The Gender of Latinidad. Angharad N. Valdivia
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of indigenous and settler colonialists, in both South and North America. Therefore, hybridity is not new to Latinidad. Indeed, hybridity may be the most authentic element of US Latina/o culture. Considerations of cultural mixing, as well as of textual hybridity, are inextricably entwined in the commodification of Latinidad. Throughout my work, I draw on the canonical writings of Levine (2001) and Naficy (1993), who usefully outline the difference between hybridity as an unsettled and difficult‐to‐harness cultural mixture and syncretism, which is a manageable, fixed, and domesticated identity. All through the violent history of the Spanish in the Americas, syncretic outbursts of local populations were allowed to manage indigenous resistance to Roman Catholic imposition. An indigenous deity, for example, would remain behind the painting or sculpture of a virgin or crucifixion. Similarly, the Virgin of Guadalupe and her attendant representations combine Mexican with Spanish religious symbols, and are further infused with feminist iconography (Latorre 2008). Syncretic appropriation is an ongoing process. The effort to domesticate and fix ultimately fails, but at least it slows a tendency toward hybridity. Unsurprisingly, mainstream media industries prefer to produce easy‐to‐manage syncretic Latina/o material culture and to visualize Latina/o audiences as settled and fixed. Neither the production, the visualization, nor the targeting of the audience engages with the complexity of contemporary Latinidad.
Media scholars, focusing across the racial spectrum, warn us that mixed race is a reality often ignored but nonetheless quite common. For example, in Undercover Asian, LeiLani Nishime (2014) seeks to understand how “ideological narratives of race, sexuality, gender, and nation intersect to create or erase multiracial representation…” Kraidy (2006) reminds us of hybridity's controversial history and charges that it represents the lives of elite intellectuals more than providing a useful tool to analyze contemporary global popular culture. However, hybridity is not synonymous with cosmopolitanism, and cultural mixture is not only the province of the rich and well‐traveled. To begin with, millions of people engage in involuntary mobility across regions and nations, and there is nothing elite about this forced migration. Along with migration comes hybridity – and US Latina/os, our culture, and our population bear out the mixture of culture, blood, and populations. Hybridity is not an effort to erase power from the equation of mixture and migration. Rather, a major task of media scholars is to tease out the many possibilities of hybridity in the production and consumption of media at each step, given that hybridity does not erase power differentials. Neither the temporary stability achieved by syncretism nor the fluidity of hybrid processes resolves power inequalities. Rather, the syncretic settlement can be called a truce – with the vanquished retaining some form of presence, albeit a negotiated one, as they continue to prepare for the next assault. Hybridity represents a combination of low‐ and high‐intensity cultural conflict. It can be harnessed toward democratic and social‐justice goals just as it is more often harnessed to buttress the status quo. It can, as anything else, be used against social movements and segments of the population. Just as some people can voluntarily and luxuriously shop for ethnicity (Halter 2000), others are forced to make do with what is available, to consume from limited options or with limited resources, and to engage with similarly displaced but differently rooted populations.
Thus, hybridity between cultures and populations is inescapable and undeniable, 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