Of the myriad realms of U.S. popular culture in which Latina/o images and narratives circulate and Latina/os themselves serve as storytellers and creative practitioners, arguably none has had as profound an impact as television. As an entertainment medium that people watch daily in their own homes, television has played an instrumental role over the decades. In the case of English-language television, it has showcased, reinforced, and occasionally challenged popular notions regarding Latina/os and their place in the nation and national history. In addition, Spanish-language television has played an influential role in the lives of many Latina/os; as a diasporic medium, it has long contributed to the Latina/o imaginary, or Latina/osâ understanding of the imagined Latina/o community, regarding discourses of race, gender, class, nationality, citizenship, and global politics. More recently, bilingual television has also found a small niche, catering to younger, acculturated Latina/os interested in media that connects with their culturally hybrid identities and lives. With regard to Latina/os and these three realms of television, English-language programming arguably has had a particularly substantial impact on U.S. popular culture, given the size of its audience and the way that these television story worlds come to stand in for idealized North American ideals. As my own area of expertise, both as a researcher and as a Latina who grew up âSpanish-impairedâ because of lack of exposure, it will be the main focus of this chapter.1
Latina/os unfortunately have been marginalized in English-language television story worlds, to a degree thatâs only beginning to be countered. We have often been invisibleâsimply not thereâand misrepresented when we do appear in prime time programming. While limited progress can be seen in recent years in the form of a few more multidimensional and broadly appealing Latina/o roles, such as in the critically lauded Jane the Virgin (2014â ) and the now cancelled George Lopez (2002â2007), Latina/o lead characters are still few and far between. In addition, there is a serious drought of Latina/o writers and producers as well. Few Latina/os were in any sort of creative position prior to the 1990s, while from 2010 through 2013 we comprised only 1 percent of employed producers, 2 percent of writers, none of the show runners, and 4 percent of directors in television (NegrĂłn Mutaner et al.).
In this regard, television has been viewed by some Latina/os as a hopelessly demoralizing realm of popular culture. There have been a few exceptions, however, with respect to portrayals and series that have been a source of pride. Progress can be seen also in the success of a few series with Latino/a leads and in the entrance of some Latino/a writers, producers, and creative executives into the industry. Series such as George Lopez, Jane the Virgin, Ugly Betty (2006â2010), and web-based series such as Ylse (2008â2010), East WillyB (2011â2013), and East Los High (2013â ) offer the promise of more well written, culturally authentic, and empowering Latina/o-oriented TV narratives in the years to come.
The study of Latina/os and television is only a few decades old. Initially, the scholars doing this work were social scientists tallying the presence of and broad representational patterns for Latina/os in narrative television. They typically counted and coded recurring and non-recurring Latina/o characters in comparison to white and African American characters, for instance, regarding whether they played major or minor roles and whether these characters were professionals, criminals, or servants. A 1994 study commissioned by the advocacy group National Council of La Raza by S. Robert Lichter and Daniel Amundson, for instance, found that Latina/o characters comprised no more than one to two percent of prime time roles from the 1950s through the early 1990s, even while the Latino population grew from 2.8 to 11 percent of the population in these years. They also found Latina/os more likely to be criminal or servant characters in the first decades, with slight improvements by the 1990s. Subsequent studies found Latina/os making only slight gains in visibility. The most recent study looking at these questions, by Frances NegrĂłn Mutaner and other researchers at Columbia University in 2014, found that the gap between our numbers in the general population and in television has, in fact, grown. While Latina/os comprised 17 percent of the population in 2013, there were no Latino or Latina lead characters on the top prime time television series that year. When they are part of the television landscape, characters such as Betty SuĂĄrez of Ugly Betty thus have the unenviable (and ultimately impossible) task of standing in for the vast diversity of Latina/os.
Scholars such as Chon Noriega, Isabel Molina GuzmĂĄn, and Gustavo PĂ©rez-Firmat have more recently been exploring Latina/o representation and participation in television in qualitative research that has looked at these topics in relation to U.S. social history and that of the evolving television industry. Analysis of television narratives, production dynamics, and promotional efforts has also been centered in the work of scholars such as Molina GuzmĂĄn in research on Ugly Betty, of Guillermo Avila-Saavedra on network-era sitcoms, and of Mary BeltrĂĄn on Chico and the Man, while Latina/o-oriented childrenâs programming has been the focus of Erynn Masi de Casanova, Angharad Valdivia, and Nicole Guidotti-HernĂĄndez, among others. Notably, Ugly Betty has inspired multiple studies, while little scholarship thus far has been conducted on television programming prior to the 1990s. A number of scholars, including Yeidy Rivero, Arlene DĂĄvila, Mari Castañeda, and Diana Rios, have also conducted research specifically on Spanish-language television. Finally, Arlene DĂĄvila, Vicki Mayer, Jillian BĂĄez and others have focused on Latina/o reception practices in relation to television. As might be obvious from this brief summary, there are major gaps in this scholarship; thereâs much that still hasnât been explored with respect to Latina/o histories in U.S. television and in relation to Latina/os and contemporary television programming, networks, and trends.
To also begin to fill those gaps, this chapter provides a broad history of Latina/o portrayals and creative authorship in U.S. English-language television, from its inception as a national medium in the late 1940s until the present day. I pause and expand on those series that have been especially popular or influentialâamong them The Cisco Kid (1950â1956), I Love Lucy (1952â1957), The Nine Lives of Elfego Baca (1958â1960), Chico and the Man (1974â1977), Resurrection Blvd. (2000â2002), George Lopez, and Ugly Betty. I conclude with discussion of some of the debates that persist regarding U.S. Latina/os and television; there are many, when it comes to this still-powerful medium that has often kept Latina/os in the wings of its national stage.
TVâs Early Decades: Less Invisibility, but Ambivalent Portrayals
While Latina/os were not always found in TV story worlds in the late 1940s and early 1950s, their presence in fact more closely matched their numbers in the U.S. than is the case today. As noted above, Lichter and Amundson, in their study of television from the 1950s through the early 1990s, found that Latinos comprised no more than 2 percent of prime time characters in the 1950sâhowever, Latina/os were only 2.8 percent of the population at the time. They seldom appeared in family sitcoms or variety shows, two genres that factored in heavily to the new mediumâs imagining of the nation, however. An important exception was I Love Lucy (1951â1957). Desi Arnaz, a Cuban-born actor and musician, and Lucille Ball, his Anglo-American wife both in the series and in real life, became beloved stars when their family sitcom became a hit, and akin to âAmericaâs first familyâ when they integrated Ballâs pregnancy and the birth of their son into the storyline. Gusavo PĂ©rez-Firmat and Mary BeltrĂĄn have separately explored how Arnazâs fair skin, cross-cultural marriage, and professed love of the U.S. contributed to his treatment in the media as a white foreigner, rather than marginalization as an âethnicâ Latino. While Arnazâs role as Ricky Ricardo did demand that he exaggerate his accent, he was also portrayed as a successful musician and businessman and âstraight manâ to Lucy, his unpredictable wife. Arnaz and Ball also maintained creative control of the series throughout its run. Arnaz became executive producer of I Love Lucy and the first Latino television executive as president of their production company, Desilu, which subsequently produced a number of other popular television series.
A few Latino and Latina film actors, among them Ricardo Montalban, Katy Jurado, and Anthony Quinn, were also cast in anthology dramas in both Latina/o and non-Latina/o roles in this era. These were one-time teleplays, often written by famous playwrights and novelists, broadcast by anthology series that presented a different story and cast each week. More often, however, the genre in which Latina/o characters were to be found in this era was the TV Western. Mexican criminals and comic, bumbling cowboys, typically with broken English, low intelligence, and questionable morals, appeared as the villains, sidekicks, and servants in many popular Western series of the 1950s and early 1960s. On the other hand, fair-skinned and wealthy Latino cowboys and vigilantes, of great integrity and often of Spanish ancestry, also appeared in roles reminiscent of Hollywoodâs Latin Lovers of the 1920s. A clear coding of âwhite Latinosâ as possessing idealized, heroic traits and a racialization of âethnic Latinosâ as inferior, comic sidekicks began to be a common paradigm of Latina/o representation in the early TV Western. As Lichter and Amundson noted in their study, the series that clearly established this dichotomy was one of U.S. televisionâs first hits, The Cisco Kid (1950â1956). After success in radio and film, The Cisco Kid became a childrenâs TV Western. It centered on its eponymous Spanish hero, played by Romanian American actor Duncan Renaldo, and his affable but less intelligent companion Pancho, played by Mexican American actor Leo Carrillo. Notably, this bifurcation of Latino types was repeated again in Zorro (1957â1959), and in Walt Disney Presents The Nine Lives of Elfego Baca (1958â1960). The Nine Lives of Elfego Baca, a childrenâs mini-series, was loosely based on the exploits of a real-life Mexican American gun fighter and lawyer well known in New Mexico for standing up for the rights of Mexican Americans, and nationally, for having survived a lynch mob of armed Anglo cowboys. Baca, played by Italian American actor Robert Loggia, was portrayed as a brave and intelligent man willing to do whatever it took to combat lawlessness and to protect the innocent, and the series and its merchandising did well with Disneyâs child audience (Telotte). Bacaâs ethnicity was glossed over, however, to the extent that itâs unclear whether late 1950s audiences thought of Baca as Mexican American or as a generic Anglo hero. The paradigm of âgoodâ and âbadâ Latina/os in these Western narratives ultimately expressed ambivalence toward Latina/os and whether they fit within the accepted history and constructed ideals of cultural citizenship of the United States.
Figure 1.1 NBCâs The High Chaparral
With the waning of the TV Western, Latina/os were seldom featured in narrative television of the 1960s and 1970s. So few Latina/o characters were seen on television by the early 1960s that JosĂ© JimĂ©nez, a Mexican character played by Hungarian Jewish actor Bill Dana, stood out. A dim-witted and bumbling bellhop, JosĂ© JimĂ©nez first appeared as a comic character on The Danny Thomas Show (1953â1965) in 1961, and then was reprised in Danaâs spin-off series, The Bill Dana Show (1963â1965). The actor, in Phillip Rodriguezâs documentary Brown is the New Green: George Lopez and the American Dream (2007), shared that he finally retired the character after Chicana/o activists called it out as demeaning and demanded that he do so.
Two additional series that included major Latina/o characters in the late 1960s and early 1970s were The High Chaparral (1967â1971) and The Man and the City (1971â1972). The High Chaparral, a Western set in the Arizona territory of the 1870s, focused in part on a marriage of convenience between âBig Johnâ Cannon (Leif Erickson), an Anglo-American settler who had recently been widowed, and a Mexicanânow Mexican Americanâfamily at a neighboring ranch (see Figure 1.1).
The growing romance between John and his Mexican American wife, Victoria (played by Italian-Argentinean Linda Cristal), is shown to develop into a more meaningful bond throughout the showâs run. While High Chaparral still tended to develop its Anglo characters more fully, it attempted to bring in some historical accuracy about Mexican Americans in this period as well. The Man and the City was also unique for showcasing Mexican Irish film star Anthony Quinn as Thomas Alcala, the Mexican American mayor of a Southwestern city. While the series was not renewed after one season, it was an important milestone as the first TV series featuring a Latino professional and political leader as protagonist.
