Advertising patriotism: The “Yo Soy El Army” campaign and the politics of visibility for Latina/o youth

Abstract

Today’s young Latina/os have come of age in a decade marked by war, rising nativism, and economic crisis. As the fastest growing group of young people in the United States, they have been identified by the US military as a primary target of current and future long-term recruitment strategies. In this article, I examine the “Yo Soy El Army” campaign, a Latino-directed recruitment initiative of the US Army (2001–2005), to consider how ethnic marketing shapes, distills, and otherwise reveals important insights about citizenship, nationalism, and patriotism for Latina/o youth in the post-9/11 era.