Dangerous Curves

Latina Bodies in the Media

Isabel Molina-Guzman, Isabel Molina-Guzmán

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN:
  9780814757369
• eBook ISBN:
  9780814796061
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Abnormal Psychology
• Index: Psychology

With images of Jennifer Lopez’s butt and America Ferrera’s smile saturating national and global culture, Latina bodies have become an ubiquitous presence. Dangerous Curves traces the visibility of the Latina body in the media and popular culture by analyzing a broad range of popular media including news, media gossip, movies, television news, and online audience discussions.
Isabel Molina-Guzmán maps the ways in which the Latina body is gendered, sexualized, and racialized within the United States media using a series of fascinating case studies. The book examines tabloid headlines about Jennifer Lopez’s indomitable sexuality, the contested authenticity of Salma Hayek’s portrayal of Frida Kahlo in the movie Frida, and America Ferrera’s universally appealing yet racially sublimated Ugly Betty character. Dangerous Curves carves out a mediated terrain where these racially ambiguous but ethnically marked feminine bodies sell everything from haute couture to tabloids.
Through a careful examination of the cultural tensions embedded in the visibility of Latina bodies in United States media culture, Molina-Guzmán paints a nuanced portrait of the media’s role in shaping public knowledge about Latina identity and Latinidad, and the ways political and social forces shape media representations.

1

Saving Elián

Cubana Motherhood, Latina Immigration, and the Nation

I begin this book by examining the journalistic production of Latinidad in the mainstream and ethnic U.S. news media.¹ Although media scholars often pay attention to the social or political role of news in influencing attitudes and behavior, little attention is given to the cultural function news performs. Within the media landscape, news is the privileged site of information for public sphere debates about immigration and citizenship. However, in this chapter I propose that news plays other equally essential roles. As Barbie Zelizer suggests, the news media are storytellers, and as storytellers they document and speak to contemporary anxieties about the nation and the changing status of marginalized groups within the national body.² Journalists are, however, unique storytellers. Film and television are categorized as fantastical fiction, news as “truth” or “fact.”³ Together, fiction and “fact,” entertainment and news, comprise an integrated media terrain of discourses about gender, ethnicity, and race. To study contemporary journalistic accounts of Latina identity and Latinidad, I begin with the social and political implications of how the news media, as privileged storytellers, covered one of the biggest Latina/o news stories in the history of United States—the 1999–2000 Elián González transnational custody battle.

While the population of Latinas/os in the United States has dramatically increased throughout the past ten years, Latinas/os remain seriously underrepresented in print and television news. According to a report by the National Association of Hispanic Journalists, of all the news stories on ABC, CBS, CNN, and NBC in 2000, 0.53 percent were about Latinas/os, down from 1.3 percent in 1999. However, the 2000 figures did not include one major anomaly—news coverage of Elián González, a six-year-old Cuban boy rescued in international waters by U.S. fishermen on Thanksgiving Day in 1999.⁴ Few stories in recent U.S. history captured the popular imagination and media’s interest like the dramatic and sometimes surreal events regarding Elián’s international custody battle—a photogenic Cuban boy sees his mother drown at sea as they travel on a rickety makeshift boat to the United States; the boy recovers in a Miami hospital as members of his exiled Cuban family, all of whom he has never met, claim legal custody of him; a heart-broken Cuban father and loyal communist party member involuntarily separated from his son challenges the legal rights of the Miami family; once-dormant Cold War tensions escalate as Cuba demands the return of the child; and a beautiful young second-generation Cuban American woman performs the role of nurturing mother for a grieving boy and a community in exile. The four major U.S. television news networks (ABC, CBS, NBC, and CNN) alone devoted 36.5 hours, or 5 percent of their overall programming time, to coverage of the Elián controversy. According to the Center for Media and Public Affairs, the Elián case received more television news coverage than the Columbine shootings, the death of Princess Diana, and the death of John F. Kennedy, Jr.⁵ The only other nonelection story to receive more television news coverage was the first O. J. Simpson trial for the murder of his ex-wife. From the day of his rescue on November 23, 1999, until the day he departed with his Cuban father on June 28, 2000, the conflict among the Cuban government, the U.S. government, and the Miami Cuban exile community over Elián’s immigration status captured the popular imagination and media interest in unprecedented fashion. By the spring of 2000, at the height of news coverage about Elián, 78 percent of the U.S. population was actively and regularly following the news surrounding the young boy and his family.⁶

Through this case study, I illustrate that underlying the Elián media coverage were cultural anxieties over globalization, immigration, and demographic increases in Latina/o populations. The Elián news coverage focused on Cuban immigrants during a time of increased domestic nativism and political backlash toward Latina/o immigration.⁷ U.S. Cubans, one of the United States’ most politically powerful and racially privileged Latina/o groups, found themselves in an unprecedented public storm critical of the exile community and U.S.-Cuban foreign policy.⁸ Like the national polls, public opinion surveys in Florida, home to the largest population of Cubans in the United States, revealed stark ethnic and racial divisions.⁹ While U.S. Cubans overwhelmingly supported the Miami relatives’ right to file an asylum claim on Elián’s behalf, Anglo American, African American, and non-Cuban Latina/o residents staunchly supported the father’s bid for Elián’s return to Cuba.¹⁰ In an ethnographic study of contemporary ethnic and racial divisions in Miami, Stepick, Grenier, and colleagues argued that the Elián controversy “brought even the most peripheral citizens of the region face-to-face with profound issues of identity, power and prejudice.”¹¹ The Elián case presents an opportunity for exploring the contested symbolic status of Cuban women in the cultural battle over U.S. definitions of nation and citizenship.¹² Below the story’s surface brewed a noxious tempest against Latina/o immigration generally and U.S. Cuban exile privilege specifically. Columns, blogs, and letters to the editor in Miami’s leading newspaper revealed a backlash against forty years of Cuban/Latina/o immigration. The ethnic news media, with the exception of El Nuevo Herald, similarly used the Elián case to point out policy disparities and racial inequities in U.S. immigration policy.

In the Elián news coverage, the media circulated a homogenizing construction of Latinidad that symbolically colonized the historically privileged immigration and racial status of Cubans, in turn reaffirming dominant U.S. racial formations. As discussed in the introduction, media discourses that symbolically colonize Latinas/os depend on a set of institutionalized practices otherwise known as genderization and the interconnected process of racialization.¹³ Together, gendering and racialization, the process through which groups regardless of ethnic or national origin are assigned racial meaning, produce media discourses that symbolically colonize Latinas/os as marginalized and governable bodies. Because of the journalistic emphasis on young Elián, his Miami and Cuban families, and his Cuban American caretaker, studying the linkages between the gendering of Cuban identity and racialization of U.S. Cuban citizenship is central to making sense of the story. The Elián case illustrates how femininity, motherhood, and the Latina body are key sites for cultural and political conflicts over citizenship and immigration. In particular, both Elisabet (Elián’s biological mother) and Marisleysis (Elián’s surrogate mother) were integrated into the news coverage as contested stand-ins for national identity—one immigrant and the other “American.” Both the mainstream and ethnic news media symbolically colonized Miami’s exile community by feminizing exile Cuban identity through news stories grounded in irrationality, emotionality, domesticity, and religiosity, thereby racializing U.S. Cuban behavior as outside the norms of socially acceptable whiteness and blackness. The Elián story as infotainment provocatively signals the completion of U.S. Cubans’ transformation from celebrated political, ethnic exiles to marginalized U.S. racial minorities.

As central figures (both living and dead) in the conflict, I pay particular attention to the journalistic rendering of the lives, voices, and bodies of Cuban women, specifically those of Elián’s mother (Elisabet Brotons), cousin (Marisleysis González), and grandmothers (Raquel Rodríguez and Mariela Quintana).¹⁴ The chapter’s first section analyzes the symbolic politics of Cuban motherhood. I situate news stories about Elisabet against stories about Mexican and Caribbean immigration, femininity, and motherhood to better understand the unique position she occupies in the U.S. national imaginary. The memory of Elián’s dead mother, Elisabet, stands in for multiple competing national interests. That is, Elisabet becomes one of the primary vehicles evocative of the rights of a nation in exile. At the same time, her Cuban identity is recuperated through the voices of Elián’s grandmothers, Mariela and Raquel. The romantic framing of Elisabet as self-sacrificing mother is counterbalanced in the media coverage through a competing frame focused on the extreme religiosity and suffocating familial ties of the exile Cuban community. I then explore how mainstream news stories about the unification of Juan Miguel González and his son Elián—five months after Elián’s rescue at sea—work in contrast to El Nuevo Herald’s emphasis on the exile community’s rights to political asylum. By focusing on the importance of family reunification and paternal rights, the news coverage about Juan Miguel González affirms the symbolic status of fatherhood and the political power of the federal government in maintaining legal and political order over ethnic and racial minorities. The needs of the father and the nation outweigh the demands of Miami’s Cuban exile community. Finally, the last two sections examine the gendering and racialization of Marisleysis as a stand-in for the exile Cuban community. News coverage critical of Marisleysis weakened the discourse of Cuban exceptionalism. As a family and community spokes-woman to the English-language media, Marisleysis’ emotional instability and public threats of civil disobedience against the U.S. federal government contributed to her gendered marginalization and the racialization of the Cuban exile identity as nonwhite ethnics.

Contextualizing Cuban Immigration in the Contemporary U.S. Media

Until the 1980s, news stories framed Cubans and Cuban migration through the perspective of Cuban exceptionalism and U.S. Cold War foreign policy.¹⁵ For example, news coverage of the 1960s Pedro Pan program, which allowed parents opposed to Castro’s communist government to send their unaccompanied children to the United States, overwhelmingly framed Cubans as political rather than economic immigrants. María de los Angeles Torres’s work on the Pedro Pan program documents how news images of these young children leaving their families in Cuba and entering the United States alone cultivated sympathy for the community as temporary political refugees rather than ethnic immigrants.¹⁶ The emotionally laden visuals of child refugees signaled the repressive consequences of communism and bolstered popular Cold War rhetoric serving the United States’ political, ideological, and symbolic goals.¹⁷ Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, Cuban exiles were continually represented in the news as white, middle- to upper-class, educated, politically conservative, and unquestionably committed to U.S. capitalism and democracy.¹⁸

Popular conceptions of Cuban exiles throughout the 1960s and 1970s also differed radically from those surrounding the U.S.-Mexico Bracero Program (1942–1964) or the U.S.-Puerto Rico Operation Bootstrap program (1947–1965). Unlike Cuban émigrés, the hundreds of thousands of Mexican and Puerto Rican laborers who came to the United States under these programs faced media invisibility and distinct economic, racial, and linguistic discrimination. The United States provided exiled Cubans with special financial and educational programs to assist their transition, yet gave Mexicans and Puerto Ricans primarily working in labor-intensive agricultural, manufacturing, and domestic service jobs little access to federal assistance. Braceros toiled mostly under substandard working conditions in the agricultural fields of California, the Southwest, and the Midwest, while Puerto Ricans, especially women, were primarily expected to work in low-wage nonunion manufacturing and domestic service jobs in the Northeast and Midwest. Moreover, while Cubans and Puerto Ricans were encouraged to come to the United States as heteronormative family units, male Bracero workers were often forced to leave behind their families in Mexico.¹⁹ Because Cubans were constructed as political refugees whose presence within the nation’s imagined borders would be temporary, their depictions in the media benefited from a fragile protection against ethnic and racial discrimination.²⁰ On the other hand, Mexican immigrants, who were legally defined as temporary economic migrants, have historically faced negative news coverage accompanied by mass involuntary deportations during moments of economic crisis, such as the Great Depression.²¹

However, the continued and stable growth of the exiled Cuban community in the decades after their initial arrival—along with the economic recession of the 1980s and the waning importance of the Cold War—triggered an intense public backlash against Cuban immigration. Much of the news coverage focused negative attention on the 1980 Mariel boatlift that brought 125,000 Cubans to Miami. The negative coverage continued as thousands of Balseros began traveling to the United States in rickety makeshift boats. No longer celebrating the political courage and self-sacrifice of first-wave Cuban families, the mainstream media highlighted the racial and economic difference surrounding the “new” third wave of Cuban refugees.²² Unlike the white middle-class professional Cubans of the 1960s and 1970s, the majority of recent Cuban exiles were black, single, and working-class laborers. The media drew attention to the race, gender, and sexuality of the Mariel and Balsero exiles (many were accused of being pedophiles and having sexually transmitted diseases), resulting in a competing news frame about Cuban exiles.²³ Given this new, more gendered and racialized construction of Cuban immigrants, recent Cuban immigrants have been welcomed by an increasingly hostile U.S. public, especially in Miami, where Cubans are the largest ethnic and racial minority group. In an attempt to deal with the backlash toward Cuban immigrants and normalize Cuban immigration, President Bill Clinton entered into the first formal immigration agreement with the Castro government in 1994. Contemporary media discourses about exiled Cubans are thus complicated. U.S. Cubans are defined both as ethnic and racial outsiders, such as in news accounts of the Marielitos and Balseros, and as “honorary white ethnics” through their Cold War position as political exiles.

Despite the negative framing of Cuban immigrants since the 1980s, the mainstream news media have traditionally excluded them from the anti-immigration discourse about Latina/o immigration. In other words, the backlash against Latina/o immigration has not generally included Cubans, until more recently that is. Indeed, a 1997 study of mainstream U.S. newspapers by Louis DeSipio and James Henson found that U.S. Cubans were more likely than Puerto Ricans and Mexicans to be covered by journalists through positive news stories focused on their political strength in Florida and their central role in U.S. foreign policymaking about Latin America.²⁴ U.S. Cubans were overrepresented in the mainstream news relative to their share of the U.S. Latina/o population and more likely to be depicted in stories about electoral politics and foreign policy rather than economic or social issues, such as immigration. As a point of contrast, news coverage about California’s anti-immigration Proposition 187 in 1994 focused almost exclusively on the economic and social impact of Mexican immigration to the exclusion of other ethnic minority groups, even though Asians and Central Americans were and continue to be two of the state’s fastest growing populations.²⁵

Maternal Interventions and the Cultural Politics of Cuban Immigrant Motherhood

“Motherhood” is one of the central tropes associated with the politics of the family and the culture of ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Mapping the Place of Latinas in the U.S. Media
• 1 Saving Elián: Cubana Motherhood, Latina Immigration, and the Nation
• 2 Disciplining J.Lo: Booty Politics in Tabloid News
• 3 Becoming Frida: Latinidad and the Production of Latina Authenticity
• 4 “Ugly” America Dreams the American Dream
• 5 Maid in Hollywood: Producing Latina Labor in an Anti-immigration Imaginary
• Conclusion: An Epilogue for Dangerous Curves
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• About the Author