million people
and 20 modern countries (Fuentes-Navarro, 2016, p.338). We proceed in
this direction in part because the label “Latin America/América Latina”
3 Of course even “the United
States” is a linguistic land
grab given the ocial
names of México and Brasil.
Nevertheless we have, for want
of a good alternative, invoked
“United States” and “U.S.” as
shorthands in this paper.
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A história dos estudos de comunicação nas Américas
has done important work in transnational discourses of communication
research since at least the 1930s, deployed by outsiders and insiders alike.
We take the connections of the region to U.S. imperialism to be a crucial
historical conjuncture that needs to be surfaced further—particularly for
those working in the U.S. And we understand coloniality to be a condition
of communication studies across the Americas which, while not the main
focus of our essay, is in need of concerted critical scrutiny of the sort Erick
Torrico (2016a, 2018) and other Latin American scholars have been giving
it over the last decade.
Drawing upon sociological approaches to the history of communication
studies (e.g., Fuentes-Navarro, 1998; Löblich & Scheu, 2011) and programmatic
statements toward a transnational history of the social sciences (esp. Heilbron et
al., 2008), we suggest the heuristic of ideas, institutions, people, and socio-political
contexts as a productive overarching framework for investigating the history of
the field across the Americas. We mean each of the four broadly. Ideas traverse
the socio-cognitive intellectual domain of theories, paradigms, concepts,
and methods, as well as the socio-material array of published books, articles,
technologies of investigation, pedagogical practices, organized initiatives
(applied research), and the embodied use, reception, and translation of them as
they cross borders and take form in particular contexts. Institutions range from
governmental agencies, international organizations, and private foundations
to professional associations, universities, departments, publishing houses,
journals, and the invisible colleges they structure. People, in turn, refer to the
scholars, students, support personnel, and other actors who help produce
ideas and institutions and are in part produced through them. Socio-political
contexts, finally, encompass all the ways that broader societal dynamics have
shaped the field of communication studies—e.g., dominant and counter-
hegemonic ideologies, hierarchies of power and privilege, geopolitical dramas
of nation-states and their allies, social and cultural movements, and structures
of feeling that shape particular historical moments. The four overarching
categories are, of course, interrelated, as are the phenomena suggested by
each of them, a reflection of the tangled complexities of academic fields as
historical phenomena.
Thinking in a specifically transnational way about the nexus of U.S. and
Latin American communication research means conceiving of various contact
zones, in which ideas, institutions, and people from different nations engage
with one another in consequential ways. While these contact zones may be
geographically located within one nation, they are shaped by sociopolitical
contexts that transcend that location. Among the phenomena of interest
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within a transnational frame are texts that circulate across borders, graduate
students pursuing degrees in foreign countries, international gatherings and
professional associations, cross-border initiatives supported by governments
and private foundations, multinational publishers and ranking systems,
and local intellectual thought-styles that take shape in relation to perceived
alternatives associated with other regions. One of the challenges is to take
up a truly communicative understanding of these multifarious phenomena
and contact zones, one that recognizes the dynamism of encounter and the
multiple forms that can take.
If the four-fold heuristic might guide inquiry in one way, then a broad
periodization can add a second organizing axis. Latin American scholars
have offered several historical periodizations for the field within the region
(e.g., Marques de Melo, 2011b; Torrico, 2016b). A transnational frame
may overlap with them but it also looks for the significant eras of South-
North entanglement. As a starting point for further inquiry, we suggest
three eras. 1. A long early period, running from the first decades of the
twentieth century through the mid-1960s, which was initially based on
exchanges around journalism education and research before encompassing
mass communication and public opinion research from the 1930s forward
(our main attention in this essay). In this period, shaped by World War II and
U.S. efforts to exert hegemony during the Cold War, communication research
was institutionalized—first in the United States and then, in embryonic
form, in Latin America. 2. A dynamic middle period, spanning from the
late 1960s to the early 1990s, marked sociopolitically by New Lefts across
both regions, pitched battles about paradigms and methods, the increased
movement of people and contacts across borders, and meaningful intellectual
exchanges mediated through English-language scholarship. This period
witnesses a deeper but still incomplete institutionalization of the field in
Latin America and its rapid expansion and pluralization in the United
States. 3. A still-unfolding recent period running from the mid-1990s to
the present and characterized by accelerated processes of globalization,
neoliberalism, sub-disciplinary specialization, U.S.-inflected versions of
professionalism, and, in the past two decades, expanded critical consciousness
about neo-colonial forms of domination in world knowledge systems. This
period also sees a full, widespread institutionalization of communication
studies across Latin America organized through an extensive Spanish- and
Portuguese-language scholarly system that faces challenges from new forces
of English-languagedomination.
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Parallels and incursions: Early Twentieth Century through the Mid-1960s
In the early decades of the twentieth century, the study of media and
communication was scattered and un-disciplined. This was as true for the
United States as for Latin American countries. In both places, a decade or two
earlier in the U.S., journalism was introduced to the university, though unevenly,
through courses, professorships, or (in fewer cases) standalone schools devoted
to training reporters. Up and down the hemisphere the pattern seems to have
been similar: a sprinkling of university-based initiatives, slowly accreting and
serviced by a thin overlay of studies on press history, law, and ethics
4
. Journalism
education and scholarship developed in rough parallel in the U.S. and Latin
America, with few prominent lines of engagement or cross-continental influence
registered in the secondary literature5.
That would soon change. Communication research, so-named, was
established in the U.S. first in the lead up to World War II. The sociologists,
political scientists, and social psychologists who started calling themselves
“communication researchers” were initially brought together by the Rockefeller
Foundation6. Tellingly, one of the very first deployments of the newly named
field was to Latin America in the form of a vast and clandestine polling operation
under the auspices of Nelson Rockefeller’s Office of the Coordinator of Inter-
American Affairs. Partly funded by the family’s foundation and led by psychologist
Hadley Cantril—Nelson’s former Ivy League roommate—the secret, region-wide
campaign was used to guide policy and propaganda to secure Latin Americans’
loyalty to the Allied cause (Cramer & Prutsch, 2006; Navarro & Ortiz Garza,
2020; Ortiz Garza, 2012). At its moment of birth, then, the U.S. field served as
a mid-twentieth century extension of the Monroe Doctrine. Communication
research was, in this signal moment, knowledge about Latin America for U.S.
elites, extracted under false pretenses7.
That one-way, top-down deployment of U.S. communication research
to Latin America was reprised, at moments that remain under-developed
in the literature, in the early decades of the Cold War. One example will
have to stand in for the others, a fitting one: Hadley Cantril, this time
with private Nelson Rockefeller funds, used the same secretive approach
to gauge Cuban opinion in the tense aftermath of the 1959 revolution. In
1960, Cantril’s research shop conducted a clandestine survey on the island,
whose real purpose was buried by innocuous-seeming questions, with the
explicit aim—as in 1940—to inform White House policy (Cantril, 1967,
pp.1-5)
8
. The point to emphasize is that postwar U.S. communication
research co-evolved with the Cold War national security state—an alliance
that, to a large extent, revolved around a shared campaign to secure “Third
4 On the U.S. case, see Carey
(1979) and Folkerts (2014);
andfor Latin American
countries, Nixon (1982),
Moreira & Lago (2017), and
Islas & Arribas (2010, pp.4-5).
5 See, for example, Daros &
Rüdiger (2022) on the muted
Brazilian reception of U.S.
journalism and journalism
education models from the
1940s through the early 1960s.
Gómez-Palacio (1989, p.41)
reports, however, that the
rst journalism school in the
region, in Argentina, was
founded with help from the
Columbia Journalism School.
6 e Rockefeller Foundation
had already assembled many
of the gures who would,
from 1940 on, occupy the new
forward position of the eld in
the war eort by the mid-1930s
with the aim to use new polling
methods to boost educational
radio. With the outbreak of war
in Europe, the foundation in
eect repurposed its network
and infrastructure to serve the
Allied propaganda cause before
the formal U.S. entry into the
war. See Gary (1996), Buxton
(1994), and—for a Latin
America-centered Rockefeller
radio project in the late
1930s—Cramer (2009).
7 As José Luis Ortiz Garza
and others have shown, the
Cantril operation le behind
a signicant, if checkered,
history in México. See Ortiz
Garza (2007); Moreno &
Sánchez-Castro (2009); and,
for the Brazilian case, Tota
(2009, pp.23-57); and Vassallo
de Lopes & Romancini (2016,
p.351).
8 Cantril (1967, p.2) noted that
the study, “of course, could not
include any direct questions
and utilized entirely what
technicians call open-ended
questions, questions worded
indirectly in such a way that
very few people would refuse to
answer them.”
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World” hearts-and-minds, in Latin America and around the non-aligned
globe (Pooley, 2008).
Still, it is important to place the cloak-and-dagger pattern—the “psychological
warfare” of U.S. communication research targeting Latin America—in broader
relief. Without denying the constitutive significance of the Cold War, it is
possible to add an overlapping but more complicated narrative—one that was
arguably more important to the postwar relationship between U.S. and Latin
American communication research. Here we refer to the overt attempt to export
the U.S. model to Latin America, most notably with the 1959 establishment of
the Centro Internacional de Estudios Superiores de Periodismo para América
Latina (CIESPAL).
To briefly reprise this second story—the front-stage counterpart to the
backstage skullduggery—we return to World War II, when newly christened
U.S. communication researchers came to populate an array of federal agencies
centered on propaganda and morale. One of those figures, the literature scholar
Wilbur Schramm, saw an opportunity. During and after the war he enlisted
research-friendly faculty at a handful of prominent journalism schools with the
self-conscious aim to institutionalize, as a doctorate-granting discipline, what had
been an interdisciplinary crossroads. By the mid-1950s Schramm’s march through
the journalism schools was well underway. The new intellectual coordinates
of the discipline were, crucially, aligned with the broader behavioral sciences
movement, underwritten by the big foundation and national security agencies.
Like other behavioral scientists, communication scholars in the Schramm
mold were for science and against socialism. In the mid- to late 1950s, they
jointly produced a new, activist literature on “modernization,” predicated on the
conviction that economic growth and communications infrastructure would
inoculate the “Third World”—Latin America very much included—against the
Soviet scourge (Gilman, 2003; Latham, 2000). In Schramm’s influential framing,
communication research was part of this project as well. As he said at a UNESCO
gathering in Santiago, Chile, in 1961, “just as mass media development is an
essential part of economic development, so is mass communication research
essential for the swiftest and most efficient development of the mass media”
(Schramm, 1960, p.7).
This modernization literature was an important backdrop to the 1959
founding of CIESPAL, in Ecuador
9
. Though established by UNESCO, in its
initial years the center was also funded by the Organization of American States
and the Ford Foundation. CIESPAL’s mission, and to some extent its operation,
centered on journalism—hence the Periodismo in its name and in keeping with
UNESCO’s mid- to late-1950s journalism initiative of which it was a part.
9 ere is a large literature
on CIESPAL and the Latin
American eld. See Daros
(2023); Feliciano (1988);
Marques de Melo (2011a);
Meditsch (2021); Aragão
(2017); and Ruiz (2010).
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CIESPAL was predicated on the same productive slippage from journalism
to communication that had characterized the U.S. discipline for over a
decade. This was no surprise: for its inaugural half-decade, the center was
something like a U.S. outpost. Its publishing program was largely devoted
to translations of U.S. “classics”; most of its rotating faculty hailed from the
U.S.; and its curriculum was unambiguously set in the behavioral sciences
key (Daros, 2023, pp.109-111; Day, 1966; Gómez-Palacio, 1989, pp.26–29,
p.164; Marques de Melo, 1988, p.409; Meditsch, 2021, p.128). European
scholars and approaches were important too, even in CIESPAL’s early years,
but they were plainly secondary to the U.S. model (Marques de Melo, 1983a,
pp.182-183).
It was in this early 1960s period, after the 1959 Cuban revolution re-
oriented the attention of Washington southward, that large numbers of Latin
Americans began taking degrees in the U.S (Gómez-Palacio, 1989, pp.26-28)10.
Michigan State, Wisconsin, and Stanford were especially common sites for
study, and all three universities retained ties to the region over subsequent
decades
11
. CIESPAL’s early research agenda was largely oriented to development
studies set within the modernization framework, supplemented by comparative
studies of the news outlets in the region. U.S. scholars were front and center
in this work, prominent among them Raymond Nixon, the University of
Minnesota journalism scholar who was, at the time, serving as president of the
UNESCO-sponsored International Association of Media and Communication
Research (IAMCR). Michigan State’s Paul Deutschmann led a major CIESPAL
modernization study; his Michigan State colleague Everett Rogers continued
the work, focused on the diffusion of agricultural “innovations” (Beltrán,
1993, pp.12-14; Fuentes-Navarro, 2005). The imported U.S. approach was
development communication in a double sense: it was designed to aid Latin
American modernization, but also—and this was among CIESPAL’s orienting
goals—to diffuse the U.S. discipline itself.
That disciplinary project succeeded in a qualified way. The remit of existing
Latin American journalism schools was, as in the U.S. before, broadened to include
communication research—and a large number of new schools and departments
were established in the balance of the decade, most of them undergraduate-
only (Daros, 2023, pp.110-112; Day, 1966; Vassallo de Lopes & Romancini,
2016, pp.352-353). The institutional spread was justified, at the same time, by
the growth of television and other non-print media across the region. By all
accounts, CIESPAL was the decisive agent.
By the mid-1960s, the U.S. presence was registered across our four-
fold heuristic: people (Nixon, Deutschmann, Schramm, and Rogers), ideas
10
Luis Ramiro Beltrán and Juan
Diaz-Bordenave, for example,
both studied at Michigan
State. France was also a site of
study for a number of Latin
American scholars.
11
See, for example, Stanford’s
long entanglements in El
Salvador (Lindo-Fuentes,
2009).
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(modernization, diffusion), institutions (UNESCO, CIESPAL, the Rockefeller
Foundation) and sociopolitical contexts (World War II and the Cold War). The
argument could be made—and it soon was, repeatedly—that the U.S. import was
an alien imposition, the latest installment in long-running U.S. campaign for
hemispheric hegemony. The universalist assumptions of the U.S. model—around
the quantitative measurement of short-term, one-way persuasion—were, by the
early 1970s, exposed as masked parochialism. The people, ideas, and socio-
political context of the early CIESPAL moment gave way, but the institutions—
the re-cast journalism schools and CIESPAL itself—lived on, adapted to new
self-governed aims. The U.S. model started as a source but quickly became a
source of contrast, in a discipline soon claimed “by the Latin Americans and for
Latin America” (Marques de Melo, 1988, p.411).
Resurgent lefts and dynamic interaction in the middle period: Late 1960s
to the early 1990s
The era from the late 1960s into the early 1990s is the most vibrant in
the transnational contact zones of the communication field between Latin
America and the U.S. Pieces of this chapter of the longer story have been told,
but much work remains to be done. The key catalyst was the emergence of the
New Left, tied to social movements led by university students, workers, women,
Afrodescendants, and Indigenous peoples. Their work sometimes intersected
with national independence movements and the Non-Aligned Movement,
which sought to counterbalance the geopolitical bi-polarization of Cold War.
Those movements were fed by resurgent and often culturally focused Marxisms,
post-colonialisms, feminisms, and bottom-up forms of participatory democracy.
Among the battlefields were universities and academic fields of knowledge
production, in which radicals and reformers sought to transform the customary
ways of doing things.
This was the broad context in which dominant U.S. forms of communication
research came in for pointed critique. The story was repeated across the
social sciences and humanities, but each discipline had its particularities. In
communication studies, lines were drawn between camps that were given
various names: critical versus administrative research, cultural studies versus
mass communication research, Marxism and semiology as against behaviorism
and positivism. Ideology, hegemony, dependency, and imperialism were preferred
concepts for the critical scholars, who offered trenchant critiques of effects,
functions, modernization, and the diffusion of innovations. Paradigm battles
were fought within disciplines, departments, and national contexts, and they
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often had a generational dimension to them. They also cut transnationally and
fed the development of what by the 1990s was being called the Latin American
School/Escuela Latinoamericana12.
Several of the key intellectual figures in the forging of a Latin American
alternative to U.S. communication research had formative experiences in the
U.S. For good reasons, both epistemological and political, this is a point not
often emphasized in the historiography of Latin American communication
studies (the European contexts that shaped Eliseo Verón, Antonio Pasquali,
Armand Mattelart, and Jesús Martín-Barbero are more commonly featured).
We raise it here not as a backhanded way of re-centering the U.S. but rather to
draw attention to the social, intellectual, and institutional spaces of interaction
that helped birth a new, distinctive, and vitally important formation of
communication studies.
Consider four pioneering figures. Juan Díaz-Bordenave (1926–2012)
earned his master’s degree from the University of Wisconsin (1955) and PhD
from Michigan State (1966) and he had long experience working with U.S.-
backed development agencies (Fuentes-Navarro, 2022). Luis Ramiro Beltrán
(1930–2015) had a similar path that also included grants to study in the U.S.
in the 1950s and graduate degrees from Michigan State (MA, 1968; PhD,
1972) (Barranquero, 2014). After taking the first doctorate in the field from
a Latin American university (at the University of São Paulo), José Marques
de Melo secured a post-doctoral fellowship at the University of Wisconsin
(1973–1974). And Paulo Freire (1921–1997) had a series of significant stays
in the U.S. between 1967 and 1973. He called the first, to New York City, “an
exceedingly important visit,” in which he met impoverished African Americans
and Puerto Ricans in similar positions as the dispossessed he worked with
in Brazil and Chile (Freire, 1994/2014, p.44). We need to understand the
cross-cultural dynamics of these and similar episodes better, in a way that
does not reproduce neo-colonial patterns reifying the significance of “center”
against “periphery.”
Beltrán was an especially important figure in mediating North-South
relations in the field—among people, ideas, and institutions alike. His intellectual
biography opens into broader currents of the Latin American-U.S. interface from
the late 1960s and early 1990s. Michigan State was a key transnational locus,
particularly before there were doctoral programs in Latin America. Everett
Rogers advised his MA thesis, David Berlo, his PhD, and both would credit
him with influencing their thought (Barranquero & Ramos-Martín, 2022).
In the mid-1970s, Beltrán published in English about Spanish-language Latin
American literature that few U.S. scholars were reading. Especially important
12
e earliest uses we have
found of this label are, in
English, Chaee et al. (1990)
and, in Spanish, Marques
de Melo (1993b). Marques
de Melo seems to have been
an important popularizer of
the term, whose use in both
languages has accelerated since
2000—sometimes in the form
Latin American Critical School.
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were the groundbreaking paper he delivered to the 1974 IAMCR conference
in Leipzig and the much-cited “Alien Premises, Objects, and Methods in Latin
American Communication Research,” published in a milestone special issue
that Díaz-Bordenave also participated in, edited by Rogers and devoted to
rethinking development communication (Beltrán, 1974, 1976; Díaz-Bordenave,
1976a; Rogers, 1976).
Beltrán introduced English-language audiences to Armand Mattelart’s
(1970) blistering critique of U.S. communication research, published in the
remarkable interdisciplinary journal Cuadernos de la Realidad Nacional—
work that trailed Mattelart’s own Rockefeller Foundation grant to Chile,
and his reading of Spanish-language translations of Robert K. Merton, Paul
Lazarsfeld, Bernard Berelson, Charles Wright, and Ithiel de Sola Pool
13
. Beltrán
(1979), along with Díaz-Bordenave (1976b), also drew upon the work of
Frank Gerace, a young American influenced by Freire and working in Bolivia
and Perú. Through them, Geraces’s 1973 book Comunicación Horizontal,
published in Lima, entered the matrix of works that shaped Latin American
conceptualizations of horizontal communication as a democratic alternative
to the top-down, technocratic, Schramm-style communication theory that
fueled classic modernization efforts. Overall, Beltrán facilitated dialogues
between critical and objectivist researchers and between South and North and
he paved the way for other prominent Latin American scholars to publish in
English-language journals—something that Marques de Melo (1976, 1988,
1993a) in particular would influentially do.
Institutionally, Beltrán’s participation in IAMCR congresses pointed to a group
of Latin Americans who found space there before the establishment of ALAIC
(Asociación Latinoamericana de Investigadores de la Comunicación, est. 1978)
or FELAFACS (Federación Latinoamericana de Facultades de Comunicación,
est. 1981). IAMCR was active in the region and held its semi-annual conferences
in Buenos Aires in 1972 and Caracas in 1980 (Cimadevilla, 2021; Roncagliolo
& Villanueva-Mansilla, 2023). The International Communication Association
(ICA) would also meet in Acapulco in 1980, providing another structured
site for South-North interchange, albeit one built upon the norms of a U.S.
professional organization.
The larger contexts of the 1970s and ‘80s for Beltrán and others included
the discipline’s institutionalization in Latin America and collective efforts to
build forms of socially engaged thought indigenous to the region. The main
currents of this history have often been told, though they remain unknown
to most U.S. scholars. The roots for a Latin American social science, one
generated within and for the region, date back to the late 1940s, and in the
13
On Mattelart in Chile, see
Zarowsky (2013). On the
history of modernization-
related and critical
communication research in
Chile from the 1950s through
the 1970s, see Davies (1999).
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1960s they were unintentionally strengthened by a US counter-revolutionary
modernization initiative, the Alliance for Progress (Fajardo, 2021). In the
1960s and ‘70s, as universities tacked strongly to the political left, the drive
for indigenous forms of knowledge gathered force, even as right-wing military
dictatorships, often backed by the U.S., drove many left-leaning scholars
into exile (on which, see Zarowsky, 2013, 2015). In the early to mid-1970s,
CIESPAL, catalyzed by the important San José, Costa Rica meetings of
1973, shook off its U.S. ties and became a site for organizing a truly Latin
American field. In 1972, it began a new journal, Chasqui, published in
Spanish, which centered scholarship from within the region (Daros, 2023).
The intellectual and political energy of the era attached itself to the MacBride
Commission’s 1980 report, which was a main topic of the IAMCR meetings
that year in Caracas (Sánchez-Narvarte, 2022). Departments and schools of
communication continued to grow across Latin America, though unevenly,
with Brasil and México together having some two-thirds of the programs
in the late 1980s. Moreover, graduate education and research lagged behind
undergraduate education and professional training (Fuentes-Navarro, 1994).
Organizing from within networks supported by IAMCR, Latin American
scholars founded ALAIC in 1978, though it would languish until 1989,
when it was reconstituted and began regular biennial meetings (Marques
de Melo, 2011b).
Intellectually, multiple vectors of transnational contact would produce a
notable interjection of Latin American thought within leading circles of U.S.
communication research. Latin American critics of classic modernization
paradigms formulated an account of how development led to new forms of
dependency, a word that, by the late 1960s, was “a ubiquitous term in Latin
American social science” (Fajardo, 2021, p.206). The concept then traveled
north to the U.S. (as well as to Europe), in which it entered discourses of both
radical social scientists and establishment institutions like the Ford Foundation.
There were analogous dual pathways for Latin American communication
thought. On the one hand, Beltrán and Díaz-Bordenave influenced U.S.
development communication researchers from the establishment to make
politically moderate revisions to their paradigms. On the other hand, more
insurgent leftist scholars like Herbert Schiller and Dallas Smythe—who met
Mattelart when they traveled to Chile in 1972 (Schiller & Smythe, 1972)—
engaged with Marxissant thought from the South. Mattelart and Ariel Dorfman’s
Como leer el pato Donald, translated into English in 1975, made its way into
citations by critical and cultural media studies scholars in the U.S., though
typically in passing.
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Interestingly, it was mainstream communication scientists like Rogers,
Chaffee, Emile McAnany, Brenda Dervin, and Rita Atwood who were among
the most committed to facilitating dialogues with critical Latin American
scholarship (Atwood & McAnany, 1986; Chaffee et al., 1990; McAnany, 1992;
Huesca & Dervin, 1994). They were influenced by their Latin American
students or graduate school colleagues and some read Spanish as well. This
period of engagement probably came to a head in the mid-1990s, which saw
the 1994 English-language translation of Martín-Barbero’s De los Medios
a las Mediaciones (1987), a signal of its interest to Anglophone media and
cultural studies, and a special issue on Latin American media in the flagship
U.S. Journal of Communication (edited by Elizabeth Fox, in 1995). After that,
outside those studying Latin American issues, U.S. communication scholars
generally oriented themselves to thinking coming from France, Germany, the
U.K.—or, in most cases, those they called “Americans,” working along in what
they considered the communication field.
Neoliberal metastasis: Mid-1990s to today
The end of the Cold War, ongoing decolonization, and the widespread
adoption of the internet promised to make the 1990s a time in which changes
in geopolitics and technology would combine to create a more inclusive world
of media and communication scholarship. This has not come to pass, and the
dominance of the U.S. and of the Anglophone world more broadly has found itself
powerfully sustained since the turn of the millennium. The 1990s ideal of scholarly
globalism, with its visions of radical interconnectedness and multivocality, has
largely dissipated into a re-inscription of power relations between Latin America
and the U.S., though this is vigorously challenged by Latin American scholars
who resist this process and a growing number of scholars from the U.S. who are
attuned to their Latin American colleagues’ decolonial critiques.
This re-inscription of power relations is apparent in academic publishing,
in which the U.S., the U.K., Australia, and Western Europe occupy a dominant
position in the social sciences. Demeter (2019a) describes a “center-periphery”
structure within the social sciences globally, one that is worse still within
communication studies (Demeter, 2019b). The vast majority (90%) of the Social
Sciences Citation Index list of communication and media studies journals are
published in English-speaking countries (Demeter, 2019b, p.45). The broader
contours of the relationship between the U.S. and Latin America are shaped
by this kind of center-periphery structure in publication and citations patterns
that obtains globally.
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Broader surveys of academic publishing that reveal the dominance of
the global North identify factors—such as English language usage, impact
factor, and professionalization of research—that reimpose the center-periphery
relationship. These same surveys also reveal that these factors—because they
represent the extension of global North traditions—are more fiercely imposed
at the periphery than at the center. Communication studies in Latin America
provides a vivid demonstration of this pattern, as we see illustrated in Heram
and Gándara’s (2021) description of the institutional place of Latin American
communication scholarship in the 1990s. They describe the 1990s as a time
when the “‘neoliberal’ offensive of capitalism deepened throughout the region,”
(p.38) a development connected to the field of communication becoming
professionalized and alienated from its more critical impulses. The distinctively
Latin American tradition, which had gained traction in the 1970s and 1980s,
confronts this advancing neoliberal logic of incorporation. In the 2000s, amid
political and economic crises, the advance of professionalizing tendencies in
academic structures has continued but this advance is countered by the region
having developed its own journals, organizations, and scholarly culture.
Much of the relationship between communication scholarship in the
U.S. and in Latin America can be understood in terms of the stubborn global
dominance of the English language in academic publishing. This dominance
is connected to broader geopolitical formations, much as Albuquerque (2021)
connects “Anglophone western-centrism” in academe to the unipolar power
relations that arose in the 1990s (p.181). This unipolar world invites Latin
American scholars to thread their work through “theories, cultural principles
and conventions, and research agenda[s] originated in the Anglophone academic
milieu” (p.181). The tremendous potential promised by digital media is sold
short by a system that “artificially introduces scarcity and homogeneity” (p.182).
The effects of this manufactured scarcity and homogeneity find a powerful
demonstration in Latin American communication scholarship in the last
three decades. By the 1990s, Latin American scholars had begun to develop
an interconnected world of schools, journals, conferences, organizations,
and intellectual communities that stood in marked counterpoint to the
familiar Anglophone power center of the field. The pursuit of a more “global”
communication study has operated as a vector out of the North, an external
shock that undermines the relevance of Latin American scholarship. Here the
introduction of what Albuquerque et al. (2020) refer to as academic capitalism
bears some consideration. Academic capitalism “refers to the organization” of
the academic field “around a logic of market competition, under which academic
institutions and professionals are evaluated in terms of their economic efficiency
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and compete for prestige and resources” (p.88). It is a system where rankings of
publications come to be an important delivery system for Anglophone dominance.
As expectations for scholars in Latin America come to be tied to expectations
of impact in the field, these scholars are thrown into the global market for
academic work, which is perforce Anglophone journals with largely Northern
editorial boards. Publication metrics, such as the Clarivate Journal Citation
Reports, appeal to a positivist concern for impact, and their usage across the
field becomes a means by which to impel scholars to adjust their work to fit
the largely Anglophone system. And so “Latin America’s international status
was downgraded when the U.S.-centered ranking system” came increasingly to
matter to communication studies in the 2000s (p.197).
An important part of the infrastructure of Latin American media scholarship
has been the remarkable number and variety of Spanish- and Portuguese-language
journals, many of them established as open access (OA) outlets that demand no
article processing charges (APCs). Aguado-López and Becerril-Garcia (2020)
remark that these journals “point towards what a scholar-led, non-profit global
scholarly communications ecosystem might look like.” They offer a crucial lifeline
for the development of Latin American communication studies on its own
terms, a lifeline that is challenged as broader currents in academic publishing
around the world tend to favor APC-focused publishing models that often have
the effect of moving resources to the global North center and away from the
periphery. There are still occasional signs of hope; Arroyave et al., (2020) find
Colombian communication research attracting more global notoriety thanks to
Web of Science. Nevertheless, the dominance of the Anglophone North remains
largely intact. The neoliberal logic of a unified global means to calculate academic
impact for the sake of ranking in the interest of measuring ‘impact’ clears a path
for the reproduction of the dominance of the global North.
The homogeneity expected of scholarship as defined by the Anglophone
world conflicts markedly with established practice in Latin American media
scholarship. Exclusion of Latin America media scholarship goes beyond the
reproduction of an Anglophone linguistic monoculture. The dynamic autonomous
tendencies that took root in Latin American communication studies in the 1970s
and 1980s enabled the emergence of both a “theoretical and methodological
syncretism” and an “emphasis on praxis” in Latin American communication
studies (Enghel & Becerra, 2018, p.116). One also finds in Latin American
scholarship what Enghel and Becerra (2018) refer to as a difference in the
“organizational logic of arguments,” (p.122) in which Latin American scholars
are accustomed to a more reflexive and less purely descriptive mode, lending
itself to a more essayistic style. Furthermore, authors from Latin America find
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themselves expected in a globalized academe to cite work that has already been
consecrated as legitimate in the Anglophone world, to the neglect of citations
of sources in Spanish or Portuguese (Suzina, 2021). The things that have made
Latin American communication scholarship different from the U.S. model have
been animated by the same independent spirit that motivated CIESPAL’s turn
away from U.S. dominance, the founding (and later resurgence) of ALAIC, and
the turn to more critical intellectual inspiration from within Latin America
(and beyond). As the ostensibly globalized field succumbs to publishing models
and ideals of professionalization imported from the global North, all of these
distinctively Latin American features come to function as obstacles to broader
circulation and impact as insufficiently “professional” means of doing the work.
The centrality of the U.S. has also been reasserted in graduate education
since the 1990s. Students have come to the U.S. for graduate degrees for a long
time, but this pattern has accelerated since the 1990s as the internet has made
it easier for prospective graduate students to find and apply to communication
graduate programs in the U.S. At the same time, U.S.-based graduate programs
in communication, similarly enabled by the expanded reach of the internet,
have also intensified their efforts to recruit students from outside the U.S.,
including Latin America (Park & Grosse, 2015). Graduate students from the
Global South pursuing degrees at communication programs in the U.S. have
found themselves transformed into “persons of color the moment they arrive
in the country” and “are further translated as international” (Murty, 2021,
p.687), often finding the need for mentoring spaces in which they can speak
from their own experiences (Murty, 2021, p.690). Graduate school pedagogy
becomes an important point of contact for #CommunicationSoWhite, wherein
students of color must confront the relative lack of concern in the field’s
canon for race, leaving them in a position to “unlearn the canon” (Mukherjee,
2020, p.8).
The neoliberal period in this history we are charting has seen
the reinvigoration of a movement to resist U.S.-centered dominance of
communication study. Though Western control remains a persistent and
protean force, the idea of de-westernizing communication study has generated
considerable momentum and has connected productively with critiques
informed by geopolitics, race, and gender. Together, these movements “tear
off the pretense of abstract, aseptic, neutral science” (Waisbord, 2022, p.26).
Latin American communication scholars have been at the forefront of efforts
to decolonialize communication studies (e.g., Magallanes Blanco & Ramos
Rodríguez, 2016; Torrico, 2016a; Daros, 2022). This happens as U.S. scholars
warm to critical theory by Latin American critical scholars, including Aníbal
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Quijano and Walter Mignolo, and to the work of Jamaican author and critic
Sylvia Winter. What remains to be seen is what will happen in the conflict
between this now well-versed chorus of critical voices and the neoliberal
impulses that have worked their way into the substrata of academic practice
in the twenty-first century.
Whereas the first two eras in our periodization were marked by patterns of
interchange—with the first era characterized by one-way U.S. intervention and
the second era bringing with it a budding and occasionally vibrant dialogue—the
third era is one in which the establishment of a neoliberal knowledge system has
emerged as a powerful constitutive force. The long-standing points of contact
between the U.S. and Latin America—graduate schools, conferences, professional
associations, and publication—continue to foster flows of ideas and people.
These flows have intensified since the 1990s. Still, these points of contact find
themselves subtended in large part by a neoliberal academic system in which
political economic forces are exerted more directly on the relationship between
U.S. and Latin American communication studies.
FINAL CONSIDERATIONS
Our conviction is that the writing of disciplinary history has a role to play,
a modest one, in the project to win a plural future for the organized study of
media and communication. One important means to that end is the work of
surfacing alternatives and paths once taken; another is to explain why those
paths met resistance or indifference, with the aim to expose the conditions of
knowledge production that have helped to narrow the field. In this respect the
Latin American historiography of communication research is an example to
emulate since so much of it is sensitive to alien premises, objects, and methods,
while also motivated to document—in partial defiance of English-language
hegemony—alternative ways of framing the field.
This essay was written in a self-reflexive spirit. We began with the hidden
parochialism of the U.S. historiography, with its definite-article claims to count
the U.S. case as the world’s—or as the world’s inheritance. Some of our own
past work has adopted this frame, implicitly and by omission, which we now
regret. The balance of the essay was then an attempt to enter a different, and
longstanding, historiographical conversation, one that starts from the complex
circulation of ideas, people, and institutional forms within and across borders.
The pan-American frame, centered on exchanges between the U.S. and Latin
America, is an especially promising site for ongoing work given the fraught
geopolitical and intellectual relations that have colored the modern history of
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the hemisphere. Our tentative periodization of the cross-regional exchanges of
the field, glossed here, is grounded in that promise.
At the same time, we want to acknowledge the dangers of adopting “the
Americas” as a shared object of historical attention. Since at least the 1990s,
there have been calls to “internationalize,” “de-Westernize,” and “globalize” the
field of communication studies. As others (e.g., Albuquerque & Oliveira, 2021;
Willems, 2014) have observed, many of these calls have come from scholars
comfortably situated within Western Europe and the U.S. and they have sometimes
had the effect of occluding longstanding traditions of inquiry in other regions,
particularly Latin America, Africa, and East Asia. If we are going to embrace
“the Americas” as a frame for historical inquiry, then we need to be on guard
against re-inscriptions of U.S. and English-language hegemony, which those
of us working in the Anglophone North are deeply implicated in and can (and
do) easily perpetuate without awareness. It is part of our institutional and
intellectual habitus and it extends outward materially through neoliberal regimes
of knowledge. We need to be on guard for ways that calling for a historiography
of the field across the Americas might in the end simply recenter the U.S. in
new but all too familiar ways.
With those cautions in mind, we suggest that “the Americas” is potentially
a productive organizer of knowledge and collaborative inquiry, one with more
historical specificity than “internationalized” or “globalized” forms of inquiry
can offer. The frame traverses South-North lines in a way that is analogous to
the rich collection of essays in the recent volume of work by Latin American
and European scholars (Paulino et al., 2020) and by Ibero-American networks
that have developed in recent years among Hispanophone and Lusophone
scholars. We can also look to the excellent volume of essays by Caribbean
and African communication scholars (Dunn et al., 2021) building out from
their shared historical experiences. “The Americas” at once calls our attention
to flows of ideas, people, and money across the region and the differential
processes through which they have been mediated in local contexts. The frame
also focuses us geopolitically and allows careful inquiry into the forces of U.S.
hegemony, resistance to them, and alternative intellectual formations that
developed beyond the North Atlantic. Though Quijano, Mignolo, Wynter, and
María Lugones, increasingly make their way into bibliographies and syllabi,
the vast majority of U.S. and Western European communication scholars know
nothing about Latin American and Caribbean traditions of critical thought,
about how scholars from those regions have taken the lead in contemporary
efforts to decolonize the field and its forms of knowledge, and about the well-
established array of open-access publishing in the region. They neither read
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nor cite scholars from outside the North Atlantic, an institutionally structured
pattern with its own history (Ganter & Ortega, 2019). From the perspective of
the U.S. field alone, “the Americas” offers a regionally focused way to do the
ongoing work of provincializing our version of the field. But the real payoff
will come when those of us investigating the history of communication studies
across the Americas pool our thinking and see what we can discover together.
M
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Albuquerque, A. (2021). The institutional basis of anglophone wes-
tern centrality. Media, Culture & Society, 43(1), 180-188. https://doi.
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Article received on October 11, 2023, and approved in November 22, 2023.
