though potentially unacknowledged. Ethnic studies used to be treated as drops of oil on pools of water. African Americans, Asian Americans, Latina/os, and Native Americans were treated as coexisting yet separate groups. While historical and geographical roots differed, they sometimes overlapped. Moreover, given the segregation prevalent in the United States, minoritized groups often share less desirable living locations. As a result of this long‐term process, we can begin to discern the acknowledgment of inevitable mixture. For instance, the Latino Media Gap (Negrón‐Muntaner et al. 2014) notes the presence and incorporation of AfroLatinos as a positive trend. Concordantly, recent research on mixed race and media (Washington 2017b) explores the mixtures that challenge previous assumptions about discrete ethnicities, and expands the possible mixtures beyond white and whatever else. For example, Washington examines Blasians – black Asians. The controversy over the casting of Zoe Saldana as Nina Simone demonstrates mainstream media's tension toward African Americans and the strategic casting of Afro‐Latinas (Molina‐Guzmán 2013b). Despite the backlash from the African American community at having one of their heroes played by a Latina, the fact remains that Saldana is and identifies herself as a black Latina. Saldana herself is subject to an industry that prefers to cast light Latinas such as Jennifer Lopez for ethnic roles. Industry practices also continue to avoid casting African Americans, especially dark‐skinned ones. So, Saldana is too dark to be Latina, and African Americans are too dark to be cast as African Americans. Here is a case that clearly illustrates the uses and abuses of hybridity. The hybrid Afro‐Latina body cannot be used for Latinidad, yet it displaces the black body. Consequently, these casting practices pit ethnic communities against one another. Possible interethnic alliances are undermined by the favoring of light skin even for African American roles.
Hybridity is deployed through gendered bodies. Ideally, one of the uses of hybridity could be to reach a space beyond gender binaries. Predictably, one of the abuses is to reinforce gender binaries as natural. Ethnically hybrid characters, when they exist beyond a mere suggestion of more than one ethnicity or race, fall firmly within cisgender categories. We are firmly embedded in a gendered mainstream wherein Latinas sign for Latinidad much more so than Latinos. Latina bodies are sexualized or relegated to abnegation narratives, such as spitfires and dedicated asexual mothers. Ultimately, Latinas are much more visible than Latinos in mainstream popular culture, especially in spectacular forms (Molina‐Guzmán 2010). Latinos appear more often as specters of violence and criminality within the current political administration of the United States.
In the 2016 US presidential election, the Republican party, which for decades has courted a section of the electorate that retains whiteness as a premium, generated a successful candidate who combines tendencies to simultaneously racialize and criminalize with a reality television approach to decision making. A love of social media and Twitter rounds out his novel idea of national governance. This toxic mixture of media and narrative results in a rapidly evolving terrain of belonging, whose terms of engagement disfavor US Latina/os regardless of citizenship, race, location, and socioeconomic status. While discrimination is suffered most heavily by those with darker skin, no browned body is safe in this political climate (Silva 2016).
In a book drawing on hybridity, it must be mentioned that we cannot assume homogeneity of political conviction within Latinidad. While it's true that more Latina/os are either Democrats or Independents, there are Latina/o Republicans – especially, though not solely, a powerful and vocal Cuban‐American community in Florida. Thus, it came to be that in the thick of the 2016 presidential election, amidst all of the ratings‐driven TV coverage that the Republican candidate received, an unexpected supportive statement from Marco Gutierrez, founder of the group Latinos for Trump, appeared. Latinos come from a very dominant culture, he warned. If you don't watch it, you might have “taco trucks on every corner”! Gutierrez’s interview with Joy Reid, broadcast on MSNBC on September 1, 2016, immediately went viral on social media and mainstream news. His statements trended for days on Facebook and Twitter, and became a favorite subject of gifs and memes. Classic and contemporary art were recruited for ironic commentary. For instance, a widely circulating visual added a taco truck to Hopper's classic painting, “Nighthawks”; another added one to Munch's “The Scream.” Visualizing technologies were added to the debate: a gif showed taco trucks spreading from south of the border throughout the continental United States. The taco truck incident also became a major news item on legacy media – newspapers, television, and radio news. As well, it inspired taco trucks throughout the States to position themselves in front of or close to Trump campaign headquarters (e.g., in Denver). Mostly, people voiced a desire to have more taco trucks in their lives and neighborhoods. Some people posted that they would welcome a taco truck in every corner of their living room. Others outed Marco Gutierrez, the originator of this statement, as a real‐estate scammer preying on poor Latinos (Kuns 2016).
This ironic reaction can be read as a repudiation of anti‐immigration policies and support for Latina/os in general and Mexican Americans in particular. However, if we heed Coco Fusco's (1995) warning that culture has an easy border crossing whereas the bodies that produce it face stiff barriers, and combine this with a neoliberal preference for a global extraction of wealth transferred to the imperial private sector, then it makes sense that people voice support for tacos while not necessarily supporting amnesty, DACA, or any of the other policies opposed by the current administration's efforts to engage in wide‐sweeping immigration reform/rollback of immigrant rights. In other words, one can be pro‐tacos and anti‐Mexican. President Trump has famously celebrated Cinco de Mayo by eating tacos even as he dedicates himself to policies to restrict the rights and possibilities of US Latina/os and immigrant bodies. Cinco de Mayo itself is a stereotypical US made‐up holiday marketed as a national Mexican holiday for the purposes of cultural commodification. As well, salsa surpassed ketchup as the condiment of choice in the United States over 20 years ago. Yet, public embraces of Latina/o culture have not necessarily elicited increasingly humane approaches to Latina/o immigration in the US Congress. To be sure, there is also undeniable backlash, and Mr. Trump's successful candidacy points to the political and cultural value of rhetorical attacks on Mexican Americans in particular and Latina/os in general. Actually, “Mexican” functions as a metonym for all Latina/os in a classic deployment of the flattening of difference. Mexicans serve a unifying function for a political party whose anti‐immigration platform serves as its raison d'être in the face of irreversible population flows and the changing domestic balance of forces they generate. Mexicans serve as a rhetorical tool to attempt to reverse decades of ambivalently inclusive racial and immigration policies. The return to the mythically pure Mexican body belies the diversity and hybridity within Latinidad but yields a simple figure to be attacked in a concerted effort to return to an imagined past of racial purity. Unfortunately, some Mexicans, such as Marco Gutierrez, contribute to this misplaced hysteria.
We could engage in a slightly more gendered analysis of the taco truck incident by asking who makes up Latinos for Trump. It's hard to tell, as the website was taken down right after the “tacos on every corner” interview. Yet, it deserves to be asked: Why are Latina/o spokespeople in the news almost inevitably male? For example, in the Joy Reid segment on MSNBC, Adriano Espaillat, New York senator and former undocumented youth, represented the counterpoint to Marco Gutierrez, author of the taco comment. No Latinas were interviewed. Soledad O'Brien, one of the few major network television Latina news broadcasters, was relieved of her CNN position in 2013, and currently anchors a political commentary show on Hearst Television Network, a part of her own Starfish Media Group. Even the taco truck rhetoric presumes a male‐gendered labor force. Though some of the memes included female cooks, by and large the representational terrain of the taco truck workforce was male. The fear and the discourse about Latinos continues to focus on working‐class or unemployed, mostly undocumented males. The fear of rapists, clearly articulated by Trump and displaced on to non‐white bodies, is about men. The attempted moral panic over lesbian farmers orchestrated by conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh (August 16, 2016), which preceded and was displaced by the taco truck fiasco, focused only on white women. In the contemporary news environment of fear of the criminal Latino body, men figure prominently and women are nearly absent. The difference with the news coverage of the epidemic of mass shootings is worth mentioning. Whereas most of the recent mass shooting in the United States have been carried out
