Shopping Malls y alimentación rápida: Americanización o mundialización de la cultura en América Latina?

The aim of this article is to highlight the profound changes that have taken place in late modernity in both the material and symbolic cultures in Latin America through the establishment and expansion of emblematic signs in the consumer society and in cultural artifacts such as super and hyper-markets, shopping malls, fast food chains, etc. These processes can only be fully understood and construed within the theoretical framework of the approaches of ‘Americanization’, ‘McDonaldization’ and, most importantly, ‘Mondialisation’. This latter approach provides a new perspective that properly accounts for the functioning of society and culture in modern world. The ideas and conceptual input of these seminal approaches make it possible, on the one hand, to analyze more accurately the processes involved and on the other to put into perspective the empirical material obtained from shopping malls and fast food chains. All this will enable us to analyze and understand the views and comments obtained from a forum organized by the BBC about the impact and influence of American fast food chains in the traditional Latin American diet. In addition to the approaches of ‘Americanization’, ‘Mcdonaldization’ and ‘Mondialisation’, the outcomes of the forum are analyzed using semiotic concepts such as cultural units, semantic fields and chains of signification which show the different classification and discourses related to these processes.