The Gender of Latinidad. Angharad N. Valdivia
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and ‐marketed children's toys and books, television, popular music, movies, and celebrity culture, this book addresses Latinidad in its everyday location. The mainstream is normative and discursive – it foregrounds power through narratives, tropes, and cultures. It proposes that which “should be” through a prism of representation that in turn represents institutions and everyday signifying practices (Giles and Middleton 2008). As well, through its wide distribution and circulation, the mainstream contributes to the functioning of institutions and our personal, group, national, and transnational everyday signifying practices. Furthermore, Media Studies research suggests that we learn more from media in the absence of personal experience – so, given the segregated reality of much of our population, the mainstream provides powerful lessons about Latina/os to those not living in contact with us. The fact that Latina/os are spread throughout the United States and come from a wide range of origins, recent and ancient, and, in turn, fan out throughout the world, means that cultural production, circulation, and consumption are globally mobile. The mobility of cultural forms is also complex, dynamic, and consistent. The mainstream has implications of access to media – and also in terms of the circulation of Latina/o narratives and tropes among non‐Latina/o audiences.
In 2019, Latina Feminist Media Studies contributes to many interdisciplinary streams, such as Feminist and Gender Studies, Ethnic Studies, Transnational Studies, Sexuality Studies, and the many forms that Latina/o Studies takes within the United States, such as Chicana/o Studies, Boricua Studies, Dominican Studies, and so on. Recent articles calling out gaps and omissions in mainstream communications and media studies publications point out our gendered (Mayer et al. 2018) and racialized (Chakravartty et al. 2018) citational practices. As this book is being finished, Latinas continue becoming more visible in academic research through Gender Studies journals such as Feminist Media Studies. As a grassroots phenomenon that continuously reacts in concert with as well as against market pressures (Cepeda 2015), Latinidad – and, more specifically, the gendering of Latinidad – has thus emerged as a key related site of inquiry for Latina/o Feminist Media Studies scholars (Cepeda 2015, p. 7). Previous erasure of Feminist Media Studies work also needs to be addressed, as by now there are decades of excellent Latina Feminist Media Studies texts (Valdivia 2018). As well, Latina Feminist Media Studies aims to be taken seriously in interdisciplinary journals such as Latino Studies. In conferences, the most notable inclusion lies in the recently created Race and Media conferences (2916, 2017, 2018), in which the work of Latina feminists is aired in a ventilated conversation across racial categories. As well, The Routledge Companion to Latina/o Media (2016), edited by Maria Elena Cepeda and Ines Casillas, includes many of the Latina feminist scholars whose work guides this chapter and this book. Moreover, in a lead article in Feminist Media Studies, the major feminist journal in our field, Maria Elena Cepeda (2015) clearly articulated the need to call to task practices that, unsurprisingly, center whiteness: we need to move beyond citational practices that exclude Latina Feminist Media Studies research, acknowledge the diversity within Latinidad, and admit the inescapability of transnationalism (Cepeda 2015). I take all three of these challenges very seriously. Journals that focus on the ethnic category of Latino Studies need to take Media Studies seriously as an interdiscipline, related to but different from Journalism, History, American Studies, and so on. This has long been a pet scholarly peeve of mine. No historian, for example, would conduct research without taking history seriously as a discipline. Conversely, scholars in all the fields just mentioned regularly publish books and articles about media in which media scholarship is barely included. This omission is doubled as the myth of discovery about Latinidad applies to scholarship as well as to mainstream media. Many of our feminist colleagues do not read our work, so I followed up my “Latina Media Studies” (2018) article in Feminist Media Histories with an exhortation to feminist media scholars to move beyond the tokenistic mention of Gloria Anzaldúa. This book contributes to a rich body of scholarship, and encourages readers to explore the other scholars, books, and articles that enrich our understanding of the world, mediated ethnic categories, and Latina/os and media in particular. It promises to extend and revise contemporary intellectual paradigms of Latina/o Studies and ethnicity. It underscores the utter necessity of understanding the tension between the need to assert an identity and the reality of the difficulty of maintaining boundaries around that identity. It also encourages the acknowledgment of hybridity as both a tool for inclusion and something to be used in the name of profit. Recognizing the uses and abuses of hybridity gives critical knowledge and potential empowering strategies to underrepresented groups.
While the flattening of difference, both within Latinidad and between ethnics, is readily apparent, so is the tacit acknowledgment that neither all Latina/os nor all ethnics are alike. Ambiguity and hybridity have been found by both the US Census, where large portions of the ethnic population feel frustrated by the discrete ethnic categories provided in census forms, and by major research projects such as the Pew Hispanic Center and Kaiser Family Foundation's report, National Survey of Latinos (2002, updated 2004), which documents that second‐ and later‐generation Latina/os overwhelmingly (62%) do not list any single national origin as their background but opt for an umbrella category such as Latina/o. Ambiguity within Latinidad is coupled by ambiguity between ethnicities, as the Pew Foundation finds that both Latina/os and Asian Americans marry across ethnicities in increasing proportions. This hybridity is present in media culture and is represented through internally contradictory approaches. So, for example, while Dávila (2001) notes that all ethnics – Latina/os, African Americans, Asian Americans, and Native Americans – are treated as the last bastion of purity, tradition, and family, in another essay (Dávila 2001) she points out that media industries are beginning to pursue a parallel path of selective differentiation between and within types of Latinidad, often built on stereotype and essentialist national characteristics. Thus, at the level of tradition, all ethnics may be the same, but Asian Americans are the “model minority.” Similarly, until quite recently – before the Elián González spectacle – Cuban Americans were treated as the model minority within Latina/os (Molina‐Guzmán 2005).
The concept of hybridity is extremely useful to communications scholars for a number of reasons, yet it remains to be fully utilized by our interdiscipline (Kraidy 1999, 2002; Murphy and Kraidy 2003). Kraidy (2002, p. 317) proposes that we foreground this concept, as it “needs to be understood as a communicative practice constitutive of, and constituted by, sociopolitical and economic arrangements” that are “complex, processual, and dynamic.” Beyond its merely descriptive uses, hybridity also opens up the space for the study of cultural negotiations, conflicts, and struggles against the backdrop of contemporary globalization (Shome and Hegde 2002a, b), wherein an increasing part of the global population is simultaneously becoming geographically displaced and endlessly commodified. This is precisely the framework of analysis around which this book coheres. Contemporary mainstream Latinidad will be explored against the backdrop of globalization, with an emphasis on cultural negotiations and displacements.
Notes
1 1 Elsewhere, many scholars have written about the history of Latina/o Studies and the previous academic formations that contributed and continue to coexist with this interdiscipline. The Gender of Latinidad begins within Latina/o Studies as a pan‐national and pan‐ethnic formation.
2 2 There is a long history and debate within US Latina/o Studies, and more so within Chicana/o Studies, about the mythical “bronze” race, which celebrated the indigenous elements of the Southwest Latina/o. Most powerfully articulated in the 1960s and '70s, this bronze race discourse was politically powerful and served to unify and valorize the presence and history of US Latina/os.
3 3 I put “voluntary” in quotes because it hides the many layers of involuntary migration due to famine, persecution, and economic dispossession. To be sure, there are fully voluntary migrants, but waves of migration usually follow push‐out forces that make it impossible for populations to remain in their homeland.
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