Latina/o Americans in Film and Television

Abstract

Latino Americans, also termed Hispanics, as individuals with ancestry in the US Southwest, Mexico, Puerto Rico, or Latin American countries, are widely diverse, even while their cinematic and televisual representations have often flattened differences in their construction of an imagined, universal Latin-ness, or Latinidad. This representational history has its roots in social history and particularly the historical oppression of Mexican Americans. Mexican Americans also historically have been the largest US Latino group. In 2011, they made up 64.6 percent of all Latino Americans, followed by Puerto Ricans (9.5 percent), Salvadorans (3.8 percent), Cuban Americans (3.5 percent), and smaller but increasing numbers of Latinos of Central and South American descent. Given their varied histories, Latino Americans differ widely with respect to such factors as class, immigrant generation, and media habits. Spanish-language usage is a commonality among many but not all Latino Americans. Younger Latino Americans are also increasingly acculturated, demonstrating hybrid media consumption of both English- and Spanish-language popular culture forms. Latino representation in US film and television is increasingly important to scholarship on American media, as the Latino population has grown exponentially in the last century and is expected to continue to increase. Latinos became the largest nonwhite group in the United States in 2000 and now make up more than 17 percent of the population and 20 percent of youth under the age of eighteen, according to the US Census Bureau. Scholarship on Latino 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 (Image of the Mexican American in Fiction and Film, 1980), Frank Javier Garcia Berumen (The Chicano/Hispanic Image in American Film, 1995), Charles Ramírez Berg (whose work was later collected in Latino Images in Film: Stereotypes, Subversion and Resistance, 2002), Chon Noriega (editor of Chicanos and Film: Representation and Resistance, 1992), Rosa Linda Fregoso (The Bronze Screen: Chicana and Chicano Film Culture, 1993), and Clara Rodríguez (editor of Latin Looks: Images of Latinas and Latinos in the US Media, 1997). Some of the work of these scholars necessarily involved establishing the legitimacy of studying Latinos and film and television representation, as Angharad Valdivia (see Valdivia 2008, cited under Anthologies) and Ramírez Berg (see Berg 2002, cited under Introductory Works) have noted. The next generations of scholars have benefited from these inroads in Latino studies and media studies and the growth and acceptance of cultural studies traditions. Scholars in recent decades have explored Latino American media representation and stardom in US film and television from a variety of disciplinary and methodological approaches. This article reviews the most useful scholarship on Latinos and US film and television, with special attention to the salient themes and notable scholars in the field.