Mexico Culture Chatter, Sep. 12, 2026

Mexico’s leaning tower of PISA

The OECD’s Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) 2025, the largest cycle to date, tested more than 760,000 15-year-olds across 91 countries and confirmed a continuing decline in student performance in Mexico amid a worsening outlook worldwide.

Across the OECD, average performance in mathematics and reading has fallen to its lowest level since PISA began. Reading scores dropped 28 points between 2015 and 2025 – roughly equivalent to a year and a half of learning – while maths fell 22 points over the same period; science, this cycle’s focus, held broadly steady. Far from the rebound some had hoped for after the pandemic-era collapse recorded in 2022, scores in rich countries have fallen further still, with the decline in literacy actually accelerating, according to The Economist. Among the 23 OECD countries that have sat every round of PISA, scores peaked around 2012 and have fallen ever since; today’s 15-year-olds are testing at the levels in maths and reading that 14-year-olds achieved a decade ago. The gap between the strongest and weakest students is now the widest PISA has ever recorded, and one in five 15-year-olds across the OECD is a low performer in all three subjects, up from 16 per cent in 2022.

Analysts point to several overlapping causes: lingering pandemic disruption, elevated pupil absenteeism, and the effect of phones and social media on reading stamina. The OECD’s Andreas Schleicher highlights a rise in “hasty readers” who rush through comprehension tests inaccurately, and has criticised schools for becoming complacent about classroom standards and for treating pupils as untested guinea pigs for ed-tech. Asian systems – led this year by China’s wealthiest provinces, alongside Singapore, Macau, Taiwan and Japan – have proved comparatively resilient, as has Estonia. Turkey is rising fast, and Britain has climbed into the global top ten across all three subjects, even as neighbouring Scotland, which spends more per pupil, continues to fall behind.

Mexico’s own average (403 points across the three core subjects) is its lowest in 20 years, placing the country 37th of the 38 OECD members assessed, against an OECD average of 469. Compared with 2022, Mexico’s scores fell seven points each in mathematics (to 388) and reading (to 408), while science rose four points (to 414), still 66 points below the OECD average, the widest gap of the three areas. Only 0.5 per cent of Mexican students reached the highest performance levels, against roughly 42 per cent who scored low across all three subjects, more than double the OECD average.

Mexico’s PISA history has swung sharply. After finishing near the bottom of the OECD in the inaugural 2000 round, and dipping further in 2003, the country staged one of the organisation’s strongest recoveries, posting the biggest gain in mathematics of any OECD member between 2003 and 2009. Results then plateaued before declining gradually, a slide that sharpened between 2018 and 2022, when reading and science both fell below their 2000 levels. Bernardo Naranjo, director of Proyecto Educativo and a former member of the now-defunct Instituto Nacional para la Evaluación de la Educación (INEE), argues the 2025 results should be read against that longer trajectory rather than as a single snapshot. He also cautions that Mexico risks slipping into the ranks of Latin America’s middle performers, as Chile continues to lead the region, Uruguay maintains stronger results, and Colombia and Costa Rica narrow the gap.

The results have reignited debate over the Nueva Escuela Mexicana, the controversial curriculum model introduced under Andrés Manuel López Obrador. President Claudia Sheinbaum defended the model, highlighting the modest gain in science and questioning PISA’s cross-country comparability. She attributed the reading decline chiefly to digital platforms, an explanation that aligns with her administration’s efforts to regulate phone and AI use in schools. However, most analysts treat technology as only one contributing factor among several, rather than the primary cause.

The Unión Nacional de Padres de Familia, which has a history of criticising the 4T’s approach to education, called the PISA results confirmation of a longstanding crisis and rejected the idea that screen use alone explains the decline. Marco Fernández of the Tec de Monterrey’s education equity initiative linked the results to skills shortages already visible in Mexican workplaces.

With INEE dissolved since 2019 and its successor, Mejoredu, itself extinguished in 2025, Naranjo’s and IMCO’s assessments converge on the same point: PISA is now effectively the only reliable measure left to assess what Mexican students are learning. IMCO notes that Mexico will have no comparable evaluation of its own until the next PISA cycle in 2029, and is calling for a national evaluation system to be reinstated in the interim, alongside clearer grade-by-grade content standards in mathematics and reading.

Fiestas Patrias celebrations: More than just fireworks

Towns and cities across the country are celebrating the Fiestas Patrias with a programme of fairs, concerts and cultural events running well beyond the “Grito de Independencia”.

Mexico City

On the night of 15 September, President Sheinbaum will preside over her second Grito as head of state from the National Palace balcony; norteño-tejano band Intocable headlines the free Zócalo concert, opening around 9pm and pausing at 11pm for the official ceremony. Boroughs stage their own free concerts alongside the central event, including Aleks Syntek in Benito Juárez and Lila Downs in Ecatepec, State of Mexico.

The Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes y Literatura (INBAL) has also announced free programming marking the 216th anniversary of independence, spanning music, cinema, sound art and performing arts. The Orquesta de Cámara de Bellas Artes opened its second 2026 season at the Palacio de Bellas Artes as part of the offering. Celebraciones con México runs on 10 September at the Palacio’s Sala Principal, repeated on 13 September at the Jardín Escénico. On 13 September, the Patio de Carteros at the Palacio Postal hosts Nómada, arte itinerante, bolero and ranchera standards arranged for string quartet under Fernando Montes de Oca. And on the weekends of 19–20 and 26–27 September, the Fonoteca Nacional’s Sonidario presents CEPROMUSIC performing Stefano Scodanibbio’s One Says Mexico, conceived as a tribute to the country he considered his second homeland.

Guanajuato

The state remains the emblematic heart of independence celebrations, home to Dolores Hidalgo, cradle of the movement that launched in the early hours of 15 September 1810. San Miguel de Allende’s Fiestas Patrias y Patronales programme, running to 2 October, layers civic, religious and cultural events atop the national date. The 15th brings the flag-raising, the Cabalgata de los Conspiradores and the 79th Carrera Simbólica, followed that night the Grito ceremony and fireworks; a civic-military parade and motorcycle route follow on the 16th. San Miguel’s calendar continues with concerts and the 25th-anniversary Alborada, closing in early October with a mariachi night, the Hermanos Aguascalientes’ concert and the Corrida de las Luces. The Fiestas Patrias Dolores Hidalgo, already underway, continue through 27 September with Yuridia, Los Tucanes de Tijuana, Calibre 50 and Grupo Frontera.

Querétaro

Santiago de Querétaro, birthplace of the conspiracy that helped set independence in motion, stages historically themed events: Governor Mauricio Kuri leads the Ignacio Pérez cavalcade on 12 September, and a theatrical performance on the capture of Josefa Ortiz takes place at the Plazuela del Convento de Santa Clara on 19 September.

Monterrey

Nuevo León’s capital celebrates with the Macro Fiesta Mexicana in the Macroplaza from 6pm on 15 September, headlined by Palomazo Norteño, uniting veterans Rosendo Cantú, Raúl Hernández, Eliseo Robles and Lalo Mora, alongside Volver a la Cumbia, Norteñazo and the Grupo Folklórico Fandangos de México, before Governor Samuel García leads the Grito from the government palace balcony.

Guadalajara

Jalisco’s capital marks the Grito at the Plaza de la Liberación, where Governor Pablo Lemus Navarro leads the ceremony ahead of a free concert headlined by Grupo Frontera. It then extends into the Fiestas de Octubre (2 October–2 November), its 61st edition, spanning Ha*Ash and Gloria Trevi to Grupo Firme and Manuel Turizo, with El Tri and Carlos Rivera closing the fair; a ticketed Palenque stage adds Alejandro Fernández and Banda MS.

The city also marks the Teatro Degollado’s 160th anniversary, with a history talk on 12 September and the exhibition Que nunca llegue el rumor de la discordia; on 13 September, the exact anniversary, the Orquesta Filarmónica de Jalisco presents Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor. The Museo de las Artes shows Alejandra Ruiz’s La ciudad de las damas until 4 October, and the Teatro Experimental de Jalisco stages the cabaret Me encontró el amor on 12 and 19 September.

2027 culture budget: modest gains, tight margins, and support for the book trade

The 2027 draft federal budget (PPEF), delivered to Congress on 8 September, proposes 15,858.7 million pesos for the Culture Ministry, reported in media outlets as either a 17.3 per cent or a 1.9 per cent annual rise, depending on the baseline used. Measured against the ministry’s original 2026 proposal (13,097.4 million pesos), the increase looks like 17.3 per cent; measured against the higher figure Congress ultimately approved that year (15,082.9 million), it is a slimmer 1.9 per cent. The same pattern appears in the Science, Humanities, Technology and Innovation budget, which rises to 42,217.7 million pesos in 2027: 17.3 per cent above its original 2026 proposal, but only 9.5 per cent above the amount Congress approved.

Paulina Castaño, a researcher at the Fundar Centre for Analysis and Research who has tracked the decline in cultural spending, argues that after two years of cuts, the new budget merely holds steady and remains insufficient, with Culture’s allocation equivalent to just 0.15 per cent of total federal net spending.

The increase is unevenly distributed. Central offices grow by around 18 per cent in nominal terms, while the decentralised institutes beneath them, chiefly INAH and INBAL, together around two-thirds of the total budget, see nominal gains so marginal (0.9 and 0.2 per cent respectively) that they amount to real-terms falls of roughly 2.5–3 per cent and 3.6 per cent. Castaño noted such shortfalls can sometimes be offset through in-year reallocations permitted under federal law, though this can also reflect poor agency planning, and saw little room for that this time given how tight the budget is. One exception is the ministry’s own Administration and Finance Unit, whose budget would jump more than thirtyfold, from 35.1 million to 1,174.3 million pesos, an increase she expects lawmakers to redistribute elsewhere.

Other bodies fare better: the Cineteca Nacional, whose staff recently protested labour conditions, would see a 14.6 per cent real increase; the General Directorate of Libraries a 53.1 per cent rise; Radio Educación a 10.4 per cent nominal increase; and the National Institute of Indigenous Languages a 5.9 per cent real gain. The renamed General Directorate of Circuits and Festivals, which organises the Cervantino festival, would receive 452.4 million pesos, sharply up from 100.8 million the previous year under its former name. Castaño was critical of the Eficine and Efiartes film and arts tax-incentive schemes, frozen at 65 million and 250 million pesos respectively, without even an inflation adjustment.

Administratively, a new Unit for Living Cultures, Intangible Heritage and Interculturality, headed by former INAH director Diego Prieto, gets its own budget line for the first time, with 221.7 million pesos; the former Undersecretariat for Cultural Diversity and Reading Promotion has disappeared from the structure; and the historical-studies institute INEHRM has moved out of Culture’s budget entirely and into the Science and Technology Ministry, its allocation nearly quadrupling to 131.1 million pesos.

Within this picture, the ministry and the Fondo de Cultura Económica (FCE) have announced a package aimed at bookshops and publishers. A zero VAT rate for small and medium-sized Mexican bookshops has been folded into the 2027 economic package, an estimated 200 to 250 million pesos a year in fiscal benefit if approved, contingent on at least 90 per cent of a beneficiary’s income coming from book sales. Castaño welcomed the measure, tying it to years of publishing-sector lobbying and, more immediately, to the announced closure of Editorial Era; FCE director Paco Ignacio Taibo II confirmed that conversations continue on how to “save” the imprint, though he said its own wishes for its future remain unclear.

Separately, the state will resume buying books for public libraries after a decade-long gap, with 50 million pesos allocated to restock the Red Nacional de Bibliotecas Públicas, a corrective, Taibo said, to what he described as the “arbitrary and chaotic” library purchases of past administrations. A call for publisher proposals opens on 21 September, aimed chiefly at independent, small and medium-sized Mexican publishers, with large groups permitted to participate only via a single joint bid across their imprints. Support for state book fairs is also set to increase in 2027.

The announcements were made during the 20th-anniversary programme for the Biblioteca Vasconcelos, which has received close to 14 million pesos for rehabilitation, maintenance and connectivity improvements; celebrations run from 25 to 27 September.

A Spanish holiday for Frida and Diego

The Gelman Collection, including masterworks by Frida Kahlo, Diego Rivera and other iconic Mexican artists, has officially kicked off its European tour as the headline act opening the new Faro Santander cultural centre in Spain, leaving behind frustrated defenders and passionate op-eds in Mexico.

The inauguration of the new centre in the Cantabrian capital on 7 September was presided over by King Felipe VI, Banco Santander chair Ana Botín and dignitaries including Mexico’s ambassador to Spain, Quirino Ordaz. The King, who did not deliver remarks, toured the building before the first visitors were admitted; Botín spoke briefly, thanking Mexico for the temporary return of “that same energy” the bank encountered on arriving in the country in 1954, and describing the centre as a symbol of the bank’s commitment to its roots.

The venue occupies the bank’s former Edificio Pereda headquarters, transformed by David Chipperfield Architects (Chipperfield won the 2023 Pritzker Prize) into a 10,000-square-metre cultural venue across ten floors, with roughly 3,000 square metres of exhibition space and a 150-seat auditorium. The foundation projects more than 200,000 visits a year. Local media have reported long lines of visitors waiting to see the new cultural centre this week.

The inaugural programme is anchored by México Moderno en la Colección Gelman Santander, curated by Marisol Argüelles, director of Mexico City’s Museum of Modern Art (MAM). The exhibition follows a hugely successful run at the MAM, where it showed from 16 February to 19 July and drew more than 310,000 visitors, among the best-attended shows in the museum’s history. The Santander showing runs until 10 January 2027 and comprises works from the collection assembled by Jacques and Natasha Gelman between 1941 and 1998. Faro Santander’s exhibitions director, Carolina Erdocia, called the loan a rare opportunity for Spanish audiences, noting that few Mexican modernist holdings exist in Spanish collections.

Santander is only the first stop. Mexico’s Culture Ministry says a further tour will take a selection of works to the Fondation Beyeler in Basel from January to May 2027, then to the National Museum of Norway from June to November 2027, before the collection returns to Mexico in 2028 for a showing at the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Monterrey (MARCO), a date Culture Secretary Claudia Curiel de Icaza has stated publicly and repeatedly. Notably, the export permit covering the move to Santander did not appear in INBAL’s official transparency records as of early June, according to a Reforma review of the institute’s permit history.

The cultural centre’s programme also includes Obras Maestras de la Colección Banco Santander, spanning the Renaissance to the present with works by Titian, El Greco, Rubens, Velázquez, Goya, Tàpies, Soledad Sevilla and Juan Uslé, and El surrealismo sintomático: Leonora Carrington, billed as the first exhibition devoted to the drawings, paintings and texts the artist produced during the Second World War.

The collection’s departure from Mexico remains a live dispute, as covered previously in this newsletter (and widely across national and foreign outlets). The Monterrey-based Zambrano family, owners of Cemex, bought the collection from Robert Littman, executor and beneficiary of Jacques and Natasha Gelman’s estate in 2023 with a loan from Banco Santander, which has a management agreement permitting the bank to exhibit the collection. Fundación Banco Santander maintains the agreement does not amount to an acquisition or permanent transfer, and that ownership remains with the Zambrano family.

The works left Mexico after closing at the MAM on 19 July, where members of the Colectivo en Defensa de la Colección Gelman (now organised as Defendamos la Colección Gelman) staged a symbolic farewell with mariachis performing “Las Golondrinas” outside the museum. Art critic Blanca González argued the best outcome would be a permanent home in Mexico with rotating displays, rather than years abroad repeating what she called Littman’s pattern of removing the works from public view. The collective has filed amparos seeking to annul the export agreement, arguing INBAL approved the departure as a single block rather than conducting the case-by-case review it says the law requires for each Artistic Monument-designated work, and has raised concerns the terms leave open the possibility the collection may not return in 2028 as promised.

The collective does not dispute the legality of the export in principle (Mexican law permits private owners to hold such works and allows INBAL to authorise temporary export) but has pressed for firmer written guarantees rather than verbal assurances. At least one prominent legal commentator has countered that Mexico’s restrictive heritage-protection rules, compared with countries such as France, Italy and the Netherlands, do more to keep art hidden in storage than serve the public.

Geles Cabrera, pioneer sculptor, dies at 100

Geles Cabrera, widely regarded as one of the first women to practise sculpture professionally in Mexico, died in Mexico City on 1 September; she had celebrated her one hundredth birthday on 2 August.

Over more than seven decades, she built a sculptural practice centred on the human figure, working the body into abstracted, often voluptuous forms across stone, bronze, wire, terracotta, plexiglass, wood, plant fibre and papier-mâché, and, most distinctively, the rough black or grey volcanic stone known as recinto, also historically used in Indigenous construction. She preferred her materials left unpolished, saying she rarely worked in marble for that reason.

Born Ángeles María Cabrera Alvarado in Mexico City in 1926, Cabrera grew up around pre-Hispanic sculpture: her father, a civil engineer, oversaw building projects in the capital that included archaeological excavations, an early exposure she later credited with shaping her interest in the human form. An aunt, Rosario Cabrera, was herself an artist who led the Open-Air Painting Schools movement. In the 1940s, Cabrera trained at the Academia de San Carlos while also joining dance teacher Alfonso Pallares’s experimental troupe; her grounding in dance fed directly into the movement and strong figuration of her sculpture. A family move to Cuba in her twenties took her to the Academia de San Alejandro, where she began exhibiting and won two awards, before she returned to Mexico City in 1949 to continue her studies at “La Esmeralda”, the national school of painting, sculpture and engraving.

That same year, aged 22, Cabrera held her first solo exhibition at the Galería Mont-Orendáin, and was a founding member, alongside 52 other artists, of the Salón de la Plástica Mexicana. Over her career she mounted more than 20 solo shows and around 50 group exhibitions across Mexico, the United States, Japan, Austria, Belgium and Israel. In 1966 she opened the Museo Escultórico in her own home in Coyoacán, described as the country’s first independent, artist-run museum founded by a living artist, funding it herself on her salary as an art teacher and charging no admission; it operated until 1990. Between 1975 and 1976 she belonged to the avant-garde collective GUCADIGOSE alongside Ángela Gurría, Juan Luis Díaz, Mathias Goeritz and Sebastián.

Recognition from major institutions came only very late in her life. She had her first solo show in the United States at New York’s Americas Society in 2022, and in 2025, at 99, she received her first individual exhibition at Mexico City’s Museo del Palacio de Bellas Artes, Geles Cabrera: Partituras corporales, curated by Joshua Sánchez and bringing together 100 of her sculptures. She was awarded the Medalla de Oro de Bellas Artes in 2023, with the presentation ceremony itself held the following year; her son spoke at the event, framing artistic recognition as something that comes once viewers can enter and appreciate the artist’s world, an achievement that endures over time.

Sculptor Pedro Reyes, who began working to revive interest in Cabrera’s work in 2016 (by which point she had gone roughly 40 years without exhibiting) wrote on her death that it had become impossible to discuss the history of sculpture in Mexico without mentioning her. OMR gallery, which represented her, remembered her as both artist and her own muse, someone who had not waited for the world to make a place for her but shaped one with her own hands.

Chatter Box

France and Mexico launch bicentennial cultural programme. Mexico’s Biblioteca Vasconcelos opened Francia-México, 200 años de relación y amistad: resonancias, disonancias y contrapuntos on 1 September, marking 200 years of diplomatic relations and launching the Gran Fiesta Franco-Mexicana, a three-month cultural programme. Curated by Philippe Ollé-Laprune and Conrado Tostado, the exhibition traces shared history through documents, photographs and testimonies from scientists, writers, artists and diplomats, including figures such as Octavio Paz and Gabriel Orozco. Organised by the French Embassy and IFAL with Mexican and French institutional partners including the Louvre and the Centre Pompidou, the show runs until 18 October at the library in Mexico City.

Chamber opera brings María Sabina’s voice to the stage. Composer Marcela Rodríguez’s Invocación operística a la sabia de los hongos, devoted to Mazatec healer María Sabina, receives its world premiere on 10 September at Cenart’s Foro Experimental Black Box, running to a sold-out house through 13 September. Rodríguez spent over two decades on the piece, drawing its libretto from Álvaro Estrada’s testimonial book on the healer and building the score around Sabina’s own recorded chants alongside invented material, scored for five voices and a small chamber ensemble. Director Jesusa Rodríguez, the composer’s sister, staged the piece around the interweaving of voices and instruments rather than attempting to depict Sabina herself, declining to represent her on stage out of respect for her name and image. The healer’s great-grandson, Bernardino García Martínez, will travel from Huautla de Jiménez to attend the premiere and receive a tribute.

Mexican cinema features across three titles at Venice 2026. The 83rd Venice Film Festival, running 2 to 12 September with roughly 170 productions across its official and parallel sections, gives Mexico a notable presence alongside dominant European and diverse international selections. Mexican cinema appears in three forms: contemporary fiction through Gael García Bernal’s Hombre al agua and Gabriel Gutiérrez Morales’s Tijuana, todavía, and historical restoration through Buñuel’s La ilusión viaja en tranvía. Actress Nathalia Acevedo also makes her directorial debut at a major festival with Salón de Belleza, adapted from Mario Bellatin’s novel of the same name and screening in the independent Giornate degli Autori section. The main Venezia 83 competition, capped at 21 world-premiere features and juried this year by Maggie Gyllenhaal, runs alongside sections including Orizzonti and Venice Spotlight, with George Clooney receiving an honorary Golden Lion for career achievement.

Cervantino Circuit expands to 32 cities across 16 states. This year’s Circuito Cervantino, running 26 September to 28 October, brings 39 national and international companies to 32 cities in 16 Mexican states, part of the Festival Internacional Cervantino’s push to extend its reach beyond Guanajuato. In Mexico City, venues include Cenart, the Centro Cultural Helénico, Complejo Cultural Los Pinos and Centro de Cultura Digital, with some programming free. France, this year’s guest of honour marking 200 years of diplomatic ties with Mexico, features prominently, including a Mexican reinterpretation of (LA)HORDE/Ballet National de Marseille’s Room with a View, danced by sixteen Mexican performers. Highlights at the Palacio de Bellas Artes include Mike Patton’s Mondo Cane and Antonio Gades’s Carmen.

Cuauhtémoc Medina to curate 2027 Bienal de Arte Paiz. Mexican curator, critic and historian Cuauhtémoc Medina has been appointed to curate the 25th Bienal de Arte Paiz, Latin America’s second-oldest biennial after São Paulo, running November 2027 to February 2028 across Antigua and Guatemala City. The edition marks 50 years of Fundación Paiz, the non-profit behind the event. Medina, a full-time UNAM researcher since 1993, a former Tate Modern Latin American art curator, and MUAC’s chief curator from 2013 to 2024, has also curated Manifesta 9 and the 12th Shanghai Biennale. Foundation director Sonia Hurtarte said the milestone edition would question, speaking from Guatemala to the international art world, what a biennial should do today.

INAH expands free admission. The federal government has proposed free admission to 53 INAH-administered museums, monuments and archaeological sites from next year, as part of amendments to the Ley de Derechos. The measure targets venues where the administrative and operational costs of charging are “disproportionate” to revenue collected. Sites include Bonampak, La Venta and Tamtoc, alongside numerous smaller museums, former convents and archaeological zones across the country. Presidencia framed the change as simplifying administration while broadening public access to cultural heritage. Charges will remain in place for a further 122 INAH sites under the same proposal, now before Congress.

Fancy tacos take Madrid. La Once Mil, the Mexico City restaurant billed as the world’s only taquería with a Michelin star (following the star’s removal this year from El Califa de León), is opening its first European branch in Madrid’s Justicia neighbourhood on 22 September. The venture is a partnership between founder César de la Parra and Nacho Ventosa and Sara Aznar of Los 33, the acclaimed sandwich bar next door. The Madrid site, in the former Bar Dávila, has imported nixtamalised maize, a steel comal and a trompo spit from Mexico to replicate the original’s tortillas and pastor-style tacos, reinterpreted here with picaña beef. De la Parra has sourced Spanish ingredients where they surpass Mexican equivalents, pairing premium products such as Discarlux beef and Wagyu with an informal taquería atmosphere; the aim is a meal under thirty-five euros despite the luxury setting.

Culture Outing

Julian Rosefeldt’s Manifesto at MUAC

German artist Julian Rosefeldt’s 13-channel film installation Manifesto opened at Mexico City’s MUAC on 5 September, running until 6 December. The work plays with 20th-century artistic and political manifestos, from Futurism to Dogma 95, using 13 collages, each performed by Cate Blanchett as a different everyday character. General admission costs 60 pesos, with free entry Thursday evenings.

Culture Conversation

Foro El País: Economía en Pantalla

El País, in partnership with CFILMA, held its inaugural Economía en Pantalla forum at Mexico City’s Museo Nacional de Antropología, bringing together producers, platforms, creators and public officials to examine Mexico’s audiovisual industry as an economic driver. The roundtables covered the economics behind storytelling, Mexican content’s global reach, women reshaping the industry, homegrown talent achieving international recognition, and pop culture’s economic weight