Chile's public television station, TVN, relies on a programming structure that places a telenovela before and after the national news hour. This programming model's popularity is due to what producers call its “umbrella effect,” meaning that the ratings of one program help to protect what comes before and after. In the months leading up to the 2009–10 presidential election, TVN blurred the boundaries between these two televisual genres by producing one telenovela that parodied the inner workings of a news station and another that enlisted a well‐known journalist to serve as its narrator. Drawing on fieldwork with media producers and telenovela fans, I argue that the overlaps between these two genres make visible the relation between media, political, and economic infrastructures. Analysis of these programming flows in the context of the electoral campaign provides insight into the role of transitions as places of politics making.
Two events rocked Chilean television in the first half of the 2010s. The first of these was an earthquake in 2010, and the second was the arrival in 2014 of the first Turkish soap opera to the screens of Chilean viewers. In this article, I situate these two events within an historical analysis of Chile’s movement to a postnetwork era. This digital transition has been marked by a much greater transnationalization both in property structure and in the viewing habits of the Chilean public. Although Chile could be considered an outlier in Latin America in terms of its digital access, my analysis emphasizes the importance of highlighting points of individual variation within the region to disaggregate regional-level conclusions regarding the state of “Latin American” television.
On 18 October 2019, a protest over an increase in metro fares in Santiago, Chile transformed into a nationwide uprising against inequality. As the protests evolved, it became clear that the discontent stemmed not only from the economic effects of the neoliberal model put into place during the Pinochet dictatorship (1973 to 1990), but also from the modes of relationality that it had engendered. The messages that protesters scrawled on the walls of the city insisted on the need for more empathy, respect, and dignity. Chilean artists responded by creating works that framed these individual grievances as collective experiences of a crisis in what in Spanish is called convivencia, or the art of living together. In this piece, I review the paste-up graffiti of Caiozzama, the visual mappings of Delight Lab, and the feminist performances of LASTESIS to highlight how these artists supported protesters’ call for dignity and a new mode of convivencia.
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