The Gender of Latinidad. Angharad N. Valdivia
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or Spanish‐language side do not move to the merged English company. Negrón‐Muntaner and Abbas (2016) found that Latina/o media underemployment is actually accelerated by media market consolidation.
The large sums that it takes to greenlight a Hollywood blockbuster, such as the now ubiquitous superhero movie, apparently have caused Latina/os nearly to disappear from our screens when such movies are shown. This generates an internal contradiction, in that big‐budget movies apparently prefer a racialized binary, but these movies are supposed to appeal to a global population whose composition is much more complex than black and white. Indeed, the global majority is “brown,” even as Hollywood film remains either uninformed or resistant to this fact (Silva 2016). Music, digital gaming, advertising campaigns, and pornography all include Latina/o production and representation, but the continuities are far greater than the ruptures. Today's US Latina/os continue to appear in the mainstream mostly according to stereotype, and more often in sidekick or background roles than as protagonists. However, we cannot pretend that nothing has changed. Indeed, numerical analyses show both gains and losses that run counter to linear hopes of incremental improvement (e.g. Negrón‐Muntaner et al. 2014; Negrón‐Muntaner and Abbas 2016).
Some of the most promising theoretical and conceptual developments for an exploration of Latinidad in mainstream media are the inclusion of hybridity (Lowe 1991; Kraidy 2006), multiracial studies (e.g. Nishime 2014), and mixed‐race studies (Washington 2017b). Challenging our field to consider hybridity in conjunction with international communications, Kraidy draws on the many intellectual streams that converge in cultural production. I am informed by the mapping of the field of hybridity by Kraniauskas (2000a, b), who identifies a cultural/anthropological strain (Canclini 1995) and a more psychoanalytical literary version (Bhaba 1994), both of which circulate as globally influential versions of hybridity. Mapped over Media Studies, from where I write, this bimodality of contemporary theories of hybridity reminds me of a constructed binary within my field that had largely, but not totally, been abandoned by the late 2010s. The US academy's tendency toward binaries, as well as its rejection of paradigms that criticize structural inequalities, resulted in the 1980s in a juxtaposition between cultural studies and political economy. This fiction was difficult to sustain, as global intellectual traditions inextricably connected these two areas of study (e.g. Cardoso and Faletto 1979; Lowe 1996), and had done so for many decades (O'Connor 1991). I find that the bimodal approaches to hybridity – in literature and anthropology – inherit traces of this divide, which partly is informed by a US academy that despite statements to the contrary, has not fully embraced global intellectual perspectives (see Shome 2016). In terms of the interdiscipline Media and Cultural Studies, there is still relatively little research on Latina/os (Valdivia 2004b), and most of that which exists is medium‐specific rather than broad, sweeping across the terrain of mainstream popular culture. Additionally, much – though not all – of the research on media issues is currently carried out by scholars outside of Media Studies, and often reveals a lack of familiarity with sophisticated approaches to the study of media. This project thoroughly combines Latina/o and Media Studies, taking both interdisciplines as foundational to the study of contemporary popular culture. Moreover, it takes both the textual and the industrial seriously.
Hybridity is not a new term or concept. Though its original 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