‘Popular culture’ has always represented a fulcrum within social, cultural and anthropological discourses in Latin America. It has often been imagined as inhabiting interstitial and heterogeneous spaces that have represented a challenge to the dominant cultural paradigms of the ‘lettered city’ since at least Colonial times, and has repeatedly been mapped on to political, economic and even libidinal boundaries – between the country and the city, between the folk and the street, between the ‘masses’ and elite national/political structures. Yet since at least the turn of the millennium, concepts of the ‘folk’, the ‘mass', the ‘people’ and the ‘multitude’ have exploded in the face of new cultural and informational technologies, with cinematic, televisual, narrative, musical and cybernetic manifestations of popular culture at the forefront of social processes which mediate between the national and the global in a see-sawing climate of technocratic neoliberal economic ideology, financial crises marked by new and intensified social problems, boom and bust cycles in commodities and resource-extraction, and the rise of demagogic, mediatic neo-populisms.