Please join the Latin American Library for a work-in progress talk by 2019-2020 Richard E. Greenleaf Fellow Dr. Daniel Party. His presentation, entitled “The Miamization of Radionovelas: Cuban-American Serials of the 1960s” will take place on Wednesday, February 12, 2020 at 3:30pm at the Latin American Library Seminar Room. The talk will be in English. Refreshments to follow.

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Abstract: Before the 1959 Cuban Revolution, the island was the most influential producer of radionovelas in Latin America. In the early 1960s, a large number of radionovela playwrights, actors and technicians migrated to Miami. There, they began an ambitious project to produce radionovelas for distribution and consumption throughout the Americas and Spain. Key in this effort was a strategy to develop content that would be devoid of references to Cuba and delivered in a neutral accent they called “Continental Spanish.”

Through an analysis of the Louis J. Boeri and Minín Bujones Collection of Cuban Radionovelas (1963-1970) at Tulane’s Latin American Library, this presentation argues that Miami radionovelas can shed light on the use of mass media as anti-Communist propaganda in Latin America, the development of Spanish-language media in the United States, and the establishment of Miami as a key production center for Latino/a popular culture.

Daniel Party is Associate Professor of Music and Director of Graduate Studies and Research for the School of Arts at Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile. He has been a visiting professor at Brown University, the University of Oregon, and the University of Georgia. He received his Ph.D. in Music History from the University of Pennsylvania, and a B.A. (Classical Guitar) from the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile. His research focuses on Latin American, U.S. Latino and Spanish popular music, and the intersection of music, gender, and sexuality.

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About Richard E. Greenleaf (1930-2011)

Until his retirement in 1998, Richard E. Greenleaf served as the France Vinton Scholes Professor of Colonial Latin American History, and as the Director of the Center for Latin American Studies at Tulane University. He also served as Chair of the Department of History. Dr. Greenleaf grew up in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and took his Bachelors, Masters and Doctoral degrees at the University of New Mexico, where he studied under the dean of Inquisition scholars, France V. Scholes. Greenleaf’s doctoral dissertation, “Zumárraga and the Mexican Inquisition 1536-1543,” served as the basis for his many excellent publications on the history of the Holy Office of the Inquisition in Latin America. Greenleaf authored eleven major scholarly books, co-authored or contributed to seventeen others, and published almost four dozen articles in the field of Latin American and New Mexico history. He was the recipient of many distinguished awards, among them the Silver Medal, the Sahagún Prize (Mexican National History Award), and the Serra Award of the Academy of American Franciscan History for Distinguished Scholarship in Colonial Latin American History. In his long and distinguished teaching career in New Mexico, Mexico City and New Orleans, Greenleaf served as mentor to 34 doctoral students at Tulane, and countless masters and undergraduate students. Richard E. Greenleaf died on November 8, 2011.