Latinos in the Media

This essay reviews eight seasons of the television series Modern Family, with a close examination of the scripted dialogue used in the first season, when Colombian actor Sofía Vergara crafts the sitcom's popular character of Gloria Delgado-Pritchett. Specifically, we pay overdue attention to the use of Gloria's accent and her grammatically incorrect English as a technique to racialize her as a Latina character. A textual analysis of the show's first season (2009–10), consisting of twenty-four episodes, found ten episodes that featured scenes in which Gloria's Spanish-accented English or her use of English words was mocked on the show. Gloria's interaction with the show's white characters often used her accent or word choice for comedic effect and for structuring racial and gendered hierarchies. Ultimately, Sofía Vergara's personification of Gloria provides an interstitial space in which the character's visual aesthetics (color, hair, curves) and language (accent, speech) function as signifiers of Latinidad and in this way racialize both her visual and vocal body.

The underrepresentation and misrepresentation of Latina/os on U.S. English-language television dates back several decades to the beginning of TV programming, and has been documented by media scholars. As television series become more culturally diverse, the images of Latina/o families are gradually becoming more multidimensional to reflect their bicultural, and often bilingual, lifestyle with a greater sense of authenticity. However, the degree to which Latina/o Americans choose to interact with Latina/o culture or with the Spanish language varies depending on their generation and how assimilated they are into American culture. This is very relevant to the success of the hit CW show Jane the Virgin. The series presents viewers with contrasting Latina perspectives in its depiction of the Villanueva women. While they are all part of the same bicultural, bilingual family, the women represent different views on topics like religion, immigration, gender norms, and sexuality, which influence the way that they act in certain situations. Through a textual analysis of select episodes from seasons 1 and 2 of the show, this thesis report illustrates the highly intersectional nature of Latina gender and cultural identity in Jane the Virgin and for U.S. Latinas more generally. An exploration of this topic through discourse analysis also demonstrates how the show is unique in its treatment of a Latina/o multigenerational family that allows for both Latina/o and non-Latina/o viewers to identify with its characters.

Developments in contemporary Latina/os media are the result not only of an exponential­ ly growing Latina/o population in the United States but also of the synergy between trans­ formations in the global political economy and the emergence of new media platforms for production, distribution, and consumption. To reflect upon the emergence of the industry is to consider the politics of the labeling of the Latina/o community and the eventual con­ figuration of a market audience. It also requires a confrontation with the cultural history of representations and stereotypes of Latina/os, particularly in radio, TV, film, and the in­ternet, and the transnational aesthetics and dynamics of media produced by and/or for Latina/os in the United States. If the notion of media revolves around a technological means of communication, it also encompasses the practices and institutions from within which the Latina/o communities are imagined, produced, and consumed. At the start of the 21st century, the idea of Latina/os in media revolved around a handful of Latina/o stars in Hollywood who often performed stereotypical representations, a racialized and marginal Spanish-language radio industry, and two Spanish television networks, Univi­sion and Telemundo. A more complex constellation of representations has evolved in both mainstream and Spanish-language media, among them new platforms for production and resistance, including social media (e.g., Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat), radio podcasts and streaming services (e.g., Hulu and Netflix), and a more active and engaged audience that consumes media in Spanish, English, and even Spanglish.

The academic study of US Spanish-language radio documents its growth and significance throughout the 20th century from disciplinary standpoints of ethnic studies, media and communications, and history. Still in its infancy, the field has produced studies that focus on its institutional development, its unique politically and/or immigrant-driven programming, as well as its popularity among Latina/o listeners. Latina/o listeners make up 16.6 percent of all radio listening in the United States and audience studies by Nielsen indicate that Latina/os tune into radio more than television, smartphones, or tablets. The literature discussed here focuses on Spanish-language radio within the geographical United States with references, for instance, from José Luis Ortiz Garza, a leading scholar of Mexican radio. Much more work is needed to further understand the political and cultural significance of Spanish-language radio to its legions of listeners in the United States. In particular, there is a significant need for more studies on Spanish-language radio that investigates its distinct role within Puerto Rican, Cuban, Central American, and other Latino-origin communities.

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This paper studies Netflix’s algorithm of prediction, recommendation and mediation to promote audiovisual consumption and symbolic mediation of Latino images in global markets. I explore some of the mechanisms used by Netflix for cultural symbolic construction of a global, transnational, Latino discourse. I focus on Netflix’s audience engagement through the appropriation of Telenovelas’ operating rules for the development of a global transnational community of producers and consumers which reuse the elaborate production and interpretative process of Latino codes, meanings and contents. I argue that Latino culture, through its diverse cultural contacts functioning like a global Rio Grande, serves Netflix as a mechanism of textual production, distribution and consumption that operates through the conflicts between three latino global market geographies.

The Latin@ media continues to exclude black bodies from television in order to perpetuate systemic white privilege. Although racism within the Latino community has not been part of a mainstream conversation, the presence of color-blind or post-racial structures may mask white supremacy within the community itself.

During the 2014 fiscal year, the United States saw a dramatic increase in Latin@ child immigration in hopes of parent-child reunification. The United States mainstream media reacted by reporting heavily on the child arrivals during the summer of 2014. The current study follows a Critical Discourse Studies approach to unveil the ideologies communicated through this media coverage by analyzing the lexical and grammatical representation of Latin@ immigrant children in two of the most read newspapers nationwide: The New York Times and the Los Angeles Times. The results corroborate many previous studies concerning the representation of immigrants in mainstream media by demonstrating how the use of a water-based lexicon and particular verbal processes of members of the majority group vis-à-vis immigrant children communicates an ideology of dealing with and removing the 'problem', rather than, for example, providing aid to the children.

This article traces the conditions that made possible the legislation of police surveillance of schools as a “solution” to the “problems” of convivencia in school, during a period of social and racial diversification of Spanish society. During the 1980s and 1990s, convivencia—the ideal of living together in harmony–served as a discourse for producing a new imaginary of conviviality in a new liberal-democratic political culture after a long dictatorship. However, since 2000, the “problem” of convivencia reassembled in Spain’s public sphere as a “problem” of diversity, violence, and public safety. But what is it about convivencia in diverse schools and society that has made it seem reasonable to have police surveil schools and students as a solution to the “problems” of convivencia?  Through the critical encounter of historical and ethnographic analysis of educational policy and printed media, I interrogate the notion of convivencia by tracing the ways in which “problems” of convivencia have been deployed in Spain’s cultural politics to produce and differentiate citizens both within and outside the educational field. I argue that convivencia has functioned as a moving target in forming the ideal citizen and has embedded a division that differentiates human bodies by gendering and racializing their attributes through a civilizing agenda.

Este Documento de Trabajo (DT) intenta explorar las dimensiones de las industrias culturales en español en Estados Unidos. Sintetizamos el estado actual del mercado cultural en español y ponemos en perspectiva la naturaleza diversa del mundo "hispano-unidense" al examinar cómo la tendencia a homogeneizar estas comunidades tan heterogéneas viene empañando la manera en que se les (des)conoce. Consideramos que el marco de las políticas lingüísticas, de integración sociocultural y económica ofrece pistas para comprender parte del olvido histórico a los aportes culturales de los hispanos en Estados Unidos. Al revisar el estado actual de las industrias culturales exploramos cómo, a lo largo de las décadas recientes, ha sido el sector comercial y privado el que ha investigado las prácticas y los consumos de los latinos para reacomodar su oferta de bienes y servicios. En contrapartida, el sector público o estatal continúa teniendo como tarea pendiente el conocimiento más profundo de las prácticas y los consumos culturales híbridos por parte de los hispanohablantes de EE.UU.

In this article we offer a detailed examination of CNN's documentary Latino in America and of the ways in which a particular group of viewers responded to it. Our goal is to show how we can explore the nature of hegemonic processes in a way that more fully incorporates the role of material reality in the reproduction of a particular social order. Thus, our analysis will shed light on how the material conditions of a specific segment of the Latino population interact with the dominant representations of this group in ways that need further exploration. As this analysis shows, a closer look at this interaction reveals that the embracement—or not—of the ideological messages embedded in a particular text is not only based on the rhetorical aspects of these messages, but also on the extent to which their implications are in consonance with the material needs, wants, and priorities of those interpellated by it.

This research explores the role of KBBF-FM, the first Chicano, community-based public radio station in the United States. It examines its development based on its own format changes and the current global context of media ownership. Research findings suggest that small, community-based media outlets are still viable alternatives to provide a voice for traditionally disenfranchised segments of the population, particularly the Latino population. In an era of media conglomerates, KBBF serves as a vehicle to promote social justice and adds to the diversity of voices that would not otherwise be heard through the mainstream media in local communities. The research uses primary and secondary bibliographical and field interviews sources for analysis.

Given the popularity of comedy, humor is an important avenue for examining the racial=ethnic stereotyping effects. Grounded in social identity theory, this study explores the effects of stereotypical comedy on Latino audiences. A 2 Â 2 Â 2 factorial experiment was conducted to explore how Latino participants' (N ¼ 150) racial=ethnic identification level (high=low) and comedians' race=ethnicity (Latino=White) influence evaluations of a target alleged offender (Latino=White) in subsequent scenarios. Findings revealed that participants rated the comedy more favorably when the comedian was Latino compared to when the comedian was White. Moreover, participants with high levels of racial=ethnic identification rated the comedy script as significantly more stereotypical and the White target alleged offender as significantly more culpable than the Latino alleged offender.

The main purpose of this article is to analyze how a representative selection of computer games, set mostly in a Latin American context or at the US-Mexico border, are capable of mounting arguments about immigration policy by making good or poor uses of what Ian Bogost has conceptualized as “procedural rhetoric” (Bogost 2007). In other words, my goal in this article is to explore to what extent videogames can be effectively persuasive in the way they manage to create a computational representation of the experience of migrating, and its associated consequences, independently of the legal or illegal status of such displacements. This article revises current research on procedural representation to offer a detailed analysis of a representative selection of digital games dealing with this particular issue (Border Patrol, Tropico (I-IV), ICED!, Rescate: Alicia Croft, and Papers, Please). Finally, I will show how two commercial games produced mostly for entertainment purposes (such as Tropico and Papers, Please) can be more effective at mounting a procedural argument and, plausibly, at influencing players’ opinions on a particular issue than a “serious game” (such as ICED!). Based on this analysis, I propose to move beyond this distinction between entertaining and serious to focus on what is particular about videogames in general, that can make them into more efficient tools to disseminate ideas and provide players with more opportunities for experiential learning.

The rapid growth of Hispanics in the United States, the parallel growth of Spanish-language media, and the difficulties that this population continues to experience in terms of important socio-demographic indicators such as education, immigration, healthcare, and criminal justice, requires research that investigates the ways in which Spanish-language news outlets are delivering the information needed by this group in terms of providing a public service and contributing to democratic notions of the press. Democratic theories of the press posit that in order for a democracy to function properly, all groups should be provided with news coverage that reflects the voices, concerns, and interests of their communities. However, it has often proved difficult for news industries undergoing rapid growth and increasing corporate concentration to serve audiences with diverse news and information needs. In order to examine the extent to which Spanish-language news outlets are providing a diverse range of news and topics relevant to their audiences, researchers used software that gathers Real Simple Syndication (RSS) feeds to archive, organize, and analyze over 10,000 news stories posted to 28 Spanish-language news websites during October 2012. The results show some diversity in the range of topics covered, but the widespread duplication of content across platforms owned by a small handful of media conglomerates found in the results raises important questions about the impact of increasing news homogenization in the digital age and the potential implications for minority audiences.

This report is based on a study of how the national television half-hour evening network news programs on ABC, CBS, NBC, and the one-hour evening news program on CNN covered Latinos and Latinos issues in the years 2008-2014.  Upon an analysis of the electronic database of the Vanderbilt University Television News Archive, and its index that allows for searches by key words, the data showed that the patterns of coverage, or most accurately stated neglect of the coverage of the nation’s largest ethnic minority population, has remained practically frozen in time or has worsened.  Albeit Latinos represent a population of over 54 million that now surpasses 17 percent of the U.S. national total, stories about Latinos and Latino issues constitute less that .78 percent of the news in the studied networks.  Also, the participation of Latinos as anchors, co-anchors or reporters of Latino stories also remains scarce and with little or no change from decades past.

If Black Puerto Ricans can’t even recognize racism coming from Puerto Ricans, how are they going to survive in a racist country like the United Sates? Are they going to say something like: “Black Lives Matter ain’t got nothing to do with me?” If Black Puerto Ricans aren’t calling out racism, it makes it seem like they love white supremacy or are content with it and ultimately have no issues with it.

Even if you’re not a Black Puerto Rican, you should be worried about decolonizing Puerto Rico from its history of white supremacy. If you care about independence, you should worry about the fact that Black Puerto Ricans can’t even pick up on racism.

Despite Puerto Ricans’ refusal to acknowledge race, the truth of the matter is that there is a difference between the success of Mónica Puig and Jaime Espinal, the same way there is a difference between the success of Gigi Fernández and Javier Culson.

En este estudio se recogerán las opiniones de jóvenes latinos que fueron a vivir a Estados Unidos siendo niños y en qué sentido la música ha contribuido a profundizar en su identificación como hispanos a la vez que los integra en grupos de mestizaje. Esta hibridación cultural (2001, Canclini) es especialmente interesante porque ellos no poseen una autoestima etnocentrista, es decir, no parten de una única cultura para valorar otros elementos creativos.
¿Qué sienten al escuchar música hispana en Estados Unidos? Artistas como Alejandro Fernández, Marc Anthony o Romeo Santos que pertenecen a grandes discográficas (Universal o Sony Music) son inmensamente populares en Norteamérica y traen ritmos de boleros, bachatas, salsa..., frente a grupos que no pertenecen al mainstream; Las Krudas, Ana Tijoux, con mensajes reivindicativos sobre la unión del sur o la igualdad de sexos. ¿Conocen y valoran las expresiones artísticas que no necesariamente son populares fuera de Latinoamérica?
Las conclusiones obtenidas harán que pueda entenderse el proceso de identificación del joven hispano con la música latina; ¿son las letras, el baile, las imágenes evocadas por el artista, sea independiente o una celebridad, las que hacen que trasciendan al asfalto y les lleven a una imaginada orilla?

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This essay analyzes the hypermedia staging of the late Puerto Rican boxer and former world champion Héctor "Macho" Camacho (1962-2012) through four decades of sporting and artistic career-80, 90 and 00-where the boxer toured the ring and he entered the world of entertainment as a dancer, entertainer and object of study of special series. The article looks at Camacho's cultural transfiguration, a concept that reinterprets the anthropological notion of cultural transfiguration (Bartolomé, 2008) defined as the process of adopting material and symbolic features of the surrounding society and its reformulation within a new context to do so, intelligible. In the case of Héctor "Macho" Camacho, the socio-cultural contexts and the hypermedia platforms in which his image circulates complicate the transfiguration process. In this way, the inventory of material and / or symbolic features varies, depending on the circularity of this between Puerto Rico and its diasporas, especially New York and Miami, places where the boxer lived part of his life. On the other hand, this project investigates the narratives that occur in spaces that challenge and reproduce simultaneously, class inequality and ethnoracial exclusion of the racialized colonial subject, embodied in the figure of Héctor "Macho" Camacho articulated sometimes Boricua, to sometimes Nuyorican, sometimes Latino, sometimes all of the above