Introduction

Is it possible, even pertinent, to carry out a history of communication studies throughout the Americas? Is it possible to think of an “American” framework to carry out a history of communication studies? What are the proposals that should be made to think about communication studies in Latin America within a history of communication studies throughout the Americas?

These are the questions that will guide this essay, which aims to reflect on the possibilities and scope of a proposal such as the one made here. There will not be a comprehensive review of the existing literature, but rather a questioning of the available frameworks that cover the histories of communication studies and propose as an alternative the approach of connected histories, which has already been suggested by some specialists of communication history of Latin American media.

It is argued here that communication studies in Latin America have particular characteristics derived from the diverse cultures and regional historical processes that should not be made invisible within a generalizing project, but, on the contrary, taking them into account can help finding similarities, differences and contrasts between existing realities and, above all, connections between both Americas.

Methodology

For this work, a review of the existing literature on the relationships between culture and territory was carried out, as well as the histories of communication in Latin America, and also on the proposal of connected histories, recently adopted by Latin American communicologists (^{Barbosa & Gutiérrez, 2022}) within the Association of Communication Historians (AsHisCom) and the Latin American Network of Media History (RELAHM). This Association is constituted by academics from several countries in Latin America, who have used this approach in media studies, in historical studies on communication and in the history of the field in this region. It was not this paper’s intention to make an exhaustive review of the postgraduate dissertations or to be rich in citations, but rather to privilege a reflection on the relationships between territory, history and communication in Latin America.

Continent, region, territory: Latin America

Throughout the 20th century, academics and intellectuals have expressed doubts about defining a Latin American identity. It is known that before the arrival of the Europeans there was no idea of a continent. Although it is known that the Guna peoples of Panama and Colombia named those territories as Abya Yala, that means “land in full maturity” (^{Ayala Mora, 2013}) and that the name was taken up by the indigenous peoples of that region as a symbol of resistance (^{López Hernández, 2004}), or that the Nahua peoples called the continent Cem Anahauac, which means “the one among the waters”, these names are vague and do not cover all the cultures and peoples that inhabit the region.

It has been said that Latin America emerged from linguistic elements: languages derived from Latin (Spanish, Portuguese and, to a lesser extent, French). The “Ñamérica” of ^{Caparrós (2021)} only includes the America that speaks Spanish and seeks common characteristics, refusing to resort to a Latin origin, also very alien to the American peoples. Likewise, the countries in the region share the characteristic of having been colonized by Europeans and having, at least at the beginning, the Catholic religion as dominant.

The origin of the concept “Latin America” comes from the 19th century and various authors are credited with it: Michel Chevalier, French, during his trip to Mexico in 1835, to enable France to claim the right to intervene due to having a common Latin background; Torres Caicedo, Colombian, in the 1850s, and Francisco Bilbao, Chilean, in 1856, with the aim of uniting the countries of the region against the interventionist efforts of the United States (^{Caparrós, 2021}; ^{O’Gorman, 2004}); this line of thought -the creation of an identity in opposition to “the others” (invading Europeans and imperialist North Americans)- can be found in Eduardo Galeano’s Las venas abiertas de América Latina and Pablo Neruda’s Canto General, among many others (^{Caparrós, 2021}).

^{Fuentes Navarro (2016)} emphasizes the enormous heterogeneity and difficulty in characterizing a continent with more than 600 million inhabitants spread across twenty countries. The discussion around the validity of these arguments has been very rich and has lasted many decades.

Both America and Latin America have been the result of “inventions” that many intellectuals have already analyzed (^{Caparrós, 2021}; ^{O’Gorman, 2004}, among many others). These inventions, the construction of these imaginaries, allowed “forms of representation with encompassing aspirations that supposedly symbolized the group of people who had remained within [the national territories]” (^{Valenzuela Arce, 1999, p. 13}). Within this imaginary, certain features stand out (creoles, dominant mestizos), while indigenous people, afromestizos, women and all those who were not part of the hegemonic groups have been in fact -although not discursively- kept out (^{Valenzuela Arce, 1999}).

Another concept that will be used in this text is that of region. This could be defined as a territory considered a homogeneous unit due to certain specific characteristics, whether historical, cultural, linguistic, climatic, or geographic. These spaces may or may not coincide with the administrative borders of a territory. Size is not a central factor to characterize these spaces either. A region can be a continent or a part of it. But how to define a region? Citing ^{Van Young (1992)}: “regions are like love: no one knows how to define it, but we all know what it is” (p. 3).

Cultural regions are of special interest for this work. These are conceived as territories with various distinguishing features: historical (presence of native peoples, specific characteristics of settlement), linguistic, political or religious, whose specificities may even depend on the characteristics of the territory: geographical isolation, for example.

The most appropriate concept to study Latin American communicative phenomena in the modality that is of concern to this work is that of “cultural spaces” (^{Garretón, 2003}), which are defined as:

… geographically delimited, visible, identifiable territories, but there are also spaces that are not territorially locatable or that are only partially so. There are spaces and cultural circuits that are not reduced to a distribution, places or geographical boundaries, that transcend nations and even the framework of a set of nation-states... Cultural space in its broadest sense is one that includes the physical, territorial and the non-territorial aspects, including the communicational and the virtual ones (p. 35).

This concept includes elements such as identities, cultural heritage, education, science and technology and, of particular interest in this case, cultural industries (p. 15).

How to apply these characterizations to communication studies? ^{Barbosa and Gutiérrez (2022)} propose:

In a history of communication, the communicational must always have primacy, and it is from the centrality of communicational articulations that temporally or spatially localized processes emerge. Furthermore, in this difficult and complicated particularization of the communicationalhistorical, it is necessary to consider, on the one hand, the difficulties of how to make history and, on the other, the specificities of possible and peculiar pasts in spaces constructed as cultural territories (p. 18, own translation).

This is fully applicable to the histories of communication studies. What have been the specificities of existing studies in cultural regions? How were the processes of development of such studies according to their moment and the space from which they emerged?

Communication studies in Latin America

A number of scholars have dealt with the origins and development of communication studies in Latin America: how did ideas develop, how were theories adopted, how did publications grow, how and where did the number of schools of communication (which in their beginnings were schools of journalism) grow, who were the founding fathers and their disciples throughout contemporary history, how did social, political and cultural factors -local and translocal- influence the development of the field?

These are huge tasks and it is not in vain that ^{Fuentes Navarro (1992)} referred to the need for a guiding map which, although necessary to understand the complexities of the field in 1990, thirty years later becomes essential. ^{Martín-Barbero (1987)} preferred to “grope” in his forays into the field, or in any case, following a “nocturnal map”, where the beacons would have to be the mediations and the subjects.

Communication scholars have stated the existence of a Latin American School of Communication, characterized, according to Marques de Melo, “by its theoretical crossbreeding, methodological hybridism, political commitment and its extranational dimension” (cited in ^{León Duarte, 2002, p. 20}). However, other specialists do not agree with the possibility of the existence of a “School”, which would require homogeneities that do not exist in Latin American communication studies. Orozco opted instead for a “Latin American Way” (cited in ^{León Duarte, 2002, p. 20}) and ^{Fuentes Navarro (2022)}, over the years, has resisted believing in the existence of a “School” and affirms that very little progress has been made in the old ideal of Latin American and Ibero-American “integration”, due, among other things, to the very visible inequalities and differences between countries.

Criticism of the use of foreign models to understand communication processes in the region dates back to the seventies and eighties of the 20th century, with distinguished researchers such as Luis Ramiro Beltrán and José Marques de Melo (^{Beltrán, 1974}; ^{Marques de Melo, 2009}; Marques de Melo cited in ^{Fuentes Navarro, 2019}). ^{Beltrán (1974)} spoke of “investigation with blinders on” to refer to communication studies in Latin America between 1960 and 1974:

… it is obvious that communication research in Latin America has followed the conceptual and methodological guidelines established by researchers in Europe and the United States. The effect of this, in essence, has meant that some studies have emphasized conceptual understanding over the production of empirical evidence, while other studies have done exactly the opposite (p. 23).

The adaptation of models designed for other contexts has been common practice up to the present day, in spite of constant criticism from academics. The possibilities of analysis and objects of study within Latin America and even within the same country are multiple, and the risk of “theoretical stretching” is imminent, that is, “the use of theories designed to explain phenomena occurring at one level of analysis, to account for phenomena observed at other levels” (^{Giraudy et al., 2021}).

Before creating or adapting models, it is necessary to account for the facts, starting from one’s own context and culture, in order to prevent the “imperialism of the universal”, as conceived by Bourdieu, as the way in which theories circulate internationally, without their contexts of production, which do not apply to other spaces and times (^{Zarowsky, 2021}), no matter how much praiseworthy efforts have been made at critical appropriation. The exercise promoted by ^{Hallin and Mancini (2012)} to rethink their famous models on communicative systems (^{Hallin & Mancini, 2004}) in spaces different from those of the global north stands out. Other researchers of journalism studies have warned about the problem of trying to unite theoretical universalism and the realities of each country (^{Hanitzsch et al., 2019}), while some more (^{Weisbord & Mellado, 2014}) raise the need to de-Westernize knowledge of communicative realities; while ^{Retis and Sierra Caballero (2011)} raise the demand to make Latin America be heard “for the sake of the democratization” of research.

In this context, it is difficult to choose the middle way pointed out by Ortiz (cited in ^{Fuentes Navarro, 1999}), who advises to avoid, on the one hand, the conservative attitude that takes the classics as the only representatives of a finished knowledge and, on the other hand, the belief that everything has changed and a different science is required.

The past is the present that manifests itself in the arsenal of concepts with which we operate, in the types of research we carry out, in the bibliography we select, in the techniques we use, etc. The art consists in understanding tradition as a starting point, in which we root our identity, without being imprisoned by its rigidity. To understand tradition is, then, to overcome it; give continuity to the constitution of a knowledge that is neither static nor definitive (Ortiz cited in ^{Fuentes Navarro, 1999, p. 21}).

It would be prudent to return to the examples of Latin American communication theorists (Marques de Melo, Beltrán, Martín-Barbero, Fuentes Navarro, among others) who have insisted on the study of the particularities and difficulties of communication research from and for Latin America practically from the origins of the institutionalization of the field, and honor their efforts to thoroughly study and historicize the development of the theories, of the objects of study, within the contexts (political and social) in which they were born.

The research group “History of Communication” of the Mexican Association of Communication Researchers (Asociación Mexicana de Investigadores de la Comunicación, AMIC) has been working for 15 years, focusing its reflections on the relationship between communication and history in Mexico. The coordinators stressed the need to study “the subjects, institutions, and research practices, their sociocultural determinations, their social articulations” (^{Fuentes Navarro & Hernández, 2009, p. 186}) and “the history of theories and methodologies (a meta-research) and the analysis of the processes of constitution of the generic objects of the study of the academic field and their complex relationships with empirical objects” (p. 193).

It is thus understood that the histories of communication studies should be included in a larger space for reflection. The authors agree that a major problem is the fragmentation of studies, and even of communication programs in schools, although they admit the progress made in the consolidation of the academic field. I agree with them taking up ideas from Wallerstein, that any useful description of social reality is necessarily historical and seeks explanations in the long term (^{Fuentes Navarro & Hernández, 2009, p. 193}). The historical dimension of communication does not refer to the past, but to the possibilities of the future.

Studies on specific media and processes are very abundant. Fuentes Navarro himself has addressed them throughout his career, although this will not be dwelled on here; ^{Fuentes Navarro and Hernández (2009)} recapitulate on the subject. Other topics, such as the study of indigenous media, Afro-descendant populations media access, gender violence and its representations in the media have been fundamental issues. ^{Gutiérrez (2013)} made an extraordinary synthesis of the types and topics of study on the history of communication from Latin America.

I consider it important to take up the proposal on the relevance of historicizing together the history of communication, the history of the media and the history of the academic field, emphasizing the articulation of situated processes (^{Fuentes Navarro & Hernández, 2009, p. 195}). In this essay, I aim to make special emphasis on the regional sphere and its connections, taking into account all the factors of enormous relevance that the authors point out, and starting from very particular histories of communication studies, without confining myself solely to them.

Regional space

Before undertaking a history of communication studies throughout the Americas, it is necessary to take stock within Latin America to determine what is missing, what needs to be strengthened, to think and rethink ourselves as a region, as regions.

A more detailed and thorough assessment of the studies that have been carried out in Latin America is required, especially at the local and regional levels, traditionally made invisible and ignored, since it has been considered that both the processes of production of meaning and “the processes of production of meaning about the processes of production of meaning” -as ^{Fuentes Navarro stated (1999, p. 67)}- that emerge from local and regional spaces are not important, judging that if they have not achieved visibility beyond their places of origin, they are probably irrelevant.

But even those figures and institutions that have transcended the local level have not been the object of systematic study. In the specific case of Mexico, for example, a detailed analysis of the contexts and reasons why journalism schools were born in the 20th century in certain places and not in others is lacking. The works of prestigious researchers have not been studied in relation to the contexts where they have worked, the political and economic circumstances that allowed the establishment of research groups in certain places outside the capital (e.g. Guadalajara or Colima) have not been analyzed, and it has not been studied how people who worked in apparent isolation, in the north or center of the country, managed to consolidate an international academic career, a trend that continues to be strengthened in the new generations.

Nor has the trajectory of communication journals that emerged outside the country’s capital city been addressed. These publications, with limited human and material resources, managed to consolidate themselves in the Latin American panorama, Comunicación y Sociedad is a paradigmatic example; another is Estudios sobre las Culturas Contemporáneas.

This is not to say that the particular trajectory of any of these researchers has not been analyzed, or that there are no brief historical accounts of these undertakings: it is to say that these histories have not been strung together by highlighting the fact that they emerged in specific regions outside of the capital cities. Possible connections could be sought between them, and also with other undertakings in the “peripheries” of other Latin American countries: Cali, Medellin, Mendoza, Minas Gerais, Rio Grande do Sul: What specific inequalities did they have to overcome? What shortcomings? What advantages (political, social, cultural) did they have? Did all these factors impact the development of their research? Were there connections and exchanges between them?

Regarding scholars who have not achieved visibility beyond their regions, there is no minimal approach to their trajectories, theories or objects of study, since it has been believed that the histories and development processes of regional academics and institutions are basically the same as those of the capital cities, reflections of reflections that are out of phase and very similar to each other. This causes studies that address local spaces to find less interest in journals and international congresses.

If regional histories and communication processes are basically the same as each other and a blurred copy of those of the capital city, then why take account of the small monographs, the articles from regional journals of very limited scope, the regional or local congresses about these processes and problems? (^{Del Palacio, 2000}, ^2006a). With this logic, a wealth of knowledge that could have interesting connections for other local and regional spaces, even very distant ones, is irremediably lost.

Only an international team could carry out such an undertaking, analyzing the authors and the regional and local institutions, the models, the bibliography used and the disciplinary origin, the contexts of production and inequalities in the access to the circulation of their research. This has been addressed by the networks that bring together researchers from different parts of Latin America, and by the conferences within and outside the region, where the problems have been thought about collectively. It should be noted that this type of work has other obstacles, such as the lack of funding for transnational collective teams and the instability of these groups.

Other difficulties

One of the recurring problems for communication studies in Latin America is the linguistic difficulty: ^{Fuentes Navarro (2019)} states that what is done in Latin America stays in Latin America and fails to transcend at a global level, since most of these works are written in Spanish and Portuguese (p. 45). And some authors who publish in English have done so in journals that are not open access and whose costs are inaccessible to most students and many academics in Latin America, particularly those working in small and remote places.

Thus, the theoretical sections in Latin American research continue to be based on the experiences of the large Western metropolises and this situation is repeated at the subnational level: young academics or students do not have access to what has been done in their own region or country, they are not familiar to the contributions of regional researchers and take up external theories and models, also adopted by academics from the capitals. And this situation, despite greater access to materials through the Internet, does not seem to have changed significantly in recent years.

Another cause of this phenomenon is the limited flow of literature among Latin American countries (even the giants of the publishing industry have a fragmented distribution) and the lack of dissemination of journals produced in the region. Even in the Internet era, it is not always easy to find journals and papers published in and for Latin America (much less in specific regions) unless an intricate specialized search is performed. This phenomenon should be studied from the geopolitics of knowledge -understood as the asymmetric relationship that has its effect on the production of knowledge- (Restrepo & Rojas cited in ^{Andrade Guevara, 2019, p. 138}).

Connected histories for a history of communication studies in the americas from regional and local spaces

If a history of communication studies is to be made across the Americas, the proposal of “connected histories” could be a useful way to approach it, leaving regional and even national boundaries behind.

The connected histories approach, also called globalized history, which has come to be constituted as “the global turn” (^{Potter & Saha, 2015}) should not be understood in the same sense as comparative history, much less as universal history. This relatively recent approach is considered one of the most important historiographical developments of recent decades. What characterizes it is “the adoption of multiple perspectives that relativize the Western view of the world” (^{Bernard, 2018, p. 4}).

This approach was originally disseminated by ^{Subrahmanyam (1997)}, who attempted to place Asia in a context of global early modernity and, to this end, proposed to study the circulations, exchanges and interactions that connected distant places, rather than considering the various parts of the world as if they were separate entities (^{Potter & Saha, 2015}). This way, the old idea of Europe as the center of the world, the perfect place for “the plenary realization of the values of culture” is called into question (^{O’Gorman, 2004, p. 147}).

The method of connected histories consists of analyzing the circulation of the tangible and the intangible assets: people, goods, technologies, institutions and beliefs, in order to integrate the history of a region in a global context. Thus, the historian must make visible the interrelated histories of such people, places, things, ideas, which were already connected (Subrahayaman cited in ^{Potter & Saha, 2015}). The same author pointed out as background of this approach the landmark study The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, by Braudel, or, in America, the studies by Gruzinski, who analyzes the American connections after the European conquest. Even from anthropology, one can cite the studies of Clifford, who has based his ethnographic analyses on displacements and not on roots (^{Bernard, 2018, p. 6}).

This method should not be mistaken for the historicization of mere facts, since, in order to make connections that are relevant to history, they must leave lasting traces, as can be seen in the aforementioned studies. Likewise, this discipline can make use of both microhistories and comparative history, ethnography, cultural studies, reception studies or studies on sociabilities that have an impact on the production and circulation of ideas, to explain the access routes to globalization which, ultimately, is the process in which connected histories are inscribed (^{Bernard, 2018}).

It should be noted that this process does not affect all actors in the same way and at the same time. As some authors have shown, modernity coexists with archaic forms (for example, it is the proposal of Regions of refuge, by anthropologist Gonzalo Aguirre Beltrán), even subaltern studies have challenged the ethnocentric version of history in which all societies must move towards certain forms of modernization, such as secularization or equality of the sexes. Thus, global history provides an alternative to traditional Eurocentric approaches (^{Bernard, 2018}).

This approach coincides with Mignolo’s proposals about “other paradigms” in order to “displace the abstract universalism of modern epistemology and world history, while leaning toward an alternative to totality conceived as a network of local histories and multiple local hegemonies” (^{Andrade Guevara, 2019, p. 143}). This approach does not lack difficulties; some of these are pointed out by ^{Barbosa and Gutiérrez (2022)}. Among them, ignorance of the points of connection, due to ignorance of the communicative processes of other places beyond the region or country; singularity abounds, but synthesis is forgotten. Another difficulty is the prevalence of individual research over collaborative groups. It is also necessary to be careful not to seek a linear history of the processes and in any case to take this as a starting point, not a point of arrival, in order to “find the connections that have been hidden by the research that has privileged particular processes” (^{Barbosa & Gutiérrez, 2022, p. 18}).

These obstacles should be added to the enormous difficulty of analyzing the history of the media in conjunction with the history of theories and the history of the academic field, as suggested by ^{Fuentes Navarro and Hernández (2009)}, not only in a situated context, but also taking their connections and dynamic processes into account.

I therefore consider that this approach constitutes an interesting opportunity to address the history of communication studies in Latin America at the regional and local level and its relations with the other America, in terms of equality, in a constant back and forth movement, breaking at the same time with the region-nation dichotomy or the comparative history that analyzes the characteristics of regions or nations separately, without the parallel processes ever touching. This approach can be useful to think about social and cultural processes starting at the regions of Latin America, without leaving the processes and cultures of other places out of the analysis.

In the very particular case of the history of journalism, taken only as an example, there is plenty of work about Mexican regions (^{Del Palacio, 2006b}, among others). Although the intention has been to make intra-regional comparisons, it is enlightening to preferably think about the connections between regions, even distant ones. Exchange of ideas, goods, technologies, influences of some journalists or newspapers on distant others, that is, displacements, and not roots, are the key to understanding and connecting the “multiple local histories”. Another interesting example is provided by ^{Gutiérrez (2019)}, for the music records of RCA Víctor in Buenos Aires, Lima and Bogota in a given year. More examples are presented in Gutiérrez (2013) and ^{Barbosa and Gutiérrez (2022)}.

Something similar is stated in the research on current “frontier journalists”: a concept that defines journalists in contexts of precariousness and distance from the big cities. These frontiers are characterized, according to ^{Das and Poole (2008)}, as the margins of the State. Places with these characteristics can be located in almost all Latin American countries, and the connections between the situation of these workers in these very distant frontiers are sobering. For example, in what has been called the “Mexicanization of violence against journalists” in the Paraguayan triple border (Di Maio cited in ^{Del Palacio, 2023}).

Based on these connections, we can think about the routes of ideas, the influence of exiles, the circulation of influences in academic journals and textbooks, the compilations of women’s contributions to communication from different places of enunciation and contexts. On this subject, the gathering of experiences carried out in the collection Mujeres de la Comunicación (Women in Communication), financed by the Friedrich Ebert Foundation, within its media and communication program for Latin America and the Caribbean (2022), stands out. The book on Mexico was coordinated by ^{Magallanes and Ricaurte (2022)} and covers the intellectual histories of 23 women.

The meticulous studies of the development of theories and approaches to communication in certain regions and the abundant existing monographic works are the input to take a step forward and seek the articulation of places, processes, practices, academic production and people, with those of other parts of the world, particularly their influence or lack thereof in the America that is not Latin America.

It is not a question of rejecting Western theories -an impossible and absurd task- which would lead to another type of provincialism. Regional studies have been accused of closing in on their specific space and taking it as the center of the world. In order to escape from this prevailing provincialism in regional studies, it would be necessary to make a profound reflection on processes and practices, taking the specific place of analysis as the center, but open, connected to the world.

Concluding remarks

In Latin America, that imaginary place, that “idea, space, project or myth” (^{Fuentes Navarro, 2022, p. 4}), bustle innumerable struggles for inclusion and for the visibilization of spaces (borders, regions, nonhegemonic cultural spaces), actors (women, native peoples, African roots, studies on rural and peripheral spaces; practices that do not lead -nor should necessarily lead- to Europeanizing modernity). All these elements have been traditionally denied, excluded from homogenizing narratives, and it is urgent to make them visible from local spaces.

In this article, I proposed to look for connections and analyze from the local space (call it Latin America, regions within it and border areas), but without taking our eyes off the world, acknowledging the important legacy of the Western tradition that we have inherited. Despite the difficulties in its implementation, I consider the theoretical and methodological approach of connected histories to be very thought-provoking to escape, through the “network of multiple local histories”, from both the homogenizing desires and the particularistic pretensions that prevail until today.