9

The Evolution of Hollywood Latinidad

Latina/o Representation and Stardom in US Entertainment Media

Mary C. Beltrán

Scholars have explored Latina and Latino (hereafter, Latina/o) media representation and stardom in US film and television from a variety of disciplinary and methodological approaches. This chapter explores the evolution of this scholarship, some of the major research questions and themes that have arisen, and the concerns central to present-day studies. In illustration of these themes it also surveys key historical eras of Latina/o representation and star promotion, and reflects on the impact of the rise of Latina/o self-representation and contemporary trends that have yet to be studied.

As individuals with ancestry in the US Southwest, Puerto Rico, or Latin American countries, Latina/os, also termed Hispanics,¹ are widely diverse, even while their cinematic and televisual representation has often flattened differences in its construction of an imagined, universal Latin-ness, or Latinidad. This representational history has its roots in Mexican American history, given that land that forms part of the Southwestern United States transferred from Mexico to the United States in 1848, transforming Mexican citizens to Mexican Americans overnight.² Mexican Americans also historically have been the largest US Latina/o group. In 2000 they comprised 58.5% of all Latina/o Americans, followed by Puerto Ricans (10%), Cuban Americans (3.5%), and smaller but steadily increasing numbers of Latina/os of Central and South American descent (US Census Bureau, 2001).³ Given their varied histories, Latina/os differ widely with respect to such factors as class, race, generation, and media habits. Spanish-language usage is a commonality among many Latina/os, but US Latinos may or may not speak Spanish. Younger Latina/os are also increasingly acculturated, demonstrating hybrid media consumption of both English and Spanish-language popular culture forms.⁴

Latina/o representation in US film and television is increasingly important to scholarship on US media, as the Latina/o population has grown exponentially in the last century and is expected to continue to increase. Latina/os became the largest non-White group in the United States in 2000 and now comprise over 15% of the population and 20% of youth under 18, according to the US Census Bureau. With respect to projections, it is predicted that Latina/os will comprise at least 24.4% of the US population by 2050.⁵

Scholarship on Latina/o representation in US film and English-language entertainment television, however, is still relatively new. Academic books on the topic began to be published in the early 1980s; pioneering scholars included Arthur Pettit, Charles Ramírez Berg, Ana M. López, Chon Noriega, Angharad Valdivia, and Clara Rodríguez. For the most part this first generation of scholars was self-taught and trained in history, Spanish language and literature, English, or other disciplines, as university departments in Latina/o studies and film and media studies were just being established. Some of the work of these scholars thus necessarily involved establishing the legitimacy of studying Latina/os and media representation, as Valdivia (2008) and Ramírez Berg (2002) have noted. The next generations of scholars have benefited from these inroads and the increasing establishment of Latina/o studies and media studies within the academy as well as from the growth and acceptance of cultural studies traditions. Differing approaches and questions thus have guided scholars of each academic generation.

With this history in mind, this introduction to scholarship on Latina/o representation and stardom is structured in relation to methodological approaches and tropes that have emerged and become fundamental to the field of study as it has evolved. The sections below are organized to hone in on the themes of (1) Latina/o visibility and stereotypes; (2) racialization and the privileging of particular “Latin looks”; (3) constructions of Latinidad and related questions of authenticity; (4) hybridity and transnationalism; (5) self-representation and Latina/o participation within the mainstream media industries; and (6) recent hypervisibility and other contemporary trends.

Invisibility and Stereotypes

Much of the early scholarship on Latina/o film and television representation focused broadly on patterns in how Latina/o characters and images were depicted, and argued that such representation was typically characterized by invisibility and stereotype – recurring, one-dimensional characterizations typically assigned to subordinate groups in a society. The underrepresentation and marginalization of Latina/o characters in minor, often denigrating roles has a direct relationship to the history of Latina/os, and specifically Mexican Americans, in the United States. Mexicans and later Mexican Americans were often seen as impediments to the move westward by European settlers in the 1800s; notions of “Manifest Destiny” circulated in frontier literature and other artifacts of mediated culture tended to pose Mexican Americans as inferior in intelligence and integrity, and thus unworthy of the rights of citizenship. Early films merely rearticulated these “American” stereotypes. Arthur Pettit (1981) was one of the first scholars to systematically document Latina/o character types as witnessed in frontier literature and silent film Westerns; such characters typically might be villainous Mexican “greasers” or untrustworthy and lusty peasant women. Such representations began the pattern of constructing Latina/os as “Others” in contrast to White heroes and heroines, in a dynamic process similar to that other racialized, colonialist, and gendered representation.

While in recent years scholars are less likely to focus solely on stereotypes in study of Latina/o representation, the stark patterns in how Latina/os were depicted in Hollywood film prior to the 1970s prompted the first generation of researchers to hone in on them and document their prevalence. More specifically, Latina/o characters often were presented as especially sexual, aggressive, or childlike in characterizations that reified biased associations held by some US citizens of Latina/o women and men. Ramírez Berg (1990, 2002) summarized these representational patterns in relation to six Latina/o character types typical of Hollywood films: the Bandito and the Harlot, characters with aggressive, criminal, and promiscuous tendencies that can be traced back to the greaser films; the Latin Lover and the Dark Lady, characters based on notions of Latina/os as innately passionate and sexual, with this sensuality at times paired with more negative traits; and the Male Buffoon and the Female Clown, comic but typically unintelligent and infantile characters.

Similarly, Ella Shohat and Robert Stam (1994) and Frances Aparicio and Susana Chávez-Silverman (1997) highlighted Hollywood's tendency to confine Latina/os and Latin Americans to characterizations that relied heavily on tropical island-related associations that reinforced the myth of discovery (Shohat & Stam, 1994), neocolonialist notions of South American, African, and Asian countries and their people and products as ripe for the taking. Such tropicalist tropes, as Aparicio and Chávez-Silverman (1997) described them, constructed Latina/o characters as possessing passionate tempers and/or libidos and through references to heat and spice. As noted by early scholars as well, Latina/os historically were not employed as producers in the film and television industries prior to the 1980s,⁶ which likely played a strong role in the continued construction of Latina/os in this manner within Hollywood storylines.

Meanwhile, another group of early researchers, communication studies scholars, approached these patterns with quantitative methodological tools to study representation in the medium of television. Social science-oriented researchers, for instance, have tallied the visibility and status of Latina/o prime-time television characters, typically coding whether such characters were in major or minor roles as professionals, criminals, or servants, in studies of US televisual diversity that documented the underrepresentation of Latina/os and the tendency in television's first decades⁷ to include Latina/os primarily in marginal and criminal roles. S. Robert Lichter and Daniel Amundson (1994), for instance, found that Latina/o characters constituted no more than 2–3% of all prime-time roles from the 1950s through the early 1990s, even while the Latino population grew dramatically during these decades. Subsequent studies have found Latina/os only slightly more visible as television characters. Some of the most recent studies include that of Dana Mastro and Bradley Greenberg (2000), Allison Hoffman and Chon Noriega (2004), and Elizabeth Monk-Turner and colleagues (2010). Monk-Turner and colleagues concluded that Latina/os comprised only 5% of characters in the March 2007 prime-time lineup.

Building on research that explored Latina/o representation in relation to image and stereotype, some scholars of Latina/o stardom⁸ also took note that Latina/o film stars' promotional campaigns often capitalized on the employment of stereotypes held by White Americans of Latina/os and Latin Americans, as they were believed authentic or were thought to increase appeal to White audiences. Latina stars thus were at times promoted in a manner in tune with the cinematic stereotypes of harlots or dark ladies, to borrow Ramírez Berg's terms. In addition, as I found in my research (Beltrán, 2009) on the historical trajectory of the promotion of Latina/o stars, they might be promoted through sexualized emphasis on their bodies and described as spicy, vivacious, or through some variation on such terminology, whether as “spitfires,” “pepperpots,” or “hot tamales.” As I note in my research on Puerto Rican actress Rita Moreno's 1950s film career (Beltrán, 2009), Moreno found that playing up her public image as a flamboyant spitfire was often the only way she could get the attention of reporters at the time. Moreno and other Latina/o stars in past decades also faced limitations in regard to what roles they were allowed to audition for and the types of roles to which they were subsequently confined. Valdivia (1998), pointing to Puerto Rican actress Rosie Perez's early film career as illustration, described such patterns as an example of the symbolic annihilation⁹ that Latino and female actors often experienced. Perez, Valdivia notes, typically was cast only as loud, working-class Latinas who served in support of other characters' goals rather than as protagonists in their own right.

While focus on stereotype in relation to Latina/o representation drove some of the earliest scholarship on the topic, it came to be viewed as limiting, as Ramírez Berg and Valdivia demonstrate in taking up different methodological approaches in more recent work. As Shohat and Stam (1994) and others have noted, specific focus on stereotypes cannot account for the multiple ways in which media narratives impart ideological discourses about the place of Latina/os in the US imagination or give Latina/os subjectivity and a voice. Scholars are now typically engaged in qualitative research beyond questions of the stereotype, for instance through studying Latina/o representation in relation to the social and industrial contexts in which it is produced and consumed and exploring ideological meanings attached to film, television, and star texts.

Racialization and “Latin Looks”

Another central trope within the literature on Latina/o media representation and stardom is that of racial categorization, or racialization,¹⁰ and its relationship to Latina/o mediated imagery. Given the lack of a biological basis for racial categories, media representations and star texts have long assisted in the construction and reification of race in the United States. In the case of Latina/o characters and stars, they have been constructed variously as White or as non-White (or, much more rarely, as racially ambiguous) throughout film and television history, echoing the slippery relationship that Latina/os have held to Whiteness in the United States.¹¹ Scholars thus have interrogated how this dynamic and contradictory history has played out in film, television, and star promotional texts and explicated the social and industrial implications of these constructions.

In one dominant dynamic, opportunities for Latina/o casting and star promotion in US film historically were (and arguably still are) dependent on how closely performers embodied White beauty and body ideals. As scholars documenting Latina/o participation in the industry's early decades noted, even at this stage actors' and actresses' appearance had a determining influence on their careers: social and industry attitudes promoted the hiring of actors with fair skin, European rather than indigenous features, and medium-to-tall, slim bodies (Beltrán, 2009; Ríos-Bustamente, 1992). In this manner, racialized beauty and body ideals dictated the opportunities afforded to Latina/o acting hopefuls: while some light-skinned Latina/os were cast in lead roles – particularly in the late silent film era, as discussed in more detail below – darker-skinned, shorter, and more “ethnic”-appearing Latina/os might be cast as villains or servants at best. Valdivia (2007) updates this research in scholarship on Hollywood's contemporary privileging of the European, in the form of Spanish stars, in recent years.

Class associations notably have also played a role in the racialization of particular stars and characters throughout US film and television history. As Joanne Hershfield (2000) and I (2009) found in analysis of the career of Dolores Del Río, an actress from Mexico who was a film star in the late 1920s through the 1940s, emphasis on her upper-class background in her promotional texts encouraged her public image as an elegant foreigner rather than a racialized Mexican. My research (Beltrán, 2009) on Del Río's career and that of her contemporaries before and after the film industry's transition to sound confirmed also the “cultural racialization” of Latina/o stars in this period. I use the term to describe how Latina/o stars, as their accents could be heard, were racially categorized based on accent, cultural traits, and class markers rather than on their appearance, which often was not so different from that of their Euro-American and European counterparts. Moreover, as I document (Beltrán, 2009), in this era actors like Del Río, now that their accents could be heard, also were no longer considered for roles earmarked as White and were confined instead to Latina/o or other “ethnic” roles, regardless of how fair-skinned they might be. These standards reinforced burgeoning social notions of Latina/os as non-White and perhaps non-American in the more xenophobic climate of the Great Depression. Dolores Del Río herself noted in interviews in the late 1930s that she was increasingly cast in limited roles that capitalized mainly on her abilities as a dancer and were overshadowed by flamboyant costumes, such as the lacy dress in which she was costumed for Lancer Spy in 1937. She eventually became frustrated with the situation and in the early 1940s moved back to Mexico, where she quickly became a major film star.

The racial politics of these unwritten casting guidelines thus confined Latina/o performers to limited, typically underdeveloped roles that did little to showcase their appeal or talent. Public and industrial racial notions also dictated that they not portray unambiguously White characters. As Rita Moreno reported in retrospective interviews regarding her years as a young actress in the 1950s, she was often told that she could not audition for a role because they wanted “an American” for the part (cited in Beltrán, 2009, p. 78).

On a related note, in the same years of classical Hollywood in which Latina/os were not considered for White or colorblind roles, the small numbers of more developed Latina/o protagonist roles that existed were at times played by Anglo actors and actresses, apparently based on the belief that Latina/o actors would not draw US audiences in to theaters. Incidences of non-Latina/o actors in what have been termed “brownface” performances (because of the brown makeup often worn by the actors) include Paul Muni as a hot-headed Mexican American lawyer in Bordertown (1935), Marlon Brando as the Mexican revolutionary leader Emiliano Zapata in Viva Zapata! (1952), and Natalie Wood as Maria, a Puerto Rican woman, in West Side Story (1961). Brownface performance is more rare in recent years as it is increasingly viewed as politically incorrect, but it was witnessed as recently as the 1990s with the casting of non-Latina/o actors in such films as The House of the Spirits (1993) and The Perez Family (1995). Meanwhile, some contemporary Latina/o actors, such as Jennifer Lopez, Benicio del Toro, and Jessica Alba, have been cast in “White” roles in the last decade, breaking down former casting barriers that Latina/o actors had historically experienced.

The film and television industries' preferred appearance of Latina/o characters and stars, notably, has also shifted slightly in the last decades. As Rodríguez (1997) and Arlene Dávila (2001) note, film studios' and advertisers' preferred “Latin look” by the 1980s came to include a slightly tan skin tone (the better to differentiate Latina/os from African Americans), straight, dark hair, and dark eyes, despite the fact that casting Latina/o and Latin American roles in line with this look negates the actual diversity among Latina/os with respect to phenotypical features, skin tone, and body type. This look still dominates Hollywood expectations; America Ferrera, who is of Honduran descent, is viewed as Latina for casting purposes, while Cameron Diaz, of partial Cuban descent, is not. Building on Rodríguez's (1997, 2008) work, I also posit in my own scholarship on Latina/o stardom (2009) that we are witnessing a slight widening of the range of preferred Latino looks in contemporary narratives. Valdivia's research (2007) on the concurrent privileging of European ancestry and appearance, as witnessed in the privileging of Spanish actors such as Penelope Cruz in Hollywood film casting, cautions of limits to this expansion, however.

Further exploring the construction of Latina/o appearance and the racializing function it can serve is scholarship that has begun to interrogate the reinforcement of such ideals by Hollywood through its treatment of Latina beauty and bodies in mediated representation. As I note in research on this topic (2002), Latinas have been given a particular opportunity when a “Latin look” has been considered particularly beautiful – such as was the case for Dolores Del Río and Lupe Vélez in the 1920s and for Jennifer Lopez and Salma Hayek in the late 1990s – and I argue that notions of Latina beauty serve a discursive and often racializing function in mediated culture. This topic has since been taken up productively by other scholars, such as Isabel Molina-Guzmán and Angharad Valdivia (2004), Martha Mendible (2007), and Molina-Guzmán (2010). Molina-Guzmán, for instance, analyzes Latina representation and embodiment in contemporary media culture through case studies that include Jennifer Lopez, the female relatives of Elían Gonzalez, and Salma Hayek in her portrayal of Mexican artist Frida Kahlo in the 2002 film Frida.

Constructions of Latinidad and the Question of Authenticity

Another topic central to scholarship on Latina/o representation is how such representation constructs public notions of Latin-ness, or as scholars such as Aparicio and Chávez-Silverman (1997) and Molina-Guzmán and Valdivia (2004) have referred to it, Latinidad. As this survey of scholarship illustrates, Latinidad has been constructed in film and television in distinct and influential ways. In my own research (2009) I refer to the Latina/o figures and culture created within Hollywood film and television storylines as Hollywood Latinidad, a vision that has evolved in relation to the status of Latina/os within the US popular imagination. Other scholars employ Latinidad to refer also to how Latina/o individuals and communities see themselves and other Latina/os. Aparicio and Chávez-Silverman (1997), for instance, use the plural term Latinidades to refer to the diverse and multiple visions of Latinidad held by Latina/os themselves, while in later scholarship Molina-Guzmán (2010) points to and examines how Latinidad is constructed both within mediated culture and by Latina/os themselves.

A number of scholars have studied and reflected on how Latinidad is constructed through US media representation (and arguably all of the scholarship surveyed in this chapter explores this topic, directly or indirectly); much of this scholarship relates the media representation to the social politics and economic climate of particular eras, to media industry developments, or to the political and economic relationships of the United States with various Latin American countries, among other factors, pointing to the correlations between social climate, media industry agendas, and Latina/o representation. For instance, with a focus on the evolution of mediated Latinidad, in Latina/o Stars in US Eyes: The Making and Meanings of Film and TV Stardom (Beltrán, 2009), I explore how Latino/a casting and star promotion have reflected and at times challenged the shifting sociopolitical status of Latina/os, through in-depth examination of the careers and evolving star images of seven film and television stars at differing historical junctures since the 1920s.

As I document (2009), building on the historical research of multiple scholars, including Ana M. López (1991), Ramírez Berg (2002), and Noriega (1992, 2000a), US mediated culture has witnessed a number of “Latin waves,” during which Latina/o and Latin American cultural forms have held particular appeal for US audiences and Latina/o performers experienced greater opportunity and visibility. Such waves emphasized particular configurations of Latinidad, however, that arguably have toed the line of popular racial politics while offering seemingly celebratory versions of Latinidad for US consumption. A case in point is the first such wave that I hone in on (Beltrán, 2009): the open and welcoming star system that Latina/os such as Ramón Novarro, Dolores Del Río, Gilbert Roland, and Lupe Vélez, all from Mexico, encountered in 1920s Hollywood. The popularity of melodramatic films and roles, social tensions over immigration, women's increasing emancipation, and Italian actor Rudolph Valentino's success contributed to an interest in darkly handsome and foreign actors with romantic images during this era. These first Latin Lovers became international stars in the mid- to late 1920s, the last years of silent film. They were cast in major roles of all nationalities, but not, it should be emphasized, Latin American or Latina/o roles – in this period in which such roles were typically heavily stereotyped. Hollywood Latinidad in this era thus was diverging and ambivalent: Latina/os were typically absent or clearly racialized Others within storylines, while fair-skinned Latina/o stars might have starring roles portraying characters of all backgrounds except Latina/o.

I uncover differing dynamics of Hollywood Latinidad in my case study of Desi Arnaz (2009), Cuban-born musician and actor who acted in films in the 1940s and in I Love Lucy in the 1950s and beyond. Arnaz's film career recalls the shifts of the 1940s “Good Neighbor” era, which prompted another rise of interest in Latina/o performers, in this case singers and musicians. In support of the government's Good Neighbor Policy during World War II by which political alliances with Latin American countries were sought, a number of studios produced films set in Latin American locales that supported notions of North and South American friendships, as Alberto Sandoval Sánchez (1999) and Ana M. López (1991) have also explored. The films produced included biographical dramas and musicals, such as Disney's animated film The Three Caballeros (1945) and the Twentieth Century-Fox musical Weekend in Havana (1941). Latina/o actors such as Cesar Romero, Lupe Vélez, and Ricardo Montalbán thus experienced opportunities, while several performers with musical abilities were imported to perform in Latin musical numbers and play minor roles. Among the most successful were Desi Arnaz and singer-actress Carmen Miranda, who was born in Portugal but had grown up in Brazil. Miranda, known for her exaggerated costumes and performance style, appeared in such musicals throughout the 1940s. In numbers such as “The Lady in the Tutti Frutti Hat,” Miranda came to symbolize the comic, tropical Latina, in a spectacular but trivializing version of Latinidad. Arnaz also experienced success as a leader of Latin bands and in small film roles, particularly because of his skill at translating Latin music and culture for US audiences (Pérez-Firmat, 1994).

Another genre of films that at times presented US Latina/os in relation to social issues they were experiencing, the social problem film, also appeared in the late 1940s and 1950s, providing depictions of Latinidad that stood in stark contrast with the tropicalized Latinidad of the Latin musical. This post- World War II cycle of films emphasized exposing real-life social inequities, and thus presented narratives and images that in many ways challenged previous patterns of Latina/o representation. Some of these films addressed discrimination faced by Mexican Americans in their communities, including A Medal for Benny (1945) and The Ring (1952). Another, Salt of the Earth (1954), produced by blacklisted filmmakers, presented the real-life story of Mexican American miners who successfully went on strike to protest inhumane working conditions, and included the miners in the writing and as actors in the film. As Ramírez Berg (1992) and Noriega (1997) argue in historical studies, these films were distinct in their aim to present Latina/os realistically and with subjectivity.

Such films were fairly rare, however, and their popularity waned as the country and industry became more politically conservative in the 1950s. As I document in my research (Beltrán, 2009), Latina/o actors in the 1950s and 1960s, moreover, often found that their ethnic background was an obstacle to being cast in interesting, well-developed roles. As studios became disinterested in Latin-themed and social problem films, Latino actors and actresses experienced fewer opportunities. Some, such as Mexican Irish Anthony Quinn and Puerto Rican José Ferrer, downplayed their Latin heritage in their publicity. (In later decades, Raquel Welch and Martin Sheen, born Jo Raquel Tejada and Ramón Estévez, similarly changed their names to avoid type-casting.) Others, such as Rita Moreno, tried to stay true to their heritage; such performers struggled with limited opportunities. Latina/o roles might include juvenile delinquents and gang members in urban dramas such as Blackboard Jungle (1955) and West Side Story (1961), or bandits in Westerns. One major exception to these patterns was Desi Arnaz, who, with his wife Lucille Ball, starred in and also was executive producer of the series I Love Lucy and spin-off productions throughout the 1950s and some of the 1960s, making him the first Latino star and executive in television. As I note (2009), however, he was viewed as a White foreigner and honorary American – particularly in relation to the romantic and relatable image that he and Ball had in the US imagination – rather than as an “ethnic” Latina/o.

More recently, the late 1990s also were trumpeted as a new “Latin Wave” in US popular culture. In this period projections that Latina/os would soon surpass African Americans as the largest non-White group likely influenced views of the Latino audience as increasingly important and influential. The media industries also received important wake-up calls regarding profits to be garnered from successfully promoting Latina/o stars and media texts, particularly in 1995 when music sales skyrocketed after the death of Tejano music legend Selena, a beloved figure among Mexican Americans who became a posthumous star for non-Latinos as well. It is notable that Nuyorican actor Jennifer Lopez got what is considered her breakout role portraying the singer in Selena (1997) two years later.¹²

As I document (Beltrán, 2009), Jennifer Lopez's career prior to and after Selena is a testament to how shifting notions of the Latina/o audience and potential appeal to the mainstream provided new and greater openings for Latina/o stardom. Lopez found her first opportunities in Latino and African American-helmed film and television products, including the sketch comedy series In Living Color (Fox, 1990–1994), and such films as My Family (Gregory Nava, 1995) and Money Train (Joseph Ruben, 1995), starring Wesley Snipes and Woody Harrelson. She built on this to then star in mainstream films after Selena, ultimately launching a music career, production company, and clothing line in addition to a successful film career. In tandem with this success, Latinidad as constructed through Lopez's star text was complicated by ambivalent discourses and the deployment of traditional stereotypes even while celebratory, however, such as in the “booty brouhaha” that called attention to Lopez's purportedly unique derrière in the late 1990s (Beltrán, 2002, 2009). She and other Latina/o performers also were described as “crossover” stars, a controversial moniker given its implication that Latina/os existed outside the boundaries of US culture. The term was heard less by the 2000s, as Lopez has been joined by a variety of Latina/o performers within the realm of US stars.

In relation to Latina/o stars and more generally to study of how Latinidad has been constructed through mediated representation, researchers also have raised questions regarding the authenticity, or the historical and cultural accuracy, of Latina/o characters and star images. Scholars of film and media, for instance, have made note that Latin American cultures have often been conflated in inaccurate representations in Westerns, musicals, and other Hollywood films, and that stars' performances and images often may not be accepted as authentic by Latina/o viewers as well. For instance, Sandoval-Sánchez (1999), in his analysis of the US theatrical and film careers of Carmen Miranda and Desi Arnaz, raises the argument that their Broadway and Hollywood performances in the 1940s conflated elements of Latin American cultures and submerged the Afro-Latino elements within those cultures to pose an imaginary, inauthentic Latinidad that fit comfortably with popular US notions at the time.

The trope of troubled authenticity has continued to have relevance in relation to Latina/o representation and is echoed in my own research (2009) on comedian Freddie Prinze, who rose to stardom playing the role of Mexican American Chico Rodriguez in the NBC comedy Chico and the Man (1974–1978). Prinze's character, notably, was the subject of ongoing debate and negotiation among the producers, the network, and Chicana/o and other viewers in the 1970s. Audience members who complained about the series felt that Prinze, of Hungarian and Puerto Rican descent, was not authentic in his portrayal of Chico and that the role as constructed was denigrating. Prinze, arguably the first Latino television star since Desi Arnaz, appealed in interviews that he was being unfairly judged. Despite the complaints and controversy, a wide audience tuned in to his performances, given the show's ratings. The series became a hit, and Prinze's career may have reached greater heights if it were not for his suicide in 1977.

A number of scholars (including this author) also have addressed the complicated questions related to demands for increased or “non-stereotypical” Latina/o representation. As Valdivia (2010) asks: “Are we asking for more Latina/os that are recognizable as Latina/o? If so, does this mean we need the inclusion of elements that we recognize as Latinidad?” (p. 124). This conundrum – of demanding greater Latina/o visibility but a diminishing of stereotyped images – is increasingly central to contemporary media culture. As such, it has been the focus of the many studies that have explored questions of authenticity and stereotype in the examination of Nuyorican star Jennifer Lopez, for instance.¹³ Given the dearth of Latina/o images in the entertainment media, Lopez and other Latina/o stars carry a heavy burden of representation – or of being expected to stand in for an entire underrepresented community.¹⁴ On the other hand, what is an authentic image, and who gets to decide? The lack of definitive answers to these questions underscores the natural tensions that exist in media representation between cultural marking (establishing that a character is Latina/o), authenticity, and stereotype.

Hybridity and Transnationalism

Also increasingly central to the study of Latina/o media representation is a focus on racial and ethnic hybridity (or mestizaje, as Gloria Anzaldúa and other scholars refer to it¹⁵). Scholars such as Anzaldúa (1987), Valdivia (particularly in 2004, 2008), Gregory Velasco y Trianosky (2003), and Molina-Guzmán (2010) have stressed the importance of hybridity to Latina/o culture and identity, given the history of racially mixed ancestry for Latina/os – even while Latina/o communities may deny African or indigenous ancestry and film and television representation typically posit Latina/os as non-White or White. Media scholars increasingly note that hybridity thus is the constant flip side of racialization, for Latina/os in media representation and elsewhere in US social life. Anzaldúa (1987) claimed in her explication of the New Mestiza (who embraces her heritage in all of its multiplicity) that challenging denial of hybridity, while difficult, could empower Latina/os and all who experience oppression. As Anzaldúa and subsequent scholars have highlighted, Latina/o mestizaje has the potential to cross boundaries and disturb racial categories. Researchers, such as Molina-Guzmán (2010), have underscored the danger that Latina/o mediated figures thus pose through calling attention to and embodying the fault lines between racialized and gendered categories.

In my own scholarship I have taken up exploration of the overlap between Latinidad and hybridity in studies that have focused on ethnically ambiguous and mixed Latina/o representation and stardom. While Latina/o stars with European heritage have always been commonplace in Hollywood, given the privileging of White norms of beauty, a more recent development is the rising visibility of performers who have made their mixed heritage central to their promotion. In “The New Hollywood Racelessness: Only the Fast, Furious (and Multi-Racial) Will Survive” (2005), I note the rising visibility of and vogue for mixed-race actors and models, including those of partial Latino ancestry, in US popular culture since the late 1990s and argue that ethnically ambiguous actors and characters constitute a new racial paradigm that is gaining momentum (but with limited impact on traditions of White centrism still predominant in contemporary action films). In “Mixed Race in Latinowood: Latino Stardom and Ethnic Ambiguity in the Era of Dark Angels” (2008), I further interrogate such trends in Latina/o representation. Based on comparative analysis of the careers of Jessica Alba and Rosario Dawson, both of partial Latina/o heritage, I conclude that a racially hegemonic cultural imaginary continues to shape opportunities experienced by Latina/o actors of mixed heritage, with Alba given broader opportunities in film roles and in fact more fully embraced within Latina/o communities and by media advocacy groups, presumably because her looks are more assimilable to Whiteness.

An overlapping strand of scholarship calls attention to Latina/o diaspora and migration and transnational media flows in relation to Latina/o representation. In contrast, much of the early scholarship on Latina/o media representation took up its research from the perspective of nation, with respect to the implications regarding national identities and the place of Latina/os within the (North) American imaginary. My own 2009 books title, Latina/o Stars in US Eyes, is a vivid illustration. However, in a productive movement some scholars are conceptualizing study of Latina/o representation in relation to the diaspora, the movement of Latina/o audiences, and global media flows. This is particularly useful given the continuous flow of Latina/o immigrants to the United States in the early part of the twentieth century, primarily from Mexico but in increasing numbers from Central and South American countries since. As recent immigrants join Mexican Americans and Puerto Ricans whose families have been here for centuries, the US Latina/o population is dynamically tied to a global diaspora, with the impact of such transnational ties and movement underresearched elements of Hollywood Latinidad. Recent studies that take up diaspora as a central trope include Maria Elena Cepeda's Musical ImagiNation: US–Columbian Identity and the Latin Music Boom (2010) and Molina-Guzmán's Dangerous Curves (2010). Among other topics, they trace how Latina/o media texts are produced and consumed in the contemporary era of global media flows and multiple and diverse audiences consuming Latinidad. An apt illustration is one of Molina-Guzmán's (2010) case studies, the construction of Mexican artist Frida Kahlo for Latina/o and non-Latina/o, US, and international audiences in the film Frida (2002), with Salma Hayek standing in for Kahlo through multiple, competing discourses. Television series like Ugly Betty (ABC, 2006–2010), an adaptation of the Colombian telenovela Yo soy Betty la fea (1999–2001), also mark shifts taking place in the source and impact of Latina/o representations in relation to transnational media flows and global audiences.

Self-Representation and Participation in Mainstream Media

In relation to and at times in conjunction with scholarship that has explored Latina/o representation and stardom, researchers also have pointed to the importance of Latina/o employment within the media industries, particularly as writers and producers. A 1999 Tomás Rivera Policy Institute study (Pachón, DeSipio, de la Garza, & Noriega, 2000) commissioned by the Screen Actors Guild (SAG) found that most Latina/o actors experience obstacles to securing agents and finding employment. In 1998, Latina/os comprised only 4.3% of total SAG membership, worked only 2.9% of total work days, and were cast in supporting rather than leading roles far more than White or African American actors. Latina/os also are largely absent from media industry and talent management executive circles (Noriega, 2000b). The professional guilds for writers, actors, directors, and producers now report statistics regarding diversity in their ranks, while media advocacy groups such as the National Hispanic Media Coalition and journalists regularly note the continuing dearth of Latina/o writers, producers, and executives in television. An assumption of such efforts is that Latina/o media producers will be mindful of including Latina/os in media narratives and more accurately and fairly represent Latina/o characters and culture, an outcome that is not guaranteed, however.

Until the 1970s and well into the 1980s, moreover, Latina/os in the United States typically did not have access to training or support to become film and television producers within the mainstream media industries. Importantly, as Noriega (1992, 2000a) and other scholars of early Chicana/o and Puerto Rican film document, Latina/o media production has its roots in civil rights activism, and specifically the Mexican American and Puerto Rican movements, which reached their zenith in the late 1960s and early 1970s. It was during this period that the term Chicano (and, for women, Chicana) began to be embraced as a label of pride by Mexican Americans. Given that many of these Chicana/o and Puerto Rican activists were the first generation to have been raised on television, their activism also often included awareness of the power of media images and of the need for creative control in their production.

As Noriega (2000a) notes, battles over media representation in this period were fought on two fronts by Chicana/o and Puerto Rican activists. Latino media advocacy groups, such as the Council to Advance and Restore the Image of Spanish-Speaking and Mexican Americans (CARISSMA), the Puerto Rican Action and Media Council, and Justicia, also known as Justice for Chicanos in the Motion Picture Industry, protested media images that were seen as denigrating and demanded training opportunities for Latina/os in the television and film industries. In addition, some Latina/os began producing short films and public affairs television series in conjunction with their activism. These films and programs are considered the first wave of Chicano and Puerto Rican cinemas; early activist-filmmakers included Moctesuma Esparza, Sylvia Morales, Jesus Salvador Treviño, Luis Valdez, and Bení Matias. As scholars of early Chicana/o and Puerto Rican film such as Noriega, Rosa Linda Fregoso (1992), and Lillian Jiménez (1998) have documented, such self-representation and the Latina/o media producers to follow in later generations importantly complicate notions of Latinidad and of diversity within Latina/o communities.

As a result of these entrances, Latina/o filmmakers began to produce feature films and have an impact on Hollywood's construction of Latinidad by the 1980s. A number of these films were distributed nationally to respectable critics' reviews and box office.¹⁶ They included Luis Valdez's Zoot Suit (1981) and La Bamba (1987), Gregory Nava's El Norte (1983), Cheech Marin's Born in East L.A. (1987), and Ramón Menéndez's Stand and Deliver(1988),¹⁷ and were joined by the first wave of films by Cuban directors who now lived in exile in the United States, such as León Ichaso and Orlando Jimenez Leal's El Super (1979) and Ichaso's Crossover Dreams (1985). True to common assumptions of the impact of self-representation, these films offered Latina/o (and particularly male) characters with cultural specificity as well as with subjectivity and dignity. As a result, they catapulted a few to stardom, such as Mexican American actor Edward James Olmos, who portrayed El Pachuco in Luis Valdez's Zoot Suit and teacher Jaime Escalante in Stand and Deliver, and Puerto Rican Esai Morales, who played Richie Valens in La Bamba, as I note in my research (Beltrán, 2009). A number of Latin American actors also were cast in starring roles in other Hollywood films in this period; they included Cuban actor Andy Garcia, Irish Cuban Mercedes Ruehl, and Maria Conchita Alonso, a Venezuelan of Cuban descent. Curiously, the success of this handful of films and stars led the news media to dub the 1980s the “Decade of the Hispanic” in 1987. In the press coverage, Olmos also was promoted as the primary star and as a symbol of Latino visibility in US popular culture. In interrogating this promotional focus for these films and for Olmos, I found (Beltrán, 2009), building on the work of Kathleen Newman (1992), that it constructed this slight rise in Latina/o visibility as unthreatening to the US status quo. Given how Olmos in the 1980s portrayed decidedly ethnic characters that fought within rather than against the system and was known as a champion of the oppressed in his public appearances, his star image did not threaten to displace the traditional, White Hollywood hero or hierarchies within the US imagination.

With respect to Latina/o self-representation, a greater diversity in the types of stories and characters has emerged in Latina/o-themed film projects since the 1990s, reflecting the divergent interests of the newest generation of Latino and Latina filmmakers and their presumed audiences. Successful films with Latino themes and main characters since the 1990s include Real Women Have Curves (2002), directed by Columbian filmmaker Patricia Cordoso, and Quinceañera (2006, Richard Glatzer, Wash Westmoreland). A number of new actors and actresses have found success and stardom as a result. In recent years, Latina/o-themed films are rarer while Latina/o actors are often integrated into diverse ensemble cast projects, as is the case for the television series Ugly Betty, shifts that call for new and targeted study.

Conclusion: Contemporary Trends and Research Questions

Can we envision another way of representing Latina/os? And does this actually amount to assimilation or a new hybridity of being? These are questions we might need to remember as we continue our analysis and resulting activism.

(Valdivia (2010, p. 124))

The present day is one in which multiple and competing trends in representation of Latina/os beg further critical examination. In the 2000s, the roster of Latino/a actors with name recognition among non-Latinos and Latinos alike has grown, as actors such as America Ferrera, Michael Peña, and Selena Gomez are joining the likes of Edward James Olmos and Jennifer Lopez in the public imagination and a few Latina/os for the first time are considered international box office draws. Latinas are being posited as protagonists in children's programming, such as in Dora the Explorer (Nick Jr., 2000–), The Wizards of Waverly Place (Disney Channel, 2007–), and Camp Rock (Matthew Diamond, 2008). We are witnessing a greater nuance at times in Latina/o representation and the rise of a handful of Latina and Latino writers and media producers, even while denigrating images have not disappeared altogether.

The visibility and apparent popularity of Latina/o actors and characters today illustrates both how marketable Latinidad now is and tensions therein (Molina-Guzmán, 2010). Given these trends, some scholars are exploring the increasing “Latinization” of US culture as Latina/o culture and stars become more popular and integrated, to differing conclusions. Molina-Guzmán (2010), Valdivia (2008, 2010), I in my own work (Beltrán, 2009), and other contemporary scholars importantly draw attention to the multiple implications of such hypervisibility. These scholars remind us that this also entails the inclusion of contradictory discourses that reaffirm Latina and female disenfranchisement in national and global culture, particularly as Latina/o immigrants are scapegoated for US social problems and xenophobia is on the rise, pointing to the need for further in-depth study of such multivalent representation and its impact.

NOTES

1 The terms Latino (and the more gender-encompassing Latina/o) and Hispanic are both used to varying degrees in different regions in the United States to refer to people whose ancestry can be traced to Latin American countries. Hispanic, a term coined by the US government in the 1980s that makes reference to Spanish ancestry and the Spanish language, is used decreasingly, however, in favor of Latino, which privileges geographic reference and acknowledges indigenous and mixed ancestry.

2 For more information on this time period and Mexican American history more generally, see Rodolfo Acuña (2000).

3 See US Census Bureau, The Hispanic Population: A Census Bureau Brief (2001), at http://www.census.gov/prod/2001pubs/c2kbr01-3.pdf.

4 Second- and third-generation Latina/os in particular typically consume both English and Spanish-language media (Johnson, 2000).

5 See Jennifer M. Ortman and Cristine M. Guarneri, US Census Bureau, United States Population Projections 2000 to 2050 (2009), at http://www.census.gov/population/www/projections/analytical-document09.pdf.

6 A small number of Latina/os of privileged backgrounds were involved in film production prior to the transition to sound film, however, as Ríos-Bustamente (1992) documents regarding the silent film era.

7 Commercial television networks began producing and broadcasting narrative programming in the United States in the last years of the 1940s, while it spread more widely and more Americans watched television regularly in the 1950s.

8 When stardom is viewed in purely economic terms, film and television stars are defined as those actors whose popular appeal is such that they can draw in viewers based on their name alone. Stars with such demonstrable appeal to draw in viewers to movie theaters or to watch a television series are considered to be “bankable” and serve as driving forces for media production.

9 Gaye Tuchman (1978), describing how women were represented in the mainstream media in that period, coined the term symbolic annihilation to describe these dynamics. She broke this down further to three distinct processes: omission, trivialization, and condemnation.

10 Racialization, a term coined by Omi and Winant (1986), is the process by which racial categories and related associations have been constructed and reified through social institutions, including the entertainment media, and social history.

11 Confusion still exists regarding whether Latina/os are a race or an ethnic group. While Latina/os are not considered a separate race by the government, they are a racialized ethnic group, viewed as non-White in the popular imagination.

12 The term Nuyorican refers to an individual born in New York and of Puerto Rican heritage.

13 Focus on Jennifer Lopez has been so prevalent in recent scholarship that Valdivia (2010) singles her out as a case study running at the end of every chapter of her overview of Latina/o communication studies to discuss the trend; among the scholars who have analyzed the representation of Lopez at some stage of her career are Frances Negrón Mutaner (1997), Barrera (2002), Aparicio (2003), Molina-Guzmán and Valdivia (2004), Valdivia (2007), and myself (2002, 2009).

14 The dynamics of the burden of representation are explored by scholars such as Shohat and Stam (1994) and can be traced back to early writers on African American representation such as James Baldwin (1968).

15 Mestizaje, a Spanish word, refers to mixture or mixing; it has commonly been used to describe racial mixing in Latin American countries. Gloria Anzaldúa (1987) made the term central to her scholarship on the progressive utility of embracing submerged elements of Mexican American heritage and marginalized people within communities.

16 As Henry Puente (2004) reports in research on the distribution of US Latino films in the 1980s and 1990s, this involved many missteps on the part of US film studios and distribution companies, however, particularly regarding how to best market films to Latina/o audiences and the mainstream public.

17 Latina filmmakers, while they did exist in this period, tended to produce short films outside the Hollywood system, as Fregoso (1992) explicates on Chicana media production.

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