Performing Representational Labor: Blackness, Indigeneity, and Legibility in Global Latinx Media Cultures

Abstract

ABSTRACT This essay analyzes the representational work and institutional reception of two contemporary transnational icons, singer/actress Amara La Negra and actress Yalitza Aparicio. The author argues that Amara La Negra and Yalitza Aparicio disrupt the dominant trope of racial ambiguity circulating in transnational media representations of Latina womanhood. In doing so, these two public figures rupture hegemonic racial ideologies embedded in colonial regimes via their self-fashioning in media. This essay also documents how Amara La Negra and Yalitza Aparicio are received by various media outlets in both English-and Spanish language markets in order to understand how their representations register within current racial formations in the Americas. The analysis reveals that Amara La Negra and Yalitza Aparicio perform both legible and illegible representational labor because while their presence and activism broadens the contours of how Latinidad is depicted globally, their messages are deemed illegible or threatening depending on the media context. In particular, within English-language media they are deemed as the exotic, foreign Other while in Spanish-language media their claims to Blackness and Indigeneity are either outright refused or ridiculed.