Latin Looks: Images of Latinas and Latinos in the U.S. Media. - book reviews

Afterimage, Jan-Feb, 1998 by Cecilia Rodriguez Milanes

Given the dearth of critical and sustained attention to the representation, and lack thereof, of Latino/as in the United States, the publication of Clara E. Rodriguez's Latin Looks: Images of Latinas and Latinos in the U.S. Media is a significant event. Finally, someone is paying attention to the diverse and growing group of Latinos who make up 10% of the nation's population (with approximately 26 million Americans of Latin descent, the U.S. is now the fifth-largest Latin American country in the world). Although critical work about Latinos and Latinas exists, academia has a perplexing tendency to use one writer's work, specifically, Gloria Anzaldua's Borderlands/Fronteras (1987), as the comprehensive, emblematic reference point. Once a scholar mentions Anzaldua's work, no further attention to the other ways Latinos live, look, write, speak or work in the world is often necessary. By using a quote from Borderlands, the Latino/a problem is addressed and one can move on to matters more important - sometimes just mentioning the title or Anzaldua's name is enough.

Latin Looks proposes to take on one of film producer Paul Espinosa's "modest" suggestions for educators: "help . . . students - and, really, all of us - to analyze the nature of the problem. What, exactly, are the impacts on the Hispanic community of being ignored or misrepresented? And why are Hispanics so poorly represented?" Rodriguez's collection of eclectic and interdisciplinary essays does indeed serve us well in attending to these and other important questions about Latino/a invisibility in popular culture. Her emphasis is on English-language television and films produced in the U.S. between 1900 and 1994, and she focuses on five major points: 1) Hispanics are underrepresented and misrepresented in the media; 2) Latino images in Hollywood films have become more negative with time; 3) the similarities in the portrayals of Chicanos, Puerto Ricans, and other groups and how these have changed over time - far outweigh the differences; 4) the quality of Hollywood's presentation of Latinos has fluctuated with the larger political and economic relationships that the U.S. has had with Latin America; and 5) fighting the currents, alternative filmmakers have sought to deconstruct media images of Latinos and construct new images and spaces that are by, for, and about the Latino community.

The 18 chapters are written by a variety of media and cultural studies scholars and social scientists. Rodriguez contributed a formal introduction to the volume, a preface to each of the four sections, brief biographies of significant male and female Latino and Latin American Hollywood film stars, and reviews of select popular films with or about Latinos from the 1980s to the 1990s. Rodriguez also authored the entire last section, "Strategies for Change," which provides a pedagogic guide for not only teaching about the issues raised in the book, but also for using this book to reform and transform the industry itself. Included as well are sample study sheets, exercises and lists of tasks for students to consider in viewing and reviewing films and shows. By offering this teaching section of the book, Rodriguez's provides readers with the "concrete, practicable steps that can be taken to change the current situation."

To her credit, each section has noteworthy contributions and the whole first section is quite compelling. Indeed, for anyone who attaches value to news reporting in a democratic society, Jorge Quiroga's "Hispanic Voices: Is the Press Listening?" is a must read. Quiroga's examination of two news events, the Los Angeles riots of 1991-92 and the Mt. Pleasant/Washington, D.C. riot of 1991, serves as an alarming example of how "clueless" the news media is in reporting stories that involve or revolve around Latinos. Quiroga states that "Hispanics experienced a symmetry of exclusion from beginning to end in the press coverage [of the L.A. riots]. They were excluded as perpetrators, victims and as a community affected by the melee." By excluding Latinos, the media can maintain the national debate on racism as facile and historically inadequate as it has been - " it's just a black/white thing." Quiroga points out that "Hispanics accounted for half of the 8700 people arrested city-wide during and after the riots; in fact, the L.A.P.D. arrested more Hispanics (4307) than blacks (3083)," "L.A. mobs ravaged about as many Hispanic businesses as Korean-owned ones," and "the areas most decimated by the riots were heavily populated by Hispanics: Koreatown (80%), Pico Union (70%) and South Central Los Angeles (45%)." Quiroga argues cogently that this media exclusion was a predominating factor in the "disproportionate attention and post-riot aid" to African Americans. The other illuminating example of media ineptitude is the manner in which The Washington Post "covered" the Mt. Pleasant/D.C. neighborhood disturbance. Quiroga notes that the newspaper's reputation for national and international reporting was met with a challenge in how to cover a disturbance in "its own backyard" with no Spanish speaking reporter in the city room; their solution was sending a "borrowed" Spanish-speaking International Desk correspondent "down there."