The Gender of Latinidad. Angharad N. Valdivia
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precede all of these areas in providing a bridge between nation and transnation, ethnicity and mixed race, and gender and transgender. The concept of hybridity connects Latina/o Studies to Feminist Media Studies, as it connects Media Studies to Ethnic Studies.
Whether we are looking at the academic location, salience, and influence of Latina Feminist Media Studies or at the media and public discourse inclusion of Latinidad as a gendered construct, with enduring narrative tropes assigned to a binary gendered terrain, there is undeniable presence. The objective of this book is to explore contemporary strategies for gendered visibility in a range of mainstream forms of popular culture. The prism of the female body, drawing on extensive gender scholarship, is chosen precisely because, historically, the female body has been used to carry out national identity struggles and struggles over the belonging of the ethnic subject. For example, López (1991) documents the Hollywood representation of Latin American women, and by extension US Latinas, as a double threat – sexual and racial – to the dominant popular culture and, by implication, the nation. The threat represented by Latinas is likely to be overrepresented across a range of discourses, from the oversignified freeway signs foregrounding the female gendered border crossers, discussed by Ruiz (2002) and now fronting a popular T‐shirt in Southern California, to the development and wildly successful marketing of ambiguously ethnic doll brands such as Bratz and Flavas (Valdivia 2004a, 2005a, b, c).
Latina/os are part of the population, part of the electorate, part of business, part of media industries and representation, and part of the cultural fiber of the United States. Latina/o culture is a core component of the United States – whether in terms of food, as in the recent taco truck moment or the more dated salsa over ketchup historical marker; of music, with all the Latina/o‐influenced genres that circulate and hybridize in the United States, such as samba, salsa, merengue, reggaeton, and hip hop; or of literature, with major authors such as Sandra Cisneros, Junot Diaz, and Isabel Allende and entire subgenres such as “chica lit.” Musicians like Marc Anthony, Daddy Yankee, Juan Gabriel (recently deceased), Los Tigres del Norte, and Enrique Iglesias demonstrate the “hotness” of Latinidad. In fact, if we google “Top Latin Hits,” Billboard rewards us with a website entitled “Hot Latin Songs.” Rather differently, but still alluding to the hotness of Latinas, the cover of the Latino Media Gap has a spotlight on a faceless yet light‐brown “cartel gunman #2,” a dark‐brown “Officer Martinez,” and a light‐brown “Latina with hot accent” (in a short yellow bodycon spaghetti‐strap dress) (Negrón‐Muntaner et al. 2014). All of these Latina/o icons reiterate the trope assigned to Latina/os and our culture: a dangerous masculinity and an exotic and sexualized female othering that continues unabated within the mainstream, and which scholars find in their research about Latina/os and the mainstream media.
In 2019, the presence, significance, and popularity of social and digital media is inescapable and undeniable. As with previous media, original “common wisdom” about Latina/o absence or indifference is not borne out by research. Whereas it was once thought that Latina/os did not read mainstream media, Selena's death news repeatedly selling out People magazine issues led to People en Español – a weird response, given that the issues Latina/os were purchasing were written in English. Research continues to deliver the findings that there are millions of Latina/os who consume English‐language media (e.g. Chavez 2015). 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