10.1: Introduction

The transformation of the Latin American television industry clearly exposes the profound impact of neoliberal policies throughout the region, including the multiplication of distribution windows, trends toward media concentration, and changes in the modalities by which global media corporations are rooting in local and national television industries. Miller and Leger argue that runaway productions are the means by which Hollywood outsources production to developing countries to realize cost advantages via flexible labor, low wages, low prices, tax incentives, cheap accommodations, and access to material, cultural, and symbolic infrastructure, all the while maintaining tight central administrative and financial control.¹ This New International Division of Cultural Labor (NICL) allows global corporations to expand their transnational presence; however, capital accumulation and profit revenues stay close to the conglomerates’ homes. Given this new media industrial order, Hesmondhalgh argues that media conglomerates acting as large bureaucracies increasingly rely on professionals from small production houses to provide creativity and innovation.²

Given this scenario, labor conventions in Latin American television are changing dramatically. The incursion of global media conglomerates in local markets across the region has caused unanticipated alliances with local independent production houses, or “indies,” which have traditionally been subject to the disproportionate power of the major national television networks in their respective countries. This combination of circumstances has led to disparate outcomes. On the one hand, the presence of global conglomerates has problematically spurred the region’s further incorporation into global capitalism, allowing penetration of Western media in countries where they were formerly confronted by institutional, linguistic, and cultural barriers tied to dynamics of local television consumption. On the other hand, these circumstances present an opportunity for indies to produce different kinds of television projects for national and regional markets, bypassing the long-standing monopoly of national television networks.

The fact that there are just a few indies in each domestic market with the capacity to produce for television networks with national distribution is symptomatic of their precarious status, and exposes their vulnerable position within an industry dominated by national or multinational media conglomerates.³ Following Miller’s reasoning, “Cultural labor incarnates this latter-day loss of life-long employment and relative income security among the Global North’s industrial proletarian and professional-managerial classes”;⁴ accordingly, the very existence of indies relies on access to media professionals obeying the dynamics of flexible labor, nonunion status, and lack of long-term health or retirement benefits, which are crucial to the sustainability of their business models. These labor conditions are at the core of what Curtin and Sanson describe as “precarious livelihoods,” which are “indicative of a new world order of social and economic instability.”⁵

I argue that there is a fundamental difference among the production dynamics of film and television in transnational settings that are largely shaped by the relation with local/national audiences. So it comes as no surprise that some authors in this volume, such as Szczepanik in the case of transnational ventures with television conglomerates in the Czech Republic ⁶ or Keane in the case of television in China,⁷ recognize the impact of the NICL and its insidious effects on creative labor and local economies and also complicate the landscape, avoiding a causal and unidirectional effect of these global processes. For instance, in Latin America, where Hollywood cinema overwhelmingly dominates the box office in every domestic market, a different scenario appears in television, where the programming of national/regional networks overwhelmingly dominates prime time and achieves high ratings because of the cultural proximity of their products.⁸ As a result, while multinationals still rely on the advantageous agreements they receive in national markets and the flexible labor their productions require, these global television corporations also need indies and local professionals, who become valuable assets, albeit temporarily, helping to connect their content with local audiences.⁹

So indies of different sizes with diverse financial and technical infrastructures now participate in projects ranging from low-budget documentaries and journalism to midbudget games and reality shows to the most expensive fictional series, telenovelas, and movies. Indies’ status across the region has grown because they can provide professional staff and talent to produce innovative narratives along with linguistic and cultural input that transnational corporations need to penetrate national and regional markets. In spite of these new opportunities for indie producers, it’s not clear that these new opportunities have as yet had a positive effect on wages and working conditions.¹⁰