This dissertation analyzes the history, mechanisms and relationships that have enabled and shaped the flow of Japanese animation to and through Latin America, particularly via the labor of translators, voice actors and other media professionals working in Mexico City, the region’s pre-eminent site of media importation and re-circulation. While sometimes discussed as an exception to the global hegemony of the Anglo-American culture industries, the history and breadth of anime’s global circulation has only recently begun to be understood beyond scopes of analysis focussed on anime’s impact in the Anglo-American cultural context itself. Drawing on work done in the areas of global media analysis, postcolonial theory, and media industry studies in conjunction with archival and field research, I argue that the circulation of anime through Mexico City to the wider Latin American mediascape functions as a significant and long-held exception to dominant dynamics of cultural flow — travelling “laterally” across sites of relative cultural peripherality rather than along pathways of cultural circulation established by political and cultural hegemons. By looking in at anime’s development as a global cultural commodity and how it has integrated the Latin American mediascape through Mexico City, I make the case for two interrelated points. The first of these focuses on anime as a media culture shaped fundamentally by logics of peripherality, with structures, aesthetics and production cultures all geared towards a mode of global circulation that has often brought it to emergent, peripheral and semi-peripheral mediascapes. The second looks at the positioning of Mexico City as a regional media capital shaped just as much by its role as a point of connection between Latin America and the rest of he world as it is by its own locally-oriented production cultures. I further argue that, rather than representing a unique phenomenon, the transperipheral nature of anime’s media flows to Latin America serves as an entry point to an entire spectrum of long-standing cultural relationships across relative peripheries. Anime’s circulation through Mexico to Latin America serves in this way as an antecedent to the more recent growth of other such points of connection across emergent, peripheral and semi-peripheral mediascapes.