Néstor García Canclini

Since 1990 García Canclini has been working as a professor and researcher at the Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana in Mexico City and until 2007 he directed the university’s program studies on urban culture.

In the text Comunicación y consumo en tiempos neoconservadores (Communication and Consumerism in Neoconservative Times), the theorist affirms that communications research, centered in the social sciences, has made areas of Latin American cultural development visible, in which the relationship between consumerism and citizenship is established.

The previous can be seen reflected in the critique of marketing studies that only counts the economic figures of Latin America’s entry into world trade, but do not take into account the symbolic-social change that this generates, in his book La globalización imaginada (The Imagined Globalization), chapter ‘Mercado e Interculturalidad: América Latina entre Europa y Estados Unidos’ (Market and Interculturality: Latin America between Europe and the United States).

Canclini speaks of the reader in two sentiments, the first making reference to the literary field like Hans Robert Jauss and the second through the editorial system like Umberto Eco does.

One of the principal terms he has coined is “cultural hybridization,” a phenomenon that “materializes in multi-determined scenarios where diverse systems intersect and interpenetrate.”[2] An example of this is contemporary music groups that mix or juxtapose global trends such as pop with indigenous or traditional rhythms.

One of his best-known works, Consumidores y ciudadanos (Consumers and Citizens) defines consumption as "the set of socio-cultural processes in which the appropriation and uses of products are carried out.

Canclini takes an interdisciplinary approach to social thought to critically reimagine Latin American issues pertaining to modernity and democracy, "Néstor García Canclini explores the tensions, verging on contradictions, between modernization and democratization in Latin American nation-states.

From its hybrid position between tradition and modernity, the challenge for Latin America is to construct democratic culture and knowledge without succumbing either to the temptations of elite art and literature or to the coercive forces of mass media and marketing.

In a work of committed scholarship the author both interrogates and advocates the development of democratic institutions and practices in Latin America.

In CANCLINI N., Chiappari C., & López S. (Authors), Hybrid Cultures: Strategies for Entering and Leaving Modernity (pp. Xi-Xviii).