derived from the intersection of Media and Cultural Studies, Gender Studies, and Latina/o Studies, as a form of Ethnic Studies, The Gender of Latinidad explores the tension between the politically necessary strategic essentialism that identity categories rely on to make demands upon the state and the impossibility or untenability of maintaining these categories as discrete and easily identifiable – the conundrum of authenticity. Moreover, The Gender of Latinidad explores this tension as it is played out through the bodies of and cultural forms signifying girls and women. Given the growing institutionalization of Latina/o Studies as a pan‐ethnic construct, this project sets out to contribute to an extension of existing paradigms.1 As a way to understand the increased acknowledgment of the heterogeneous complexity of Latina/o populations, industries, and cultural forms, The Gender of Latinidad draws extensively on hybridity and mixed race as essential, recurring, and unifying concepts for understanding the contemporary situation of ethnicity and the media. Given that the Latina/o population and Latina/o popular culture encompass a wide range of origins – perhaps running the gamut of origin possibilities – The Gender of Latinidad maintains a tension between identifying and acknowledging Latinidad, allowing or erasing its multiplicity, and identifying its spillage into other ethnic categories or markers. Ultimately, this book explores the tension between the top‐down efforts by media industries to market ethnicity and the bottom‐up pressures and efforts to gain employment, expand visibility, and transform the mainstream. What are some of the current degrees of freedom? Rules of engagement? Who benefits within Latinidad? The material conditions that segregate racialized communities and generate bottom‐up community pride formation, as well as strategies for inclusion in the body politic and in mainstream culture, coexist with efforts to exploit newly created niche audiences for the purposes of increasing profit. Latina/os draw on symbolic resources to maintain an identity and draw from a shared history even as their massive mobility and mixture generate a hybrid culture. Mainstream media industries draw on an archive and an overflow of talent and creativity from ethnicized populations to pick and choose what fits best with their vision of “multiculturalism.” Latina/os must disrupt and provide their vision, which itself is contested due to their heterogeneity.
The year is 2019. In the past 5 years, Latina/os have been highly visible in a range of mainstream television programs, post‐network digital offerings, and feature‐length films, such as Modern Family (ABC, 2009–19), Jane the Virgin (CW, 2014–19), Narcos (Netflix, 2015–), East Los High (Hulu, 2013–17), Coco (Disney, 2017), One Day at a Time (Netflix, 2017–19), and Beatriz at Dinner (Killer Films/Bron Studios, 2017). Latina/os are present on the screen, behind the screen, and as audiences. As we explore and analyze visibility through presence, production, and interpretation, we need to consider the demands for visibility as a complex process and dynamic that encompasses the trifecta of media studies – production, content, and representation – in relation to issues of cultural citizenship, the inescapable hybridity that works against the fantasy of authenticity, and the implicit utopia that is both never articulated and always beyond the possible. As Latina/o Media Studies ascends into a field of its own, in relation to a number of interdisciplinary projects, it also experiences the limits and possibilities of expansion, dilution, and acknowledged hybridity. It was much easier for hegemonic forces to produce mainstream popular culture and proceed when a simplified purity and imposed homogeneity prevailed as dominant discourses. From a mostly white mainstream, to a Derridean juxtaposition of white and black bodies and narratives, to the inclusion of the homogenized bronze2 race, to the suggestion of AfroLatinidad, the presence of Latina/os disrupts easy narratives of the US national imaginary. Moreover, because the United States has been an imperial power and thus US media conglomerates function across a global terrain, these narratives circulate transnationally. Thus, the visibility of US Latina/os has global implications, though these remain to be extensively researched.
Latina/os unsettle the US racial binary arrangement. Latina/o internal diversity poses many challenges to strategies for inclusion. We can no longer pretend that Latina/os are a pure group – the “bronze” race – nor that Latina/os remain within Latinidad, in terms of culture, reproduction, and geographic mobility. Latina/os fan out globally (both racially and geographically), sample and mix culture globally, and reproduce across ethnic, national, and cultural groups. In sum, Latina/os are inescapably hybrid, and any analysis of visibility or activism through media must take this mixture and hybridity into account. Latina/os lead hybrid lives, consume a hybrid diet of hybrid media, and deserve to be treated in relation to their hybridity. While this book focuses on gendered Latinidad in contemporary mainstream media, a hybrid analysis can be made for all other ethno‐racial groups (e.g. Washington, 2017b). Issues of mixed race and hybridity apply across the racial spectrum. Nonetheless, mixed‐race studies and postracial studies still cohere around transnational feminist studies, which in many ways precede all of these areas in providing a bridge between nation and transnation, ethnicity and mixed race, and gender and transgender. The concept of hybridity connects Latina/o Studies to Feminist Media Studies, as it connects Media Studies to Ethnic Studies.
Whether we are looking at the academic location, salience, and influence of Latina Feminist Media Studies or at the media and public discourse inclusion of Latinidad as a gendered construct, with enduring narrative tropes assigned to a binary gendered terrain, there is undeniable presence. The objective of this book is to explore contemporary strategies for gendered visibility in a range of mainstream forms of popular culture. The prism of the female body, drawing on extensive gender scholarship, is chosen precisely because, historically, the female body has been used to carry out national identity struggles and struggles over the belonging of the ethnic subject. For example, López (1991) documents the Hollywood representation of Latin American women, and by extension US Latinas, as a double threat – sexual and racial – to the dominant popular culture and, by implication, the nation. The threat represented by Latinas is likely to be overrepresented across a range of discourses, from the oversignified freeway signs foregrounding the female gendered border crossers, discussed by Ruiz (2002) and now fronting a popular T‐shirt in Southern California, to the development and wildly successful marketing of ambiguously ethnic doll brands such as Bratz and Flavas (Valdivia 2004a, 2005a, b, c).
Latina/os are part of the population, part of the electorate, part of business, part of media industries and representation, and part of the cultural fiber of the United States. Latina/o culture is a core component of the United States – whether in terms of food, as in the recent taco truck moment or the more dated salsa over ketchup historical marker; of music, with all the Latina/o‐influenced genres that circulate and hybridize in the United States, such as samba, salsa, merengue, reggaeton, and hip hop; or of literature, with major authors such as Sandra Cisneros, Junot Diaz, and Isabel Allende and entire subgenres such as “chica lit.” Musicians like Marc Anthony, Daddy Yankee, Juan Gabriel (recently deceased), Los Tigres del Norte, and Enrique Iglesias demonstrate the “hotness” of Latinidad. In fact, if we google “Top Latin Hits,” Billboard rewards us with a website entitled “Hot Latin Songs.” Rather differently, but still alluding to the hotness of Latinas, the cover of the Latino Media Gap has a spotlight on a faceless yet light‐brown “cartel gunman #2,” a dark‐brown “Officer Martinez,” and a light‐brown “Latina with hot accent” (in a short yellow bodycon spaghetti‐strap dress) (Negrón‐Muntaner et al. 2014). All of these Latina/o icons reiterate the trope assigned to Latina/os and our culture: a dangerous masculinity and an exotic and sexualized female othering that continues unabated within the mainstream, and which scholars find in their research about Latina/os and the mainstream media.
In 2019, the presence, significance, and popularity of social and digital media is inescapable and undeniable. As with previous media, original “common wisdom” about Latina/o absence or indifference is not borne out by research. Whereas it was once thought that Latina/os did not read mainstream media, Selena's death news repeatedly selling out People magazine issues led to People en Español – a weird response, given that the issues Latina/os were purchasing were written in English. Research continues to deliver the findings that there are millions
