The Gender of Latinidad. Angharad N. Valdivia
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States. Latina/o presence has great implications for mainstream media, which prefers the male 18–34 age group as both media and general product consumers. Latina/os are a young demographic, and that fact could have positive expenditure implications for media industries, should they choose to exploit it, in terms of sheer ratings for television and box office receipts for movies. The gendered preference of mainstream advertising rhetoric about the most desired segment of the audience implicitly undervalues women. Exploiting this gender blindspot would be a great asset to media industries, which are constantly actively seeking new “niche” audiences, and would be an opportunity for Latina audiences to assert symbolic ruptures and cultural citizenship (Molina‐Guzmán 2010, 2018; Báez 2018).
Because viewership is but a point of entry into the synergistic merchandising, product placement, and tie‐ins accompanying any mainstream media circulation, media produced by conglomerates derives profit from integrated global marketing and advertising campaigns. The 18–34‐year‐old age group has been found to devote more time to media and to have the discretionary income to purchase the products and services implied by the media that it consumes. As the Latino Media Gap (Negrón‐Muntaner et al. 2014) documents, Latinos are overrepresented (in relation to their percentage of the population) as radio listeners, moviegoers, and social media participants. Thus, including Latina/os in general, and Latinas in particular in the production of media, in their representation and narratives, and in their target audiences seems like a win–win proposition. That this strategy is not being widely deployed once again illustrates that media production is not always about the bottom line but implicitly derives from ethnic and gendered omissions.
The Gender of Latinidad investigates specific representational strategies used in mainstream popular culture that differ, sometimes drastically, from previous efforts to account for and to reach ethnically diverse populations. Drawing on a wealth of research (Molina‐Guzmán and Valdivia 2004; Valdivia 2004a, b, 2005a, b, c; Harewood and Valdivia 2005; Calafell 2008; Moreman 2008; Molina‐Guzmán 2010; Cepeda 2015, etc.), the book seeks to map the deployment of particular ways of representing the “radical and dynamic relationality” resulting from population and cultural mobility (forced and voluntary). As Shohat (1991) has so brilliantly noted, ethnicities only make sense in relation to other ethnicities, and this is all the more true in the contemporary global situation. Ethnicities are discursive, in that they are deployments of power. They are not natural, as a brief tour of what constitutes Latina/o or blackness in separate nations will reveal. There is no such thing as an absolute ethnic identity or position. Ethnic positions shift across time and space. There is no such thing as a particular skin color – for, the very fact of identifying and naming a skin color results from a political, historical, and cultural context.5 In the contemporary US moment, Latinas, for example, make sense in relation to whiteness and blackness. They/we occupy an in‐between location, regardless of our heterogeneity. Despite the fact that some Latinas are Afro‐Latinas, others are China‐Latinas,6 and so on, we have been coded, for cultural purposes, as light‐brown Latinas. Our hybridity is erased in favor of that very useful in‐between location that serves many purposes at once. Light‐brown Latinas provide the US mainstream with a rationale of inclusivity. They can say, “hey, look, we are diverse.” This inclusion often displaces blackness, because why stop at that in‐between, why not just redraw the spectrum to white and light brown? It also excludes many if not most Latinas, as it displaces blackness and foregrounds whiteness as normative (Shuggart 2007). It coexists uneasily with other ethnicities, such as Asian Americans, Native Americans, and Arab Americans, whose skin color and ethnicization also place them between the white and black poles that rule the United States' racial spectrum.
Within US history, and really anywhere else in the world, ethnicization as a project has served not only to categorize but also to segregate. Government and marketing efforts to control and profit from this ethnic relationality coexist with ethnic populations' efforts to gain rights and access to democratic processes – including education – as well as their political and cultural representation, ranging from political elections – both as voters and as candidates – to mediated representations – both behind and in front of the camera. The slow quantitative increase in the representation of Latinas and the qualitative change of these representations of Latinidad bear witness to the resilience of ethnic narratives of purity and binary fantasies. Both of these tactics are so entrenched that they function as default. To try anything else means going against the stream. The force of this ideological marginalization and erasure ensures their survival, despite the fact that quite possibly it would be more profitable to leave them behind. The mainstream is not very open to change, even if it promises increased profit. Latinas provide a malleable signifier of difference that at once tames the unruliness of hybridity through desirable sexualized images and provides close to a tabula rasa of ethnic signification for government and business purposes. In the simplest of formulations, Latinas provide an in‐between space of representation for a nation that until recently thought of itself as black and white. The recurring and unavoidable reminders of a far more complex and violent history, culture, and population – that is, the inescapable heterogeneity within Latinidad and within the US population – renders such simplicity unstable and untenable. Yet, hybridity bites back. Returning the look or focus to the mainstream with the complexity of that in‐between space, Latinas talk and push back (Báez 2018). Ethnically diverse Latinas can use the foregrounding of ambiguity to complicate previously binary US national imaginary. Industry and audiences understand that ambiguity simultaneously displaces, and sometimes replaces, the darker, usually black, subject (see also Molina‐Guzmán 2005). Throughout the research on the subject, the attention to global circulation and hybridity has been constant. Latina/os come from everywhere and fan out everywhere – in unexpected paths. What are we to make of the Latin Americans who migrate to Europe – either Spain or the United Kingdom – and later come to the States as European citizens (Retis, 2014)? My ongoing interest in hybridity and mixed race, as a rejection of purity and an indicator or Latina/os and Latinidad, takes me back to the mainstream, a hybrid space that attempts to assert purity through contradiction and erasure – a process whose failure is yet another indication of the identity crisis facing the United States as a nation and transmitted globally through transnational conglomerate media industries.
The uses and abuses of representing ethnicities as hybrid have both potential for liberation and an expanded public sphere but also the danger of subsuming all difference into a flat ambiguous otherness for the sake of commodification and transnational profit. Therein lies the rub, in terms of production and activism. Producers within the mainstream and activists trying to make demands upon mainstream media industries engage in unequally empowered bargaining and negotiations. Demands for richer and more textured narratives are met with resistance and outright avoidance. Industry executives claim that the profit motive guides development, and as such it makes little sense to alienate a large segment of the audience. Even when production of a television show including a range of Latinas somehow comes to be, the perceived tensions between mainstream (read: white) and Latina (read: brown) audiences appear to producers as a liability rather than a possibility. Exploring the production of Devious Maids as a more Latina version of Desperate Housewives, Báez (2015) concluded: “Ultimately, in trying to simultaneously appeal to a broader female audience and a narrow Latina/o audience segment, Devious Maids illustrates the difficulties cable networks like Lifetime experience in trying to diversify programming that will attract highly segmented audiences, while also maintaining their larger audience base” (p. 54). Internal contradictions abound.
The long history of representations of Latina/os in the US mainstream reveals far more continuities than ruptures. Felix Gutiérrez (2012) summarizes the range of possibilities:
Greasy bandidos, fat mamacitas, romantic Latin lovers, lazy peons sleeping under sombreros, short‐tempered Mexican spitfires, violent revolutionaries, faithful servants, gang members, and sexy señoritas with low‐cut blouses and loose morals have long been staples of Latin images in fiction, films, and television. When seen on the screen or page, the stereotyped characters quickly trigger a picture in the heads of the audience of what the character is like and