The possibilities Jesús Martín-Barbero left for us to understand Latin America.

This essay analyzes the Ph.D dissertation of Jesús Martín-Barbero, written in 1972 in Louvain, Belgium. Equipped with Paul Ricoeur's explorations on how a text is constructed and Paulo Freire's insistence on the emancipatory nature of the communicative action, Martín-Barbero centered his scholarship on the urgency to study and understand Latin American popular cultures. Martín-Barbero's dissertation centers the great problem of academic analysis on language as the subject that acts in the world. To explore the connection of language and action, Martín-Barbero proposes three historically situated language devices that allow individuals to position themselves and move toward praxis: myth, prophecy, and poetry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]