The Gender of Latinidad

Uses and Abuses of Hybridity

Angharad N. Valdivia

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781405163385, 9781405163378
• eBook ISBN: 9781119574972
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Presents innovative scholarship on Latina/o visibility in contemporary mainstream media 

Latina/os have seen increased visibility in the media in the past several years, especially in feature-length films, network television programs, and various digital platforms. The Gender of Latinidad: Uses and Abuses of Hybridity explores Latina/o visibility—analyzing presence, production, and interpretation throughout various media. An important contribution to the emerging field of Latina/o Media Studies, this unique volume brings together political economy and cultural studies to consider the limitations of cultural politics and explore current issues relevant to Latina/o cultural inclusion.

Author Angharad N. Valdivia addresses the concept of hybridity and applies it to contemporary Latinidad, in which hybrid Latina/os lead hybrid lives and consume hybrid media. The text explores strategies for gendered visibility in a range of popular culture media, using the concept of hybridity to connect Latina/o Studies to Feminist Media Studies, Gender Studies, and Ethnic Studies. Throughout the text, the author discusses the inclusion Latina/o scholars and audiences seek and considers if such inclusion is even achievable. Offering intersectional exploration of Latinidad in mainstream media, this volume:

• Explores the trope of the spitfire in the context of popular media
• Brings Disney Studies into Latina/o Studies
• Discusses the dynamic inclusion of Latinidad in awards ceremonies
• Assesses the implicit utopias of Latina/o representation
• Presents the only major academic treatment of Charo

Presenting an original perspective on Latina/os in media, The Gender of Latinidad: Uses and Abuses of Hybridity is an ideal text for students and scholars in areas including Gender Studies, Ethnic Studies, and general Media and Feminist Media Studies.

1
Continuities and Ruptures: The Gender of Latinidad

…the gendered subject of globalization, far from being self‐evident or transparent as often assumed, has to be situated within shifting formations of power.

(Hegde 2011, p. 1)

When I started, I was labeled “exotic.” That was it. It was like you had to be mysterious and sexual. Back in the day if you were Latina it was always a stereotype. They couldn't write you as a normal person in the world. [Director] Robert Rodriguez was kinda the first person who made Latinos commercial in his movies, like in the Spy Kids franchise. And then Jennifer Lopez and Salma Hayek [helped pave the way]. It was tough in the beginning.

(Jessica Alba, quoted by Brown 2018, p. 93)

In this millennial rewriting of Latina/o media history, Jessica Alba, a 37‐year‐old Latina mogul, takes us back to Robert Rodriguez's success story, begun in 1991, and Jennifer Lopez's Fly Girl days in 1992 – or perhaps to her major starring role in Selena, in 1997. Salma Hayek also crossed over to Hollywood from Mexico in 1991 but did not achieve a major role until she landed a part in Robert Rodriguez's Desperado (1995). Alba nails a historically significant period of Latina/o popular culture ascendance in which Latina/os functioned in particular roles but managed to rupture stereotypes and achieve lasting inclusion in the entertainment industry. All of those mentioned by Alba remain in the spotlight today: Robert Rodriguez, Jennifer Lopez, and Salma Hayek have not disappeared. Indeed, their careers are solid, their legacy secure. Jessica Alba herself continues to have success as a cover girl and neoliberal entrepreneur, creator and owner of the billion‐dollar Honest Company, selling organic and environmentally sustainable baby and beauty products. All of these prominent popular culture Latina/os have a broad range of provenances and function in relation to one another and to other ethnicities within a national and global terrain of mainstream media. None of them are pure, nor do they resemble one another. Yet, they represent mainstream Latinidad. Their varied careers, geographical and professional roots, and visibility speak to the gender of Latinidad in contemporary mainstream media.

One undeniably enduring component of any politics of inclusion continues to be mainstream media – whether legacy, digital, or thoroughly converged – as this serves to circulate narratives with embedded ideologies to a wide swath of the population. So‐called “minority” populations deserve presence, respect, and dignity in the mainstream because they/we are part of the mainstream, and expectations that apply to mainstream presence go to the core of citizenship issues (Amaya 2013; Casillas 2014). This book focuses on Latinidad as a broad multiplicitous and diverse category of ethnicity that is pan‐national, multi‐ethnic, intersectional, and transnational. Latinidad is a flexible and unstable hybrid construct whose mediated presence remains salient in the new millennium and indexes broader currents of population mixtures, resulting demands, and backlashes from and through the mainstream, which both construct and are constructed by the cultural struggle identified so long ago by Gramsci, amended by Bauman, and articulated to media by Shohat and Stam (1995).

Thoroughly grounded in a set of analytical frameworks derived from the intersection of Media and Cultural Studies, Gender Studies, and Latina/o Studies, as a form of Ethnic Studies, The Gender of Latinidad explores the tension between the politically necessary strategic essentialism that identity categories rely on to make demands upon the state and the impossibility or untenability of maintaining these categories as discrete and easily identifiable – the conundrum of authenticity. Moreover, The Gender of Latinidad explores this tension as it is played out through the bodies of and cultural forms signifying girls and women. Given the growing institutionalization of Latina/o Studies as a pan‐ethnic construct, this project sets out to contribute to an extension of existing paradigms.¹ As a way to understand the increased acknowledgment of the heterogeneous complexity of Latina/o populations, industries, and cultural forms, The Gender of Latinidad draws extensively on hybridity and mixed race as essential, recurring, and unifying concepts for understanding the contemporary situation of ethnicity and the media. Given that the Latina/o population and Latina/o popular culture encompass a wide range of origins – perhaps running the gamut of origin possibilities – The Gender of Latinidad maintains a tension between identifying and acknowledging Latinidad, allowing or erasing its multiplicity, and identifying its spillage into other ethnic categories or markers. Ultimately, this book explores the tension between the top‐down efforts by media industries to market ethnicity and the bottom‐up pressures and efforts to gain employment, expand visibility, and transform the mainstream. What are some of the current degrees of freedom? Rules of engagement? Who benefits within Latinidad? The material conditions that segregate racialized communities and generate bottom‐up community pride formation, as well as strategies for inclusion in the body politic and in mainstream culture, coexist with efforts to exploit newly created niche audiences for the purposes of increasing profit. Latina/os draw on symbolic resources to maintain an identity and draw from a shared history even as their massive mobility and mixture generate a hybrid culture. Mainstream media industries draw on an archive and an overflow of talent and creativity from ethnicized populations to pick and choose what fits best with their vision of “multiculturalism.” Latina/os must disrupt and provide their vision, which itself is contested due to their heterogeneity.

The year is 2019. In the past 5 years, Latina/os have been highly visible in a range of mainstream television programs, post‐network digital offerings, and feature‐length films, such as Modern Family (ABC, 2009–19), Jane the Virgin (CW, 2014–19), Narcos (Netflix, 2015–), East Los High (Hulu, 2013–17), Coco (Disney, 2017), One Day at a Time (Netflix, 2017–19), and Beatriz at Dinner (Killer Films/Bron Studios, 2017). Latina/os are present on the screen, behind the screen, and as audiences. As we explore and analyze visibility through presence, production, and interpretation, we need to consider the demands for visibility as a complex process and dynamic that encompasses the trifecta of media studies – production, content, and representation – in relation to issues of cultural citizenship, the inescapable hybridity that works against the fantasy of authenticity, and the implicit utopia that is both never articulated and always beyond the possible. As Latina/o Media Studies ascends into a field of its own, in relation to a number of interdisciplinary projects, it also experiences the limits and possibilities of expansion, dilution, and acknowledged hybridity. It was much easier for hegemonic forces to produce mainstream popular culture and proceed when a simplified purity and imposed homogeneity prevailed as dominant discourses. From a mostly white mainstream, to a Derridean juxtaposition of white and black bodies and narratives, to the inclusion of the homogenized bronze² race, to the suggestion of AfroLatinidad, the presence of Latina/os disrupts easy narratives of the US national imaginary. Moreover, because the United States has been an imperial power and thus US media conglomerates function across a global terrain, these narratives circulate transnationally. Thus, the visibility of US Latina/os has global implications, though these remain to be extensively researched.

Latina/os unsettle the US racial binary arrangement. Latina/o internal diversity poses many challenges to strategies for inclusion. We can no longer pretend that Latina/os are a pure group – the “bronze” race – nor that Latina/os remain within Latinidad, in terms of culture, reproduction, and geographic mobility. Latina/os fan out globally (both racially and geographically), sample and mix culture globally, and reproduce across ethnic, national, and cultural groups. In sum, Latina/os are inescapably hybrid, and any analysis of visibility or activism through media must take this mixture and hybridity into account. Latina/os lead hybrid lives, consume a hybrid diet of hybrid media, and deserve to be treated in relation to their hybridity. While this book focuses on gendered Latinidad in contemporary mainstream media, a hybrid analysis can be made for all other ethno‐racial groups (e.g. Washington, 2017b). Issues of mixed race and hybridity apply across the racial spectrum. Nonetheless, mixed‐race studies and postracial studies still cohere around transnational feminist studies, which in many ways 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...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Continuities and Ruptures: The Gender of Latinidad
• 2 Spitfire Transition Tales: The Production of a Career
• 3 An Unambivalent Structure of Ambivalence: Disney's Production of Latina Princesses
• 4 Latina/o Media Utopias: The Ideal Place or No Place
• References
• Index
• End User License Agreement