Introduction: Popular communication, an epistemological debate between South and North

This article presents popular communication as one epistemology of the South, based on the identification of the roots that forge it as a method, a pedagogy and a practice deeply enchained with each other. It discusses how the constant referential exchanges between these three elements raise theoretical concepts that are forcibly engaged, without losing neither rigor nor the possibilities of stepping into dialogues with contexts and issues—in social and academic terms—beyond its Latin American birthplace, like it is in the cases of the fields of communication for social change and of the right to communicate.