As we face the changes of the digital era, and media try to survive the waves of new platforms and ways to connect people, Peruvian media is still pretty much rooted on the broadcasting system, without figuring out how to approach the digital era, other than using its platforms to upload already broadcasted shows.
Peru is a multiethnic country, a former Spanish colony close to celebrating its independence bicentennial, and its media production seems to show little changes on the way it represents the multiple Peruvians on their screen. This research focusses on the way Peruvian television fiction has represented the different ethnic groups of the country in the last decade. After twenty years of internal violence, at the turn of the Century, Peru has supposedly turned into a more inclusive country, recognizing its cultural and ethnic diversity as part of our identity, and facing its long problem of racism and discrimination. This research asks if that supposed change is tangible on the way cultural products -mainly television- represent Peruvians in its fiction, the cultural product with the highest audience in the country.
The research objective is to analyze who are the individuals represented in these cultural products as part of the Peruvian ethnical diversity and how they are represented. This research asks for the stereotyped present on the TV fiction representation of Peruvian individuals, and the absences and invisibilities their stories content, as well as which are the topics and social interests these characters represent, as part of the Peruvian society.
To answer these questions, we use a mixed-method. Using a sample of 10 Peruvian TV fictions (around 13% of the decade’s production), we have focused on the character representation using an analysis matrix which identifies different character dimensions such as race, gender, age, place of origin, social status, occupation, temper, etc. This allows us to understand the amount of representation and underrepresentation -compared to the national Census- present on the Peruvian TV fictions. With a qualitative method of analysis -based on theoretical frameworks of visual analysis, representation, identity, and race, developed by authors such as Rose, Hall, Jodelet, Mulvey, Foucault, De la Cadena, Flores Galindo, and Callirgos- we analyze the ways these characters are represented, and how it represents the power structure on Peruvian society.
The research is on its final stage, and the initial findings show that, even if there have been changes on the Peruvian fiction, and the national discourse embraces the country’s cultural and ethnic diversity, the representation is still far behind of the much-needed societal change. We may ask ourselves in a future research if the digital era in Peru will really mean a change, or only expand the same representations on different platforms.