In Search of Belonging

Latinas, Media, and Citizenship

Jillian M Baez

• Publisher: University of Illinois Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780252050466
• Topic: Sciences sociales
• Subtopic: Sociologie

In Search of Belonging explores the ways Latina/o audiences in general, and women in particular, make sense of and engage both mainstream and Spanish-language media. Jillian M. Báez's eye-opening ethnographic analysis draws on the experiences of a diverse group of Latinas in Chicago. In-depth interviews reveal Latinas viewing media images through a lens of citizenship. These women search for nothing less than recognition—and belonging—through representations of Latinas in films, advertising, telenovelas, and TV shows like Ugly Betty and Modern Family. Báez's personal interactions and research merge to create a fascinating portrait, one that privileges the perspectives of the women themselves as they consume media in complex, unpredictable ways.

Innovative and informed by a wealth of new evidence, In Search of Belonging answers important questions about the ways Latinas perform citizenship in today's America.

1

Navigating and Negotiating Latina Beauty

I think there’s so many different people, you know. Latinas
are of so many different shapes, sizes, and colors.

—Ester (Mexican/white, 32, college advisor)

Latinas come in so many different colors and sizes—black,
white, brunette, blonde, skinny, fat, anything!

—Bianca (Mexican/black, 24, college student)

What is Latina beauty? What does it mean to look Latina? How does media’s construction of Latina beauty match up to or bump up against audiences’ preferred aesthetics? This chapter explores Latina audiences’ attempts to navigate and negotiate Latina beauty ideals in relation to or against dominant U.S. and Latin American media representations. In particular, it interrogates how Latina audiences define Latina beauty vis-à-vis representations of gender and race depicted in various forms of Latina/o-oriented media, especially celebrity culture and telenovelas. While these ideals, aesthetics, and practices are related to audiences’ desired representations of sexuality, as described in more depth in chapter 3, this chapter specifically problematizes the women’s notions of ideal beauty that are embedded within racialized hierarchies informed by both U.S. and Latin American notions of race. In particular, I reveal here how citizenship is mapped onto the mediated Latina body in what I view as a form of neo-mestizaje. The participants pushed back against Eurocentric beauty regimes in order to assert a more racially diverse ideal of citizenship. In doing so, they embodied what Gloria Anzaldúa (1987) calls “nueva mestiza” as racially mixed and culturally hybrid women.

I primarily focus here on how Latina audiences make sense of the dominant images of Latina beauty in U.S. and Latina American media because these images are the most widely circulated depictions of Latin(a) American womanhood. They were also the aesthetics most often discussed and contested in my fieldwork and interviews with participants. However, it should be noted that many of the participants did engage in countercultural beauty practices that diverged from the chaste, middle-class archetype prevalent in U.S. and Latin American media. These women engaged in reappropriation by reclaiming stereotypical images. For example, some of the women reappropriated images of Latinas as hypersexual and prone to excess in clothing, jewelry, and makeup by donning form-fitting clothing, bright colors and prints, large hoop earrings, multiple pairs of metallic earrings, bracelets, and necklaces, hair highlights, dark lip colors, and bold black eyeliner. These countercultural beauty practices are similar to the chusma (specific to Cubans), chonga (specific to Latinas in South and Central Florida), and chola (specific to Chicanas)1 aesthetics discussed in the work of José Esteban Muñoz (1999), Jillian Hernandez (2008), Norma Mendoza-Denton (2011), and Rosa Linda Fregoso (1999). Hernandez (2008) urges scholars to consider these aesthetics in a nuanced fashion: “rather than critique visual representations of these young women for reproducing negative stereotypes,” she suggests, “we [should] read them as indexing ethnic pride, personal confidence, and non-normative sexuality” (66). In a similar vein, I view these countercultural beauty practices as giving Latinas a way to contest the sanitizing and whitening images of Latina beauty that appear in both U.S. and Latin American media.

The participants’ call for more racially inclusive imagery of Latinas in media and more expansive beauty norms serves as a vehicle for the women to envision themselves differently in the public sphere. This reframing of Latina beauty and what kinds of Latinas are visually foregrounded is one way of reimagining the self as a worthy subject of not only media content and consumption but also production. In other words, imagining how Latina beauty ideals might be broadened is one way that Latinas enact citizenship through asserting their place within the public space of media. For most of the women in this study, discussions of media (whether in the formal interview setting or the more informal setting of everyday life) provided them with their only opportunity to produce their own representations of Latina beauty. Particularly for those who had little access to technologies of media production such as the internet, video cameras, smartphones, and computers, or who did not have enough free time to produce their own media, this was a space in which all the women could participate in self-representations. In doing this kind of reframing, Latinas perform an alternative racialized citizenship that holds media accountable for including a wider array of Latina beauty aesthetics to reflect the racial diversity within Latina/o communities.

Latina/o media studies scholars study ethnicity in a rigorous and extensive fashion, often examining how the pan-ethnic nature of Latinidad is viewed from both within and outside the Latina/o community. However, while media scholars do explore how media depictions of Latina/os are racialized in the United States—as criminals, as hypersexual, as underachieving, and the like—race as a category of analysis apart from ethnicity remains understudied within scholarship on Latina/o audiences. Work is needed that explains how the multiple media systems that Latina/o audiences encounter position Latina/os in overlapping and competing ways in terms of whiteness and racial ambiguity. Attentive to this gap in the literature, this chapter foregrounds race as the central category through which Latina audiences make sense of media’s construction of ideal beauty. In particular, I explore here how the participants defined ideal Latina beauty vis-à-vis representations of Latinas in mainstream, Spanish-language, and ethnic media. While their interpretations of mediated Latina-ness are related to their desired representations of sexuality, which will be explored more extensively in chapter 3, this chapter specifically problematizes the women’s notions of ideal beauty, in and outside media, that are embedded within racialized hierarchies. In particular, analysis demonstrates that the participants contested the dominant representations of Latina beauty and inserted themselves into the beauty ideal. I argue that this departure from the Eurocentric standard of beauty in Latin American and U.S. media is an expression of racialized citizenship through which Latina audiences reclaim their worthiness and belonging through demanding more expansive representation.

Navigating Multiple Constructions of Race

Social scientists document that Latina/os make sense of race in ways that are informed by both U.S. and Latin American racial hierarchies (Candelario 2007; Duany 2002; Roth 2012). There is some overlap between the two racial classification systems, but there are also some distinctions. In the United States, race was historically determined by a rule of hypodescent (i.e., the “one drop rule”), which asserted that if someone had any black ancestors, he or she was considered black. In Latin America, the rule of hypodescent was applied to people with black ancestry but not necessarily those of indigenous backgrounds, who were permitted to move up the racial hierarchy by way of blanqueamiento (“whitening”) through marriage and producing offspring (Katzew 2004). The racial classification system in Latin America also appeared to be more complex than that in the United States, as illustrated by the casta paintings of the eighteenth century, which outlined a taxonomy of nearly twenty mixed races (ibid.). To complicate matters, socioeconomic class played a role in how individuals were racialized in Latin America, with higher income, education, and prestige associated with whiteness. In both contemporary Latin America and the United States, race and class still play a major role in determining one’s status in society.

While race in the United States is often perceived through the lens of a black/white binary that excludes the history and experiences of Latina/os, Asian Americans, Native Americans, and Arab Americans (Valdivia 2010), in legal practice all groups deemed nonwhite historically were racialized and excluded from certain rights, such as property ownership, racially integrated schools and housing, and intermarriage. Peggy Pascoe (2009) notes that while miscegenation between whites and blacks was prohibited in the U.S. North and South, in the West intermarriage was banned between whites and Native Americans, native Hawaiians, Chinese, Japanese, Koreans, and Filipinos. Rosa Linda Fregoso (2003) demonstrates that there were also anxieties about intermarriage between whites and Mexicans expressed in silent film in the United States (e.g., Red Girl [1908], Mexican Sweethearts [1909], and Licking the Greasers [1914]). In Latin America, even though intermarriage between whites and indigenous individuals was encouraged because of blanqueamiento, miscegenation with blacks was perceived as taboo (Katzew 2004). As a result, Latin America more overtly fosters a pigmentocracy, where racial mixture is the norm but whiteness is still privileged.

While race appears to be more fluid in Latin America than in the United States, this does not mean that racism is obsolete in Latin America. Nineteenth-century Latin America drew from Western European racial ideologies, including scientific racism, which placed mixed-race people lower on the social evolutionary scale. In the twentieth century, Latin American nations such as Mexico, Cuba, and Puerto Rico began heralding racial mixture as a form of nation building in opposition to U.S. imperialism. In contrast to the rigid miscegenation codes in the United States, Latin America historically celebrated mestizaje, or racial mixture, as evidence of a racial democracy. The U.S. Mexican intellectual José Vasconcelos (1997) promoted racial mixture, going so far as to claim that Latin America had produced a “raza cosmica”—a superior and almost magical people who were of mixed race. In so doing, Vasconcelos elided blackness. When discourses of mestizaje are closely examined, they privilege whiteness by foregrounding Latin America’s European roots as a result of Spanish colonization. In addition, blackness and indigeneity tend to be erased within romanticized discourses of mestizaje. In Puerto Rico, for example, intellectuals in the 1930s tried to distinguish the island from the United States by emphasizing that all Puerto Ricans were part of la gran familia puertorriqueña (the great Puerto Rican family). Foregrounding the image of the white jibaro while also noting that Puerto Ricans have a mixture of European, indigenous (Taino), and African roots, the discourse of la gran familia puertorriqueña maintained a façade of racial democracy that also erased blackness (Torres 1998). In addition, more recently scholars have documented the racial disparities that black Latina/os and Latin Americans face in both the United States and Latin America (Jiménez Román and Flores 2010; Quiñones Rivera 2006).

There has been some resistance to racial hierarchies rooted in colonialism in Latin America. Impacted by the art of the Cuban Revolution, in the 1960s and 1970s, Chicana/o and Nuyorican artists worked to remedy stereotypes in both U.S. and Latin American culture. Moving away from Eurocentric ideals that subjugate indigenous people and cultures as inferior, Chicana/o artists heralded their indigenous identity by focusing on the mythos of Aztlán, the U.S. Southwest, which before the Treaty of Guadalupe was Mexican territory. Pre-Columbian images were common in Chicana/o art of this area, with indigenous women revered as mothers and sexualized lovers. Consider, for example, the film Yo soy Joaquin (1969), produced by the Teatro Campesino, and based on a poem of the same title written by Rodolfo Corky Gonzales, who was one of the leaders of the Chicana/o movement. Throughout the film, artistic images of indigenous people abound alongside more contemporary photographs of Chicana/os. Sylvia Morales’s documentary Chicana (1979) is a feminist response to Yo soy Joaquin, but also invokes indigeneity by including numerous matriarchal images of Aztec and Mayan art. Nuyorican artists of the 1960s and 1970s also sought to recuperate the historical past by invoking indigenous and African imagery. Approaching their work as exiles, they used their art to overtly critique Spanish colonization as the source of their displacement (Caragol-Barreto 2005). Chicana/os and Puerto Ricans share colonized histories that are told through Eurocentric perspectives in both the Latin American and U.S. educational systems. Artists’ recuperation of indigenous and African lineages also informs audiences’ responses to contemporary media representations of race.

Latina/os in the United States navigate both the U.S. and the Latin American racial systems. Especially for Mexicans, racial classification has been arbitrary (Fernández 2012a; Menchaca 2002). For example, Latina/os were defined as white in some states, such as Texas, and as mixed race in others, including Indiana; and there were also states like California in which the courts deployed a “common knowledge” rationale based on local understandings of racial classification (Haney López 2006; Martinez 1997). The category of Latina/o is a pan-ethnicity that includes people of many races, often of mixed race. As such, Latina/os challenge the black/white binary still prevalent in the United States. At the same time, even third- and older-generation Latina/os still work from Latin American notions of race rooted in mestizaje. Latina/os consistently mark “Other” on U.S. Census surveys, opting not to choose between the limited white, black, Indian American, and Asian and Pacific Islander categories (Duany 2002; Rodriguez 2000).

Certainly, media draw on dominant notions of race in a given society. For example, U.S. mainstream media privilege whiteness as the norm within a colorblind discourse that claims that race no longer matters (Squires 2014). While U.S. media are becoming more inclusive of nonwhite representations, especially Latina/o and Asian American depictions, whites still constitute the majority in both production and content. At the same time, Spanish-language media has continually been critiqued for reifying whiteness as the norm and ideal (Casanova 2011; Quiñones Rivera 2006; Rivero 2006; Rojas 2004). Ethnic media, including black and Latina/o outlets, can provide an alternative by focusing on the experiences of people of color, but they also privilege whiteness in subtle ways. For example, although women celebrities of color are heralded in ethnic media, these women are usually thin and light-skinned, with looser hair textures (Johnson, David, and Huey-Ohlsson 2003). Furthermore, in mainstream, Spanish-language, and ethnic media alike, whiteness appears to be the mark against which beauty is measured. Consider that while more women celebrities of color are visible in contemporary mainstream media, these women are usually racially ambiguous (Molina-Guzmán 2013) and depart in only small ways from older ideals of whiteness (Quiñones Rivera 2006). Thus, all three media systems define women of darker complexions, heavier body frames, and more textured hair as outside the beauty standard. In the case of Latinas, this beauty standard specifically excludes indigenous and black women.

Earlier scholarly writing on Latina audiences indicates that Latinas’ notions of ideal beauty are informed by multiple media systems (mainstream, Spanish-language, and ethnic media) that each have their own racial hierarchies (Quiñones Rivera 2006; Rivero 2006; Vargas 2009).2 My research finds that Latina audiences are mostly aware of and sometimes critical of these racial hierarchies, especially in Spanish-language media. For example, almost all the participants noted that in mainstream and ethnic media, Latinas are largely represented as having olive skin, dark eyes, and long hair despite the racial heterogeneity of the Latina/o community (Dávila 2012; Rodriguez 1997). At the same time, most participants recognized that in Spanish-language media, especially television news shows and telenovelas, women are primarily very light-skinned, with light eyes and straight hair. Many women expressed concern that mainstream Latina celebrities such as Jennifer Lopez and Shakira were engaged in whitening their image, lightening their hair and using skin-brightening products to attract more non-Latina/o audiences. Some participants called for more images of Afro-Latina and indigenous women in Spanish-language and ethnic media. Overall, most of the women felt that the representation of Latinas in all media systems is Eurocentric and does not reflect the racial diversity of the Latina/o community. The participants recognize the trappings of narrow definitions of Latina beauty in media and instead embrace a beauty ideal that is more heterogeneous and in...