Top-Down and Bottom-Up Strategies of Identity Construction in Ethnic Media

Abstract

In this article, I investigate the construction of Latin@ identities within a Spanish language radio station broadcasting to a Latin American audience in the Washington–Baltimore area. I argue that ethnic media such as this radio station provide a channel for the enactment of interests and strategies at different local and translocal scales and that therefore the analysis of discourse and communication processes within such media provides a glimpse into the complexities that underlie identity construction among transnational communities. I focus on the contrast between top-down strategies used by the radio owners, advertisers and other agents to build a Latin@ identity and bottom-up processes of identity negotiation among hosts within the radio. While top-down strategies converge in proposing an image of local Latin@s as a homogeneous, culturally and linguistically united transnational community, concrete identity negotiations among hosts complicate this picture, illustrating potential divisions within such imagined community. I focus on exchanges involving English and Spanish by Spanish- or English-dominant hosts to illustrate diverging perceptions about the significance for identity claims of using hybrid English–Spanish talk and accented or unaccented varieties of English.