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On the polished flagstones of a Santiago cultural centre’s forecourt, four Chilean girls dance in energetic union, counting their steps aloud in Korean.
In front of them, a YouTube video with 1.3bn views plays atop a speaker throbbing to the beat of How You Like That, by the K-pop megastars Blackpink.
What might have drawn bemused looks a decade ago now puts them at the forefront of a phenomenon that is ever more present across Latin America.
From food to television, skincare to clothing, Korean culture is flooding the region – and spreading far beyond what was once a niche interest.
In Mexico, Sujin Kim, known by her pseudonym Chingu Amiga, has become one of the country’s most popular online personalities, with videos exploring K-dramas and recommending skincare products to more than 12 million followers.
In Colombia, where the K-pop World Festival was held in 2025, the Korean YouTuber Zion Hwang has set up a string of karaoke restaurants to profit from the boom.
And in Brazil, where South Korea’s former ambassador is fondly remembered for his viral renditions of Brazilian songs, Korean and Korean Brazilian influencers such as Arthur Paek, who has 6.3 million Instagram followers, are also making waves promoting Korean culture and cuisine.
The “Korean wave” – or hallyu – that brought the country’s culture to the world has now well and truly engulfed Latin America. Mexico is K-pop’s fifth global market, and such was the demand for tickets for the comeback tour by K-pop behemoth BTS, that the Mexican president, Claudia Sheinbaum, wrote to her Korean counterpart to help plan extra dates. The tour will also land in Bogotá, Lima, Santiago, Buenos Aires and São Paulo.
“It all began during the pandemic for us,” says Daniela Im, who lives and works in Patronato, the small Santiago neighbourhood that received a tiny influx of economic migrants from Korea in the 1970s.
K-dramas and hit films such as Parasite soared in popularity during lockdown, and when restrictions eased, Im’s family converted their textiles workshop into a traditional Korean restaurant.
“People never cared much about our culture or where we were from, but now when a character drinks soju or eats samgyeopsal [Korean barbecue] in a Korean TV show, the next day there are kids in here trying to order it,” she says. “I just have to try and keep up!”
A few colourful shop fronts down, a minimarket stocks canned kimchi and mild ssamjang sauces with labels in Spanish and hangul, the Korean alphabet. In this tiny knot of low-rise streets there are now more than 40 Korean restaurants – almost all of which appeared in the past five years.
Across Latin America, Korean culture has expanded rapidly, pushed by a soft power campaign to introduce the world to its music, film, television, fashion and food.
Brazil’s health minister, Alexandre Padilha, said Latin America’s interest in Asian culture contrasted with – and was possibly connected to – the US’s flagging international appeal under Donald Trump.
“Perhaps the US is no longer, in people’s imagination, the place they want to go … Whenever my [10-year-old] daughter talks about going somewhere, she never cites the US … she cites things that she’s seeing more and more from the East and which are influencing our culture,” Padilha said last year, after Trump officials stripped his child and wife of their visas in an attempt to pressure Brazil’s government.
The first group of 1,014 Korean migrants to Latin America arrived at the Mexican port of Progreso in 1905, aboard the British ship S.S. Ilford. Tricked by misleading promises of stable work, they were instead forced to work the agave plantations on the Yucután peninsula, harvesting thorny fibres in extreme heat.
A second wave began in the 1960s when Korea, plagued by high unemployment and political and economic instability, promoted emigration to Latin America; a third followed in the 1970s and 1980s.
Today, only about 100,000 Koreans and their descendants live across Latin America, but most major cities pay some form of tribute to Korean culture and fandom.
In Mexico City, that presence has spread far beyond a neighbourhood long known as Little Seoul for its Korean restaurants, karaoke bars and beauty shops.
Christian Burgos, a Mexican TV presenter in South Korea, said that, when he first became interested in Korean culture as a teenager in 2010, he was almost alone. “It was really niche,” he said. “Only the most obsessed were on to it.”
Burgos began learning Korean at the main public university in Mexico City – one of the few places offering language classes back then – and moved to South Korea in 2014, where he ended up working on TV.
“Over the decade that I’ve been doing Korean television, I’ve seen the fandom for Korea grow a huge amount in Mexico,” said Burgos. “In the past, when you told people you were studying Korean, they’d say, ‘Korea? Where’s that?’ And now I think there’s barely a person who doesn’t know something about Korea.”
Spotify reports there are now 14 million K-pop fans in Mexico. Public spaces in Mexico City are dotted with groups of teenagers dressed like K-pop stars dancing in front of a tripod. “Even if you don’t like the music, the videos are so visually addictive, so full of colours and quick changes, that it’s hard to stop watching,” Burgos said.
Other fans have managed to make the leap from Latin America to Korea. In 2022, a group of young Chileans travelled to Seoul to win the world’s largest international K-pop dance competition.
And the five-piece boyband Santos Bravos, signed to BTS’s own label, has members from Brazil, Peru, Mexico, Puerto Rico and the US.
“I always felt like I needed to build a bridge between Korea and Argentina, the two halves of me,” said Liry Onni, in an interview from Seoul.
Onni, 38, was born in Argentina to Korean parents, and shunned most Argentinian television in favour of Korean shows. Then in 2018, a friend invited her on to a YouTube show to discuss the differences between China, Korea and Japan, which at the time were largely lumped together by most Argentines as “Asian” cultures.
“Ever since I was little, I felt that there was a lot of ignorance about Asia throughout Latin America and vice versa – not in a bad way, maybe just because they are so far apart,” she said.
Although shy at first, Onni started her own YouTube channel explaining the differences between Argentinian and Korean culture, and in 2023, she and her husband moved to Seoul. By December 2024, she was interviewing the Squid Game star Lee Jung-jae for her social media channels.
Dr Jinok Choi, the director of the Universidad Central’s Rey Sejong Institute in Santiago, teaches a masters programme in Korean studies. It began in 2019 with Korean language classes for 60 curious students – and she now teaches a couple of hundred students across 15 classes.
“More than a passing interest, young Chileans are showing a real commitment to learning about Korea beyond just its culture,” she said. “There’s a profound interest in Korea, and new avenues of the relationship are opening up all the time.”
