use in the 17th century was in a biological sense, much of the resistance to it stems precisely from its racist social applications. Hybrid agricultural plants, for example, are not only more resistant to disease but are also infertile. However, when applied to populations in the 18th century, hybridity was often “invoked by those hostile to racial difference” (Labanyi 2000, p. 56) – usually in conjunction with the term “miscegenation,” which connoted unwanted and often illegal reproduction between white women and men of color. This concern was all the more intense in a historical period marked by colonial expansion, which brought many previously separate populations in contact with one another (Young 1995). Miscegenation was legally precluded in some settings so as to preserve both purity and colonial authority, but in others it was encouraged so as to improve, Westernize, and whiten the local population in a positivist quest for racial breeding. Of course, the latter strategy always simultaneously generated fears of the tipping point where the native blood, stock, and bodies would outnumber the racial purity of the white colonizer. Fears of mixing were voiced both by the colonizers and the colonized. For instance, hybridity was reviled by Octavio Paz (1959), who identified the pachuco, a young masculine Mexican American resistant subject, as an instance of depravity. For Paz, this depravity resulted from the mixing of the purity of Mexico with the pollution of the United States. Fears of the contamination, dilution, and disappearance of the pure‐white subject continue today, and are central to understanding the contemporary sociopolitical situation wherein Latina/os have become the largest US minority, with some demographic projections showing us becoming the majority sometime in this century. From a Latin American perspective, Paz's sentiments toward US Latina/os have not altogether disappeared. Given that so many producers of mainstream US Latina/o media are actually Latin Americans, this historical trace is not inconsequential. As well, these fears demonstrate the endurance of a biologically and anthropologically untenable belief in purity – though, when people implicitly refer to “purity,” this has to be treated as a floating signifier.
Contemporary scholars continue to contribute to this language of cultural tension, collision, mixture, erasure, and displacement. Thus, Mary Louise Pratt uses “zones of contact,” Gloria Anzaldúa speaks of “nepantla,” Homi Bhabha writes of “mimicry” and a “third space,” and Nestor García Canclini uses “hybrid cultures.” While its application to population and cultural form is undeniable, there are still many who caution against the wholesale adoption of the concept of hybridity. Foremost among their concerns is the depoliticizing potential of accepting that there is an inevitable mixture and hybridity in everything and that if everything and everyone is hybrid then there is no theoretical validity to the term. Sommer (1991) worries that the deployment of hybridity duplicates national unity movements that seek to rewrite the violent and uneasy history of many Latin American nations. Others are concerned that concepts such as hybridity, mestizaje, syncretism, miscegenation, and assimilation are being used carelessly and interchangeably, flattening historical, geographical, and cultural specificity. Shohat warns that a “celebration of syncretism and hybridity per se, if not articulated in conjunction with questions of hegemony and neocolonial power relations, runs the risk of appearing to sanctify the fait accompli of colonial violence” (1991, p. 109). When coupled with a critical assessment of hegemonic relations, the concept is foremost a rejection of essentialist notions, either of gender or of ethnicity and race, as well as an acknowledgment that there is no purity to be found at the level of culture, the body, blood, or DNA.
Since Latina/os represent an instance of radical hybridity, drawing the boundaries around this ethnic group proves to be most challenging. Focusing on Latina/o television, Levine (2001), drawing on Naficy (1993), reminds us that hybridity is unstable and uncomfortable. Not only is it verifiably evident that cities are not the sites of national (let alone ethnic or class) purity – Miami is not purely Cuban American, Los Angeles is not purely Mexican American, New York is not purely Puerto Rican – but also the in‐between space (the Midwest, the South, etc.) is populated by fast‐growing heterogeneous Latina/o populations that are, in turn, reproducing across the ethnic and racial spectrum. Yet, a range of Latina/o Studies scholars, such as Fusco (1995) and Lugo (2000), remind us that it is far easier for cultural forms to cross borders than it is for human beings, for whom hybridity is often a wrenching lived experience. The lived experience of Latina/o bodies remains a hybrid one, full of ambivalence, tension, and pain despite celebratory and messianic messages of the joys and pressures of globalization. Whereas music, food, and style may cross borders unchecked, bodies are continuously inspected, even after legal and successful border crossings, as Latina/os remain the eternal outsiders within the US political psyche and system. Against this context, media strives to portray and reach the Latina/o audience.
Applying hybridity to US Latinidad and mainstream popular culture must rely on a combination of both versions and take up inherent tensions in locating the concept of US Latina/o within a nation while simultaneously acknowledging that Latinidad cannot be contained by national boundaries and is influenced by hybrid cultures and populations. Historically, at least as far back as the 15th century, Latin American populations were already hybrid, with a mixture of indigenous and settler colonialists, in both South and North America. Therefore, hybridity is not new to Latinidad. Indeed, hybridity may be the most authentic element of US Latina/o culture. Considerations of cultural mixing, as well as of textual hybridity, are inextricably entwined in the commodification of Latinidad. Throughout my work, I draw on the canonical writings of Levine (2001) and Naficy (1993), who usefully outline the difference between hybridity as an unsettled and difficult‐to‐harness cultural mixture and syncretism, which is a manageable, fixed, and domesticated identity. All through the violent history of the Spanish in the Americas, syncretic outbursts of local populations were allowed to manage indigenous resistance to Roman Catholic imposition. An indigenous deity, for example, would remain behind the painting or sculpture of a virgin or crucifixion. Similarly, the Virgin of Guadalupe and her attendant representations combine Mexican with Spanish religious symbols, and are further infused with feminist iconography (Latorre 2008). Syncretic appropriation is an ongoing process. The effort to domesticate and fix ultimately fails, but at least it slows a tendency toward hybridity. Unsurprisingly, mainstream media industries prefer to produce easy‐to‐manage syncretic Latina/o material culture and to visualize Latina/o audiences as settled and fixed. Neither the production, the visualization, nor the targeting of the audience engages with the complexity of contemporary Latinidad.
Media scholars, focusing across the racial spectrum, warn us that mixed race is a reality often ignored but nonetheless quite common. For example, in Undercover Asian, LeiLani Nishime (2014) seeks to understand how “ideological narratives of race, sexuality, gender, and nation intersect to create or erase multiracial representation…” Kraidy (2006) reminds us of hybridity's controversial history and charges that it represents the lives of elite intellectuals more than providing a useful tool to analyze contemporary global popular culture. However, hybridity is not synonymous with cosmopolitanism, and cultural mixture is not only the province of the rich and well‐traveled. To begin with, millions of people engage in involuntary mobility across regions and nations, and there is nothing elite about this forced migration. Along with migration comes hybridity – and US Latina/os, our culture, and our population bear out the mixture of culture, blood, and populations. Hybridity is not an effort to erase power from the equation of mixture and migration. Rather, a major task of media scholars is to tease out the many possibilities of hybridity in the production and consumption of media at each step, given that hybridity does not erase power differentials. Neither the temporary stability achieved by syncretism nor the fluidity of hybrid processes resolves power inequalities. Rather, the syncretic settlement can be called a truce – with the vanquished retaining some form of presence, albeit a negotiated one, as they continue to prepare for the next assault. Hybridity represents a combination of low‐ and high‐intensity cultural conflict. It can be harnessed toward democratic and social‐justice goals just as it is more often harnessed to buttress the status quo. It can, as anything else, be used against social movements and segments of the population. Just as some people can voluntarily and luxuriously shop for ethnicity (Halter 2000), others are forced to make do with what is available, to consume from limited options or with limited resources, and to engage with similarly displaced but differently rooted populations.
Thus,
