A report by Pew Research (Flores and Lopez 2018) reveals that for US Latina/os, the internet rivals legacy television as a source of news. That study reiterates that radio remains an important source of information for Latina/os. Latina/os appear in and consume media across the spectrum.
In presence and erasure, Latina/os stand in for the imagined nation. They/we track the interstices and struggles of the contemporary identity crisis that face the United States, which formerly thought of itself as homogenously white or binary in composition (i.e. black and white). The rather recent and reluctant public acknowledgment that Latina/os are a numerically and culturally significant part of the United States documents the fact that from its very beginning, the country was anything but homogeneous. Prior to the relentless settler colonialism enacted since the 17th century, native populations were numerous and heterogeneous. Involuntary waves of slaves and “voluntary”3 waves of immigrants from every region of the globe have continued to expand the heterogeneity of the US population. Maintaining a predominantly white mainstream media has taken an enormous amount of exclusionary labor. Given that a huge chunk of the continental United States was Mexico until 1848, and that border crossings were not considered as such – that is, they were not named, articulated, and regulated – the flow of Latin Americans into and out of the US national space was fluid. The presence of what is now known as the US Latina/o4 dates back to the birth of the US nation, and even before. Waves of slaves and migrants from Africa and the other continents further complicated the homogeneous fiction assiduously circulated by the mainstream – a fiction that had to be sustained, as all political fictions do, through unequal power arrangements. Present and culturally productive US Latina/os have been excluded – an active process. Resistance to demands, refusal to employ, insistence on rehashing old genres and tropes, all form part of the conscious labor of exclusion – that is, the active construction of a fictitious homogeneity.
The institutional level of analysis rests above the organizational layer, wherein, at the site of production of media, decisions and routines serve to perpetuate existing arrangements. In a capitalist economy – or, rather, in a capitalist global system – the search for profits reigns supreme. From an industrial perspective, the inexorable search for increased profits must include an effort to discover new audiences, beyond the mass audiences that had previously been conceptualized as white. Looking for audience niches involves the tricky task of not alienating the dominant white audience. The search for new audiences in the 21st century reaches out to previously ignored segments such as women, working‐class people, nonheteronormative people, and people of color. The tension between identifying these “niches” to begin with and moving to the realization that niches are not mutually exclusive, within or without Latinidad, is a rather big lesson for an industry that remains mired in whiteness or with a binary black and white representational terrain and audience conceptualization. Latinas are part of all these targeted audiences, and their/our hybridity makes us as desirable as we are slippery, in terms of being difficult to peg down concerning our presence, predilections, affect, and attention. Moreover, our belonging within multiple Latinidades (Báez 2007) and across ethnicities and races further muddles efforts to track us, to include us, certainly to coopt us, and totally to market to us.
The complexity of Latinidad derives from and informs the global circulation of mainstream media. Narratives and situations must be produced with acknowledgment of global flows and diversity. This is not an altruistic enterprise. Rather, from an industrial perspective, a global sensitivity potentially increases audiences, and therefore profits. If done well, frontloading the global possibilities can pay abundant dividends, not only for a particular media vehicle, but also for many more products in a franchise, for a particular company, genre, or actor (Meehan 2005). Indeed, given the synergy deployed by the major media conglomerates, initial global attention is the crack in the door through which massive investments will hopefully yield consistent, long‐term returns. Economic figures support this global move. Traditionally, in the network era, US mainstream producers of television shows recouped a large portion of their production costs with the large US audience. Global circulation of these media vehicles, leading to multiple syndications, was merely the icing on the cake of a very profitable national distribution model. In the contemporary post‐network era, when conglomerates release their films simultaneously across a range of countries, or parse out releases to coincide with national holidays, the global is no longer the afterthought but the very core of a distribution strategy. In fact, film production has experienced a flip of its 80/20 budget model – that is, whereas through the 1980s, Hollywood film planned to recoup 80% of its investment with domestic audiences, nowadays the aim is for 80% to come from global audiences. Another facet of media industry expansion alongside Latina/o exclusions is that mergers of Latina/o‐targeting media do not include Latina/os in the process. No apparent upward mobility from entry‐level to executive ranks in the merged top brass exists for Latina/os working in Latina/o‐targeted media industries. Workers from the Latina/o or Spanish‐language side do not move to the merged English company. Negrón‐Muntaner and Abbas (2016) found that Latina/o media underemployment is actually accelerated by media market consolidation.
The large sums that it takes to greenlight a Hollywood blockbuster, such as the now ubiquitous superhero movie, apparently have caused Latina/os nearly to disappear from our screens when such movies are shown. This generates an internal contradiction, in that big‐budget movies apparently prefer a racialized binary, but these movies are supposed to appeal to a global population whose composition is much more complex than black and white. Indeed, the global majority is “brown,” even as Hollywood film remains either uninformed or resistant to this fact (Silva 2016). Music, digital gaming, advertising campaigns, and pornography all include Latina/o production and representation, but the continuities are far greater than the ruptures. Today's US Latina/os continue to appear in the mainstream mostly according to stereotype, and more often in sidekick or background roles than as protagonists. However, we cannot pretend that nothing has changed. Indeed, numerical analyses show both gains and losses that run counter to linear hopes of incremental improvement (e.g. Negrón‐Muntaner et al. 2014; Negrón‐Muntaner and Abbas 2016).
Some of the most promising theoretical and conceptual developments for an exploration of Latinidad in mainstream media are the inclusion of hybridity (Lowe 1991; Kraidy 2006), multiracial studies (e.g. Nishime 2014), and mixed‐race studies (Washington 2017b). Challenging our field to consider hybridity in conjunction with international communications, Kraidy draws on the many intellectual streams that converge in cultural production. I am informed by the mapping of the field of hybridity by Kraniauskas (2000a, b), who identifies a cultural/anthropological strain (Canclini 1995) and a more psychoanalytical literary version (Bhaba 1994), both of which circulate as globally influential versions of hybridity. Mapped over Media Studies, from where I write, this bimodality of contemporary theories of hybridity reminds me of a constructed binary within my field that had largely, but not totally, been abandoned by the late 2010s. The US academy's tendency toward binaries, as well as its rejection of paradigms that criticize structural inequalities, resulted in the 1980s in a juxtaposition between cultural studies and political economy. This fiction was difficult to sustain, as global intellectual traditions inextricably connected these two areas of study (e.g. Cardoso and Faletto 1979; Lowe 1996), and had done so for many decades (O'Connor 1991). I find that the bimodal approaches to hybridity – in literature and anthropology – inherit traces of this divide, which partly is informed by a US academy that despite statements to the contrary, has not fully embraced global intellectual perspectives (see Shome 2016). In terms of the interdiscipline Media and Cultural Studies, there is still relatively little research on Latina/os (Valdivia 2004b), and most of that which exists is medium‐specific rather than broad, sweeping across the terrain of mainstream popular culture. Additionally, much – though not all – of the research on media issues is currently carried out by scholars outside of Media Studies, and often reveals a lack of familiarity with sophisticated approaches to the study of media. This project thoroughly combines Latina/o and Media Studies, taking both interdisciplines as foundational to the study of contemporary popular culture. Moreover, it takes both the textual and the industrial seriously.
Hybridity
