The gained visibility of US Latina/os as the largest social minority has resulted in the explosive growth of new media institutions within the television industry targeting Latina/ os as never seen before. Even though Spanish-language television corporations are growing and are consolidating their presence in the television landscape, the enthusiasm for the Hispanic market has opened the door for new players, such as new Spanish-and Englishlanguage Latino television networks and the incursion of mainstream and global television corporations. In this article we analyze and categorize the new configurations of the Latino-oriented television industry where language and Latina/o identity are a key source of symbolic capital for the national, regional and global players investing in this industry.

The Latin American telenovela genre has enjoyed a long-lasting hegemonic position in prime-time television across the region, and particularly within US Spanish-language television market. However, in the last several years, Spanish-language national television networks, as well as their prime-time telenovela product, are being challenged by the new digital and mobile media landscape. Television networks have deployed a variety of strategies to better accommodate to new audiences’ consumption routines in a digital age. This article focuses on a particular moment of disruption – and continuity –, which has been a game changer for US Hispanic television and has transformed the face of fictional serial (telenovelas) in prime time. The surge in popularity of a telenovela subgenre originating in Colombia and widely adopted by US television corporations, known as narconovela, has transformed the telenovela genre/format, prompting industry professionals to initiate new institutional discourses aimed to mark these texts as super series, and in doing so labelling them as a new type of genre. Super series are an excellent case study for understanding the dialectic notion of disruption and continuity both in television studies and the television industry.

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In the context of a new economy and the new international cultural division of labor, we must recognize emerging globalization processes, triggered by the rise of a network cities media system in telenovela production comprising by the axis of Miami, Bogota, Mexico. This system has created an economic-socio-cultural production template I term reglocalization within the Spanish-language television industry. Reglocalization is a process through which Latinidad is re-crafted for regional/global consumption, through notions of traveling narratives, multinational settings, and multicultural castings, and transnational co-production agreements in which local entities produce a hybrid version of the region that includes a commodified production of a hemispheric Latinidad for global consumption.

El artículo analiza la situación de las narrativas transmedia en la ficción latina en Estados Unidos. La investigación, de corte exploratorio, se centra en el mapeo de prácticas y en la identificación de patrones comunes en las estrategias transmedia, así como en los contenidos generados por sus fans. Se estudia además la emergencia de diferentes tipos de webnovelas y concluye reflexionando sobre la situación y posibilidades de la narrativa transmedia en la ficción latina.