Other Americans

Matthew Bush’s research explores contemporary Latin American narrative and culture. His latest book, Other Americans: The Art of Latin America in the US Imaginary, examines the representation of Latin America across a host of media, in works that have been highly successful in the United States.

Bush, professor of Spanish and Hispanic studies in the department of modern languages and literatures, studies contemporary literature, film, and Netflix serials. He argues that these widely consumed works about Latin America are loaded with fear, anxiety, and shame, which has an impact that surpasses any receptive story framing. The negative feelings encoded in visions of Latin America run the risk of becoming common beliefs for American audiences, ultimately shaping their ideological relationship with the region. Bush studies the underlying melodramatic structures of these works that portray Latin America as an implicit other and a process of affective thought that encourages an us/them, or north/south binary paradigm in the reception of Latin America’s globalized art.

“When you have shows, films, and books that produce fear or anxiety and shame about Latin America, that impacts the audience and it affects their ideological relationship with the region,” he says. “If you are only consuming Narcos, and you don't know anything else about Colombia, you get the one-sided version of the story. Notably in those shows, there's next to nothing about the United States’ underlying role in the situation.”

Bush notes that this negative imagery tends to affect audiences’ ideological perceptions because it impacts them emotionally. “It feeds their imaginary relationship with the region as this place that needs to be kept at bay. That's the overarching theoretical perspective of the book, but it starts out with me thinking about, also, how did I first learn about Latin America? What do I know about, or what was my exposure to, Latin America?

The United States and Latin America at large, and very specifically Mexico, have long historical relations. One can't live without the other, he adds. He is interested in delving deeper into works that are portraying border spaces, the space of contact between the two regions, between the two cultures. 

“If nothing else, I want to highlight not only what's being told, but also what's left out of that purview. How does telling the story in this way influence our understandings of the cultures that make up Latin America and its immigrants in the United States?”