Latinx and Chicanx Film and Television

This article interrogates the immense popularity of Fast & Furious (Justin Lin, 2009), the fourth film in the Fast franchise, with US Latino viewers when it was released, exploring both the film industry's targeting of Latinos in recent years and the potential of and limitations inherent to foregrounding a "bilingual aesthetic" in a franchise known for an ethos of racelessness. Comparisons to the short film Los Bandoleros (Vin Diesel, 2009), included with Fast& Furious on the commercial DVD, highlight borders that still exist when major US studios construct a seemingly multicultural narrative for global audiences.

There is a lack of information on how Latinas consume popular culture in general and how they interact and respond to Spanish-language media in particular. Studies on representation and stereotyping in the Spanish-language media as well as audience research within the Latino community are recent phenomena in the Latino media scholarship. This article examines how a group of 27 immigrant and nonimmigrant Latinas from the city of Austin, Texas, evaluate and negotiate women’s representations in Univision and Telemundo, the two largest Hispanic networks in the United States. Women of diverse income levels participated in a series of 1 to 3 in-depth interviews between 1999 and 2002. The main focus of the study is on the respondents’ evaluations of gender, race and class representations in the talk shows El Show de Cristina and Laura en América. Interview transcripts reflected Latinas’ ambivalent and conflicted relationship with the television programs. Latinas felt attacked, insulted, offended and embarrassed by women’s portrayals in certain entertainment and humor shows. The respondents used their criticism of women’s sexualization on Spanish-language television as a strategy to escape labels and stereotypes ascribed to Latinos by the majority groups. Women used class as a marker of difference and distinction among different groups of Latinas. They also challenged the concept of Latino cultural unity—Latinidad—so promoted by the networks and in general disagreed with Cristina and Laura’s declared philosophy of Latino empowerment. Two concepts emerged from the relationship Latinas experienced with the Hispanic TV: ambivalence and distinction. These results are discussed in terms of Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of practice.

Afro-Latina/os, those that I argue here have a “marginal Latinidad,” are rarely included in what is imagined as the Latino/Hispanic population within the United States, as their mediated racialization can be difficult to read and sometimes intentionally ambiguous. Using actors Rosario Dawson, Zoe Saldana, and Gina Torres as case studies, this article asks: how are audiences reading these Afro-Latina actors’ race/ethnicity and what are the discourses informing these readings? Based on critical, textual, and reception analyses, I assert that Dawson, Saldana, and Torres’s ethnoracialization reflects their embodiment of “marginal Latinidad,” which is constructed in juxtaposition to normative Latino representation, influenced by the presence of blackness, rooted in narrative location and context, and, at times, signals ideological challenges to normative racial thinking in the United States.

This article analyzes the discourses of Latina/o identity embedded in the movie Frida, the Latino news coverage about the film, and an on-line chat stream about the film. Comparing the identity discourses circulated by the movie's producers, Latina/o journalists, and Latina/o audiences when discussing the film shows how different communities negotiate the meanings of ethnic identity. The study concludes that the discourses of ethnic identity circulated through the movie, news coverage, and chat stream disrupt notions of Latina/o ethnic identity as a stable and commodifiable demographic category.

Through a four-pronged methodology which includes textual analyses of the films, film reviews, and interviews with Rosie Perez as well as possible spectatorship positions to Rosie Perez films, the author examines the construction of Latinas in Hollywood film, especially in regard to traditional ethnic stereotypes. In addition, the author ventures into an understudied area of scholarship-namely the consideration of active audience and Latinas/Latinos. This combined methodology which examines both representation and interpretations-that is the production of meaning both at the sending and reception of popular culture-allows for a complicated reading of what Rosie Perez might mean to different segments of the audience.

Discusses the effect of Hispanic-oriented media on Latinos in the U.S. Views on the role of the Hispanic media as a spokesperson for the U.S. Latinos; Impact of the dominance of white Hispanic types in Spanish television on the racial and ethnic diversity of Latinos in the country; Implications of the association of nationality with particular types of music.

In the articles in the two special sections on "U.S. Latinos and the Media, the approach to Latino representation and self-representation has focused on "speaking" in the broadest sense of the term. Who gets to speak — that is, to make films? What are the thematic, generic, and ideological characteristics of Hollywood films about Latinos? How have social conditions and production constraints determined the types of films Latinos have made? What strategies might allow Latino filmmakers to both enter and subvert the system? And what do filmmakers themselves have to say about their work and its contexts?

After a string of profitable US Latino motion pictures like Born in East L.A., Stand and Deliver, and La Bamba in the Hispanic Hollywood of the late 1980s, the number of these films in Hollywood studio pipelines became fewer in the early 1990s. While Hollywood studios did not circulate many US Latino films in the early portion of that decade, studios did develop specialty divisions like Sony Pictures Classics or purchase successful independent distributors like New Line Cinema in order to acquire and distribute niche films like My Family/Mi Familia (1995). These specialty divisions gave Hollywood studios the opportunity to target blacks and Latinos without spending a great deal of money on marketing and distribution. By the end of this period, US Latino films wer promoted and distributed by three different types of distributors (studio, studio specialty divisions, and independent). This paper examines how the early 1990s marketplace affected US Latino film development, promotion, and distribution. In addition, this describes and critiques how these various distributors attempted to promote and distribution of US Latino films from 1990 to 1995.