Latino Spin

Public Image and the Whitewashing of Race

Arlene Dávila

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2008
• ISBN:
  9780814720967
• Topic: Sozialwissenschaften
• Subtopic: Kultur- & Sozialanthropologie

Winner of the 2010 Distinguished Book Award in Latino Studies from the Latin American Studies Association

Illegal immigrant, tax burden, job stealer. Patriot, family oriented, hard worker, model consumer. Ever since Latinos became the largest minority in the U.S. they have been caught between these wildly contrasting characterizations leaving us to wonder: Are Latinos friend or foe?

Latino Spin cuts through the spin about Latinos' supposed values, political attitudes, and impact on U.S. national identity to ask what these caricatures suggest about Latinos' shifting place in the popular and political imaginary. Noted scholar Arlene Dávila illustrates the growing consensus among pundits, advocates, and scholars that Latinos are not a social liability, that they are moving up and contributing, and that, in fact, they are more American than "the Americans." But what is at stake in such a sanitized and marketable representation of Latinidad? Dávila follows the spin through the realm of politics, think tanks, Latino museums, and urban planning to uncover whether they effectively challenge the growing fear over Latinos' supposedly dreadful effect on the "integrity" of U.S. national identity. What may be some of the intended or unintended consequences of these more marketable representations in regard to current debates over immigration?

With particular attention to what these representations reveal about the place and role of Latinos in the contemporary politics of race, Latino Spin highlights the realities they skew and the polarization they effect between Latinos and other minorities, and among Latinos themselves along the lines of citizenship and class. Finally, by considering Latinos in all their diversity, including their increasing financial and geographic disparities, Dávila can present alternative and more empowering representations of Latinidad to help attain true political equity and intraracial coalitions.

PART I

The Politics of Latino Spin

1

Here Comes the Latino Middle Class

As recently as a decade ago, it was unimaginable to talk openly about middle-class Latinos. But now, this topic is present with a vengeance. With the marketing industry touting the profitability of Latinos as a market, and political parties touting their vibrancy as the “new electorate,” poverty is more than ever a political liability, almost entirely obviated from the national agenda. Thus, when in 2004 a study by the Puerto Rican Legal Defense and Education Fund (PRLDEF) showed that 26 percent of all Puerto Ricans, almost three times the national average, live in poverty, people were not amused. In the words of Angelo Falcón, then senior policy executive of the center: “I could not believe the reactions to this report. Not the feedback we got fifteen years ago. Even our own Puerto Rican politicians were telling us to bury the story, that I was making us look bad.” Instead, he was prompted to highlight the good news also shown in the report, that a higher percentage of Puerto Ricans have earned bachelors’ degrees, a higher rate than the Latino average, and that nearly 20 percent of Puerto Ricans hold managerial jobs which is a higher rate than the Latino average. This is one instance where the prophets of doom are silenced by the cheerleaders of Latino accomplishment in the process of controlling Latinos’ image, in this case that of Puerto Ricans. Attention from marketers and politicians comes to those who are moving up the ladder. What credibility or rentability as voters and consumers can a poor community possibly attract?

This concern to control Latinos’ image is far from new. For as long as Latino leaders have organized publicly, there has been debate about the best way to project a more mainstream identity for themselves and their constituency in order to command greater political legitimacy. The issue I’m concerned with here is the seemingly growing consensus on the need to project Latinos as an upwardly mobile constituency alongside the lack of debate about the social and political consequences of such positive projections. In other words, what is at stake when a veteran marketer could so easily assert during an interview that they have won the battle over images? As he explained: “In the 1970s, politicians and scholars were crying poverty making it impossible for us to sell this market, but 30 years later we’ve won the battle.” Or, in the poignant words of Mike Nieves, deputy chief of staff at the New York City Council, the “Perfumados (the perfumed ones) are in; the titeres (thugs) holding a flag are totally out.” That he would contrast the so-called perfumed ones to “thugs” is telling of the legitimacy lost by whoever is not a professional or upwardly mobile when representing Latinos as a constituency—especially if “holding a flag.”

This is the central point that this chapter questions: the confluence of interests that are now intent on reshaping Latinos’ image around more marketable, mainstreamed, and upscale definitions in light of the renewed urgency in public debate about Latinos’ current and future impact on this country. In what follows, I examine these dynamics by looking at the growing public turn to Latinos’ upward mobility. I do not debate this trend—insofar as the entire Latino population has grown, an argument that any of its sectors has grown is impossible to contest. The comments of Roberto Suro, the then director of the Pew Hispanic Center, one of the most important Latino think tanks, come to mind: “insofar [as] the entire Latino population has grown one could even state that the number of freckle faced Latinos has grown and be in the right.” What I am concerned with then is the growing overemphasis of discussion and debate about this particular subsector, especially with regard to current debates over immigration and over Latinos’ future mobility or lack thereof.

Discovering the Middle Class: The Role of Marketers and Latino Think Tanks

We need to start with the marketing industry which, dependent as it is on advertising monies, has been a leading force in projecting Latinos’ buying power and their middle-class status. This has been in direct contrast with the appeals of Latino politicians and scholars whose assessments have necessarily and predictably been more dire, though as I note here, there have also been noticeable changes in their positions. Marketers, however, have always pushed for Latinos’ buying power, and for the existence of what the Euro RSCG Latino advertising firm has recently termed the Hispanic “prosumer,” the proactive, affluent, and influential Latino whose behaviors evidence future consumer trends. Even brokerage firms such as Merrill Lynch are now targeting the “rapidly growing Hispanic middle and upper class,” a far cry from the basic food and personal item product companies that have historically targeted Latinos (Rifkin 1999).

Indeed, the entire business of Hispanic marketing has been central to the concept of the “Hispanic market” and of Hispanics as a people with spending money, not just as the downward poor. Since the early 1960s, this task has been primarily undertaken by native-born, educated, middle-class Mexican Americans in the West, and by Cuban marketing entrepreneurs arriving in New York post–Castro’s revolution who founded the first Hispanic advertising agencies. And not unlike today, this task was invested with demands for inclusion and equal participation in the economy. As I note elsewhere, this was the case with the Cuban entrepreneurs who lacked direct experience with U.S. racism prior to their arrival and were quick to project their own middle-class identity onto a newly emergent “Hispanic market” as part of their own claims to belonging as non-minorities in this country. It was also the case with second-and third-generation middle-class Mexican Americans eager to challenge the discrimination that tainted their status. Jesus Chavarria, who founded Hispanic Business in 1979, spoke to this when explaining his rationale for founding the magazine:

I knew there was a Hispanic middle class since the 1950s cause there were lawyers, doctors, merchants who had a clear standing but that standing was always affected by this issue of status and civil rights; and this translated into the 60s and 70s which was the first time there was a national consciousness of being Hispanic in America. This prompted me to do a publication that addressed Hispanic issues beyond identity and social services. My concern was how do we become stakeholders in this country. How do we become entrepreneurs? Thus from its inception HB was all about the middle class. It described the struggle of a community that had achieved increased well being and wanted to become part of society, and make that society realize their contribution to the common well and wealth of the nation.

Through their many articles highlighting growing trends in the income, education, and occupational status of Latinos, Hispanic Business would indeed be at the forefront of projecting the image of the middle-class Latino. This was important to challenge the view that Latinos are an economic burden, the same view that has long constituted a rationale for challenging immigration and Latinos. Still, it was not until 1994 that it dedicated an issue to the coming out of the “silent minority,” confronting the national focus on working-class, new immigrant, primarily Spanish-language Hispanics by highlighting the “silent minority” with enough power to exert influence in national and international politics (Zate 1994).

A similar impetus for recognition and empowerment was also behind one of the first major studies on the Latino middle class, “The Latino Middle Class: Myth, Reality and Potential,” conducted by the Tomas Rivera Policy Institute (TRPI), another highly influential Latino think tank. The study was funded by Univision, the largest Spanish TV network and one of the most influential players in defining the parameters of the Hispanic market, under its former president Henry Cisneros, whose connections as former secretary of housing helped secure additional corporate sponsors. The project presented TRPI an opportunity to challenge anti-immigrant arguments and policies as Proposition 187, by neutralizing anti-immigrant sentiment with evidence that Latinos were doing well and moving up, and consequently, that there was little cause for mainstream society’s concern. Univision, for its part, gained “objective” research from a nonpartisan think tank documenting the strength of the Latino consumer it could now quote in its marketing pitches. Commercial and policy interests came harmoniously together, if for different reasons.

This confluence of corporate and nonprofit advocacy interests marks an important development in the processes of shaping contemporary representations of Latinidad. It is evident in the involvement of Latino marketers as “experts” in national presidential campaigns, and in the growing co-sponsorship of research by private corporations, especially in the growing involvement of Univision in polls and research, as in the 2004 Washington Post/Univision/TRPI poll on Latino voters or in NALEO’s Latino voter mobilization project, or in the Tomas Rivera Institute Research on Latinos’ TV viewing habits. Not that corporate sponsorship of Latino advocacy organization is new. By the 1970s, companies such as Coors Brewery, Sears, and Exxon were actively involved in Hispanic organizations, such as the League of United Latin American Citizens, known as LULAC (Marquez 1993). What is new is the growing importance of the corporate sector in light of diminishing funding by government and private foundations. Also new is the larger political and economic context favoring emphasis on upwardly mobile constituencies, at the cost of the working poor. All the while, even the most auspicious-sounding report states that when taken as a group, Latinos are still overwhelmingly working and lower middle class, that the poor almost tripled during the same time there was a growth in the Latino middle class, and that the gap between Latino households and all U.S. households has actually widened during the same period.

Granted, Latinos have always been more heterogeneous than their public representations. Whatever its size, a Latino middle class has always existed, though it has been largely understudied and absent from public view. The issue, then, is not whether middle-class Latinos exist and are thriving, but rather, why are we hearing so much about an ever-present segment of the Latino population, and most significantly to what end. Indeed, we know that Mexican-American elites in the Southwest have long represented themselves as Hispanics to distinguish themselves from the poor Mexican immigrants, while we have read important accounts of how middle- and upper-middle-class Cubans have been fueling Miami’s economy for decades (Portes and Stepic 1993; Montejano 1987). Middle-class Latinos have also been behind the founding of advocacy institutions and organizations projecting a strong middle-class stance to challenge their subordination and stake a rightful place in mainstream society. One of the oldest political organizations, LULAC, founded in 1929, was in fact the product of middle-class Mexican Americans intent on asserting their entitlements as citizens of the United States, an accommodating stance that also involved their distancing themselves from Mexican immigrants (Marquez 1993). A similar accommodating stance characterized other Mexican-American organizations, akin to the outlook of some Puerto Rican organizations of the same period in the East.¹ In other words, geographical and historical differences aside, efforts at distinguishing and defining a Latino middle class have been abiding, especially as a means of challenging Latinos’ status as foreign and un-American irrespective of their achievements, gains, and citizenship status.

The radicalization of Latino social movements in the 1960s and 1970s, however, would dramatically center poverty, economic and political enfranchisement, and self-determination in the national Latino agenda. Still, an accommodating stance was never altogether abandoned. After all, ethnic advocacy organizations have never operated free from mainstream society nor government and private funding sources, a position that would undoubtedly limit their critique of the economic and political structures of mainstream society. This explains why many of the civil rights organizations founded in the late 1960s, such as MALDEF and NCLR, have been accused of elitism and have been criticized for their dependency on government and corporate interests and for emphasizing Latinos’ rights rather than the much-needed economic and political transformations (Marquez 2003). These tensions were evident in the highly corporate-sponsored annual conferences of the National Council of La Raza that I attended in 2005 and 2006. Then, it was not uncommon to find delegates openly frustrated with multiple interests as varied as the U.S. Marines, political parties, the Mexican government, and major corporations that gather there to sing Latinos’ praises. The corporate-inscribed pens, note pads, mugs, and other freebies laid out at the elaborate luncheon tables were simply not enough to curb my luncheon partners’ frustration; their local constituencies did not quite match the glossy images so lauded by the speakers during their “Latino love fest” luncheon speeches.

The political movements of the late 1960s and 1970s, however, unavoidably instilled a renewed activism around community and working-class empowerment, foregrounding poverty into the Latino political agenda as never before. The Great Society programs of the times also contributed to this trend by helping to turn poverty and social programs into a political commodity. Indeed, the range of social programs and resources associated with the Great Society may have had limited effects on structural economic transformations, and may have functioned more to regulate and govern, rather than to empower the poor. But they also provided invaluable resources for Latinos and other minorities. In the then primarily Puerto Rican New York City’s East Harlem, Great Society programs strengthened a bourgeoning Puerto Rican middle class, while leading to the rise of minority power blocks around the control of government funds (Sanchez 2007). One result is that government funds created incentives for consolidating “poverty” and marginality, though not necessarily for fostering a critical working-class politics into the Latino political agenda.²

Also contributing to the politicization of Latino poverty at this time was the onset of university programs in Chicano and Puerto Rican—now Latino—studies. After all, these programs were the direct product of social struggles for inclusion and representation in the academy, and exposing inequalities and bringing about social equality were seen as part of this mission. Let us remember that by this juncture, Latino poverty had long been pathologized through numerous “culture of poverty” arguments and was in dire need of critical analysis to account for the historical and structural inequalities that produced it. Within the nascent Chicano, Puerto Rican, and later Latino studies programs, pedagogy and research were therefore necessarily tied to a larger social equity agenda. Interestingly, despite the considerable amount of research on the Latino working class and the poor, there would be a dearth of scholarly attention in the documentation and research of issues related to class differentiation among Latinos. This is in sharp contrast to the African-American studies literature, where the black middle class has been the subject of more consistent scholarly attention; a disparity I believe is linked to the historical hyper-privileging of “culture” and language as defining elements of Latinidad.³ There had been important studies that examined the Mexican middle class in the Southwest, and some of Cubans, whose preferred immigrant status soon made them synonymous with middle- and upper-class Latinos. But in general, if Latinos and class were discussed, it was the working class, if not the poor, that was assumed to be the norm.

The result was a monolithic “imagined working-class community” where differences around gender, sexual preferences, race, and class were largely subjugated as part of what Tomas Ybarra-Frausto has termed the necessary strategic essentialism of the times (1999). In an interview, he recalled the pressures exerted on him and the generation of college-educated Chicanos coming of age in the 1960s by the romanticization of the working class, “We all felt great pressure to be cholos because the only identity that was legitimate was that of the rural or urban poor. And people felt guilty to be middle class. We ended up sabotaging our own mobility.” There were consequences with this trend, he noted. In his view, alliances with upwardly mobile groups that would lead to a stronger movement were never fostered, while class suspicions were aggravated by the politics of racial authenticity.

The hegemony of this Latino monolithic “imagined working-class community” explains the uproar created by two of the most important works speaking about or on behalf of the Latino middle class from the 1980s onward: Richard Rodriguez’s Hunger of Memory (1982), and Linda Chavez’s Out of the Barrio: Toward a New Politics of Hispanic Assimilation (1991). Both personal and autobiographical, these works differed in tone and political repercussion. Rodriguez’s indigenous “brownness” has always tempered his views about assimilation; and in his latest book “Brown” maintains a firm eye on the trilogy of class, ethnicity, and race; while Chavez still prides herself in her conservative assimilationist views and in being “the most hated Hispanic in America,” a tag incorporated into the title of her latest autobiography. Rodriguez’s work is rife with pain, the pain of becoming distanced from his family and culture by formal education, the pain of misrecognition, and the clash between his upwardly mobile disposition and his status as “underprivileged” minority student. Chavez, less reflective of her own ascent, takes shots at the entire Latino advocacy system that facilitated her mobility. What these works shared was a critique of the caging of Hispanic identity around narrow conventions of authenticity espoused at the time. Both espoused the view that empowerment can only come through assimilation, and both censure Latinos’ culture and the Spanish language as culprits for their ghettoization. As such, these books were immediately controversial. Puerto Rican intellectuals, in particular, were especially angered at Chavez’s representation of their community as “the Puerto Rican exception,” the group whose poverty challenged all rational explanations, leaving only them to blame for their status.⁴

Controversies aside, these authors were extremely influential in challenging orthodoxies of Latinidad—the notion that true Latinos are always liberal, poor, needy, etc.—opening up the door to numerous exposés on the emerging middle class. Even critics of these works I spoke with credited them with opening discussion on the Latino middle class throughout the 1990s, marking a turn away from dominant representations by both the mainstream press and most Latino advocates and scholars. Henry Pachon, president of TRPI, identified additional factors that fueled this turn, among them the booming 1990s economy and the growth of the Latino population. But most important, he attributed the budding attention to the middle class to a growing intolerance among Latino middle-class researchers with the stereotypical and unilateral portrayal of Latinos a...