Community Media in Latin America: Breaking the Siege

• Author: Javier Campo,Tomás Crowder-Taraborrelli
• Published date: 01 May 2018
• Date: 01 May 2018
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/0094582X18765729
• Subject Matter: Book Reviews

LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES, Issue 220, Vol. 45 No. 3, May 2018, 284–290

DOI: 10.1177/0094582X18765729

© 2018 Latin American Perspectives

284

Book Review

Community Media in Latin America

Breaking the Siege

by

Javier Campo and Tomás Crowder-Taraborrelli

Translated by

Margot Olavarria

Natalia Vinelli La televisión desde abajo: Historia, alternatividad y periodismo de contrainfor-

mación. Buenos Aires: Colectivo El Topo Blindado/Cooperativa Editorial El Río Suena,

2014.

Gabriela Zamorano Villarreal Indigenous Media and Political Imaginaries in Contemporary

Bolivia. Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 2017.

Freya Schiwy and Byrt Wammack Weber (eds.) Adjusting the Lens: Community and

Collaborative Video in Mexico. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2017.

Vinelli’s La television desde abajo explores one of the least-studied phenomena in com-

munity cultural production: television. As one of the “heaviest” technologies to develop,

it has not been as widely studied as radio, the press, or the Web. This book reevaluates

the tradition in Argentina on a solid theoretical basis. The author, a professor at the

Universidad de Buenos Aires and an active participant in the community television

movement, aims to “recover a social history of plebeian communication” (25). She con-

ceptualizes “communication” as a “human right,” a notion that has been imposed on

some academic sectors with some difficulty (53). This implies defending the prolifera-

tion of alternative, community, and popular (Vinelli considers them together, working

with open rather than closed concepts) voices, sounds, and images. The prologue’s

author, Martín Becerra, says that the book “opens an essential path in communication

studies” by proposing to investigate the productions and modes of organization of

cultural movements on the margins of both the state and the mass media (15). Without

considering community media it is impossible to have a complete map of Latin

America’s media landscape.

The book is divided into “two temporalities”: the “analog stage,” from 1987 to

1999, when community television channels appeared, and the “convergence stage,”

from 2000 to the present, when television channels are beginning to complement their

“aired” transmission with Web-based platforms (27–28). Vinelli uses a great variety

of bibliographical and oral sources, clearly recognizing her subject as a socially and

culturally intersected and constructed object and as one of great theoretical and

practical significance.

Javier Campo is a researcher at the Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas and

a professor of film aesthetics at the Universidad Nacional del Centro de la Provincia de Buenos

Aires. Tomás Crowder-Taraborrelli is visiting assistant professor of Latin American studies at

Soka University. Margot Olavarria is a translator living in New York City.

765729LAPXXX10.1177/0094582X18765729Latin American PerspectivesCampo and Crowder-Taraborrelli / BOOK REVIEW

book-review2018