The Evolution of Popular Communication in Latin America: Edited by

PALGRAVE STUDIES IN COMMUNICATION FOR SOCIAL CHANGE
The Evolution of
Popular Communication
in Latin America
Edited by
Ana Cristina Suzina
Palgrave Studies in Communication
for Social Change
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Ana Cristina Suzina
Editor
The Evolution of
Popular
Communication in
Latin America
Editor
Ana Cristina Suzina
Loughborough University
Loughborough, UK
ISSN 2634-6397 ISSN 2634-6400 (electronic)

Palgrave Studies in Communication for Social Change
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To every popular communicator in Latin America who inspired
the reflections presented in this book
Acknowledgements
This book comes from a history of close relationship with the field that
turned into a research path. I am deeply grateful to practitioner and aca-
demic peers with whom I have exchanged so many reflections about how
to make popular communication more significative to social change pro-
cesses and how to develop its conceptual framework. Editing this book in
English means to me an opportunity to reverberate all these voices in a
larger arena, where often times they get lost or become invisible. Thus I
would like to thank Pradip Thomas and Elske van de Fliert, editors of the
Palgrave Series Studies in Communication for Social Change, for hosting
this project and providing the resources to make it real.
My deep gratitude extends to each of the contributors for their trust,
their commitment with this editorial project, their efforts to improve each
version of the manuscripts, and their patience during the process. I feel
honored to work with such great authors who have also been a reference
to me as a practitioner and as a researcher.
In March 2020, I presented the first draft of the Introduction as well as
the summary of this book in a meeting with members of two Brazilian
research groups: the Núcleo de Estudos de Comunicação Comunitária e
Local (Comuni), coordinated by Professor Cicilia Peruzzo, and the
Interculturalidade, Cidadania, Comunicacao e Consumo (Deslocar),
coordinated by Professor Denise Cogo. I want to thank the generous
feedback of colleagues from these groups that contributed to clarify and
improve the reflections presented here.
I also want to thank the translators who worked with several chapters,
and to recognize their huge contribution in organizing the ideas
vii
viii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
contained within, while preserving their epistemological roots. The length

and style vary quite a lot between the contributions. The experiences are
diverse and imprint the reflections as well as the way they are expressed.
There is a red line between all texts, but that diversity was preserved with
the support of the translators. Thanks to Jim McDonnell for proofreading
the Introduction and for the longstanding partnership.
Finally, I am grateful for the work of the Palgrave Macmillan team who
worked with me along the way. Mala Shangera Warren, Liam McLeam,
Emily Wood, Divya Anish, and those others whose names I don’t know,
but were there backing copyediting, design, production, printing, distri-
bution, and other vital tasks.
It is also important to say that the references mobilized in this book are
evidently not exhaustive. Authors talk extensively about Juan Díaz
Bordenave and Orlando Fals Borda, but usually not much about Paulo
Freire and Luís Ramiro Beltrán, for instance. The evidence applies to sev-
eral other great names of the literature of popular communication in Latin
America. Aníbal Orue Pozzo makes an extremely important footnote in
which he points to the lack of general reference in the literature to the
women who contributed to build this field. We count on the contributions
of great ones for this book, but many others are missing. We are aware of
the limitations of this work in the face of the richness and diversity of this
school of thought, and highlight the articulation with other important
works already in existence (e.g., Stephensen and Treré, 2020; Pertierra
and Salazar, 2019; Martens, Venegas and Tapuy, 2020), and those that
might hopefully appear in the future to fulfill a more complete framework.
Praise for The Evolution of Popular Communication
in Latin America
“Popular communication is about communication processes in which cultures that

are marginalized are allowed to express themselves and breathe. Addressing the
histories and epistemologies of popular communication in Latin America, this
book is a breath of fresh air at a time when people from many corners of the world
are fighting colonial oppression. It offers an important contribution to the field by
embracing diverse writing styles and lived experiences whilst promoting important
global dialogues.”
—Andrea Medrado, Tenured Assistant Professor, Universidade Federal
Fluminense, Vice-President of IAMCR
“In Latin America, an autonomous and critical scientific thought has been based
on popular communication practices that have reoriented communication as cul-
ture and as a political ground for the production of power, struggle, and resis-
tance. The texts gathered in this work revisit the Latin American communicational
thought and invite to a South–North dialogue that resignifies popular communi-
cation as a decolonial epistemology and in the scope of the rearrangements pro-
duced by globalization and the processes of life digitalization.”
—Denise Cogo, Professor at ESPM and researcher at CNPq, Brazil
“This is a timely and relevant book that makes a valuable contribution to the field
of Communication and Media Studies from a Latin American Perspective. It offers
an array of experiences anchored in historical, cultural, and social contexts that
provide a sound discussion about popular communication. It presents voices from
the margins of society and academia to broaden the sources of knowledges from
which we all should learn.”
—Claudia Magallanes-Blanco, Profesor, Universidad Iberoamericana
Puebla, Mexico
“This volume makes a decisive contribution to theoretical and practical efforts to

refound democratic communication at the service of those—working classes,
women, minorities—who are on the wrong side of social relations of domination.
If social sciences usually feed a certain pessimism of reason, the contributions gath-
ered in this volume deliberately choose, in the struggle against the global violence
of neoliberal capitalism, the optimism of the will.”
—Benjamin Ferron, East-Paris University, France
Contents
1 Introduction: Popular Communication, an

Epistemological Debate between South and North 1
Ana Cristina Suzina
Part I The Roots of an Epistemology 27
2 Thinking about Communication from the Global

South. Subjectivities Construction in Latin America:
An Overview 29
Aníbal Orué Pozzo
3 Popular and Communitarian Communication

in Rural Social Movements: Beyond “Diffusionism”
to Emancipatory Participation 51
Cicilia M. Krohling Peruzzo
4 Faith, Communication and Commitment to Liberation 73

Washington Uranga
5 The Vestiges of the Concept of Popular

in Latin America 91
Santiago Gómez Obando
xi
xii CONTENTS
Part II A Method, a Pedagogy, a Practice 107
6 Disenchantment as a Path Toward Autonomy:

Orlando Fals Borda, Participatory Action Research,
Communication and Social Change109
Jair Vega-Casanova
7 A Praise of Dignity in Educational Practice129

Daniel Prieto Castillo
8 Popular Radios: Constants and Tensions141

María Cristina Mata
9 Popular Communication in Latin America:

A Look at the Actors Who Build Bridges159
Nívea Canalli Bona
Part III Decolonial Perspectives 175
10 The Decolonial Nature of Comunicação Popular177

Leonardo Custódio
11 Digital Media and Emancipation in Latin American

Communication Thinking191
Dorismilda Flores-Márquez
12 Communication and Vivir Bien/Buen Vivir:

In the Care of Our Common Home209
Adalid Contreras Baspineiro
Index229
Notes on Contributors
Nívea Canalli Bona Brazilian journalist Canalli Bona holds a PhD in

Communications from Brazil. She studies Communication in Social
Movements, and Alternative, Community and Popular Media, among
other subjects. She has three books published, was chair of a Journalism
Program in Brazil and researched in Spain and the United States. She
believes another communication is possible.
Jair Vega Casanova Sociologist, professor at the Department of Social
Communication, researcher at PBX Communication and Culture Research
Group and director of the Master on Communication at Universidad del
Norte, Colombia, Casanova holds a master’s degree in Politic and
Economic Studies. His research areas can be articulated within communi-
cation, participation and social change.
Daniel Prieto Castillo Prieto Castillo is an educator with a PhD in Social
Communication, Emeritus Professor at the National University of Cuyo
(Mendoza, Argentina). He has worked as specialist in educational com-
munication in several projects in different countries of Latin America. He
has published 48 books with theoretical, methodological and practical
contributions to the relationship between communication and education,
in formal and non-formal education.
Adalid Contreras Baspineiro Bolivian sociologist, specialist in commu-
nication for development and communication strategies, Contreras
Baspinero is attached to the Universidad Andina Simón Bolívar and the
Latin American Council of Social Sciences. He is visiting professor in
xiii
xiv NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
ostgraduate courses at Latin American and European universities, and

p
author of 30 books and a hundred academic essays.
Leonardo Custódio Custódio is a postdoctoral researcher at Åbo
Akademi University, Finland. He also coordinates the Anti-racism Media
Activist Alliance (www.armaalliance.fi) together with Monica Gathuo, and
is the author of Favela Media Activism: Counterpublics for Human Rights
in Brazil (2017).
Dorismilda Flores-Márquez Flores-Márquez is associate professor of
Communication at the Universidad De La Salle Bajío (León, México). She
holds a PhD in Social-Scientific Studies (ITESO, 2016) and is the author
of Imaginar un mundo mejor: La expression pública de los activistas en
Internet (ITESO, 2019).
María Cristina Mata Marita Mata is a consultant professor at the
National University of Córdoba (Argentina) and director of the
Specialization in Management and Production of Audiovisual Media. She
directed the Master in Communication and Contemporary Culture and
the Communication and Citizenship Program of that university. Researcher
specialized in public, mass and popular media.
Santiago Gómez Obando Gómez Obando is Popular educator and
occasional professor at the National University of Colombia. He is mem-
ber of the collective Dimensión Educativa, Centro de Pensamiento en
Políticas Públicas de Educación Superior (C3PES) and Centre de recher-
ches interdisciplinaires: Démocratie, Institutions, Subjectivité (Cridis).
Aníbal Orué Pozzo Orué Pozzo is a Faculty member of the graduate
Program in Latin American Interdisciplinary Studies, Federal University
of Latin American Integration, and at the Graduate School, East National
University (UNE), Paraguay. He is Researcher at Paraguayan Agency
on Science and Technology (CONACYT) and at the Centre for
Interdisciplinary Rural Studies (CERI), Paraguay.
Cicilia M. Krohling Peruzzo Khroling Peruzzo is PhD in
Communication from the University of São Paulo (ECA-USP), visiting
professor at University of State of Rio de Janeiro, researcher at CNPq.
Author of the books Relações públicas no modo de produção capitalista
(Public Relations in the Capitalist Mode of Production), Comunicação nos
movimentos populares – a participação na construção na cidadania
(Communication in Popular Movements—Participation in the Construction
NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS xv
of Citizenship) and Televisão comunitária—dimensão pública e participa-

ção cidadã na mídia local (Community Television—Public Dimension and
Citizen Participation in Local Media). She organized some book collec-
tions and has articles published in several national and international scien-
tific journals.
Ana Cristina Suzina Suzina has a bachelor’s degree in Journalism
(Universidade Estadual de Ponta Grossa, Brazil) and a PhD in Political
and Social Sciences (UCLouvain, Belgium). She is a Leverhulme Early
Career Fellow in the Institute for Media and Creative Industries at
Loughborough University London. Her research focuses on the relation-
ship between communication, social movements and democracy, with spe-
cial interest in Latin American societies.
Washington Uranga Uranga is a Uruguayan, resident of Argentina,
journalist, teacher and investigator of communication. He was vice presi-
dent of the World Catholic Association for Radio and Television (UNDA)
and President of the Latin American region of the same organization.
Author of several books on topics of communication, popular movements
and religion.
CHAPTER 1
Introduction: Popular Communication,

an Epistemological Debate between South
and North
Ana Cristina Suzina
There are many ways in which popular communication can be defined.1 As

the contributions that form this book testify, it is a theoretical framework
capable of preserving some fundamental pillars while hosting a diversity of
understandings that come from a rigorous engagement with the context
in which practices and concepts emerge and develop. As a summarizing
proposal, I advance that popular communication refers to dynamics that
are guided by three main principles: a bottom-up approach, that requires
embracing the diversity of knowledge; a strong connection with social
struggles, conforming with a “communication movement” in a struggle
1
Acknowledgements to the members of the Brazilian research groups Comuni, coordi-
nated by Professor Cicilia Peruzzo, and Deslocar, coordinated by Professor Denise Cogo,
with whom this article was discussed in March of 2020. Their comments and questions
contributed to clarify and enrich the ideas and debates exposed here.
A. C. Suzina (*)
Loughborough University, Loughborough, UK
e-mail: a.suzina@lboro.ac.uk
© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 1

Switzerland AG 2021
A. C. Suzina (ed.), The Evolution of Popular Communication in
Latin America, Palgrave Studies in Communication for Social
Change, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-62557-3_1
2 A. C. SUZINA
around meanings; and an alternative configuration to mainstream media,

guided by the will of occupying the public debate. In the sequence, I will
unfold these principles and reflect upon how they inform an epistemology
of the South coming from communication and media studies, exploring
some fruitful dialogues with other currents in the field.
The Bottom-Up Approach: An Epistemological Root

In 2015, I had a great exchange with Vivian, a journalist working at the
Centro Popular de Mídias, in São Paulo. It was one among several other
very inspiring conversations that I had the luck to have in the context of
my doctoral research.2 Vivian shared with me an internal debate about the
employment of the notion of the popular in their mediatic production. At
a certain point, she advanced a notion of her own, that of of “poor jour-
nalism” that goes as follows:
New journalism? I don’t know what it is currently. Some people say that it
is A Pública.3 I agree, but I would like to do the ‘poor journalism’, that is
directed to the real poor, the one in which we go there and put our feet in
the mud. And there is neither the concern to compete to know who gets
more clicks. […] It is to understand that there is a cultural exclusion in
Brazil that is associated with an economic exclusion that is associated with a
social and geographic exclusion—these people usually live in the periphery.
Understand that this situation exists and that we want a dialogue with these
people. And it does not mean that we will ‘descend from our position of
lords of knowledge’, but that there is a proper language. […] This is to
make an effort to listen to the other. […] Because I know about my condi-
tion. I am a white middle class girl with a university degree. My text will
never or will hardly touch someone who is black, poor, did not go to the
university and is pregnant at 16 years old. I didn’t live it. I don’t know what
it is. I don’t know what text or image will touch this person. (Vivian, Centro
Popular de Mídias 2015)
In a certain way, this notion of “poor journalism” reflected many nor-

mative definitions expressed by several other Brazilian popular communi-
cators among the fifty-five I have interviewed from 2013 to 2017 (Suzina
2
My doctoral research was funded by the Brazilian agency CAPES—Coordenação de
Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior.
3
Brazilian news agency of investigative journalism. Available at: https://apublica.org/
1 INTRODUCTION: POPULAR COMMUNICATION, AN EPISTEMOLOGICAL… 3
2018). Many of them used terms similar to this idea of putting “the feet
in the mud” that she expressed to describe a golden rule for anyone search-
ing to do a communication related to or supporting processes of social
change. The “feet in the mud” summarizes the bottom-up principle of
popular communication. It refers to a posture of getting into deep contact
with the realities of marginalized people and honestly listening to them in
order to incorporate their voices in the communication or, ideally, engag-
ing them in the process of doing communication in any platform chosen.
It is about getting impregnated with these realities and, beyond narrating
them, sharing the feeling of living them and the urgency of changing
them. Joelma, from Rede de Notícias da Amazônia, during that same
research, told me that this is a more cherished skill than any university
degree, which relates with the idea of a communicator forged by/in the
field, as described by Nívea Canalli Bona (2020), in this book.
Another aspect of this refers to our work in popular communication in a way

that it is directed to the reality of that community, the people, that it really
approaches what people experience. […] The popular communication high-
lights the diversity and you make it for the people and with the people.
(Wellington, Landless Workers Movement, October 2015)
The idea of “feet in the mud” is close to the very sense of love that we
can find in Paulo Freire (see e.g., Freire 1967, 1992, 2017) and in the
works of bell hooks (see e.g. hooks 2001), in which it represents a mindful
engagement with liberating the other while also liberating oneself. What
we can see in Vivian’s, Joelma’s and other popular communicator’s words
is that this communication does not change just the other who might need
help to reach better living conditions. It summarizes the comprehension
that while the other is marginalized, I am marginalized as well, everyone
is marginalized, and transformation is required for all.
The bottom-up approach is about the source of knowledge mobilized,
breaking barriers that define whose voices have worth. Gilberto Gimenez
proposes a conceptual definition of popular communication that seeks to
distinguish it from a kind of dominant “popular communication,” fre-
quently used by elites in order to approach the masses. The latter is a top-
down popular communication in the sense of having the people as destiny
of the messages. According to Gimenez, “it is a relationship that is estab-
lished between cultural constellations not only different, but also ‘uneven’”
(Gimenez 1980, p. 12).
4 A. C. SUZINA
For this author, on the opposite, the liberating popular communication

is made of a “political conversion” (idem., p.16) because of its critical
perspective. On the top of highlighting the popular culture and knowl-
edge, it embraces the effort of transforming the oppressive realities. The
popular communication “implies breaking the logic of domination and
develops itself not from above, but from the people, sharing as much as
possible their own codes” (idem.). This is the essence of the bottom-up
principle that also included the Latin American tradition of popular com-
munication in the larger “participatory paradigm” of communication.4
In this sense, the analysis of the evolution of popular communication
under the light of the current digital disruption necessarily pushes the
debate about participatory issues, present in the reflections and promises
of both popular communication and the digital culture. Within the latter,
there is an emphasis on the enlargement of individual expression, such as
in the concept of self-massive information described by Manuel Castells to
talk about the potential of individually reaching large audiences through
the Internet (Castells 2013). The alluring potential of digital technologies
may however blur the idea of process approximating communication and
media back to the principles of the diffusionist model, in which the objec-
tive was to create appealing messages capable of being reproduced inde-
pendent of their pertinence to the public. This is a much cherished debate
under the perspective of popular communication, that can be found in the
seminal works of Paulo Freire (2013) and Juan Díaz Bordenave (Orué
Pozzo A. 2014), for instance.
Even though the perspective of popular communication also defendes
the dialogical process where receivers also produce information, participa-
tion is better related to dynamics of collective construction of messages
(Cogo 2009). Within this tradition, participation is necessarily associated
with the incorporation of grassroots perspectives and experiences in the
appropriation of communication and media. Flores-Márquez (2020)
highlights, in this book, that beyond increasing visibility, popular com-
munication embeds necessarily processes of resistance and hope. Out of
this complex articulation, there may be use of communication and media
platforms, but they will lack a political character that allows the constitu-
tion of an identity of struggle.
4
Other “images” of popular that apply to this reflection can be found in Gómez Obando’s
contribution to this book.
The Attachment to Social Struggles: A Battle

Around Meanings
The political character of popular communication lays down in the way
the appropriation of communication turns into a full component of the
social change pursued by a social collective. It goes beyond using com-
munication devices or platforms as tools to make struggles or issues more
visible. It means introducing a social complaint into a struggle around
meanings. Through popular communication, social actors engage in a dis-
pute around the grammar of arguments. Living in asymmetric democra-
cies (Suzina 2016, 2018) they face relations of oppression, where there are
distributive and recognition issues that disable parity of participation
(Fraser 2010). An important part of society is denied its right to speak for
themselves and to contribute in the debate and definition of social arrange-
ments. The problem is in the heart of contemporary social struggles all
over the world, expressed by demands such as the “reclamation and expan-
sion of citizenship” (Gerbaudo 2017, p. 3).
The communication that emerges from these emancipation processes is
pregnant of symbols, voices, and hopes of these peoples, and plays internal
and external roles within a social struggle. From one side, it exists to wrap
up a cosmovision that will, at a moment, nurture and confirm individual
and collective subjectivities, and from the other, it supports the constitu-
tion of a public representation of themselves and their utopia.
Even if concrete transformations, such as making a demand for health
or education visible, figure among the main popular communication
objectives, the process of recognizing rights and becoming a subject is
considered as more important than the material improvement itself
(Gumucio-Dagron 2014). In this sense, the improvement of living condi-
tions is always associated with an increase in political participation, as
Peruzzo’s and Mata’s contributions to this book describe. In a very
Freirean sense, it is about replacing oneself in the world as a subject who
can name things, instead of an object who is named by others. Popular
communication supports individuals and collectives to recover their own
voice and perspective, frequently blurred by dominant ones imposed
over them.
The term ‘popular’ is very cherished by us. Joana, the editor of Brasil de
Fato in Minas Gerais, classifies our work as popular. I think it is alternative.
These are never ending discussions, but the reason for employing popular is
6 A. C. SUZINA
that we already use ‘popular movement’, we build a popular project for the
country, we define ourselves as part of the popular field, everything for us
ends up in the popular. Everything is popular. If there is a hegemonic vision,
what is our vision? The popular one. […] For us, today, a popular vision of
Brazil and of the world is charged with this sense of entwining the
people in this construction. (Vivian, Centro Popular de Mídias 2015, my
highlights)
This understanding enlarges the scope of initiatives that can be consid-

ered within the spectrum of popular communication, focusing more on
the attachment to the struggles themselves than in the institutional profile
of the organization. The common principle between the practices is that
of resistance that supports the construction of a counter power that may
take different forms according to contexts and subjects of struggle. The
will to bring about transformation is the main shared feature and commu-
nication practices mirror it, recovering perspectives and experiences that
endorse it. In his defense of the method of Investigación Acción
Participativa, Orlando Fals Borda considers that the development of this
counter power, as a popular power, is directly associated with the retrieval
of the Other and the power of popular sectors. For him, recovering local
knowledge and practices makes the path for fighting top-down and asym-
metrical relations that configure the domination of hegemonic forces in
societies (Fals Borda 1985, 1987; see also Jair Vega Casanova, in this book).
In this sense, the long-term appropriation of communication within
social struggles can also contribute to the reflections about the use of
media during periods of latency of social movements (Melucci 1985), i.e.,
those periods between the peaks of public mobilization and visibility. The
political character of popular communication contributes to analyzing the
use of these platforms beyond the notion of tools or strategies, but as a full
component of the process of social change claimed by social movements,
as we can see in Peruzzo’s contribution to this book. It embeds a compre-
hension that every change must include a shift in the frame designing, to
employ Nancy Fraser’s concept (2010); it is about changing the collective
meanings that inspire and guide a society. Therefore, the internal role is
deeply related to the external role.
Evolving continuously throughout periods of latency and visibility,
popular communication practices support a public struggle in the defi-
nition of meanings. This idea is very important in this debate, while there
is a search of recognition of each voice, as a process of subjectivation and

intervention in the social order.
Meaning is what gives us sense of our own identity, of who we are and with
whom we ‘belong’—so it is tied up with questions of how culture is used to
mark out and maintain identity within and difference between groups. (Hall
2013, p. xix)
Considering the high concentration of argument producers and a vari-

ety of barriers regarding the legitimacy of the speakers in the public sphere,
the aim of having their own say confirms a demand for representation. The
claims of social actors against mainstream media, for instance, correlate to
the issues of “normative legitimacy” and “political efficacy” of public
opinion, as conceptualized by Fraser (2010, pp. 93–99). The problem is
that inequalities in local and global public spheres are still producing polit-
ical asymmetries while excluding particular social groups—especially dis-
advantaged ones—from the community of fellow members allowed to
interfere in the frame designing (Suzina 2016).
Popular communication initiatives are shaped by the way each social
group dialogues with and challenges its context. It participates, then, in
the construction of a language and a narrative to produce enough disso-
nance (Suzina 2019, 2020) and confront hegemonic visions.
An Alternative to Mainstream Media:

The Occupation of the Public Sphere
John D. H. Downing has organized an entire encyclopedia gathering
analyses about the multiple models of appropriation of media by social
actors in different countries and historical times (Downing J. D. 2011). As
varied as their formats, methods and results are the concepts applied for
describing and analyzing them. In a compilation discussing the epistemol-
ogy and the implications of such a variety of terms and definitions,
Benjamin Ferron retrieved around fifty different concepts applied to this
genre of initiative (Ferron 2006). Regina Festa identified thirty-three dif-
ferent terms used only in Latin America (Dornelles 2007, p. 5). According
to Ferron’s compilation, the definitions provided by scholars can refer to
a variety of characteristics:
8 A. C. SUZINA
• their differences compared to mainstream media: in this sense, they

could be named as “alternative media,” because of their subaltern or
dissident origins and approaches;
• their economic conditions: in this case, they could be referred to as
“independent media,” for their autonomy regarding capitalist own-
ership and partisan attachments or not-for-profit status;
• their editorial approaches: here, they could be defined as “radical
media”—the term coined by Downing himself (2001)—regarding
their critical engagement in diffusing alternative perspectives about
reality and the social order;
• their relations with audiences: referring to situations where they
could be called “participatory media” because of their efforts to
include the audience in the news routines, or “citizen media”—the
term coined by Clemencia Rodríguez (2001)—for their capacity of
transforming audiences into producers and broadcasters of informa-
tion from their own experience and perspective; among others.
There have been attempts for establishing one normative model to be

applied in the field and Downing’s encyclopedia is a recent example of
this, while he proposes to talk about “social movements’ media.” As
observed by Ferron, definitions can be understood in many senses, but in
general they play an important role in the (de)legitimation of these opera-
tions as a field of study as well as in their consideration as full agents in the
media and the public spheres. And this is the main aspect of the whole
reflection. I define the third principle of popular communication of a will
to appropriate media as a quest to occupy the public debate.
At a certain point in my exchanges with popular communicators from
the Landless Workers Movement, one of them said “we know that occupy-
ing land is dangerous but we do it; the same goes with occupying media,”
placing communication actions at the same level as the main historically
political action of the movement. When it comes to the appropriation of
media platforms, in general, popular communication is presented as an
alternative to mainstream media, in ownership models, format, and con-
tent. In fact, it fights power asymmetries in the participation in the public
sphere. Throughout this whole book, “popular communication” might be
the first most mentioned term. The second, I would guess, might be
“inequalities.”
The sense of developing popular communication within the Movimento

Sem-Terra is exactly to democratize it, the media, which means that all men
and women will have access to means of communication. […] In the popu-
lar communication, we understand that we must have access to these media
that already exist and build new ones also. (Wellington, Landless Workers
Movement, October 2015)
Already in the 1980s, the MacBride Report denounced the concentra-

tion of media ownership in the world and praised alternative initiatives
developed by social groups (Otre 2015). The challenge persists, along
with the resilience of grassroots actors who become even more conscious
of its role within social change processes.
When it comes to the practice, format and content are influenced by
the straight connection with the social groups with which the practice is
connected. It means that the choice of technological and communication
platforms and the way they will be used, as well as the subjects covered,
take into account aspects such as cultural traditions, socioeconomic condi-
tions, particular interests, the social struggle in question, and everyday
experiences. However, historically, the concept did not refer to produc-
tions necessarily made to compete with any other kind of media (Peruzzo
C. M. 2014).
There are two remarks that may be made around this aspect. Some
popular media initiatives develop the perspective of providing an alterna-
tive source of information independent of any competitive concern with
mainstream media. However, despite criticism and awareness, traditional
media models can be employed by popular communicators which does
not necessarily prejudice their projects of resistance. These aspects may be
observed with attention, because the quality of analysis may be enriched
with a greater understanding of the normative feature of “being
alternative.”
Considering the possibility of rivalry with mainstream media, even
when popular communicators develop a consistent criticism regarding the
mainstream approach, frequently, their main concern is to build some-
thing in which the local community is able to see for themselves and can
talk about their particular issues, as discussed by Bona (2020), in this
book. They are aware that mainstream media have a high penetration
among their audiences and, generally, do not try to replace sources of
information and entertainment with popular media. They recognize that
the game is not fair, considering the availability of resources that make
10 A. C. SUZINA
their productions less financially secure and, therefore, less stable and
sometimes less technically qualified. However, they make efforts to offer a
complementary source that breaks misinformation and highlights the
value of local and alternative experiences and perspectives. The examples
presented by Custódio (2020) in this book, in the context of the corona-
virus crisis, are illustrative. This is the point where the alternative to main-
stream media must be analyzed beyond models, which leads to my
second remark.
I argue that the idea of popular as an expression of resistance must con-
sider also aspects of assimilation and hybridization. In this sense, the con-
cept of mediation in the work of Martín-Barbero (1987) can be helpful.
Talking about content reception, he affirms that there is never a complete
subordination, but a resignification of contents. The practice of popular
media suggests that the incorporation of mainstream models and practices
may also be resignified and support the emergence and consolidation of
the initiatives, based on the connection to social struggle and on the bot-
tom-up approach. It suggests a resistance that is rather rooted in content,
approaches, and managerial aspects than in technical and technological
formats.
Ferron makes a critical discussion about the normative aspects in alter-
native media studies and highlight three main premises: heterodoxy/
autonomy, unity/cooperation, and democratic/grassroots (Ferron 2010,
p. 136). This set of premises generally overlaps the principles of popular
communication, which suggests another rich international dialogue.
However, the “opposition” to mainstream media models is a central point
in the alternative media approaches, while it is rather a principle depen-
dent upon the other two—the bottom-up approach and connection with
struggles—in the context of the popular communication tradition.
An Epistemology of the South from Media

and Communication Studies
The term “popular” in comunicación popular, in Spanish, and comunica-

ção popular, in Portuguese, refers to the culture of the so-called popular
classes in Latin America—which includes indigenous people, those living
on the peripheries and in the suburbs, campesinos, and all groups that are
excluded from the dominant elite culture. We talk about popular commu-
nication to discuss the general use of communication processes—includ-
ing media, but also any communication tool such as theater, music,
interpersonal communications etc.—to empower citizens within a
historical and socioeconomic context through participation. We talk par-

ticularly about popular media to discuss the appropriation by these groups
of media outlets to produce or highlight a narrative opposed to a domi-
nant one (González 1990; Peruzzo C. M. 2008). It also refers to opera-
tions seeking the emancipation and the improvement in the conditions of
life of these groups (Gimenez 1984; Festa 1984; Otre 2016).
As mentioned before, if there is one main common root between the
definitions of popular communication that are diversely expressed across
the eleven contributor-chapters in this book, this is an awareness of
inequalities and a genuine engagement with those who suffer them. It
appears in a frequent recall of historical and deep structural inequalities in
Latin America, associated with a violent process of colonization that per-
sists in forms of coloniality up until our day. Aníbal Orué Pozzo (2020)
summarizes the evolution of policies and politics since the 1950s, high-
lighting projects of development that did nothing more than sustaining
structures of economic and cultural dependency. Leonardo Custódio
(2020) traces the meaning of colonization and coloniality that feeds the
latter since the arrival of colonizers in what Santiago Gómez Obando
(2020) calls “Our America.”
But this common root is also expressed by the reference to a number of
efforts to break this dependency coming from different social sectors.
Washington Uranga (2020) recalls the Theology of Liberation as a fertile
soil in which grassroots communities have awaken to a reality of oppres-
sion and for a collective response to it, including a creative and critical
appropriation of communication. Jair Vega Casanova (2020) describes the
path of Orlando Fals Borda in the search for a research methodology in
the social sciences that leaves room for the emergence of the voices of
marginalized and frequently invisible social actors. Daniel Prieto Castillo
(2020) shares a long path of construction of a pedagogic mediation in
which “communicators-educators” create a space of encounter and learn-
ing exchange that praises dignity for all. All the authors talk about recogni-
tion and full adhesion to forms of knowledge that combine rational
arguments with a mystique that encompasses feelings and beliefs, as con-
densed in the notion of buen vivir, presented by Adalid Contreras
Baspineiro (2020).
The focus of the studies about popular and alternative communication,

according to Fernando Reyes Matta (apud Festa 1995, pp. 131–132), was
to understand this new phenomenon in the life of Latin-Americans and walk
12 A. C. SUZINA
together in the common search of liberation utopias. Essentially, this com-

munication from the social looked for changing the unjust, changing the
oppressor, changing the historical inertia that imposes suffocating dimen-
sions, through a liberation vocation nurtured by a multiplicity of communi-
cative experiences. (Peruzzo C. M. 2008, free translation)
While reflecting upon the reasons why critical actors still appropriate
and make sense of the notion of popular in Latin America, Gómez Obando
(2020) attributes its pertinence and relevance to “the affirmative, articu-
lating and mythical possibilities that the popular guarantees for the set of
discursive formations in which they are produced and articulated.” In
short, the sense of popular communication continuously produces and is
produced by the sense and the direction of social struggles. Cicilia
M. Krohling Peruzzo (2020) describes this process based on two case
studies that demonstrate how popular communication takes form embed-
ded in moments of latency and visibility of social movements, becoming
an integral part of their dynamics.
Following these premises, popular communication constitutes one
epistemology because these roots forge a method, a pedagogy, and a
practice coherent with the mud in which they step in. They are forcibly
engaged, without losing rigor. And although deeply marked by these
roots, the approach proposed by popular communication dialogues easily
with contexts and issues—in social and academic terms—beyond its Latin
American birthplace, as we will see below.
Boaventura de Sousa Santos (2019) recently offered a large recognition
to the works of Paulo Freire and Orlando Fals Borda for their contribution
to his definition of epistemologies of the South. As it happens with popu-
lar communication, these epistemologies are enough flexible to capture
the spirit and dynamics of social struggles across the world.
The epistemologies of the South refer to the production and validation of

knowledge anchored in the experiences of resistance of all social groups that
have been systematically victims of the injustice, oppression and destruction
caused by capitalism, colonialism and patriarchy. I call the vast and very
diverse scope of these experiences an anti-imperial South. It is an epistemo-
logical, non-geographic South, composed of many epistemological souths
that have in common the fact that they are knowledge born in struggles
against capitalism, colonialism and patriarchy. They are produced wherever
these struggles occur, both in the geographical north and in the geographi-
cal south. The aim of Southern epistemologies is to allow oppressed social
groups to represent the world as their own and on their own terms, as only
in this way will they be able to transform it according to their own aspira-
tions. (Santos 2019, p. 17, free translation, my highlights)
Additionally, as for the epistemologies of the South, the concept of

popular communication does not search for the absolute, rather recogniz-
ing itself as one part, one perspective, dialogical—although necessarily
critical—in its constitution and in the relation with other currents.
However, it is important to observe how the constitution of one field of
research integrates the decolonial character of popular communication.
Dorismilda Flores-Márquez (2020) highlights in this book a “double way
of resistance.”. While “communities resisted to oppression with creativ-
ity … Latin American scholars resisted the Anglo and Eurocentric theo-
retical production, by exploring, analysing and explaining their own
context, by reformulating or discussing concepts, and particularly by artic-
ulating the practical projects with the theoretical production.”. The trajec-
tories of scholars such as Juan Díaz Bordenave, as commented by Orué
Pozzo (2020, this book), and Fals Borda, as summarized by Jair Vega
Casanova (2020, this book), as well as the dynamic and critical coexistence
with the current of communication for/and development and social
change, as discussed by Peruzzo (2020, this book) illustrate this produc-
tive tension.
The development of the concept is straightly connected with the expe-
riences and reflexivity in the field. Uranga (2020, this book) and Prieto
Castillo (2020, this book) highlight that the practice came before the
theory. The number and the relevance of popular radio stations within
historical social struggles in Latin America, as described by María Cristina
Mata (2020, this book), illustrate this process. It is a particular theoretical
development embedded in a Latin American school of thinking, that
emerged in the 1960s, with the creation of Ciespal (Centro Internacional
de Estudios Superiores de Comunicación para América Latina) in Ecuador
and followed by other research centers in countries such as Chile,
Venezuela, and Mexico. The work of scholars such as Luis Ramiro Beltrán,
Antonio Pasquali, Fernando Reyes Matta, Armand and Michelle Mattelart,
among others, contributed to build and disseminate an approach that
searched to discuss communication developments in relation to the politi-
cal and cultural context of the region. Since the beginning, there was a
concern related to the incorporation of technologies within processes of
domination and dependency, which were deepened by the dictatorships.
14 A. C. SUZINA
Opposite to the functional-diffusionist conception propitiated by the North

American agencies in those years that, when identifying Latin American
countries as underdeveloped, tied “development” directly to the quantitative
growth of the number of copies of newspapers sold or the number of radio
and television sets per inhabitant, the “theory of communication” that origi-
nated in these countries provided a historical-social approach that made it
impossible to isolate the action of media from the political context and pro-
cesses of the region. What finally caused a dispute about Latin American
research during its first years was not the weight of media in the moderniza-
tion of these countries but the purpose of communication in the emancipation
of our societies. The academic formation on communication was born under
the sign of a double function: to study the action and conformation of mass
media, most of them commercial, with an intent to introduce into their
pages and programs the voices of social agents that had been usually absent,
and working in the creation of alternative media which were to be demo-
cratic right from the start. (Martín-Barbero 2014, p. 22, free translation,
italics in the original)
Christa Berger (1999) highlighted that this was a generation that dis-
cussed Latin America from the perspective of the communication, as well
as the global process of communication from the perspective of Latin
America. A diversity of initiatives and associations make efforts to over-
come what José Marques de Melo defined as the “complex of the colo-
nized,” searching for what he summarized as “(1) work on the nature of
the communication process; (2) theoretical autonomy and the promotion
of methodological criticism, and (3) the rescue of empirical knowledge in
its triple dimension: autochthonous, mestizo and popular” (Mattos 2019,
p. 63). In 1980, the MacBride Report, from Unesco, suggested a New
World Information and Communication Order and enhanced this process
with a strong support to alternative forms of communication coming from
marginal voices. The critical analysis of a global and unequal flow of infor-
mation led to a theoretical perspective engaged with a political project
very close to popular movements.
Taking advantage of this window of international visibility and of a new
wave of thinkers, such as Jesús Martín-Barbero and Néstor García Canclini,
the concept enjoyed a recognition that positioned it in global literature
and consolidated it as an internal reference to scholars in the region. As
described by Thomas Tufte, the tradition of popular communication
embedded in the Latin American school of thinking, constitutes “a
groundbreaking work of the late 1980s on rehabilitating popular culture
and reassessing the political potential of everyday social and cultural prac-
tices, not least communicative practices” (Tufte 2017, p. 45). Florencia
Enghel and Martín Becerra (2018) recall a study from the 1990s that
identified an autonomy of reciprocal references between Latin American
thinkers in relation with a previous centrality of European and North
American peers.
From the 1980s to the twenty-first century, the perspective of popular
communication continued to develop all over Latin America, evolving and
establishing dialogues with complementary approaches. It represents a
strong field of research in the region. In Brazil, between 1972 and 2012,
more than one hundred Master and PhD dissertations analyzed these
kinds of practices (Otre 2016). It became, however, together with other
Latin American contributions, rather invisible in the international litera-
ture of communication and media studies (Enghel and Becerra 2018;
Ganter and Ortega 2019).
Despite this invisibility, the popular communication tradition addresses
one of the main challenges that came with the recent wave of scientific
interest in the appropriation of digital media by communities and social
movements, as observed by Clemencia Rodríguez, Benjamin Ferron, and
Kristin Shamas. The authors invite scholars to take into account historical
processes, economic and political contexts, a wider understanding of com-
munication, and the need to ground research in the field in order to better
understand and analyze the use of media in the context of social change
(Rodríguez et al. 2014, p. 3). The combination of young and more expe-
rienced authors in this book demonstrates the permanent evolution of
practices and reflections, reflecting this continuous dialogue with realities.
The South and the North:

An Epistemological Debate
Bringing popular communication into a global debate can prove challeng-
ing. From one side, it can be easily misrelated to the “dominant popular
communication” as defined by Gimenez (see above) and then associated
with the mass media. From the other side, it can also be related to Latin
America to the point of being perceived as a too-located and dated per-
spective. Considering that mainstream theoretical approaches are not
labeled with their Anglo-Saxon and European origins, the identification of
popular communication with a particular geographical region incurs the
16 A. C. SUZINA
risk of justifying a peripherical position. Under the principles of the epis-

temologies of the South, the correlation is worth it because it underlines
the key contextual inputs that build its rationale while placing itself as one
knowledge that integrates an ecology of coexisting knowledges.
The strength of this theoretical framework comes from the fruitful dia-
logue that can be developed with other approaches in which participation
is a core principle. The concept of popular communication was built upon
dynamics of participation and conflict. Mario Kaplún talks about a people
who assume a protagonist role and like this author, Regina Festa and
Gilberto Gimenez speak of a communication coming from the bottom of
society, enhancing popular codes and triggering awareness and reflexivity
(Peruzzo C. M. 2006, p. 3).
Historically, the adjective popular meant “communication of the people,”

made by them and for them, through their emancipator organizations and
movements towards the transformation of oppressive structures and inhu-
man living conditions. (Peruzzo C. M. 2006, p. 2, free translation)
Two globalized approaches seem particularly suitable and largely inter-

twined in this field. The approach of communication for social change
places popular communication in an historical epistemological debate in
which communication and media reflections and practices take part in
processes of transformation on different levels. The approach of the right
to communication inserts popular communication in a global debate from
the perspective of the peripheries.
Popular Communication and the Perspective of Communication

for Social Change
In their anthology of communication for social change, Afonso Gumucio-
Dagrón and Thomas Tufte define a most distinctive character for the initia-
tives in this field. According to them, for the most part, this kind of media
configures communication processes “which allow people themselves to
define who they are, what they want and need, and how they will work
together to improve their lives” (Gumucio-Dragon and Tufte 2006, p.
xiv). The richness of this conception is that it leaves plenty of room for the
reflexivity of the actors and the consideration to the context, configuring
also a concrete path of dialogue with the concept of popular communica-
tion. Tufte has developed a tri-dimensional model where communication
for social change is also associated with the “liberation pedagogy” and
“dialogical principles” of Paulo Freire (Tufte 2013, pp. 80–81).
I argue that there are three general conceptual approaches that can be rep-
resented in a model of three generations. The first generation refers to the
diffusion of innovations, focused in the dissemination of information and
closely linked to the Communication for Behavior Change. The second
focuses on communication skills, promoting the development of competen-
cies more or less general; it is mainly associated with Media Literacy. The
third is the Communication for Social Change, which emerges from Paulo
Freire’s liberating pedagogy and the principles of Dialogical Communication.
(Tufte 2013, p. 80, free translation)
If based on Freirean principles, communication for social change pur-

sues community development, common ground, and linkage of groups
together in pursuit of social justice, economic inclusion, and political par-
ticipation for all.
The debates in this field also include a tension and a dialogue with the
improvement of living conditions. Its history is closely connected with the
field of communication for development, which is very related to research
and practice of communication within more institutionalized initiatives
searching for the transformation of realities—such as those managed by
international aid organizations and cooperation. Under a shared umbrella,
the large field of communication for development and social change com-
bines an approach more generally related to the diffusion of technological
innovations, as analyzed by Everett Rogers (Rogers 1974), with another
approach closer to the participatory models, although the limits between
one and another may be very blurred in some reflections and
configurations.
Victor Manuel Marí Sáez (2014) mentions two studies conducted by
Jo Ellen Fair, in 1989, and later by Fair and Hammant Shah, in 1997, in
which they recovered academic research in communication and develop-
ment. The first period, between 1958 and 1986, highlights the perspec-
tive of diffusion, revealing a high level of trust in communication strategies
for changing individual and collective attitudes and, consequently, push-
ing transformations in underdeveloped regions of the world. The second,
between 1986 and 1997, points the emergence of participatory paradigms
in the field (idem., p. 62).
18 A. C. SUZINA
The role of technology is another important subject of debate in the

large field of communication for development and social change. Marí
Sáez (2014) recalls the importance of the pioneer community radios in
Latin America as a turning point in the definition of the model of develop-
ment in the region (See Mata 2020, this book). In short, technological
advances are taken as core resources within social change actions. Their
availability represents an enlargement of possibilities for organizing these
actions, for reaching audiences and getting them on board, as well as for
improving the visibility of their demands (See Flores-Márquez 2020,
this book).
For Marí Sáez (2014), the choice of technologies can be more deter-
minist or sociocritical, depending on the centrality of the technical solu-
tions. In the first, technology moves or strongly influences the social
change, while in the second the context imposes conditions on the choice
and on the efficiency of the technology. Jo Tacchi (2017) recalls the
importance of a weighted observation about the effect of the increasing
use of technology in relation to local needs and appropriations of different
devices. For her, a “balance is needed between what technologies provide
in terms of affordances as the possible properties of technologies and
broad and specific contextual constraints and opportunities” (Tacchi
2017, p. 106)
In Latin America, the concept of communication for development was
largely avoided by scholars and practitioners, following a critical reflection
regarding programs and policies of development recommended or even
imposed by international institutions to the countries in the region. As
mentioned before, the emergence of the concept of popular communica-
tion took place with the creation of Ciespal and other local organizations
that gathered researchers and field practitioners interested in developing
and disseminating a concept and methods to confront international domi-
nation and dependency, strengthening local and regional experiences and
knowledges.
Only later in the 2000s, the notions of communication for develop-
ment and social change started to be applied in the region, exploring
potential associations with the local schools of thinking and translating it
to regional contexts and experiences. Scholars such as Uranga propose a
step forward in “fragmented perspectives” in order to dialogue with
enlarged communication processes (Uranga 2016).
We want to recover a more integral view of communication, related to the

essential condition of the human being who lives in community, who is
constituted as an actor in a relational manner, who generates networks and
organizational processes based on conversational exchanges and who,
through collective production of senses, constitutes and constructs the cul-
ture that contains him/her and that, at the same time, forges him/her in a
characteristic way. (Uranga 2016, p. 17, free translation)
For the author, the popular communication is not in opposition to

massive, industrial, and institutional forms of communication. It is a per-
spective of communication for social change that incorporates other ana-
lytical frameworks while preserving and strengthening popular roots.
Popular Communication and the Perspective of the Right

to Communicate
The “right to communicate” or “communication rights” consists of
another international approach that is close to that of popular communi-
cation, as they both conceive communication in relation to the subjectiva-
tion and agency of social actors. One particularity of this approach is that
it is strongly related to the establishment of laws and policies for guaran-
teeing the right conditions for the access to and production of communi-
cation. Another of its features is a claim for recognizing communication as
a human right, connecting all peripheral processes and battles searching
for the constitution and recognition of a political voice to marginalized
actors, as with the case of popular communication.
The rights-based approach gives a legal entitlement for communica-
tion, requiring and legitimizing claims and policies that grant access to
production and use of information by all members of a society. It takes
communication to a metalevel of rights that deal with asymmetrical rela-
tionships, claiming that all human beings should be able to express their
feelings and thoughts regarding the way a society is organized and, mainly,
the way this social order affects their lives. As summarized by Seán Ó
Siochrú (2016), the “right to communicate” is about deepening and
expanding other human rights.
The right to communicate is generally formulated as laws and policies
allowing and protecting the freedom of expression, as is the case in the
Universal Declaration of Human Rights. It is, nevertheless, unfolded in all
legal regulations regarding the ownership of media, the rules for
20 A. C. SUZINA
producing and diffusing information, as well as policies and direct actions

enabling the expression of marginalized groups, among others.
Additionally, it includes a concern regarding the consideration of the con-
tents expressed, claiming the recognition of the diversity of perspectives.
It foresees an equal-based dialogue and response from powerful actors to
whom messages are addressed. In short, the “right to communicate is, in
the end, not just about being heard: it must also mean securing access to the
information you need; and being listened to by those in power with due
consideration for your views.” (Ó Siochrú 2016, p. 6, italics in the original)
The collective Intervozes, one of the main social associations campaign-
ing for the right to communicate in Brazil, has identified seven axes for
struggles and debate in this field. They are (1) freedom of expression, (2)
public communication, (3) alternative and community communication—
which contains the approach of popular communication, (4) the link
between media and human rights, (5) the regulation of broadcasting ini-
tiatives, (6) access to the Internet, and (7) issues regarding privacy and
surveillance (Intervozes 2007–2014).
The lack or the nature of the laws ruling the practices in the field of
popular communication has a great influence on the conditions for devel-
oping each action. The difficulties of getting a license for launching a
community audiovisual outlet constitute a clear example in this sense and
affect most of the countries in Latin America. The predominance of
market-oriented policies consists of another problem. For instance, leav-
ing to the private sector the decision of where and how to develop media
outlets contributes to the constitution and maintenance of “deserts of
news,”, that are places in which there is none or very few local producers
of information (Pimenta et al. 2017).
However, field actors do not frequently declare a clear affiliation with
the concept, something that was observed during a global evaluation of
projects financed by the World Christian Association for Communication
(WACC) in 2015 (Ó Siochrú 2016). The report suggested that the idea
of communication rights was not widely understood by actors in the field
and that it was not easily operational in daily based practices. As observed
by Peruzzo, popular communication consists of a great variety of practices
that enable debates and the development of the right to communicate
(Peruzzo C. M. 2016). The dialogue with this globalized approach
explores the cross-fertilization between the field of concrete experiences,
the constitution of legal frameworks, as well as the appropriation of the
idea of the right of communicating.
Final Considerations
Many of the characteristics attributed to particular theoretical approaches,
such as popular communication or communication for social change, are
found intertwined in the field of experiences, which suggests two reflec-
tions. The first is that the categorization might be rather used to identify
patterns of experiences in relation to the contexts and to the balance of
power that can interfere in the evolution of the practices. It means that,
more relevant than establishing categories to classify the experience, is
understanding how a concept fits and may be transformed in relation to
particular features of social and historical contexts. The second reflection
is, nevertheless, that the development of concepts is still important to con-
tribute to the consolidation of a full field of research and social action that
becomes increasingly relevant in a highly mediatized society. The cross-
fertilization between theoretical concepts and information coming from
the field can contribute to the development of reflections about both the
communication practices themselves and the influence of communication
in general in the construction of social order.
Ferron (2010) highlights a remark made by Clemencia Rodríguez and
Chris Atton, for whom it is imperative to stop defining this kind of initia-
tive by what they are not (i.e. they do not search for profit, they are not
big, they are not professionals, etc.) and privilege conceptualizations that
define them for what they actually are and do, for instance, for their oppo-
sition to a symbolic domination coming from mainstream media and for
their potential for empowering social groups.
Popular communication is above all a bottom-up oriented theoretical
and empirical approach that leads to a variety of perspectives in permanent
evolution. From Mario Kaplun, and his Cassete Foro method, to Jorge
Gonzalez and his concept of cybercultur@, it analyzes the evolution of the
practices—frequently searching to contribute with it—but also seeks to
incorporate new analytical challenges in a permanent dialogue with the
social and political context. This diversity of approaches constitutes an
epistemological field that paves the way for a rich dialogue between North
and South, local and global approaches.
22 A. C. SUZINA
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PART I
The Roots of an Epistemology

CHAPTER 2
Thinking about Communication

from the Global South. Subjectivities
Construction in Latin America: An Overview
Aníbal Orué Pozzo
General Presentation
Beginning in 1492, from the occupation of the territory initially named
America by Spaniards and Portuguese—and then by British, French, and
Dutch, among other imperial powers—the occupied territory was sub-
jected to various impositions of new subjectivities, by different forms of
physical and symbolic violence. While the processes of building and impos-
ing subjectivities go through multiple instances, and involve the combina-
tion of a number of factors, what I will try to develop relates more directly
to the communication processes that are inserted in the newly occupied
A. Orué Pozzo (*)
Graduate Program on Interdisciplinary Latin-American Studies (IELA),
Federal University of Latin-American Integration (UNILA),
Foz do Iguaçu, Brazil
Graduate School, East National University (UNE), Ciudad del Este, Paraguay
e-mail: aoruepozzo@gmail.com

Switzerland AG 2021
30 A. ORUÉ POZZO
territories. More specifically, I will try to develop the impositions of new

subjectivities from the popular perspective, that is, from the processes that
are installed and developed within what is called in a very broad and vague
way “the people,” as opposed to hegemonic and dominant sectors in
Latina American society. I analyze and discuss some moments and situa-
tions that arise in Latin American social theory and, specifically in the
communication field in the region, from the 1950s approximately (and
perhaps a little earlier). This cut has two aspects: one exogenous and one
endogenous to the Latin American region.
Among the exogenous aspects to the region it is possible to highlight
two moments:
1. The end of the Second European War, with the emergence of a new

imperial power: The United States (1945).
2. As a result of this situation, the United States assumes the role of
new imperial power, consolidating and promoting the development
of a number of institutions in Latin America—and also in other
world regions—in order to expand its physical and symbolic pres-
ence in different areas; the “internationalization” of its presence.
As for the endogenous context in the Latin American region, it is possi-

ble to highlight:
1. A slight industrialization process that, since the 1930s, is expanding

mainly in some countries of the region such as Argentina, Brazil,
and Mexico.
2. Emergence of an autonomous proposal of Latin American socio-
economic thought in the mid-twentieth century, which involved,
among other things, the creation of the Economic Commission for
Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC) in 1948, and, at the
same time, its “critical” side: Theory of Dependency.
3. The emergence of autonomous social grass-roots movements,

campesinos, indigenous peoples, women, and others, that question
impositions (social, political, and cultural) external to the region.
4. The Cuban revolution in 1959, as a first practical response to Latin
American thought in the region; the imperial reaction: The Alliance
for Progress, in March 1961 that seeks to “transform” the conti-
nent, “modernizing” the productive structure, mainly that related
to agriculture.
2 THINKING ABOUT COMMUNICATION FROM THE GLOBAL SOUTH… 31
Undoubtedly, it is important to note that these changes and transfor-

mations have a continuity in time; they are not isolated processes. This
paper will allow me to think about the region and then focus on discussing
some elements present in the Latin American and Paraguayan experience,
so that I can reflect on the constitution of a critical social thinking and,
further, a popular and grass-roots communication thought and practice in
the region. To this end I will seek to discuss not only some concrete expe-
riences, I will also highlight certain thinkers who laid the constitutive
foundations for, or rescued, the existence of social and communication
theory in the region. At the same time, the chapter points toward a Latin
American communication process, questioning models imported into the
region and moving away from them, mainly from those related to Euro-
American models. Such is the case with Juan Díaz Bordenave, Luis Ramiro
Beltrán, and Orlando Fals Borda.
Background: Experiences in Latin America

From the 1930s onward Latin America went through a series of social,
political, economic, and cultural transformations, which have again a pro-
found relationship with the emergence of new subjectivities in broad pop-
ular sectors of the region. In the following pages, I will introduce
evolutions in several fields of thought and research in order to situate,
from this point of view, the emergence of popular and grass-root commu-
nication within this context.
With the end of the Second Eurpean War, the United States succeeded
in taking over political, economic, and cultural control in almost every
region of the world from the British Empire, assuming leadership as an
imperialist power (Dos Santos 1998). This has direct consequences for
Latin America. The subtle and contradictory move towards autonomous
industrialization in the region is questioned and consequently a model is
“suggested” in order to increase the presence of US capital in important
areas of the Latin American production apparatus. In other words, the
United States seeks to somehow regain the prominence in the region
which, because of its active participation in the European war, had shifted
its interest to other territories; it deepens the internationalization of its
presence, including Latin America.
A new concept of development is introduced, underpinned by the aid
and cooperation of more “advanced” countries, based mainly on the con-
tributions that the United States can give to different regions so that they
32 A. ORUÉ POZZO
reach, or attain, levels close to those that the new hegemonic power and
other industrialized countries of Europe possess. In this way, a “new era”
begins, one that holds the United States as expanding its model to differ-
ent regions of the world. A very contradictory situation, for this country’s
past places it as one of the first in America that managed to become inde-
pendent from British colonialism and has no colonies.1
In parallel with this process of consolidating the new imperial power,
there are several situations in Latin America that, in some ways, seek to
advance a more autonomous and independent spectrum. The experience
of the years leading up to the Second European War (1939–1945) and,
even experiences during it, contribute to raising this expectation of auton-
omy in the region, but not that much. The “Manifest Destiny” of the
United States—which follows the implementation of the so-called Monroe
Doctrine in the former nineteenth century—which was that of “the colo-
nization and possession of the continent” (Morales Duran 1991)—
becomes more effective and present since the end of the European conflict
by 1945.
These years have been extremely fruitful for Latin American thought.
Likewise, some countries in the region have promoted several processes of
autonomous and independent development (Marini 1974; Dos
Santos 2020). With the end of the war, the United States reassumed its
leadership in the region. However, in the face of its active participation in
the European conflict, and in the face of the need to increase its global
economic and political control, the country focused its main attention on
regions outside Latin America. This enabled the region to emerge with
lukewarm and contradictory processes of independence toward the US
empire, which in some countries strengthened autonomous processes at
the society level, as well as social and political thinking of its own.
New Thoughts and Practices Questioning

Eurocentric Models
Since the establishment of the Economic Commission for Latin America
and the Caribbean (ECLAC) in 1948, there has been an intense discus-
sion about the economic and political problems of the region and how to
1
However, from the beginning of the twentieth century, Puerto Rico became a United
States colony, going through various legal situations until reaching that of “Associated
State,” a colonial euphemism.
overcome them. In the early years, the great discussion was organized
around the industrialization processes (Bielschowsky and Torres 2018). In
one article, Prebisch2 stresses the importance of initiating a process of
industrialization, as part of a new dynamic to overcome the specific role
attributed to countries on the periphery, which is to produce food and raw
materials for large industrial centers. At the same time, and questioning
the international division of labour, the article argues that “the enormous
benefits that derive from increased productivity have not reached the
periphery” (1962, p. 1), concentrating it in industrialized countries in the
North. There is an imbalance in this exchange, “a fact which, whatever its
explanation or justification, destroys the basic premise underlying the
schema of the international division of labour” (1962, p. 1). In this way,
the industrialization of the countries of the region is fundamental.
This means abandoning growth dynamics driven from the outside by
exports; it is necessary to grow inward through industrialization. These
ideas end up permeating the entire structure of this multilateral institution
during the first years, as noted above. One of ECLAC‘s main objectives
being to “carry out and promote research on economic and technical
problems and on economic and technical development within the terri-
tory of Latin America” (Prebisch 1949, p. i. Presentation), it is important
to consider those who develop it, that is, the subjects who drive it. In this
regard, he argues that:
The greatest difficulty is perhaps the small number of economists capable of

an original approach to the specific problems of these countries. For various
reasons, it has not been possible to supply the lack by training an adequate
number of young men of high intellectual calibre. Considerable progress has
been made by sending them to the great European and American universi-
ties, but this is not sufficient. One of the most conspicuous deficiencies of
general economic theory, from the point of view of the periphery, is its false
sense of universality. It could hardly be expected that the economists of the
great countries, absorbed by serious problems of their own, should devote
preferential attention to a study of those of Latin America. The study of
Latin America’s economic life is primarily the concern of its own econo-
mists. Only if this regional economy can be explained rationally and with
2
Raul Prebisch, Executive Secretary of ECLAC 1950–1963, and one of the main theorists
on the process of industrialization by import substitution in Latin America, and the concept
of center and periphery, as part of the international division of labor.
34 A. ORUÉ POZZO
scientific objectivity, can effective proposals for practical action be achieved.

(Prebisch, 1962:4. Footnote)
Briefly, Prebisch holds two aspects as fundamental to advancing “Latin

America’s economic development”: (i) a process of industrialization, (ii)
the non-universality of economic theory, mainly Anglo-Saxon theory, and
the creation and strengthening one’s own economic knowledge, outside
the thinking of “the economists of the great countries.” Undoubtedly, it
introduces a break in the dominant paradigm in the 1950s, stating that
economic relations between the center and the periphery tend to repro-
duce underdevelopment and increase the gap between developed and
“developing” countries.
With these theoretical-practical developments, Latin American social
thought takes important steps. Years later, these proposals initially devel-
oped by Prebisch from within the ECLAC were subject to harsh criticism
from different sectors. The economic crisis of the 1960s opened the gate
for several researchers to question certain postulates of the industrializa-
tion that underpinned the thinking of Prebisch and ECLAC.
These criticisms argue that the process of industrialization that emerged
in Latin America, in the interregnum between the two European wars,
takes place on a different basis from those developed in Europe. In this
context, a very weak industry emerges that only “widens” from crises and
external situations, as was in some cases the situation of war in Europe, or
trade crises (Marini 2015). Thus, for example, Marini disputes the premise
that “the economic and social problems afflicting Latin American social
formation were due to an inadequacy of capitalist development”
(Marini 2015, p. 137) and that, in order to overcome them, it would suf-
fice to accelerate capitalist development in the region. These structural
weaknesses would appear to be corrected—according to certain under-
standings of Prebisch and ECLAC—if the countries of dependent capital-
ism were oriented in the direction of classical industrial countries.
However, the industrialization incipiently implemented in Latin
America between the 1930s and 1940s served as the basis for new postwar
industrial development and ended up being articulated with the expansive
movement of international capital, whose core was made up of multina-
tional companies created between the 1940s and 1960s. This new reality
opened the way for understanding development and underdevelopment as
the historical result of the development of capitalism, a world system that
produced both conditions (Dos Santos 1998). We could then understand,
from the criticism of these sectors, that underdevelopment is the “dark

side” of development, that is, there is no development without underde-
velopment as Dos Santos emphasizes. In this sense, economic choices
become political choices, and there is no neutrality in development. These
criticisms give way to the Theory of Dependence, which arises in the sec-
ond half of the 1960s and represented an effort to understand the limita-
tions of development, constituted under the hegemony of imperialist
forces in the process of decolonization in other regions of the world (Dos
Santos 1998). Dependence “in simple terms expresses the subordination
of economic structures (and not just them, since there are others that
reinforce it and make it possible: politics, culture) to the hegemonic cen-
ter” (Faletto 1980, p. 16).
The Countryside and Socio-cultural Transformation

in the Cities
These ways of rethinking the region from the region itself, or studying
Latin American reality from perspectives other than both classical or tradi-
tional ones—whether from a liberal perspective or even within Marxism in
the region—are impelled to be studied according to the more active “allu-
vial” presence of large popular sectors of Latin America in the cities. In
this sense:
The eruption of the masses is linked to the time of the country–city migra-
tion immediately after World War II, and to the campesinos mobilization
with its pressure for land reform. The process has long standing, and certain
Latin American political moments, such as Varguism, Peronism and the
Bolivian revolution, are inscribed in this context. (Faletto 1980, p. 25)
In this way the campesinos’ presence, and popular movements with their
demands, put in check the existing model and opened a crisis in the urban
alliance then constituted to promote industrialization. These develop-
ments brought important changes in the campesinos’ private sphere and in
Latin American cities, redefining the family nucleus. At the same time,
traditional forms of political control were broken, and new models and
forms of consumption and cultural practices emerged in these reconfig-
ured social spaces.
The increase of the university population and student mobilizations
since the reform of Córdoba in 1918, brought a great deal of pressure
36 A. ORUÉ POZZO
within the main elites, questioning the role of professionals who graduated
from these institutions. These, in turn, also put pressure on the dominant
elites, as there was a scarce and limited labor market for them. According
to Quijano, the Latin American political crisis began as a crisis of the
oligarchic state (Quijano 1976).
This movement of flows and internal displacements in various countries
of the region is rethought and repositioned as an “innovative” process and
different from that of the countries of European modernity. Jesús Martín
Barbero—an important Latin American communication and cultural
researcher—refers to the situation described above by Faletto, as a perma-
nent process of “simultaneous discontinuity,” from which Latin America
carries out its modernization.
Discontinuities on three levels: in the time between state and nation—some

states become nations much later and some nations will take time to consoli-
date as states—, in the deviant mode as popular classes enter the political
system and the process of formation of national states—rather as a result of
a general crisis in the system that confronts the State than by the autono-
mous development of its organizations—, and in the political and not only
ideological role that the media plays in nationalization of the popular masses.
(Martín Barbero 1987, p. 165)
Martín Barbero argues that these flows and migrations, just like the
new modes of work, lead to the “hybridization of popular classes” (Martín
Barbero 1987, p. 171), that is, a new way of becoming present in cities,
and also new forms of reconfiguring social processes in the field. The city
is transformed—along with the countryside—and the massive becomes a
hybridization of the national and the foreign, be that in cultural terms as
well as political. The “wretched of the earth” go on to assume new identi-
ties according to the new territories occupied after their own expulsion
(Martín Barbero 1987; Gutiérrez and Romero 2007). The national state
and the nation-space is questioned, as well as the different forms of pres-
ence of the popular in the city assume very different connotations to those
that marked the steps in industrialized Euro-American countries.
This alluvial population was generally understood as the presence of the
“countryside in the city”, that is, as the displacement of large population
groups expelled from their small rural properties, which will “take refuge”
in the periphery of the great cities. While this is correct, very few studies
carried out highlight that much of this population belonged to indigenous
groups—or constituted direct heirs to them—that is, ancestral populations

of the continent that were settled in those territories since long before the
European colonialist invasion. Now their lands were being hoisted by cap-
ital, seeking to expand areas of influence and production in regions beyond
cities: capital goes to the countryside, while the countryside goes to the
city, that is, the population of these regions go—in fact are expelled and
forced to violently dislocate—to the peripheral pockets of the cities.
This is what can be observed in the mid-nineteenth century in Paraguay.
Thus, the great offensive of the Paraguayan government of Carlos Antonio
López3 in the mid-nineteenth century, occupying lands and vast indige-
nous wastelands, forcing them to become Paraguayan citizens, imposing
on them another identity and, at the same time expropriating and confis-
cating their lands, is nothing more than a small example of the process
vastly implemented by the dominant Latin American elites in the post-
independence years—and throughout the twentieth century—upon
ancestral populations (Pastore 1972).
These transformations underway in Latin America from the 1930s,
when the process of industrialization began, are also moments of authori-
tarian imposition of models. The national states that were built in the
region as a result of the independence movements of the nineteenth cen-
tury emerge with several “defects of origin”. One of them is that they are
states that from the beginning were responsible for excluding important
groups of populations. Several of the excluded populations had already
inhabited these territories for centuries, as is the case for indigenous peo-
ples, for whom Afro-descendants, and women and people with other gen-
der identities are added (see Custódio, this book). The emerging national
post-independence state did not intend a radical break with the scheme
and thinking of metropolitan imperial society; in some cases, they were
even “inspired” by them to establish new relationships between hege-
monic sectors on both sides of the ocean; the social science still miss a
study of how some important movement in Europe, as the French
Revolution for instance, has been influenced by Latin American indige-
nous liberation movement such as the Tupac Katari insurgence (1781),
and the Guarani’s War (1753–1755).
3
Carlos Antonio López was president of Paraguay, after the death of José Gaspar Rodríguez
de Francia (1813–1840). He ruled the country between 1844–1862, and led the conserva-
tive restoration process in the country, after the long years of Francism.
38 A. ORUÉ POZZO
Sometime later, in the first decades of the twentieth century, the “stra-
tegic” alliance between dominant sectors that support incipiently industri-
alization process and those displaced sectors from the countryside that
now occupy cities, allows an autonomous proposal to go forth in some
regions of Latin America. However, with the alluvial presence of different
groups traditionally occupying the countryside—now in the cities—this
pact cracked into pieces and the alliance is refocused between poor sectors
of different regions: el pueblo. The Bolivian revolution of 1952, the pro-
cess initiated by Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala in the 1950s and finally the
Cuban revolution in 1959, are made up of major turning points for these
movements. In this sense, it is possible to understand that the movement
had already begun years ago. What was initially proposed from the work
of Prebisch and ECLAC—an independence in the approach of Latin
American reality by Latin American economists—stimulates and is stimu-
lated by the similar movements in the fields of intellectual, cultural, and
political production (see Vega Casanova, this book).
Thus, some Latin American cities, such as Mexico D.F. and Buenos
Aires, become publishing centers in which important materials that make
up a more “Latin American” thought are published, also followed by São
Paulo, to complete the Ibero-American spectrum. In the 1920s, Mexican
muralism is constituted in a great movement of resistance and orients
new ways of approaching the aesthetic and the artistic from the local, that
is, from Latin America (Mandel 2007; Feria and Campillo 2010). Also,
for those same years, artistic production and narrative in general, is ques-
tioned by the Paulista urban intellectuality looking for paths of its own:
the Modern Art Week in 1922 (Andrade 1976). In the field of music, an
even paradoxical situation arises: a city of the emerging imperialist center,
New York, becomes a space for the reinvention of Latin American music.
“In addition to Buenos Aires, Rio de Janeiro and Havana, the develop-
ment of a widely Latin American music had a fourth port city center of
enormous importance: New York, but more than for the sailors, for emi-
gration” (Quintero Rivera 2009, p. 125). The presence of inhabitants of
their colony, Puerto Rico, in this country (US) who obtain citizenship
status makes this “alluvial population” possible in some way. Thus, vari-
ous movements arise in the field of music, rescuing various aspects of
popular feelings of the region, taking on melodies and indigenous
rhythms of its own. It is also the case with tango and candombe in the Río
de la Plata (García Brunelli 2015; Martín Barbero 1987), of the guara-
nia in Paraguay (Noguera 2019), the samba in Brazil (Miceli 1984;
Martín Barbero 1987), of salsa and merengue in the Caribbean (Quintero

Rivera 1998, 2009), and so many other new rhythms that emerged
throughout the continent.
As noted above, the Cuban revolution of 1959 is an important turning
point in different fields of cultural activity and Latin American thought.
Just four months after the triumph of the revolution, Casa de las Americas
is founded in Havana, an institution that in a short time constitutes a space
of dialogue between countries in and outside the continent, also in a meet-
ing point of artists and intellectuals in general. In the mid-1960s, perhaps
one of the most profound discussions about Latin American development,
its characteristics, and how to promote it from heterodox schemes and
thoughts, is the exchange of ideas about Cuban development that took
place between Ernesto Che Guevara and Carlos Rafael Rodríguez, then in
the leadership of the National Institute of Agrarian Reform of Cuba
(Tablada Pérez 2017). In this way, the Cuban revolution from its begin-
nings gave rise to a reformulation of traditional orientations not only of
traditional sectors, but also had great influence on other groups such as
middle sectors and even in the bourgeoisie itself (Faletto 1980). It rethinks,
in this sense, the problem of radical transformations, also that of alliances
between groups and social classes. Various areas of social and intellectual
production were affected, as Gilman (2012) pointss out in her very inter-
esting work:
The studies dedicated to this period, the generalization of which, as “the

sixties” should be explained and analyzed, have considered different types of
objects, including intellectuals, literary production and magazines, to be
relevant. While it is certainly difficult to classify them as single-entry studies,
the different approaches made by specialists are overprinted, involved with
each other and, in general, thematic differences are resolved in important
consensus about the uniqueness of the period. (Gilman 2012, p. 15)
One of these “entries” is that of communication and popular culture—

theory and practice—that, whether in its daily bases, also in its conceptu-
alizations, undergoes important changes accompanying the process
outlined above. There emerges a thought and a practice in the field of
popular and grass-roots communication that also incorporates the possi-
bility of self and autonomous thinking in relation to the one developed
outside the region, mainly Euro-American practices and theories (see
Peruzzo, this book). I will present, in the following paragraphs, some
40 A. ORUÉ POZZO
milestones and some experiences that led to consolidating the field as a

process that is strengthened from their own paths and thoughts, question-
ing and moving away from certain postulates that until then dominated
the field of communication in Latin America.
Popular Latin America Communication:

A Genesis Proposal
It is possible to point out that the emergence and development of a new
popular and grass-roots communication proposal in Latin America, has as
an immediate reference to the Cuban revolution; the second reference is
the Second Vatican Council (1963–1965) and the Second Episcopal
Conference of Latin America, held in 1968 in Medellin, Colombia (Orué
Pozzo 2017; see also Uranga, this book).
The transformations underway in Latin America since the 1930s of the
last century, and presented above, involved in some way great migration
movements, in the sense that both the city and the countryside were
changing, concentrating people, on the one hand, expelling them on the
other. An important part of the communication thinking in the region
comes from people who accompanied these interventions in rural Latin
American areas. Some of them were working in international agencies,
others getting directly involved with social movements in the conflicting
territories. Thus, between the years 1960–1980 social and communicative
thinking in Latin America had several changes and transformations in rela-
tion to previous periods.
The processes of incipiently developing industrialization in some coun-
tries, at the same time as the hoarding of large tracts of land by national
and international capitals to the region, the creation of ECLAC in 1948,
and finally the imposition of the Alliance for Progress program in the early
1960s, “stimulated” while also challenging national states and their tech-
nicians to think of ways to accompany these transformations. This means
that they have to develop and design different supports to the subjects in
question: small farmers stalked by the great capital, in the process of
increasing pauperization. Strong criticisms emerged from the practices of
the national technicians accompanying the actions in the field.
Briefly, I will present and develop a genesis of these critical emerging
practices and thoughts, which are then consolidated into the broad field of
communication and social sciences. To this end, I will work with three
thinkers who, in my opinion, represent and explain the criticisms of the

then current hegemonic process, while constituting themselves as critical
theorists-facilitators of understandings that, either from the national state
or from multilateral agencies, were driven in the region: Juan Díaz
Bordenave, Luís Ramiro Beltrán, and Orlando Fals Borda.4 For these
social and Latin American thinkers, the two immediate references placed
above—the Cuban revolution and the Second Vatican Council—are key
references in the constitution of independent ideas and thoughts, far away
from their Anglo Saxon academic origins. All three come from a religious
tradition that gives way and critically assumes the social shift of their
church’s practices (see Uranga, this book). Díaz Bordenave and Beltrán,
from Catholicism and later the experiences of the basic communities
developed extensively by sectors of the Catholic Church and other
Christians in the continent, and Fals Borda from the Methodist tradition,
strongly present in family terms.5
Some Constituent Elements of Popular

and Decolonizing Communication in Latin America
In the following paragraphs I will develop an idea that a horizontal, par-

ticipatory, and sentipensante (thinking-feeling) communication, i.e. a non-
hegemonic and at the same time non-Western communication, would not
be possible without the critical efforts, research, and work of these thinkers.
In the 1970s, Díaz Bordenave already proposed the need for new com-
munication models, specifically those oriented to rural development in
Latin America. The trajectory of this Paraguayan social thinker is interest-
ing. His professional involvement with the field began by working with
small rural producers in the area of agricultural information in the
mid-1950s, together with an institution created by US cooperation in
Paraguay, the Technical Service Inter-American Agricultural Cooperation
4
Despite the great importance of these thinkers to the Latin American social sciences,
there is no shortage of more research that deepens and enthuses the presence of women in
this critical elaborations of Euro-American theories, such as Rosario Castellanos in Mexico,
Lélia Gonzalez in Brazil, and Serafina Davalos in Paraguay, among others.
5
It is interesting to note that some of the critical thinking of the second half of the Latin
American twentieth century has its “roots” in these two great historical events in the region:
the Cuban Revolution and the Second Vatican Council. These events radicalized social sec-
tors, on the one hand, and on the other, pushed broad religious sectors into the struggle for
political, social, and spiritual liberation, in the understandings of Liberation Theology.
42 A. ORUÉ POZZO
(STICA). His work with small producers in Paraguay led him, years later,
to strongly question the communication process implemented by US
agencies in Latin America, based on postulates developed by theorists and
researchers in the United States. In papers published in the mid-1970s, he
suggests that the diffusionist model and the “transmission mentality”
model in education and communication should be replaced by another
liberating form of communication, focused on dialogue and receiver-
oriented; the ideas of the Brazilian educator, Paulo Freire, were present in
a transversal way in all these works of Díaz Bordenave (Orué Pozzo 2017).
In short, for Díaz Bordenave:
the technification or adoption of innovations cannot be understood as an

end in itself, but as part of a broader social transformation, involving an
awareness of small farmers, their organization and politicization. (Orué
Pozzo 2017, p. 63)
From these placements, Díaz Bordenave begins a process of systematic

criticism of the Euro-American model of rural communication that agen-
cies—inspired by US consultants and researchers—seek to impose as a
strategy in order to strengthen their proposals in the Latin American field.
In an article published in 1976, he claims the need for new models of
communication delinked form traditional Euro-American models:
Latin America carries the imprint of the U.S. “classical” diffusion model.
Latin American communication scholars must overcome their mental com-
pulsion to perceive their own reality through foreign concepts and ideolo-
gies, and they must learn to look at the communication and adoption of
innovations from their own perspective. (Díaz Bordenave 1976, p. 145)
At the same time, he maintains that “needed are models concerned

with what happens to the person who adopts an innovation to his society”
(Díaz Bordenave 1976, p. 148). Slowly, a turning point toward thinking
about communication and the social processes as subject-centered not
object-centered, begins. According to Díaz Bordenave, this radical reac-
tion against Euro-American models did not emerge as isolated criticism
but from a larger and more specific context of revising concepts on devel-
opment from Latin American researchers. He highlights some of these
forerunner Latin American thinkers: Theotonio dos Santos, Celso Furtado,
Fernando Enrique Cardozo, Raul Prebish, Anibal Quijano, among others

(Díaz Bordenave 1978).
From reality to reality, this was his fundamental thought about the
edu-communicational process: the arc model: starting from reality, theo-
rizing, and finally to reality again (Díaz Bordenave and Martins Pereira
1985). He built, endorsed, and practiced a proposal that he called
“Problematization Pedagogy.” According to this Paraguayan thinker the
relationship “between communication and education has been discovered
by popular communication practitioners as Mario Kaplun, Carlos Nuñez
Hurtado, Francisco Gutierrez, Daniel Prieto Castillo among others” (Díaz
Bordenave 2011, p. 18). So far, we have three fundamental issues that
have a strong presence in popular and grass-roots Latin American com-
munication that also points toward a decolonization model in the field: (i)
a questioning relationship between subject–object, as an axis supported
modernity; (ii) a critical review of the universal model of understanding
history and development; (iii) an understanding that these new ideas did
not come from universities or research centers but from the outside, i.e.
from popular movements: social, indigenous peoples, campesinos, and
women resistances (see Vega Casanova, this book).
During those same years, the Bolivian thinker and researcher Luis
Ramiro Beltrán also began to develop highly critical proposals to the dom-
inant communication scheme that derived from northern countries. In the
late 1970s he published a text that can be considered also a turning point
in Latin American communication thinking: Farewell to Aristotle. A defini-
tion of communication, according to Beltrán, can be traced back to
Aristotle who wrote that “rhetoric as being composed of three elements:
the speaker, the speech and the listener” (Beltrán 1979, p. 2). In this
paper—which also begans with a quote from Paulo Freire—he proposes to
move away from the methods and schemes that a vertical communication
develops, recommending a new horizontal, non-hegemonic and dialogical
model. This implies, for Beltrán, a move away from Western thinking,
developing a model focused on dialogue, participation, and assuming
communication as a right for broad popular sectors of Latin America. He
observed that the communication field used to be an area of still water. No
longer anymore, because:
The developing countries had realized long before 1970 that their economic
and political life was dominated by the developed countries to such a degree
that development was impeded. What is new is the full realization that such
44 A. ORUÉ POZZO
a situation of dependence also exists in the cultural sphere. Moreover, the

acknowledgement that communication serves considerably to promote all
three types of neo-colonial domination clearly came about with this decade.
(Beltrán 1979, p. 1)
A few lines later the Bolivian researcher maintains that the traditional
conception and the classical paradigm of communication were the
result of experiences involving communication in the US and Western
Europe. Research is not the only area where this traditional model
shows “stubborn endurance”: “the practice of international communica-
tion constitutes an eloquent example of how at the international level also
communication occurs essentially in a one-way flow from de developed to
the under developed countries” (Beltrán 1979, p. 7). Communication in
his understanding is a matter of social relations, not a unilateral exercise of
individual influence. He also points out that virtually all Latin American
criticism may be summed up in the expression “vertical communication”;
that is, from the top down, domineering, imposing, one-way, and manipu-
lative; in short, undemocratic. Communication, in this sense, is not a
technical question:
It is a political matter which is largely determined by this structure and

which, in turn, helps to perpetuate it. Thus, the search for a way out of such
situations is focused on moving from vertical/undemocratic communica-
tion to horizontal/democratic communication. The search began mainly in
the present decade, in several places, taking forms that varied in scope and
approach but coincided in their aim: to democratize communication in its
conception and in its practice. (Beltrán 1979, p. 14)
So, a democratic communication model is a horizontal and democratic

process with three conditions: it must have public access bases, be sus-
tained by dialogue, and include participant movement.
Beltrán is also known by his work in the field of communication poli-
cies. In an article that presents a kind of synthesis of the last fifty years of
communication thinking in Latin America, he points to some forerunner
experiences in the “communication turn”: the radio schools of Colombia,
an example of educational communication to promote rural development;
Bolivian mining radios that, by the end of the 1950s, had managed to
form a network of more than thirty stations that also broadcast in indige-
nous languages; and finally, the experiences in agricultural extension,
health education, and audiovisual education, which, although initiated as

communication bodies of the agricultural extension promoted by American
agencies, in a short time developed not only a local character, but also a
model different from the one initially proposed (Beltrán 2005). It also
highlights several theorists in the United States, as references in the field
of rural communication to and finally from experiences in the region,
move forward with a model focused on Latin American regional processes;
not imported from Euro-American experiences and theorists. Both think-
ers, Juan Díaz Bordenave and Luís Ramiro Beltrán, are thus considered as
the researchers who, from Latin America, reconfigured and resignified the
emerging field of communication for development. Somehow these think-
ers assume what the original and indigenous peoples have been developing
on the continent for centuries, laying the groundwork for decolonizing,
non-Western communication.
Also in the 1970s, a Colombian researcher, Orlando Fals Borda—who,
in the face of strong political pressures, was forced to leave the university
and work for more than fifteen years in the Caribbean region—produces
one of the most challenging proposals based on his experience with rural
sectors on the Atlantic coast (see Vega Casanova, this book). This
researcher takes important steps in this “non-Western turn” of Latin
American social sciences, which are collected by researchers from the com-
munication field. He argues that the “object is also subject” (Fals Borda
2015, p. 313), breaking the classic separation of Western science between
the subject and object of research. Deepening his critique of Eurocentrism,
he argues that:
Even admitting the positive harmony with that beacon, it would be sad to
stay in the paradigms already surpassed by modern technical-scientific devel-
opments, and to continue to repeat and imitate authors, philosophers and
ideologues whose validity may be debatable. Why continue to bring flowers
to dubious idols, uncritically cite obsolete writers, or elevate as teachers col-
leagues whose thinking has been echoed or developed from our own analy-
ses, an echo sometimes expanded by the resonance of hegemonic devices?
(Fals Borda 2015, p. 379)
In one of his major research books, Double History of the Coast (Fals
Borda 1979–1986), published in four volumes, he also points out non-
Aristotelian, i.e. non-Western approaches, such as the participatory
research-action (IAP) proposal.
46 A. ORUÉ POZZO
The strategy of thinking and writing breaks with several schemes in the
social sciences, as well as the understanding of Western normal science
rationality-oriented. At the same time, not separating sentiment from rea-
son, integrating both aspects of the subject that the Western sciences since
Descartes have taken care of, introduces one of the strongest criticisms of
the Eurocentrism of the Western sciences, questioned from local practices.
The feeling thus constitutes one of the sharpest proposals that, on the
other hand, has been present in the way of thinking and acting of the Latin
American population for centuries.
In this way we can, without any doubt, emphasize that the presence of
these three Latin American thinkers in the 1960–1970s, in different areas
of communication and social sciences, has contributed to the development
of an autonomous and independent Latin American communicative think-
ing: from them, the foundations for a popular and grass-roots communi-
cation have been laid. These thinkers are three examples. But, at the same
time, it is important to note that they do not in any way exhaust the “non-
Western” traditions of communication in Latin America.
What is presented above is the questioning of the ways in which the
process of colonization builds subjectivities throughout all these years. In
reality, it is not just a change in the way of accessing knowledge.
Colonization introduces the imposition of subjectivities other than those
existing in the indigenous peoples of Latin America; it is imposed on them
violently, ending all vestige of a precolonial past. These forms persist
despite the political independence of Latin American countries through-
out the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, through what González
Casanova (2007) has called internal colonialism (see Custódio, this book).
Undoubtedly, at various times the reactions and resistance were also the
results of violent actions by the local population, but nothing is compa-
rable to the action of the invaders.
The recovery of this memory, also the development of self-thinking,
autonomous in different areas of knowledge, was a slow but sustained
process. Step-by-step, a new episteme emerged—or maybe always existed
at the surface but was ignored and silenced by the hegemonic elite. It is
necessary to recover these old and new traditional way of thinking and
practices in order to build a society based on solidarity and justice for all
the “wretched of the earth” in the Fanonian sense. This was the path that
Díaz Bordenave, Luis Ramiro Beltrán, and Orlando Fals Borda pointed to
years ago.
In this sense, communication theory and practices in Latin America,

and specifically popular, grass-roots and decolonial communication
thinking-feeling—an inter- and transdisciplinary field—emerge from vast
and diverse practices. These new subjectivities exploded and consolidated
at the beginning of the twenty-first century. What we see is the return of
the popular, the indigenous, and an autonomous presence of the people at
the national scenario. Brief but deep experiences in Bolivia, Venezuela,
Brazil, Ecuador, and Paraguay shows us that the 1950s were strongly pres-
ent in the twenty-first century, as critical and strong theories and practices
that reshape the building of a world in which various worlds coexist: the
transforming subjectivities come to stay.
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CHAPTER 3
Popular and Communitarian Communication

in Rural Social Movements: Beyond
“Diffusionism” to Emancipatory
Participation
Cicilia M. Krohling Peruzzo
Introduction
This text addresses a critical perspective of communication in Latin
America, which is aligned with popular, community, and alternative com-
munication, or participatory communication, communication for citizen-
ship, and communication for social change, to mention some of the terms
Research developed with the support of the Brazilian National Council for Scientific
and Technological Development (CNPq—acronym from the Portuguese). Partial and
modified version of the Spanish text entitled “Comunicación popular y conocimiento
en movimientos sociales rurales: el adiós al modelo de ‘Difusión de Innovaciones’.”
C. M. Krohling Peruzzo (*)
University of State of Rio de Janeiro, Vitória, Brazil
Federal University of Espírito Santo, Vitória, Brazil
e-mail: kperuzzo@uol.com.br; cicilia.peruzzo@gmail.com

Switzerland AG 2021
52 C. M. KROHLING PERUZZO
widely used to characterize this phenomenon in the Latin American

region. Expressions like these indicate that communication is practiced
and studied in the context of communities, popular social movements and
other non-profit civil organizations, in their struggles to change situations
of disrespect for human rights in different social spheres, for example, the
lack of access to collective goods (education, health, etc.), gender and
cultural discrimination, work and income issues, lack of political participa-
tion, etc. It is, therefore, a communication strategy that develops its own
forms and means, and uses them according to its own worldviews and
communication needs. (See Bona, this book.)
We start with the following research question: how is the process of renew-
ing traditional patterns of using “communication for development” to become
“another communication” linked to the interests and needs of the social move-
ments themselves? The objective is to understand the popular communication
perspective, developed from the grassroots, in the territories being studied,
contrasting community organizational praxis with the original concepts of
“communication for development.” The specific objectives are as follows: (a)
to understand the main forms of popular/community organization of rural
workers (farmers’ families); (b) understand how popular and community com-
munication is inserted into activities that lead to significant changes in the lives
of people who participate in new community work practices; (c) identify the
forms and means of communication linked to the processes of generating col-
lective knowledge and systems of cooperation; (d) analyze the contrasts
between the praxis of popular communication and that of “communication for
development” within an analytical and theoretical framework.
The territories to which we refer are the experiences of rural commu-
nity development in the semiarid region of north-eastern Brazil, where the
Borborema Union Pole operates in Borborema, Paraíba state, and the
Copavi1 settlement community, in Paranacity, Paraná state.
The study is based on bibliographic and documentary research, direct
unsystematic observation, and in-depth interviews with community lead-
ers based on reports of practices (Bertaux 2005), although the present text
is limited to a more analytical perspective.
Brief Theoretical Foundation

From the conceptual point of view, the phenomenon of popular, commu-
nitarian, and alternative communication, or in Mario Kaplun’s (1985)
words, “another communication,” is mainly related to two
1
Cooperativa de Produção Agropecuária União da Vitória.
3 POPULAR AND COMMUNITARIAN COMMUNICATION IN RURAL SOCIAL… 53
theoretical-epistemological matrices. The first theoretical perspective is

based on the concept of citizenship, and is characterized by the joint use
of three terms, “popular,” “community,” and “alternative” communica-
tion, or by the specific use of one of these three terms, depending on the
context of social practices and of the theoretical foundations which inspire
them. In a broader sense, in Brazil and in some other Latin American
countries, they are practices known (and recognized) as “communication
and citizenship,” “communication for citizenship” or “communication
for social transformation.” Fundamentally, it is about communication
linked to social movements and non-profit popular organizations, ori-
ented toward the transformation of reality, understood in the sense of
deepening and broadening the achievement of citizenship rights. When
referring to this popular and alternative phenomenon, Mario Kaplun
(1985, p. 7) claims it is about a “liberating, transformative communica-
tion, in which the people are generators and protagonists.”
The second theoretical perspective is of “communication for develop-
ment and social change,” an expression broadly used since 2000 in many
countries of Latin America and Europe to characterize similar communi-
cation processes in communities and social movements. It is a theoretical
approach that arises out of the reframing of conceptions of “communica-
tion and development.” This is understood as a process of desired changes
from a type of (sub) development of precarious conditions of existence to
another reality through the search, with broad popular participation, for
solutions to local socio-economic problems. Originally, the so-called
“communication and development” approach was created in the context
of the interest in social “modernization.” Later, this perspective was refor-
mulated to “social change communication.” However, both these expres-
sions continue to be used in different countries, sometimes with different
meanings, sometimes not.
The Roots of Communication for Development

The first theoretical perspective – popular, communitarian and alternative
communication – has been used more in Brazil and Argentina, among
other countries, but the second - communication for development and
social change - permeated research on “another communication” across
Latin America and other continents, such as Europe, Africa, and Asia.
Nowadays, both theoretical perspectives can refer to the same process:
communication by communities and organized segments of civil society,
such as social movements and similar popular organizations. Historically,

however, in the 1950s and in the following decades, the conceptual matri-
ces of the second perspective were marked by a distinct epistemological
position, denominated “communication and development.” However,
the latter was born out of different purposes from those of “communica-
tion for citizenship” and “communication for social transformation,”
which are both forms of emancipatory communication in the face of con-
crete realities of oppression.
The idea of “communication and development” appears in mid-
twentieth century literature (end of the 1940s and during the 1950s) in
an instrumental sense: the objective was to use the communication media
as instruments for spreading information, ideas, and modern values favor-
able to capitalist development, based on the standards of Western “devel-
oped countries,” such as the United States and European nations. Besides
the involvement with the implementation of development programs, from
governmental and private institutions, the communication media would
act as mediators in order to persuade populations in favor of developmen-
talism, the diffusion of technological innovations, industrialized products,
and new customs. The foundation was the theory of modernization, which
defends the necessity of “modernizing” societies based on the conception
of development as progress, and of progress as technological and eco-
nomic development. In this conception of development, nations which do
not reach the same standards of development as rich or developed coun-
tries would be underdeveloped or peripheral, and so, to escape this fate,
should follow the industrialization models of central countries and adopt
their technologies and standards of production and consumerism. The
background strategy was the expansion of capital and the monopoly of the
capitalist market in favor of large North American and European corpora-
tions. What can be seen is the expansion of technologies, products, and
services, not the transfer of know-how (see Orué Pozzo, this book).
This strategy also produced the diffusion of an epistemological posi-
tion, an ethnocentric view of the world that never recognized the cultures
and the type of knowledge and development of the countries where it has
taken place as worthy of respect. On the contrary, these peoples were seen
as being behind the times, with traditions that could prevent develop-
ment, and who thus needed to change (see Custódio and also Contreras
Baspineiro, this book). The strategy was not equal development of these
countries, but the expansion of capital to the benefit of developed coun-
tries, beginning with the United States. As Paul Baran (1964) said, the
“main deterrents to development are not the lack of capital and manage-
ment capacity, as supported by the modernization theorists, but […] that
the development of the centre determines and perpetuates the underde-
velopment of the periphery” (apud Servaes 2004, p. 31). According to
Celso Furtado (1973, p. 8), therefore, underdevelopment is a creation of
development: besides supporting the production logic of the countries at
the center, it generates a dependency on foreign capital.
Besides not taking into account local cultures or their specificities, the
diffusion model does not respect the environment, or workers’ and public
health, as pesticides and other chemical products are strong components
of this policy. Certainly, together with technological and technical innova-
tion, the promoters of this model disseminated a socio-political culture
through new views of the world, as well as despising local knowledge.
Advertisements, the news, and films disseminated by the mass media con-
tributed to this purpose, in the same way that institutional information
was transmitted by staff of public and private organizations.
So, initially, communication for development was associated with being
at the service of the diffusion of innovation. It was seen as something
important to instrumentalize—inform, call people together, “spread
ideas,” “broaden horizons,” “change attitudes,” “help to form tastes”
(Schramm 1976), with the intention of facilitating the implementation of
development program policies and practices based on the promise of
progress.
The outstanding exponents of this theoretical approach, the pioneers
Everett Rogers, Daniel Lerner, and Wilbur Schramm, handed on concepts
of communication and development2 that influenced practice and research
around the world. Schramm even had his communication for develop-
ment proposal adopted by the United Nations after the Second World War
(1945). He believed that the media had “the role to accelerate economic
development, overcoming steps in the process of cultural socialization”
(Peruzzo 2014, p. 16).
In short, this development model, which expanded in different conti-
nents, has left harmful footprints. If, on one hand, it benefited and made
a lot of money for some sectors, on the other hand, it caused the impov-
erishment of a great part of local populations, besides the destruction of
the environment, and increasing pollution and risks to public health.
2
See Gumucio-Dagron and Tufte (2008), a work that gathers their contributions and
those of another 147 authors.
An Alternative View: Toward

Emancipatory Communication
Following the example of the Non-Aligned Movement, critical reactions
appeared on many fronts, both at level of the analysis of macro configura-
tions of the world’s communication media and in proposals for concrete
initiatives for alternative and community communications and media. The
debate generated studies about the International Information Order (IIO)
and the proposal for a New World Information and Communication
Order (NWICO). One of the most significant documents of research at an
international level was the MacBride Report, One World, Many Voices,3
finalized in 1979, which besides diagnosing the unidirectional flows of
international information put forward alternatives, including national
communication policies and the establishment of a democratic right to
communicate.
All over the world, and with the involvement of the United Nations
(UN), international conferences, work of commissions, conventions
(Biodiversity, Agenda 21, etc.) helped formulate new forms of develop-
ment: human, endogenous, local, sustainable, holistic, participative,
among other terms. There was even talk of “another development.”
So, as communication is embedded in different “models” of development
and in a debate about development at different times, it has been influenced
by the different concepts of development that have emerged. For instance,
since the 1980s and the 1990s, there has appeared, at least in Brazil, the idea
of “communication for citizenship,” an expression that counterbalances the
original “communication and development” model adopted in other parts of
the world for at least the three previous decades. In the 2000s, in other Latin
American countries, “communication and development” was reframed as
“communication for development and social change,” despite the fact that
some of the social practices had moved in the direction of “another develop-
ment” under the same traditional denomination.
However, it is necessary to recognize that all these proposals followed
the perspective of Western development, that is, without disconnecting
themselves from the ideas embedded in the development model of rich
countries (Silva 2011). At the end of the first decade of the twenty-first
century, there are signs of trying to change this perspective as expressed in
the concept of “living well” (Schavelzon 2015; Esteva 2009) or, in other
3
Available on: http://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0004/000400/040066sb.pdf.
languages, sumak kawsay (Quechua) or sumaj qamaña (Aimará) (see

Contreras Baspineiro, this book).
Returning to the question of “communication for social change,”
Amparo Cadavid (2014, p. 41) clarifies that it is not a “new way to name
an old concept, but a new name for a new understanding of the strength
and capacity of communication which comes from the people.” However,
this is not a unanimous view. Victor Marí (2016, p. 160) believes that the
debate between “communication for development” and “communication
for social change” is “sterile, as long as, in the words of Florencia Enghel
[…] they are inadequate and insufficient expressions to confront socio-
political problems.” To Marí (2016), and in Chaparro’s (2015, p. 77)
words, “the fundamental problem of the term ‘social change’ is that the
meaning of the word ‘change’ does not move in a concrete direction and
can be promoted from many positions across the ideological spectrum.”
That is, the term can refer to a change only within the parameters of devel-
opment, not, therefore, substantially transforming the structures of
domination.
The central aspects of the theory of “communication for social change,”
according to Alfonso Gumucio-Dagron (2014), are inscribed in demo-
cratic participation, horizontality of decision-making, the recognition of
identities and cultures, and dialogical relations. In this perspective, when
praxis has an emancipatory character, the concepts of popular, communi-
tarian, and alternative communication intertwine with the concepts of
“communication for social change,” but they distance themselves from it
when they identify with developmentalism. This is the reason why popular
communication is more intertwined with the concepts of active citizenship
than with those of development.
To sum up, popular communication expresses the action of segments of
the population as forms of resistance to oppressive political reality, to pre-
carious living conditions, low-paid jobs, lack of access to land, social dis-
crimination, and the problems faced by young people and children. At the
same time, popular communication also includes wider struggles for the
achievement of human and citizenship rights and for the transformation of
social reality. In Brazil, this transformation developed through social
movements and communities mainly came into being from the end of the
1970s, despite the oppressive context of the military dictatorship
(1964–1985). Therefore, popular communication, communitarian, or
alternative communication, as it has been reformulated over time (also
sometimes called participative, participatory, dialogical, group, horizontal,
or educative communication), is considered as a Latin American approach4

promoting transformation in the context of social struggles where the
activism of popular sectors is developed in communicative tasks, based on
the autonomy and active participation of the “receivers” of communica-
tion, who also become, according to Kaplún (1985), communicators in
their own right.
The participation to which we refer means the real participation of peo-
ple, with power of decision-making, in the process of communication. A
pedagogic and educative approach, in part inspired by Paulo Freire, helped
to develop participative methodologies. Participation can be on many lev-
els, but it is accomplished only when based on a methodological strategy
and as expression of a universal right. According to Juan Díaz Bordenave
(1983, p. 84):
in participatory communication all the interlocutors freely exert their right

to self-expression, as a permanent and inalienable social function; generate
and interchange their own themes and messages; in a spirit of solidarity cre-
ate knowledge and wisdom, and share feelings; organise themselves and
acquire collective power; they solve their common problems and contribute
to a transformation of the social structure in a way that it becomes free, fair
and participative.
Historically, participatory popular communication expresses itself

through direct, face-to-face or handmade and technologically based com-
munication media. However, popular communication is not limited
to communication media, that is to communication channels used as
instruments to disseminate content intended to create awareness and
to mobilize people. It is also a communicative process intertwined in
awareness-organization-action processes (Peruzzo 2004, 2008) developed
by communities, social movements, and related community associations.
Such processes happen in an integrated and continuous way and depend
on the presence of a fabric of structures (community associations and
social movements) with a temporal stability and durability, which distin-
guishes social movements from mere public demonstrations or protests.
In an effort to explain that the social movements are not merely phe-
nomena for mobilization, Alberto Melucci, as long ago as the 1980s,
4
Hopefully starting to be recognized as a component of “Southern Epistemologies”
(Sousa Santos and Meneses 2009).
related them to the network concept, as a structure of “collective action”

characterized by a bipolar model: latency and visibility. For him (1987,
pp. 61–62), latency corresponds to the phase of construction of cultural
elements—the elaboration of meanings and the creation of new codes of
identity. It is the period in which relationships are more restricted to the
interpersonal and informal, when there is a need to establish relationships
on a small scale up to the level of “submerged networks.” In his own words:
Latency enables people to experiment directly with new cultural models—a

change in the meaning system that, frequently, opposes the dominant social
pressures: the meaning of sexual differences, of time and space, the relation-
ship with nature, with the body, successively. Latency creates new cultural
codes and incentivizes individuals to practice them. (Melucci 1999, p. 37)
The pole of visibility is characterized by Melucci (1989, 1999) as the

collective public mobilization phase that has a symbolic function. That is,
it is expressed in public demonstrations and other forms of pressure and
intervention, in the communication media, for example, involving engage-
ment and mobilization. “Visibility shows opposition to the logic that
informs decision-making in public policy. At the same time public mobili-
zation indicates to the rest of society that the specific problem is con-
nected to the general logic of the system and that alternative cultural
models are possible” (Melucci 1999, p. 37). However, these two poles,
visibility and latency, are reciprocally correlated.
Latency feeds visibility with resources of solidarity and with a cultural struc-
ture for mobilization. Visibility reinforces submerged networks. It provides
energy to renew solidarity, facilitates the creation of new groups and the
recruiting of new activists, attracted by the public mobilization that already
flows in the submerged network. (Melucci 1999, p. 37)
Latency is an appropriate category to explain the future dimension of a

social movement, but it is not a matter of understanding it as if it were the
whole trajectory while it is not on public display, because, in fact, it implies
distinct phases of mutation. That is, latency always gives rise to an internal
process as a mechanism for continuous making and remaking, according
to circumstances and short-, medium- and long-term strategies, not nec-
essarily restricted to a limited number of people. It is natural that social
movements5 develop beyond a latency phase, periods of greater emphasis

in qualifying and consolidating their internal processes, self-organization,
expansion, strengthening their identity foundations and relationships, and
sometimes, their institutionalization. The Landless Workers Movement
(acronym in Portuguese: MST),6 for example, had its latency period and,
subsequently, lived through a consolidation period after its birth in the
1980s, although it gained greater visibility only during its moments of
public demonstrations, as part of its dynamics and related to specific strat-
egies and purposes.
The Impulse of “Another Development”

from Practices
Contextual Aspects
Borborema is a region of North-eastern Brazil in the state of Paraíba,
formed by twenty-one counties and with a population of 671,244 inhabit-
ants, of which 21.34 percent live in the rural area. In this rural area, there
are 24,725 family members of farmers and 1,661 families of settlers (of
MST) and three quilombolas7 communities (O TERRITÓRIO n.d.).
This research outlines the part played by the Borborema Union Pole,8
an organization that operates in fifteen of the twenty-one counties of the
territory. It is formed by a network of unions for rural and non-rural work-
ers, though not all such workers are members, as there still are unions
following the standards of traditional rural unionism, and approximately
150 community associations. The Union is advised by NGOs, such as the
Brazilian Semiarid Articulation (in Portuguese: Articulação Semiarida
Brasileira—ASA)9 and AS-PTA—Family Agriculture and Agro ecology
(in Portuguese: Agricultura Familiar e Agroecologia).10
The territory of Borborema is located in the Brazilian Northeast, a semiarid
region, because of the dry and hot climatic conditions most of the year, and
also known as the hinterland. Added to this geographical setting are other
5
We refer to the so-called social movements, not to the large public demonstrations that
happened around the world in the last decades, mainly, those mobilized with a great deal of
help from digital social networks.
6
MST is the social movement to which COPAVI is linked.
7
Communities formed by remaining quilombos, or communities with a predominantly
black population, descendants of ex-slaves.
8
See: http://aspta.org.br/category/videos/?programas=programa-paraiba.
9
See: http://www.asabrasil.org.br/.
10
See: http://aspta.org.br/.
factors, like the concentration of land ownership and the spread of policies that
favor land erosion, partly due to the regular use of pesticides, soil exhaustion
caused by monocultures, and the discretionary extraction of water resources.
The Borborema Union and the unions that form it have created collective
forms of organization and community practices, besides being committed to
the promotion of family farming based on agroecology, which have generated
improvements in the living standards.
The Cooperative of Agropecuary União da Vitória (in Portuguese:
Cooperativa de Produção Agropecuária União da Vitória, Copavi
Cooperative of Agropecuary União da Vitória) is a self-managed com-
munity originating in one of the settlements of the Landless Workers
Movement (MST).11 It is located in Paranacity, in the northwest of
Paraná State, in the south of Brazil. Originally (in 1993) it was a farm
that became unproductive and was occupied by activists of the
MST. The original owners lost their land because of bank mortgages
made as guarantees for loans during the period of developmentalism,
encouraged by the military government in the context of the strategy
of modernization and industrialization of the country, within the
framework of the expansion of international capital that we presented
at the beginning of this article.
Copavi12 adopted collective ownership as it is a settlement of rural work-
ers connected to the MST. However, it is also composed of around twenty
farmers’ families. Each family receives a small piece of land where they have
their house, but the farmland and production spaces are held in common.
Copavi is defined as a business in the solidarity economy, but in truth it is a
community where there are political and ideological identities, shared inter-
ests, and a high level of participation from all, both in working and in deci-
sion-making. It is organized for work and collective management from the
self-management point of view. All the products of this work are shared
equally, and there is a rotation of management and production functions.
Changes from the Point of View of the Practices

Before discussing the changes, we will briefly introduce the central aspects
of the forms of organization and the strategies for action adopted by each
11
MST was created in January 1984 and it is nowadays one of the most successful social
movements in Brazil.
12
See: http://cirandas.net/cooperativa-de-producao-agropecuaria-vitoria-ltda.
of the experiences considered in this text. Both carry out programs that
involve farmers. In the Borborema Union, farmers have small plots of
land, where they work independently to support themselves, and in
Copavi, farmers work cooperatively on an area of collectively owned prop-
erty, where they extract resources for their own livelihood.
Specifically, at the Borborema Center, each of its programs, like the
Seed Bank, production of agroecological fertilizer and insecticide, con-
struction of cisterns (rain water reservoirs), Solidary Rotating Fund, com-
mercialization, and knowledge exchange amongst the farmers, has its own
objectives and an important role in the whole. For example, the Seed Bank
is a community bank that gathers seeds produced without pesticides by
the farmers to be distributed during the sowing season. They are called
“Seeds of Passion” because they represent a love-letter both to the knowl-
edge of their ancestors (family heritage) and to the crop species most
suited (in adaptability and productivity) to the conditions of the semiarid
climate. With more than sixty units in over forty years, these banks hold
and conserve seeds of beans, corn, etc. in family environments, in order to
share them, for free, among the farmers who participate in the program.13
From the organizational point of view, each family contributes by donat-
ing a small part of their produce and, during sowing, receives another
portion of properly conserved seeds.
This strategy is an alternative to and, at the same time, a rejection of the
offer of transgenic seed by governmental programs that support agricul-
ture. Therefore, it is a way to say “no” to a development program derived
from the diffusion and modernization schemes we have mentioned.
It is necessary to clarify the aspects that characterize the organization
led by the Borborema Union. It is a trade union organization, community
based, formed by farmers’ families, owners of small properties. Therefore,
the commitment is to family agriculture and collective forms of organiza-
tion in the face of rural problems. One of the achievements is provision of
alternatives in the semiarid region that enable survival and, also perhaps, a
reduction in the desire to emigrate.
The Copavi programs are geared toward the production of sugar cane,
cachaça, and brown sugar, livestock, dairy and cereal farming, vegetable
and food production, and support of internal jobs in management, tech-
nology, and the commercialization of their own production. These
13
There are similar projects in other parts of Brazil and, in general, they are called
“Creole Seed.”
programs are carried out based on strategies collectively discussed and

implemented by the active participation of everyone. The produce is for
the families’ consumption. The surplus is sold commercially and the
resources it generates allocated to wages for work, maintenance, and rein-
vestment in the cooperative.
As we have explained earlier, Copavi adopts the formal organizational
system of a farmers’ cooperative, but acts as a self-managed community.
This means that there is no authoritarian hierarchy, but active participa-
tion of everyone in all decision-making processes, there are alternating
functions (everyone works in different types of jobs), and equitable remu-
neration (though slightly higher for heavier work). There is also freedom
of membership (the permanence or not as a member of the cooperative is
optional).
There is a clear option for agroecological production in both experi-
ences, both in supplying healthy food for themselves and in offering high
quality products to society at large.
The changes in social reality produced by both experiences are very
significant, at different levels: in terms of overcoming difficulties (poverty,
exhausted land, sexist and individualist culture, stereotypes, etc.), in a bet-
ter quality of life, in organizational development from a popular base, in
the reframing and generation of knowledge, agroecological production,
the active role of women, the creation of a collaborative and community
character, as well as the changes in knowledge construction and
communication.
Farewell to the Diffusion of Innovation Model

The Borborema Union and the Copavi experiences represent a question-
ing of the premises and strategies of the modernization theory and of the
consequent strategy of diffusion of innovation from Western countries to
Latin America, which in Brazil gained strength from 1960, and then under
the military dictatorship (1964–1985). There are several reasons for this.
First: these experiences express the rejection of agribusiness, instituting
family agriculture and agroecological production. They oppose the mono-
culture of cotton, tobacco, sugar cane, soya, etc., the use of chemical
products, and the export of raw material by business groups and even
foreign capital. By contrast, they manage, on the basis of family groups
(small private property or collective property), many types of agriculture
with the main objective of producing food, besides developing systems for
land fertilization and natural pesticides with local natural resources.

Instead of transgenic seeds supplied by big companies, they use native
seeds, free from chemical products. Instead of buying seeds or using those
donated by government programs, they distribute them for free through
the cooperation system of the community seed banks.
Second: these experiences, while they question a development “model,”
also make explicit that it is possible to construct concrete alternatives for
community development. The alternative they offer is participatory devel-
opment, in which the benefits return to the people who generated them
and which implies respect for nature as it is agroecologic and, therefore,
does not cause environmental destruction, something that would not
occur in the modernizing system based on developmentalism.
In relation to Copavi, there is another type of challenge to the tradi-
tional model: the private property system14 is checked by the establish-
ment of collective ownership of the land on which agricultural families live
and work. Facing this whole transformation process, we should ask: what
is the new “model” of development that is being built? It is not possible
to term it a development “model,” as the experiences carried out are closer
to participatory development proposals (Servaes 1996; Peruzzo 2014).
They have a local stamp, are self-sustainable, transcend the economic,
favor the integral growth of people and are of a community nature.
In summary, in both experiences there is the development of coopera-
tion (between unions; associations; farmers and NGOs; civil institutions;
federal and state government agencies, etc.); sharing (building cisterns,
seed banks, solidarity fund, sharing of products and of profits from work,
sharing of knowledge); active participation (open to all and in different
situations and projects); and respect for local conditions (recovering the
productivity of land, appreciation of native species, and solutions based on
natural resources).
How Does Participatory Development Affect

Grassroots Communication?
In the examples studied, popular and community communication is mani-
fested like this:
14
Collective ownership is a characteristic of all MST settlements. In general, when they
settle on the land, the land is shared amongst settlers.
(1) Communication is a process—understood as something dynamic,

with multiple facets, inserted into the broad dynamics of mobilization,
organization, and community action. Processes include communication as
part of:
practices capable of being recognized as spaces of interaction between actors

in which there are processes of production of meaning, creation and re-
creation of meaning, which generate relations in which the same actors
(protagonists) are constituted individually and collectively. Practices in
which the media intervenes, as a fundamental component in a society that
we call “mediated” as an unquestionable part of the construction process of
the real, but never as the only variable. (Vargas and Uranga 2010, p. 85)
Therefore, communication manifests itself as a process and, in social

organization processes, as a facilitator of collective, interpersonal, intra-
and intergroup relations. It also helps to weave relationships and to coor-
dinate actions (see González 2012), like mediation in informal education
and in relations with external sectors of the municipal and state educa-
tional system, and public organs of government, etc.
In this context, there is a very strong educational dimension, in which
the intersections between communication and education are visible (see
Deliberador and Rampazzo 2006). They are present at the level of infor-
mal and non-formal education in both experiences. It is a dimension that
is inserted into the dynamics of daily life (see Bona, this book). On the
other hand, at Copavi, formal education is also highly valued, through
young adults and adults graduating from university, and through rein-
forcement of what is taught in school to children.
The development of knowledge in this context acquires a revolutionary
perspective when compared to a traditional conception of its transmission
by those who possess it. First, because the dominant tendency of taking
knowledge as something that exists on a higher level, elaborated by “elites”
and handed down to the people, is subverted by valuing local knowledge,
including ancestral knowledge; by rescuing the wisdom related to native
species that are better adapted to drought; by adopting traditional conser-
vation techniques for seeds, and using the practical knowledge acquired in
dealing daily with semiarid conditions (see Contreras Baspineiro and also
Vega Casanova, this book).
Second, there is a construction of collective knowledge generated in
organizational processes faced with finding solutions to problems and
challenges that affect the “communities,” as these involve knowledge

exchange enhanced by the cooperation and active participation of mem-
bers through interpersonal and group communication. Paulo Freire
(1977, p. 67) recognizes the importance of communication when affirm-
ing that “it is not possible to comprehend thought outside its dual func-
tion: cognitive and communicative.” Third, when reclaiming accumulated
knowledge and valuing the knowledge of local actors, while engaging with
insights provided by technical-scientific knowledge, new knowledge is also
generated, for example, in agroecology, the ability to lead, understanding
the political and economic situation, development of forms of coopera-
tion, and so on.
(2) Communication as dialogue. Paulo Freire (1977) criticizes the ver-
tical communication (information and knowledge transmission) from the
agronomist to the farmer, when trying to convince the latter to change
habits and traditions and to adopt new work standards with the land,
according to the diffusion framework (see Peruzzo 2014) and its approach
to modernization (see Orué Pozzo, this book). In contraposition to this
type of cultural invasion, Freire considers human communication as a dia-
logue, which implies recognizing the other as a subject and not as an
object. To be dialogical, to Freire (1977, p. 43), “is to live the dialogue,
neither to invade nor manipulate, even less to impose. It is to commit to
the constant transformation of reality.”
Group communication, dialogic communication, face-to-face, in
groups and between groups and institutions, is the most important form
of communication for the experiences that have been studied. It is inter-
personal and group communication, mainly oral and face-to-face, that
makes viable the dissemination of information, knowledge exchange, and
decision-making. A process inserted into daily life, it helps to mobilize
people and, in the end, facilitates the coordination of actions, such as the
high communicative expression of resilience. It is produced both through
direct contact between people and in face-to-face gatherings (meetings,
exchange of knowledge and ideas,15 educational and political activities,
discussion of topics of local interest and the orientation of proposals,
15
Exchange that dialogue favors, but it is possible to go beyond that. For example, at the
Borborema Union there is a programme called “Experimental Farmers,” which consists in a
concrete exchange experience based on practice. For example, if a farmer or a community
implemented a new orchard irrigation system, the experience is shared with farmers from
other areas, as forms of instruction and socialization of knowledge.
lanning, evaluation, etc.) and through gatherings mediated by communi-

p
cative forms like the Marcha das Margaridas (collective public demonstra-
tion for women’s rights and against sexism), music, banners, and poetry,
besides incorporating technological media such as mobile phones and
smartphones which are more and more common within the rural
population.
(3) Forms and means of communication that are more frequent. As we
have shown, dialogical, interpersonal, group, and intergroup communica-
tion is extremely important in the groups studied. However, it exists
alongside other forms of communication and incorporates means of com-
munications such as printed newsletters,16 posters, documentary videos,
radio programs,17 and, depending on the conditions, but on a small scale
at least at the moment, sites and blogs on the Internet and digital social
media profiles. These spaces on the Internet, as well as the videos, are
developed by advisory groups and collaborators (people and institutions),
more than the local organizations but, in general, they participate as pro-
tagonists in the production process. This technological support is more
useful in external public relations, that is, in the relationship with public
and private institutions, and with the general public; in spreading forms of
action and discussing matters of social interest and, in this way, communi-
cating with society and public authorities, according to the needs and
strategies of each situation.
As a whole, these dimensions of popular communication, face-to-face
and mediated by technology, are evident as communications of the peo-
ple, made by the people and for the people (Peruzzo 2008), one reason
they are seen as popular and community based. The local social movement
structures its communicative dynamics according to broader demands for
a better quality of life and to talk about itself, its proposals, and its world-
view aimed at bringing about necessary changes through agroecological
production, the cooperative economic model, and engaging the commit-
ment of people to the common good.
16
The printed newsletters are not of the traditional informative type. They are documen-
tary newsletters as they talk about successful experiences in general, using examples of fami-
lies who innovated in their practices.
17
Produced by a member of the movement in the name of Workers and Rural Workers
Union of Remigio, Paraiba, and was broadcast by local radio.
Even though there are forms of participatory development in progress
that are grounded in agroecologic family agriculture focused essentially on
food production, the experiences referred to in this text are not free from
interference from a surrounding environment predominantly favorable to
monoculture and agribusiness.
On one side, following modernization theory, which generated the
logic of the diffusion of innovation embedded in development policies,
the conventional communication media (radio, television, magazines,
newspapers, etc.) operate as channels of ideas and values’ transmission
promising progress, well-being, and the advantages of consumption of
industrialized products, from chemicals to children’s milk. But the appar-
ent objective to favor social well-being and the progress of all is subverted
by the aim of increasing the concentration of profit and the expansion of
international capital.
On the other side, there are changes in conventional standards of farm-
ing and land ownership. Popular knowledge is valued and renewed, and
reality is transformed as other perspectives of development are imple-
mented. Popular communication is constituted in a process inside other
processes and merged with them. Popular communication and knowledge
interconnect in the building of alternatives. In this context of community
development and of social movements and organizations, which priori-
tizes a solidarity economy, as we have demonstrated, popular and com-
munity communication is part of a process of popular mobilization,
organization, and action to create awareness, mobilize, plan, exchange
knowledge, and weave relationships, but with a human purpose. It devel-
ops in line with the conditions and needs of the movements and the com-
munities themselves. It is predominantly horizontal, dialogical
communication that incorporates other significant tasks, such as facilitat-
ing coordinating actions, as well as integrating other channels and com-
municative forms according to the needs and conditions of the movements
and communities.
In other words, popular communication works organically in the com-
munities and social movements both in their periods of latency and con-
tinuous (re)configuration and consolidation, and in times of greater public
visibility. In this way, it lives with the opportunities presented by public
policies, the difficult circumstances, daily difficulties and defeats, but also
cultivates resilience, happiness, and achievements. In this sense, the praxis
of popular communication is revealed as epistemological resistance because

it conceives communication as a human process in its intrinsic sense of
something common, of reciprocity and dialogue, that uses technological
mediation but goes beyond it, besides valuing and systemizing knowledge
situated and rooted in the local context, without disregarding and using
accumulated empirical and scientific knowledge.
The communication processes constituted in the context of social
movements emphasized in this research matches the praxis of participatory
development enabling the traditional view of “communication for devel-
opment” to be displaced and an epistemology linked to popular, commu-
nitarian, and alternative communication to be consolidated.
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CHAPTER 4
Faith, Communication and Commitment

to Liberation
Washington Uranga
Translated by Gustavo Andújar
The Latin American and Caribbean journey of what we generically call

“popular communication” is inevitably marked by two intrinsically linked
central ideas that have always intersected these practices: social and politi-
cal liberation; and democratization of communication. There are not,
however, many theoretical elaborations on this topic. Fundamentally
because the popular, community, or alternative communication—different
denominations by which experiences in this area are known to the world—
was first a practice, a way to be and to act in the territory, committed to
popular actors and, only later, subject to systematization, analysis, and
theoretical construction. We can affirm that popular communication grew
and consolidated out of the concern for change and social justice,
W. Uranga (*)
Universidad Nacional de La Plata and Universidad de Buenos Aires,
La Plata and Buenos Aires, Argentina
e-mail: wuranga@wuranga.com.ar

Switzerland AG 2021
74 W. URANGA
accompanying political, social, cultural, and also religious experiences that

were, either demanding communication to make sense of their action, or
using it as an information-diffusion tool. It can also be said that those
practices found in the communicational environment a favorable and nec-
essary scenario to transcend, consolidate, and permeate the citizens and
society as a whole.
For this book I have been asked to focus especially on the links between
popular communication and the Catholic religious experience in the
region, in particular the connections between these communicational
practices and the so-called “theology of liberation” or, with similar mean-
ings, the theology of the people, or the theology of culture. According to
experts in religious or theological subjects, conceptual and positioning
differences exist among them that we prefer to obviate in this case because
they do not relate to the core of the question as to the topic at hand. In all
the cases we will be referring to a way of understanding Christian life from
the perspective of present and active participants in history, and to theol-
ogy as an approach to and a reading of the Gospel of Jesus Christ of that
same Christian practice.
Then, when thinking of the genesis of popular communication—also
called communication for social change by other authors—in this part of
the world, at least three mutually imbricated threads of thought can be
analyzed: the practice of communication and the evolution of critical
thought on the matter; the political, social, and cultural realities in which
the communicational processes considered are developed; and lastly, the
incidence that, at least partly, the Catholic religious experience has had in
the region and the theological thought around it (see Contreras Baspineiro,
this book). We will develop this reflection based on the analysis of these
three factors.
Communication in the Political Social Context

It is impossible to understand the course of popular communication if you
do not consider it in the political-social and economic context in which
each response took place.
In the 1970s, the exhaustion of the development pattern imposed on
Latin American and Caribbean countries was evident: fiscal expense grew
over-the-top and the crisis of the foreign debt occurred. What happened
in fact was that the pattern of “economicist development,” unjust and
inequitable in itself, that the countries of the region had imported
4 FAITH, COMMUNICATION AND COMMITMENT TO LIBERATION 75
uncritically starting from the proposal of economic developmentalism,

failed. It sought—so went the argument—the modernization and produc-
tive reactivation of the middle sectors: on account of an overflow effect,
this would necessarily arrive—so it was said—to the poorest. It was the
idea of developmentalism. Serious mistake. Not only did it not happen,
but our countries entered instead during the 1970s into a serious crisis;
the consequences of which we are still experiencing.
Then the terrible night of military dictatorships and national security
regimes occurred, sowing death and forced disappearances, imprison-
ments, tortures and, in general, violations of human rights and basic free-
doms in most countries. Justice and dignity were enslaved, but also the
right to communication and freedom of speech. Then communication
went through times of resistance, and popular communication became a
refuge and, often from clandestinity, a tool in the struggle for liberation.
Nowadays, past that stage, in the dawn of renewed democracies, the
proposal for political democratization in later years has pointed to under-
standing development well beyond its strictly economic aspects. There was
talk of participatory processes and socio-political changes that would sus-
tain what was stated in the strictly economic sense. Results were not
obtained, or they were meager, and the crisis dragged on without improv-
ing the living conditions for most of the population.
At the same time, already since the 1970s and still under the dictator-
ships, the movement promoting the democratization of communication
experienced significant growth in the whole region. It can be said that it
was based on resistance, in the cellars of society, but also in the develop-
ment of a critical Latin American thought. Simultaneously, two not always
connected currents were developing. On one hand, there was the transfor-
mation in education experiences through the media, in popular communi-
cation realities, using radio for its main support. On the other hand, there
were practices of communication linked to popular agents (peasants,
aborigines, workers in general). In these cases, the presence of the Catholic
Church and of Christian grassroots movements inspired by the theology
of liberation and grassroots ecclesial communities (acronym in Spanish:
CEBs) was important and significant. But at the same time Latin America
became a cradle of critical and creative thought on communication and
the debate was extended to the national communication policies based on
a New International News Order (NOII), and in a New World Information
and Communication Order (NWICO or NWIO). Thinkers but also poli-
ticians of the region were integrated in that global dispute and
76 W. URANGA
participated in the international forums. Nevertheless, achievements and

specific progresses were low in number. Furthermore, only a few isolated,
not very significant experiences, managed to endure.
In the first case it was the experience of the literacy teachers themselves
and their closeness to the most popular sectors that yielded the transfor-
mation into a perspective of popular communication.
The proposal of national communication policies found its political
basis in the idea of liberation, its theoretical foundation in the critical Latin
American school of communication and their practical references in the
experiences of alternative communication that had been previously sowed
in the region since the 1950s, starting with the works of education through
Radio Sutatenza (Colombia), a Catholic Church radio station, and com-
munication experiences then called alternative.
There was, however, a dissociation between political discourse and
practice. The great majority of Latin American governments participated
in the San José Conference in Costa Rica (1976), that focused on com-
munication policies, and subscribed to its declarations on NWICO.
However, almost none of them exhibited later the capacity and political
zeal necessary to apply the required transformations.
For example, there was no effective modification of the media system
beyond experiences that did not reach a true transformative capacity, as it
happened to the ASIN1 and ALASEI2 agencies and the ULCRA3 network.
Neither was there an impulse and a concrete support for national radio
and television systems of public service. In a dialogue held between the
author and Luis Ramiro Beltrán in 1990, the Bolivian investigator claimed
that “alternative proposals at that time did not even reach a 5% of the total
media in each country.”
Many political and theoretical-political discourses on NWICO and
communication policies in the continent did not keep in mind, in a real
and concrete way, the grassroots experiences of communication that had
been developing in the region. But also, for those who made grassroots
communication, for those who lived popular communication as a political
1
ASIN (Acción de Sistemas Informativos Nacionales) (National Informative Systems
Action).
2
ALASEI (Agencia Latinoamericana de Servicios Especiales de Información) (Latin
American Special Information Services Agency).
3
ULCRA (Unión Latinoamericana y Caribeña de Radiodifusión) (Latin American and
Caribbean Union of Broadcasting).
experience and as a tool for social change, the discourse on the New Order
sounded, more than once, as a distant, alien, or empty claim.
Beyond this dissociation between practice and discourse, communica-
tion experiences were at the time directly linked to the political debate: at
the level of the superstructure, because the discussion on the New Order
and on national communication policies mobilized interests and promoted
confrontations; at grassroots level, because communication became a full
part of the struggle against social injustice and in favor of
democratization.
How to Understand Communication?

As already stated, there is a practice of communication in Latin America
closely linked with political practice and with popular struggles. This is
because there were and there are protagonists of communication who, in
the midst of the political debate, conceive it as a fundamental human right
and, therefore, a political perspective of civic construction.
The above-mentioned supposes leaving aside any reductionistic and
information-related approaches to communication, restricting it to the
use of media and technologies, to understand it substantially as a connec-
tion between actors, a dialogue that gives purpose to social, cultural, and
political life; including media but not limited to them. It is at the same
time, a way to understand communication processes historically, as the
fabric of history, and not just isolated, incidental events; it is to under-
stand communication as a narrative arising from experience and practice,
from the daily life of subjects. It is not about an isolated cry, but about a
call to a dialogue woven into the actions of the actors in history, turned
into an event through the action of popular actors (see Peruzzo,
this book).
As we pointed out in a previous work, communication is “a social pro-
cess of production, exchange and negotiation of symbolic forms, a con-
stituent phase of man’s practical being and the knowledge derived thereof”
(Uranga 2016, p. 30). Departing from that same approach, we claimed
then that “communication is defined by action” and thus, through our
actions, we proceed configuring ways of communication. Adding that
“the communication that we turn into our action, the language that we
use, constitutes the purpose and contents of our action” (Enz et al.
2006, p. 40).
78 W. URANGA
This perspective of communication is clearly related with the Latin

American experience of popular communication. It is supported by a prac-
tice which cannot be interpreted separately from the social and political
experience of its protagonist.
Thus, popular communication is also communication for social change,
because social agents are symbolically built and constituted there, they
arise as protagonists, and they impregnate with purpose the historical pro-
cesses in which they participate, including their struggles, their quests,
their aspirations. This way, communicational processes give life to a
cultural-political methodology in which history ceases to be the sum of
small daily facts or extraordinary big events without any articulation to
each other to introduce a new perspective to the way of acquiring knowl-
edge, to the form of appropriating historical events as a form of accumula-
tion of knowledge by the participant agents and society as a whole.
Starting from its practices, popular communication invites to recon-
struct the narrative of history from the communicational processes, allow-
ing facts to intertwine with each other, which supposes weaving the
peculiar history of every one of the social agents into the political, social,
and cultural collective history. When we speak about this type of commu-
nication we are not referring strictly to media, but rather to a communica-
tional process into which those media are inscribed and of which they are
a part. What we are concerned about is a communicational process that is
constituted of and which, at the same time, builds the historical narrative
(see Custódio, this book).
The popular and the communitarian are directly linked to the political
vocation, in terms of construction of citizenship and social participation in
a continent where inequalities are evident and become more and more
pronounced by the day. Where the claim for justice is clamorous in the
demands made by the poor and the excluded. The political construction
there is not linked exclusively to the traditional political organization but
is rather related to the achievement of the common good, a task that can
move along very diverse roads, all intersected by the struggle for power.
Disaggregating popular communication from the struggle for power
would mean emptying it of purpose and losing the direction of social
change. Without disregarding that, although communication collaborates
to the construction of consensus, it also contributes to the constitution of
a space of dialogue in the difference.
An Option for the Poor: The Centrality

of the Announcement of the Gospel
It is not difficult to establish links between popular communication and

Christian commitment in Latin America because both are experiences that
have been intertwined without major difficulty in the recent history of our
countries. People, institutions, alliances, ways of construction which are
common to both occur. But what exists, most of all, is a common episte-
mology that is born out of recognizing the poor as actors and protagonists
of both social change and religious Christian practice.
The II General Conference of Latin American Bishops (Medellín 1968)
1968) was a transcendent landmark for Catholicism in the region because
it settled the perspective of the option for the poor. The III General
Conference (Puebla 1979) would inscribe itself years later in the same
theological and ecclesiological, but also political and cultural, line of
reflection. Both, although they were encounters of the Catholic hierarchy,
express in diverse ways a religious practice of the whole faithful people, an
experience of faith extended long and wide across the Latin American
continent and of proximity with and commitment to the popular sectors.
Quoting the documents of the Latin American church, Salvadoran
theologian Jon Sobrino (n.d.) remembers that:
the option for the poor has arisen in Latin America, a continent for the most
part poor and Christian. Puebla refers it to Medellín, ‘that made a clear and
prophetic option of preference for and solidarity with the poor’, (Puebla
1134) and it consecrates the expression ‘preferential option for the poor’ in
the context of the evangelizing mission of the Church. That option refers to
the addressee as much as to the content of evangelization. The objective of
the preferential option for the poor is the announcement of Christ the
Savior Who will shed his light on their dignity, support them in their efforts
of liberation from all their wants and take them to the communion with the
Father and their brethren, by means of the living of evangelical poverty
(Puebla 1153). (Sobrino, J. Relat No. 251)
And he adds that:
the foundation of this option is in the evangelization by Jesus himself

(Puebla 1141) and in the defense and love of God toward them for the mere
fact of being poor (Puebla 1142); it is historically demanded ‘by the scandal-
ous reality of the economic imbalances in Latin America’ (Puebla 1154). As
80 W. URANGA
a pastoral option, this option is preferential, not excluding; it does not

mean, therefore, to disregard the evangelization of others, although it is
insinuated that even for the evangelization of those who are not poor this
option is very important and necessary. (Sobrino, J. op. cit.)
For Sobrino “the option for the poor is an option for a life and a faith”
organizing the action around that fundamental decision. And the Central
American theologian adds that, “in current language, the ‘poor’ are in the
first place the socio-economically poor ones, a language that should not
surprise or be crossed out as ideological, because what is behind the socio-
economic thing is the oikos, the home, and the socium, the partner; that is
to say, the two fundamental realities of every human being: life and frater-
nity” (Sobrino, J. op. cit.).
This evangelical perspective is supported by a practice putting the his-
torical reality of the people in the center of the preoccupation and the
commitment of Christians. Liberation, in consequence, was transformed
into a concrete, historical, social, and cultural horizon, and not just into a
utopia projected toward the transcendent. The above-mentioned sup-
poses to “take care of reality” which implies to take reality as “principle
and foundation of all activity,” just as pointed out by Alberto Moliner (n.d.).
The option for the poor enables the theological perspective of the lib-
eration, since it includes the practice as a social process, a natural environ-
ment for the transformation of society.
Peruvian Gustavo Gutiérrez in his original work on the theology of
liberation wrote that:
theology as a critical reflection of historical practice is thus a liberating theol-

ogy, a theology of the liberating transformation of the history of humanity
and, therefore, also of the portion of it—gathered in ecclesia—that openly
confesses Christ. A theology that is not limited to think the world, but rather
looks to be situated as a moment of the process through which the world is
transformed: opening up—in the protest in the face of the tramped dignity of
humans, in the struggle against the looting of the immense majority of men,
in love that liberates, in the construction of a new society, fair and fraternal—
to the gift of the Kingdom of God. (Gutierréz 1972, pp. 40–41)
Years later, when reissuing the same work in Peru, Gutiérrez reaf-
firmed that:
the theology of liberation is closely bound to this new presence of those who
were always absent from our history. They have transformed little by little
into active actors of their own destiny, initiating a process that is changing
the condition of the poor and oppressed of this world. The theology of lib-
eration (expression of the right of the poor to reflect on their faith) is not
the automatic result of that situation and its changes; it is an attempt to read
the signs of the times […] in which a critical reflection is made in the light
of the Word of God. It takes us to seriously discern the values and limits of
this event. (Gutiérrez 1988, p. 16)
Regarding communication, also the fundamental documents of the

contemporary Latin American Church, settled a position that contrib-
utes in the aforementioned sense. In Medellín (1968) the bishops
pointed out that “in Latin America the media is one of the factors which
have contributed and continue to contribute the most to raise the aware-
ness of the masses on their conditions of life, raising aspirations and
demands for radical transformations.” They also acknowledged, perhaps
in a self-referential fashion regarding the practice of the Church itself,
that these media “although in incipient form, have been acting as posi-
tive agents of change by means of grassroots education, formation pro-
grams and public opinion.” Not forgetting that “however, many of these
media are linked to economic and political groups, national and foreign,
interested in maintaining the social ‘statu quo’” (II Conferencia General
del Episcopado Latinoamericano, Documento final, 1968, Apartado
sobre Comunicación, No. 2).
In 1977, the Department of Social Communication of the Latin
American Bishops’ Council (acronym in Spanish: CELAM) produced a
preparatory document for the III General Conference of Latin American
Bishops (Puebla 1979). That text was not widely publicized, but it had the
merit, on one hand, to collect the communication experience of the
Church from Medellín and, on the other, to bear influence on the final
document of Puebla as well as on the pastoral work of the particular
churches. That work reflects, in general, the liberation perspective that
intersected the ecclesiological experience of the region at that time. By
way of example we can mention a section in which it is claimed that “social
communication will make evident the situations of injustice, dominance
and extreme poverty to which important sectors of the Latin American
community are subject to.” Adding that “it should also collaborate to the
creation of a liberation project able to assure peaceful, fair and fraternal
conditions of living for our peoples” (DECOS-CELAM 1979, p. 49).
82 W. URANGA
This approach also impelled the institutional support of Catholic orga-

nizations in the apostolate of communication, with institutions such as the
International Catholic Association for Radio and Television (UNDA), the
International Catholic Organization for Cinema and Audiovisuals (OCIC),
and the Latin American Catholic Press Association (acronym in Spanish:
UCLAP), in whose ranks acted militants (lay, priests, and religious) clearly
identified with experiences in grassroots ecclesial communities and in the
theology of liberation.
Luis Liberti, a specialist on the subject of communication and the
Church in Latin America, claims that in the years after Medellín (1968)
“in the cultural field we noticed the profound influence of the thought of
Brazilian Paulo Freire, educator, sociologist and philosopher; his propos-
als have been widely accepted in the continent, bringing about widespread
awareness and a remarkable change in the appreciation and analysis of the
Latin American situation.” And he adds that Paulo Freire “inspired the
initial quest for models of horizontal and dialogic communication” also in
the Church environment. (Liberti 1995, p. 38)
The document of the Latin American bishops in Puebla (1979) gathers
only partially the rich experience of the Church on the subject during the
preceding years. However, in the part of the pastoral recommendations it
can be read that “given the situation of poverty, marginality and injustice,
and of violation of human rights, in which large Latin American masses are
submersed, the Church, by the use of its own media, should become,
every day more, the voice of those deprived, even with the risk that it
implies” (Conferencia General del Episcopado Latinoamericana,
Documento final, 1979, Puebla, 1082).
Grassroots Ecclesial Communities: The Practice

of Liberation
The evangelical option for the poor was expressed in different ways in
religious Latin American practice but it had in the Grassroots Ecclesial
Communities (Spanish acronym: CEBs) one of its most important mani-
festations. They expressed, apart from the centrality of the commitment to
the poor, understood as a popular actor, organization forms for political
action, even though these were not always associated to specific parties.
Already in 1968, the Latin American bishops had defined CEBs as “the
initial cell of ecclesial structuring and focal point of evangelization and, at
the moment, a primordial factor of human promotion and development”

(Medellín, 15). In 1979, the same bishops said that “the Grassroots
Ecclesial Communities that in 1968 were barely an incipient experience,
have matured and multiplied, mainly in some countries, so that now they
constitute a reason of joy and hope for the Church. In communion with
the Bishop and as Medellín requested, they have turned into focal points
of Evangelization and motors of liberation and development”
(Puebla, 641).
Bolivian theologian Gregorio Iriarte understands by grassroots ecclesial
community (CEB) “a small group in which members know each other,
share their life, celebrate their faith and help each other to fully live their
commitment to the construction of the Kingdom” (Iriarte 2006). In prac-
tice, these communities arose in Latin America in the light of a double
perspective: to live their faith next to their neighbor, their near one, but
also with the decision to put reality at the center of their concerns.
CEBs have also been expression of the ecclesial novelty contributed by
the Vatican II Council (1962–1965) portrayed in Latin America in the
1960s, when, just as it was pointed out above, the development project
promoted by the United States for this part of the world began to show its
weakness (See Flores-Márquez, this book). The poverty of the peoples of
the continent set the demand for liberation over any proposal of develop-
ment, that was shown to be not only insufficient by itself, but also unfair,
given the existing conditions of exploitation and dominance.
It is at that point in time when the theology of liberation finds a histori-
cal cultural pattern. In the CEBs, a theological practice is shaped that
arises from the concrete history of the people but that, at the same time,
is a way to live life from the perspective of the poor. Thus, the theology of
liberation cautions about the necessity to live a Christian faith without
separating it from the existential specific conditions of most of the Latin
American people.
And the CEBs are, at the same time, a manifestation of a new way to
understand the Church, a new ecclesiology that is also a fruit of the appli-
cation of the Vatican II Council in Latin America. An ecclesiological per-
spective that puts the emphasis in the community inserted in the people,
in the history of the people, as a center of the experience of faith.
The Grassroots Ecclesial Community—claims Alberto Moliner—integrates

as a community its families, adults and youths in an interpersonal intimate
relationship in the faith. Because it is ecclesial, it is a community of faith,
84 W. URANGA
hope and charity; it celebrates the Word of God and is nurtured by the
Eucharist, pinnacle of all the sacraments; it carries out the Word of God in
life, through solidarity and commitment to the new commandment of the
Lord and it makes present and acting the ecclesial mission and the visible
communion with the shepherds, through the service of approved coordina-
tors. It is at the grassroots, constituted by few members, permanently and in
the fashion of a cell of the great community. (Moliner, op. cit)
And Moliner underlines that CEBs develop:
lay ministries and recover the charismatic and diaconal dimensions of the
Church, playing an important critical-prophetic and liberating role. Aware
that the political solutions to which they offer their support do not have an
absolute character, they emphasize historical mediations. These communi-
ties are the presence of the Church in the popular movements of struggle for
just claims, where the conscience of liberation lies. (Moliner, op. cit.)
It can be said then that the experience of CEBs was the form of portraying
in Latin America the reformations of Vatican II, in an original way and
collecting the religious practice and the politics of this part of the world.
And, at the same time, they constituted a way of proposing another model
of Church from the perspective of the poor as the actor and protagonist of
history. It is the Church that is part of the people, that assumes their pains
and their struggles because its members suffer the condition of dominance
and the sufferings of the poor.
For that reason, the faithful gathered in the CEBs work in favor of a
new type of society that looks to overcome the situations of injustice and
dominance, for itself and for society as a whole. And it was the theological
reflection of liberation that systematized this practice in order to transform
it into a proposal, enabling a critical reflection on Christian practice from
a liberating perspective.
It is not only a way to reflect about life, but a different way to live life
in the history of the people.
It was a time during which a lot of emphasis was placed on the social,
political, and revolutionary commitment from faith. Some Christians
chose the way of armed struggle and the repression of the “national secu-
rity” governments fell on them as well as on others with different options,
considering them, in general, “subversive.” Many Christians died or were
victims of abuses.
This way, the CEBs became a novel experience which, following the
teaching of the first Christian communities, reinforced also the commit-
ment to the option for the poor that, inspired by the Vatican II Council,
was portrayed in Latin America through the teaching of the bishops. This
was also supported by the theological reflections of liberation in their
diverse tendencies and significances.
Popular Communication and Christian Commitment

But the CEBs also participated in experiences of popular religiosity, in
which popular culture was synthesized with religious culture and with the
language of the people. This was a communication experience in the dou-
ble sense of the small community but also popular culture as a form of
expression and manifestation of the life of the people. These communica-
tion experiences rooted in Christian life moved to the radio stations, to
community centers, to the communication practices that these Christian
militants displayed in different environments.
For British Jesuit Robert White, social communicator with a long expe-
rience in Latin America, particularly in Central America, the CEBs were a
basic experience in communication. In general, he claims, with the use of
participatory methods they achieved “a more horizontal communication
than in the vertical pattern of information, up from the priest to the
bishop, and then down, to the people” (White 1988, p. 152). According
to White, the CEBs were transformed into an environment of democrati-
zation of the word and shared responsibility, and in many cases that expe-
rience was projected into the generation of their own media, from printed
bulletins and debate forums to countless community radios with a social
projection.
For White “popular communication impels a systematic organization of
the media produced by the poor and relatively uneducated; it financially
controls and supports simple mimeographed newspapers, popular theater,
posters, simple slide projections, marionettes, etc.” (White p. 160). An
express review of emergent experiences of community radio in Latin
America and the Caribbean shows the Catholic Church as an enormous
protagonist, from the pioneer Radio Sutatenza (Colombia), to Radio
Santa María (Dominican Republic), and Escuelas Radiofónicas de Bolivia
(ERBOL). These and many other initiatives of popular and community
radios gave origin to what would become ALER (Latin American
Association of Radio Education) one of the most important networks of
86 W. URANGA
popular communication that still exists on the continent, initially consti-

tuted for the most part by media institutions of Catholic origin, whether
or not institutionally linked to the Church. The option for the poor and
the theology of liberation are the very episteme of its generation.
Accordingly, the practice of communication of a sector of the Catholic
Church and progressive Christianity in the region was, through this con-
nection, intrinsically related to the idea of social change in different forms.
The magazine UNDA-AL, journal of the Catholic Latin American
Association for Radio and Television, published in Bogotá and Buenos
Aires between 1980 and 1989, stated this perspective in many of its
articles.
As an example, it is worth summarizing what Mexican Jesuit priest and
theologian Fernando Espinosa wrote in it in 1981, pointing out that
popular communication will “only end up being genuinely popular to the
extent that it seriously assumes the task of liberating the oppressed classes,
transforms itself into a medium expressing its own interests and breaks up
with the oppression and the manipulation of the ruling class.” And he
added that:
popular communication will have to be intimately related and integrated

with all the movement of organization and reinforcement of social practice
at a political level. Communication alone will not change society, no matter
how well it is carried out: it merely belongs to the superstructure. Somehow
it will be necessary to impact the social relationships of production. (Espinosa
1981, p. 19)
And the following year, in the same publication, the Hispanic

Venezuelan Jesuit priest and theologian José Martínez Terrero, in the
article “Popular communication in NOMIC” claimed that “the commu-
nicational practice of popular groups that struggle for liberation goes […]
along the line of a new communicational and group-oriented popular pro-
cess,” pointing out that “the most important thing is that the oppressed
people voice their own words” and that communication “is oriented
toward the popular organization for a macro structural liberating change
in which the organized sectors themselves have control on the media.” He
concluded by stating that popular communication is defined as “the com-
munication of the oppressed people who express themselves and demand
their defrauded rights, using for this purpose those media that may be the
most helpful in order to achieve their liberation” (Martínez Terrero 1982,

pp. 46–48). And later on, the same author stated that “the practice of
popular communication is in the frame of the relationship of the Church
with the poor” (op. cit. p. 54).
In 1992, in a text reflecting on 500 years of evangelization in Latin
America, I wrote that it was “the Latin American Catholic Church, the
place where many popular and professional communicators—especially
the first ones—found support for their demands in favor of the right to
communications and to develop communication experiences that were
alternative to the system,” underlining that “this has been one of the most
valuable contributions of the Church in that respect” (Uranga 1992,
p. 420). A recognition that, from a distance, confirms what we have kept
supporting regarding the importance of the contribution of committed
agents of the Catholic Church and of Christianity in general, to popular
communication in the region.
Closing Notes
Throughout this text we wanted to make evident that, as far as the Latin
American and Caribbean region is concerned, the practice that we have
called popular communication (also called community communication or
communication for social change) has been clearly linked with the theo-
logical and ecclesiological perspective built around what the documents of
the Catholic hierarchy designated as “preferential option for the poor,”
and was synthesized by theologians in the theology of the liberation with
its variants of theology of the people or theology of culture, depending on
the authors. Similarly, those who have reflected about communication rec-
ognize signs of this thought, but they also assume that they have incorpo-
rated practices coming from Christian organizations and movements
committed to the popular sectors.
The choice of the poor as the history building actor, but also as the
main author of its change, becomes the common epistemological axis
around which the Christian practice of liberation, the popular communi-
cation and the processes toward social change in Latin America are orga-
nized. In order to understand the poor, those who suffer dominance, as
liberating actors and promoters of the historical-cultural changes, the key
has been the interpretation of social processes of popular origin. It is the
88 W. URANGA
same key of interpretation that you apply to communicators and popular

communicators in the long path from “giving a voice to those who do not
have a voice” down to the acknowledgement of the popular agent as the
subject of the right to communication. But it is the same epistemological
root that gives sense to the theology of liberation understood, as Gustavo
Gutiérrez says, as the intelligence of Christian practice lived in the midst
of the poor, their culture, and their social reality.
This synthesis has also occurred in the life and experiences of commu-
nicators who enrich the theoretical tradition of the field in Latin America.
Without pretending to make a full list—and apologizing in advance for
the inevitable omissions—it is worthwhile to mention some of the names
of professors of communication in Latin America of well-known identifi-
cation with Christian faith, who integrate into their teachings, texts, and
practices, the synthesis we are referring to: Jesús Aguirre (Venezuela),
Rosa María Alfaro (Peru), Jesús Martín-Barbero (Colombia), Fernando
Reyes Mata (Chile), Regina Festa, Cicilia Peruzzo, Attilio Hartmann, José
Marques de Melo, Ismar de Oliveira Soares (Brazil), Juan Díaz Bordenave
(Paraguay), Luis Ramiro Beltrán (Bolivia), Mario y Gabriel Kaplún
(Uruguay), Daniel Prieto Castillo, María Cristina Mata (Argentina). There
are many, many more, but those mentioned suffice as evidence of what
was affirmed previously. All of them forged the Latin American communi-
cational thought, but they also have been and are pioneers of a perspective
of popular communication and their roots were, earlier or later, linked to
the Christian practice of liberation.
All of the above hardly exists anymore in theoretical exercises. It exists
in countless experiences linking grassroots ecclesial communities, other
Christian communities, organizations, and ecclesial movements with prac-
tices of popular communication and communication for social change.
Also, examples of Christian fighters who ended up giving their life at work,
in communication, for the liberation of their peoples. Maybe one of the
most outstanding examples is still that of Bolivian nationalized Spanish
Jesuit religious Luis Espinal Camps, poet, journalist, and film director. On
March 21, 1980, he was kidnapped by the paramilitary from the door of
the 6 de Agosto cinema in La Paz, and the next day his body was found in
the Achachila region with twelve bullet shots. He was a Christian com-
municator and martyr of communication who is in himself, in his life and
death, a synthesis of faith, communication, and commitment to liberation.
References
DECOS-CELAM. (1979). Evangelización y comunicación social en América
Latina, Ediciones Paulinas, Bogotá
Enz, A. et al. (2006). El cambio social como acción transformadora. Buenos Aires:
Cumunia-La Crujía.
Espinosa F. (1981). Boletín UNDA-AL, No. 3, UNDA-AL, Bogotá.
Gutiérrez, G. (1972). Teología de la Liberación. Perspectivas. Salamanca: Sígueme.
Gutiérrez, G. (1988). Teología de la Liberación. Perspectivas. Lima: CEP.
Iriarte, G. (2006). Qué es una Comunidad Eclesial de Base? In Redes Cristianas.
Available at http://www.redescristianas.net/%C2%BFque-es-una-comunidad-
eclesial-de-base-gregorio-iriarte/
Liberti, Luis O. svd (1995). La pastoral de la comunicación social en torno a
Medellín, Puebla y Santo Domingo [1966–1992]: una visión teológica de la
búsqueda de un modelo y estilo pastoral para la comunicación solidaria e incul-
turada del Evangelio en la Iglesia latinoamericana. Tesis de licenciatura—
Universidad Católica Argentina, Facultad de Teología [on-line]. Available at:
http://bibliotecadigital.uca.edu.ar/repositorio/tesis/pastoral-comunicacion-
social-medellin-puebla
Martínez Terrero J. (1982). Popular communication in NOMIC, In Boletín
UNDA-AL, No. 7, UNDA-AL, Bogotá.
Medellín. (1968). II Conferencia General del Episcopado Latinoamericano.
Bogotá: CELAM.
Moliner, A. (n.d.). Los procedimientos de la teología de liberación. Relat Revista
electrónica latinoamericana de teología No. 378 En línea: http://www.servi-
cioskoinonia.org/relat/378.htm.
Puebla. (1979). III Conferencia General del Episcopado Latinoamericano.
Bogotá: CELAM.
Sobrino, J. (n.d.). Opción por los pobres. Revista Koinonía 251. En línea: http://
servicioskoinonia.org/relat/251.htm.
Uranga, W. (1992). Evangelizar é Comunicar. In Beozzo J. O. et al (1992), Vida,
clamor e esperança: reflexões para os 500 anos de evangelização a partir da
América Latina. São Paulo, Loyola.
Uranga, W. (2016). Conocer, transformar, comunicar. Buenos Aires: Editora
Patria Grande.
White, P., R. SJ. (1988). La iglesia y la comunicación en América Latina: Treinta
años en busca de modelos. Publicado en Teoría y Praxis de la Iglesia
Latinoamericana en Comunicaciones Sociales (Consejo Episcopal
Latinoamericano de Comunicación Social). Colección DECOS 2
(pp. 129–167). Bogotá, Colombia: CELAM.
CHAPTER 5
The Vestiges of the Concept of Popular

in Latin America
Santiago Gómez Obando
The popular communication as well as other theories and critical

approaches that emerged in Our Latin American ontext during the second
half of the last century such as Liberation Theology (see Uranga, this vol-
ume), Popular Education (see Prieto Castillo, this volume), Participation
Action Research (see Vega, this volume), Liberation Philosophy or the
Theatre of the Oppressed integrated the concept of popular as one of its
referential frameworks to carry out the emancipatory ethical-political
intentions that encouraged its emergence and subsequent development.
According to Marco Raul Mejia
“These processes in different dimensions of knowledge inaugurate from our

reality a critique of an episteme of knowing that is located as unique and that
excludes the others that are generated in places other than it. Therefore,
within the proposal of each one of them as a form of research and production
of knowledge from the practices of subordinate groups and accompanying
S. Gómez Obando (*)
Dimensión Educativa, Bogotá, Colombia
e-mail: chespiritoesrojo@hotmail.com

Switzerland AG 2021
92 S. GÓMEZ OBANDO
the action in a conceptual way that the proposals outlined in their own con-
texts and in other contexts carry out on a daily basis and in other latitudes, a
discourse is emerging from this work that, when discussing the episteme of
scientific knowledge, locates its legitimacy in a historical context, in which
the beginning of European modernity takes shape as the way to explain and
understand the world, as part of the control of capitalism.” (Mejía 2011, p. 30)
However, generally speaking, it is possible to affirm that a theoretical

comprehension about the meaning and importance of this concept does
not exist. Thus, the concept of popular in many cases could be associated
commonly with “the people”, especially with those sectors and popular
groups that live in “marginal” areas in the city or in the countryside.1
Furthermore, in the last thirty years, the concept of “popular” has been
replaced by the concept of “subaltern” in Our Latin American academic
context and by the concept of “multitude” in the Euro-Western context.
The straight relation that some authors see between people as a category
and the very existence of the nation-state, the broad and vague that might
seem this concept in a critical Latin American tradition or its inclination
toward establishing a totality over the multiple—meaning a superiority of
the singular and standard over the dynamic plural—has led many writers
to prefer the use of more convenient terms that could be less problematic,
polysemic, and polemic. For this reason, the following question emerges:
Why is the concept of popular still being used within political projects by
critical actors in Our Latin American context, when academia seems to
have condemned its death?
The effort to answer this question is the primary intent of this chapter.
In order to do it, I have opted for dividing the text into three major sec-
tions. In the first section, I present some of the most important images
about what the popular has meant. In the second section, I will introduce
some of the main critiques that have emerged in relation to this concept
and finally, in the third section, I will expose the reasons why I argue that
the concept of popular is still valid for critical actors in Our Latin America.
Some Images Around the Meaning of Popular

In Our Latin American context, the meaning of popular can be organized
around at least eight images. I will dedicate this first section to present
what each of them consists of, seeking thereby to characterize the main
uses of the popular in everyday language and, above all, in the language
1
Using interchangeably categories like popular, social, subaltern, dominated, excluded,
and marginalized.
5 THE VESTIGES OF THE CONCEPT OF POPULAR IN LATIN AMERICA 93
employed by intellectuals, academics, and social scientists. In addition, I

propose a short interpretive synthesis in which I establish the importance
that the concept of popular has had in the process of constructing narra-
tives about those sectors and subjects that have historically been consid-
ered as “subalternized”, excluded, dominated, or exploited.
If we were to ask common people2 what the meaning of popular is,
probably most of them would connect the concept with someone who has
acceptance, respect or fame in a local, regional, national, or transnational
level. A song, an artist, a soap opera, or a magazine are “popular” because
they have a certain renown within a specific population. Consequently,
keeping in mind the frame associated with this first image, popular could be
characterized as everything that has relevance—popularity—in the public
spaces, cultural industries, or in the market. The theoretical approaches
close to the political, cultural, and economic marketing have been pioneers
in studies of the leaders’ popularity, be they politicians, brands or celebri-
ties. For instance, the paradigmatic works of Mueller (1970), Goodhart
and Bhansali (1970) and Kramer (1971) introduced in the field of political
science the study about the popularity of politicians, governments, and
political parties in relation with the management of economic issues.
A second common image, especially in Our Latin American socio-
political context, relates popular to poverty and its effects—marginaliza-
tion and exclusion. It is the case of some public policies searching to
improve life conditions of some groups, with the main intention of help-
ing to mitigate the negative effects that “developmental” policies produce
at the local, regional, or national level. Such policies usually associate the
notion of popular with social groups that live in vulnerable conditions or
regions, for instance, popular neighborhoods or marginal zones in the
countryside. Despite being rare in theoretical assumptions, these positions
that reduce the popular to a sense of poverty can be found, in Our Latin
America, in some public programs and policies that aim at the poorest
populations. Policies offering “popular housing” in Colombia (1942) and
in El Salvador (1992), the Peruvian “popular dining rooms” (1976) and
the “popular health insurance” in Mexico (2011) illustrate well how the
notion of popular is used in association with poverty.
The third image of popular relates this concept with the one of folklore.
It emerges in the field of cultural studies approaching ethnic groups. This
analytic perspective approaches peoples and native or traditional
communities from a viewpoint in which they are represented as “primitive”
and “pure” without any kind of miscegenation, cultural hybridization, or
2
Under the sense developed by British Marxist historians. See e.g.: Kaye (1989).
94 S. GÓMEZ OBANDO
political domination. Thus, this kind of academic and scientific production

is characterized by social constructions that appreciate mainly “the myths,
legends, celebrations, craftworks, habits and institutions” (García Canclini
1987, p. 2). The pioneer works in the study of folklore, according to
Renato Ortiz (1992) were conducted by Thoms in 1846 and John Brand
in 1857 who wanted to collect and classify the popular knowledge from an
antiquarian perspective. In Our Latin America—specifically in Brazil—
Ortiz (1992) places Silvio Romero’s and Gilberto Freyre’s works as para-
digmatic examples of an approach that searched a new balance for regional
knowledges within the Brazilian culture. García Canclini (1987) argues
that Vicente Teódulo Mendoza (1939, 1956), Martínez Peñaloza (1943,
1972, 1980, 1981, 1982) and Rubín De La Borbolla (1947, 1949, 1950,
1952) are the best examples of the Mexican anthropological folklorism.
The fourth image tends to associate the concept of popular with that of
mass. The frame of reference includes, in this case, elite theories (Spengler
1923; Ortega y Gasset 1955), the democratic perspective of the social
masses (Arendt 1998) and the later reformulations of the collective behav-
ior in the North American sociology in the 1960s (Smelser 1963;
Kornhauser 1969). In these approaches, the popular is related with the
behavior of the masses,3 suggesting that irrationality, alienation, atomiza-
tion, resentment, discredit, and social isolation could be the main reasons
for the creation and participation in “extremist” groups risking liberal
freedom and order. Therefore, participating in popular or “mass” groups
would be one of the ways with which certain individuals who have failed
or feel bad about their lives would fill a void, by appealing to the group
image as an effective substitute for their own image. Consequently, accord-
ing to these approaches, the multitude of apathetic and resentful people
would be the main support of social and popular movements.
Another current within this approach sets the production of popular in
the actions of mass media. In the image emerging from the theory of
social behavior, the massive becomes the social ground in which radical
perspectives emerge to question the establishment, while the one emerg-
ing from the folklore refers to popular as a result of the traditions and give
it a meaning based exclusively on its premodern character. Unlike the
3
According to William Kornhauser (1969), “A high proportion of mass behavior can be
expected when both elites and non-elites lack social isolation; that is, when the elites are
accessible to the direct intervention of groups that do not form elites, and when the latter are
at the disposal of the elites for direct mobilization” (p. 40).
latter, in this perspective, the popular is actively produced by cultural

industries benefiting from the passivity of the masses homogenized by
their power. The functionalist theory in the sociology of communication
is considered to be the best exponent of this approach. Its most paradig-
matic authors are, among others, Lasswell (1985), Lazarsfeld (1940,
1985), Wright (1960, 1978) and Merton (1949). According to García
Canclini (1987), from this perspective:
[…] contemporary popular culture is constituted from electronic media, it

is not the result of local differences but of the homogenizing action of the
cultural industry. Thanks to research on mass communication, central
aspects of popular cultures have become evident that do not come from the
historical heritage of each people, nor from their insertion in the relations of
production, but from other spaces of reproduction and social control, such
as they are information and consumption. These studies provide valuable
insight into media strategies and the structure of the communication mar-
ket. But their way of dealing with popular culture deserves several criticisms.
On the one hand, they tend to conceive mass culture as an instrument of
power to manipulate the popular classes. They also adopt the perspective of
message production and neglect reception and appropriation. Finally, they
tend to reduce their analysis of communication processes to electronic
media. (p. 3)
The fifth image defines popular as a national people, i.e., like an indivis-
ible unity whose existence is necessarily related to the emergence of the
modern nation-state. Some of the expressions of an approach that under-
stands the people and the popular as a monolith without gaps or fissures
that legitimizes the existence of a State and its sovereignty are: the under-
standing of people as “a unit, which has a single will, and to which a com-
mon action can be attributed” (p. 158) in the absolutist theory of the
State of Thomas Hobbes (1998); the construction of the general will and
the expression of popular sovereignty in Rousseau’s social contract (1999)
that argues that “it would be convenient to examine the act by which a
people is a people; since being this act by necessity previous to the other,
it is the true foundation of society” (p. 18); the idea according to which
“the State is the special condition of a people, and namely: the determin-
ing condition” (Schmitt 1998, p. 10), provided that it is considered as a
politically united entity and ready to fight for its existence and for its inde-
pendence, taking into account that “by autonomous decision it has deter-
mined what that independence and that freedom consists of” (p. 26) in
the theory of the friend-enemy of Carl Schmitt.
96 S. GÓMEZ OBANDO
The sixth image of popular is associated with kindness and truth.

Closely related to folklorism—although not necessarily or only with it—
there has been a theoretical-practical tendency of a “populist” nature4 that
has characterized popular sectors as good in themselves. Consequently,
those groups rise as the main—sometimes the only ones—bearing the wis-
dom and the truth. This conception emerges as a reaction against elite,
messianic, and/or avant-garde perspectives—both from the right and the
left—that consider the people as ignorant, passive, or alienated,5 being this
the reason why a structure that enlightens and fills the popular groups and
sectors with content was required. According to Germán Mariño (2006)
in the educational field:
Transmissionism epistemologically corresponds to what Not would call

“hetero-structuring.” In such a fundamentally empiricist perspective, the
subject is conceived as a blank photographic film on which the light (infor-
mation) that comes from the “outside” is printed and where, in addition to
being recorded (forever), it magically transforms their attitudes and prac-
tices. Ignorance (or ideologization) and passivity, are then its two basic pos-
tulates […] For various reasons and not always in a linear way, populism
arises concomitant with transmissionist messianism. In some contexts, it
does so precisely as a reaction to messianism and in others out of a naive
humanism that mythologizes the student. For populism, “the truth hides in
the people as the seed hides in the fruit” […] and the educator’s task is to
help it to emerge. It is also about “letting go”, to avoid distorting their
innate wisdom. (p. 3)
A variant within this image includes the popular as a dominant form of

representation, in which the emergence of the people in the political pro-
cesses organized by caudillistas leaders during the first half of the twenti-
eth century, in Our Latin American context, was based on a hierarchical
scenario in which, at the same time that politics was massified and the
cultural expressions of the popular sectors were recognized, there was an
intention of leadership on the part of the national elites, who abrogated
the right to teach and guide this “child-people” who were beginning to be
4
The term “populism”—between quotation marks—used here, is far from the sense in
which Laclau (2005) conceives populism as a legitimate way of doing politics, in which a
partial-totality—the people—is used to oppose and fight against what is excluded or denied—
the oligarchies, the elites, the ruling classes, etc.
5
In other words, they consider the people as a mass in the sense developed by
Kornhauser (1969).
recognized and exalted in official circles. The genealogical work of Renán

Silva (2000) on the Colombian popular culture, in the period known as
the Liberal Republic (1930–1946), is a good example that illustrates the
way in which the dominant sectors made use of the popular with the prac-
tical purpose of rethinking and reconfiguring traditional forms of domi-
nance and hegemony.
The seventh image of the popular—which could be considered critical
or emancipatory—relates this term to the existence of social classes, power
and/or social confrontation. In this regard, it is important to note that
this has been one of the most prolific and polysemic images in relation to
the use and circulation of this term in Our Latin American context (see
Flores-Márquez, this book). In this sense:
–– the popular class of Father Camilo Torres (1965) intended to fos-

ter the articulation between a diversity of members of political and
social organizations, while seeking to bring closer together sectors
and actors not aligned or affiliated with existing participation and
mobilization structures;
–– the understanding of the popular as that antagonistic pole in rela-
tion to what is defined as the Other-dominant in the theoretical
proposal developed by Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe (1987);
–– the construction of the concept of popular power in practices
inspired, above all, by Marxism Leninism (Leiva 2007), having as
a main reference the accumulation of forces between the organs of
power of the people and the revolutionary party—duality
of powers;
–– the proposals of the popular movement of Camacho (1989) and
Leopoldo Múnera (1993), based on the articulation and unifica-
tion of different social sectors, or on the recognition of logics of
exploitation and other type of domination that is exercised over
certain social sectors that are organized and who organize
struggles;
–– the theoretical development of the people and the popular in the
philosophy of liberation of Enrique Dussel (2007), starting from
the recognition of the existence of a confrontation between the
ruling classes and those organized social sectors that are oppressed
from the moment in which occurs the division of the political
community;
98 S. GÓMEZ OBANDO
–– or the use and understanding of the concept of popular in the

Liberation Theology, popular communication, popular education,
liberation psychology, and the theater of the oppressed, where it
has tended to give recognition and prominence to actors that suf-
fer the effects of domination and exclusion in the process of know-
ing, organizing, fighting and subverting their own reality and that
of society as a whole (2011).
All of these approaches are erected upon critical proposals in which the
popular is permanently articulated in one or more of the following fields:
relations and struggles between classes, historical processes of domination
and resistance, hegemonic and subordinate constructions, and/or forms
of social articulation and collective action.
Finally, there is an eighth image in which a cultural approach to the
popular is carried out. The pioneering works of Jesús Martín Barbero
(1984, 1987) and Néstor García Canclini (1982, 1989) inaugurated a
new paradigm in the study of this concept in the region. During the devel-
opment of their proposal, these authors build a way of understanding
popular cultures in which the massive works from within, without neces-
sarily implying the submission of these cultures to the cultural industries
of entertainment and information. In this way, the popular is permanently
and conflictively built by the weight of traditions, dominations, resistance,
affirmations, challenges, and reproductions of the social order. Despite
this, as will be seen later, García Canclini (1989) was one of the authors
who most vigorously and rigorously questioned the analytical-political rel-
evance of making use of this category.
The route made up to here, allows us to understand the repeated use
that the concept of popular has had, both in everyday language and in sci-
ence. This is largely due to the polysemy and elasticity that terms such as
people and popular allow. In this way, the popular has been used to frame
and interpret cultural practices, processes of resistance, forms of protest
and social articulation, undertaken by sectors that do not belong to the
political elites and/or the ruling classes. Likewise, terms such as popular
classes, popular movements, popular culture, among others, have had
constant and repeated use by social actors who seek to build stories, infor-
mation, and senses of reality about those who consider themselves domi-
nated, excluded, or inferiorized. Finally, this concept has been used as part
of the political languages that have allowed the popular sectors to build
the horizons of meaning in which their social action is framed.
Main Critics to the Popular Field

Despite the importance that the popular has had for the structuring of
political and scientific languages in Our Latin American context, in the last
thirty years this concept has been a recurring target of criticism in the aca-
demic field. Because of this, I consider it convenient to dedicate this sec-
tion to the presentation of some of the questions raised by social scientists
who “decreed” the crisis of the popular, or proposed replacing it with
other apparently less problematic terms from a political or analytical point
of view.
In the Euro-Western context, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri
(2004), for example, chose to continue the analytical path proposed by
Hobbes,6 in order to question the way in which the category of people has
served to legitimize the creation of sovereign power, under which all sub-
jects or citizens should voluntarily subordinate themselves.7 Likewise,
these two authors consider the popular as that element of identity that
enables the existence of an undifferentiated agglomeration of subjects,
which is why they propose to replace the term people with that of a mul-
titude, considering that:
[…] people has traditionally been a unitary conception. The population, of

course, is characterized by differences of all kinds, but “the people” reduces
that diversity to unity and gives the population a unique identity. “The peo-
ple” is one. The multitude, in contrast, is many. The multitude is composed
of innumerable internal differences that can never be reduced to a unity or
a single identity. There are differences in culture, race, ethnicity, gender,
sexuality, different ways of working, living, seeing the world, and different
desires. The multitude is a multiplicity of such singular differences. (p. 16)
From another perspective, some academics, such as the Colombian his-

torian Mauricio Archila (2005), have criticized the concepts of people and
popular from the approach or perspective of subalternity. For Archila,
6
Baruch Spinoza is the other author that they take as a starting point and reference.
Despite this, the differentiation between people and multitude could hardly be made in
Spinoza’s work, taking into account that this author makes use of these two terms
interchangeably.
7
For Hardt and Negri (2004), “Frequently, ‘the people’ serves as an intermediary between
the consent given by the population and the command exercised by the sovereign power, but
more usually the word designates a claim aimed at validating the dominant authority”
(p. 107).
100 S. GÓMEZ OBANDO
these two categories are problematic for the following reasons: (1) they
are polysemic concepts that vary according to the sectors that are included
or excluded, (2) in common use they assume the false homogeneity of
those who constitute them and, (3) they are a gateway to revive the illu-
sion of a Latin American revolutionary subject, capable of radically trans-
forming a social order that is considered unjust.
On the other hand, in relation to the concept of popular movement,
this author maintains that although it may become more relevant, the fact
that it continues to transpire “something of the homogeneity and revolu-
tionary teleology attributed to the category people” is still problematic
(p. 81). For this reason, Archila prefers to use the concept of subaltern
sectors, bearing in mind that for the study of social movements this cate-
gory would have the following practical consequences: (1) it does not
imply a socio-economic determination of the groups designated by this
name and, (2) there is no possibility of intersectoral unification until they
become a State.
Finally, in the attempt to reconfigure the popular from the perspective
of cultural hybridizations and intercultural intersections, Néstor García
Canclini (1989) ends up dismissing the use of this concept.8 For him, the
crisis of the popular lies in the fact that “it does not have the univocal
meaning of a scientific concept, but the ambiguous value of a theatrical
notion” (p. 259). Therefore, in light of this redefinition, the popular
would have a serious and structural problem of analytical rigor on the
theoretical level. Meanwhile, on the political level, the premise according
to which “the popular designates the positions of certain actors, those that
place them before hegemonics, not always in the form of confrontations”
(p. 259) poses serious dilemmas to all critical actors who aspire to carry
out some type of counter-hegemonic articulation, bearing in mind that
“Even in the most direct and self-managed experiences there is action and
performance, expression of one’s own and incessant reconstitution of what
is understood by one’s own in relation to the broader laws of social dra-
maturgy, as well as reproduction of the dominant order” (p. 260).
As could be seen in this section, the criticisms of the popular refer to
the close relationship that some authors find between the emergence of
the people and the legitimation of the nation-state, the hopes of unifica-
tion of the different actors that could be included as part of the people or
8
This position coincides with that of the British Marxist historian Peter Burke regarding
popular culture. In this regard, see: Florenzano and Somarriva (November 5, 2006).
the popular movements, or how broad and diffuse this concept could be
to characterize what could be considered as “one’s own” of the popular
sectors. Despite this, as will be seen in the next section, the popular con-
tinues to have relevance in the structuring of the political languages used
by critical Latin American actors, due to a series of affirmative and imagi-
native possibilities that the use of said concept allows or enables.
The Validity of Popular for Critical Sectors

Despite what many intellectuals think or aspire to, reality is not solely and
exclusively what they believe or say it is. Therefore, although the positions
and debates in the academic field are relevant, they are still one of the
multiple registers that contribute to the social construction and structur-
ing of reality by the actors who dispute the meaning and orientation of the
world in a specific space–time. The latter is related to the way in which
political concepts are understood and worked in the so-called new intel-
lectual history,9 since the existence of different semantic layers that con-
tribute to the realization of discursive formations is recognized—beyond
academic productions that scientists and philosophers organize—while
questioning the “coherence mythology” (Skinner 2007, p. 131), the “fal-
lacy of the lexicographic definition” (Fernández and Fuentes 2002, p. 11),
the “constant scales of ideas that remain unchanged” (Koselleck 1993,
p. 113), or the “understanding of works as autonomous theories of a more
global social imaginary” (Rosanvallon 2003, p. 45).
In the specific case of the Colombian context, the historical study of the
use of this concept by critical actors10 allows us to point out at least four
main reasons why the people and popular semantic containers continue to
be valid today. In the first place, although terms such as popular sectors
and subordinate sectors tend to mean the same thing, the designation of
something or someone as subordinate is a way of naming the Other—
almost never himself—from the position of suffering, subordination, lack,
or condition of inferiority in relation to exercise and, above all, the effects
of power. For this reason, in terms of use of language, it is not common
9
Regarding the new intellectual history category, see: Solís (2013).
10
Based on research on the uses of popular in the Colombian context by six critical aca-
demics, six left-wing newspapers and magazines, and three popular organizations, in the
period 1991–2016, that I am currently conducting. Likewise, to see the preference that the
use of popular has had for critical social actors in the Brazilian context, see: Suzina (2018).
that critical popular sectors consider themselves as subordinated, unlike

what happens when they pronounce phrases such as “We, the people, will
continue resisting” or “Here we continue fighting, the popular sectors of
the countryside and the city.” It could be said then that the popular—
unlike the subaltern—is characterized by affirmatively designating that
which includes and integrates diffusely.11
Second, unlike what Hardt and Negri (2004) argue, only taking into
account the use of categories such as people and popular from the perspec-
tive of domination, critical actors use the popular in order to articulate the
multiplicity of sectors and collective actors that continuously carry out and
recreate the struggles of the people. Therefore, from the point of view of
counter-hegemonic actors, people, and multitude, they would be two
concepts that could be used interchangeably since they have the purpose
of enabling the encounter of differences, the realization of the common
power of singularities, or the differentiated cohesion of what is recognized
as diverse. However, in Our Latin American context, concepts such as
people and popular have had significantly greater hold and political rele-
vance than multitude,12 as evidenced by the vast number of communica-
tive pieces—books, articles, songs, poetry, radio programs, etc.—in which
there is a constant appeal to the need to carry out joint struggles against
the different types of domination that critical actors have historically
defined and interpreted.
Thirdly, unlike what Archila (2005) maintains, the relationship that the
popular has with asymmetries, distinctions, inequalities and socio-
economic differences, enables the popular sectors to differentiate them-
selves from other social actors when they organize certain processes of
struggle. In this sense, the experience of the Popular Women’s Organization
(OFP) of Barrancabermeja—Colombia—is a good example to illustrate
the way in which the popular is used, in some cases, to affirm and position
the existence of certain base works that are qualitatively different from
those carried out by academic feminism or by non-governmental organi-
zations (NGOs). In this way, the popular ends up being an element that
11
The condition of subalternity—as happens in the case of belonging to the popular—var-
ies according to the sectors that one decides to include or exclude in the analyses or dis-
courses. Because of this, I consider that the opposition that Archila (2005) makes between
the popular and the subaltern, at least, at this point is not valid.
12
Except in the case of Bolivia, where the concept of multitude has been constantly used
to frame anticolonial struggles in a universe with a different meaning from that of the so-
called national-popular revolution of 1952.
allows the differentiation of the class actors from the rest of the subjects
that make up a sector or social movement.
Finally, unlike what García Canclini (1989) maintains, one of the great
advantages and potentialities that the concept of the popular has is its
polysemic and mythical character. The ambiguity and lack of lexicographi-
cal precision regarding the meaning of what is popular—that which wor-
ried Canclini so much during the 1980s—as well as the existence—since
the birth of Euro-Western modernity—of a way of imagining the people
as creator and destroyer of the social order, are two factors that make pos-
sible the grouping or inclusion of different sectors and experiences by
critical actors, attending to the needs and purposes that they establish at
specific moments of confrontation with state institutions and/or those
actors who are defined and interpreted as dominant. Consequently, it
could be concluded that popular has been a fundamental concept in the
process of framing and guiding anticolonial struggles in Our Latin
American context, and an idea-force that has made it possible for protago-
nists to enter the political arena of all actors on whom the weight of injus-
tices, domination, and violence historically produced and institutionalized
rests (see Custódio, this book).
In short, semantic containers as people and popular have served to feed
illusions and dreams, to articulate works and struggles, to differentiate and
affirm the place of enunciation of the class actors, and to diffusely and
creatively delimit those who fight from those against whom we fight. In
this sense, what is popular in the use and circulation given to it by critical
sectors of Our Latin America continues to be in force due to the affirma-
tive, articulating, and mythical possibilities that the popular guarantees
for the set of discursive formations in which collective actions are pro-
duced and articulated, seeking resistance or emancipation against a state of
affairs that is perceived by a segment of society as unfair or oppressive.
Hence, what is popular for critical sectors is a way of naming and putting
into play the transgressive possibilities of a series of actors that could be
themselves or the “friendly” part that makes up this broad, diffuse, and
heterogeneous segment of the population.
By way of conclusion, it could be said that what is popular—in the spe-
cific use that has been given by the critical actors of Our Latin America—
resembles Pablo Neruda’s poem “Oda al hombre sencillo,” in which the
following is established:
[…] Come, come with me, come with everyone who looks like you, the
simplest, come, do not suffer, come with me, because even if you don’t
know, I do know that: I know where we are going, and this is the word: do
not suffer because we will win, we will win, the simplest ones, we will win,
even if you don’t believe it, we will win.
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Skinner, Q. (2007). Lenguaje, política e historia. Buenos Aires: Universidad
Nacional de Quilmes.
Smelser, N. (1963). Theory of collective behavior. New York: The Free Press.
Solís, C. (2013). La relación contexto-sujeto en Quentin Skinner. Revista Región
y Sociedad, 56, 269–297.
Spengler, O. (1923). La decadencia de Occidente. Bosquejo de una morfología de la
Historia Universal. Madrid: Calpe.
Suzina, A. C. (2018). Popular media and political asymmetries in the Brazilian
democracy in times of digital disruption. Lovaina la Nueva: Presses Universitaires
de Louvain.
Torres, C. (1965). Consignas: Camilo Torres. Chile: Archivo Chile. Historia
político-social. Movimiento Popular.
Wright, C. R. (1960). Análisis funcional y comunicación de masas. En: Miquel de
Moragas (ed.). Sociología de la comunicación de masas, v. 2, Barcelona:
Gustavo Gili: Barcelona.
Wright, C. R. (1978). Comunicación de masas. Buenos Aires: Paidós.
PART II
A Method, a Pedagogy, a Practice

CHAPTER 6
Disenchantment as a Path Toward

Autonomy: Orlando Fals Borda,
Participatory Action Research,
Communication and Social Change
Jair Vega-Casanova
Translated by Camilo Pérez Quintero
When we talk about communication and popular education in Latin

America, one of the recurring referents is Orlando Fals Borda. His contri-
butions have been very important as a worldwide pioneer of the so called
Participatory Action Research (PAR) approach. Among its more relevant
contributions is his criticism of the coloniality of positivist research meth-
ods, which he did not consider pertinent for addressing conflicting reali-
ties such as those in Latin America, so he proposed instead an
This work is part of the project “Orlando Fals Borda’s contributions to the field
of communication and social change,” research directed toward the doctorate in
communication from the Universidad del Norte.
J. Vega-Casanova (*)
Department of Social Communication, Universidad del Norte,
Barranquilla, Colombia
e-mail: jvega@uninorte.edu.co

Switzerland AG 2021
110 J. VEGA-CASANOVA
epistemological, methodological, and political commitment to social

research, that transcends the interpretation of these realities towards their
transformation (see Custodio, this book). One of the essential conditions
of this approach is the participation of the appropriate actors in each con-
text, from the knowledge production process to its incorporation in social
transformations. This way, PAR has become the basis for the articulation
between knowledge and power in the communication and popular educa-
tion processes in the Latin American region.
In fact, Boaventura de Sousa Santos in his recent publication The End
of the Cognitive Empire: the Coming of Age of Epistemologies of the South
(2018) dedicates a chapter to Freire’s pedagogy of the oppressed and Fals
Borda’s PAR. Although he points out that there are important differences
between these Latin American approaches with his proposal of “the epis-
temologies of the South,” he concludes that the latter would not be pos-
sible without the former two proposals that became its foundations.
On the path followed by Orlando Fals Borda to consolidate his pro-
posal for PAR (with all its sources and derivatives), one can identify a
confluence of disenchantments. And nothing could have more strength to
sustain the forcefulness of its proposed alternatives than the combination
of three experiences: his complete conviction of the transformative capac-
ity of the modernizing project; the fact of having been situated in strategic
instances so that he had ample opportunities to promote it; and the disap-
pointments, frustrations, and disagreements in each of those efforts.
Although there is abundant literature about the three experiences, the
present work is intended to delve into his disappointments and misunder-
standings, which, although one could try to describe them in a chrono-
logical way, the truth is that they appear in a more interspersed manner
throughout the course of his personal, professional, and academic life.
They are included here: (1) his abandonment of a military career for litera-
ture and music studies; (2) his way of assuming subversion in a disagree-
ment with the armed struggle; (3) his religious vocation committed to the
people as opposed to a segregationist religious institutionality; (4) his dis-
enchantment with the transformative possibility from the intellectual insti-
tutionality; (5) his distance from an academia that he considered far
removed from reality; (6) his break with a scientific method incapable of
understanding our contexts in conflict; (7) the emergence of a transforma-
tive relationship of communication in the social sciences.
6 DISENCHANTMENT AS A PATH TOWARD AUTONOMY: ORLANDO FALS… 111
My Mom Saved Me
As stated in an interview, thanks to an act of “salvation” by his mother,
Fals Borda left a military career, to which he was committed, to devote
himself to study an undergraduate degree in literature and music at the
Presbyterian University of Dubuque, Iowa, where he had his first contact
with sociology (Fals Borda 2012, p. 25). This decision marked his sensitiv-
ity regarding the importance of aesthetics and of different cultural expres-
sions in the lives of individuals and communities. Not surprisingly, one of
the constants in the environments in which he spent his youth was partici-
pating in choirs or playing an instrument in local Presbyterian, and even
Catholic, religious congregations.
In his investigations, this assessment is already reflected in his first great
sociological study of the Saucío village, Peasants of the Andes (Fals Borda
1961a), in which he includes a chapter on symbolic institutions, analyzing
topics such as language, music, and dancing, and popular beliefs. In his
writing, as he expressed it, his intellect was moving away from “too
Eurocentric writers”, and approaching Latin American referents such as
Eduardo Galeano, Gabriel García Márquez, and Carpentier. Also Julio
Cortazar, from whom in the work Rayuela he acknowledges having take
the polyphonic methodology, as can be seen in the Double History of the
Coast (Fals Borda 1979, 1981, 1984, 1984, 1986a), trying to “add local
history to literary morphology” (Fals Borda 2012, p. 18).
A Disorganous Agent
Fals Borda’s military past was also material for conjecture. In the 1960s
and 1970s, critics of the social commitment of Fals Borda questioned him
why, having had military training (which for instance Camilo Torres
Restrepo did not) he had not been an active part of any armed leftist
group in Colombia. Gabriel Restrepo (2016) explained the profound
vocation of Fals Borda for nonviolent means as a “vital predestination” of
his mother’s opposition, creating outlets for his son against the previous
military dispositions of his father. Obviously, the PAR has a great deal of
resistance and commitment to subversion from civility.1
1
The concept of “civility” implies that subversion is understood not strictly as armed
struggle, but with more emphasis on the processes of popular empowerment and the trans-
formation and democratization of State institutions.
Although Fals Borda recognized that guerrillas could be considered as

one of the disorganous actors of subversion, he never personally took this
path as a mechanism for social transformation. Of course, the premature
death of Camilo Torres (who was his committed partner for several years)
had a great impact on him after he joined the newly created National
Liberation Army (acronym in Spanish: ELN). In fact, although Fals Borda
and his wife Maria Cristina, were persecuted and imprisoned, accused of
being members of the M19 movement, their positions were always associ-
ated with non-violent subversion.
Specifically, between 1967 and 1969, Fals Borda made his first concep-
tual approximations to his concept of subversion, in a text which was
republished and reworked the following year and also published in English
(Fals Borda 1967, 1968, 1969). In this text, he condensed his disenchant-
ment with his institutional commitments to social change that he had tried
to implement from the Ministry of Agriculture in favor of the peasants. An
example was the Community Action Boards (acronym in Spanish: JAC),
which faded or were instrumentalized in favor of traditional groups of
power, during the Frente Nacional (National Front) era. Here, he gave up
his hope on the reformist liberal elite, which he believed to be acting in
contradiction to the democratic principles he was proclaiming. In his
book, also emerged a criticism of the submission of this national elite to
the decisions of imperialism.
Although the text was dedicated to the memory of Camilo Torres, it
does not strictly refer to his option of armed confrontation. On the con-
trary, it assumes subversion as a sociological concept, defined in a positive
way, as a situation that reveals the contradiction of a social order, at the
moment when new utopias of social change come into conflict with the
traditional elements of the dominant order (Pereira 2008, p. 395).
When conceiving subversion as the right of a people to fight for their
freedom and autonomy, the disorganous agents are strategic “insurgent
social subjects: intellectuals, politicians, anti-elites, revolutionary parties,
guerrillas, unions, peasants, students, among others, who can maintain a
rebellious action toward changing the traditional order” (Pereira 2008,
p. 395). These reflections were beginning to justify the role of the intel-
lectual in the processes of social change, a role that he would assume.
However, they also constituted a critique of leftist movements of the
1960s, which he considered doctrinaire, dogmatic, and obsolete.
A Church Not of Dogmas But of Music

In the case of the Church, Fals Borda affirmed that he was linked to it
more through music and singing than by its dogmas. During his studies at
the American School in Barranquilla, his teacher and advisor was Richard
Schaull, whom he would encounter at various moments of his life and who
is considered one of the forefathers of liberation theology (Fals Borda
2012, p. 26). After being excommunicated by a fundamentalist sector of
the Presbyterian church, Fals Borda kept his distance from the Church for
more than thirty years, affirming instead his commitment to liberation
theology (Púa 2010). He considered his religious beliefs to be largely the
source of his engagement with the less favored sectors (see Uranga, this
book). Upon expulsion, the somehow “sacred character” of the Church
was lost for him. This turned the practice of his religiosity around, opting
for the poor, “a sign of predestination,” distancing himself from the con-
cept of religiosity associated with capital and power explained by Max
Weber (Restrepo 2016, p. 207). Paradoxically, Rodrigo Parra (1985)
stated that the christianity of Orlando Fals Borda and Camilo Torres
Restrepo conferred on them a Weberian sense of work ethic, expressed in
their charismatic leadership as intellectuals.
An Incompetent State Function

It is evident that Fals Borda was disenchanted with the state function.
During the 1950s and early 1960s he had a fierce belief in institutional
reformism from below. He had the opportunity to push for major reforms
from the state, as general director of the Ministry of Agriculture, a posi-
tion he held in parallel with the direction of the sociology program at the
National University of Colombia, of which he was also the founder. Within
these efforts were the creation of the Community Action Boards JAC
(Fals Borda 1961b), which was promoted in the 1960s during the National
Front era as a model of community engagement, and whose purpose was
to institutionalize the organization of groups of neighbors to function as
a contact between neighborhood and community bases and state institu-
tions in order to solve problems such as those related with public services,
and to advance the pacification of conflict (López 1983). Within this com-
mitment to institutional change, in addition to the JAC, there was the
Program of Agrarian Social Reform, INCORA (acronym in Spanish), and
the programs of the rural directories and the neighborhood councils,

among others (Ocampo 2009).
However, for Fals Borda, these efforts led to great frustrations with
regard to changes in the realities of the peasantry, a situation that caused
him to break with the government, inasmuch as the implementation of
these projects of community action were instrumentalized by clientelist
and bureaucratic interests, which some sectors had criticized, as this insti-
tutional reformism had its limits in pacts between the elites of the National
Front governments (Palacios 2003). In the opinion of Fals Borda, there
was an adverse environment during the mid-1960s in Colombia, gener-
ated by the discomfort produced by “an academy routinized and distant
from reality, an incompetent state, and a dogmatic and obsolete left” (Fals
Borda, cited by Vizcaíno 2008).
A quarter of century later, the type of state power to which Fals Borda
(1993) aspired after the 1991 Constitution, and which he saw beginning
to appear in some contexts, was one less centralized, vertical, or elitist,
which recognized the autonomy of the regions, provinces, and other ter-
ritorial entities, passing from the nation-state to the region-state as an
expression of democratic self-determination. Precisely this type of state
had been conceived as a goal of PAR.
The creative dynamics that unfold with PAR can also lead to proposing the
constitution of a new type of state that is less demanding, controlling and
arrogant, inspired by positive root local values and fed by indigenous cul-
tural currents consistent with a human and democratic ideal.
This would try to better distribute power-knowledge among its constitu-
ents, to ensure a healthy balance between state and society, with fewer levia-
than central controls, more creativity in the bases, less Locke and more
Kropotkin, that is, a return to the human scale that has been lost with the
passage of recent history. (Fals Borda 1986, pp. 133–134)
In fact, it is possible to understand the participation of Fals Borda as a

member of the Constituent Assembly that drafted the constitution, on
behalf of the M19 Democratic Alliance, because he considered that in
conflict situations such as in Colombia, “prudence, coalitions and dia-
logue with institutions” can give results only within their tolerance mar-
gins to exercise the implicit “right to moral subversion”. PAR practitioners
can thus make a consideration in established institutions and put into
practice a reverse cooptation (Anisur Rahman and Fals Borda 1988).
A Routine Academia Far from Reality

He also reaffirmed his disenchantment with academia, in which he had the
possibility of being founder and dean of the Faculty of Sociology of the
National University of Colombia, historically the most important in the
country, from where he was later essentially expelled because he was con-
sidered an infiltrator of North American imperialism. His posture of dis-
enchantment can be seen in his letter of resignation (1970) from the
position of full professor of this faculty.
Jaime Eduardo Jaramillo (2017) showed how by mid-1965, “anti-
imperialist” currents of the student movement within the Faculty of
Sociology had developed a sort of hostility to Orlando Fals Borda. He was
seen and accused of being a religious pastor, with ties to American institu-
tions such as the Ford Foundation, which made him an “agent” of the
United States government. “For the revolutionary it is irrelevant to distin-
guish between democratic reformism and the anti-subversive struggle.
Under the premise that democratic institutions are an elitist masquerade,
gradual social change is perceived as collaborationism” (Rudas, p. 81).
This situation was leading students to veto some of his classes, such as
rural sociology, which led him to request in 1966 an “ad honorem” com-
mission of studies in several countries of Latin America and Europe. In his
absence, the sociology program he had created was transformed into one
more antagonistic to the state; they submitted international researchers to
a “public trial,” cooperating international organizations were expelled,
and there was a subsequent exodus of researchers trained in the Fals Borda
school of thought, like Jorge Ucrós Arciniegas, Cecilia Muñoz, Carlos
Castillo, and Rodrigo Parra, among others (Rudas 2019).
In this context, on his return, in his resignation letter, Fals
Borda addressed, among other aspects, the restructuring of the sociology
program:
It is a return to disquisition without rigor, eighteenth-century style, which

considered that the only advance of modern sociology was functionalism,
whose models had begun to be rejected among the faculty in 1962 because
of their inapplicability to the Colombian reality. (Fals Borda, in Rudas
2019 p. 86)
Nicolás Rudas (2019) asserted that this was not a distancing from soci-
ology but from sociological institutionality. In fact, just before returning
from Switzerland, where he was director of the United Nations Institute

for Social Development, foreseeing his inconvenience in returning to this
university context, Fals Borda, together with other Colombian researchers
from various social sciences, conceived the creation of the La Rosca
Foundation for Research and Social Action (Parra 1983). This foundation
was legally formed upon his return to Colombia in 1970, which, along
with other organizations created later, would be the basis for his pioneer-
ing investigations applying PAR (Fals Borda 2012). These would have
their greatest expression in his work in the Colombian Caribbean between
1979 and 1986, among which one of the major ones was The Double
History of the Coast.
Orlando Fals Borda, after much insistence from his current colleagues,
only returned to the National University of Colombia in 1986, not to the
Department of Sociology but to the Institute of Political Studies and
International Relations (IEPRI), where his first publication, Insurgency in
the Provinces: Toward a New Territorial Planning for Colombia (Fals Borda
and Guhl 1988), capitalized on one of the important reflections from
fieldwork during his research, especially on the existing contradictions
between the limits of institutional politics and cultural dynamics in the
definition of the territories. In fact, many of us who studied sociology in
Colombia in the 1980s, especially in the Caribbean region, the cradle of
his PAR approach, and had the opportunity to connect with some of the
work of Fals Borda, did so from heresy. At the time, neither the Double
History of the Coast nor the PAR—with all its references such as: Knowledge
and Popular Power (1986), By Praxis: The Problem of How to Investigate
Reality to Transform It (1986), Local Science and Intellectual Colonialism:
New Directions (1987)—were part of the sociology programs. It was
debated whether these texts were the product of sociological research or
political activism, and we accessed them in alternative spaces to the acad-
emy, supported even by the professors themselves (Correa De
Andreis 2016).
The Dangerous Scientific Self-Deception

of Value Neutrality
On the path to his concept of the PAR, one of Fals Borda’s most far-
reaching disappointments was with positivist research methods. He was
heir of the functionalist tradition of classical North American sociology,
through both his Masters in Sociology at the University of Minnesota

(1953) and his Doctorate in Latin American Sociology at the University
of Florida (1955). From here, he made his first approaches to the reality
of the peasants in the Colombian Andes, but thereafter it was insufficient
for him to understand the structural inequities of that peasantry.
His Master’s thesis Peasant Society in the Colombian Andes: A Sociological
Study of Saucío Village, published in 1955 by Florida University Press and
in 1961 in Castilian by the National University of Colombia (Campesinos
de los Andes. Estudio sociológico de Saucío), plus his doctoral dissertation
The Man and the Land in Boyacá: Socio-historical Bases for an Agrarian
Reform, published in Castilian (Fals Borda 1957), have been considered
classic texts of rural sociology from a functionalist perspective. In fact, in
the presentation of Campesinos de Andes, he makes it explicit:
The approach was sociological in the Comtian sense, that is, it encompassed
research from a wide range of social aspects.
The modern sociological approach, with its analysis, study of processes,
interpretation of statistics and attempts at prediction, is essential for the
determination of many problems in Colombia.
As far as possible, the peasant from Saucío is presented without bias or
prejudice, as he really is. (Fals Borda 1961, pp. xix, xx)
Veronica Giordano (2012) states that although the intention of Fals

Borda was “to make an objective science, respectful of the functionalist
sociology in which he had been shaped, which would avoid subjective
‘interpretation,’” his commitment to the explanation of sociological type
was overwhelmed because geography, anthropology, and history seeped
into his work, as argued in a criticism done at the time by researcher Eric
Wolf (1956), in his review of this book. Gonzalo Cataño (2008), on the
other hand, considered that Orlando Fals Borda, with “that singular com-
bination of sociological perspective with the historical and anthropologi-
cal, raised his name to the pinnacle of Latin American social science when
he was barely thirty years old” (p. 80).
As noted above, in these first studies Fals Borda had already turned to
anthropology and history to address symbolic institutions, among which
he included language, music, dance, and popular beliefs. Likewise, he
included aspects such as culture and personality, within which he analyzed,
in the training of the peasant, elements such as: camaraderie, adult life, old
age and death; religion, with topics such as reverence and fear, resignation
and fatigability; as well as within the ethos of the peasant, aspects such as the
conflict and synthesis of cultures, democratic imbalance within the organi-
zation, its relationship with the parties, and its passivity.
As Dean of the Faculty of Sociology, he linked a major group of inter-
national leaders in the social sciences. Gonzalo Cataño (2008) asserted
that thanks to his prestige, he could count on the Englishman Andrew
Pearse, the German-Brazilian Emilio Willems, and the Americans Everett
Rogers, Arthur Vidich, Aaron Lipman, Eugene Havens, William Flinn,
and his professor T. Lynn Smith (p. 82). It is important to highlight the
presence of Everett Rogers, author of the Theory of Diffusion of Innovations,
which was based on Merton and Lerner among others, and which was an
important support for the worldwide promotion and dissemination of
ideas about development. Specifically, through Paul Deutsch, Fals Borda
approached the theory of Rogers, and also conducted in Saucío a study
based on it, published in 1962—the same year that Rogers published his
classic Diffusion of Innovations—by the National University press with the
title The Communication of Ideas Among Colombian Peasants: A Socio-
statistical Analysis. This little-known study is transcendental as it reflects
the searches of Fals Borda at that time.
In an interview conducted by Raúl Fuentes (2005), Rogers describes
how in 1961 he met Fals Borda at the Congress of the American
Sociological Association, where he invited him to come to Colombia as a
Fulbright professor, a fellowship that materialized two years later:
I read the presentation and then a handsome young Latin American came
over to shake my hand and say in perfect English that he liked my work. He
left me his business card, which on one side said, in gold letters: “Orlando
Fals Borda, Dean,” and on the other side, written in pen: “if you want a
drink of good whiskey, come to room 631.”
My colleague liked whiskey, so we went to room 631 of the hotel. There
was Fals Borda, indeed with a bottle of good whiskey in hand. I said to him:
“You must be the Fals Borda who collaborated with Deutschmann in his
diffusion study.” He said “yes” and also, “I want you to come to Colombia
to do diffusion studies and teach my students to do them.” (p. 109)
Several authors agree that one of the first texts to reveal the disencha-
ment of Fals Borda with the functionalist method and his search for a
more relevant methodological approach to Latin American realities, was
his pioneering study Violence in Colombia, conducted with Camilo Torres
and published with Germán Guzmán and Eduardo Umaña (1962).

Regarding the sociological approach of this study, Fals Borda stated:
But the time came when the application of the framework that originates
from a functionalist analysis of a more or less stable society like the United
States, a model of social balance, of order in society, not of disorder; conflict
is left out as something harmful, something marginal, inconvenient or dys-
functional, as was said then, not functional for society. If one applies it to a
conflictive society, in the midst of violence, a model that was designed to
understand social balance, not social change and less conflict, then there is
an obvious flaw, a mismatch of explanation and analysis.
Upon analyzing that work, its intensity, the nature of conflict, the entire
scheme that had arisen from functionalism broke down in my head, it could
not be explained within the frame of reference learned in my teachers’ class-
rooms. As a conclusion to that volume I wrote my first expression of dis-
tance from that functionalist model; we had to take a much clearer position,
committed to solutions, and that is why the book on violence ends with 27
or 30 recommendations to the government, the Colombian society, the
church and the university, to the whole world, on how to solve the problem
of violence. (Fals Borda 2012, pp. 33–34)
For the authors of this research, the real perpetrators of violence in

Colombia would be the dominant elites, in their excessive desire to con-
trol the state (Pereira 2008).
The subsequent transformation process of Fals Borda is reviewed “from
outside” by Rogers himself, over whom he and his environment had a
major influence, both in his research methods and in the conception of his
theory. Rogers recognizes, in addition to Fals Borda, the influence of
other Latin Americans like Luís Ramiro Beltrán and Juan Diaz-Bordenave
(see Orué Pozzo, this book).
During the year I was in Colombia, Fals Borda was still very committed to
studies that collected quantitative empirical data, but he was beginning to
have some doubts. I was also starting to have them [...] This was a period of
questioning for me [...] and for Orlando Fals Borda.
The students also participated with me in collecting data from studies
that I did. So I began to see what I couldn’t measure with surveys and quan-
titative data analysis.
I began to question modernization studies after having done at least one
such study. (Rogers in Fuentes 2005, pp. 110–112)
Having met Fals-Borda and working with him influenced my way of think-
ing more and more over the years […]; the year I stayed in Colombia had a
great effect on me, particularly in the way I began to think about the diffu-
sion model. (Rogers in Singhal and Obregón 2005, pp. 90–91)
However, it is in the text Subversion in Colombia (1967) that Fals Borda

openly brings up the researcher’s commitment to his subjects of study,
reviewing epistemological assumptions such as the pretense of objectivity
and a sociology free of values.
In his opinion, every analyst interested in current processes, those that

involve finality and purpose, soon discovers that the notion of neutrality dis-
solves in the mind until it becomes an empty predicate. His active member-
ship status in society inevitably leads him to take positions in the face of split
realities in permanent dispute. Even more, in developing countries like
Colombia, the sociologist cannot avoid assesments: the impoverished sec-
tors expect from him a diagnosis of a society in transition and a choice of the
optimal path to achieve their longings for equality and social justice. (Cataño
2008, p. 84)
This challenge of moving toward an appropriate methodological

approach to understand Latin American contexts leads him to question
the mechanical use of foreign theoretical procedures that in turn take on a
colonizing role, a reflection he shared in 1970 in the text Local Science and
Intellectual Colonialism,2 of which a third edition was published in 1987
with the subtitle New Rhumbs. Of course he received criticism from the
most classical sociological traditions that considered his readings as a
“frustrating experience” because of his “romanticism” of invoking the
people as a source of scientific inspiration and for the “insufficient philo-
sophical training of the author” (Uricoechea 1988, p. 133).
At the beginning of the 1970s, Fals Borda was advancing a research
proposal with the characteristics of PAR. Its principles involved decoloni-
zation of the method to bring it closer not only to the understanding but
also to the transformation of realities; developing interdisciplinary
approaches that enable a broader and more complex understanding of
contexts; reframing the “neutral” and “non-evaluative” character of
2
The original concept “Ciencia Propia: Own Science” does not refer strictly and only to
the people being the owners of science and the knowledge generated, but also to an appro-
priate science to understand local realities and contexts.
positive science through a transformation of the researcher toward an

intellectual committed to processes of change; and rethinking the rela-
tionship between researcher and researched in order to build a more hori-
zontal and dialogic relationship between individuals and produce
transformative knowledge. Of course, a methodological and epistemologi-
cal commitment to these characteristics could not work within the
academy.
For its development, he promoted the creation of Institutions like
FUNDARCO, Punta de Lanza, and La Rosca Foundation for Research
and Social Action, through which he could attract domestic and foreign
resources in order to ensure the realization of processes, and changed its
participants, formerly composed by students and teachers, replacing them
with peasants, unions, and left-wing parties, in a new company that com-
bined the scientific character with the political and subversive
(Cataño 2008).
It is agreed among several authors that one of the most important
moments for the recognition of the consolidation of PAR in a new aca-
demic field was a result of the World Symposium of Cartagena on
Participatory Action Research, conducted in 1977 with the support of
UNESCO and the Bank of the Republic. This symposium gathered expe-
riences from Latin America and various parts of the world, and the PAR
methodology was either debated or legitimated by a scientific community.
The work presented there by Fals Borda later became the classic book
published in 1978: For Praxis: How to Investigate Reality to Transform It.
Goodbye to the Academic Sociologist

with Prophylactic Gloves
Within this set of restatements, it is possible to recognize the way in which

Fals Borda was transforming his concept of communication in the pro-
cesses of both generation and social integration of knowledge.
In any case, it is uncommon to find Fals Borda’s communicative per-
spective in texts on communication for development, communication for
social change, or popular communication. Generally, his contributions are
reviewed from his PAR, and his decolonizing debates about scientific
dependence (Barranquero 2005), without specifying much about the
communicational aspects that it entails.
In the appendix to The Method and Fieldwork of Peasants of the Andes,

Fals Borda (1961a) describes in detail his process of communication with
the residents of Saucío village, to either: integrate into the community
(living on the village, making a dictionary of local phrases and speaking on
their own terms, making friends as a bridge, learning and performing local
tasks, wearing typical clothing such as the ruana, singing and dancing dur-
ing local holidays, or using “diplomacy, tact and kindness” to build cul-
tural bridges); maintain some distance (not accepting food when there was
a shortage); be inconspicuous (not taking notes in front of peasants until
after meeting them, taking their pictures and giving them copies).
Everything as a process of mutual adaptation. In addition, he allowed the
first manuscripts to be read by some peasants to learn from their reactions
and opinions, suggestions he considered essential to make “a fair and hon-
est judgment about the community” and ensure that the study was
accepted by them (pp. 309–316).
In the study with Deutschmann (Deutschmann & Fals-Borda 1962),
the purpose was to classify the channels for the communication of ideas
used by Saucío peasants that were more prone for the early adoption of
innovative ideas about social change, a commitment that was completely
compatible with the aims of developmentalism, for which he was later
criticized.
Fals Borda then explained the challenge he assumed from the second
half of the 1960s, based on the text The Formation of the Field of
Communication Studies in Colombia, for which Jesús Martín Barbero and
Germán Rey (1999) reported a great disagreement between the social sci-
ences and communication, especially in the field of social problems and
demands. This disagreement originated in the social sciences because
while “the political and cultural importance of the processes and media are
unknown,” in communication studies there is a “lack of the in-depth
social and political awareness that its own discipline has. The former, the
‘scientists,’ underestimate what they find in this field; the latter, ‘the com-
municators,’ fail to understand the relationship between what they do and
say and the country’s conflicts” (p. 61). In short, it is about a very dense
and poorly communicative social science, on the one hand, and on the
other hand some very communicative and less dense processes (Fals-Borda
2003 third paragraph).
He then invites the scientists to overcome these closed paradigms with
open alternative paradigms from postmodern and postdevelopmentalist
origins, inviting a return to the paths obstructed by functionalists,
mechanists, and determinists. Alternatives are found in theories of open

systems and of complexity, in that of chaos and Batesonian holism, and in
humanistic and ecological Marxism. To which he added from the southern
hemisphere the PAR, which has the advantage—almost unique among the
available methods—of clearly constructing a bridge toward social com-
munication and mass media and journalistic techniques (Fals Borda 2003,
view of the sociologist).
Fals Borda acknowledged the emergent importance of the transforma-
tion of his scientific language and narrative in his work. In fact, Pereira
(2008)—returning to Stanislav Andreski and Jorge Eliécer Ruiz—argues
that the early reissue of his book on subversion in 1967 was due, among
other aspects, to the criticism that the first edition received for its dense
writing, its “dark and pretentious terminology,” with a “terminological
mesh with an often shocking esotericism,” before which Fals Borda reacted
with a new version. This experience would mark him, as the future showed,
as having great concern for using a simpler and more direct vocabulary
(p. 392).
Fals Borda also acknowledged that his life as a “journalist” was key to
the transformation of his writing, his time at Brecha and Alternativa mag-
azines helped to improve his form of communication. He considered
Alternativa a “trial by fire,” in which he ceased to be “the academic soci-
ologist with prophylactic gloves, as he had been trained in North America.”
He suffered the “hanging” of his first articles, not because of censorship
or manipulation, but because they were too long and dense (Fals Borda
2003, view of the journalist).
The most important and visible thing that I felt in my new journalistic con-
dition was the impact that my writing style suffered, in order to be able to
communicate better and with clarity. I had to think not only with the printed
word but also with the multimedia that we were beginning to try out. From
there arose the stereophonic polymorphism that was evident in my latest
writings. With Alternativa, the illustrated brochure was also born as a result
of social and historical research; the vallenato protest was invented and pop-
ular theater and short stories were promoted as cultural recovery.
All this to say that without the communication and media experience of
Alternativa, Double History of the Coast would not have been born with its
two channels, nor would have the action research that is practiced today in
many parts of the world been strengthened. (Fals Borda 2003, view of the
journalist)
This process consolidates the technique of systematic return, typical of

PAR, with its emphasis on oral culture and horizontality in the investiga-
tive relationship, adopting the intersubjective contact of the creative and
communicative process, from and to the bases, a process in which the
generated knowledge turns into power. One of his expressions is the style
and dual technique of mythos–logos that was developed in the Double
History of the Coast, “a method rather distant from the language of the
traditional sociological academy, which belongs to the field of communi-
cation” (Fals Borda 2003, view of the journalist).
The Double History, as indicated by its title, reveals the systematic
return, presenting the findings in two different channels of communica-
tion: In channel A, for a more general audience, “the story, the descrip-
tion, the environment, and the anecdote are used.” Channel B, for a more
specialized audience, simultaneously includes “the respective theoretical
interpretation, concepts, sources and methodology of what is contained in
channel A, plus summaries of the story” (Fals Borda 1981, p. xi). For the
channel A narrative, in order to reconfigure a more literary style of narra-
tion, Fals Borda uses the imputation technique, which consists of the
“parsimonious and convenient use of imagination” for historical recon-
struction, “which may be ninety percent facts and ten percent imagina-
tion” (p. 56B). This allows him, even if there are some alterations to the
characters or their contexts, to remain faithful to the facts. The imputation
allowed Fals Borda “to flesh out with meat and muscles the skeleton they
described to me [...] and to add, combine and compose the information
to give it coherence and communicative effectiveness” (1981, p. 58B).
This technique has been criticized by classical historians who consider
that “Fals Borda essentially ignores historiography,” questioning his han-
dling of sources, which “for the professional historian, it was already a
contaminated material; it is not known which part comes from Fals Borda
and which from his informant” (Bergquist 1989, pp. 214–221).
Finally, it is worth highlighting what could be called channel C of the
Double History of the Coast, understanding that the systematic return and
imputation were not only conceived as a final product. For Fals Borda, the
connection between sociology and communication “opened the door to
procedures and arts linked to social communication, such as photography,
literature, painting and music” to be taken as “elements of popular aware-
ness and mobilization, for a deeper knowledge and sense of social reality
through the spoken and written word.” Specifically, in a review of the
“investigation and preparation process of illustrated brochures that were
published for the education of the base of the National Association of

Peasant Users (ANUC),” Joanne Rappaport (2018) confirmed that the
technique of imputation was not only given in the writing of the final text
but also in the field, “as a process of dialogue in which both peasants and
external researchers offered their own interpretations of historical sources”
(pp. 138–139).
According to the findings of Rappaport, Fals Borda along with the
Caribbean Foundation sought for an artist to help them to mobilize the
peasants around the ANUC to recover their lands, and they found
Chalarka, who was not a peasant or trained researcher but a neighborhood
painter, and his work “occupied an intermediate position, as a translator
between the knowledge that the peasants expressed in their meetings with
the team and the interpretation of the materials carefully collected by Fals
Borda and members of the Caribbean Foundation” (p.144). He was inte-
grated into the team, and in the research process, jointly with the partici-
pants selected the characters and contents for cartoons, which ultimately
had “a semi-fictitious narrator, based on a known leader in the region, but
which combined stories of various narrators (another example of ‘imputa-
tion’)” (p. 143).
In relation to the communication dynamics learned in the processes
accompanyed by the PAR, and attending to the recurring return of hege-
monic policies in the Latin American region, one may conclude, using Fals
Borda’s own words:
Left behind is the mechanistic stage of the “diffusion of innovations”

brought to us by sociologists Everett Rogers and Paul Deutschmann in the
1960s. The stage of dangerous scientific self-deception of value neutrality
also ended. The fact is that we now have a common technical, conceptual
and epistemic frame of reference that is also ethical; it requires our reason-
ing, our feeling and our prudence, especially in cases of economic, bureau-
cratic and personal survival in times of repressive “security” statutes. (Fals
Borda 2003, view of the journalist)
One more lesson that could be inherited from the route traveled by
Orlando Fals Borda, which led him to his concept of subversion, to his
proposal of a transforming and committed science via PAR, and to his new
concept of communication as a central element to transform knowledge
into popular power, is the need for disenchantment as a means of settling
accounts with the sparkles of the modernizing project that repeatedly try
to dazzle our eyes.
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CHAPTER 7
A Praise of Dignity in Educational Practice
Daniel Prieto Castillo
The material presented in this chapter was originally prepared to participate

in a roundtable of the Latin American and Caribbean Communication
Congress (COMLAC) held in Asunción, Paraguay, in October of 2016.
The first part contains the full text presented in that congress. In the second
part, I have expanded central concepts in an original contribution to this
book. The writing, originally formatted for a meeting with communicators
from the region, is inspired by my own career in the field of formal and non-
formal education. It summarizes what I have characterized as a communica-
tional pedagogy in numerous works published in different countries and in
an educator practice that I have been developing since the early 1960s.
Part I
Dear participants in this roundtable and in this COMLAC Congress in
Paraguay:
D. Prieto Castillo (*)
National University of Cuyo, Mendoza, Argentina
e-mail: d_prietoc@yahoo.com

Switzerland AG 2021
130 D. PRIETO CASTILLO
Firstly, I want to express my appreciation for the honor of being invited to

work with you—from a distance in this case, but we follow you very
closely and we have been able to collaborate time and again with the
efforts made in our countries in favor of a different communication,
carried out by organizations represented in this great group of human
beings coming together here in Paraguay.
Secondly, but also of paramount importance, to thank those who recalled
the work of our dear Juan Díaz Bordenave, in order to grant him the
“Communicator of Peace” Award. Why is this award valuable? Because
Juan irradiated, from his deep spirituality, the serenity of peace, the sta-
bility of peace, the wisdom to build and to sustain peace, the happiness
of peace, the hope for peace, the communication capacity to sow peace.
Juan was one of the people I have loved most dearly in my life; this
award is a way to bring to our memory someone who taught us lessons
about life and about the capacity to love and to feel.
Within the framework of this roundtable referred to the university, I
decided to focus in an experience that I have been living for the last
twenty-one years, since 1995, as the director of the Undergraduate Studies
with Specialization in University Teaching, in Mendoza, in the Faculty of
Philosophy and Literature of the National University of Cuyo.
The key element of this project we are carrying forward with a current
group of eleven people, is centered on what we described back in the
1980s, with another dear friend, Francisco Gutiérrez Pérez, and it is con-
nected with what we called pedagogic mediation. It has been already
thirty-five years since its first employment in two Guatemalan universities
and we continue working within that framework.1
What is the purpose of speaking about pedagogic mediation in the field
of university teaching?
Let us begin by remembering how we define that notion. In short:
pedagogic mediation consists of the task of promoting and accompanying
learning. To comply with it, it is our duty as educators to struggle to create
learning environments. Our “Specialization in Teaching,” organized as a
distance education system, is conceived as a learning environment designed
with a communicational approach in all fronts; the study materials, the
1
Gutiérrez Pérez, Francisco and Prieto Castillo, Daniel. La mediación pedagógica.
Apuntes para una educación a distancia alternativa. San José de Costa Rica, Ed. RNTC, 1991.
7 A PRAISE OF DIGNITY IN EDUCATIONAL PRACTICE 131
learning practices, the present encounters, the technologies, the ways to

evaluate, to dialog.
Such an environment means a space for encounter, for collaboration,
for a learning exchange in an institutional setting, which I want to make
clear, does not always constitute a valid environment for promoting and
accompanying learning.
I’ll put it like this: university institutions can well be a space in contra-
diction with educational ideals, and even abusive to educators; the latter
happens when they are denied alternatives to grow, to improve their quali-
fication, to build knowledge, to be joyfully related with their students.
The principle of all our postgraduate courses, along these twenty-one
years working with more than 1850 postgraduates, is good treatment; and
good treatment always goes hand-in-hand with good communication.
The origin of such programs, and also of pedagogic mediation, is in
popular education, from where we interwove the proposal that we then
took to universities.
There is no space, here, for presenting every detail of these twenty-one
years of postgraduate studies. I leave at your disposal and with the friends
who invited me, the book that we wrote on our twentieth anniversary,
called A Praise of Pedagogy: Twenty Years of Postgraduate Specialization in
Teaching.2
In those pages I tried to put together the communicational axes that
have sustained the academic program, which I have called “Praises.” They
are the praises of: proximity, difference, serenity, clarity, writing, the emer-
gence of voices, intellectual work, educator’s time, the pedagogic com-
municational approach, dignity.
I have decided, for the sake of this conversation, to underline the last
one of them: the praise of dignity. Let us recall the precious charge this
word brings to anything we relate with it. To be dignified means to stand
in the position of looking face-to-face, to make your voice heard, to go
around in life enjoying all your rights, to feel able to build a future, your
own future and the future of your loved ones.
If in our environment we, communicator-educators, have the immense
responsibility to support and push forward the construction of our stu-
dents’ selves, we have the permanent task of a beautiful practice: to col-
laborate to bring up subjects who stand firmly on their ground, who are
2
The complete text in Spanish (Elogio de la Pedagogía. Veinte años del posgrado de espe-
cialización en docencia) can be downloaded from my web page: prietocastillo.com
respected by the others and by themselves, who are acknowledged in their

individuality and their difference, who stand in the position of looking
face-to-face, making their voice heard, moving around in life with all their
rights, feeling able to build their own future and that of their loved ones.
That is our task.
We feel that such has always been the task of those of us who choose to
be professional educators, but a question must be asked: what about us?
What if we were humiliated many times as educators? Humiliation has a
terrible power, because it can undermine confidence, destroy dignity, and
it is very difficult to support the construction of dignity within such a
context. Humiliation can come from many sources, such as the social sta-
tus of education in politics; contempt for the function of education; con-
tempt for the experience and practice of educators; contempt for our
culture and our knowledge, lack of time in our daily work to think, to
share, to grow; reduction and even disappearance of spaces for the
exchange of learning experiences. To summarize: when a person spends
years submitted to a series of humiliations, their feelings and conscience
can be so harmed that humiliation can come to be accepted as normal,
with the person brought down to the floor. From being told many times
“you are not worthy,” “you don’t count,” “you don’t feel,” one tends to
arrive at “I am not worthy,” “I don’t count,” “I am no one, or almost
no one.”
Dear friends, for us, pedagogy deals with the dignity of all those who
constitute the foundation of the educational act: students and educators,
who must be supported and motivated in their learning process. And since
dignity is not assured but is rather in a permanent process of construction
against the threats of humiliation, we have the permanent task of sustain-
ing our pedagogy on a communicational basis, stubbornly determined to
support the construction of dignity. It is in favor of that pedagogy that we
communicate.
If we have been able to continue with our project for more than twenty
years, it has been because we have always tried to sustain a learning envi-
ronment where we talk and relate to each other from dignity to dignity. In
this, communication constitutes the fundamental axis.
We seek to live a pedagogy of the encounter, a non-violent communica-
tion, a communication with the other, for the other, from the other, but
permanently attentive of ourselves. I cannot give myself up to be destroyed
so that others can turn into subjects; that is why we insist so much that it
is up to us, as coordinators of the project, to develop ourselves
permanently as communicators. This development implies richness of lan-

guage, the joy of being together, the joy and fundamentally the will to
communicate. We also want such tasks to be felt by those who come to
study with us as colleague professors, so it can grow in their daily educa-
tional practice. We demand the same that we are trying to offer. That is
why we suggest that texts are written with a communicational and peda-
gogic approach, that every time that a space is opened to the voice of the
others, it should be to build a relationship, to dialog, to meet with others
in the word and in the daily work.
I am not painting anything ideal. At this point in my life I don’t seek
compliments regarding what I may have been able to make. What I am
describing is the road that we have traveled together with a group of dear
colleagues for more than twenty years.
This is what I wanted to share with you: how a long experience can be
sustained on the will and the joy of communicating, searching at the same
time that those who come to us may also develop their will to communi-
cate and find in that will the capacity, the possibility to enrich their peda-
gogic work.
Thank you for allowing me to bring you my word, my best wishes, my
companionship and my regard, my affection.
Part II
About the Praises
This is where I concluded the communication that I sent to the colleagues
who participated in the Congress held in Asunción, Paraguay. I had the
opportunity to dialogue with them through technological platforms. It
was an encounter between people united by ideals and common practices.
I return now, to expand the central point of that presentation, the refer-
ence to what I define as praise, in my theoretical explorations and experi-
ences of the pedagogy of communication.
These praises were not the product of some intellectual abstraction,
something that we could have worked out with a group of friends imagin-
ing ideals. Each and every one of them responds to what we have experi-
enced and worked on for more than twenty years. They are all based on a
communication in which voices, lives, and experiences emerge from those
who participate, bound to the necessity of sustaining the educational task
upon knowledge.
The Praise of Proximity

You learn from what is near to what is distant. And the nearest thing in the
world is each and every one of us, is me. There are schools, educational
proposals, ways to relate, where the way to go is presented the other way
around, as though you could learn from what is far away to what is nearby.
Proximities are not only physical, but also cultural. They correspond to
ways to perceive, to act, to feel, to imagine, to remember, to create, and
to relate. This cannot be ignored. Learnings are built from proximity.
The Praise of Difference

The first text of a human being is their context; it has always been like
this. It is in the context that we can find the other ones. The concepts
are not floating in the air, neither are the categories, nor the laws of a
certain science, nor the disciplines. Those who come to us to learn, do
so with a hiistory and a string of relationships which is impossible to
leave aside. We do not receive in our classrooms always the same genera-
tions, the same faces, the same histories. When the difference is ignored,
roads are wide open to indifference. In educational work, we are never,
ever, in front of undifferentiated human beings, with everything that
this word implies regarding the negation of the different and an attitude
of indifference.
The Praise of Serenity

Thinking fast, racing to survive, hastily drinking glasses of numbness: all
these do not leave space for serenity. Every day we experience boundless
aggressions on our personal time, the time required for intimate relation-
ships with others. We need to defend our periods of serenity, of queries
about our existence, about what it means to have a loving encounter with
ourselves, with words that can make us shudder deep inside. We insist on
our praise of serenity in education: there is no hurry to educate. In our
programs, we are putting at stake the intellectual and human construction
of those who choose to look for alternatives to their immense responsibil-
ity to promote and to accompany learning.
The Praise of Clarity

No close relationships are possible without a commitment to clarity.
Clarity never spoiled the presentation of a concept or an idea, however
complex they were. Nor is there any bigger communicational nonsense
than to speak or to write so that the others will not understand. This is
valid for any educational endeavor, be it formal or non-formal, for elemen-
tary or university students. Clarity supposes an effort of adaptation of the
subject at hand, a recognition of how much can be learned at a certain
moment, a search for bridges between those who teach and those
who learn.
The Praise of Writing

Educators are a special class of intellectuals often condemned to teach
without having been formed through writing and without having a peda-
gogic legacy. This refers to works employed to promoting and to accom-
panying learning in all possible paths of knowledge. Prisoners of daily
work, of the many hours dedicated to survival, we lack the time required
for reflection and for what is the meaning of pedagogic writing.
Emergence of the Voices
In the field of education, we always aspire to a communication that allows
for the participants in human relationships to emerge, in any social situa-
tion. This implies opening spaces for the emergence of their voices. We
refer to spaces for learning exchanges, for interdisciplinarity, interaction,
recreation, for the presentation of the products of intellectual creation.
The emergence of those voices supposes an effort of personalization, of
recognition of oneself and the others.
The Praise of the Intellectual

We demand in full strength the attribution of the status of intellectuals to
educators, in the strict sense of the creation of a pedagogic oeuvre and a
vocation to transform the practice. We affirm that the creation of an intel-
lectual in the field of education attains beautiful foundations when it has
been possible to produce a legacy, when it has been possible to add the
words of others to their own words, taking into account their lifetime
experiences and originality, and all the strength of someone who has devel-
oped enough confidence and self-esteem to express their voice in the con-
cert of all the voices present in an educational process.
The Praise of the Educator’s Time

If we define ourselves as educators, then we exist for others to learn. Such
a purpose requires people able to carry this task out, which requires time,
often denied to us by society and bureaucratic educational structures. It is
not only that time passes. But it is not time that passes; those who pass are
us, we who are made of time. And in that senseless passing, in that con-
stant wasting of the most valuable time of our existence of educators, we
miss the possibility of building ourselves towards promoting and accom-
panying learning.
The Praise of the Pedagogic Gaze

We define the pedagogic gaze as the capacity to perceive others as learning
and communicative beings, whatever their age or social situation. This
gaze recognizes the entirety of culture as an infinite treasure of resources
to promote and accompany learning. There is no possible pedagogic gaze
if the educator does not also regard him or herself as a learning and com-
municative being. The pedagogic gaze takes a lifetime for the educator to
develop. Even longer than that, because generations of educators commit-
ted to this task keep building the vast and always unfinished territory of
pedagogy, understood and experienced under a communicational
perspective.
Praise of Dignity
Pedagogy is concerned with the dignity of all those who are the founda-
tion of the educational act: students and educators. And since dignity is
not granted but is rather in a constant process of construction against the
threats of humiliation, the task permanently at hand for us is to sustain a
pedagogy stubbornly determined to support that creation. We always
aspire to the construction of dignity through learning, so that our stu-
dents and ourselves can be more. Education, understood this way, is a
dialogue between one dignity and another.
About Pedagogic Mediation

Let us review what has been expressed in that communication dur-
ing COMLAC:
I said that I wanted to add that the origin of these studies and of the peda-
gogic mediation is in popular education; from it we knitted a proposal that
we then took to the universities.
Let us remember in the first place one of the great educators from our
territory: Simón Rodríguez. It has always been said of him that he was
Bolívar‘s teacher, but that is barely a detail if you take into account his
pedagogic work oriented toward the rescue of the impoverished sectors of
society, in times when little, if anything, was thought of them, back at the
beginning of the nineteenth century. Rodríguez formulated a pedagogy
based on communication and education ideals (“all learning is a learning
exchange,” “the good teacher teaches how to learn and helps to under-
stand”), in a political sense (“we are in the world to help-one-another and
not to destroy-one-another”), in a utopian sense (with regard to Chancellor
Thomas More: “their utopia will be in fact America.”)3
A second reference to the background of communication and popular
education was given to us by Luis Ramiro Beltrán.
The radios of the mining workers from Bolivia in the 1950s decade consti-
tute an eminent and exemplary experience. Twenty years before our admired
thinker Paulo Freire declared that the word should be given back to the
people, silicosis-afflicted miners died at thirty-five because they lost their
lungs in the mine, where they earned forty dollars a month working twelve
hours a day. They took the word by themselves by establishing small, rustic
radio stations of minimal reach, but great importance, since commercial
media didn’t take them into account and state-owned media scared and
condemned them. Thus, they were able to create self-managed radios,
financed with quotas they donated from their miserable wages. They were
convinced that if they didn’t have at least their own public voice to com-
municate among them, let alone with the whole nation, they could never
overcome their situation of neglect and exploitation.
3

Daniel Prieto Castillo. Utopia y comunicación en Simón Rodríguez. México, Ed.
Premia, 1995.
It was practice twenty years ahead of theory (see Uranga, this book). The
expressions “alternative, popular communication” or “dialogic communica-
tion” did not exist back then. Those mining workers were illiterate former
peasants, aymaras, who also didn’t have an idea about how to manage a
radio. They began with improvised facilities but with great resolve and they
established a strategy of “open microphone” in the sense that they were not
only limited to a trade union struggle, but they became a rather integral
expression of their communities. They took their microphones to markets,
to soccer stadiums, to schools, and to the streets. Any inhabitant of the town
could just come to their radio station—as if they felt it was theirs—to say
whatever they wanted, and to discuss and to participate to such an extent
that some of those radio stations became pivoting centers of the debate on
the problems of the community at any given moment. It no longer hap-
pened only in their small studios, but rather in large public places, where the
community gathered to air their problems. The radio turned then into the
axis of access, dialogue, and participation.4
These words show us what it meant then and means still now in Latin
American countries to have the cultural diversity served during decades by
Bolivian, Guatemalan, or Dominican radio stations, through programs in
Quechua, Creole, and all the richness of Mayan languages (see Mata, this
book). Their task was, and still is, communicational with a strong educa-
tional emphasis.
Simón Rodríguez gathered in his thought and practice the contribu-
tions of the European utopian socialism of the beginning of the nine-
teenth century with his deep experience of the reality of our countries.
Such a synthesis allowed him to formulate one of the most original pro-
posals in communication-based education ever produced in our region.
Luis Ramiro Beltrán, one of the founders of Latin American communi-
cation, also combined his intellectual formation as researcher and educator
with his passion to know and to support Latin American culture.
In the case of the pedagogic mediation that we proposed at the begin-
ning of the 1990s with Francisco Gutiérrez Pérez, we had a similar start-
ing point. We both came from a strong communicational formation in the
field of formal education and at the same time we had had continuous
4
Movimiento Los Sin Techo, Santa Fe, Argentina. El derecho de los pobres a la información
y la educación, Ed. Los Sin Techo, 2007.
practice in non-formal education, especially in projects of communication

alternatives to mass media. This took us to outline a proposal that we
characterized as follows:
Between an area of knowledge and human practice, and those who are in a
situation of learning, society offers mediations. We call pedagogic a mediation
which is able to promote and to accompany learning.
This, from a characterization of pedagogy as:
the intent to understand and to make sense of the educational act, at any age
and under any circumstances in which it takes place, in order to collaborate, on
the basis of that understanding, with the learning process considered as con-
struction and appropriation of the world and of one’s self.
Our proposal of pedagogic mediation is part of a Latin American move-

ment in the field of communication that looks for alternatives to overcome
social contradictions, based on the strong cultural basis of our countries
and the treasure of both popular and formal education. The density of
pedagogic culture in Latin America is far from insignificant, both on
account of the innovative proposals and what has been treasured by educa-
tors themselves in their daily work. We acknowledge that a pedagogic cul-
ture exists both in formal and non-formal systems. In our varied social
reality it is not possible to overlook such large experience, such hard work
put into the promotion and companionship of learning, often carried out
under precarious conditions, within the framework of the withdrawal of
the state from its fundamental functions.
The praises, as a proposal of strong communicational features, consti-
tute one part of that movement as well as of our call to pedagogic media-
tion. We have developed and employed them up to these days within the
framework of a dialogue with those who live and promote education, and
with reflections and searches in the latter’s encounter with communication
within the general field of social communication in Latin America. The
contributions of science and the broadening of epistemological perspec-
tives are not left out of the task, but are always present with a clear, and
inalienable orientation towards practice.
CHAPTER 8
Popular Radios: Constants and Tensions
María Cristina Mata
I come from an old

and very long silence
of people who are rebelling
from the bottom of the centuries,
of people they call
subordinate classes.
[…].
I come from a silence
that is not resigned…
that people will break
now that they want to be free
and love life;
people who demand the things
that have been denied to them.
—Raimón
(Poems and Songs)
M. C. Mata (*)
National University of Córdoba, Córdoba, Argentina
e-mail: maritamata@gmail.com

Switzerland AG 2021
142 M. C. MATA
With the epigraph verses of Raimón, the Catalan singer-composer, I

declare that, regardless of technologies, methodologies, resources, and
means, what we call popular communication in Latin America and the
Caribbean has to do with that defiant silence, with that collective word
that has for a long time designated—when, where, and in the way it can
designate it—the reality of popular sectors, and by doing so making it
identifiable and significant (Mata 2011). I now want to say that those
verses let me talk about popular radio; above all, to talk about whatever
mobilizes the popular sectors at a given moment—on their own, autono-
mous initiative, or with the cooperation and mediation of others—to
speak openly, to speak to each other and to others, in a technological space
that, not by nature, but due to some economic rationality, historical rea-
sons and political conditions, was designed for them as a listening-only
space. To say that, against generalizing approaches and refined models and
definitions, to talk about popular radio implies to go into a territory of
heterogeneous and changing material qualities coexisting since the origins
of this medium of communication—the end of the 1940s—and existing
still today, not necessarily consistent variations of that collective expression
daring to break commercial and even legal rationalities, in order to enrich
the social discourse with the emergence of the silenced, the submitted, the
undervalued, the repressed.
Differences/Distances
I begin by remembering the past. I re-read unpublished texts of long ago;
notes that I made while accompanying many of those radio stations during
my investigation processes and my formation. Scenes from the end of the
1980s, when the experiences of popular radios on the continent had been
already on the making for almost forty years and a consolidated movement
had brought them together in national entities, and before regional orga-
nizations such as ALER (Latin American Association of Radio Education)
and Amarc-AL (World Association of Community Radios, Latin American
section) even existed.
In the northern mountains of Peru, in Cajamarca, the peasants who
made history in popular movements for the patrols they organized as a
protection against rustlers, manufacture small radio stations by disman-
tling discarded radio receivers and old transmitters. Their radio waves only
8 POPULAR RADIOS: CONSTANTS AND TENSIONS 143
reach ten kilometers. For a few hours a day Andean music, chicha,1 can be
heard and Ecuadorian music, and notifications and messages are sent so
that people in the area can know of each other, what happens to them; that
is something that the country’s main radio network—the only one they
can tune to—completely ignores. Those radios, listened to and appreci-
ated by rural cajamarquinos, work in disregard of all official regulations.
They are part of the informal Peru that pops up in the field of communica-
tions and shows itself in Lima through speakers set up in popular quarters
and markets, where neighbors can listen to the voices of their leaders, be
informed, summon each other, and even act out their daily dramas.
In the periphery of São Paulo, in Brazil, an area where people lack
almost everything, basically inhabited by “nordestino”2 migrants, Rádio
do Povo brings together some forty popular radio stations. It is a column
with four horns installed in the locality of the parish or the communal
center of different sectors of São Miguel. Neighbors speak and are listened
to on those peculiar radio stations encouraged by the Pastoral of
Communication of the Catholic Church of São Paulo. Each radio covers a
reduced space but all together, they succeed in covering the entire region.
They are even mobile: six wheelbarrows with their corresponding speakers
march along with the demonstrations and protests of the neighbors to
empower their voices.
Very far from São Paulo, in the Venezuelan Andes, there are no speak-
ers, or farmers dismantling old receivers in order to broadcast. However,
the voices of the peasants of the southern part of the State of Merida are
heard through Radio Occidente, a radio station with a 10 kw power, prop-
erty of the local archdiocese. Something similar happens in Peruvian
Amazonía through La Voz de la Selva; in the south of the Dominican
Republic, where Radio Enriquillo broadcasts; in the southernmost part of
Chile, thanks to Estrella del Mar and La Voz de la Costa. The list could
include more than thirty other Catholic radio stations, which in those
countries and others as Ecuador, Bolivia, Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras,
favor rural areas and work with popular sectors, encouraging them to
express themselves through that medium (see Uranga, this book). In
general, these are radio stations with a long history, with relatively good
facilities and equipment, and financial support. They are legally instituted,
1
Also known as Peruvian cumbia; a mixture of Andean melodies with tropical rhythms,
incorporating typical instruments of modern music, such as batteries and electric guitars.
2
Coming from the Northeast, the poorest part of the country (Translator’s note).
144 M. C. MATA
although that condition doesn’t preserve them from being targets of more
or less violent attacks, because of their standing regarding social and politi-
cal issues.
On the other hand, the legal situation of the radios of Bolivian miners,
property of the unions which are part of the Union Federation of Mining
Workers, is very different. Radio stations are vital for the political and
union-related organization and mobilization of the sector. That is why
they are repressed every time that the military violently attack the Bolivian
people. Also a different legal standing was that of the guerrilla radios that
operated secretly, as diffusion and propaganda organs, in El Salvador,
accompanying the political-military groups that operated there until 1992.
Community radio stations emerging in Argentina from 1983 as a part of
multiple efforts to democratize the society after the brutal years of the
civic–military dictatorship were also different. Small FM radio stations that
open their doors to the community—neighborhood, small town—where
they operate, do not accept to be branded as pirate or secret by the manag-
ers of broadcasting and government institutions, because they do not steal
anything and they do not hide. They are rather exercising a right denied
to them by the juridical system in place. They prefer to be considered as
non-authorized radio stations, created and managed by ecclesiastic or
educational institutions, local and juvenile groups, thus opening the road
toward having a special regard for the particular and the local, as a way to
oppose the concentration of media in the hands of a few and to make it
possible for all to exercise their right to communication.
Many of those scenarios have changed. In order to get an idea of the
magnitude of those changes, it might suffice to point out that, due to dif-
ferent economic and political processes the country has gone through,
only three Bolivian mine radio stations survive today, out of more than
twenty that existed by the end of the 1980s. Of the Salvadoran guerrilla
radios nothing remains but a historical, and to a certain extent heroic,
mark. Something similar happens with those primitive and homemade
technologies popular resourcefulness resorted to in order to satisfy com-
munication needs. For some time, the market made available multiple
resources—devices, programs—to vast sectors, facilitating the production,
reception, and continuous exchange of messages. Meanwhile, there are
new strengths and weaknesses. Several of those Argentinean incipient
community radio stations were consolidated to the point that they played
a key role in 2009, through FARCO—the national organization that
brought them together—in the design, debate, and approval of the Law of
Services of Audiovisual Communication. That law was a landmark in the

struggle for the democratization of the national audiovisual spectrum, and
a reference at the continental level. On the other hand, many of those
powerful and dare I say avant-garde popular radios of old, created and
managed by the Catholic Church, survive today as routine institutions
that barely remember the spaces of production of a collective, alternative
word that they were until the 1990s.
I do not intend to analyze the ups and downs in the number of agents
in popular Latin American broadcasting. The contrast between former
scenes and the present time is aimed at avoiding a generalizing approach.
To show that the emergence and development of every radio station
deemed as popular (or alternative, or community3), regardless of whether
they found or not their inspiration in preexisting experiences and models,
accounts for the ways certain populations have to inhabit a given territory:
the material conditions and symbolic dimensions under which one lives;
the ways to be and to interact in a given space and time.
A Constant: The Matter of Power

Within that changing history of popular Latin American radio stations,
what allows the connection of differences and distances is their determina-
tion to look for other ways to get their voices heard, because there is a
search for other ways to be. But to claim that popular radio stations repre-
sent the search and construction of differentiated words, new voices, or
ways of speaking in order to live differently, is to assume that what they
have expressed is always a will to upset the power, or rather, powers that
shape the social order in different realms of life: economy, politics, legisla-
tion, culture. Powers that in the field of communication are applied at a
macro level through legal systems that regulate the use of airwaves, the
modes of mass media property, the exercise of professions, and, at a micro
level, are exerted by means of the group of regulations that govern speech
in daily life and in the most diverse private and public spaces.
In that sense, I acknowledge three fields in which that anti-hegemonic
will has been tried by popular radio stations with greater or smaller
3
Although they are not absolutely equivalent and have conceptual and ideological differ-
entiating trajectories, in Latin America there is a tendency to unify those terms. I keep using
the expression “popular radios” for reasons formerly debated and explained elsewhere (Mata,
“Radio popular o comunitaria?” en Chasqui, N°47, nov.1993, CIESPAL, Quito).
146 M. C. MATA
emphasis on different occasions: the field of knowledge, the field of expres-

sivity; and the field of collective action. Dimensions which are intimately
linked to each other, but that cover different aspects of social practice and
the practice of radio stations.
The Power to Know

The first link in the chain that strongly ties popular Latin American radio
stations to the question of knowledge and specifically the power to know,
are those experiences of the 1950s and 1960s, inspired by diffusionist and
developmentalist conceptions that postulated the use of the technology to
facilitate the literacy and formal schooling of indigenous and peasant pop-
ulations. The question of the legitimacy of that knowledge—associated
with the access to some minimum knowledge to guarantee a more func-
tional incorporation of vast sectors to productive markets—was, among
other reasons, what made many of those radios to assume, from the
mid-1970s and during the 1980s, the objectives and strategies of popular
education. Hence, what was later recognized as popular radio, cannot be
separated from that vast continental movement which nurtured it and to
which it would contribute a significant mass dimension.
Starting from their contact with rural populations and impoverished,
excluded natives, the members of those educational radios began to refute
the concepts according to which “underdevelopment is in man’s mind”
(Vaca Gutiérrez 2017), recognizing a more complex panorama instead.
The penuries that afflicted those whom they intended to educate were not
a consequence of their ignorance or of atavistic matters. They were a con-
sequence of a process of submission exerted by national and international
agents who had taken over their land and labor (see Orue Pozzo, this
book). Also, those dominant sectors had knowledge that they instituted as
true—scientifically valid and socially useful—while invalidating the popu-
lar ways of understanding reality, which they associated with backward-
ness, superstition, immediacy, and the impossibility of being universalized
(see Custódio, this book). These were, however, the expression of mille-
narian cultures and the capacity for daily survival that peasants and work-
ers developed. Acknowledging these different kinds of knowledge, popular
educational radios established themselves as spaces for another knowledge,
which took various forms. The recovery of the history of communities and
peoples, the conversion of work and organization experiences into teach-
ings through their diffusion and debate, the recovery of autochthonous,
undervalued forms of expression, went hand-in-hand with the populariza-

tion of appropriate technical and scientific knowledge designed to support
the development of local production and to assist with practical problems
of daily life in situations where basic resources are lacking (see Contreras
Baspineiro, this book). For that reason, although the popular radio sta-
tions seldom openly confronted the political systems and their official edu-
cational policies, they were recognized as spaces of learning, of production
of knowledge that was close and collective, claimed as their own by diverse
communities.
It was because of that same acknowledgement that popular radio sta-
tions were affirmed as news media and as such they did openly confront
the communication power, i.e., the hegemonic mass media, instituted as
legitimate providers of knowledge about the present time, a category whose
condition of artifact was manufactured by the power they hid. The char-
acterization of popular radio stations as alternative was founded to a great
extent on that field. Those radio stations challenged with their popular
correspondents the liberal approach of the journalistic profession; they
toppled the concept of market-regulated news; they increased the number
of classic news sources by granting hierarchy to the information provided
by popular agents; they innovated formats and mixed genres way before
the hybridization that would decades later characterize mass communica-
tion. And they made that by reversing the devices of concealment of
power; i.e., by questioning the notion of objectivity and assuming the
deliberate character of the agendas put in place by the powers that be.
For that reason, the confirmation of those radio stations as popular and
alternative news media meant a challenge to the power expressed in hege-
monic media, while allowing many to acknowledge the rights to informa-
tion and free expression formally promulgated in some of the constitutional
texts of our countries, but always denied in practice to the large majorities.
The Power to Speak

Agitators and subversives. Popular radio stations were called by these two
names in almost all the countries of the continent, sometimes by dictato-
rial governments, but also by some democratically elected ones, in order
to justify deterrents against them and their members. Certainly, the irrup-
tion in the public space of voices that had been silenced historically sub-
verts the established order; it unsettles the security of those who only
recognize their own voice as endowed with the required legitimacy to be
148 M. C. MATA
listened to by all. It is not by coincidence that throughout the most dis-

similar times and places, one of the aspects people value most in popular
radio stations is that through them you can speak “as whoever you are”:
indigenous, young person, as woman, boy, peasant; that is to say, as indi-
viduals who were devaluated or silenced by those who control the pub-
lic debate.
In historical terms, some radio stations were assumed as the voice of
“the voiceless” in clear connection with the postulates of the theology of
liberation (see Uranga, this book). That situation referred to alienation, to
an impossibility to recognize the estrangement that the system of capital-
istic exploitation produced regarding the product of the work and regard-
ing the values, ideas, and traditions of those groups deprived of
power—ethnic, agrarian, or urban labor communities. To be voiceless was
equivalent to having lost self-consciousness; therefore, you should recover
your voice in order to facilitate liberation from all oppression. In other
experiences, the idea of “voiceless” majorities to which a voice should be
given was discussed and revised: there were those who advocated that “the
voice of the people must be allowed to be heard” or to “open the micro-
phones” so that it could be listened to. Beyond that—not minor—differ-
ence, which generated excellent debates, listening to and allowing the
popular radio stations to speak created a formerly unknown polyphony,
since it revealed the voices censored by mass media and those who estab-
lished the rules of the speech game in different environments: those who
decide which subjects, languages, and modes of expression are suitable for
home, school, social organizations, political parties, and churches. Such
domination is enforced in multiple spaces, seeking the submission of the
weakest, of those who are different, and of those who oppose the status
quo because they regard it as unfair or unsatisfactory for their needs, inter-
ests, and desires.
There were radio stations that played the role of door keepers to the
popular word, zealously reproducing the control and surveillance devices
that they systematically denounced in their programs. But there were
comparatively more of those who provided space for the new voices. Thus,
the inhabitants of the countryside and the neighborhoods knew that to say
their voices had been silenced until then, meant to make it recognizable
for their equals and to turn it into a bridge for interaction, and the con-
struction of agreements and common projects. It also meant making that
word audible for others, also different, to whom it was directed in order
to request their attention, solidarity, and support for their own causes,
considered to transcend the particular. And making it audible for those

whom they were opposing and whose power they were demanding. The
word was to be wielded before them as a symbol of resistance and strug-
gle, as a territory of construction of antagonism and an unequivocal sign
of the will to become an alternative power (see Flores-Marquez, this book).
The Power to Be and to Act Collectively

The power to know and to speak according to certain values, principles,
and interests, represented for many the conquest of their dignity and the
awareness that it is possible to think and to look for new ways to be with
one another. In that sense, to be listened to was, for popular sectors, as
important as to speak. To say was to be said. That was the collectivizing
power of popular radio stations that operate as spaces of mediation and
interrelation, of encounter and dialogue. They are key instruments for
movements and ways to struggle to become visible.
Since their origins until the present time, the articulation between pop-
ular radio stations and social communities has been crucial for their goals
and quests. It was not always properly solved, but conflicts also show that
radio communication, far from being a mechanical exercise, regimented
according to formats, programming, and styles, is a construction of com-
munity sustained by messages produced and received, but also material-
ized in combined actions. When the people make a demand, the radio
station amplifies their voice. When there is a call for collective action, the
radio station reinforces the call. When the people require information in
order to carry out a project, the radio station looks for qualified sources.
It also works in the opposite sense: when the radio station wants to pro-
duce fictions to attract an audience, the people contribute their voices and
creativity; when the radio station requires knowledge in order to inform,
popular correspondents bring along data from specific communities (see
Peruzzo, this book).
To be and to do with others, in dialogue, is the communication back-
ground steering these radio stations. In that sense, popular radio stations
have shown that it is possible to participate politically from the field of
culture and they were able to warn against the weakness that isolation
implies. They recognized the need to strengthen their voice in the face of
threats to their work and of competition in the media market, although in
many countries they didn’t succeed to get laws approved that fully autho-
rized and protected them, neither did they find alternative strategies for
150 M. C. MATA
sustainability and growth. But even in the middle of crises and uncertain-
ties, they had the capacity to be organized and to build multiple interac-
tions. Just as they promoted and supported collective action for the
popular sectors, they assumed that it was necessary to do so in their own
field. They are practically the only popular communication experiences
that have built bonds and institutional designs stimulating their work:
national, regional, and continental associations; programs of formation
and joint production, and news satellite networks, all of them ways to
operate that, with their practice, announce and prefigure solidaristic and
cooperative ways to be in society.
The Constituent Tension

The strongly educational character and the preferably rural location of
popular radio stations originally allowed them to visualize their audience
as people who were almost isolated from all sorts of mass- and mercantile
entertainment, just as then students were thought to be only inside the
space limited by school and family. But their prompt conversion into
media committed to the needs and yearnings of popular sectors, and the
consequent recognition of the genuineness of the ways to live and to com-
municate characteristic of those sectors, generated a tension that crosses
the history of popular radio stations in different ways and with varying
intensity and ways of resolution.
A nodal point of that tension is the collision between the will of repre-
sentation and genuine expression of popular sectors by radio stations and
the lack of a full acceptance of the complexity of what is popular (see
Gómez Obando, this book). An anecdote is worth more than a thou-
sand words.
Radio Pío XII is a radio station interwoven with the struggles of
Bolivian miners. Created originally by a religious congregation in order to
combat communism in the mines of Llallagua, it turned to daily work and
when it reached twenty-five years on-air in 1984, it headed the network of
mine radios transmitting the XX National Miner Congress from the
Matilde mine. There it is designated “friend of the National Miner
Proletariat” and honored with the silver “Guardatojo, for the disinterested
services rendered […] to the hard-working class of the country” (López
Vigil 1984, 301). At that time Pío had been broadcasting again after being
shut down for two years, together with the other mine radios, after the
military coup carried out in 1980 by García Meza. Then, as his then direc-
tor tells, they “grew impatient.” They felt that they should report to and
educate the people all day long; that they had to strengthen their organi-
zations; to design spaces so that the unions, the members of the rural
movement, the groups that worked to reactivate the political life cut short
by the dictatorship, could express themselves. On one occasion, the cook
of the radio station explained why she preferred to listen to other radios:
–– “Pardon me, father, but Pío is boring. Words no more they say. At
least play some music, such be wayñito.
–– Music! That is very much like you. Music to forget the sorrows.
–– Sometimes it is necessary to forget, father. How do you carry on
with life, if not?
–– If we play music at night, even faster will they go to buy beer.
–– Play wayñito at least, for happiness. A little later on the army will
come and there will be a surplus of laments. Holy Friday arrives
not without the Carnival before. Time knows how to be there for
everything.” (op. cit., pp. 292–293)
The representation and expression of what is popular was limited

then—and that happened many times in different radio stations and under
different circumstances—to some highly politically charged, conscientious
sectors, or to problems linked to the dominance situation and the strug-
gles to oppose it. Outside the programs and activities of radio stations, or
almost totally alien to them, there were popular ways to have a good time,
to dream, to believe, strongly influenced since the 1960s at an urban level,
and already in the 1980s at a rural level, by mass culture. A culture belit-
tled by popular practices of communication in general, along the lines of
the critical theoretical thought developed in Latin American academic
spaces since the 1960s: the process of industrialization of culture and
printed media, radio, and television, were the spearheads of economic
imperialism; they led the people away from their problematic reality, offer-
ing them alienating fictions and exogenous models of life.
Without going into the discussions raised by those conceptions, it
should be remembered that in the early 1980s, thanks to different theo-
retical influences and to the work of intellectuals who joined their capacity
for reflection with their political commitment and their insertion into
152 M. C. MATA
popular realities, that mass culture—market-oriented and functional to the

dominant power—began also to be thought of as a space where what is
popular resided. Backtracking on substancialist thoughts, they began to
pose questions regarding the way in which those constructions of purpose
dialogued with the ways to feel, to think, and to narrate characteristic to
popular sectors, who found in mass fictions and information, desirable
food, places to be recognized and to interact. In sum, they began to for-
mulate new questions around that mass culture that did not operate by
imposition but rather by seduction, as a part of a process of hegemony
construction characteristic of capitalistic modernity (Martín Barbero 1987).
The debate was also intense on popular radio stations. The question of
massiveness divided the waters and options were sharply differentiated.
Either the radios—representatives of the popular sectors, mediators of
their voice—were limited to be a sort of group media, i.e., to restrict their
communication strategies to a certain collective and end up “preaching to
the choir”—as it used to be said—or they wanted the voice of those sec-
tors excluded from the public speech, but aware of their situation of sub-
mission, to be amplified to reach the people as a whole, the large majorities.
In other terms, they either limited their technological potential in terms of
reach, instantaneity, and impact, or they went out to find audiences, offer-
ing an alternative message.
At the beginning of the 1990s, a preparatory document for the VIII
Ordinary Assembly of ALER, outlined: “What is popular in radio is not
only the sound of liberation, of demands and organization, but also the
sounds of voices in the kitchen and the street, in the tavern and the tem-
ple: voices that express themselves from their culture and their daily life,”
And they added: “At the same time, we acknowledge that it is up to us to
continue to be ‘the other’ communication, the one that protests, claims
and builds on the interests of the people. We know that this is not achieved
with theoretical speeches, but being connected to the life of the audience,
to their own communication spaces and to the ways the people have to
understand and to express their life” (ALER 1991).
At the present time, those communication spaces have been radically
transformed and popular radio stations face new sociocultural designs that
bring about crises and redefinitions. Media becoming dominant in soci-
ety—the growing articulation between social practices, production tech-
nologies, and the gathering of information—places radio in a space of
renovated habits and cultural uses. The traditional distinction between
informative and recreational media explodes; daily routines, as well as
consumption environments and modes are shattered; the notions of cur-

rentness, sources, and even newsworthiness, are modified; enunciators
proliferate; we live under the illusion of a democratic dialoging hive of
speakers supported in networks. On our continent media concentration
exceeds the internationally allowed standards but the resort to figures such
as prosumers seems enough to close the gap between those who have the
power of the public word and those who do not. In that framework broad-
casters wonder again for a purpose to their practice, aware that there are
no possibilities to modify the unfair economic, social, and political order
in which they operate and popular sectors develop their life, unless some
words, some voices, emerge, with the ability to interrupt, to confront the
dominant discourse (see Flores-Márques, this book).
The collision between the will of representation and the genuine expres-
sion of what is popular on the part of radio stations, and the lack of full
acceptance of its complexity, was also evidenced facing the transformations
of the political landscape in Latin America. During the 1960s and until the
mid-1970s, with different modalities and intensities, party, union, reli-
gious and cultural revolutionary or liberating forces—according to their
self-denomination—promoted the emergence and development of move-
ments in favor of popular demands and national and sector affirmation.
Those were the practices that popular radio stations wanted to strengthen
and to make visible; the ones they went along with and from which they
were nurtured. Somehow, the popular subject, the addressee and object of
the work of the radios, was an empirical subject, easily identifiable and
ideologically recognizable.
The military coups and the advance of conservative forces marked a
period of strong repression and regression on the continent. During the
1970s, violent military coups dismantled the more combative organiza-
tions and popular movements; in the following decade the advance of
neoliberal ideas turned the market into an arbiter of social relationships
and promoted reformations of the state that brought along the neglect of
basic services. That placed the popular sectors in a situation of survival,
limiting their possibilities for material development and their possibilities
to imagine future projects. Also, the transformations of the economic
structure implied the loss of centrality of union organizations that used to
be the backbone of the popular field—the Bolivian mines proletariat, the
Argentinean industrial working class, for example—weakening them. That
field was redefined at the same time with the advent of other agents and
154 M. C. MATA
organizations, bearers of new demands and proposals: the unemployed,

the self-employed, the women, the impoverished middle classes.
In the face of that fragmentation and alteration of the popular field and
its organizations, and the reservations about the ideological-political cer-
tainties that guided them in previous decades, popular radio stations expe-
rienced a strong crisis that was expressed in operational problems and a
loss of horizons. An investigation about the validity and relevance of these
radios carried out by ALER during 1999 revealed the extent of the crisis.
The study (Geerts and Van Oeyen 2001) gives an account of the dents left
on popular radio stations by the breakdown of national revolutionary
projects and their political and ideological references; the loss of hope in
collective projects and a notorious advance of individualistic behavior; the
ideological setback of agents such as the Catholic Church on account of
processes of media concentration. But it also acknowledges the emergence
of numerous articulate movements around torn-away rights, new unsatis-
fied necessities, and even around the will to rethink the political-cultural
order: the reinforcement of the problem of the human rights, the discus-
sion of gender, identity, and ethnic perspectives; the re-elaboration of con-
cepts such as democracy and citizenship.
Since the 1990s, popular radio stations began, not without difficulties,
to look for new insertions and organicities, new partnerships, and new
strategies to approach those new agents committed to social transforma-
tion. They assumed in different ways the necessity to revise conceptions
regarding subjectivities, the sensitive dimensions of human interactions
and the articulation between public and private, which they acknowledged
had been insufficiently considered in their practice. A practice that had
been founded on a restrictive representation of popular sectors, delimiting
their performance spaces and identity features to labor relationships and
organizational procedures. Among the multiple conflicts afflicting popular
life such practices had privileged those derived from the contradiction of
capital-work over those of an affective, family, and generational nature.
That amplification of the political purpose of their work is the other
nodal point of the tension that popular radio stations are going through,
and it represents—together with their acknowledgement of mass-oriented,
media-driven culture as the environment for their development—their
biggest contribution to popular communication, since it means to accept
challenges that redefine the ways in which the construction of hegemony
was thought and worked from them.
One of those challenges has to do with the sense that acquires, for the
construction of democratic power, the recognition of the diversity of
oppressions and exclusions that are suffered in our societies and of the
diversity of demands and strategies which they face. Although it is true
that particularisms can obstruct the accumulation of power, ignoring the
multiple ways and places from which the discriminatory order is chal-
lenged can continue reinforcing exclusions. In that sense, popular radio
stations require to be attentive in order to detect the emergence of groups
and movements that struggle to express themselves, and they need to give
space to the plurality of expressions that demand another possible order.
The acceptance of that challenge imposes another. Explicitly, popular
radio stations play a new role: to be aggregation spaces. However minor
or irrelevant a demand, a rebuttal to the existing power or a transforma-
tion proposal may seem, it should find its place in that framework of voices
that radios are: a place to dialogue with other demands and proposals. If
the logic of power operates to assure isolation in individuality and particu-
larity, if in mass media isolated cases cannot make their causes understood,
much less find correlations and preview collective strategies, popular radio
stations begin to be thought of as bridges that make it possible to recog-
nize relationships and to establish convergences and which, at the same
time, allow contradictions and even irreducible antagonisms to be
expressed.
In that sense, popular radio stations dispute with hegemonic media
what I usually call the map of citizenship. Against the proliferation of indi-
viduals and communities isolated from each other who complain on the
screens and in the airwaves because of their sufferings; against the irrup-
tion—also partial—of proposals, what popular radio stations intend to
make visible is a fabric made of threads of different thicknesses and colors,
in combinations changing the ranks and hierarchies established in the pri-
orities of rulers, in the agenda of the media, in the cultural offers of the
market. It is a bet on that new map, on that new sound landscape, to make
it easier to understand the regularities and connections that exist between
different types of exclusion and the possibility to collectivize alternatives of
inclusion and fairness.
In the same sense, popular radio stations dispute the political and cul-
tural agenda of hegemonic media, providing instead the “socially neces-
sary” information (Schiller 1996), without which the gap between those
who have the technical resources to gather data, analyze it, and then
decide on its use and diffusion, and those who do not, grows day by day.
156 M. C. MATA
For that reason, assuming their character as mediators and articulators,

popular radio stations can, with the technology with which many of them
count on and the experience developed in multiple interactions and net-
works, offer themselves as data archives, live memory of struggles, ampli-
fiers of protests, demands and proposals at the regional, national, and even
international levels.
One last consideration. As a mass medium inserted into an inceasingly
concentrated market and in a technological reality that multiplies sources,
enunciators, and devices to access very diverse messages, these radio sta-
tions continue betting on producing alternative knowledge, words, and
ways to act, in order to build equal and democratic societies, where all can
exercise their right to communication. It also supposes a permanent ten-
sion, because they face limitations imposed by the context in which they
operate: if they are not listened to by large majorities, they do not fulfill
their objectives, but neither do they achieve their goals if they submit
totally to the logic of that context. And what they discover day by day in
practice is that, in order to reiterate what was outlined at the beginning of
this chapter, there are no models or recipes that may guarantee an alterna-
tive popularity to a radio station. Each one of them builds on, in a dia-
logue with their audience, its strategies to be unique and to represent that
space of identification and collective action as the function for which it
exists. Some achieve it by working meticulously with local information
that does not appear in the commonplace media. Others achieve it by
addressing the cultural specificity of certain age or ethnic groups. Still oth-
ers by confronting the opinions of the hegemonic media with thorough
investigations and irrefutable sources. There are those who undertake
online broadcasts, as a way to reach digital natives; but there are also those
who bet on traditional methods, and are present in public squares and
markets. Now, like never before, radio stations are diversified and go into
particulars, in order to confront a growing homogenization. They must
also give an account of the countless voices that should be listened to
when building a society of equals. Because, in a nutshell, popular radio
stations are made from the presence and speech of the subjects of
those voices.
References
ALER. (1991). La radio popular en América Latina hoy. Documento, Quito.
Geerts, A., & Van Oeyen, V. (2001). La radio popular frente al nuevo siglo: estudio
de vigencia e incidencia. Quito: ALER.
López Vigil, J. I. (1984). Radio Pío XII. Una mina de coraje. Quito: ALER.
Martín Barbero, J. (1987). De los medios a las mediaciones. México-Barcelona:
Gustavo Gili.
Mata, M. C. (2011). Comunicación Popular. Continuidades, transformaciones y
desafíos. Oficios Terrestres, Año XVII, N° 26, Facultad de Periodismo y
Comunicación Social, Universidad Nacional de La Plata, La Plata.
Schiller, H. (1996). Information inequality. London: Routledge.
Vaca Gutiérrez, H. (2017). Procesos interactivos mediáticos de Radio Sutatenza con
los campesinos de Colombia. Cali: UA de Occidente.
CHAPTER 9
Popular Communication in Latin America:

A Look at the Actors Who Build Bridges
Nívea Canalli Bona
Translated by Alexandra Barros
The challenge of defining the “popular communicator” in Latin America

is tackled by different authors. Some of them, like myself, were armed only
with curiosity, but had a history of witnessing and participating in social
struggles, in a deeply unfair and unjust country regarding the distribution
of resources, or dignity of means to live well. Brazil was never an example
of a welfare state, and if we look carefully at its neighbors the landscape
was not much different and, sadly, has not changed much.
But it is exactly because of this context of deep inequality that some
very specific types of actions, groups, and congregations arose, and, hand-
in-hand with them, specific ways of using communication were created.
They produced a very local identity that mixes strategies, tactics (Certeau
2013), and a habitus (Bourdieu 2011) which combines creative ways of
doing communication with scarce resources. What defines this reflection is
N. Canalli Bona (*)
Núcleo de Estudos de Comunicação Comunitária e Local (COMUNI),
São Paulo, Brazil
e-mail: bonanivea@gmail.com

Switzerland AG 2021
160 N. CANALLI BONA
the goal to understand how these people, these popular actors, doers, are
developing communication for social organizations and communities.
I am going to discuss some of what surrounds and provokes these
actions within the context of what we understand as popular communica-
tion in Latin America. Subsequently, the goal is to draw a tentative profile
of this popular individual, as his/her actions define and change his/her
habitus, both being transformed by the cause they fight for, by the social
and economic place they are in, by the formal (or not) education, and by
the groups they are part of. This communicator is a patchwork of different
variables and our aim here is to identify how these variables influence this
actor, the popular communicator.
The Context
If we look into some historical aspects of the way Latin America was colo-
nized (not to say raped, looted, and plundered), we can understand that a
brutal form of occupation took place with the help of some sectors of the
Catholic Church (Galeano 2010; Ribeiro 2006). As a result of the said
colonization, an extremely unequal society was born and remains until
today, which means that an elite concentrates a large part of the resources,
whether in the form of property, access to education, or human rights (see
Custódio and also Orue Pozzo, this book). On the other extreme of the
social spectrum are the descendants of the native peoples, many of whom
were decimated for their lands, and the descendants of enslaved people
brought from África to Latin America to do the hard labor on sugarcane
and coffee farms. In addition, there are the descendants of the white
Ibero-Europeans sent to colonize the vast territory and, later, those who
came because of economic difficulties/problems provoked by the two
twentieth-century World Wars. This is the picture of a land rich in resources
that are really poorly distributed.
These groups (elites and exploited) display their tensions on multiple
levels of the tangible world. One example is the dispute over land on
which to plant, and to live off, that opposes on one side the big agroindus-
try (with its machines, pesticides, and large tracts of land to guarantee
huge harvests for export), and on the other side groups like quilombolas,1
Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra (Landless Workers
Movement), and native tribes (with their traditional way of cultivating
1
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maroons.
9 POPULAR COMMUNICATION IN LATIN AMERICA: A LOOK… 161
food). Others disputes involve the following groups: large state corpora-
tions (lots of them internationally funded) and neighborhoods in the cities
with the Movimento dos Trabalhadores Sem Teto (Roofless Workers
Movement); tailings dams disasters and local communities (see Mariana in
2015 and Brumadinho in 2019); power plants, and local communities
such as Belo Monte (hydroelectric power plant), in Pará State, and Povos
da Floresta (Peoples of the Forest2), among numerous others. These
conflicts, historical and current, are the sparks that trigger the creation of
what we call social movements, social organizations, or community
associations.
The truth is: Latin America was never released from international
exploitation. Every time a country tries to elect someone who can repre-
sent the interests of these popular groups, the elites manage, often with
the help of other powerful countries, to regain power, and not always
democratically. This is why almost all countries in Latin America had
decades of dictatorships, some more violent than others.
Therefore, regarding the disputes in different spheres of society, the
one concerning information was, and still is, one of the most important
because it determines who has a voice, who has the right to tell their side
of the story. And this specific dispute takes place in the intersection of the
fields of education and communication. The opportunity to go to school
and get a good education has always been scarcer for popular groups.
Universities have always been reserved for the elite. To add to that, media
outlets are controlled by a small number of the elite. In Brazil, for exam-
ple, the main media networks (including TV broadcasting, newspapers,
and radio stations) are in the hands of five families (Cavalcanti 1993,
p. 41). A large number of radio stations are in hands of political represen-
tatives, which is forbidden by law. And if this was not enough, electronic
outlets like TV and radio stations are public concessions in the federal
constitution, but often used as private property, as Biz and Guareschi
(2005, p. 29), explain: “the understanding of the concessionaires, and,
consequently of the population, is that if ‘I have’ a radio or TV, I do what-
ever I want with them, I say what I want and allow who I want to speak
there, because, in the end, this is mine.”
This concentration of media outlets did not come about by chance. It
is a well-written plan to control information that people consume, thereby,
2
Indigenous peoples, maroon communities, riverbank dwellers, forest collectors. (https://
peoplesoftheforest.org/).
162 N. CANALLI BONA
maintaining the status quo. To this effect, Biz and Guareschi (2005,
p. 114) understand that there is a kind of censorship, a social/economic
one, which prevents people in general from having access to media outlets
and to speak about their life projects.
The Popular in Latin America

It is clear that all this repression and decades of violence and exploitation
would be fertile land on which to grow various forms of resistance, like
social movements, popular associations, and communities, as we have said.
Sometimes riots and protests are the result. In Latin America, this resis-
tance is fed by a mix of eagerness to survive, a thirst for justice, and a
mystique3 that is partly inspired by “religious culture” (mostly Catholic)
but mostly transcends the boundaries of the “religious” spaces (see
Contreras Baspineiro, this book). So, in this way, some social movements
and organizations arose in CEBs (Comunidades Eclesiais de Base) and the
Liberation Theology (which challenged the Vatican in some ways) was a
new approach forged in Latin America, with a rich experience in Brazil. In
other countries some sectors of the Catholic Church were also very pres-
ent, fighting alongside these groups (see Uranga, this book).
One of the most studied Latin American authors and activist who
worked with popular activism through education and communication was
Mario Kaplun. He devoted his life to reflecting, studying, and creating
ways of bringing these two fields in a liberating way to the people who
needed them most. The Argentinian intellectual was the creator/mentor
of the Cassete-Foro, an activity that enabled campesinos4 to solve their
problems in a democratic and participative way. In the 1970s, the tech-
nique used cassette tapes to record group discussions of campesinos about
their daily problems. A group of editors from the community would select
the main solutions and send them to other groups of campesinos in a hori-
zontal exchange of ideas. The idea was applied in Uruguay and,
subsequently, in other countries. Mario Kaplun and his wife lived in many
3
Dictionaries state that mystique is a framework of doctrines, ideas, beliefs, or the like,
constructed around a person or object, endowing the person or object with enhanced value
or profound meaning. In our use, mystique brings all these things, and a “way” of making
things happen, that can bring about Christian beliefs like the search for justice, and food for
all, and includes the use of songs, symbols, and rituals that normally invigorates activists
about the cause. Sometimes, mystique can come with a type of ideology.
4
Small farmers who have the family working the land.
Latin American countries mostly because dictatorships would chase them

out of the country. He also worked with popular radio and his most
famous project was linked to the Catholic faith. He created a series of
radio shows called Padre Vicente: Diario de un Cura del Barrio (Rev.
Vicente: a journal of a neighborhood priest). The show had five series with
more than 200 episodes.5
Kaplun´s list of achievements regarding popular communication mate-
rials (radio shows, books, and group activities) is immense. He also expe-
rienced success with different methodologies of popular communication
and education which, in parallel with the works of Paulo Freire, set the
tone of popular communication and popular education in Latin America.
“For him, the type of communication you do is a reflection of the society
you live in or you want to build” (Bona et al. 2007).
Inspired by training in this path of popular communication or by an
instinctive (tactical) perception of survival, many popular organizations
ended up using alternative communication to express their problems, to
work on the awareness of society in relation to their demands, and to posi-
tion themselves against the hegemonic communication. Plays, posters,
music, marches, and pamphlets are rich examples of some communication
strategies (Peruzzo 1998, p. 115). Later, the Internet would come to give
hope of more space to all kinds of voices (see Flores-Márquez, this book).
Popular communication is a recurring concept in Latin America Studies
and can, sometimes, be understood as alternative, communitarian, or local
communication based on the context in history and the protagonist
groups (Peruzzo 2008; Festa 1986; Kaplun 2002). To discuss the popular
communicator, we understand that “popular” comes from the so-called
popular movements in Latin America—indigenous people, the underprivi-
leged, campesinos, and all groups that are excluded from the dominant
elite culture—who produce a specific narrative opposed to the dominant
one (Suzina 2016).
Who Is the Popular Communicator?

Since 2003, one of the main lines of research I have been following aims
to discover who is the popular communicator. This actor is not a North
American volunteer doing charitable work, nor the student in the riots in
Turkey protesting against the government, nor is it the German housewife
5
https://radioteca.net/audioseries/el-padre-vicente-diario-de-un-cura-de-barrio/.
164 N. CANALLI BONA
who acts together with the neighbors to bring about some changes in the
local school. Although some of the actions could be similar, the popular
communicator in Latin America carries out a mystique that intertwines
different struggles that are, somehow, historically the same: the resistance
against centuries of exploitation and absence of minimum dignity. This
struggle pervades the racial, gender, and minorities struggles. That is why
this communicator is a patchwork of indigenous, black, poor, women,
non-binary people, and their ordeals.
Since the media outlets are in the hands of the elite, underprivileged
people seldom have space for their own narrative on the news or other
kinds of shows on TV, radio, and in newspapers. Nor do they have money
to produce mass media shows to tell their side of the story. However,
somehow, some stories are covered by journalists from mass media outlets,
portraying them with a fair approach. My initial question was: how can
some people break through and make their appearance on the mass media
agenda while others cannot? My findings, in that specific research project
(Bona 2003) with an organization that shelters homeless teenagers, were
that two professional journalists bridged the connection between the
“technical” and mainstream agenda used in mass media productions and
the more “informal” language used in popular organizations. The two of
them had deep knowledge of both sides: they knew what angle the mass
media outlets would “buy.” They also knew what would make the move-
ment run away (or not), from the exposure that could stigmatize the teen-
agers even more than the news usually did.
After that finding, my interest shifted to understanding how the popu-
lar communicator would decide the communication strategies and what
would influence their choices. In essence, who is the popular communica-
tor? What makes up this specific actor that is engaged in social movements,
social organizations or community groups and associations?
To answer this question, I applied an array of techniques and methods
in order to observe the movement’s influence on the communicators´
work, their media trajectory (which media outlets they utilize on a daily
basis), the formal education they possibly had, and to understand if they
are activists or members of the group’s cause.
There is a specific characteristic in this field that contrasts the profes-
sional training in communication with the beliefs and values this commu-
nicator holds. Technical training provided by universities generally
prepares this actor for activities related to the market. So, that the future
journalist learns how to identify newsworthy facts, how to write the article
with a structured lead and the upside-down pyramid, and how to inter-
view official sources and witnesses. Those studying advertising learn how
to create an advertisement, how to use the benefits of a product to sell
more, how to make beautiful radio spots or TV inserts. Also, under the
communication umbrella (division made in the pedagogic curriculum of
the universities), we can find the public relations student learning how to
prepare appealing events to promote companies or ideas, and learning
how to develop relationships with stakeholders to prevent or diminish
problems with companies/products images.
The higher education factor is also important in the Latin American
context since other kinds of technical media training barely exist. There is,
as well, seldom any “on-the-job training” which is similarly offered to
professionals in Europe or North America without a degree. In Latin
America, having a higher education diploma is still something that distin-
guishes some individuals from others. Let us remember that elites have
priority access to education, and normally this education would be taught
and applied to emphasize the market agenda and maintain the status quo.
In recent periods, efforts made by left-wing governments contributed
to making access to higher education easier for popular groups, and some
actors had the chance to get their degrees in communication. In addition,
social movements and organizations started to understand the advantages
of a good communication strategy to state their demands and convince
the audience. In this scenario, professionals trained in journalism, advertis-
ing, and public relations have seen a market increasingly thirsty for com-
munication professionals who know how to meet the needs of creating
information and relationship flows with their stakeholders.
The Cause and the Activist

Although having higher education gives one a higher “rank” over the
popular communicator, it is not the technical knowledge that defines this
communicator. In fact, it is definitely the other way around. The inter-
views conducted with communicators and activists from different groups
(Bona 2008, 2014) stated that what renders the popular communicator is
the belief this person has in the cause. It is the motivation to contribute to
causes involving children, land, black people, gender rights, indigenous
rights, animal rights, human rights, the struggles in the neighborhood or
yet, to fight against injustice, which makes this professional, whether a
graduate or not, perform this role.
166 N. CANALLI BONA
Another side to it is a conflict created when the professional journalist,

trained to report news in a balanced way, works with communication for a
specific cause. Giannotti and Santiago (1997) reflect on this question
when they think about how trade union communication should be done.
For them, the journalist who decides to dedicate himself/herself to trade
union communication should give up the mythical impartiality and think
about broader issues, being his/her own editor (see Mata, this book).
The popular communicator in Latin America can be professionally
trained, nonetheless retaining their ideological beliefs which could lead
them to work with different causes. Similarly, we observed some individu-
als without technical qualifications developing creative and strong com-
munication processes. Their knowledge comes from the movements and
community. It is almost an intuitive way of doing communication that is
assimilated in their daily work. These practices sometimes would be
wrongly portrayed by the mass media that do not understand (and some-
times do not want to understand) this whole “alternative” world. That
explains why, for a long time, popular communicators did not spend time
trying to have their voices heard in the mass media outlets. From experi-
ence, they knew they would be stereotyped, so they preferred to dedicate
themselves to other kinds of “radical media” (Downing 2001).
There was a case of a “graduate” who was performing as a popular
communicator in a non-profit organization who said he was taught how
to access the mainstream media as a public relation professional, how to
write a beautiful press-release to stimulate the mainstream outlets to fol-
low his stories and give some space to their civil organization demands.
But he preferred to not waste his time trying to attract the “eyes” of main-
stream media since, in his opinion, they always “change” the approach or
they do not give the exact attention he would expect to the subject. He
preferred to focus his work on communicating with stakeholders and
other specific audiences using other kinds of techniques he learned in the
non-profit organization (Bona 2014).
This relation between what is achieved from technical education, from
life trajectory, or from the influence of activism can be explained through
three concepts: habitus by Bourdieu; and tactics and strategies by Certeau.
Field and Habitus
We understand that popular communicators have their practices constantly
traversed by both the practical knowledge of their vocational training and
the political, technical, and social fields that aggregate the practices of the
communities in which they are embedded. For Barros (“field and habitus
in Pierre Bourdieu‘s sociology integrate a whole ontological piece. There
is not one without the other. They are inseparable.” Thus, the habitus of a
social actor is structured by social positions in any field. But this field is
structured by these social positions in continuous movement. Thus, both
habitus and field are mutually structured and structuring (Barros et al.
2003, p. 12).
In “The Influence of Journalism” (1997), Bourdieu asserts that the
mechanisms of journalism exert a constant influence on journalists who
are part of it, mainly on the forces that are interrelated in the process of
reporting. This reflection is useful here to understand how the field also
influences the habitus of popular communicators and how this dialectic
relation occurs, from this habitus built in this field with the
communication.
After all, the communicator who studied journalism will not be in a
newsroom, so this scenario (field) of news production does not participate
in the building of their habitus. The public relations professional will not
be in a private or state organization. Advertising professionals will not be
in the “field” of products and services markets and/or consumption. The
action scene of these communicators will be the social group or commu-
nity and the entire context of social disputes. It is another field; one in
which they did not (or rarely) have formal training at university. The field
would be the community or social movement, which would include their
demands, their historical context and path, so this communicator would
be influenced by their media trajectory which, as a field, would also con-
tribute to the configuration of their habitus and action.
At first glance, what is understood is that the concept of habitus pro-
posed by Bourdieu refers to the incorporation of schemes that guide the
practices from the perspective of reproducing social structures and which
have some stability. But in the sense of a dynamic habitus it is possible to
think of a continuous “edition,” reconstruction, reconfiguration that can
arise from the communicator’s experiences and actions. When, and if,
these communicators have the possibility of questioning this habitus, they
168 N. CANALLI BONA
disrupt and reconfigure it, and there may be innovation in the way of see-
ing and doing popular communication.
The Communicator’s “Works” by Certeau

Michel de Certeau did not believe in a dogmatic order inflicted by the
authorities, and turned his attention to the nonconformists’ behavior,
even those who were silenced, those who changed the imposed truth or
resisted in a practical way on a daily basis (2013, p. 18). For him, people
at the consumption level end up reinventing the uses of some common
strategies every day, and this is almost invisible. The analysis of the ordi-
nary “work” included all sorts of activities, from aid association for immi-
grants, girls trying to learn to manage their own health, educators in the
prison system or slums, minorities defending a tradition, and a regional
language against a centralizing and unifying state, among others.
For him, everyday life is invented in a thousand ways, and his aim was
to understand the operative combinations that build a specific user’s cul-
ture, commonly referred to as consumers, and who are often considered
to be the dominated ones, which, to him, does not mean docile or passive.
Somehow, it is possible to see the popular communicator from Latin
America in this model.
The author offers two ways of understanding these common “doings,”
by ordinary individuals: based on strategies and on tactics. For him, strat-
egy is what is formalized, is calculated through the relationship of forces,
and can be isolated in a subject of will and power. The gesture here is
Cartesian, planned, distinguishing the field and the attitude: “The politi-
cal, economic, and scientific rationality was built according to this strate-
gic model” (2013, p. 45). Whereas the tactic is the improvisation. It is
within the domain of the “other,” there is an absence of self, it takes
advantage of the moment, and depends on timing to play with the events
to transform them into a fruitful occasion. What is gained is not preserved,
it uses the lapses in the situation to make its move; it is astute. In short, for
the author, the tactic is the art of the weak. For him, shopping, cooking,
speaking, moving are some of the examples of the gestures of the weak in
an order established by the strong ones. It is a doing within the breaches
of a system (Certeau 2013, p. 98).
The studies (interviews and observations) that I carried out over the
years reflected that what is seen as almost intuitive communication tactics,
performed by popular communicators, can become reflected and
reconfigured in habitus (when the field, the organization, helps to shape

them), often turning into carefully planned strategies and fulfilled within
the communication tasks.
One example comes from a journalist who was the popular communi-
cator for a group who occupied some empty buildings in an action of
resistance against evictions in that city. He wanted to persuade a TV chan-
nel to cover the cause, so they would come and do some stories on those
homeless families and their reasons for being there. For the day of the
visit/interview he asked one of the families to mop the floor while the
reporters were there. The intention, a tactic, was to make them feel guilty
for stepping on the recently cleaned floor and to take a more merciful
approach when telling their story. He did not learn that at university. But
instead, as the “weapon of the weak,” he used what he had on hand to
communicate and achieve his goal.
Locating the Field and the Popular

Communicator’s Habitus
It is accepted here that journalists, advertisers, and public relations profes-
sionals have a certain knowledge, both technical and humanistic, provided
by the university that also ends up setting standards of social settings
where these professionals must act. Very few universities offer, as a profes-
sional prospect, the option for this communicator to work in social move-
ments, communities, or social organizations. In a simplistic way, it was
expected that journalists will work in media outlets, public relations pro-
fessionals in institutional communication, and advertisers in the develop-
ment of arguments relative to consumption. What has been witnessed in
popular communicators is a reconfiguration of these perspectives. Prior
research (Bona 2008, 2014; Moreira 2012; Valdez Sarabia 2019) revealed
popular communicators from all programs and some who did not have any
of these degrees being part of an ongoing reframing of this habitus arising
from university education. One example is a communicator who gradu-
ated in advertising working in a trade union as a communication manager
who often performs other activities not closely related to the area. Thus,
for example, the advertiser’s habitus, which was to promote products, is
reframed, and reconfigures itself according to the organization’s demands
and his activism also relates to voluntary “doings” in social movements. In
sum, the habitus changes, it “rehabits.”
170 N. CANALLI BONA
The same happens with a journalist who decides to establish a commu-

nication company and devotes herself to learning how to develop websites
to help the partner “doing” communication for social organizations for a
fair price or for free. This journalist also develops different skills and
becomes a “Jack of all trades.” Or the public relations professional work-
ing for homeless people, writing articles and helping to produce videos.
So, he/she is not defending the interests of a company as would be
expected from his/her qualification. Other observations revealed others
leaving the habitus of journalism to become edu-communicators, a mix
between a communicator and a teacher, who teaches how to communi-
cate. The reconfiguration of the habitus happens with the practice of
democratizing communication techniques, forms, and processes with vari-
ous communities and when training is used beyond its purposes to create
and recreate other communication formats.
Forged in the Field
Despite witnessing some popular communicators with a university degree
lately, the majority of popular communicators are forged in the field.
These actors rely on the knowledge of other popular communicators who
would teach them the stepping-stones of how to do communication in
popular groups and communities. This communicator learns every day,
practicing, doing, and almost intuitively deciding what to do.
Clearly, here we are observing communicators that are in the field of
the weak, according to Certeau, because they represent in their “doings”
those who are the weakest in society. In this way, placing communicators
in this “field,” we see within the “doings”, processes that are strategic,
which are planned and measured, and others that are built on the tactical
level. They demonstrate strategic communication when they develop pro-
cesses based on the results they can offer (measuring outcomes and reas-
sessing the “doings” according to the results). On the other hand, we can
understand that those who see themselves as activists have a more tactical
way of doing communication. They build their knowledge daily and seek
the gaps in the system. One testimony that represents this individual
comes from a popular communicator with a degree talking about a popu-
lar communicator (activist) from MST (Movimento dos Sem Terra) who
did not go to university:
he used to get on our nerves, often asking to come with us to the events and
he used to ask for tips and such. Now, we are no longer the ones who report
the actions of the MST. He is the one, the best person to do this, because he
comes from there. He will portray the image from his standpoint. […]
He used to keep a website updated every two hours about what was
going on at the event. In other words, he can’t go to mass media TV, but
with his camera, with his editing, with free software, he would go there,
record, bring the tape, edit and post it on the internet. On time. Not with
the agility and quality that TV has; however, he was reporting what was hap-
pening. (Anderson Leandro—interview on December 18, 2007)
(Bona 2008)
This can pretty much be used as an example of any popular communi-

cator in Latin America. From an array of tactics, according to Certeau, this
actor uses the available resources and informal knowledge to build a com-
munication process, create documents, reports, and videos.
Based on this example, many organizations built their own way of train-
ing popular communicators. That is why, as Kaplun said, education and
communication go hand-in-hand. While most of the popular communica-
tors learn the technical content by practicing in their daily work, popular
communication training courses have been a constant since the dictator-
ships in Latin America. And these courses, events, and other kinds of
meetings to share experiences are happening now with the help of the
Internet.
This is why some of these actors say they are “not sure” what they
would call their role. They say they feel like both educators and commu-
nicators at the same time. So, the practice can be technical, learned at the
university or in the community, but there are no boundaries between the
education field and the communication field. What is learned in theory or
experienced is shared with the peers in a training course or in daily
activities.
I consider myself a popular communicator. But I understand that I do this

as an educator. In my opinion these two things are really related. When you
are a communicator who is going to do a workshop, to perform this work,
you are also an educator. But I consider myself a popular communicator,
because sometimes I also do a job that is not education, that is really popular
communication, dissemination, covering things that have to do with the
struggle, with the organizations. (Interview in Moreira 2012, p. 62)
172 N. CANALLI BONA
Kaplun’s legacy is explained here. For him, the type of communication

or education we perform is consistent with the society we live in. In his
analysis we live in a society where the “banking” model of education by
Paulo Freire is still the main one, and it is reflected in the mainstream
media, which, in his words, is only information, not communication. In
this teaching format, there is one-way communication, from the teacher
to the student and from the TV/radio/newspaper to the receiver. There
is no interaction between sender and receiver in these concepts. But what
we see in the habitus of the popular communicator whether being a tactic
or a strategy is an attempt to change the communication process in an
eagerness to change the society.
I think that, often, most of the time, I do things that are not journalism.
These days I went to a place and was asked if I was a Social Worker. But I
think that the strategic vision of communication, within what we do, regard-
less of in fact doing communication, in this case, contributes a lot. I under-
stand that having this critical approach that communication gives you is also
very cool. […] Yes, in communication, like it or not, you know, you learn to
see things also in a more critical way. (Interview in Bona 2008, p. 236)
A critical and participative process of communication is, generally, the

common ground between popular communicators in Latin America and
this modus operandi is often observed among communicators coming
from university and/or raised in the community.
Clearly, with the training phase of audiovisual producers and integral popu-
lar communicators—I am the one who does this part—we give tools to a
school, in a theoretical way and with the opportunity to practice with the
camera. This is my way of contributing to the democratization of the media
and make it possible for people to create their own media to inform them-
selves. (Interview in Valdez Sarabia 2019, p. 132)
In these words, this is the way the popular communicator sees himself/
herself. That is why the concept developed by Kaplun is still so contempo-
rary and it needs to be revisited often. Communication and education are
the keywords of popular communication, so emancipation and develop-
ment for change are real. It is evident that the popular communicator aims
to establish a habitus which is influenced by the community (field) and is
reconfigured to be critical, participative, and democratic, setting the
groundwork for a society based on a different logic, as Kaplun (2002) stated.
The Communicator as a Bridge and Metamorphosis

In Latin America, popular communication was born to resist and face the
concentration of the media and to be the voice of the unheard. This very
type of communication has specific characteristics based on the context,
resources available, group identities, and the knowledge of the actor, the
popular communicator. This actor is, consistently, seen as a bridge. A
bridge that links social movements and their demands with the mass
media. He/she links communities and popular media outlets. He/she
links communication strategies and social organizations’ needs. He/she
links the technical knowledge from universities and the mystique that is
born in the community.
The popular communicator is the result of a group of variables that
construct their profile: personality and talents, skills, beliefs, knowledge,
movement and community influences, technical training, and media con-
sumption. And, it is this professional who, little by little, has been develop-
ing communication in organizations, contributing to stimulating a broader
view of the role of the communicator in society, guiding the press with
new perspectives, building networks with the university to promote a
broader curriculum, and educating grass-roots groups on communication
strategies aiming at empowerment.
At the same time, this popular communicator has his/her practices
intertwined with the fields they occupy (newsroom, universities, commu-
nity, movement) forming then, their habitus, a dynamic edition and re-
edition of what the field asks of this communicator and what this
communicator has to offer. Included in this constant transformation are
the strategies and tactics conceived and applied when this popular com-
municator sees the need for specific ways of doing communication, sowing
the seeds for a different model of society arising from a critical way of
doing communication.
References
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Bona, N. C. (2014). Práticas Comunicacionais Digitais de Comunicadores Inseridos

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Comunicación, Quito.
PART III
Decolonial Perspectives
CHAPTER 10
The Decolonial Nature of Comunicação

Popular
Leonardo Custódio
Introduction
The anti-hegemonic urgency that the term “decolonization” entails seems
evident. Centuries of European territorial expansion and domination
through colonization have stamped today’s capitalist world with the blood
of indigenous and enslaved people as well as the exploitation of natural
resources around the globe. While most formal colonial structures have
succumbed to struggles for independence, their legacies remain evident
today in the primacy of whiteness in socio-political and economic rela-
tions, in the normativity of Western governance in politics, in the natural-
ized exploitation of underprivileged bodies for profit, in the destruction of
nature by compulsive extractivism, and other aspects of contemporaneity
rooted in colonialism. Therefore, the prefix de- added to the verb “colo-
nize” and the noun “colonization” suggests a process of stripping, as
L. Custódio (*)
Åbo Akademi University, Turku, Finland
e-mail: leonardo.custodio@abo.fi

Switzerland AG 2021
178 L. CUSTÓDIO
much as possible, whatever effects of colonialism from all dimensions

of life.
For these reasons, the perception that the term “decolonization” has
become a comfortable buzzword in and out of academia is very unsettling.
Scholars and activists who belong to social groups that have historically
suffered from the atrocities and legacies of colonialism have denounced
the danger of depoliticizing the term. From an indigenous standpoint in
North America, Eve Tuck, an indigenous scholar, and K. Wayne Yang
argue against the process of reducing decolonization into a metaphor.
They denounce how well-meaning settler scholars who call for decoloniz-
ing schools, methods, and curricula, for example, have in fact appropriated
and depoliticized decolonial discourse in ways to alleviate their guilt and
complicity to power relations established in colonialism (Tuck and Yang
2012). Similarly motivated, Dr. Nayantara Sheoran Appleton, an Indian
immigrant in New Zealand’s academia, proposes a different vocabulary list
for practical actions (including terms like “diversification of curriculum,”
“devaluing of hierarchies,” and “decentralization of knowledge produc-
tion”) for scholars to avoid emptying “decolonization” of its political
meaning (Appleton 2019). Other voices from South America (e.g. Rivera
Cusicanqui 2012) and Africa (e.g. Hlabangane 2018) have also contested
the colonial legacies in decolonial discourses and practices in predomi-
nantly white and Westernized academia (Grossfoguel et al. 2016; Bhambra
et al. 2018; see also Vega, this book).
This chapter is a contribution to similar debates that reinforce the
socio-political character and relevance of decolonization as a term that
denotes anti-hegemonic and transformative knowledge and action. My
objective is to demonstrate the decolonial nature of practices of comunica-
ção popular (in Portuguese, or comunicación popular, in Spanish). In
short, comunicação popular entails community-building and contentious
processes of communication created by underprivileged, marginalized,
and structurally oppressed social groups. First, I position myself socio-
politically and reflect upon what (de)colonization means from my stand-
point in academia and society. Then, I analyze practices of comunicação
popular as decolonial actions for social change. I illustrate my arguments
with examples of favela media activist actions to prevent the spread of
Covid-19 in favelas of Rio de Janeiro. The examples I present feature
media activist collectives with which I familiarized through research and
solidarity with favela residents engaged in media uses for social justice,
human rights, and changes in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil (see Custódio 2017).
10 THE DECOLONIAL NATURE OF COMUNICAÇÃO POPULAR 179
What Does “Decolonial” Mean?

The unsettling feeling caused by the perception of depoliticization of
decolonization as an essentially anti-hegemonic term arises from the situ-
atedness of my learning and knowledge production (cf. Intemann 2019).
I am a Black scholar from the South in academia at the north of the North.
The observation, in Finland (where I live) and elsewhere in Europe, of
conferences and symposiums that call for decolonization has made funda-
mental questions become recurrent on my mind: what does decoloniza-
tion mean? How does the meaning of the imperative “decolonize” vary
according to those who call for it?
Political and epistemological questions like these, grounded on one’s
self and positionality, tend to be derogatorily reduced and dismissed as a
matter of “identity politics” (cf. Alcoff et al. 2006). However, I am refer-
ring to my Black-Brazilianess not only as an identity, but as a historical,
cultural, and political evidence of the impact of colonialism and its legacies
on people’s bodies, minds, social relations, and actions as political agents
(cf. Bonilla-Silva and Zuberi 2008). In other words, quoting the late
Abdias do Nascimento, one of Brazil’s leading Black scholars:
I cannot and it does not interest me to transcend myself as social scientists

declare to supposedly do in relation to their investigations. In relation to
me, I consider myself to be part of the researched subject. It is only from my
own experience and situation in the ethnic-cultural group to which I belong,
interacting in the global context of the Brazilian society, that I can catch a
glimpse of the reality that conditions and defines my being. Situation that
involves me like a historical belt from which I cannot consciously escape
without practicing lies, betrayals, or the distortion of my personality.
(Nascimento 1978, p. 41, italics in the original)1
As a late twentieth-century descendant of the enslaved in Africa by the

Portuguese, I was not colonized. I am colonial. I have no experience of
ancestry and life that is not colonial. Most people like me have no idea
1
“Não posso e não me interessa transcender a mim mesmo, como habitualmente os cien-
tistas sociais declaram supostamente fazer em relação às suas investigações. Quanto a mim,
considero-me parte da matéria investigada. Somente da minha própria experiência e situação
no grupo étnico-cultural a que pertenço, interagindo no contexto global da sociedade
brasileira, é que posso surpreender a realidade que condiciona o meu ser e o define. Situação
que me envolve qual um cinturão histórico de onde não posso escapar conscientemente sem
praticar a mentira, a traição, ou a distorção da minha personalidade.”
180 L. CUSTÓDIO
where their ethnic, linguistic, and cultural roots in Africa are. Most of us
cannot even trace back our genealogical tree beyond our grandparents.
Most of us grew up with colonial values infused into us daily through
white supremacist narratives of sub-humanity shaping our character and
our relationship to the public space (Nascimento 1978). Take religion, for
example. As a consequence of the imposition and assimilation of
Christianity over the centuries, those in Brazil who remained faithful to
African religions continue, to this day, to be perceived as evil (cf. Engler
and Schmidt 2016). In addition, many of us still have to wear white masks
(Fanon 2017) to survive and thrive in a capitalist world where whiteness is
the standard for everything positive while Blackness—and the features of
other Othered social groups—remains as a trace of the dangerous threats
to be surveilled and violently controlled (Mbembe 2019), the culture to
be commodified (Sansone 2003), and the history of resistance (Santana
2019; Mitchell 2018) and struggle for humanity (Fanon 1967) to be
ignored or mistreated as actions of a past of oppression that is wrongfully
believed to no longer exist (Alves 2018).
It is from within this framework of shared histories that my questions
about the meaning of decolonization arise. It is also in this framework that
the thinking toward an answer takes shape by, as a first step, reflecting
about what the adjective “colonial” means. For that reflection, I believe it
is important to highlight the difference between “colonialism” and
“coloniality.”
Colonialism is a term that designates a historical process. Indian scholar
Ania Loomba (2015) reflects on how dictionary entries about the term do
not often include the complexity of conquest and domination of other
people’s land and goods. While Loomba acknowledges that similar pat-
terns of colonial expansion have happened since ancient times, she also
emphasizes the importance of identifying the difference that characterizes
the colonial expansion of European nations. “European colonialisms
involved a variety of techniques and patterns of domination, penetrating
deep into some societies and involving a comparatively superficial contact
with others, all of them produced the economic imbalance that was neces-
sary for the growth of European capitalism and industry” (Loomba 2015,
p. 22). Loomba also makes an important distinction (23–24) between
administrative colonialism—as it happened in India to her native ances-
tors—and settler colonialism—as it happened in Brazil to my enslaved
ancestors.
In contrast, coloniality is a conceptual construct that sheds light on the

material and symbolic consequences of colonialism in social life (Mignolo
and Escobar 2010). The Peruvian sociologist Aníbal Quijano coined the
notion of “coloniality” in the early 1990s in an intellectual effort to re-
think modernity from a Latin American perspective. In the essay
“Coloniality and Modernity/Rationality” (Quijano 2007), Quijano
reflects on the history of European colonialism to argue that while the
administrative domination in the southern hemisphere has ended, the
colonial structure of power built on social discriminations, Eurocentric
knowledge production and legitimation, and the universal character of
European culture has remained to the present time. In other words, as
Walter Mignolo defines it, coloniality is the nastier side of European
modernity (Mignolo 2011). Following Quijano, the Puerto Rican scholar
Nelson Maldonado-Torres (2007) developed a definition for coloniality
that is very important for its clarity.
[Coloniality] refers to long-standing patterns of power that emerged as a

result of colonialism, but that define culture, labor, intersubjective relations,
and knowledge production well beyond the strict limits of colonial adminis-
trations. Thus, coloniality survives colonialism. It is maintained alive in
books, in the criteria for academic performance, in cultural patterns, in com-
mon sense, in the self-image of peoples, in aspiration of self, and so many
other aspects of our modern experience. In a way, as modern subjects we
breathe coloniality all the time and everyday. (Maldonado-Torres
2007, p. 243)
The differentiation between colonialism and coloniality contributes to

grasping another set of differences related to the meanings of the prefixes
anti-, post-, neo-, and de- when connected to the adjective “colonial.”
Each of these prefixes indicate specific bodies of political and/or episte-
mological discourses. For suggesting opposition to colonialism, “anticolo-
nial” often refers to historical-political movements and the critical thinking
engaged against colonial rule across the colonized South (Elam 2017).
“Postcolonial” designates both the historical legacy following the end of
European colonial administration (Ivison 2017) and a diverse and con-
flicting field of scholarship across the humanities and social sciences dedi-
cated to interrogating the colonial past, its aftermath, and remaining
relevance in culture, politics, economy, and society (Gandhi 2019).
Referring to a historical phenomenon, “neocolonial” suggests a mutation
182 L. CUSTÓDIO
and the persistence of colonial characteristics in local and global power
relations defined by cultural, financial, and economic domination, control,
and subjection in today’s capitalist and neoliberal world (Ponzanesi 2018).
Finally, “decolonial” designates both the historical movements to rip
countries apart from colonial rule and the intellectual action to dismantle
coloniality during and after colonialism (Mignolo and Escobar 2010).
That is, actions deemed as decolonial target four interrelated dimensions
of the colonial matrix of power as defined by Walter Mignolo: the histori-
cal and systematic management and control of subjectivities (e.g. through
Christianity), authority (e.g. through colonial administration), economy
(e.g. land exploitation), and knowledge (e.g. European epistemology. See
also Blauner and Wellman 1998). Racism (the control of non-white peo-
ple) and patriarchy (the control of women) underlie the production of
knowledge in this matrix (Mignolo 2011).
Therefore, the notion of a colonial matrix of power provides us with a
suitable blueprint with which to analyze symbolic and material levels of
resistance against coloniality around the world. Brazil, where I was born,
is still a deeply colonial society if we think in terms of coloniality. This is
evident in how Christianity and capitalism dominate Brazilian subjectivity,
how political authority is still controlled by white settler colonizers, how
the logics of exploitation of natural resources still define our economy,
how Westernized knowledge still enjoys institutional legitimacy, and how
the intersection and hierarchies of race and gender, combined with class,
still seem to determine sociability and power relations (Jodhka et al. 2018;
Souza 2009).
The theoretical understanding of coloniality combined with my lived
experience as a Black Brazilian man makes me believe that the contesting
character denoted in the term “decolonial” at both material/historical
and symbolic levels resembles the contesting nature of comunicação popu-
lar at the levels of politics and epistemology.
Comunicação Popular as Decolonial Action

The meaning of the adjective “popular” in the term comunicação popular
is intrinsically connected with the way coloniality developed in Latin
America. In English, “popular” primarily refers to the characteristics of
someone or something who enjoys popularity among a large number of
people. Also in English, “popular” also refers to people in general, espe-
cially in contrast to those in positions of political, economic, and cultural
power. These meanings also exist in Portuguese and Spanish, but in Latin
America the term “popular” also denotes characteristics and actions of the
populations who are impoverished, underprivileged, discriminated
against,and predominantly racialized as indigenous and black. That is,
“popular” refers to qualities and actions of the povo (Portuguese)/pueblo
(Spanish), the noun that often designates people disregarded as sub-
citizens by the better-off, predominantly white classes that have built their
wealth across generations by maintaining the colonial logic of exploitation
of low-paid labor and the inheritances of financial, political, and cultural
power (for studies on sub-citizenship and inequalities in Brazil, see Souza
2003; Holston 2008; see also Peruzzo 1998, pp. 116–118; for the diver-
sity of appropriations and understandings around the term popular; see
also Gomez Obando, this book).
In such contexts of inequalities, the perception of “popular” as a posi-
tive or negative varies according to: (a) one’s position within social hierar-
chies; and (b) how threatening or beneficial to the maintenance of the
unequal social order someone or something is. The more one benefits
from coloniality (e.g. by having low-paid services, accessing high-quality
public services and jobs with certain exclusivity, enjoying safety and pro-
tection of state-provided security without dealing with their violence,
etc.), the more likely one is to despise popular expressions and actions. In
contrast, the more one suffers from coloniality (e.g. being dependent on
low-quality education and healthcare, being forced to accept low wages
for everyday survival, being surveilled and repressed by the state’s military
apparatuses, etc.), the more likely one is to identify with, learn from, cel-
ebrate, and act according to popular expressions and actions. In other
words, for many beneficiaries of coloniality, popular expressions and
actions represent backwardness, lack of manners, symbols of stupidity and
ignorance, and danger to their inherited welfare. For many who suffer
from coloniality, the “popular” represents creative forms of celebration
and resistance of the diverse knowledge, culture, and worldviews among
historically oppressed, but very diverse populations in their wisdom and
creativity.
Unsurprisingly, “popular” phenomena are at times treated as inferior,
criminal and/or opportunistically appropriated by representatives of the
white supremacist values that dominate Latin American societies. In Brazil,
the history of samba is very telling of how popular expressions and actions
are treated. Samba appeared in the early twentieth century not only as a
music genre, but as a means for low-income black workers to record their
184 L. CUSTÓDIO
oral histories, to historicize their everyday life, to celebrate their culture,

and to mobilize and contest the persisting patterns of exploitation by the
upper classes and the violent repression of the state. Samba, in cultural and
political terms, is decolonial. Perhaps for these reasons the white political
and economic elites and elitist middle classes deemed it not only as low-
culture (or non-culture), but also as a crime. However, for being an
expression of popular wisdom, culture, and politics shared by so many
people, samba gained popularity among black low-income populations
and beyond. Gradually the elites saw this popularity as an opportunity. So,
they appropriated it. Politicians used samba for their populist propaganda,
media owners used samba to increase their audiences, the business sector
used samba to increase the appeal of their products and to increase their
consumption. Today, despite samba’s commercial success and its impor-
tance for the people who most identify with its messages, many still see
and treat samba and its variations as less worthy cultural expressions than
those of American and European origins. The logic of elites despising,
discriminating and—depending on popularity—appropriating popular
expressions seems to be recurrent in other forms of music as well as culi-
nary traditions, dialects, arts, and literature.
As a social phenomenon, comunicação popular is similarly a kind of
decolonial action in societies where coloniality remains a strong source of
inequalities. In short, comunicação popular happens when people at the
bottom of the social hierarchies in urban and rural settings collectively
raise their voices and, with whatever means available, communicate poli-
tics that challenge the dominant colonial ideas and mobilize social change
on their own terms (cf. Peruzzo 2009; Suzina 2019a, b). In Latin America,
we could argue that the historically plural practices of comunicação popu-
lar are both antagonic to communication by mainstream media outlets
(that have historically reinforced and reproduced coloniality) and dialectic
as they contribute to cultural transformations and media democratization
often through grassroots participatory processes (cf. Peruzzo 1998,
p. 119). Rising from the context of struggles by people who suffer the
most from inequalities, comunicação popular works as spaces for demo-
cratic expression and sharing of critical thinking instrumental for those
involved to act as protagonists in the struggles against the consequences of
coloniality (cf. Peruzzo 1998, pp. 124–129; 2017).
Decolonial Comunicação Popular Against

Coronavirus in the Favelas of Rio de Janeiro
The way residents of favelas in Rio de Janeiro have engaged with media
activism to help prevent the spread of Covid-19 in the places where they
live are good illustrative examples of decolonial comunicação popular. Let
me start by clarifying, as I have done in more detail elsewhere (Custódio
2017), what I understand favelas to mean. Most people often associate
favelas with two things: poverty and violence. It is undeniable that favelas
suffer from high crime rates and low-quality public services (e.g. educa-
tion, health care, waste management, water supply, and leisure facilities).
These two characteristics are perhaps some of the most perverse material-
izations of coloniality in the everyday life of low-income working-class
Brazilians. However, favelas have existed since the end of the nineteenth
century because of the historical disregard of the country for the predomi-
nantly black and mixed-race poor who gradually and uncoordinatedly
occupied uninhabited urban spaces (e.g. forests on hills, abandoned build-
ings, and swampy areas) so that they could settle in the surroundings of
work opportunities. As favelas grew in size and number throughout the
twentieth century, so did the community mobilizations by residents acting
collectively for housing, security, respect, and rights. The twenty-first cen-
tury media activism in favelas is one of the contemporary faces of the his-
tory of popular struggles against the consequences of coloniality in
everyday life.
What I refer to as “favela media activism” can be considered a form of
comunicação popular (Giannotti 2016). By favela media activism I mean
the individual and collective actions of favela residents in, through and
about the media. These contesting actions derive from and/or lead to the
enactment of citizenship among favela residents. By engaging in media
activism inside, outside and across favelas, favela residents raise critical
awareness among peers, generate public debates, and mobilize actions
against or in reaction to material and symbolic consequences of social
inequality in their everyday lives (Custódio 2017). How does this idea of
favela media activism characterize as decolonial action in practice? The
(re)actions of favela-based media activist collectives during the Covid-19
pandemic illustrate how this form of comunicação popular is decolonial.
Let me describe—purposefully in a superficial way—how some media
activist collectives whose actions I have studied since 2013 have been
active to prevent the spread of the coronavirus in favelas. Coletivo Papo
186 L. CUSTÓDIO
Reto (Straight Talk Collective) was created in 2013 with the proposal of
communicating in clear and direct terms with residents and outsiders
about the everyday life struggles in the favela of Complexo do Alemão
and other favelas of Rio de Janeiro. This communication includes inten-
sive interactions on different social media platforms (e.g. Facebook,
Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, blogs), phone applications (e.g. WhatsApp),
and face-to-face conversations in meetings, events, and demonstrations.
Coletivo Papo Reto combines journalistic reporting with political mobiliza-
tion strategies. A second initiative is called Maré Vive and was created in
2014 as an anonymous network of residents in the favela of Complexo da
Maré. Its name means “Maré Lives” in reference to the vibrant local cul-
ture and social diversity. Maré Vive uses social networks (e.g. Facebook,
Twitter) and mobile phone applications (e.g. WhatsApp) to communicate
and mediate communication among favela residents and to non-favela
residents. The members of Maré Vive are very careful not to reveal their
identities. Then, the group’s public page on Facebook has become one of
the most dynamic spaces for denouncing police violence, governmental
neglect, and for celebrating local culture and traditions.
During the Covid-19 pandemic, both collectives have joined forces
with other individuals and organizations from inside and outside favelas to
act against the spread of the virus in their impoverished and highly popu-
lated neighborhoods. At Complexo do Alemão, members of media activist
collectives have created a crisis task force. At Complexo da Maré, media
activists have created the Mobilization Front of Maré. The timeline of
decolonial actions was similar in both favelas. First, media activist groups
in both favelas used their social media channels to call out the state’s
neglect of impoverished areas when cases of infection started spreading in
Brazil in March 2020. At the first stage, they also emphasized that some
of the measures for prevention (e.g. self-isolation, home office) were not
viable among low-income people who live in small and precarious houses
shared with many relatives. The hashtag #covid19nasfavelas (Covid 19 in
favelas), created and shared by favela media activists, contributed for the
public debates in and beyond favelas about inequalities during the pan-
demic. This kind of contesting actions is decolonial because it denounces
the ways in which the lives of favela residents—mostly direct descendants
of enslaved blacks and exploited and impoverished mixed-race migrants
from Brazil’s Northeast—remain treated as less important than those of
people on the other side of urban segregation and social divide.
After that, both groups started informational campaigns to inform resi-

dents about preventive measures and how to get help if needed. For these
campaigns, the activists realized that they would need to engage with
other forms of communication than digital devices and platforms to reach
as many people in favelas as possible. So, strategically, the activists used
“media” typical of what we could refer to as “favela mediascape.” Banners
hung on light poles in the entrances and corners of favelas to announce
cultural events (e.g. music shows, church activities) were used to spread
the recommendations of the World Health Organization (WHO). In
addition, the collectives recorded the recommendations and, through
crowd-funding campaigns, paid the traditional cars with loudspeakers to
circulate all over the favelas so that even more people would know what to
do in their circumstances to prevent the spread of coronavirus. The deco-
lonial character of these informational campaigns lies in the formation of
for-us-by-us civic counterpublics (cf. Custódio 2017) that contest the mis-
information circulated by supporters of extreme-right, pro-business presi-
dent Jair Bolsonaro who, like the president, claim that the mass infection
of the population is inevitable and that the recommendations for self-
isolation will cause irreparable harm to the country’s economy. This way,
favela activists are countering the elitist and neoliberal ideology that has
washed over Brazilian politics since the elections of 2018—one of the
most evident legacies of colonialism in today’s Brazil—with the promo-
tion of peer-to-peer practices of solidarity through practices of comunica-
ção popular. Even though these counterpublics have a smaller reach and
lower budget than commercial media outlets, their power lies in their
capacity to contest dominant narratives and mobilize actions at the local
level in which they act.
One last example of decolonial practice in the comunicação popular by
favela media activists in the context of the coronavirus pandemic is the
protagonism and leadership of favelados (favela residents) in the mobiliza-
tion of support from outside favelas. By using social media, peer-to-peer
mobile applications, and even designated websites, activists from favelas
have coordinated crowd-funding campaigns to finance their communica-
tional actions, articulated the donations of food and supplies for hygiene,
mobilized support to their actions from public figures and civil society
organizations, and secured support from journalists in mainstream media
outlets.
188 L. CUSTÓDIO
If, in Maldonado-Torres’ terms, coloniality refers to “long-standing pat-
terns of power” originated from colonialism, favela residents have histori-
cally been in the exploited, oppressed, and subaltern end of power
relationships with people and institutions outside favelas. The leadership of
favela residents in these processes of media activism as forms of comunica-
ção popular during the pandemic are an example of a resignification of what
“place in society” favelados occupy. Their organizational skills not only for
solidarity, but also for self-organized action to overcome governmental
neglect have always been known within favelas. Now, they have been able
to demonstrate to the whole society their capacity to lead, mobilize, and
promote change in ways that are educational to many in positions of power
in governments, public institutions, parties, and civil society organizations.
In that sense, in comunicação popular, decolonization is not a comfort-
able buzzword, but a horizon toward which those who have suffered the
most from the consequences of coloniality act (see Contreras Baspineiro,
this book). To be sure, comunicação popular is fundamentally a symbolic
type of action. By collectively raising voices, the people designated by the
term popular express their grievances, contest hegemonic narratives that
discriminate them, call for justice and demand respect to their rights as
citizens and above all as human beings. However, as the cases in favelas
demonstrate, these symbolic actions have very important material conse-
quences. In the context of the Covid-19 pandemic, actions by practitio-
ners of comunicação popular have materialized in donations, hygiene
supplies, and food. More importantly, they have contributed to the dis-
mantlement of the general perception of favelados as poor people in con-
stant need of help and danger and who need violent surveillance and
control. The Brazilian patterns of coloniality have historically deemed pre-
dominantly black and mixed-race favela residents as second-class citizens.
It is against this history of discrimination and neglect not just in Brazil,
but wherever else whole populations are discriminated and neglected, that
comunicação popular proves its decolonial power.
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CHAPTER 11
Digital Media and Emancipation in Latin

American Communication Thinking
Dorismilda Flores-Márquez
Even the smallest person can change the course of history.

—Lady Galadriel, The Lord of the Rings, JRR Tolkien
There is no change without dream, and there is no dream without hope.
—Paulo Freire
The emergence of digital media has revived the old debates about media
and their possibilities for dominance or emancipation. The Zapatista upris-
ing in 1994 was one of the most emblematic cases of the link between
social movements and the Internet, as their website was a key element to
gain international visibility and solidarity. In recent decades, the presence
of digital media in activism has grown considerably and has contributed to
broadening the access to public expression, to the point that some of the
mobilizations known as the “Arab Spring” were also named the Facebook
revolution or the Twitter revolution. Beyond technological deterministic
D. Flores-Márquez (*)
Universidad De La Salle Bajío, León, México
e-mail: dfloresm@delasalle.edu.mx

Switzerland AG 2021
192 D. FLORES-MÁRQUEZ
perspectives, there is a recognition of the emancipatory dimension of digi-

tal media. However, during all this time some scholars and activists have
warned that not all is freedom and hope in the digital world, as the dark
side of technology has also grown, by creating resources for surveillance,
repression, and misinformation. The triumphs of Donald Trump in the
United States and Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil have drawn the attention to the
information spread by digital media and the algorithmic logics as well, by
emphasizing the domination trends.
This chapter explores digital media and emancipation in Latin American
communication thinking. The first part presents an outline of popular
communication traditions and highlights their emancipatory orientation.
The second part approaches the irruption of digital media, with their pos-
sibilities and challenges. Finally, the chapter ends with a reflection about
the need for nuances.
Emancipation in Latin American Communication

Thinking: A Story about Innovation, Resistance,
and Hope
Latin American communication thinking has grown during the twentieth

and twenty-first centuries as a double way of showing a resistant face to
domination: in practical terms, oppressed communities resisted oppres-
sion with creativity; in theoretical terms, Latin American scholars resisted
the Anglo and Eurocentric theoretical production by exploring, analyzing,
and explaining their own context, by reformulating or discussing concepts,1
and particularly by articulating the practical projects with theoretical pro-
duction. However, these developments have been concentrated within the
continent, suffering a certain invisibility beyond the borders (Enghel and
Becerra 2018; Ganther and Ortega 2019).
Gabriel Kaplún (2013) has identified four main traditions in the Latin
American communication field: functionalist, critical, culturalist, and
1
The concept of development is an example. Beltrán (2005) tried to go beyond the idea
of development as economic growth and redefined it as a process of deep and accelerated
socio-political change that transforms the economy, ecology, and culture of a country, with
the aim of promoting the moral and material advance of the majority of the of population in
conditions of dignity, justice, and freedom. These discussions have been widespread in differ-
ent lines, for example, to the field of communication for development, as Latin American
scholars questioned the notion of development: what development, by whom, and for whom.
11 DIGITAL MEDIA AND EMANCIPATION IN LATIN AMERICAN… 193
alternativist. As will be seen in the following paragraphs, these traditions

are not separated from each other, but they are closely intertwined and
crossed.
First: the functionalist perspective, which did not originate its own
development on the continent, but appropriated theoretical proposals in
order to study the effects and functions of the media. Second: the critical
emancipatory perspective—based on the Frankfurt school and semiotic
studies—was focused on power, and the economic and discursive struc-
tures of media. In this line, the contributions of Armand Mattelart, Héctor
Schmucler, among other authors, were key to the development of this
tradition. Both perspectives focused on media and their direct persuasive
effects over audiences.
By contrast, the culturalist and alternativist perspectives proposed a
shift, in order to recognize the role of audiences and the presence of the
popular in mass communication and culture. Although the link with
British cultural studies is important, the key contributions on the Latin
American culturalist perspectives were Jesús Martín-Barbero with De los
medios a las mediaciones—published in English as Communication,
Culture and Hegemony: From the Media to Mediations—and Néstor García
Canclini with Culturas híbridas—Hybrid Cultures.
Meanwhile, the alternativist perspective set a practical interest as a start-
ing point: beyond the research, some activists, practitioners, and scholars
were trying to generate alternatives to face mainstream communication in
popular education NGOs, small local radio stations, and community cul-
tural centers. This perspective is linked with the Freirean popular educa-
tion tradition that is oriented to the emancipation of the oppressed.
According to him, emancipation is a possibility achievable in practical
terms through popular education and communication: “Problem-posing
education, as a humanist and liberating praxis, posits as fundamental that
the people subjected to domination must fight for their emancipation
[…]. Problem-posing education does not and cannot serve the interests of
the oppressor” (Freire 2005, p. 86). Emancipation, thus, is a struggle
against oppression.
In Latin America, oppression has had different faces: first, centuries
ago, the European colonization tried to erase the diversity in terms of
culture, ethnicities, languages, religions, and more (Freire 2005; Freire
and Macedo 2005; Therborn 2011). Our current generations are a prod-
uct of that encounter, but we recognize that the encounter was violent
and painful.
Second, during the twentieth century, some Latin American countries

developed a political history of civil and military dictatorships and authori-
tarian regimes, that implied a constant attack on human rights, such as
military and police repression, genocides, forced disappearances, torture,
threats, and more. In addition, there were several US interventions—some
of them military interventions—in Latin American political affairs
(Garretón 2003; Garretón and Garretón 2010).
Third, during the recent decades extractive industries have proliferated
in Latin American countries. Most projects come from multinational com-
panies and operate with the approval of national governments, while
affecting indigenous communities by neglecting the basic actions to avoid
risks, resulting in environmental and sanitary degradation, or even occu-
pying sacred territories, without sharing benefits with the people. In this
way, extractivism replicate the history of colonization (Raftopoulus 2017).
Fourth, the persistent inequalities form a continuum since the times of
colonization until our days. Latin America has been historically character-
ized by high levels of inequality, and their causes and consequences are
complex, as income, educational level, gender, age, ethnicity, and other
factors, are intertwined (CEPAL 2019; Therborn 2011).
All this history of oppression has had its correlate in the realm of com-
munication practices and media. On one hand, certain communities and/
or sectors have historically been silenced by different actors. On the other
hand, the communities found ways of expressing themselves through dif-
ferent tactics.2 In this way, Latin America experienced the rise of popular
communication in practice, previous to any theory (see Uranga, this
book). Several projects began in the 1940s, trying to give a voice to the
voiceless, making education more accessible, promoting the participation
of citizens, through projects as the Radioescuelas in Colombia, the radios
mineras in Bolivia, and more (Beltrán 2005) (see also Orue Pozzo and
Prieto Castillo, this book).
These popular communication projects continued rising through the
1970s and 1980s and beyond, under different notions such as popular
communication, alternative communication, community communication,
edu-communication, horizontal communication, participatory communi-
cation, communication for development, and communication for social
2
According to Scott (1990), subordinate groups produce hidden transcripts that are pub-
licly visible, but have a double meaning that is not public. These hidden transcripts express
dissent and are present in songs, rituals, jokes, and more.
change (Alfaro-Moreno 2000; Beltrán 2005; Kaplún 2007, 2013, 2019;

Navarro Nicoletti and Rodríguez Marino 2018). Each notion has its own
particularities and emphasis, but all coincide in their key elements, as we
may see in the following paragraphs.
The socio-historical context in Latin America has been characterized by
contrasts between wealth—in cultural diversity and natural resources—
and inequalities—poverty, racism, discrimination, illiteracy, health prob-
lems, gender violence, human rights violations. This translated into a
fertile ground for the emergence of projects that pursuit social change. As
I mentioned previously, some of these projects started with the aim of
solving a practical problem in specific groups or communities—such as
learning something or communicating with the others about common
issues—through interventions. In this way, there was a link between alter-
native communication and popular education processes, social move-
ments, as well as the development of liberation theology (Alfaro-Moreno
1999, 2000; Kaplún 2013; see also Uranga, this book).
Another characteristic is the participation of popular or oppressed sec-
tors that had been traditionally marginalized. There is a link with indige-
nous communication and, in this way, an intercultural dimension as these
projects propose the recognition of diversity in the world (Gumucio-
Dagron 2014). The development of alternative or popular media enabled
the voiceless to have a voice and construct their own spaces for public
expression. These also facilitated the participation of actors in horizontal
models based on dialogue that challenge the vertical models of the mass
media. The terms “alternative communication” and “alternative media”
emphasize these reactive positions’ attitude to mainstream media. This is
linked with the exercise of creativity and ingenuity in their interventions
and communication practices, instead of large budgets and magical for-
mulas to reach large audiences.
In addition, these projects coincide with the orientation toward social
transformation from the grass roots, which in several cases involved the pro-
motion of political engagement and critical thinking attitudes against domi-
nation and repression. Of course, these projects have not been exempted
from complications, contradictions, and critics. The main complications
have been the continuity, the resources and, in some cases, the repression.
Thus, the popular communication tradition represents innovation,
resistance, and hope for Latin American societies. The innovation was
present in the ways of understanding and practicing community, culture,
media, communication, and freedom of expression. The experiences allow
the observation of the creativity of participants to intervene and transform

their reality. Furthermore, the core of these experiences is hope, as the
projects seek to foster the imagination and creation of a better world. In
this way, Rosa María Alfaro-Moreno (2000) argues that popular commu-
nication is an ethical proposal against hopelessness, in which communica-
tion is the way to construct a society of justice and solidarity.
In sum, in Latin America, alternative and popular communication
experiences have been—or, at least, have tried to be—clearly emancipa-
tory. These started from an ethical inspiration of responsibility with the
community and operated through a participatory dialogue oriented
toward their liberation (Alfaro-Moreno 2000).
This emancipatory nature of popular communication involves media,
practices, and actors. Popular/community/alternative media may imply
forms of ownership different to the media corporations, forms of manage-
ment and operation that are not focused only on economic profit, con-
tents that propose new issues respect to those of mainstream media, and
non-dominant communication models as well (Kaplún 2019). This chal-
lenges the mainstream media logics and opens the door to the possibility
of expression.
In this way, the media are not enough on their own, but their practices
have the potential for making a difference, as one of the main contribu-
tions of popular communication has been the shift from vertical to hori-
zontal models, based on dialogue and participation processes
(Gumucio-Dagron 2014; Servaes 1996). Long before the rise of digital
media, these models broke the logic of mainstream one-to-many commu-
nication, thus making possible many-to-many communication models.
Finally, practices are not abstractions and do not exist on their own;
practices are performed by actors. In this way actors have pursued social
change with their needs and limitations, but also with their creativity and
hard work (see Bona, this book). These actors include people with profes-
sional training in communication, but also people without it, as we all
have the right to communicate (Martín-Barbero 2002). Moreover, these
emancipatory processes are focused not on individuals, but on communi-
ties (Alfaro-Moreno 2000).
As I said previously, this represents a double way maintaining a resis-
tance face to domination: on one hand, the practical resistance that has
been developed to solve specific problems in communities; on the other
hand, the theoretical resistance, where some Latin American scholars have
proposed alternative ways of understanding the communication practices,
media, and actors, by recognizing the relevance of Anglo and Eurocentric

theoretical production, as well as its inadequacy to explain in depth the
complex realities on this side of the world.
The Irruption of Digital Media: Possibilities,

Challenges, and Struggles
Every time a medium emerges, a set of debates about its possibilities for
dominance or emancipation comes with it. Such was the case with cinema,
the press, and television. In this way, the irruption of digital media has
revived old debates about media. While some scholars and practitioners
were optimistic about the new resources, another sector warned of the
dark side of technology that could open the door to new risks.
Indeed, the Internet—as the core of digital media—has had its own
paradoxes, as its origin is dual. On the one hand, its precursor in the late
1960s was ARPANET (Advanced Research Projects Agency Network),
which originally received funding from the US Department of Defense to
create a network of computers that could communicate remotely. On the
other hand, we owe the creation of the World Wide Web to Tim Berners-
Lee and his team at CERN (Conseil Européen pour la Recherche
Nucléaire, based in Switzerland) in 1990. This innovation sought to make
the network accessible for everyone and become the most common way of
access to the Internet (Allmer 2015; Berners-Lee 1990; Briggs and Burke
2002; Castells 2001).
This implies a permanent tension between control and freedom that
has continued to grow. The side of control is visible in legislative proposals
such as SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act) in the United States and Sinde
Law in Spain, also in surveillance programs such as PRISM—a project of
the US National Security Agency—and many others. The side of emanci-
pation is assumed mostly by activists through cyber-insurgency projects
such as WikiLeaks and Anonymous, independent media such as IndyMedia
and Mídia NINJA, knowledge management initiatives such as Wikipedia
and, more recently, data activism initiatives (Assange et al. 2012;
Coleman 2013; Kidd 2003, 2019; Lievrouw 2011; Milan and Treré 2019;
Olson 2013; Scharlau Vieira 2013; Vila Seoane and Hornidge 2020).
For the Latin American popular communication tradition, the emer-
gence of digital media has represented new spaces, opportunities, and pos-
sibilities of expression, organization, and participation in the digital public
sphere. Of course, this does not mean we should be complacent and sim-
ply obviate that these countries have had very different trends in digital
inclusion,3 as the expansion of the Internet within the continent and the
access to technology among the population is closely linked with other
factors, such as educative and socio-economic levels, which must be con-
sidered in these very unequal countries. This just means that we recognize
the relevance of digital media projects’ experiences, with their contribu-
tions and challenges.
Alternative media—as mentioned in the last section—challenge the logic
of mainstream media in terms of ownership, management, contents, and
communication models (Kaplún 2019). Leah Lievrouw (2011) focuses on
the digital realm and defines alternative/activist new media as those that
“employ or modify the communication artifacts, practices, and social
arrangements of new information and communication technologies to chal-
lenge or alter dominant, expected, of accepted ways of doing society, cul-
ture, and politics” (p. 19). This author highlights that alternative media do
not stay in the level of reflection or critique about mainstream media and
their logics, but they intervene to change those logics and create new ones.
In her proposal, Lievrouw (2011) distinguishes five basic genres of
contemporary alternative and activist new media projects, that appropriate
the resources in relation to specific purposes: culture jamming, alternative
computing, participatory journalism, mediated mobilization, and com-
mons knowledge. Culture jamming refers to the appropriation and “repur-
pose” that subvert elements from popular culture. Alternative computing
includes the development of technological resources that face the threats
of surveillance or censorship. Participatory journalism uses digital media
to practice alternative ways of producing news, opposite to the logics of
mainstream media. Mediated mobilization creates and maintain networks
that contribute to the organization and spreading of collective action.
Finally, commons knowledge seeks for new and free ways of producing
and sharing knowledge.
As Lievrouw (2011) recognizes, some of these genres have their roots
in art and alternative media projects existing before the Internet, such as
the activist art of Dada and the Situationist International. In the case of the
3
There are important differences among Latin American countries in terms of the incor-
poration and expansion of the Internet. Even in the present, data show high levels of digital
inclusion in countries like Chile and Argentina, as well as very low levels in countries such as
Nicaragua and Haiti (ITU 2019).
Latin American popular communication tradition, this has been explored

during the twentieth century with options such as the theater of the
oppressed, fanzines, community radio, and much more. In this way, for
popular communicators the horizontal, participatory, and dialogic models
do not come only from the possibilities of digital media. But the reticular
and interactive logic of the Internet aligned well with their projects, and
broadened the possibilities linked with reach, speed, and simultaneity.
Some alternative communication projects are oriented to public expres-
sion, while others involve the transformation of digital technologies.
The most evident face of alternative communication projects in digital
media is the access to public expression, that challenges the non-democratic
logics of mainstream media by enabling users to gain visibility and to take
part in the global public sphere (Flores-Márquez 2019). These projects
are usually driven by activists—with or without professional training in
communication and digital media—by designing websites, as well as using
mainstream platforms and applications, such as Facebook, Twitter,
Instagram, YouTube, among others. The appropriation consists in their
exercise of freedom of expression, by presenting their worldviews.
The Zapatista movement, as previously mentioned, has been one of the
most emblematic cases of articulation between mobilization at the grass
roots and the spreading of information through the Web. Although this
movement began in 1983, it became known on January 1, 1994,4 when
the Zapatistas took up arms in Chiapas, in southern Mexico, the same day
that the North America Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) went into force
in Mexico, the United States, and Canada. This struggle against neoliber-
alism made evident the inequalities caused by it that have particularly
affected indigenous communities.
Paradoxically, the Zapatistas did not have access to the Internet and
other basic services. Thus, the creation and maintenance of their website
required a strong collaboration among volunteers in Mexico and abroad
(Schulz 2014). This spreading of information through the web contrib-
uted to making visible the Zapatista movement all around the world,
breaking the unfavorable Mexican mainstream media coverage, and gain-
ing international solidarity as well (Castells 2001; Islas and Gutiérrez
2000; Russell 2001; Sagástegui 2004). There are different perspectives
about this case; some of them romanticize the use of the Internet, by
4
January 1, 1994 was also the day that the North America Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA)
went into force, which included Canada, the United States, and Mexico.
focusing just on that part instead of the deep political and cultural move-
ment; while others try to explain the relevance of digital media as one
factor, but not the only one.
In the recent decades, some movements have launched their own alter-
native digital media, in order to communicate with their peers and larger
audiences as well. Such is the case of mobilizations in Argentina, Brazil,
Chile, Colombia, Mexico, among other countries in Latin America and
the rest of the world. These movements have emphasized a critical posi-
tion face to the mainstream media and their non-democratic practices.
They have also experienced lack of coverage and even criminalization
through media framing (Cardoso and Di Fátima 2013; Castells 2012;
Gómez and Treré 2014; Mansilla Hernández 2014; Rovira 2013). In con-
trast, they have found in digital media the ideal spaces for raising their
voices without intermediaries and participating in the public sphere.
One relevant case in these years is Mídia NINJA, that had emerged in
2011, but gained international visibility in the 2013 demonstrations in
Brazil. People were protesting in the streets and squares against excessive
public spending in the preparation for the 2014 FIFA World Cup, that
basic services were not a priority in governmental projects, so that inequal-
ities and discontents were increasing. In that context, Mídia NINJA pro-
vided an innovative real-time coverage, spreading through socio-digital
media. NINJA is the acronym of Narrativas Independentes, Jornalismo e
Ação—in English Independent Narratives Journalism and Action. The
project enhanced collaboration in independent journalism, challenged the
newsworthiness criteria and the authorship logics of mainstream media,
exercised the right to freedom of expression, and provided an alternative
source of news (Martinez and Persichetti 2015; Scharlau Vieira 2013;
Schneider and Da Silva 2019; Vila Seoane and Hornidge 2020).
These kinds of experiences in Latin America and all around the world
match with what Lievrouw (2011) calls culture jamming, participatory
journalism, mediated mobilization, and commons knowledge, and chal-
lenges the management, contents, and communication models of main-
stream media (Kaplún 2019). These projects contribute to sustain the idea
of digital media as spaces where freedom of expression is possible in face
to the mainstream media coverage, where users are able to communicate
with their peers and knit networks of identification and solidarity in local
and global contexts. Its relevance lies in the possibility of gaining visibility,
taking part in the global public sphere, making evident the diversity of
world views, but the risk is to romanticize the digital media logics, and
ignore their contradictions. The same digital platforms that enable users
to share information and raise their voices, at the same time “enable the
collection, analysis, and sale of personal data by commercial web plat-
forms” (Allmer 2015, p. 3), leading us back to the duality of the Internet.
Various authors focus their gaze on capitalism, as this tension in the way
of understanding information has to do with its benefits.
Based on a critical and dialectical perspective, it is possible to comprehend

these contradictions occurring between emancipatory potentials of new and
digital media that imply a logic of the commons and processes of commodi-
fication and enclosure that tend to jeopardize the commons and incorporate
them into the logic of capital. (Allmer 2015, p. 5)
Indeed, critical approaches to the study of the Internet in everyday life

raise some key questions: “Is Internet use empowering or oppressing peo-
ple? Is Internet use leading to more equality and opportunity for people?
Does it alienate and exploit people?” (Bakardjieva 2011, p. 63). Thus,
issues such as data management, surveillance, repression, censorship, fake
news, and misinformation have attracted the attention of scholars, practi-
tioners, and activists, who have identified in digital media the perpetuation
of neoliberalism, capitalism, and colonialism logics (Couldry and Mejías
2019; Fuchs 2017; Kidd 2019; Milan and Treré 2019; Ricaurte 2019;
Treré 2019).
The discussion on data colonialism highlights these concerns. Broadly
speaking, colonialism refers to the invasion and exploitation of one coun-
try by another country. It included violent invasion, exploitation of natu-
ral resources and the labor force, and repression or even annihilation of
native peoples. In recent years, the notion of colonialism also began to be
employed to think about data in the digital age (see Custódio, in this book).
According to Couldry and Mejías (2019), “data colonialism combines
the predatory extractive practices of historical colonialism with the abstract
quantification methods of computing” (p. 337). This operates in various
ways. In material terms, the production of ICT devices is linked with the
extraction of minerals, while in information terms, the operation of digital
platforms implies the data extractivism too. These processes are natural-
ized in the everyday use of digital media but involve a non-transparent and
non-necessarily-ethic management of data, privacy, freedom of expression
and digital rights (Allmer 2015; Couldry and Mejías 2019; Fuchs 2009;
Kidd 2019; Ricaurte 2019).
In that regard, another area of interest is emerging around algorithms

and algorithmic cultures. Although algorithms have been present in the
whole history of digital media, the discussions about them and their impli-
cations in contemporary societies and cultures have been recently grow-
ing. According to Ted Striphas (2015), “human beings have been
delegating the work of culture—the sorting, classifying and hierarchizing
of people, places, objects and ideas—to data-intensive computational pro-
cesses” (p. 396). Thus, our contemporary culture is crossed by algorithms
that we do not see when we interact with Google, Facebook, Twitter,
Netflix, and other platforms, but it is leading to algorithmic cultures.
This is where other kinds of alternative projects linked with technolo-
gies come in. These initiatives are oriented toward a more radical transfor-
mation, that Lievrouw (2011) call alternative computing. In this way,
Valencia-Rincón (2014) include in a typology of social movements on the
Internet: privacy advocacy, anti-brands, digital divide, free software,
copyleft & digital commons, hackers and hacktivists, and virus creators as
well. The point here is hacking and subverting the dominance logics of
technologies, in order to face up the inequalities.
The case of Rhizomatica in Oaxaca, Mexico, is very relevant. This con-
sists in a community mobile telephony network in indigenous territories,
where major telecommunications corporations do not provide their ser-
vices, and the Mexican government does not provide a solution to the
needs of communication.5 The community and activists used available
devices, free software, and computers to create a network that enabled
people to communicate in a low-cost way (Magallanes-Blanco and
Rodríguez-Medina 2017).
There are other digital media activist initiatives that encourage pro-
cesses of creative appropriation of technologies in terms of freedom,
human rights, participation, and emancipation. Such is the case of
Luchadoras6—a Mexican feminist collective that works on the appropria-
tion of ICT, Internet as a space free of violence, and womens’ rights—and
Sursiendo7—an Mexican activist collective that works on free software,
natural common goods, technopolitics, hacking, and hackfeminisms.
5
One of the consequences of the neoliberal reforms in Mexico was the privatization of
telephone services, from the 1990s.
6
Available at https://luchadoras.mx/.
7
Available at https://www.sursiendo.com/.
As Treré (2016, 2019) highlights, algorithms are the key for propa-
ganda and repression, but also for knowledge and resistance, as activists
have developed strategic appropriations of digital media algorithmic log-
ics. This affects the realm of the political in various ways, as digital media
is a privileged space of interaction and public expression, and of the forma-
tion of certain kinds of imagined communities, in the interaction between
users and algorithms (Treré 2019).
In sum, the emergence of digital media represented a shift in the logic,
from the vertical one-way logic of mass media to a complex reticular logic.
These characteristics aligned well with those of the Latin American popu-
lar communication tradition. The latter emphasize the participation, dia-
logue, and engagement and these elements are not produced by digital
media on their own, but this kind of technological basis enable the action
of previously engaged actors. Anyway, digital media broaden the possibili-
ties for alternative media projects, which involve a wide range from activist
communication practices through mainstream platforms to disruptive
technological development.
Beyond the possibilities, digital media also represent a set of challenges.
Since the beginning of the Internet history, the tensions have been pres-
ent, between control and freedom, commodification and commonization,
colonialism and resistance, domination and emancipation. These make
evident the poles and are usually seem as dichotomic where just one of the
options is possible. However, I emphasize the idea of the tension, as it is a
struggle of forces, where each one pulls to its own side but both share the
space. The challenges are not situated just on one side of the tension, but
in the contradictions and paradoxes. In this way, we may focus on the
struggles among forces.
Conclusion: Is There Emancipation in Digital Media?

The invitation to write this chapter came with the question “is there eman-
cipation in technology?” What a question! In the pursuit of an answer the
chapter presented a brief overview of Latin American communication
thinking, focused on the popular communication tradition and empha-
sized the emancipatory orientation. Within this framework, the emergence
of digital media is approached in this text in terms of possibilities, chal-
lenges, and struggles.
Emancipation, as a pursuit of liberation, implies the notion of domina-
tion. As I said previously, in Latin American communication thinking, the
contributions of Paulo Freire were fundamental to the understanding of

emancipation as a possibility that is achievable through popular education
and communication projects. Emancipation, thus, is not something given,
but a struggle, a process.
In the 1970s, popular communicators did not imagine the digitalization
of everything and the discussions on algorithms. However, contemporary
alternative media projects coincide with the ethical options of Latin American
popular communication tradition, as these understand media not just as a
tool but as a field where they try to construct a better world, by sustaining
hope and resistance, as well as promoting community participation in the
pursuit of liberation (Alfaro-Moreno 2000; Milan and Treré 2019).
Is there emancipation in digital media? Of course there is, but there is
also domination. Both are enabled by the same digital platforms, resources,
and practices. The tensions between logics have characterized Internet
history and, of course, the most recent history of humanity. These ten-
sions are translated into an opportunity to think beyond the poles and
focus on the nuances. Technology and, particularly, digital media are not
emancipators on their own—emancipation requires a certain degree of
agency of actors. This does not mean we should obviate that disparities in
digital inclusion and digital literacy affect the possibilities of actors to make
changes.
Our challenging times, in which the polarization of societies is growing
and those who hold political power do not seem to have the purpose of
generating fair conditions for everyone, are the appropriate moment to
remember that communication and communicators have a political role,
not just a technical one. Our commitment as communication scholars and
practitioners in the digital age involves the contribution to the critical digi-
tal literacy that enables people to resist. As the epigraphs to this chapter
suggest, this is our opportunity to change the course of history. This is not
an optimistic position, but a hopeful one.
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CHAPTER 12
Communication and Vivir Bien/Buen Vivir:

In the Care of Our Common Home
Adalid Contreras Baspineiro
Translated by Susan Weissert
The purpose of this article is to develop the concept of communication

and Vivir Bien/Buen Vivir, the contemporary expression of popular com-
munication, for the construction a society of plenty and harmony. This is
a vision of integral ecology for the care of the common home: our com-
munities, our states, nature and the cosmos in which we grow.
We understand Vivir Bien/Buen Vivir as a communicational cosmovi-
sion, whose dialogical and participative character fosters inclusive public
policies for the common good. The principles of communication for Vivir
Translator’s Note: Vivir Bien/Buen Vivir has several translations into English, for
example: To live well/good living. However, none of them capture the depth of
life in fullness and justice, life from the histories, values, cultures, and relationship
with all of nature that have marked their histories and development.
A. Contreras Baspineiro (*)
Universidad Andina Simón Bolívar, La Paz, Bolivia
Universidad Andina Simón Bolívar, Quito, Ecuador
e-mail: adalid.contreras1@gmail.com

Switzerland AG 2021
210 A. CONTRERAS BASPINEIRO
Bien/Buen Vivir are: (i) to know how to listen; (ii) to know how to share;
(iii) to know how to live in harmony; and (iv) to know how to dream of a
future that announces the good news of life in its fullness. To build this
society daily and in the future, the logical methodology follows these
steps: (i) feel/think; (ii) decide/act; (iii) return to the past/co-exist; (iv)
celebrate/hope.
In Order to Read Vivir Bien/Buen Vivir
Origins, Appropriations, Re-creations

Vivir Bien/Buen Vivir, a concept under construction, begins with four
aspects that co-exist and mutually nurture or resist each other. The first
current, in which the paradigm originates, is found in the community
practices of the indigenous peoples of our continent, as well as other peo-
ples from the metaphorical South of this planet. The second complemen-
tary current is found in the adoption, thematic reconstructions, and
incorporation of the demands of anti-systemic movements; the third is
rooted in the political applications of States, particularly in Bolivia and
Ecuador; and the fourth resides in the active declaration and construction
of a just society, embodied in the churches of the peoples.
Therefore, we are not looking at a finished concept, but rather a “defi-
nition in dispute” (Solón 2016, p. 11) and under construction, with both
experiential and conceptual agreements and disagreements.
Agreements generally arise from common conceptual roots, based on
the search for justice on a sustainable planet. However, disagreements gen-
erally arise from the reality of the State’s intervention, where the promise of
a new civilizing era conflicts with overcoming the frameworks of a capitalist
system. And academia does not accept a worldview that negates traditional
positivism which dominates Western thought. Citizens demand immediate
answers for a paradigm still to be created and some forms of communica-
tion focusing on Vivir Bien/Buen Vivir continue to rely on publicity and
circulation as opposed to a focus on reflection and relationships.
The Foundational Moment: The Legacy of the Abya Yala People

On our continent, indigenous people are living societies which recreate
their rich community experiences of a life of solidarity. Since time imme-
morial, they have based their existence on good coexistence or good life in
fullness and harmony or sublime life. Their ways of life are forged in their
12 COMMUNICATION AND VIVIR BIEN/BUEN VIVIR: IN THE CARE… 211
histories of resistance to colonization, to modernity, and to development,

resulting in alternative proposals not only for indigenous people but for
humanity. They offer the perspective of forging a planet of harmony
among societies, nature, and the cosmos.
These are expressions of the worldviews of peoples who do not submit
to domination or colonization, and whose communities are spread the
length of the continent.
The Aymara nation proposes Qamaña (life, to live or dwell in, or a
warm and protected place) as an expression of community coexistence
where everyone shelters and cares for each other. It is a way of coexistence
that is integral and interdependent among people, animals, and plants in
the world of the Pachamama (Mother Earth), of the Achachilas (guardian
gods) and Umalmama (water and earth), in the framework of institution-
ality represented in the ayllu or community.
The Aymara Quamaña is evident on three levels of Vivir Bien/Buen
Vivir: (1) Vivir Bien at an individual or family level, finding spiritual and
material fulfillment by assuring their food security as the source of life; (2)
Suma Qamaña, that is, collective or all-inclusive Vivir Bien, where no one
is better than others or at the cost of others; (3) Khuska Qamaña, the
highest level, where everything is in its place of harmony, with bonds of
equality and where we all need each other in order to attain coexistence
and life in its fullness.
The Quichua/Quechua nation propose Sumak Kawsay and Allin
Kawsay. Sumak and Allin Kawsay together mean a virtuous or a splendid
life: a good life of fullness, without excesses. This is a life without want,
with dignity, a space of well-being here, now, and in the future. This is a
life of health and balance, without pressures or anxieties, among human
beings and all of nature.
For the Guaraní people, Vivir Bien/Buen Vivir is the Tekoporá. Tekoporá
consists of values such as generosity and reciprocity (jopoi), not only with
open hands, but also with the spoken word and open ears in the tekobá or
space of life and coexistence. More specifically, Tekó Kaví refers to life that
is shared, or to a way of being with other humans and non-humans, soci-
ety, and nature.
For the Mayan people, Tiichajil is a wholistic way of understanding a
state of integral well-being, of people in society, with nature and the spiri-
tual world. It is a civilization in which one’s existence is explained in the
existence of others. This is expressed in the Wach’alal, where there is no I
without us. Collaboration is one of the fundamental pillars of community

life and solidarity.
The Mapuche people have internalized Vivir Bien/Buen Vivir in their
forms of community life. Küme Mongen is a way of life and relationships
based on the principle of interior and exterior equilibrium, within indi-
vidual persons and in their social relationships and with all of creation. It
expresses the culture of life in harmony with all beings, with all other men
and women, with God, with spiritual forces and nature.
In Chiapas, the Lekil Kuxlejal is expressed through the practices of col-
lective and community life, in their work, in the commitment and reci-
procity which seeks balance and harmony among human beings, with
Mother Earth and with Nature.
In addition, the peoples of the Amazon have rich expressions of life in
fullness, deeply rooted in their relationship with nature. The Shuar people
recognize nature as the mother or common home, the Shiir Waras, or
knowing how to live harmoniously with all living beings.
These societies and others of Abya Yala are energized by collaborative
practices, respectful of their peers, of nature, and of the cosmos (Contreras
2016b, p. 3–4). This is the common home for the “good life in full mea-
sure” (Macas 2010, p. 14), or the good life in harmonious coexistence,
now, in the present and in the future. This is a life which does not stop at
human happiness, but has a commitment to harmonious coexistence
among the worlds of animals, vegetation, the gods and the earth; worlds
with which we human beings coexist.
We refer to the worldview of the original peoples as cosmos-coexistence,
a relationship (or communication) among four other interdependent
views of the world: the cosmocentric (the center is the cosmos), biocentric
(the center is life), ethnocentric (the center is the human being), and eco-
centric (the center is nature).
The Contributions of the Anti-systemic Movements

For the anti-systemic movements made up of innumerable groups, net-
works, and citizen collectives, Vivir Bien/Buen Vivir is more than a world-
view; it is civilization’s alternative to capitalism. The movements of
defenders of human rights, nature, and consumers; movements of women,
youth, artists, artisans; defenders of the rights to communication and
many other groups find in Vivir Bien/Buen Vivir a space in which to bring
their demands together and orient them toward the building of a different
model of society.
Notice that if it is true that the philosophic foundation is common to
all, the demands of the anti-systemic movements broaden the field of
intervention, as well as the themes, the demands, the practices and the
horizons of Suma Qamaña/Sumak Kausay.
Thus, it is not by chance that the wording of Vivir Bien/Buen Vivir is
not a literal or sufficient translation of the good life in its fullness, or of com-
munal co-existence. Rather, it complements these descriptions, so that we
may understand them as “epistemologies of the South.” Boaventura de
Sousa Santos understands them as expressions of subversion and rupture
with Western eurocentric thinking, in contrast to the emancipatory alter-
natives of social groups discriminated against by capitalism, colonialism,
and their “different positions of inequality” (2011, p. 16).
The Contributions of the New Constitutionalism

The Vivir Bien/Buen Vivir, institutionalized in the new political constitu-
tions of the pluri-national state of Bolivia and the Republic of Ecuador,
has the markings of the emergence of indigenous people in contemporary
history. Distinct from other historical stages in which the Magna Cartas
were adaptations of demands and rights within the margins of the feudal
or capitalist system, Vivir Bien/Buen Vivir leads states towards societal
transformations with a new constitutionalism based on the validity of col-
lective rights which include individuals and recognize the rights of nature.
In the political constitution of the pluri-national state of Bolivia, Chap.
8 says: “1) The State assumes and promotes as ethical-moral principles of
a pluralistic society: ama qhilla, ama llulla, ama suwa (do not be lazy, do
not lie, do not steal), suma qamaña (live well), ñandereko (life of har-
mony), tekokavi (life of fullness), ivimaraei (earth without evil) and qhapa-
jñan (noble road or life).” These are based on values of the common
good, responsibility, social justice, and the distribution and redistribution
of products and social goods as well as many others.
The constitution of the state of Ecuador incorporates the “Rule of
Good Living” or Sumak Kausay and Allin Kausay, stating that “Good
Living requires that persons, communities, peoples and nations may effec-
tively enjoy their rights and exercise responsibilities in the framework of
interculturality, of respect of their diversity, and of a harmonious co-
existence with Nature” (CPE, art. 275).
In like manner, the National Development Plan of Bolivia proposes for

living well: “the balanced co-existence and equitable complementarity of
the State Economy, the Community Economy […] the Mixed Economy
and the Private Economy.” This is accomplished by means of four pro-
grams for a Bolivia that intends to be honorable, sovereign, productive,
and democratic. For its part, the National Plan for Good Living in Ecuador
considers three strategic axes: the first refers to the transformation of the
democratic system, “a change in the relations of power for the construc-
tion of popular power.” The second gathers elements of equity, promo-
tion of the rights of citizens, identity, and the rights of nature. And the
third axis refers to the economic relationships centered on “economic-
productive transformation starting with the change of the productive
matrix.”
As can be seen, these proposals are difficult to bring about, because the
political state functions under a two-hundred year inheritance laden with
practices of denying equality, justice, sustainability of the environment,
and citizen participation. This is the structural reason that the state poli-
cies are subject to strong tensions originating between the idea of Vivir
Bien/Buen Vivir and its actual application to programs.
The Contributions of Theology

In reality this is not a question of an explicit and formally intentional
involvement of the churches in Vivir Bien/Buen Vivir, but rather a nexus
between the message of the Gospel and the construction of a good life in
fullness and harmony. From different initiatives and the lived experiences,
some churches have been truly developing proposals for a life of dignity
and hope in community and in equality.
In recognizing this, we point out only some aspects of the different
contributions from theology which are important to take into account as
aspects for the care of our common home (see Uranga, this book).
The first element we highlight is from the Book of Genesis, where it
affirms that “God saw all that he had made and it was good” (Gen. 1.21).
The meaning given to the work of the creation of the world, of the cos-
mos, of the earth, and of man is the same meaning that we find in the
Suma Qamaña, the Ñanderekó y Tekoporá, the Sumak Kausay, the Küme
Mongen, or the Tiichajil. These all express the magnificence of the splen-
did existence of beautiful life, from a creation made up of a single unit
where all beings live in harmony with nature.
This expression is enhanced by the plea to “work and care for” the
garden of the world (Gen., 15), or Mother Earth to whom we belong.
Who among us should work and care for the garden of the world? We
ourselves, human beings, all of us.
On the other hand, the history of the Church, which adapts to different
cultures found in diverse social realities, has elements common to all. On
this basis, the announcement, the proclamation and the formation of the
Good News has a foundation in the trinitarian communion or community
coexistence. This is expressed in relationships of love, eschatological hope,
of salvation that seeks happiness and the fullness of life in the same way as
Vivir Bien/Buen Vivir. This is not only for the utopia of a new society, but
in daily life, in the origins of cultures and in social praxis.
The Gospel is an intercultural and historical construction, with an
undeniable option for the poorest, coinciding with the proposals of Vivir
Bien/Buen Vivir that promote equilibrium among person, societ-
ies, nature, and the cosmos.
The encyclical of Pope Francis, Laudato Si, is in its entirety a contem-
porary expression of the building of an existence of plenty and harmony.
We particularly point out the conceptualization of the “Integral Ecology”
(numbers 138–142), which assumes the common home as a reality which
is economic, environmental, social, and cultural. Following Laudato Si,
the care for our common home requires an urgent dialogue about how we
are managing the planet and finding comprehensive agreements which
return dignity to the excluded, and which at the same time care for nature.
Communication for Vivir Bien/Buen Vivir
Horizons of Communication of Vivir Bien/Buen Vivir

Aruskipasipxañanakasakipunirakispawa amara (we always need to be in
communication with each other) has two meanings: one is inclusive and
dialogic (we communicate one to another) in situations of verbal
exchanges. The other involves connection (the obligation to communi-
cate) in social practice; to improve understanding, to compromise, and
undertake decision-making in an act of humanizing the word by “speak-
ing with the heart”, honestly, constructively, with love and with the goal
of harmony and socio-cultural strengthening. (Contreras, 2016c, p. 6)
Sharing this understanding of communication, communication for
Vivir Bien/Buen Vivir is relational. It is based on dialogue and its aim is
the development of commitments and actions for a style of life based on a

good life of fullness and harmony, in communal co-existence.
We could also affirm, reclaiming and following the idea of integral ecol-
ogy, that communication for Vivir Bien/Buen Vivir is built on a shared
spirituality in order to combat poverty, to care for nature, and to return
dignity to those who are excluded (Laudato Si, Cap. 4).
Communication for Vivir Bien/Buen Vivir, as the Word, permanently
returns to the past, to Creation, to identity, in order to reclaim them as the
sources of inspiration in order to move toward the future. In this journey,
the word is a pilgrim on the road to the Great Jubilee, or to Jacha Uru
(the great day), constructing meanings of society, of culture, of politics,
and of spirituality for a life of fullness and harmony, to become reality in
the present day and for future societies.
Since its origins, Vivir Bien/Buen Vivir has been a worldview in perma-
nent construction, or a process in constant movement toward the evolu-
tion of the Splendid Existence. This is also the space where communication
is carried out from the discursive constructions, interactions, and exchanges
among societies who follow the route of Qhapaq Ñan, or the road of wis-
dom and righteousness, and the space which integrates different peoples
and cultures. (Contreras 2015, p. 131)
Communication is the word which carries the historic transformation
of multiple peoples and societies who construct and proclaim discourse,
giving meaning to the movement of community and the transitions of
community life from its tetralectic rationality. Communication is the word
that flows in social practices, in cultural interactions, in interpersonal dia-
logues, in exchanges and reciprocities of peoples who interact in the build-
ing of a society of life in fullness and harmony, here and in the future.
Communication for Vivir Bien/Buen Vivir articulates its epistemology
in a conceptual and methodological framework that has three sources of
inspiration: the systemization of the experiences of community life; the
struggles for rights; and the Latin American theories of communication
that precede it (theology of liberation, popular communication, cultural
mediations). These positions question paradigms of dissemination and
cause a decentralization in the point of view of the political and aca-
demic fields.
Know How to Communicate

Communication for Vivir Bien/Buen Vivir is based in the jaqi aru (word
of the people), which David Choquehuanca explains by four principles:
(1) know how to listen; (2) know how to share; (3) know how to live in
harmony; (4) know how to dream (2012, p. 1). And Silvia Rivera
Cusicanqui, reclaiming the jaqin parlaña or speaking like the people
“from below” defines Buen Vivir as: (1) to listen in order to be able to
speak; (2) to know about that of which you speak; (3) to support words
with actions. To these characterizations we add, to know how to dream,
“speak hopefully,” or energetically construct life. (Contreras 2014, p. 111)
now How to Speak: Knowing How to Listen

K
In reality, it is equivalent to listen to each other with all of the senses or look
with the heart, or as the japysaka guaraní expresses: “know how to see
with your ears.” To know how to listen consists in translating the sounds
into identities, understandings, and feelings about the world—recogniz-
ing the lives and the stories of those who express their words with speech,
image, gestures, with their signs, their symbols, and their signifiers.
In Vivir Bien/Buen Vivir, to know how to listen is more complex than
human interaction. As Choquehuanca says, we should “listen to each
other, listen to Mother Earth, to all beings, to the river, to our birds and
above all to the humblest beings” (2012, p. 1). To know how to listen
includes: (i) listening to each other participatively, beginning from those
others who are communicating; (ii) listening to Mother Earth, to nature as
the generator of speech; (iii) listening above all to the most humble, by
which communication for Vivir Bien/Buen Vivir is committed to a world
of rights and of justice.
To listen to each other assumes that one recognizes individuals in their
true or imaginary contexts, always as grounded realities where they
decide—for themselves—their social and cultural constructions, in addi-
tion to changes in themselves, their societies, and their reality (Alfaro
2006, p. 98). As Jesús Martín Barbero suggests, it’s about constructing
meanings of life, starting with the social and cultural—and we add—politi-
cal, spiritual, and cosmic interventions.
In order to listen to Mother Earth, to all beings, to the river, to our birds,
it is important to shift our points of view, preconceptions, practices, and
ways of seeing things: the voices around us, of the environment, the
sounds of nature, the trembling of the earth, and radical meanings
accumulated in popular wisdom and activist practices. It is fitting that we

see those beings who are excluded from society, from history, and from
communication media. We should encourage alternative means by which
they can express their voices, which, in situations of crisis such as climate
change, are expressed in eruptions, mudslides, droughts and floods, bring-
ing suit against the causes and effects provoked by the voracity of capitalism.
On one hand, in everyday situations we hear about the balance among
persons/society/nature/the cosmos, expressed in the sounds of nature
and the voices of the environment. These come to us in testimonies,
phrases, poetry, songs, legends, images, and through analysis. They are
stored in the beauty and goodness of nature gathered in the philosophy of
peoples whose existence is ruled by the principle of life (Kowii 2005, p. 3).
In addition, they are expressed through the understanding that is attrib-
uted to the Pachamama/Mother Earth: the characteristics of a living
being, capable of listening, of reacting, of being loved, and thus, of being
a subject with rights, with which we establish an indivisible, interdepen-
dent, complementary and spiritual relationship.
To know how to listen above all to the most humble persons requires revi-
talizing and contemporizing popular communication, the space where the
word of the people is expressed. This would be an expressive project of
proposals to build a new society based on solidarity and justice.
Communication for Vivir Bien/Buen Vivir is, without a doubt, the con-
temporary expression of popular communication.
Know About That of Which One Speaks
Think with Feeling
Feeling-thoughts require us to construct our discourse with meaning and
discussion, recovering content as a fundamental component of the mes-
sage together with form, and ethics together with aesthetics.
In times of an oversaturation of information, of the speeding up of mes-
sages and life, we need spaces for meditation and construction based on
the word, in such a way that feelings and knowledge stimulate practices
which develop Vivir Bien/Buen Vivir, in fullness and harmony.
Know How to Dream

To know how to dream refers to “how to defend our identity, how to com-
plement each other in a balanced way, so that the most abandoned person
has the possibility of sharing in education, health, coexistence in nature
and in the community” (Choquehuanca 2012, p. 1). It means to design a

future that begins now, or better said, in the historical accumulation of
communal reciprocity. Indeed, to know how to dream is to think in uto-
pias, but with paths that are collectively constructed in order that they
might be traveled in individual and social harmony, with nature and
the cosmos.
As we have now stated several times, the processes of communication
accompany the word on the road of Vivir Bien/Buen Vivir, in addition to
imagining a place of arrival on a map that is under permanent construc-
tion. The word expresses conquests, warns of difficulties, and feeds dreams
and hopes in an exercise in which one should dream with one’s feet on the
ground so that the most abandoned person lives with dignity and experi-
ence coexistence. Approaches to these transitions of the common good of
humanity include: (i) redefining our relationship with nature, from
exploiting it to respecting it as the source of life; (ii) refocusing the foun-
dation of life, privileging usage value over exchange value; (iii) reorganiz-
ing collective life through the generalization of democracy in social and
institutional relations; and (iv) establishing interculturality (Houtart 2013,
pp. 39–68), so that universal common goods, such as water, biodiversity,
air, or raw materials will be global rights to which we all can have access,
in the same way as other common goods or rights such as education, food,
health, housing, and communication should be enjoyed.
Support Words with Actions
Know How to Share

To know how to share “is to stop competing in order to complement each
other; it is to know how to give in order to receive, to know that we are all
siblings” (Choquehuanca 2012, p. 1). To promote this principle implies
including an educational perspective in the communicative process, per-
mitting the systematization of experiences, as well as the production of
new knowledge for the critical response to social demands and public poli-
cies. Let us remember with Paulo Freire that education “is not the trans-
ference or transmission of wisdom or culture, it is not the extension of
technical knowledge” (1969, p. 59); it is the sharing, recognition,
exchange, and (re)creation of experiences and knowledge. In this way we
can build societies of solidarity in a world that must be critically changed;
we must foster a positive practice of life in community, where living beings,
animate and inanimate, protect each other.
The recognition of solidarity, trust, equilibrium, complementarity, and

reciprocity as values and principles of community life requires a discourse
with meaning. This includes arguments that permit communication for
Vivir Bien/Buen Vivir to be developed as a communicative action in the
way that Habermas proposes critical reflection, reasoned language, and
interactions in functions of agreements and understandings.
It is for this reason that the jaqin parlaña assumes that one should
speak of what they know and of that for which they hope. It gives a tran-
scendental function of communication to silence or amuki which is the
time for human beings to connect with their interior subjective world, as
well as with the social, natural, and cosmic exterior in a framework of
mutual respect. From this space of connection emerge the concepts,
actions, and discursive constructions that have meaning. Thus, we move
beyond the idea of accumulated knowledge about things to the ability to
also know with feeling the how, the means of communicating, in order to
generate more communication.
One will understand, then, the inconvenience of publicity and informa-
tion as the only paths for communication. In developing narratives of the
love for life we turn to testimonial genres, life histories, stories and chron-
icles expressed in vernacular, everyday and descriptive language. It is
important to point out that which is subjective and to recover the notion
of a we. This we has cultural and social identity, even though the stories
may be specific, weaving real or virtual, lived and recounted memories.
But, in addition, it is necessary to expose that which is a colonialist,
patriarchal, and capitalist vision. For this, Silvia Rivera proposes a “sociol-
ogy of the image,” arguing that, in colonialism, words did not describe,
but rather concealed ways of “not saying.” In contrast, she retrieves images
“that illuminate this social backdrop and offer us perspectives of a critical
understanding of reality” (2010, pp. 19–20). These are found in the sto-
ries contained in weavings, in astrology, in paintings; revealing a world
hidden by official cultures.
Know How to Live in Harmony and Complementarity

Definitely, communication is a relational process carried out through
social practices. The word is not only expressed with messages, but also
with actions. And in communication for Vivir Bien/Buen Vivir, one has to
affirm words with actions, demonstrating the correspondence between
that which one says and that which one does.
It is for this reason that communication for Vivir Bien/Buen Vivir is a

space for observation and control of the practices of transparency. In short,
under the influence of the cosmovision of Vivir Bien/Buen Vivir, thoughts
and practices should be re-created, where reciprocity is recognized as a
way of life, community as a form of organization, coexistence with nature
and the cosmos as identity, equality among men and women as a daily real-
ity, equity as dignity, and a fulfilled life as destiny.
For a life in harmony and complementarity, States should promote
inclusive policies. Citizens should practice ways of community coexistence
in different settings, and communication should offer spaces for diverse
persons to exchange histories, narratives, and projects. In this way they
reaffirm each other within societies of solidarity, in practices of unity that
are inclusive of diversity and based on plurality.
The Methodology of Community Coexistence: The Tetralectic Logic

We reaffirm that “the methodology of Communication for Vivir Bien/
Buen Vivir, is basically participative, due to its characteristics which are
inclusive of societies and cultures. Through its contribution to the harmo-
nization of societies with nature and the cosmos, it is fundamentally edu-
cative, and because of its political orientation it is irreversibly popular (of
the people)” (Contreras 2016a, p. 118).
Just as all methodologies maintain their theoretical focus or political
position by specific methods, communication for Vivir Bien/Buen Vivir is
basically participative, organized with methodologies that are fundamen-
tally horizontal, dialogical, and participative. Thus, we recognize that
communication is a discipline of horizons, that connects and intersects at
the same time that it is transversed by other disciplines. Thus, complemen-
tarities are generated that do not separate practice from theory, nor man-
ual work from the intellectual word, nor to be from should be, nor feelings
and reason, nor beliefs and certainties. As Alejandro Barranquero and
Chiara Saez-Baez point out, while for modern science only that which is
measurable and quantifiable is an object of knowledge, for Vivir Bien/
Buen Vivir and its multidimensional principles, the logic of give-and-take,
cooperation, and the generating of networks are fundamental to the cre-
ation of knowledge and community (2015, p. 60).
For this reason, the characterization of horizontal and alternative com-
munication in three spaces—access, dialogue, and participation—(Beltrán
1981, pp. 19–20) should be challenged to include yet one more step:
coexistence. Communication is not limited to the construction of mes-

sages, but rather, it takes on social, political, cultural, and spiritual action.
Tretralectic logic structures the building of knowledge, of practices, of
that which is imaginary and of the word. These moments maintain a tight
correspondence with the principles of know how to listen—know how to
share—know how to coexist—know how to dream.
Feel/Think
The process of building knowledge begins with peoples’ thoughtful reflec-
tions, creating unceasing relationships among themselves and with the
reality to which they belong, either concretely or virtually. The first
approach to this reality is located in the indivisible unity between feelings
and thoughts (feeling/thoughts) which expresses our understanding and
re-creations of historical reality in specific places. These lead us to process
acts and ideas that arise from our fears and hopes, from what we know and
what we feel, from our real and imagined realities, from our identities.
If thus we belong and reproduce ourselves socially and culturally, in
order to communicate with each other we must put into practice the prin-
ciple of to know how to listen. Our feeling/thoughts are composed of fears
and joys, as well as intuitions and reasoning, and they must be processed
at the same time and in the same relational level with the so-called “recep-
tion pole,” or the source of discursive interpretation and identification. In
the same way, the so called “emission pole” processes knowledge from its
particular points of reference, a result of its knowledge and life experience.
Decide/Act
The first moment permits us to examine, predict, or take the pulse of our
feeling/thoughts, which explain reality beyond its appearances from its
structural causes, and in its context. As a result, it now has the capacity to
critically create, deepen, project, and broaden the experiences of Vivir
Bien/Buen Vivir. This must take place in its own context as well as con-
tributing to its construction in other distinct spaces—local, regional,
national, planetary, civic, and State. This new state of locus concretizes, in
practice, the principle of know how to share.
In terms of communication, the moment of decide/act is produced in
recognition, defined by Eliseo Verón as a space or moment of reception in
which the individual and collective persons being questioned become the
owners of the discourse. At the same time, they produce the messages
from a place of their own representations and feelings.
This gives birth to the decision to work on breaking with structural

(dis)orders and to develop applications of ways of life in community coex-
istence. The process is holistic and cyclical, because each completion leads
to a new situation in which communication must continue in order bring
about that which is imagined, and beliefs combine with the knowledge of
new reflections and experiences. Thus, people and societies can commit to
work in solidary and with complementarities in the construction and legit-
imation of Vivir Bien/Buen Vivir.
Return/Coexist
The third moment refers on one hand to the idea of a permanent return
to identity in order to face the future, recovering historical memory. One
advances dynamically, situations are transformed, realities are recreated,
new stories are founded, but the accumulated impressions remain, and it
is necessary to return to them in order to continue building. In the
Andino-Amazonic world, when one looks at life, the qhip nayra/Aymara
or qhip ñawi/Quichua/Quechua is practiced, which consists of looking
back (return) to go forward (give hope, encourage) or the “vision which
integrates the memory of the past into the future” (Choque 2007, p. 174).
This going back combines with collaborative coexistence, safeguarding
all of society with equitable policies, social justice, cultural acknowledge-
ments, gender equality, in harmony with nature. In other words, it means
to generalize the practices of Vivir Bien/Buen Vivir, transforming reality
with mystique and commitment.
This space consists of authenticating words with acts, in daily relations
as in broad cultural expressions and in public policies. The path to reach
this level begins with our personal values, carrying them toward comple-
mentarity with other persons, nurturing each other. Thus, we know that
“each society rewrites the signs, they adapt them, they reconstruct them,
they reinterpret them, they relocate them, they find new meaning in
them” (Mattelart 2006, p. 103). And we also know that each society
writes its stories with its fist, its writings, its language, its visual representa-
tions, and from its lived experience and imagination.
Celebrate/Hope
Communication for Vivir Bien/Buen Vivir must be the setting of collec-
tive joy for civilizing transformations and the enthusiastic announcement
of a new society reaching beyond capitalism, colonialism, or patriarchy. To
celebrate is comparable to the jubilee that commemorates the
announcement of the Good News and the achievements of communal

coexistence, relationships of solidarity and collaboration, gender equality,
and the preservation of our environment.
It is the enjoyment of life, recognizing our peers for the shared activities and
the goals attained. It is the offering we make to Mother Earth because she
protects us. It is seeking silence to be in dialogue with the gods. It is the joy
in following—and making—the path which leads us toward the society
of Vivir Bien/Buen Vivir. It is the happiness of being builders —and
travelers —on this path, expressing the word which expands the meanings of
a life in fullness and harmony. (Contreras 2016a, pp. 120–121)
This hope, which substitutes the fear of change for the enthusiasm of
being part of the transformations, now makes sense. Turning to the peda-
gogical value of the question of and for the future, we must be creative in
order to take on future analyses and find adequate paths for sharing col-
laborative experiences and moving toward good coexistence.
Thus, one finds paths that explain the present, beginning with the nec-
essary questioning of self, of accumulated memory, of identity, of that
which is rooted in the past, but allows knowledge of the future. In the
original cultures, thinking from a place of historical memory or longtime
memory is equivalent to returning to be or continuing to be. This promotes
a mechanism of remaking, permitting “the reconstruction of knowledge
and learnings” (Mamani 2007, p. 303) or to know how to dream the future.
The Care of the Communal Home

It is not possible to understand the Latin American/Caribbean theory of
communication without considering its developments in the political
arena, given that its representative paradigms are born and developed
through the resistance of its citizens, in the battles for meaning shown in
how they express themselves (see Flores-Márquez, this book). This is seen
as well in their search for participative democracies, the desire for projects
on a continental level, integrated by the people themselves, and in a new
libertarian gnosis and in the struggle for the hegemony of society’s proj-
ects, helping to develop them.
The Vivir Bien/Buen Vivir that initiates and is built in the political
arena of the citizenry takes a leap to the political level of state, passing
from the traditional anti-hegemony resistance to a possibility of being the
hegemonic change project of the time. And communication for Vivir

Bien/Buen Vivir could become a contemporary paradigm of the commu-
nication theory of Latin America and the Caribbean, knowing that it is not
possible to insert this world vision in already existing schools unless they
accommodate to the current reality. For this to happen, what is needed is
an exercise in the shake-up of certainties and the decolonizing of cartesian
linearities.
This challenge implies working, at least, in the following levels:
1. Multi-discursive strategies will need to be designed and imple-

mented in order to undo the prior colonization of word and life,
thus legitimizing the ideas, experiences, and horizons of community
coexistence with all communication resources and through all pos-
sible media: traditional, group, mass, digital, print, radio, television,
electronics, satellites. All of these, without exception, are included in
a transition toward multimedia projects where each medium, from
its own particularity, contributes to the shared objectives. Since it
means constructing a new order of civilization, it is of utmost impor-
tance to create a style that has the ethics and characteristics of Vivir
Bien/Buen Vivir, returning to the path covered by popular
communication.
2. The integration of institutionality is a condition which requires

applying the principles of harmony and community in the area of
communication structures, as institutional achievements gain mean-
ing by belonging to networks and collectives that establish the local
word in global spaces. The institutions of communication should
strengthen themselves with the principles of Vivir Bien/Buen Vivir,
developing their missions with the worldview of life in harmony and
encouraging encounters among civil society, the state, academia,
and unions.
3. Pluri-national policies of communication are necessary, which, cor-
responding with the new constitutionalism of the states, generate
decentralized, intercultural, and pluralistic processes of construction
of the word for life. Paraphrasing Jesús Martín-Barbero, what are
needed are “policies that make active in the public sphere that which
is of the people” (2010, p. 192). This goes hand-in-hand with cul-
tural politics, with protagonists, esthetics, and processes that re-
envision the traditional meaning of art, patrimony, and the cultural
industries which navigate in seas of the cultured culture of
museum studies.
4. The Right to Communication is a fundamental component of the

communication for Vivir Bien/Buen Vivir, if one wishes to contrib-
ute to a new world with aspirations, norms, and concrete methods
for having property, infrastructure, and the discursive construction
that make possible the democratization of the word. Communication
should be understood and exercised as a right, so that from its own
place it takes initiatives that dignify the word and should be under-
stood as more than simply the distribution of resources and the flow
of information. It needs to promote a more equitable working order
which is pertinent to the cultural industries, and to exchange the
monopolist and oligopolist structures of the communication media
for systems of ownership that are more equitable, with the participa-
tion of society, the state, and academia.
For many ways of understanding this, the common home is identified

with our natural surroundings in the same ways that understanding Vivir
Bien/Buen Vivir is limited to seeing it as an ecological alternative. To
share these understandings would imply being in agreement with views
that we know break apart the makeup of Vivir Bien/Buen Vivir as well as
the characterization of the common home. That is how the peoples of the
continent understand it in the Acuerdo de los Pueblos, undersigned in
Cochabamba, Bolivia, in 2010, expressing that “humanity stands before
a great divide: continue on the path of capitalism, of patriarchy, of prog-
ress and death, or take on the path of harmony with nature and respect
for life.”
In this text we maintain that Vivir Bien/Buen Vivir is the cosmovision
of cosmo-interconnection, which articulates, intercommunicates, and
allows for the interdependent encounter of these other four worldviews
that, together, are its components: the biocentric, for which the center is
life; the ethnocentric, which following the postulates of human develop-
ment puts the human in the center of decisions; the ecocentric, which
promotes the sustainable development of the planet; and the cosmocen-
tric, which incorporates the world of the gods, spirituality, and qualita-
tive values such as solidarity and happiness of the individual within
the whole.
The common home is all of this together, functioning as a unit in which
the parts correspond with each other as an integral ecology. Thus, Pope
Francis proposes this as the need for economic, environmental, and social
responses as an indivisible whole in solidarity for the common good.
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Index1
A Articulação Semiarida Brasileira—ASA,

Acuerdo de los Pueblos, 226 see Brazilian Semiarid Articulation
Agricultura Familiar e Aymaras, 138, 211
Agroecologia, 60
ALER (Latin American Association of
Radio Education), 85, 142, B
152, 154 Beltrán, Luis Ramiro, 13, 31, 41, 43,
Alliance for Progress, 30, 40 45, 119, 137, 138
Alternative media, 8, 10, 14, 195, Berners-Lee, Tim, 197
196, 198, 203, 204 Blackness, 180
Amarc-AL, see World Association of Boal, Augusto, see Theatre of the
Community Radios, Latin oppressed
American section Bogotá, see Colombia
Anti-systemic Movements, Bolívar, 137
212–213 Bolivia, 47, 137, 143, 194, 210, 213,
ANUC, see National Association of 214, 226
Peasant Users Bolivian mining radios, see
Arc model, 43 Radios Mineras
Argentina, 30, 53, 144, 200 Bolivian revolution, 35, 38
ARPANET (Advanced Research Borborema Union Pole, 52, 60
Projects Agency Network), 197 Bourdieu, Pierre, 159, 167
Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

Switzerland AG 2021
Change, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-62557-3
230 INDEX
Brazil, 15, 20, 30, 38, 47, 52, Communication for citizenship, 51,
53, 56, 57, 60, 61, 61n11, 53, 54, 56
62n13, 63, 94, 143, 159, Communication for development, 17,
161, 178–180, 182, 183, 18, 52–57, 69
186–188, 200 See also Communication and
Brazilian Semiarid Articulation, 60 development
Buenos Aires, see Argentina Communication for social change,
16–19, 21, 51, 57
Communication rights, 19
C Community Action Boards, 112
Cajamarca, see Peru Concentration of media, 9, 161, 173
Caribbean Foundation, 125 Concentration of media ownership, see
Casa de las Americas, 39 Concentration of media
Cassete-Foro, 21, 162 Cooperative of Agropecuary União da
Catholic, see Catholic Church Vitória, 61
Catholic Church, 75, 76, 85–87, 143, Copavi, see Cooperative of
145, 154 Agropecuary União da Vitória
Catholic hierarchy, see Catholic Church Copavi settlement, 52
Catholic Latin American Association Coronavirus pandemic, 187
for Radio and Television, see Cuba, 39
International Catholic Association Cuban revolution, 30, 38–41
for Radio and Television (UNDA) Cybercultur@, 21
CEBs, see Grassroots ecclesial
communities
Centro de Mídias Populares, 2 D
Certeau, Michel de, 168 Decolonization, 177
Chiapas, see Mexico Democratization of
Chile, 143, 200 communication, 73, 75
Ciespal, 13, 18 Department of Social
Citizen media, 8 Communication of the Latin
Coletivo Papo Reto, 185–186 American Bishops’ Council
Colombia, 76, 85, 93, 102, 111, (acronym in Spanish:
114, 116, 118, 119, CELAM), 81
194, 200 Deutschmann, Paul, 125
Colonialism, 177–182, 187, 188 Developmentalism, 75
Coloniality, 180–185, 188 Díaz Bordenave, Juan, 13, 31, 41, 42,
COMLAC, see Latin American and 45, 46, 119, 130
Caribbean Communication Diffusion model, 55
Congress Diffusion of innovation, see
Communication and Diffusion model
development, 53–56 Dominican Republic, 85, 143
INDEX 231
E Guaraní people, 211

ECLAC, see Economic Commission Guarani’s War, 37
for Latin America and the Guatemala, 38, 143
Caribbean Guatemalan, 130
Economic Commission for Latin Guerrilla radios, 144
America and the Caribbean, 30, Gutierrez, Francisco, 43
32–34, 33n2, 38, 40 Gutiérrez Pérez, Francisco,
Ecuador, 47, 143, 210, 213, 214 130, 138
El Salvador, 93, 144
Epistemologies of the South, 12, 13,
110, 213 H
Escuelas Radiofónicas de Bolivia Habitus, 159, 160, 166, 167,
(ERBOL), 85 169–170, 172, 173
Estrella del Mar, 143 Havana, see Cuba
F Havens, Eugene, 118
Fals Borda, Orlando, 6, 11, 12, 31, Honduras, 143
41, 45, 46, 109–125 hooks, bell, 3
FARCO, 144
Favela media activism, see Media
activism I
Favela mediascape, 187 Imputation technique, see Participatory
Favelas, 178, 185–188 Action Research
Field and habitus, 167–168 International Catholic Association for
See also Bourdieu, Pierre Radio and Television
Finland, 179 (UNDA), 82
Flinn, William, 118 International Catholic Organization
Folklore, 93 for Cinema and Audiovisuals
Freire, Paulo, 3, 12, 17, 42, 43, 58, (OCIC), 82
66, 82, 137, 163, 172, 204 International Information Order
Freirean popular education tradition, (IIO), 56
see Freire, Paulo Investigación Acción Participativa, see
Freire’s pedagogy of the oppressed, see Participation Action Research
Freire, Paulo
FUNDARCO, 121
J
JAC, see Community Action Boards
G
García Canclini, Néstor, 14, 98, 193
Global South, 29–47 K
Gonzalez, Jorge, 21 Kaplún, Gabriel, 192
Grassroots ecclesial communities, 75, Kaplun, Mario, 21, 43, 162,
82, 83, 88, 162 163, 172
232 INDEX
L Mídia NINJA, 197, 200

Landless Workers Movement Mine radios, see Radios mineras
(MST), 60, 61 Monroe Doctrine, 32
La Paz, see Bolivia Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais
La Rosca Foundation for Research and Sem Terra, see Landless Workers
Social Action, 116, 121 Movement (MST)
Latin American and Caribbean Movimento dos Trabalhadores Sem
Communication Congress, Teto, 161
129, 137
Latin American Catholic Press
Association (acronym in Spanish: N
UCLAP), 82 Narrativas Independentes, Jornalismo
Laudato Si, 215, 216 e Ação, see Mídia Ninja
La Voz de la Costa, 143 National Association of Peasant
La Voz de la Selva, 143 Users, 125
Law of Services of Audiovisual National Institute of Agrarian Reform
Communication, 144–145 of Cuba, 39
Lerner, Daniel, 55 National Liberation Army, 112
Liberation philosophy, 91, 97 National University of Colombia,
Liberation psychology, 98 113, 115–117
Liberation theology, 74, 75, 80, 82, National University of Cuyo, 130
83, 86, 88, 91, 98, 113, 148, New International News Order
162, 195 (NOII), 75
Lipman, Aaron, 118 New World Information and
Llallagua, see Bolivia Communication Order (NWICO
Luchadoras, 202 or NWIO), 14, 56, 75, 86
New York, see United States
NOMIC, see New World Information
M and Communication Order
MacBride Report, 9, 14, 56 Non-Aligned Movement, 56
Mapuche people, 212 North America Free Trade Agreement
Maré Vive, 186 (NAFTA), 199
Martin-Barbero, Jesús, 14, 36, 98, 193 Nuñez Hurtado, Carlos, 43
Mattelart, Armand, 193
Mattelart, Michelle, 13
Mayan people, 211 P
Media activism, 185, 188 PAR, see Participation Action Research
Media activist, see Media activism Paraguay, 37, 37n3, 38, 41, 47, 129,
Mendoza, see Argentina 130, 133
Merida, see Venezuela Participation Action Research, 6, 45,
Metaphorical South, see Global South 91, 109–125
Mexico, 30, 38, 93, 143, 199, See also Fals Borda, Orlando
200, 202 Participatory development, 64–69
INDEX 233
Participatory media, 8 Radio Schools of Colombia, 44

Pasquali, Antonio, 13 Radios mineras, 44, 194
Pastoral of Communication, 143 Radios of Bolivian miners, see
Pearse, Andrew, 118 Radios mineras
Pedagogic mediation, 130, Radios of the mining workers, see
131, 137–139 Radios mineras
Pedagogy of communication, 133 Radio Sutatenza, 76, 85
Peru, 80, 142 Raimón, the Catalan singer-
Philosophy of the liberation, see composer, 142
Liberation philosophy Reform of Córdoba, 35
Pope Francis, 215, 226 Reyes Matta, Fernando, 13
Popular communicator, 159, 160, Rhizomatica, 202
163–166, 168–173 Right to communicate, see Right to
Popular education, 91, 98, 131, communication
137, 146 Right to communication, 16,
Popular educational radios, 146 19, 56, 226
Popular movement, 97, 100 Rio de Janeiro, see Brazil
Popular radios, 142, 143, 145–150, Rodríguez, Simón, 137, 137n3, 138
145n3, 154–156 Rogers, Everett, 17, 55, 118, 125
Popular Women’s Organization
(OFP), 102
Preferential option for the poor, see S
Theology of liberation Samba, 183
Prieto Castillo, Daniel, 43 Sao Paulo, see Brazil
Problematization Pedagogy, 43 Saucío, see Colombia
Puerto Rico, 32n1, 38 Schmucler, Héctor, 193
Punta de Lanza, 121 Schramm, Wilbur, 55
Second Episcopal Conference of Latin
America, see II General
Q Conference of Latin American
Quichua/Quechua nation, 211 Bishops (Medellín)
Quijano, Aníbal, 181 Second European War, see Second
World War
II General Conference of Latin
R American Bishops
Radical media, 8 (Medellín), 40, 79
Rádio do Povo, 143 Second Vatican Council, 40, 41,
Radio Enriquillo, 143 41n5, 83
Radioescuelas, 194 Second World War, 30–32, 35, 55
Radio Occidente, 143 Shiir Waras, 212
Radio Pío XII, 150 Shuar people, 212
Radio Santa María, 85 Smith, T. Lynn, 118
234 INDEX
Social movements’ media, 8 Universal Declaration of Human

STICA, 42 Rights, 19
Sursiendo, 202 University of Florida, 117
University of Minnesota, 117
Uruguay, 162
T
Tactics and strategies, 166
See also Certeau, Michel de V
Technical Service Inter-American Vatican II, see Vatican II Council
Agricultural Cooperation, 41 (1962-1965)
Technique of systematic return, see Vatican II Council (1962-1965), see
Participatory Action Research Second Vatican Council
Theatre of the oppressed, 91, 98 Venezuela, 47
See also Boal, Augusto Vidich, Arthur, 118
Theology, 214–215
Theology of culture, see Theology of
liberation W
Theology of liberation, see Liberation Whiteness, 177, 180
Theology White supremacist narratives, see
Theology of the people, see Theology Whiteness
of liberation White supremacist values, see
Theory of Dependence, 35 Whiteness
Theory of Dependency, 30 Willems, Emilio, 118
Theory of Diffusion of Innovations, see World Association of Community
Rogers, Everett Radios, Latin American
III General Conference, see III General section, 142
Conference of Latin American World Christian Association for
Bishops (Puebla 1979) Communication (WACC), 20
III General Conference of Latin World Health Organization
American Bishops (Puebla (WHO), 187
1979), 81 World Symposium of Cartagena on
Torres and Torres Restrepo, Camilo, Participatory Action
97, 111, 113 Research, 121
Tupac Katari insurgence, 37 World War II, see Second World War
World Wars, 160
See also Second World War
U
UNESCO, 14, 121
Union Federation of Mining Z
Workers, 144 Zapatista movement, see Zapatista
United Nations, 55, 56 uprising
United States, 30–32, 38, 42, 45 Zapatista uprising, 191

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PALGRAVE STUDIES IN COMMUNICATION FOR SOCIAL CHANGE

More information about this series at

ISSN 2634-6397 ISSN 2634-6400 (electronic)

Cover illustration: Merrill Images / Getty Images

contained within, while preserving their epistemological roots. The length

“Popular communication is about communication processes in which cultures that

“This volume makes a decisive contribution to theoretical and practical efforts to

1 Introduction: Popular Communication, an

Part I The Roots of an Epistemology 27

2 Thinking about Communication from the Global

3 Popular and Communitarian Communication

4 Faith, Communication and Commitment to Liberation 73

5 The Vestiges of the Concept of Popular

Part II A Method, a Pedagogy, a Practice 107

6 Disenchantment as a Path Toward Autonomy:

7 A Praise of Dignity in Educational Practice129

8 Popular Radios: Constants and Tensions141

9 Popular Communication in Latin America:

Part III Decolonial Perspectives 175

10 The Decolonial Nature of Comunicação Popular177

11 Digital Media and Emancipation in Latin American

12 Communication and Vivir Bien/Buen Vivir:

Nívea Canalli Bona Brazilian journalist Canalli Bona holds a PhD in

­ ostgraduate courses at Latin American and European universities, and

of Citizenship) and Televisão comunitária—dimensão pública e participa-

Introduction: Popular Communication,

There are many ways in which popular communication can be defined.1 As

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 1

around meanings; and an alternative configuration to mainstream media,

The Bottom-Up Approach: An Epistemological Root

In a certain way, this notion of “poor journalism” reflected many nor-

Another aspect of this refers to our work in popular communication in a way

For this author, on the opposite, the liberating popular communication

The Attachment to Social Struggles: A Battle

This understanding enlarges the scope of initiatives that can be consid-

is a search of recognition of each voice, as a process of subjectivation and

Considering the high concentration of argument producers and a vari-

An Alternative to Mainstream Media:

• their differences compared to mainstream media: in this sense, they

There have been attempts for establishing one normative model to be

The sense of developing popular communication within the Movimento

Already in the 1980s, the MacBride Report denounced the concentra-

An Epistemology of the South from Media

The term “popular” in comunicación popular, in Spanish, and comunica-

historical and socioeconomic context through participation. We talk par-

The focus of the studies about popular and alternative communication,

together in the common search of liberation utopias. Essentially, this com-

The epistemologies of the South refer to the production and validation of

Additionally, as for the epistemologies of the South, the concept of

Opposite to the functional-diffusionist conception propitiated by the North

The South and the North:

risk of justifying a peripherical position. Under the principles of the epis-

Historically, the adjective popular meant “communication of the people,”

Two globalized approaches seem particularly suitable and largely inter-

Popular Communication and the Perspective of Communication

If based on Freirean principles, communication for social change pur-

The role of technology is another important subject of debate in the

We want to recover a more integral view of communication, related to the

For the author, the popular communication is not in opposition to

Popular Communication and the Perspective of the Right

producing and diffusing information, as well as policies and direct actions

Festa, R. (1984). Comunicação popular e alternativa: a realidade e as utopias. In

Peruzzo, C. M. (2008). Conceitos de comunicação popular, alternativa e comuni-

1 Introduction: Popular Communication, an

Part I The Roots of an Epistemology 27

2 Thinking about Communication from the Global

3 Popular and Communitarian Communication

4 Faith, Communication and Commitment to Liberation 73

5 The Vestiges of the Concept of Popular

Part II A Method, a Pedagogy, a Practice 107

6 Disenchantment as a Path Toward Autonomy:

7 A Praise of Dignity in Educational Practice129

8 Popular Radios: Constants and Tensions141

9 Popular Communication in Latin America:

Part III Decolonial Perspectives 175

10 The Decolonial Nature of Comunicação Popular177

11 Digital Media and Emancipation in Latin American

12 Communication and Vivir Bien/Buen Vivir:

ostgraduate courses at Latin American and European universities, and

theoretical-epistemological matrices. The first theoretical perspective is

lanning, evaluation, etc.) and through gatherings mediated by communi-