The article analyzes the reception of Adorno and Horkheimer's book Dialectic of Enlightenment in Chile, Argentina and Latin America. A bottom-up methodology is used to reconstruct the different ways in which the texts have been appropriated. The study of the Chilean case shows that such reception concentrates on the fragments that develop the concepts of enlightenment and mass culture, leaving aside other fragments of the book, which acquire a marginal character. It also shows that as the decades go by, this reception specializes and publishes in journals more than in books. The text then studies the reception of these marginal fragments in Latin America, showing that the only country where they are truly studied and used is Argentina. This is considered an indicator of a more complex, deep, and substantive than what occurs in other Latin American countries.