The Gender of Latinidad. Angharad N. Valdivia
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a neoliberal preference for a global extraction of wealth transferred to the imperial private sector, then it makes sense that people voice support for tacos while not necessarily supporting amnesty, DACA, or any of the other policies opposed by the current administration's efforts to engage in wide‐sweeping immigration reform/rollback of immigrant rights. In other words, one can be pro‐tacos and anti‐Mexican. President Trump has famously celebrated Cinco de Mayo by eating tacos even as he dedicates himself to policies to restrict the rights and possibilities of US Latina/os and immigrant bodies. Cinco de Mayo itself is a stereotypical US made‐up holiday marketed as a national Mexican holiday for the purposes of cultural commodification. As well, salsa surpassed ketchup as the condiment of choice in the United States over 20 years ago. Yet, public embraces of Latina/o culture have not necessarily elicited increasingly humane approaches to Latina/o immigration in the US Congress. To be sure, there is also undeniable backlash, and Mr. Trump's successful candidacy points to the political and cultural value of rhetorical attacks on Mexican Americans in particular and Latina/os in general. Actually, “Mexican” functions as a metonym for all Latina/os in a classic deployment of the flattening of difference. Mexicans serve a unifying function for a political party whose anti‐immigration platform serves as its raison d'être in the face of irreversible population flows and the changing domestic balance of forces they generate. Mexicans serve as a rhetorical tool to attempt to reverse decades of ambivalently inclusive racial and immigration policies. The return to the mythically pure Mexican body belies the diversity and hybridity within Latinidad but yields a simple figure to be attacked in a concerted effort to return to an imagined past of racial purity. Unfortunately, some Mexicans, such as Marco Gutierrez, contribute to this misplaced hysteria.
We could engage in a slightly more gendered analysis of the taco truck incident by asking who makes up Latinos for Trump. It's hard to tell, as the website was taken down right after the “tacos on every corner” interview. Yet, it deserves to be asked: Why are Latina/o spokespeople in the news almost inevitably male? For example, in the Joy Reid segment on MSNBC, Adriano Espaillat, New York senator and former undocumented youth, represented the counterpoint to Marco Gutierrez, author of the taco comment. No Latinas were interviewed. Soledad O'Brien, one of the few major network television Latina news broadcasters, was relieved of her CNN position in 2013, and currently anchors a political commentary show on Hearst Television Network, a part of her own Starfish Media Group. Even the taco truck rhetoric presumes a male‐gendered labor force. Though some of the memes included female cooks, by and large the representational terrain of the taco truck workforce was male. The fear and the discourse about Latinos continues to focus on working‐class or unemployed, mostly undocumented males. The fear of rapists, clearly articulated by Trump and displaced on to non‐white bodies, is about men. The attempted moral panic over lesbian farmers orchestrated by conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh (August 16, 2016), which preceded and was displaced by the taco truck fiasco, focused only on white women. In the contemporary news environment of fear of the criminal Latino body, men figure prominently and women are nearly absent. The difference with the news coverage of the epidemic of mass shootings is worth mentioning. Whereas most of the recent mass shooting in the United States have been carried out by white males, the mainstream news media seldom calls out the race and gender characteristics of the perpetrators of this violence. On the other hand, with little evidence, both the current administration and Fox News repeatedly and continuously construct a narrative of Latino male criminality.
Latinas largely fall out of the news prism, both as news sources and as news subjects. In comparison, when it comes to celebrities, Latinas sign in as spectacular bodies, as theorized by Isabel Molina‐Guzmán (2010). Spectacular Latinas in the mainstream include major figures, enduring names, and new stars. These women can carve out long‐term careers that remain remarkably normative in terms of whiteness but show ruptures illustrating the presence of a hybrid and heterogeneous population whose numbers and influence continue to increase. Feminist Media Studies has long tracked the many and ingenious ways in which mainstream media genders populations, genres, and bodies as a discursive means of parsing out power, empowering some and disempowering others between and within ethnic categories. Thus, not surprisingly, we are witnessing a gendered division of Latina/o visibility in mainstream media. There is a fear of Latinos in the news and a desire for curvy Latinas in entertainment. In terms of sources of authority (news anchors and reporters), neither gender is prominent, but Latinos appear more often than Latinas.
The Gender of Latinidad addresses the contemporary situation of Latinidad, the dynamic process of signifying and performing Latina/o peoples and cultural forms, in the United States and, by implication, globally, as US popular culture is exported throughout the world. Focusing on three sites of intervention – historical and contemporary efforts by Latina actors who entered the mainstream as spitfires to construct an enduring career in entertainment; the ambiguous Latinidad constructed by Disney; and an exploration of the tensions within Latinidad about implicit and explicit utopias through the media – this book addresses Latinidad as a constant low‐intensity conflict of cultural engagement, negotiation, and deferment carried out by unequally empowered forces. On the one hand are individual Latina actors, who function as representatives of labor and cultural forces, and who seek to carve out a space of presence, belonging, and, hopefully, success. Some major examples are discussed individually in Chapter 2. On the other hand is mainstream media as a whole, with its global power and resources. In particular, Chapter 3 focuses on the Walt Disney company, arguably the biggest global media conglomerate, as it engages in avowal and disavowal of Latinidad. The push and pull of forces come together in the desire for an ideal place, a utopia, whose internally contradictory contours are discussed in Chapter 4.
The book explores the concept of hybridity and applies it to the study of contemporary Latina/os. In particular, it seeks to complement documented demographic and political evidence of increased Latina/o presence with an understanding of the complex terrain of representations and narratives in the mainstream media. The Gender of Latinidad investigates some of the many ways that hybridity as a concept is strategically deployed in a range of contemporary media, with strong tendencies to resolve tensions by settling for syncretism. Hybrid launches land as syncretic culture. The energy that sends hybridity off settles in a domesticated manner. Efforts to contain hybridity and to harness it toward increased profitability, the commodification of Latinidad, coexist with unruly bodies and messy categories that threaten to interfere with neatly planned advertising and marketing campaigns, as well as official government efforts to account for, regulate, and service the Latina/o segment of the population. Indeed, the ongoing debates and controversies about Census categories reveal the fissures over both the definition of Latinidad and the acknowledgment of mixed race and hybridity as a challenge to that most official of population accounting. The tendency to “snap back” – that is, to retreat to old‐school ethnic categories – is great. It is always easier to rely on outdated yet neat categories than to engage in the far more difficult process of trying to understand and include heterogeneous populations whose lumping together originally occurred out of historical exigency and oppressive undemocratic goals, and not necessarily due to any empirical accuracy. Borders to the north and south of the United States effectively divided pre‐existing communities in the name of unifying the nation. Despite an undeniable increase in representation of Latina/os, production and representational analysis, findings are examined in terms of the gains in visibility against the costs, displacements, and erasures generated through it. Visibility is not the only goal. The questions of whose visibility and toward what purposes overlap with hybridity, as, in representing mixed cultures and populations, decisions have to be made as to what to foreground, and ipso facto what to displace or leave out.
Nonetheless, Latina/os compose a statistically significant percentage of the US population: 17.6% as of 2019. Projections predict Latina/o population growth, Latina/o consumer power growth, and Latina/o media consumption growth. Historical attention to the Northeast and Southwest has transitioned to acknowledgment that Latina/os are present in every region of the country. In addition to the “flyover” zone of the Midwest (not only Chicago, but other cities and the rural area), there has been Latina/o growth