The Aesthetics of Alienation and the Problem of Emancipation: The Case of Cuban and Salvadoran Smartphone Media

This article analyzes mobile videography in Cuba and El Salvador through the lens of critical theory, focusing on how aesthetic strategies deployed by female creators negotiate alienation and pursue symbolic or material emancipation. Drawing on Rahel Jaeggi’s theory of alienation and Habermasian concepts of communicative action, this study compares rural Salvadoran soap-opera-style productions with Cuban urban visual satire. While Salvadoran videos often depict domestic resilience within modest settings without overt critique, Cuban creators highlight urban decay and employ irony to expose social contradictions. Using a qualitative, interpretive approach, this study identifies three core dynamics: (1) contrasting aesthetic strategies shaped by cultural and infrastructural contexts, (2) divergent modes of appropriation and authorship enabled by mobile technologies, and (3) emergent, though partial, forms of emancipation, most notably among women, through creative autonomy and economic self-positioning. Ultimately, the findings suggest that under conditions of structural alienation, the mobile phone camera becomes a symbolic tool through which creators, especially women, negotiate meaning, reclaim interpretive agency, and pursue situated forms of partial emancipation.

Introduction

The widespread availability of smartphones equipped with high-resolution cameras has transformed audio-visual production globally. Individuals now possess portable tools that enable the creation and distribution of visual narratives, with minimal resources. In Latin America, where access to traditional media has often been restricted by political, economic, or technological limitations, this shift has opened up new spaces for self-expression and collective representation. Among these, YouTube has emerged as a particularly important platform, allowing creators in countries such as Cuba and El Salvador to navigate, document, and sometimes contest the contradictions in their everyday lives. Such practices have been documented as forms of vernacular creativity and political self-expression, particularly in the Global South (Hjorth & Pink, 2014; Treré & Mattoni, 2016).

In both countries, the underlying and common denominator in smartphone cinematography is the problem of alienation, the social obstacles that impede self-realization, or the problematic separation of a subject and object that belong together (Leopold, 2022). Drawing on Jaeggi (2014), alienation is understood here as a failed relationship to the world, specifically the inability to appropriate one’s own conditions of existence. The Salvadoran prevailing imagery centres around the art of growing corn and cooking pupusas, house chores, and competition games in mostly impoverished rural areas, where tradition dictates that women’s domesticity is dependent on men. Limitations and inequalities are shown by slow-paced actualités about the mundane: fertilizing the corn plot, walking to a river pool, helping a friend rebuild his or her adobe hut, etc. The social commentary on contradictions is covert, even unaware, in Salvadoran smartphone aesthetics, as if alienation was not consciously recognised. On the other hand, the Cuban image concerns the urban art of queuing for food items and other basic commodities in fairly elegant colonial settings. It is overt or even subversive when Cuban filmmakers theorize on, for instance, the price of the cup of coffee while contemplating a beautiful seafront sunset, as if being alienated is a conscious problem.

This study analyzes a purposive sample of smartphone videos uploaded on YouTube by Cuban and Salvadoran creators between 2019 and 2023. It employs an interpretive analysis of visual motifs, themes, and aesthetic strategies as informed by critical theory. Whereas Salvadoran and Cuban smartphone cinematographies diverge in their aesthetics, both are open windows into the social and political struggles of their respective realities. Appropriating the tools of production, in this case the mobile phone, is the means to neutralize the alienated conditions in which these videographers are immersed. With this tool, meaning is constructed using different aesthetic motifs in each country.

Given the diverse set of conditions of alienation, appropriation, ownership of the means of production, and emancipation, we end up with several questions: (1) To what extent do Salvadoran and Cuban smartphone videographers appropriate mobile phones as a means of overcoming alienation? (2) How do the aesthetic strategies employed reflect differing forms of agency and resistance? (3) Can these aesthetic forms be interpreted as routes toward emancipation and, if so, what are the limits of that emancipation? In this sense, I propose that the mobile phone is not just a technological tool but also a symbolic medium of empowerment—one that enables marginalized subjects to negotiate their conditions of alienation and envision possibilities of self-determined expression.

Historical and Institutional Background

Cuba and El Salvador have long histories of conflict, inequality, and survival. In Cuba, racial hierarchies persist despite decades of revolutionary rhetoric: White citizens still enjoy better conditions than Black and mulatto Cubans (Hayes, 2015). Economic mismanagement, external boycotts, and the collapse of tourism during the Covid-19 pandemic have further eroded food production and access. In El Salvador, land dispossession after independence fueled an export economy of indigo and coffee, entrenched elite dominance, and triggered coups and dictatorships. Severe inequality culminated in a 14-year civil war (Chávez, 2014), followed by migration, economic devastation, and the rise of gang-violence (Saca-Schader, 2015). The international media now associates El Salvador primarily with death and tattooed gangsters (Cienfuegos, 2016).

These dominant portrayals obscure more localized forms of representation. Young Salvadorans use smartphones to document domestic labor, farming, cooking, and religious festivities, offering alternative narratives that complicate violent images. Channels such as El Salvador Full show twenty-somethings tending to cornfields or preparing pupusas in modest kitchens. The aesthetic is unpolished but intimate, reinforcing ties to the land and contrasting with urban life in Cuba.

In contrast, Cuba built a globally recognised film industry after the revolution. Early productions drew on dialectical materialism, as interpreted by Plekhanov and Lenin (Callinicoset al., 2021). Julio García Espinosa’s manifesto on “Imperfect Cinema” (1969) called for films that displayed the process of problems rather than beautifying conclusions, aligning with utilitarian and orthodox Marxist principles. By the mid-1970s, however, Cuban filmmakers had turned toward more experimental and critical works, reflecting evolving Marxist debates (Quirós, 1996). Films such as Alicia en el pueblo de las maravillas (1990) and Madagascar (1995) illustrate this shift. Today, this legacy reappears in the work of independent smartphone creators, who circulate content outside official channels through YouTube.

Institutional training also diverges. Cuba established university programmes in photography, film, and television, as well as a technical school near Havana. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, state production declined but co-production and training sustained a skilled workforce. Some contemporary videographers such as Camila Carballo clearly benefit from this tradition (Carballo, 2020). In contrast, El Salvador lacks a comparable industry or infrastructure. Beyond a small unit at the Universidad de El Salvador and one private programme, there is no film school. Most Salvadoran professionals work abroad. However, smartphone videographers within the country have developed a distinctive aesthetic rooted in improvisation, humour, and rural life. Without institutional support, their marginal practices generate counternarratives that challenge dominant images.

Theoretical Framework

To interpret these elements, the analysis draws on critical theory, particularly the frameworks developed by Habermas (1990), Jaeggi (2014), and Mihai (2018), who view aesthetic practices as embedded in sociopolitical structures. These perspectives help elucidate how aesthetic and communicative practices are entangled with the relations of power, alienation, appropriation, and potential emancipation. From this viewpoint, aesthetic choices are never neutral but ideologically charged and capable of expressing, resisting, or transforming marginalizing conditions.

As a conceptual anchor for this framework, Rahel Jaeggi’s account of alienation offers deeper philosophical grounding. In her view, alienation is understood not merely as a psychological condition, but as a “relation of relationlessness,” a distorted or failed connection between a person and the world in which they live (Jaeggi, 2014). Alienation occurs when individuals cannot appropriate the social and material conditions that shape their lives in a meaningful and self-determining way. For Jaeggi, emancipation becomes possible not through withdrawal or rebellion alone but through the critical reappropriation of those very conditions, transforming one’s relation to them by giving them new meaning, purpose, and use. This idea of appropriation implies a kind of “world disclosure,” whereby alienated subjects reconfigure their embeddedness in structural constraints, such as poverty, racial inequality, or political repression, into avenues for self-expression and agency. In this sense, the act of creating and sharing smartphone videos may be read as a form of reappropriation; it enables individuals to narrate their social reality, engage in aesthetic world-making, and potentially shift their relation to alienating forces by embedding critique, irony, or intimacy into the very conditions that marginalize them. The comparison between Cuban and Salvadoran smartphone cinematography allowed us to explore how different aesthetic strategies may facilitate different modalities of emancipation.

Building on these theoretical lenses, the analytical process was further shaped by the conceptual apparatus of critical theory, particularly the triad of alienation, appropriation, and emancipation. These were not used as static coding categories, but as sensitizing concepts that oriented the interpretation of aesthetic and communicative practices. That is, rather than seeking direct evidence of these concepts, this study looked at how videographic material, as an art form embedded in material constraints, might reflect or resist conditions of alienation, enact forms of appropriation, or gesture toward emancipatory possibilities. In this sense, the relationship between theory and data was dialogical: empirical material was examined not only to illustrate theoretical premises but also to refine or challenge them in light of vernacular, gendered, and locally embedded practices of smartphone-based videography.

Methodology

Across both national cases, the primary unit of analysis was the aesthetic and narrative content of the videos themselves. Special attention is given to production choices (staging, camera work, sound design), thematic patterns (critique, celebration, irony), and communicative forms (direct address, satire, and visual juxtaposition). These features were selected as proxies to understand how creators construct meaning under conditions of social constraints and media precarity.

This study employs a qualitative, critical-theory-informed approach to analyze mobile-phone-based videography from Cuba and El Salvador, with particular emphasis on the aesthetic forms and narrative structures deployed by creators, most of whom are women, in their self-produced YouTube content. The corpus was selected purposively rather than randomly to capture culturally significant and aesthetically coherent examples that illuminate the dynamics of alienation, appropriation, and emancipation. Channels and creators were chosen based on their gendered and political relevance, sustained activity, thematic clarity, consistent output, and audience base during the 2019–2023 period, particularly those that had produced a substantial volume of videos over time and an ample subscription base. It is important to note that such visibility may also reflect platform-specific algorithmic dynamics that can favor certain types of narratives or aesthetic choices while marginalizing others (Cakmaket al., 2024; Duffy & Meisner, 2023).

Such purposive sampling is a well-established strategy in qualitative research for selecting information-rich cases that align with conceptual objectives of a study, like this one, rather than achieving statistical representativeness (Campbellet al., 2020; Palinkaset al., 2015; Tracy, 2020). Purposive sampling is used to select respondents who are most likely to yield appropriate and useful information (Kelly, 2010). The goal is to gain theoretical insights and interpretive richness.

Once selected, the videos were analyzed through a qualitative, interpretive approach informed by the emancipatory aims of Critical Theory. Aesthetic elements such as framing, tone, pacing, and composition were examined not only for style but also for their role in expressing or concealing social contradictions. Narrative forms, ranging from melodrama to parody and from soliloquy to observational realism, were interpreted as symbolic enactments of alienation, marginality, and self-assertion. Using this approach, this analysis aims to uncover not only themes but also latent structures of misrecognition, epistemic injustice, misogyny, and constrained subjectivity. Interpretation is immanent and historically situated, following Jaeggi’s (2014) view that critiques must begin from the internal contradictions of social practices and their capacity to enable or hinder self-realization.

This multimodal analysis was carried out inductively and interpretively, allowing salient motifs and contradictions to emerge through close viewing and iterative reflection. Descriptive observations were anchored to the specific visual and narrative features of the videos. Interpretations were then situated within the broader socio-political and historical context of each country, attending to how aesthetic practices may resist, reproduce, or re-signify the dominant power relations. Although the examples are intentionally selective and focused, they are designed to be illustrative of broader dynamics, rather than exhaustive or statistically representative.

Results

The selection and examination of mobile phone-based video content created by Cuban and Salvadoran videographers was guided by the overarching conceptual lens of critical theory, particularly the dynamics of alienation, appropriation, and emancipation. Accordingly, what is reported here are not only patterns of style, content, and form but also the ways in which these patterns may reflect conditions of constraint, agency, or resistance within contemporary lived experiences. These findings are presented in three subsections: Forms of Alienation, Modes of Appropriation, and Aesthetic Strategies of Emancipation, each articulating a distinct but interrelated dimension of analysis. Together, they provide a basis for interpreting how everyday aesthetic choices articulate broader possibilities or limitations of subjectivity and social transformation. While this section draws on illustrative examples rather than statistical samples, each video or channel was selected for narrative coherence, aesthetic consistency, and audience engagement. The analysis focuses on how these examples express or negotiate alienation, appropriation, and emancipation through observable stylistic choices such as framing, irony, montage, voiceover, or recurring character tropes, interpreted in relation to contextual and cultural cues.

Forms of Alienation

The following examples were chosen to illustrate recurring tropes and not to claim exhaustiveness. The goal is to explore how specific audiovisual practices reflect or mediate lived experiences shaped by alienation in different sociopolitical settings. In El Salvador, over 100 informal production units or ensembles were identified, most comprising two–20 members. These ensembles tend to be based in rural areas, particularly in the departments of Ahuachapán and Sonsonate, and are characterized by high turnover and flexible membership. Common topics include everyday rural life: cooking, planting maize, tending animals, walking through fields, swimming in rivers, and social games or competitions. Many of these ensembles produce short soap-opera-style sketches, which are released as serialized videos of approximately 12 minutes each. These telenovela-inspired (soap-operas) productions, of which there are hundreds, if not thousands, often center on melodramatic themes such as romantic betrayal, domestic strife, and gendered dependence. For example, El Salvador Nación, with over one million subscribers, frequently features narratives that reinforce patriarchal dynamics by portraying women as either nags or objects of sexual desire. A similar narrative structure is visible in the sketches produced by El Salvador ES, which depict women as either materialistic or lacking principles. “Alienation is not a condition of separation from something, but rather a deficient relation to self and world, a way of being in the world that is marked by indifference, constraint, or meaninglessness,” as Rahel Jaeggi observes in Alienation (Jaeggi, 2014, p. 176). These cases were selected for their popularity and narrative coherence as well as their alignment with broader cultural and aesthetic norms in Salvadoran social life.

In contrast to ensemble-based Salvadoran sketches, Cuban creators operate primarily as individuals, crafting content rooted in personal observation and socio-political commentary. Most of them are university-educated and based in urban areas. Unlike their Salvadoran counterparts, these creators rarely produced fictional narratives. Instead, their videos revolve around documentary-style explorations of scarcity, daily routines, cultural heritage, and social critiques. The topics range from food scarcity and inflation to beach visits and historical tours. These creators often employed soliloquy, irony, and montage to construct a mediated critique of Cuban modernity, juxtaposing government ideals with lived contradictions. Such interpretations are grounded in close viewing of visual and narrative cues, such as the ironic tone of narration, symbolic contrasts, and the use of personal addresses, which align with critical theory’s concern for disrupted meaning-making and subjective dissonance.

Channels such as Alita’s World, Camila Carballo, and Lisa Garci were selected based on consistency, audience engagement, and evolving aesthetic practices. For instance, Lisa Garci’s videos, typically over 20 minutes long, focus on the absurdities of everyday life and reflect a self-ethnographic sensibility (Ardévol & Gómez Cruz, 2013; Dunn & Myers, 2020). Her use of irony, visual metaphors, and narrative commentary makes her work particularly valuable for analyzing the aesthetics of alienation and emancipation within a contemporary Cuban socialist context. As Jaeggi argues, “Critique must begin from within, from the experiences, and practices of the subjects themselves. It is in the contradictions of lived experience that the potentials for transformation lie” (Jaeggi, 2014, p. 217).

This contrast between ensemble collectives and individual creators also reflects differing models of authorship and narrative framing. Although Salvadoran productions are often collaborative and melodramatic, Cuban creators use a first-person mode of address to interpret their surroundings. These representational choices do more than reflect living conditions; they also embody forms of appropriation. Through the act of producing, editing, and circulating content, many creators, especially those operating under material constraints, assert a degree of agency. Their participation in digital economies and aesthetic expression mark a subtle but meaningful negotiation with dominant narratives and power structures, setting the stage for further inquiry into how such practices function as modes of appropriation. This blurring of representation and agency sets the groundwork for examining how production practices become appropriation sites.

Modes of Appropriations

One of the most prominent formats is the micro-telenovela: serialized melodramas dealing with love, betrayal, and morality, often with overt gender hierarchies. In channels such as El Salvador Nación and El Salvador ES, women are routinely depicted in either submissive or objectified roles, thus reinforcing patriarchal norms. However, the widespread participation of rural women in front of and behind the camera suggests a complex dynamic. While the content often reaffirms gendered subordination, the act of production itself may signify a form of appropriation and economic agency. As Jaeggi clarifies, appropriation can be understood as the activity of making something one’s own... a process through which individuals relate to conditions, norms, and roles not merely by adapting to them but by shaping and modifying them in light of their own concerns. (Jaeggi, 2014). Many of these creators have leveraged YouTube revenue to attain modest financial independence, which, despite being entangled in traditional aesthetic forms, can be read as localized and partial enactment of emancipation.

In El Salvador, most mobile video production is carried out by informal ensemble groups operating in rural areas with limited infrastructure. These collectives produce a high volume of content focused on domestic life, agriculture, and small-scale social interactions. The aesthetic is simple and unrefined, favoring handheld camera work, natural lighting, and real locations, which may be read as both a constraint and sign of rooted authenticity. Common narratives center on everyday acts of cooking, harvesting, tending animals, or competing in playful challenges. In this sense, the participation in intersubjective processes of understanding does the subject acquire the capacity to form an identity and to understand itself as the author of its own life history, as stated by Jürgen Habermas (1984). These acts are performed and recorded in environments marked by economic precarity yet rendered with a tone of resilience and communal communicative outreach.

In both national contexts, the act of video production itself becomes a site of negotiation, with material constraints and even cultural norms. Whether through ensemble-based collectives or individual creators, the process of crafting and disseminating visual content suggests emergent appropriation of voice, form, and visibility. However, this appropriation is not limited to production techniques or participation in digital economies; it also extends to the aesthetic shaping of meaning. The next section examines how creators not only appropriate representational tools but also reconfigure them into strategies of irony, critique, and symbolic resistance, thereby edging closer to what critical theory understands as practices of emancipation.

Aesthetic Strategies of Emancipation

While many productions avoid direct political commentary, many creators employ irony, role-play, parody, and montage to engage in symbolic resistance. These aesthetic interventions complicate the boundary between entertainment and critique by subtly reconfiguring everyday acts of performance into reflexivity and reappropriation gestures. Rather than conveying a unified ideology, these strategies highlight the plurality of aesthetic means used by these divergent creators. This section examines how such strategies contribute to a broader understanding of emancipation as a situated, aesthetic, and often-ambivalent process. Emancipation is not a one-time act of liberation but a continuous process of appropriating one’s conditions of life in ways that make them one’s own (Jaeggi, 2014).

At the margins of this dominant pattern are channels such as Aventuras D Yency, which subverts conventional norms through comedic gender reversals and parody. In sketches where men perform female roles and vice versa, traditional binaries are temporarily destabilized. While humor softens critique, these aesthetic strategies make visible otherwise normalized forms of gendered alienation. Through satire and role-play, these performances generate openings for reflection and, by extension, for emergent emancipatory discourse, even if not explicitly formulated as such by the creators. By appropriating a role or norm, Jaeggi states that, it “is not merely to act in accordance with it, but to relate to it critically, to reinterpret it, and to possibly transform its meaning” (Jaeggi, 2014, p. 95). By reverting the norm, Yency attempts to transform the meaning of gender roles.

Channels such as Alita’s World use juxtaposition—between revolutionary iconography and market prices, or between official buildings and derelict infrastructure—to comment on the dissonance between ideology and material reality. Alita’s address to the Ministry of Finance as “Mummy,” layered with laughter and sarcasm, exemplifies how humor becomes a communicative strategy that critiques without direct confrontation. The act of framing these contradictions with aesthetic care and emotional nuance transforms personal observation into a form of narrative resistance.

Lisa Garci offers another example. Her self-ethnographic videos about food shortages, COVID-19 lockdown life, or broken services created affective documents of alienation, rendered with subtle acts of reclamation. In one video, her commentary on running out of coffee is not trivial; it becomes a window into systemic dysfunction and shared frustration. Her use of the mobile phone to document, narrate, and share these experiences positions her not simply as a subject of constraint but also as an active interpreter of her social reality. This performative act, while small-scale, aligns with the critical theory notion of emancipation: the reclamation of voice, narrative, and interpretive authority.

Similarly, Camila Carballo’s content combines historical reflection with visual montage to highlight the temporal layers of Cuban life: past optimism, present disrepair, and unclear future. Her aesthetic, too, avoids direct denunciation but enacts a quiet confrontation through contrast, irony, and the strategic use of voice-over. These creators do not proclaim emancipation, but their videos function as communicative actions that foster reflexivity, dialogical awareness, and the symbolic reappropriation of lived conditions. The lifeworld is reproduced through communicative action, in which actors pursue mutual understanding and coordinate their actions on the basis of shared meanings (Habermas & McCarthy, 1984).

These strategies do not amount to systematic resistance, but instead offer partial and situated gestures of agency. Their significance lies in how they reconfigure aesthetic form as a space for reflexivity, improvisation, and mediated critique. In this way, they lay the groundwork for the interpretive reflections that follow, where these aesthetic gestures are examined through the lens of critical theory and the concept of emancipation as a process, rather than a fixed outcome.

Discussion

This section interprets empirical findings through the conceptual lens of contemporary critical theory, particularly as formulated by Jaeggi (2016), Habermas (1990), and Mihai (2018), to assess how aesthetic and narrative strategies in Cuban and Salvadoran smartphone videos respond to specific conditions of alienation. The aim is to examine how the aesthetic and narrative strategies employed by Salvadoran and Cuban smartphone videographers engage with specific conditions of alienation, such as economic precarity, gendered social roles, and institutional control, and whether they enable forms of appropriation or gestures toward emancipation. By grounding interpretation in the socio-political contexts of each country, the analysis considers how these mobile videos creations symbolically gesture toward resistance or re-signification, acknowledging that such interpretive acts do not constitute definitive outcomes but rather partial responses to alienation. This also responds to the need, highlighted by recent critiques of critical theory, to re-anchor normative claims in the concrete lived experiences and practices of marginal actors (Jaeggi, 2014; Mihai, 2018). Rather than treating emancipation as a fixed endpoint, this approach views it as a process that unfolds through communicative and aesthetic actions. It draws on Habermas and McCarthy’s (1984) concept of communicative action, which emphasizes mutual understanding as a basis for social coordination, and Jaeggi’s (Jaeggi, 2014) idea that alienation is not simply a deviation from normative ideals but a disrupted relationship to one’s world. Within this framework, appropriation becomes central to critique and transformation, particularly when subjects use everyday media to rework social roles or reinterpret structural conditions through their own lens. As Mihai (2018) argues, though tentative, such gestures can prefigure counterpublic spaces where alienated subjects rehearse alternative ways of relating to the self and world. This conceptual triangulation, between alienation as deficient relatedness (Jaeggi), communicative action (Habermas), and prefigurative practice (Mihai), frames mobile video not as evidence of outcomes but as socially embedded action open to situated, interpretive understanding.

Alienation and Appropriation

Common individuals in both El Salvador and Cuba face forms of exclusion from key resources, although they take different shapes. In Cuba, the state guarantees access to education and healthcare, but material scarcity, especially of food and consumer goods, deeply affects daily life. In El Salvador, food and commercial goods are generally available; however, structural limitations in education, public health, and income inequality restrict access to broader social opportunities. These restrictions reflect what Rahel Jaeggi (Jaeggi, 2016) calls the pathologies of modernity rather than pathologies exclusive to capitalism or socialism. In this view, alienation is not tied to a specific economic formation, but emerges when structural obstacles hinder self-realization and autonomy (Habermas, 1990).

Alienation has been articulated in diverse ways by major thinkers. For Karl Marx, alienation is rooted in the separation of individuals from the conditions and products of their labor, an exclusion from the resources necessary for self-determination. As summarized by Fazio (2021), building on Honneth, alienation can be understood as a social pathology rooted in insufficient recognition, or what Honneth describes as an insufficient appropriation of an objectively possible reason (Honneth, 2017, p. 917). Jaeggi (2014) defines alienation as a deficient relationship with the world, encompassing personal, social, and institutional domains. Alienation is a rupture in the subject’s capacity to meaningfully relate to their own actions, institutions, or the environment. Skotnicki and Nielsen (2021) described it as a crisis of agency, a condition in which individuals fail to appropriate the world as their own because it lies beyond their control, whether materially, culturally, or symbolically.

This appropriation failure is not confined to economic life. As Mihai (2018) notes, alienation can manifest in the realm of culture and aesthetics through epistemic injustice, where individuals are denied recognition as credible “knowers” or authors of meaning. These asymmetries often overlap with systemic misrecognition along the lines of race and gender, producing what Azmanova (2016) identifies as layered forms of symbolic exclusion. In parallel, (Turkle, 2011) argued that information technologies can intensify feelings of dislocation and disaffection, as digital mediation restructures how individuals relate to one another and to the social world. Taken together, these perspectives frame alienation as a persistent feature of modernity, an obstacle to self-realization across both political spheres.

To respond to the condition of alienation, critical theory turns to the concept of appropriation, not as a passive outcome, but as an active, dialectical process. Appropriation, in this sense, refers both to the usurpation of labor and resources by dominant groups and to the potential for individuals and communities to reclaim authorship over their material, symbolic, and expressive lives. Habermas (1990) contends that communicative action, particularly as exercised through aesthetic and artistic expression, offers a space in which subjectivity can be affirmed outside the constraints of market or state rationality. Freedom is also discursive: the capacity to express perspectives beyond dominant norms and to co-create meaning with others. Skotnicki and Nielsen (2021) echo this idea, suggesting that art, aesthetics, and sports function as tools of reappropriation, enabling individuals to challenge and reshape what they and others may become.

Emancipation becomes possible when individuals gain material and symbolic access to the tools of expression. In this context, mobile phone cameras and internet platforms can be understood as “enabling powers” (Andrew & Baker, 2020): which provide both the means and the conceptual space to produce counter-narratives, assert agency, and resist dominant configurations of power. However, this potential is not automatically realized; it depends on how these tools are used, by whom, and under what conditions. For marginalized creators in El Salvador and Cuba, the appropriation of audiovisual tools represents not just creative expression but a partial reclaiming of the means of symbolic production.

In Cuba and El Salvador, mobile creators operate under authoritarianism, scarcity, and marginalization, not just materially but epistemically. Their narratives often fall outside the dominant frameworks of modernity and legitimacy, thus limiting the impact of creative appropriation. As Gronow (2016) observed, cultural production from marginalized voices is often dismissed due to class origin, a dynamic still visible in today’s platform hierarchies. In principle, mobile videographers in both countries appear to have partially achieved emancipation; they possess the devices, author the content, and may receive compensation through platforms such as YouTube. However, emancipation remains incomplete, because creators are not sovereign over circulation or economic viability. Google/YouTube, as a hegemonic institution, embeds capitalist and patriarchal norms in its algorithms, moderation, and monetization structures (van Zoonen, 2006). Emancipation through creative production is therefore constrained by transnational digital architectures: creators may reclaim symbolic space but remain subject to platform logic that shapes visibility and value.

This question of ownership over the means of production echoes the Snap-on Tools model, in which auto mechanics purchased and owned their own hand tools while working under the rules of a larger mechanical shop (Keehn, 1983). During the explosive growth of the automotive industry in the early twentieth century, well-paid mechanics were expected to bring their own hand tools, even though the shop ultimately controlled labor conditions. Similarly, today’s mobile phone creators own their phones and content, but remain subject to opaque policies and monetization systems of platforms such as YouTube. The artist or communicator owns the creative tool—the mobile phone camera—but operates within a global “shop” whose algorithms are unclear and whose bargaining table overwhelmingly favors the platform. The creative “artefact” becomes the sole medium through which ideas are communicated, and financial viability is sought. Thus, mobile phone cinematography offers a route to emancipation, but with complex dependencies that constrain its potential.

Aesthetics of Alienation and the Question of Emancipation

The aesthetic forms emerging in mobile videography often mirror the contradictions of modernity itself, sometimes reinforcing dominant norms and other times subtly subverting them. For instance, the serialized micro telenovelas produced by Salvadoran ensembles are adaptations of global production, drawing on narrative conventions popularized by Mexican, Colombian, and Turkish melodramas (Joyeet al., 2017). El Salvador Nación, with over one million subscribers, has produced multiple series of infidelity and romantic conflicts that tend to reinforce social norms. In the episode “My neighbour, she understands me better than my wife,” the wife is portrayed as nagging and undesirable, while the neighbor is framed as sexually attractive and emotionally available. A similar structure appears in El Salvador ES, where a female character is seduced under false pretenses of wealth and is ultimately presented as lacking principles. These sketches align with what van Zoonen (2006) calls for the normalization of patriarchal values, where women’s subordination is reproduced through familiar visual and narrative codes.

Another example is the highly successful Salvadoran ensemble Aventuras Plus, which is a spin-off of El Salvador Plus. Comprised of approximately 20 individuals, many of them related, this ensemble evolved from filming on the front porch of a humble adobe house in 2016 to operating by 2022 on a 14-hectare campus with studio infrastructure. In one of their melodramas, “I found my husband with the maid,” (Aventuras Plus, 2022) the narrative once again centers on infidelity. The wife sarcastically invites the maid to live with the couple after discovering her husband’s betrayal. While the wife ultimately rejects the proposal and asserts her independence by expelling both parties, the maid remains a silent character throughout, and her opinion is never solicited. On the one hand, the wife’s actions challenge patriarchal authority and align with a form of neoliberal feminism that promotes female self-reliance (Banet-Weiseret al., 2020). However, the sketch reproduces a rigid class hierarchy: the maid is rendered passive, defined by her subordination, and excluded from the space of communicative action. Her alienation is not dramatized, only normalized, another example of what van Zoonen (van Zoonen, 2006) describes as the aesthetic reinforcement of social stratification. As Jaeggi (2014) argues, such normalization reflects a condition in which alienation is no longer experienced as a problem because it has been internalized as the default mode of relating to the world. The maid’s silence and exclusion exemplify a disturbed form of alienation where individuals are denied participation in shaping their own life narratives.

A rare exception to the dominant aesthetic in Salvadoran videography is the Aventuras D Yency channel, which frequently produces parodies of telenovelas. Notably, this ensemble often engage in gender role reversal, with male actors portraying female characters and vice versa. While these performances are primarily comedic, they introduce visual and narrative dissonances that challenge the entrenched gender codes. In the sketch “Mother spoiled her 15-year-old daughter,” a teenage male actor played a sexually active girl who became pregnant, while her boyfriend was portrayed by a girl dressed as a boy. This form of non-canonical imagery disrupts naturalized assumptions about gender and sexuality using a comedy to reveal their constructedness.

Such techniques echo the aesthetic strategies of Pourriat’s I Am Not an Easy Man (Pourriat, 2018), where gender hierarchies are inverted: where a “woman has physical superiority, wears the suit, gives orders to a man, seduces him, sleeps with him and pays him” (Kahilifé, 2019, p. 268). As Patricia García observes that “Pourriat forces us to consider how much we have come to naturalize a number of sexist gender norms and behaviors, without questioning them at all” (García Ces, 2019, p. 3). In both the sketch and the film, irony and exaggeration function as tools to visualize alienation, particularly in its gendered forms. These sketches may not be framed as conscious critiques of patriarchy; however, their structure invites viewers to question what is typically taken for granted. In this sense, role reversal serves a dual function: it constructs an aesthetics of alienation while opening symbolic space for the possibility of emancipation through ironic distance and re-signification.

Despite these unintended moments of aesthetic critique, most Salvadoran ensembles do not appear to engage in explicit political or economic criticisms. Their narratives tend to avoid confronting the structural conditions that shape the lives they depict, even though they often emerge from the very social segments most disadvantaged by these systems. This aligns with the views of Honneth and Jaeggi, who argue that alienation can become normalized among those who experience it most acutely; its ontology is obscured by habituation or misrecognition (Fazio, 2021). As noted by Quirós (1996), the alienated subject cannot address the ontology of alienation and its social ramifications because he or she cannot solve the problem of self-consciousness while she/he is alienated. Alienation obscures the ability of self awareness about alienation.

The aesthetics of these videos reinforce this contradiction. Many are filmed in modest or deteriorating adobe houses, where the surrounding environment includes unpainted walls, leftover construction materials, firewood piles, and patches of bare soil. However, these markers of poverty are not problematized; they are integrated into the visual field without critical reflection. As Jaeggi (2014) argues, alienation occurs when individuals are unable to relate to their own actions, environments, or social roles in a meaningful way. This “relation of relationlessness” suggests that the absence of critique in these visual portrayals may itself be symptomatic of normalized disconnection from structures that produce deprivation. In some cases, their inclusion seems to affirm a narrative of humble authenticity, rather than deprivation. The disparity between this benevolent self-presentation and the threatening imagery of urban gang violence often depicted in mainstream media (Saca-Schader, 2015) further underscores the selective visibility of marginalization. Salvadoran rural videography offers a counterimage to dominant media stereotypes, but one that still refrains from confronting the underlying structures of alienation.

Cuban mobile videographers rather than producing fictional sketches or melodramas, they created documentary-style soliloquies, observational commentaries, and first-person narratives that blend everyday life with subtle political reflection. Many focus on food scarcity, inflation, and urban decay, often contrasting them with moments of intimate joy or ironic detachment. While their content rarely names the political system explicitly, their aesthetic choices reveal a sustained critique of the incongruities of modernity, particularly the gap between official discourse and lived experience.

In addition to staging visual contrasts and narrative irony, these creators receive modest monetary compensation via YouTube, which introduces a further dimension to their position. The creation of mobile phone videography becomes not only a communicative act but also a potentially emancipatory one, insofar as it allows creators to appropriate both narrative space and limited economic agency. This dual function, symbolic and material, aligns with the notion of enabling powers discussed by Andrew and Baker (2020), in which the capacity to produce and circulate discourse under constrained conditions constitutes a form of partial autonomy.

For instance, in Alita’s World, there has been a visible shift in aesthetic tone over the four years of content creation. Her videos from 2019 portrayed a vibrant and optimistic Havana, populated by stylish youth and curated through an almost celebratory lens. By 2022, however, her focus expanded to include the more precarious conditions of Old Havana, where poverty and infrastructural decay are readily visible. In her video “Cuba Uncovered,” (Alita’s World, 2022) Alita walks along Empedrado Street, narrating a tour that oscillates between humor and critique. She visits an agro-market and notes, with ironic distance and the steep prices of basic vegetables. As the camera pans across a pile of carrots beneath a poster of Fidel Castro, she quips, “here things are a bit too expensive” (Alita’s World, 2022), delivering the line as if speaking directly to the revolutionary leader.

Later, she passes a blackboard menu with inflated restaurant prices—“yeap, prices still high,” she remarks—and juxtaposes this with a makeshift sign advertising a match-maker’s services: “Let’s support local industry,” she adds, her tone slipping into playful sarcasm. When she reaches the Ministry of Finance and Prices, she shifts to a voiceover: “Mummy please, control, mummy please, because we are in a moment that we need you to control. Prices are disparatados,” a neologism blending disparados (fired off) and desbaratados (ruined). This address to the ministry as “Mummy,” accompanied by subdued laughter, enacts a form of aesthetic abstraction that critiques structural conditions without confrontation. Through these creative mediations, enabled by her phone camera and narrative irony, Alita engages in symbolic appropriation. Her strategy exemplifies what Andrew and Baker (2020) describe as enabling powers in the arts: the coupling of expressive capacity with socio-political awareness forged under material constraints. This also aligns with Jaeggi’s conception of appropriation as the ability to relate to one’s actions, roles, and social conditions (2014). Even under material constraints, such mediated self-representation can be interpreted as a symbolic reconfiguration of alienation as it reclaims interpretive authority over lived experience.

Moving beyond comedic dissonance to a more sustained narrative critique, another creative and poignant Cuban videographer is Lisa Garci, whose videos revolve around the struggles of daily survival: food, clothing, inflation, infrastructure, and fleeting moments of personal comfort. As the only prominent Black Cuban female creator with substantial YouTube followings, Lisa rarely addresses racial identity directly. Instead, she offers a form of self-ethnographic storytelling that reflects her lived environment through irony, humor, and slow visual rhythms (Ardévol & Gómez Cruz, 2013; Dunn & Myers, 2020). Her videos recall the tone of The Death of a Bureaucrat (Gutiérrez Alea, 1966), in which absurd legal procedures delay the burial of a loyal revolutionary worker. In both cases, bureaucratic dysfunction is aestheticized, not through denunciation but through a wry commentary and careful montage.

Lisa’s videos do not directly target the politburo. Rather, they examine how ordinary people, including themselves, adapt to social environments marked by contradictory demands. This indirect form of critique mirrors (Mihai’s, 2018) notion of prefigurative practice in which creative expression subtly reclaims voice in alienating environments. In one video, “I went out to look for coffee, there were only long lines…” (Lisa Garci, 2020), she begins: “Something terrible, something unthinkable happened: I ran out of coffee!” What follows is a carefully edited narrative: shots of architectural ornamentation, Havana’s bay, and clotheslines draped from colonial apartments are intercut by close-ups of instant coffee and broken infrastructure. A neighbor eventually provides her with coffee, and she comments on the absurdity of government quotas, lockdowns, and the maintenance crew that never arrived. While drinking coffee in her apartment, she states: “Workers were supposed to come by and fix this window, but look.” She then reveals the still-broken flap, an understated but effective metaphor for the detachment of institutions from the lived reality. In doing so, her videos demonstrate how aesthetic juxtaposition can serve as a communicative action, articulating critique not through confrontation but through irony, montage, and symbolic layering.

The visual and narrative structure of Lisa’s videos transforms a cup of coffee into a mediated symbol of appropriation, a metaphor for securing a voice, and a reclaiming agency in the midst of constraint. The “odyssey to secure it,” as she calls it, is both literal and figurative. Her aesthetic communicates alienation, yet resists it by framing daily acts as moments of self-definition. This capacity to make one’s experience narratable and meaningful exemplifies (Jaeggi’s, 2014) emphasis on regaining a meaningful relation between self and world. As Mihai (2018) argues, “not all artworks enrich and perplex us nor all narratives are revelatory;” however, in this case, Lisa’s narrative illuminates the processes of alienation, the possibilities for appropriation, and the glimmers of emancipation embedded in everyday acts. As her critique is aimed not at capitalism per se but at the conditions of modernity, it resonates with Jaeggi’s (2016) conception of alienation as a broader structural pathology.

A similar creative discourse emerges in Camila Carballo, whose videos often blend historical commentary with visual documentation of contemporary hardships. In one video titled “Cubans today do not want to survive, they want to live,” (Camila Carballo Inside, 2022) Carballo interweaves the footage of Havana’s decaying neighborhoods with voiceovers recalling life during the 1990s. “With two salaries you could get by,” says an interviewee, as the camera lingers on a mother bathing a toddler on a broken third-story balcony. The voice continues: “Now the situation is as bad as never before,” (2022) as the visual field shifts to images of crumbling buildings, then pans to a row of immaculately preserved and beautifully painted 1955 and 1956 Chevrolet Bel Airs, rented out to tourists.

Camila’s strategy hinges on visual juxtaposition: nostalgia for a simpler past sharply contrasts with the material inequalities of the present. One speaker reflected, “We did not have internet so we were happy with what we had, for there was nothing to compare to,” (2022) just as the camera cuts to a tricycle taxi bearing a balloon with the word “Fuck” and a raised middle finger, while others wait in line for food in the background. These long food queues, now normalized in the post-pandemic period, serve as stark reminders of structural scarcity. However, at no point, she or her interviewees explicitly criticized the government. Instead, the critique subtext emerges through montage, tone, and irony. Her Clockwork Orange montage exemplifies her ideas as she appears drinking milk, in a country where milk is only available for children under 7 (See Fig. 1). As Jaeggi (2014) argues, critique is possible only in light of experiences that reveal what is lacking—not in the sense of a transhistorical ideal, but as a discrepancy that is actually experienced. The strategy culminates when Carballo closes the video by saying, “If any of this has any relation to the current situation, it’s pure coincidence” (2022). This aesthetic of critical sarcasm functions as a form of communicative action operating within the constraints of censorship and ideology. Like Alita and Lisa, Camila does not confront power directly. Instead, she composes a narrative space where alienation is rendered visible through contrast and where viewers are invited to an appropriate meaning beyond what is explicitly stated, à la Kuleshov. Her work enacts the subtle forms of resignification that, as described by Habermas and Mihai and anticipated in Jaeggi’s notion of reflexive appropriation, are central to democratic discourse and epistemic justice.

Fig. 1. Camila WorkOrange montage. Note: Still from Camila Carballo inside.

The comparative analysis of Cuban and Salvadoran mobile videography offers nuanced answers to the three guiding questions posed in the Introduction. First, the appropriation of mobile phones functions as a vehicle for navigating alienation, while Salvadoran ensembles emphasize collaborative production rooted in rural life, and Cuban creators focus on individualized narratives and critical commentary; both groups leverage the device to assert voice, visibility, and a degree of financial independence under precarious conditions. Second, the aesthetic strategies employed, ranging from melodrama and parody to irony, montage, and self-ethnography, function not merely as stylistic choices but also as situated expressions of agency, revealing different modes of resistance and adaptation rooted in context-specific material conditions. Finally, although emancipation remains elusive, these grassroots practices reflect attempts at achieving appropriate narrative authorship and representation. In this sense, the mobile phone becomes a medium not only of communication but also of critical world-making, resonating with Jaeggi’s view of critique from lived contradictions and Habermas’s notion of communicative action. These findings support the idea that emancipation is not a fixed outcome, but an unfolding process rooted in the everyday aesthetics of those negotiating alienation from within.

Overall, the aesthetic practices of Cuban and Salvadoran smartphone videographers illustrate how ordinary creators navigate the layered constraints of modernity through symbolic, narrative and material means. While their work emerges from different structural contexts and expressive capabilities, both sets of creators confront conditions of alienation, whether through the reinforcement of dominant norms or subtle subversion. In some cases, mobile videography reproduces exclusion and misrecognition; in others, it opens up spaces for appropriation and reflexive critique. By capturing moments of irony, contradiction, and situated self-expression, these creators engage—whether intentionally or not—in acts of communicative action that reclaim interpretive authority over everyday life. The emancipatory potential of their work lies not in overt resistance but in the quiet labor of transforming alienation into meaning, converting marginality into authorship, survival into narrative, and everyday contradiction into communicative action. As Habermas and McCarthy (1984) contends, such communicative acts do not resolve systemic dysfunction, but they may seed conditions for mutual understanding and moral critique. In Jaeggi’s terms (Jaeggi & Cronin, 2018), this process reflects not the abolition of alienation in a final sense but rather an ongoing effort to reshape one’s relation to the world through reflexive appropriation. Emancipation, then, is less of a destination than a practical engagement with a contradiction. This underscores the critical role of vernacular media as a terrain in which subjectivity is contested, negotiated, and sometimes reclaimed. In this sense, the aesthetic labor of creators like Lisa and Camila exemplifies Jaeggi’s insight that critique emerges not from abstract ideals, but from contradictions that are lived, embodied, and narratively processed.

Conclusions

This study has examined how Cuban and Salvadoran smartphone videography reflects conditions of alienation while also opening possibilities for appropriation and emancipation. Despite divergent contexts, creators in both countries confront structural constraints that shape their practices. Cuban videographers inherit a long tradition of revolutionary cinema and film training but face scarcity, censorship, and the weight of institutional decline. Salvadoran creators, lacking infrastructure, improvise with minimal resources to counter the dominant global image of violence with depictions of everyday life, humour, and rural continuity. Yet both are embedded within similar conditions of alienation, appropriation, and the struggle for emancipation, as proposed by different critical theory postulates (Andrew & Baker, 2020; Habermas, 1990; Jaeggi, 2016).

Alienation here is not only economic but also symbolic, as creators’ work is often dismissed or marginalised due to its class origin or informality (Gronow, 2016). Their partial appropriation of digital tools demonstrates agency; they own the devices, author their content, and sometimes monetise it. However, they remain dependent on YouTube’s opaque algorithms and monetisation rules, which mediate circulation and value. Emancipation, therefore, remains incomplete, as creators are not sovereign over either the means of subsistence or distribution. This paradox underscores the tension between creativity and the structural constraints.

Cuban videography illustrates continuity with the legacy of “Imperfect Cinema,” which sought to expose problems and processes rather than provide polished solutions (García Espinosa, 1969). Today’s smartphone creators extend this ethos by using accessible technology to portray scarcity, humour, and critique, as argued by Szita (2020). In contrast, Salvadoran creators reveal how grassroots practices can destabilise stereotypes. Their videos of farming, cooking, and family life foreground resilience complicate the image of gangs and violence projected by the mainstream media.

The analysis also highlights the differences in aesthetic strategies. Cuban videographers often employ irony, metaphors, and commentary that echo earlier cinematic traditions. Salvadoran ensembles emphasise collective action, improvisation, and melodrama, rooted in rural settings. These variations demonstrate how the appropriation of mobile phones intersects with national history, institutions, and collective memories. Both, however, represent creative engagements with alienation that embody what Jaeggi (2014) describes as lived contradictions and spaces where critique and possibility emerge together.

Emancipation, as critical theory insists, is never a finished state but a contested process. For Cuban and Salvadoran videographers, mobile phones are both tools of empowerment and a reminder of dependency on transnational digital infrastructure. Their work signals the persistence of alienation, while also pointing toward alternative visions of self-representation and appropriation. Rather than resolving these contradictions, smartphone videography brings them into view, offering a medium through which marginalised voices negotiate their conditions and options for emancipation. In summary, smartphone videography is not just a device for expression, but also a facilitating tool for negotiating alienation and opening space for emergent forms of lived emancipation, aligning with Jaeggi’s idea of appropriation as negotiation, a possible route to emancipation.

Conflict of Interest

Conflict of Interest: Author declares that he does not have any conflict of interest.