Azteca Television, Hybrid Cultural Identity, and Transnational Commercialization is an ethnography of the business practices of TV Azteca (Mexico) and its U.S. Spanish-language network Azteca America. Drawing upon approaches to cultural industries, critical studies of global marketing and market segmentation, cultural theories of globalization, performance studies, and Latin American and Latino/a studies, it examines how those practices affect the company's depictions of Mexican, Mexican-American, and Latino/a cultures produced for advertisers and television audiences. Exploring sales meetings and events, integrated (in-program) advertising and media convergence, and programming practices, I analyze how this cross-border network delineates those cultural identities. I critically examine how the network has contributed to the transformation of Mexican cultural identities via the global circulation of television and advertising. Hence, this dissertation speaks about the role of transnational media in the reconfiguration of national identities and in the politics of race, class, migration, and belonging. To carry out this research, I conducted interviews, obtained public and private industry and network materials, and acted as participant-observer at various settings in Mexico City, New York City, and Los Angeles.;The dissertation argues that Azteca's practices articulate ideologies about cultural identity and citizenship. In Mexico, TV Azteca has disseminated unorthodox treatments of national politics, gender, and sexuality. But because it targets the metropolitan, white and mestizo (mixed race) upper and middle classes, the company reinforces class, ethnic, racial, and regional hierarchies. Across the border, Azteca America has contested the U.S. Spanish-language television industry's homogenous pan-ethnic paradigm: the network has been pursuing Mexicans in the first instance, while creating secondary programming for the broader Hispanic audience. Azteca America, however, promotes both its immigrant and U.S.-born Mexican audiences paradoxically as cultural foreigners and domestic consumers. Transnationally, Azteca circulates a hybrid Mexican culture that expands national identity beyond rigid categories and that occasionally critiques sociopolitical disenfranchisement of Mexican Americans and immigrants.;While the primary focus is on Azteca's business practices, the dissertation also considers how advertising clients, television performers, audiences, new media users, and citizens negotiate their participant roles with the network. These contexts of consumer-citizen participation and protest challenge the authority of Azteca and its clients to define Mexican and Mexican-American cultural identities. Still, much of the network's practices privilege the participation of its clients, and this transnational media corporation retains vast control over its screen images and how it shapes cultural representations according to its sales and marketing priorities.
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