International Journal of Cultural
Studies
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Popular media as public 'sphericules' for diasporic communities
Stuart Cunningham
International Journal of Cultural Studies 2001; 4; 131
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A RT I CLE
INTERNATIONAL
journal of
CULTURAL st udies
Copyright © 2001 SAGE Publicat ions
London, Thousand Oaks,
CA and New Delhi
Volume 4(2): 131–147
[1367-8779(200106)4:2; 131–147; 017215]
Popular media as public ‘sphericules’ for
diasporic communities
●
St uart Cunningham
Q ueensland University of Technology
● The dynamics of ‘diasporic’ video, t elevision, cinema, music
and Int ernet use – w here peoples displaced f rom homelands by migrat ion,
ref ugee st at us or business and economic imperat ive use media t o negot iat e new
cult ural ident it ies – off er challenges f or how media and cult ure are underst ood in
our t imes. Draw ing on research published in Float ing Lives: The M edia and Asian
Diasporas, on dynamics t hat are indust rial (t he pat hw ays by w hich t hese media
t ravel t o t heir mult if arious dest inat ions), t ext ual and audience-relat ed (t ypes of
diasporic st yle and pract ice w here popular cult ure debat es and moral panics are
played out in cult urally divergent circumst ances among communit ies marked by
int ernal diff erence and ext ernal ‘ot hering’), t he art icle w ill int errogat e f urt her
t he nat ure of t he public ‘sphericules’ f ormed around diasporic media. ●
A BSTRA CT
KEY W O RD S
●
diaspora
●
et hnic minorit ies
●
media
●
public sphere
The research team that authored Floating L ives: T he M edia and A sian
D iasporas (Cunningham and Sinclair, 2000) mapped the mediascapes of
Asian diasporic communities against the background of the theoretical and
policy territory of understanding media use in contemporary, culturally
plural societies. In this article, I will take further than Floating L ives the
nature of the public spheres activated around diasporic media as a specific
form of public communication, by engaging with public sphere debates and
assessing the contribution that the research conducted for Floating L ives
might make to those debates.
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The public sphere, in its classic sense advanced in the work of Jürgen
H abermas (1989 [1962]), is a space of open debate standing against the state
as a special subset of civil society in which the logic of ‘democratic equivalence’ is cultivated. The concept has been used regularly in the fields of
media, cultural and communications studies to theorize the media’s articulation between the state and civil society. Indeed, N icholas Garnham
claimed in the mid-1990s that the public sphere had replaced the concept
of hegemony as the central motivating idea in media and cultural studies
(Garnham, 1995). This is certainly an overstatement, but it is equally certain
that, almost 40 years since H abermas first published his public sphere argument, and almost 30 years since it was first published in outline in English
(H abermas, 1974), the debate continues strongly over how progressive
elements of civil societies are constructed and how media support, inhibit
or, indeed, are coterminous with such self-determining public communication.
The debate is marked out at either end of the spectrum by those, on the
one hand, for whom the contemporary western public sphere has been tarnished or even fatally compromised by the encroachment of particularly
commercial media and communications (for example, Schiller, 1989). O n
the other hand, there are those for whom the media have become the main,
if not the only, vehicle for whatever can be held to exist of the public sphere
in such societies. Such ‘media-centric’ theorists in these fields can hold that
the media actually envelop the public sphere:
The ‘mediasphere’ is the whole universe of media . . . in all languages in all
countries. It therefore completely encloses and contains as a differentiated
part of itself the (H abermasian) public sphere (or the many public spheres),
and it is itself contained by the much larger semiosphere . . . which is the
whole universe of sense-making by whatever means, including speech . . . it
is clear that television is a crucial site of the mediasphere and a crucial mediator between general cultural sense-making systems (the semiosphere) and
specialist components of social sense-making like the public sphere. H ence
the public sphere can be rethought not as a category binarily contrasted with
its implied opposite, the private sphere, but as a ‘Russian doll’ enclosed within
a larger mediasphere, itself enclosed within the semiosphere. And within ‘the’
public sphere, there may equally be found, Russian-doll style, further countercultural, oppositional or minoritarian public spheres. (H artley, 1999:
217–18)
H artley’s topography has the virtue of clarity, scope and heuristic utility,
even while it remains provocatively media-centric. This is mostly due to
H artley’s commitment to the strictly textual provenance of public communication, and to his greater interest in Lotman’s notion of the semiosphere than H abermas’ modernist understanding that the public sphere
stands outside and even against its ‘mediatization’.
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Cunningham
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Popular media as public ‘sphericules’
I will complicate that topography by suggesting that minoritarian public
spheres are rarely subsets of classic nationally bound public spheres but are
none the less vibrant, globalized but very specific spaces of self- and community-making and identity (see, for example, H usband, 1998). I agree with
H artley, however, in his iconoclastic insistence that the commercial realm
must be factored into the debate more centrally and positively than it has
been to date. Diasporic media entrepreneurs and producers are mostly uninterested in or wary of the state, in part because the copyright status of much
of their production is dubious.
I will also stress another neglected aspect of the public sphere debate
developed by Jim M cGuigan (1998: 92) – the ‘affective’ as much as ‘effective’ dimension of public communication, which allows for an adequate
grasp of entertainment in a debate dominated by ratiocinative and informational activity. M cGuigan speaks of a ‘rather softer’ conception of the
public sphere than is found in the work of H abermas and others (1998: 98)
and develops these ideas around the significance of affective popular politics expressed through media mobilization of western responses to poverty
and aid campaigns. Underdeveloped, though, and tantalisingly so, is the role
played by the entertainment content of the media in the formation and
reproduction of public communication (M cGuigan, 1998: 98, quoting
Garnham, 1992: 274). This is the domain on which such strongly opposed
writers as M cGuigan and H artley might begin to at least share an object of
study.
Todd Gitlin has posed the question as to whether we can continue to
speak of the ideal of the public sphere as an increasingly complex, polyethnic, communications-saturated series of societies develop around the
world. Rather, what might be emerging are numerous public ‘sphericules’:
‘does it not look as though the public sphere, in falling, has shattered into
a scatter of globules, like mercury?’ (Gitlin, 1998: 173). Gitlin’s answer is
the deeply pessimistic one of seeing the future as the irretrievable loss of
elements of a modernist public commonality.
The spatial metaphor of fragmentation, of dissolution, of the centre not
holding, assumes that there is a singular nation-state to anchor it. Thinking
of public sphericules as constituted beyond the singular nation-state, as
global narrow casting of polity and culture, assists in restoring them to a
place – not necessarily counter-hegemonic but certainly culturally plural and
dynamically contending with western forms for recognition – of undeniable
importance for contemporary, culturally plural societies and any media, cultural and communication studies claiming similar contemporaneity.
There are now several claims for such public sphericules. One can speak of
a feminist public sphere and international public sphericules constituted
around environmental or human rights issues. They may take the form of ‘subaltern counterpublics’, as Nancy Fraser (1992) calls them, or they may be
termed taste cultures, such as those formed around gay style (which doesn’t
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of course exclude them from acting as ‘counterpublics’). As John H artley and
Allen McKee put it in The Indigenous Public Sphere (2000: 3), these are possibly peculiar examples of public spheres because they are not predicated on
any nation that a public sphere usually expresses – they are the ‘civil societies’
of nations without borders, without state institutions and without citizens.
These authors go on to suggest that such public spheres might stand as a model
for developments in late modern culture generally, with do-it-yourself citizenship based on culture, identity and voluntary belonging rather than based on
rights derived from, and obligations to, a state.
M y present argument is in part a contribution to the elaboration of just
such a project. H owever, there are still undeniably relations of dominance,
and ‘mainstreams’ and ‘peripheries’; the metaphor is not simply a series of
sphericules, overlapping to a greater or lesser extent. Although this latter
explanatory model goes some distance in explaining the complexity of overlapping taste cultures, identity formations, social commitments and specialist understandings that constitute the horizon of many if not most
citizens/consumers in post-industrial societies, there are broad consensuses
and agenda-setting capabilities that cannot be gainsaid in enthusiasm for
embracing tout court a ‘capillary’ model of power. The key, as H artley and
M cKee identify, is the degree of control over the meanings created about
and within the sphericule (2000: 3, 7) and by which this control is exercised.
In contrast to Gitlin, then, I argue that ethno-specific global mediatized
communities display in microcosm elements we would expect to find in ‘the’
public sphere. Such activities may constitute valid and indeed dynamic
counter-examples to a discourse of decline and fragmentation, while taking
full account of contemporary vectors of communication in a globalizing,
commercializing and pluralizing world.
O ngoing public sphere debates in the field, then, continue to be structured
around dualisms which are arguably less aids than inhibitors of analysis:
dualisms such as public–private, information–entertainment, cognition–
affect or emotion, public versus commercial culture and – the ‘master’
dualism – public sphere in the singular or plural. What follows is no pretence at a H egelian A ufhebung (transcendence) catching up these dualisms
in a grand synthesis, but rather a contribution to a more positive account
of the operations of media-based public communication – in this case,
ethno-specific diasporic sphericules – which place a different slant on highly
generalized debates about globalization, commercialization and the fate of
public communication in these contexts.
The ethno-specific mediatized sphericule
First, they are indeed ‘sphericules’; that is, they are social fragments that do
not have critical mass. N evertheless, they share many of the characteristics
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Popular media as public ‘sphericules’
of the classically conceived public sphere – they provide a central site for
public communication in globally dispersed communities, stage communal
difference and discord productively, and work to articulate insider ethnospecific identities – which are by definition ‘multi-national’, even global – to
the wider ‘host’ environments.
The audience research for Floating L ives was conducted in communities
in Australia. Although Australia is, in proportional terms, the world’s
second-largest immigrant nation next to Israel, the relatively low numbers
of any individual group (at present, more than 150 ethnic groups speaking
over 100 different languages) has meant that a critical mass of a few dominant N on-English Speaking Background (N ESB) groupings has not made
the impact that H ispanic peoples, for example, have made in the United
States. N o one non-Anglo Celt ethnic group has, therefore, reached ‘critical
mass’ in terms of being able to operate significantly as a self-contained community in the nation. For this reason, Australia offers a useful laboratory
for testing notions of diasporic communities that need to be ‘de-essentialized’, adapted to conditions where ethnicities and sub-ethnicities jostle in
ways that would have been unlikely or impossible in their respective homeland settings or where long and sustained patterns of immigration have produced a critical mass of singular ethnicities.
Sinclair et al.’s (2000) study of the Chinese in Floating L ives posits that
the sources, socioeconomic backgrounds and circumstances of Chinese
immigrant arrivals in Australia have been much more diverse than those of
Chinese communities in the other great contemporary immigrant-receiving
countries such as the United States, Canada, Britain and N ew Z ealand, or
earlier immigrant-receiving countries in Southeast Asia, South America,
Europe and Africa. To make sense of ‘the’ Chinese community is to break
it down into a series of complex and often interrelated sub-groupings based
on geographical origin – mainland (PRC), Southeast Asia (Indonesia,
M alaysia and Singapore), Taiwan, Indochina (Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia),
H ong Kong – together with overlapping language and dialect use.
Similarly, Cunningham and N guyen’s (2000) Vietnamese study shows that
there are significant differences among quite a small population along axes
of generation, ethnicity, region of the home country, education and class, and
recency of arrival and conditions under which arrival took place. And for the
Fiji Indians in M anas Ray’s work (2000), if it was legislated racial discrimination that compelled them to leave Fiji, in Australia they find themselves
‘othered’ by, and othering, the mainland Indian groupings who contest the
authenticity of Fiji Indian claims to rootedness in Indian popular culture.
The formats for diasporic popular media owe much to their inscription
within such ‘narrowcast’ cultural spaces and share many significant attributes: karaoke, with its performative, communal and de-aestheticized performative and communal space (Wong, 1994); the Vietnamese variety music
video and ‘Paris/Sydney/Toronto by N ight’ live show formats; and the
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typical ‘modular’ Bollywood film and accompanying live and playback
music culture.
Against the locus of examination of the ‘diasporic imagination’ as one of
aesthetically transgressive hybridity produced out of a presumed ‘ontological condition’ occupied by the migrant subject, these are not necessarily
aesthetically transgressive or politically progressive texts. Their politics
cannot be read off their textual forms, but must be grasped in the use to
which they are put in the communities. In Floating L ives we see these uses
as centring on popular culture debates – where communities contend around
the politics, identity formations and tensions of hybrid popular forms
emerging to serve the diasporas.
M uch diasporic cultural expression is a struggle for survival, identity and
assertion, and it can be a struggle as much enforced by the necessities of
coming to terms with the dominant culture as it is freely assumed. And the
results may not be pretty. The instability of cultural maintenance and
negotiation can lead, at one extreme, to being locked into a time warp with
the fetishized homeland – as it once might have been but no longer is or can
be; and, at the other, to assimilation to the dominant host culture and a loss
of place in one’s originary culture. It can involve insistent reactionary politics and extreme overcommercialization (N aficy [1993: 71] cites a situation
in 1987 when Iranian television in Los Angeles was scheduling more than
40 minutes advertising an hour) because of the need to fund expensive forms
of media for a narrowcast audience; and textual material of excoriating
tragedy (the [fictional] self-immolation and [actual] atrocity scenarios
played out in some, respectively, Iranian and Croatian videos), as recounted
by N aficy and by Kolar-Panov (1997).
Second, there is explanatory pay-off in pursuing the specificity of the
ethno-specific public sphericule in comparison with other emergent public
spheres. Like the classic H abermasian bourgeois public sphere of the café
society of 18th- and 19th-century France and Britain, they are constituted
as elements of civil society. H owever, our understanding of civil society is
formulated out of its dualistic relationship to formal apparatuses of political and juridical power. Ethno-specific sphericules constitute themselves as
potentially global civil societies that intersect with state apparatuses at
various points (immigration law, multicultural public policy and, for the
irredentist and the exilic, against the regimes that control homeland
societies). It follows that ethno-specific public sphericules are not congruent
with international taste cultures borne by a homogenizing global media
culture. For diasporic groupings w ere parts of states, nations and polities
and much of the diasporic polity is about the process of remembering, positioning and, by no means least, constructing business opportunities around
these pre-diasporic states and/or nations.
It is out of these realities that the assumption grows that ethnic minoritarian publics contribute to the further fragmentation of the majoritarian
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public sphere, breaking the ‘social compact’ that subsumes nation and
ethnicity within the state; a process that has been foundational for the
modern nation state. Irredentist politics and ‘long-distance’ nationalism,
where the prime allegiance continues to be to an often-defunct state or
regime, are deemed non-progressive by most commentators – classically
captured by Susan Sontag in her celebrated essays on the Cubans in
Florida. H owever, a focus on the popular culture of diasporas and its place
in the construction of public sphericules complicates these assumptions,
as it shows that a variety of voices contend for recognition and influence
in the micro-polity, and great generational renewal can arise from the
vibrancy of such popular culture.
Sophisticated cosmopolitanism and successful international business
dealing sit alongside long-distance nationalism – the diasporic subject is
typically a citizen of a western country, who is not stateless and is not
seeking the recognition of a separate national status in their ‘new’ country,
like the prototypal instances in the European context such as the Basques,
the Scots or the Welsh. These sphericules are definitively transnational, even
global in their constitution but are not the same as emerging transnational
polities and cultures of global corporate culture, world-spanning nongovernmental organizations and international bodies of governments.
Perhaps the most consistent relation, or non-relation, that diasporic
media have with the various states into which they are introduced concerns
issues of piracy. This gives another layer to the notion of civil cultures standing against the state, where ‘public’ is irreducible to ‘official’ culture. Indeed,
given that significant amounts of the cultural production exist in a paralegal penumbra of copyright breach and piracy, there is a strong desire on
the part of the entrepreneurs who disseminate such products to keep their
distance from organs of the state. It is apparent that routinized piracy makes
of much diasporic media a ‘shadow system’, as Kolar-Panov (1997: 31) dubs
such minority video circuits as they are perceived from outside. They operate
‘in parallel’ to the majoritarian system, with few industry linkages.
Third, they reconfigure essentialist notions of community and reflex anticommercialism. These sphericules are communities in a sense that goes
beyond the bland homogeneous arcadia that the term community usually
connotes. O n the one hand, the ethno-specific community assumes an
importance that is greater by far than the term usually implies in mainstream
parlance, as the community constitutes the markets and audiences for the
media services – there is almost no cross-over or recognition outside the
specific community in most cases of diasporic cultural production. The
‘community’ therefore becomes an economic calculus, not only a multicultural demographic instance. The community is to an important extent
constituted through media (see H artley and M cKee, 2000: 84) in so far as
media performance is one of the main reasons to meet together, and there
is very little else available as a mediator of information and entertainment.
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These media and their entrepreneurs and audiences work within a deessentialized community and its differences as a condition of their practice
and engagement.
Diasporic media are largely commercially driven media but are not fully
fledged markets. They are largely constituted in and through a commercial
culture but this is not the globalizing, homogenizing commercialism that has
been posed by neo-M arxist political economists as threatening cultural
pluralism, authenticity and agency at the local level. With notable exceptions
such as global Chinese popular cultural forms such as cantopop and H ong
Kong cinema, which has experienced significant cross-over into both dominant and other emerging contemporary cultural formations, and the Indian
popular Bhangra music and Bollywood cinema which is still more singularly
based in Indian homeland and diasporic audiences, this is small business
commercialism that deals with the practical specificities of cultural difference
at the local level as an absolute precondition of business viability.
The spaces for ethno-specific public communication are, fourth, mediacentric, and this affords new configurations of the information–
entertainment dualism. Given the at times extreme marginalization of many
diasporic groupings in public space and their lack of representation within
leaderships of influence and persuasion in the dominant forums of the host
country, ethno-specific media become, by default, the main organs of communication outside of certain circumscribed and defined social spaces, such
as the Chinatowns, Koreatowns, the little Saigons, the churches and
temples, or the local video, spice and herb parlours.
The ethno-specific sphericule is mediacentric but, unlike the way that
mediacentricity can give rise to functionalist thinking (media are the cement
that forms and gives identity to the community), it should be thought of
rather as ‘staging’ difference and dissension in ways that the community
itself can manage. There are severe constraints on public political discourse
among, for example, refugee-based communities such as the Vietnamese.
The ‘compulsive memorialisation’ (Thomas, 1999: 149) of the precommunist past of Vietnam and the compulsory anti-communism of the
leadership of the Vietnamese community are internalized as unsavoury to
mainstream society. As part of the pressure to be the perfect citizen in the
host society (H age, 1998: 10), there is considerable self-censorship in the
expression of public critical opinion. This filtering of political partisanship
for external consumption is also turned back on itself in the community,
with attempts by members of the community to have the rigorous anti-communist refugee stance softened (by the mid-1990s, only 30 percent of the
Vietnamese community in Australia were originally refugees) met with harsh
rebuke. In this situation, Vietnamese entertainment formats, discussed
below, operate to create a space where political and cultural identities can
be processed in a self-determining way, where voices other than the official,
but constitutive of community sentiment, can speak.
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M ediacentricity also means, in this context, a constant blurring of the
information–entertainment distinction, giving rise to a positive sense of a
‘tabloidized’ sphericule wherein M cGuigan’s affective as well as effective
communication takes on another meaning. The information–entertainment
distinction – usually maintained in the abundance of available media in
dominant cultures – is blurred in the diasporic setting. As there is typically
such a small diet of ethno-specific media available to these communities,
they are mined deeply for social cues (including fashion, language use and
so on), personal gossip, public information as well as singing along to the
song or following the fictional narrative. Within this concentrated and contracted informational and libidinal economy, ‘contemporary popular media
as guides to choice, or guides to the attitudes that inform choices’ (H artley,
1999: 143) take on a thoroughly continuous and central role in information
and entertainment for creating a negotiated habitus.
The Vietnamese
The Vietnamese are by far the largest refugee community in Australia. For
most, ‘home’ is a denigrated category while ‘the regime’ continues in power,
and so media networks, especially music video, operate to connect the dispersed exilic Vietnamese communities. As Cunningham and N guyen (2000)
argue in our chapter in Floating L ives, there are obviously other media in
play (community newspapers, H ong Kong film and video products) but
music video carries especial significance and allows a focus on the affective
dimension of public communication. Small business entrepreneurs produce
low-budget music videos mostly out of southern California (but also Paris),
which are taken up within the fan circuits of the United States, Australia,
Canada, France and elsewhere. The internal cultural conflicts in the communities centre on the felt need to maintain pre-revolutionary Vietnamese
heritage and traditions; find a negotiated place in a more mainstreamed
culture; or engage in the formation of distinct hybrid identities around the
appropriation of dominant western popular cultural forms. These three cultural positions or stances are dynamic and mutable, but the main debates
are constructed around them, and are played out principally within variety
music video formats.
Although by no means exhausting the media diet of the Vietnamese diaspora, live variety shows and music videos are undeniably unique to it, as
audio-visual media made specifically by and for the diaspora. These media
forms bear many similarities to the commercial and variety-based cultural production of Iranian television in Los Angeles studied by Naficy in his benchmark The Mak ing of Ex ile Cultures (1993), not least because Vietnamese
variety show and music video production is also centred on the Los Angeles
conurbation. The Vietnamese grouped there are not as numerous or as rich
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as Naficy’s Iranians and so have not developed the business infrastructure to
support the range and depth of media activity recounted by Naficy. The business infrastructure of Vietnamese audiovisual production is structured around
a small number of small businesses operating on very low margins.
To be exilic means not, or at least not ‘officially’, being able to draw on
the contemporary cultural production of the home country. Indeed, it
means actively denying its existence in a dialectical process of mutual
disauthentification (Carruthers, forthcoming). The Vietnam government
Figure 1 Asia Video 21, ‘Songs from the Era of Wartime’. A 1998 music video
compilation by Asia Productions. Remembrance of the heroic loss of the Vietnam
War remains a normative element of Vietnamese diasporic popular culture.
Reproduced with kind permission.
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proposes that the Viet Kieu (the appellation for Vietnamese overseas which
carries a pejorative connotation) are fatally westernised. Ironically, the
diasporic population makes a similar counter-charge against the regime,
proposing that the homeland population has lost its moral integrity
Figure 2 Paris by N ight 36. A high production value 1996 release, ‘H ouston’
(based on one of the regular live shows throughout the diaspora, this time in
H ouston), by the main Vietnamese production house in the United States, Thuy
N ga Productions. Reproduced with kind permission.
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through the wholesale compulsory adoption of an alien western ideology
– M arxism-Leninism.
Together, the dispersed geography and the demography of a small series
of communities frame the conditions for ‘global narrowcasting’ – that is,
ethnically specific cultural production for widely dispersed population fragments centripetally organized around their disavowed state of origin. This
makes the media, and the media use, of the Vietnamese diaspora fundamentally different from those of the Indian or Chinese diasporas. The last
revolve around massive cinema and television production centres in the
‘home’ countries that enjoy international cachet. By contrast, the fact that
the media uses of the Vietnamese diaspora are globally oriented but commercially marginal ensures that they flourish outside the purview of state
and major commercial vectors of subvention and trade.
These conditions also determine the small business character of the production companies. These small enterprises run at low margins and are constantly undercut by piracy and copying of their video products. They have
clustered around the only Vietnamese population base that offers critical
mass and is geographically adjacent to the much larger ECI (entertainmentcommunications-information) complex in Southern California. There is evidence of internal migration within the diaspora from the rest of the United
States, Canada and France to Southern California to take advantage of the
largest overseas Vietnamese population concentration and the world’s major
ECI complex.
During the course of the 20 and more years since the fall of Saigon and
the establishing of the diaspora through flight and migration, a substantial
amount of music video material has been produced. Thuy N ga Productions, by far the largest and most successful company, organizes major live
shows in the United States and franchises appearance schedules for its highprofile performers at shows around the global diaspora. It has produced
more than 60 two- to three-hour videotapes since the early 1980s, as well
as a constant flow of CDs, audio-cassettes and karaoke discs, in addition
to documentary specials and re-releases of classic Vietnamese movies. The
other companies, between them, have also produced hundreds of hours of
variety music video (see Figures 1 and 2).
Virtually every overseas Vietnamese household views this music video
material, most regularly attend the live variety performances on which the
video material is based, and a significant proportion have developed comprehensive home libraries. The popularity of this material is exemplary,
cutting across the several axes of difference in the community: ethnicity, age,
gender, recentness of arrival, educational level, refugee or immigrant status,
and home region. It is also widely available in pirated form in Vietnam itself,
as the economic and cultural ‘thaw’ that has proceeded since the government’s so-called Doi M oi policies of greater openness has resulted in extensive penetration of the homeland by this most international of Vietnamese
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forms of expression. As the only popular culture produced by and specifically for the Vietnamese diaspora, these texts attract an emotive investment
in the overseas communities which is as deep as it is varied. The social text
that surrounds, indeed engulfs, these productions is intense, multi-layered
and makes its address across differences of generation, gender, ethnicity,
class and education levels and recentness of arrival.
The key point linking attention to the textual dynamics of the music
videos and media use in the communities is that each style cannot exist
without the others, because of the marginal size of the audience base.
From the point of view of business logic, each style cannot exist without
the others. Thus, at the level of both the individual show/video and
company outputs as a whole, the organizational structure of the shows
and videos reflects the heterogeneity required to maximize the audience
within a strictly narrowcast range. This is a programming philosophy congruent with ‘broadcasting’ to a globally spread, narrowcast demographic:
‘the variety show form has been a mainstay of overseas Vietnamese anticommunist culture from the mid seventies onwards’ (Carruthers, forthcoming).
In any given live show or video production, the musical styles might range
from precolonial traditionalism to French colonial era high modernist classicism, to crooners adapting Vietnamese folksongs to the Sinatra era and to
bilingual cover versions of G rease or M adonna. Stringing this concatenation of taste cultures together are comperes, typically well-known political
and cultural figures in their own right, who perform a rhetorical unifying
function:
Audience members are constantly recouped via the show’s diegesis, and the
anchoring role of the comperes and their commentaries, into an overarching
conception of shared overseas Vietnamese identity. This is centred on the
appeal to . . . core cultural values, common tradition, linguistic unity and an
anti-communist homeland politics. (Carruthers, forthcoming)
Within this overall political trajectory, however, there are major differences to be managed. The stances evidenced in the video and live material
range on a continuum from ‘pure’ heritage maintenance and ideological
monitoring; to mainstream cultural negotiation; through to assertive
hybridity. M ost performers and productions seek to situate themselves
within the mainstream of cultural negotiation between Vietnamese and
western traditions. H owever, at one end of the continuum there are strong
attempts both to keep the original folkloric music traditions alive and to
keep the integrity of the originary anti-communist stance foundational to
the diaspora, through very public criticism of any lapse from that stance.
At the other end, Vietnamese-American youth culture is exploring the
limits of hybrid identities through the radical intermixing of musical
styles.
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The Fiji Indians
In a remarkably short time, essentially since the coups of the late 1980s
which pushed thousands of Fiji Indians out of Fiji and into diaspora around
the Pacific Rim in cities such as Vancouver, Auckland and Sydney, the community in Sydney has fashioned a vibrant popular culture based on consumption and celebration of H indi filmdom and its associated music, dance
and fashion cultures. It is an especial irony that a people ‘extracted’ from
mainland Indian polity and culture a century or more ago – for whom the
relationship with the world of H indi film is a purely imaginary one – should
embrace and appropriate such a culture with far greater strength than those
enjoying a much more recent connection to the ‘homeland’.
M anas Ray’s analysis of the Fiji Indian public sphericule in Floating L ives
(2000) is structured around a comparison with the expatriate Bengalis. The
two groups are contrasted on a caste, class and cultural consumption basis,
and Ray stresses that, given that there is no critical mass of sub-ethnicities
within the Indian diaspora in Australia, cultural difference is definitional.
The Bengalis are seen as locked into their history as bearers of the Indian
project of modernity which they assumed centrally under the British Raj.
The once-unassailed centrality that the educated, H indu Bengali gentry, the
bradralok , had in the political and civic institutions of India has been challenged in the decades since independence by the subaltern classes:
Figure 3 Fiji Tim es, February and M arch 1999. The most popular free
magazine among Fiji Indians in Sydney. Reproduced with kind permission.
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It is from this Bengal that the bradralok flees, either to relatively prosperous
parts of India or, if possible, abroad – to the affluent west, taking with them
the dream of a nation that they were once so passionate about and the cultural baggage which had expressed that dream. (Ray, 2000: 142–3)
The Bengali diaspora, argues Ray, frames its cultural life around the high
culture of the past, which has become a ‘fossilized’ taste culture (2000: 143).
In startling contrast to the Fiji Indian community, which is by far the
highest consumer of H indi films, for the Indian Bengalis, Indian-sourced film
and video is of little interest and is even the subject of active disparagement.
The literature and other high cultural forms, which once had ‘organic links
to the independence movement and to early post-independence hardship
and hope’, have fossilized into a predictable and ageing taste culture that is
remarkably similar whether the Bengali community is in Philadelphia,
Boston, London, Düsseldorf, Dubai or Sydney (Ray, 2000: 143). The issues
of inter-generational deficit as the young turn to western youth culture are
evident.
The politics of popular culture are fought out across the communal fractions and across the generations. The inter-communal discord between
mainland Indians and Fiji Indians, which are neither new nor restricted only
to Australia – where many mainland Indians continue to exhibit deeply
entrenched casteist attitudes and Fiji Indians often characterized mainland
Indians with the same kind of negativity they were wont to use for ethnic
Fijians – are often played out around media and film culture. There are
elements of fully blown popular culture debates being played out. At the
time of a particularly vitriolic controversy in 1997, the editor of the mainland Indian Post argued that while the Fiji Indians are ‘good H indus’ and
‘they are the people who spend’, their ‘westernised ways’ and ‘excessive
attachment to filmy culture’ bring disrepute to the Indian community as a
whole (Dello, 1997). The resolution to these kinds of issues is often found
in the commercial reality that Fiji Indians are the main consumers of the
products and services advertised in mainland Indian shops (see Figure 3)!
Despite virtual slavery in the extraction period and uprootedness in the
contemporary period, the affective dimension of the Fiji Indian public
sphericule is deeply rooted in H indu belief and folklore. The central text of
H induism, ‘The Ramayan’, thus was used to heal the wounds of indenture
and provide a cultural and moral texture in the new settlement. A strong
emotional identification to the Ramayan and other expressions of the Bhakti
movement – a constrained cultural environment, continued degradation at
the hands of the racist white regime, a disdain for the culture of the ethnic
Fijians, a less hard-pressed post-indenture life and, finally, a deep-rooted
need of a dynamic, discursive site for the imaginative reconstruction of
motherland – were all factors which, together, ensured the popularity of
H indi films once they started reaching the shores of Fiji. This was because
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H indi film deployed the Ramayan extensively, providing the right pragmatics for ‘continual mythification’ of home (Ray, 2000: 156).
As a result, second-generation Fiji Indians in their twice-displaced settings
of Sydney, Auckland or Vancouver have developed a cultural platform that,
although not counter-hegemonic, is markedly different from their western
host cultures. In contrast, ‘the emphasis of the first generation Indian Bengali
diaspora on aestheticised cultural forms of the past offers to second generation very little in terms of a home country popular youth culture with
which they can identify’ (Ray, 2000: 145).
References
Carruthers, Ashley (forthcoming) ‘N ational Identity, Diasporic Anxiety and
M usic Video Culture in Vietnam’, in Yao Souchou (ed.) H ouse of G lass:
Culture, M odernity and the State in Southeast A sia. Singapore: Institute of
Southeast Asian Studies.
Cunningham, Stuart and John Sinclair, eds (2000) Floating L ives: T he M edia
and A sian D iasporas, pp. 91–135. St Lucia: University of Q ueensland Press
(and Boulder, CO : Rowman & Littlefield, 2001).
Cunningham, Stuart and Tina N guyen (2000) ‘Popular M edia of the Vietnamese
Diaspora’, in Stuart Cunningham and John Sinclair (eds) Floating L ives: T he
M edia and A sian D iasporas. St Lucia: University of Q ueensland Press (and
Boulder, CO : Rowman & Littlefield, 2001).
Dello, Sanjay (1997) Interview with M anas Ray, Sydney, M ay.
Fraser, N ancy (1992) ‘Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the
Critique of Actually Existing Democracy’, in C. Calhoun (ed.) H aberm as and
the Public Sphere, pp. 109–42. Cambridge, M A: M IT Press.
Garnham, N icholas (1992) ‘The M edia and the Public Sphere’, in C. Calhoun
(ed.) H aberm as and the Public Sphere, pp. 359–76. Cambridge, M A: M IT
Press
Garnham, N icholas (1995) ‘The M edia and N arratives of the Intellectual’,
M edia, Culture & Society 17(3): 359–84.
Gitlin, T. (1998) ‘Public Sphere or Public Sphericules?’, in T. Liebes and J.
Curran (eds) M edia, R itual and Identity, pp. 175–202. London: Routledge.
H abermas, J. (1974) ‘The Public Sphere’, N ew G erm an Critique 1(3): 49–55.
H abermas, J. (1989[1962]) T he Structural Transform ation of the Public Sphere:
A n Inquiry in a Category of Bourgeois Society. Cambridge: Polity Press.
H age, Ghassan (1998) W hite N ation: Fantasies of W hite Suprem acy in a M ulticultural Society. Annandale: Pluto Press; and West Wickham: Comerford and
M iller.
H artley, John (1999) Uses of Television. London: Routledge.
H artley, John and Allen M cKee (2000) T he Indigenous Public Sphere. O xford:
O xford University Press.
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H usband, Charles (1998) ‘Differentiated Citizenship and the M ulti-ethnic
Public Sphere’, Journal of International Com m unication 5(1/2): 134 –48.
Kolar-Panov, D. (1997) Video, W ar and the D iasporic Im agination. London:
Routledge.
M cGuigan, Jim (1998) ‘What Price the Public Sphere?’, in Daya Kishan Thussu
(ed.) Electronic Em pires: G lobal M edia and L ocal R esistance, pp. 91–107.
London: Arnold.
N aficy, H amid (1993) T he M ak ing of Ex ile Cultures: Iranian Television in L os
A ngeles. M inneapolis: University of M innesota Press.
Ray, M anas (2000) ‘Bollywood Down Under: Fiji Indian Cultural H istory and
Popular Assertion’, in Stuart Cunningham and John Sinclair (eds) Floating
L ives: T he M edia and A sian D iasporas, pp. 136–84. St Lucia: University of
Q ueensland Press (and Boulder, CO : Rowman & Littlefield, 2001).
Schiller, H . (1989) Culture Inc.: T he Corporate Tak eover of Public Ex pression.
N ew York: O xford University Press.
Sinclair, John, Audrey Yue, Gay H awkins, Kee Pookong and Josephine Fox
(2000) ‘Chinese Cosmopolitanism and M edia Use’, in Stuart Cunningham
and John Sinclair (eds) Floating L ives: T he M edia and A sian D iasporas, pp.
35–90. St Lucia: University of Q ueensland Press (and Boulder, CO : Rowman
& Littlefield, 2001).
Thomas, M andy (1999) D ream s in the Shadow s: Vietnam ese-A ustralian L ives
in Transition. St Leonards: Allen & Unwin.
Wong, Deborah (1994) ‘ “ I Want the M icrophone” : M ass M ediation and
Agency in Asian-American Popular M usic’, T D R (T he D ram a R eview ) 38(3):
152–67.
●
STUART CUNNINGHAM is prof essor and direct or of t he Creat ive
Indust ries Research and Applicat ions Cent re (CIRAC), Queensland
Universit y of Technology. He is co-edit or (w it h John Sinclair) of Float ing
Lives: The M edia and Asian Diasporas (Queensland Universit y Press, St
Lucia, 2000). Previous edit ed publicat ions include (w it h John Sinclair and
Elizabet h Jacka) New Pat t erns in Global Television: Peripheral Vision
(Oxf ord Universit y Press, Oxf ord and New York, 1996) and (w it h Graeme
Turner) st andard Aust ralian media t ext books The Aust ralian TV Book
(Allen & Unw in, St Leonards, 2000) and The M edia and Communicat ions
in Aust ralia (3rd edn, Allen & Unw in, St Leonards, 2001). Address: School
of M edia and Journalism, Queensland Universit y of Technology, GPO Box
●
2434, Brisbane 4001, Aust ralia. [email: s.cunningham@qut .edu.au]
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Television & New Media
http://tvn.sagepub.com
Mapping Latinidad: Language and Culture in the Spanish TV Battlefront
Arlene Davila
Television New Media 2000; 1; 75
DOI: 10.1177/152747640000100105
The online version of this article can be found at:
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Davila / Language and CultureTelevision
in the Spanish
& New
TVMedia / February 2000
Mapping Latinidad
Language and Culture in the Spanish TV Battlefront
Arlene Davila
Syracuse University
After reading your cover story “Must Si TV” by Elia Esparza, I couldn’t help
but think—it’s about time! As a Mexican American and a Tejano, I have always been disappointed with television’s lack of recognition of my culture.
Since most TV stations are based in Miami, Mexico City, New York, or Los
Angeles, the views expressed or characters portrayed on most shows have
been based on those cities’ demographics.
—John Barraza (Hispanic Magazine, 1998, 8)
It’s great that networks like Galavision are heading in a new direction as far as
bilingual programming goes. But at what cost? When I was younger, I lost my
interest in my roots and my second language, which is Spanish. I became too
assimilated. I realized that relearning Spanish would benefit me in my job. I
had to do something. I didn’t have the money to go back to college, so I
watched a lot of Spanish television—no bilingual television—and read
books. I learned how to speak Spanish better. I believe bilingual television
will cause the younger generation to be cut off from their roots.
—Beatriz Montelongo (Hispanic Magazine, 1998, 8)
The letters above were sent to the editor of Hispanic Magazine in reaction to
an earlier article announcing the development of “Must Si TV,” the first
television programming service targeting bilingual and English-dominant
Latinos. They evidence how closely intertwined specific media developments are with the very heated language debate among Latinos. This
debate, concerning the question of Spanish as integral to Latino identity is
one that the Spanish-language TV networks have historically made central
to their own marketing by positing Spanish and accordingly themselves as
TELEVISION & NEW MEDIA
Vol. 1 No. 1, February 2000 75–94
© 2000 Sage Publications, Inc.
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Television & New Media / February 2000
primary conduits of Latinidad, although not without controversy and criticism. The first reader’s disappointment at the Spanish TV networks’ lack of
representation of his culture and the second’s concern that she would be
too assimilated if she did not speak Spanish evidence the kind of dilemmas
ensuing from the strict association of the Spanish language with U.S. Latinidad.1
This article examines the politicization and general treatment of language by the Spanish TV networks through an analysis of their philosophy
and recent changes in programming and what that suggests about the
imaging and conceptualization of U.S. Latinos. The past few years have
seen the growth of new bilingual shows targeting the English-dominant
Latino/Latina, such as Must Si TV’s Funny is Funny and Cafe Olé, as well as
a rapid growth in bilingual and English-dominant print media that challenge traditional definitions of Hispanics as a Spanish monolingual con2
stituency. There is also an increase in the use of “Latino/Latina” as the new
media’s main form of address for this imaginary constituency, rather than
“Hispanic”–long used to mark the importance of the Spanish language as
the primary identity marker3— as well as a growing interest in the bilingual, English-dominant, urban Afro-Latino or the “home girl” as the prototype of the Latino/Latina. Many publications of recent years have even
adopted mission statements evoking Latino empowerment and selfrepresentation, announcing that their writers and personnel have indeed
“lived and experienced” Latino culture, and are thus able to represent “all
sides of our story,” evidencing the emphasis placed on the issue of repre4
sentativity in these media’s marketing and self-presentation.
Yet, nothing has provoked more excitement, and fear, in the Hispanic
media and marketing industry in recent years than the sale and revamping
of Telemundo, the number-two rated Hispanic network, after its purchase
in 1998 by Sony Pictures Entertainment, in conjunction with Liberty Media
Corporation, Apollo Investment Fund III, and Bastion Capital Fund. This
event marked the inclusive acquisition of a Spanish network by a group of
global corporations and the entry of one of the major mainstream entertainment companies (Sony) into the U.S. Hispanic market, leading to a major
revamping of the stations’ programming and bringing to the forefront
5
questions of purpose and intention on the part of the “American” investors.
Of concern to the Hispanic advertising community was whether this sale
would culminate in Telemundo’s “Anglicization” and the ultimate eradication of this Latino/Hispanic network space. News about this event
repeatedly pointed to the lack of familiarity of Telemundo’s new president
and CEO with the Latino community and the lack of Latino representation
in its management team, prompting questions about the network’s legitimacy and authenticity (Esparza 1998a; Mejia 1998). A further cause of
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Davila / Language and Culture in the Spanish TV
excitement and distress were public announcements about Telemundo’s
plans to reshape Hispanic television through original programming that
would provide real alternatives for the Hispanic consumer. Although limited in scope, as I shall argue below, such initiatives are opening spaces for
alternative discourses of Latinidad to be contested in the market with different media outlets debating the dominant Spanish language-centered
definition of Hispanics/Latinos, to carve out a specific niche clearly distinct from their competitors.
I will argue that at stake in these developments is the very location of
Latinidad, with Spanish language and the importation of Latin American
programming at the center in the transnationalization of Latinidad beyond
U.S. borders, and English language and U.S. made initiatives functioning
as a venue for consolidating the United States as its primary terrain. Additionally, I will suggest that whether parting from the discursive realms of
Latin America or the United States, both models are similarly limited by
their equation of language and Latino representativity in ways that subsume other differences among Latinos and, moreover, are confined by the
exigencies of dominant notions of U.S. citizenship. While citizenship is certainly a contentious term, my emphasis will be on assessing the extent to
which assertions of cultural differences intersect with dominant norms of
American citizenship that give preeminence to white, monolingual,
middle-class producers of and contributors to a political body defined in
national terms. That is, my concern is not with citizenship as a neutral category or with the United States as an apolitical body similarly devoid of cultural meaning but with how notions of citizenship, belonging, and entitlement are directly intertwined and predicated on dominant U.S. nationalist
categories. Such categories conflate race, culture, and language with
nationality, establishing the hierarchies and coordinates against which cultural and linguistic differences are ultimately evaluated (Ong 1999; Williams 1989). It is therefore these hierarchies that frame the discourses of
Latinidad channeled in the media, as well as the media’s treatment of language and what it may potentially communicate to and about Latino’s
claim to belonging, and in what terms they may or may not belong within
the political community of the United States. I start by analyzing the fare
and philosophy of Univision, the number-one rated network, with a
claimed share of 80 percent of the Latino/Latina viewership, and the primary promoter of Latinidad as an “ethnoscape,” a diasporic community
transcending the United States and Latin American nation states (Appadurai 1996). I then turn to analyze the U.S.-based approaches to Latinidad presented by Telemundo under its new management, and the predicaments
6
involved in both of these modes of representation.
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Television & New Media / February 2000
Univision and Telemundo: Toward One Vision,
One Culture
Since its establishment as SIN in 1961, Univision has been the principal
disseminator of a Spanish-speaking version of Latinidad, with its principal
target audience consisting of one segment of the highly diverse U.S.-Latino
population: the recently immigrated and monolingual Spanish-speaking
Latino. While U.S. Latinos differ in terms of levels of acculturation and language use, it is the “unique” needs of this model viewer for culturally and
language-specific programming that have historically provided Univision’s marketing edge and rationale for existence as a Spanish monolingual
7
network. Emphasis on this audience has also sustained the network’s
“transnational” orientation and linkages with the Latin American media
market. Specifically, while Univision has historically sold itself as the station for U.S. Latinos—touted by its Channel 41 as El Canal de la Hispanidad,
una herencia, un idioma, un canal (The Channel of Hispanidad, one heritage,
one language, one channel)—it has largely operated as “transnational”
rather than ethnic media, by importing cheaper Latin American programming into the U.S. market instead of investing in the production of original
8
programming. Such dependency on Mexican products was most marked
until the 1980s, when Mexico’s Televisa provided 80 percent of its programs, although it is still at play in most contemporary U.S.-produced Hispanic shows.9 These are the product of a new pattern for importing Latin
American cultural products: namely, the importation of Latin American
actors and shows to be produced in the United States and repackaged as
“U.S. Hispanic productions.” Through this new strategy, Univision has
continued to produce Spanish-speaking shows featuring only native speakers of Spanish, ensuring in this manner the appeal and marketability of its
programs throughout Latin America. These are issues of central concern to
Univision’s owners, U.S. entrepreneur Jerrold Perenchio, along with two of
the largest Latin American media empires, Mexico’s Televisa and Venezuela’s Venevision, which have a vested financial interest in maintaining this
close language and programming synergy between the U.S. Hispanic and
10
Latin American media markets. Some examples of this pattern of cultural
production include Don Francisco and his successful program Sabado
Gigante, imported from Chile to Miami in the mid 1980s, and the recruitment of Puerto Ricans Giselle Blondet and Rafael Jose and Mexicans Ana
Maria Conseco and Fernando Arau, to lead Despierta America, Univision’s
version of ABC’s Good Morning America.
Such close language and programming synergy between the U.S. Hispanic and Latin American media markets is additionally important in
ensuring a level of recognition of and identification with Univision’s programming among its audience both in the United States and in Latin
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Davila / Language and Culture in the Spanish TV
America. Televisa has long been the most significant exporter of programming to the rest of the Spanish-speaking world, and as a result, the dominance of Mexican programming in Univision is not altogether an anomaly
to Latin American consumers outside of Mexico (Wilkinson 1995);
although, as I shall argue below, this does not imply that the programming
has entirely shed its Mexican identity in the eyes of U.S. Latinos or is
unproblematically consumed as a pan-Latino product.
Beyond economic considerations, Univision’s heavy fare of imported
shows, actors, and performers responds also to its self-appointed role as the
keeper and broker of Latin American culture and primary conduit between
U.S. Latinos and their culture. Univision thus positions itself as the primary
venue in which U.S. Latinos can connect or reconnect with a world that they
may or may not have experienced but that nonetheless, as they are continually told, is a representation of Latin America and thus of their heritage.
Being Hispanic or Latino in the United States, according to Univision then
becomes recognizing the latest Mexican farandula (celebrity), or being conversant with details of Hurricane George’s devastation of the Caribbean
(news that is only peripherally covered in mainstream U.S. media), or with
the most recent soccer match, the latest Miss Venezuela, the “right Spanish,” and other bits of culture and knowledge through which Latinos can
prove their Latin American prowess and cultural knowledge to themselves
and others. The result is a transcontinental view of Latinidad, in which the
latest conjunto band from Los Angeles is juxtaposed with the newest pop
artist from Puerto Rico, and in which guests from television shows are as
likely to be flown in from Panama as from New York, and in which Latin
America is constantly reinstated as the central signifier in the U.S. Latino
landscape.
Such a Latin American–centered approach to Latinidad is, of course, not
irrelevant to U.S. Hispanics but, rather, a dominant trend in most contemporary representations of Latino identity that is similarly evidenced in
other fields of cultural production. Following the nationalist underpinnings underlying contemporary representations of culture and identity, in
which cultures are seen as bounded and contained entities, tied to a territory, a past, and a heritage, it is Latin America rather than the deterritorialized U.S.-Latino culture that has traditionally been valorized as the source
11
of cultural authenticity in Latino/Hispanic culture. The network’s stance
is therefore not an arbitrary one but, rather, is guided by existing hierarchies of representation that necessarily affect Univision’s attempts to
become the representative medium for Latinos.
At the same time, such strong connections with Latin America have generated strong criticisms about the network’s lack of attention to the needs
and experiences of U.S.-based Latinos, who are marginalized if not altogether absent. In New York City, the Spanish network’s Latin American–
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Television & New Media / February 2000
centered outlook was a repeated concern of some media activists and grassroots groups such as La Comuna, a New York City–based not-for-profit
community group, which even called for a general boycott against Univision and Telemundo in 1998. As part of their overall dismissal of U.S.
domestic news in favor of Latin American stories,12 these networks had
failed to broadcast Bill Clinton’s 1998 State of the Union address, and the
community group claimed that Hispanics were being deprived of information that is “vital for the growth and development of their community” (El
Diario 1998, 20). Similarly, media activists in New York City have voiced
concerns such as those stated by the Houston reader at this article’s opening, that these stations reflect the interests of a few people who dictate from
Miami what Hispanics should see and hear in the media. During my interviews with members of the New York chapter of the Hispanic Media Coalition, whose members are mostly Puerto Rican, this issue surfaced in their
resentment of the dominance of Cubans in the Hispanic media and marketing industry, which they saw as an impediment to raising the visibility of
Puerto Ricans. Concerns such as these point to the public association of
these media with particular Latino nationalities or particularized locations,
a phenomenon that impedes the unqualified acceptance of these networks
as truly pan-ethnic Latino products.
At the heart of these concerns is that the transnationalization of media
flows provides little space for material that fully addresses U.S. Latinos’
concerns and sensibilities. These issues remain hidden and invisible, ultimately rendering these texts assimilationist in content, as insofar as similar
to Gray’s (1995) discussion of black-oriented television shows, Hispanic
media completely eliminates and marginalizes cultural differences in the
name of “universal similarity,” among and across Latino subgroups. Obviously, I am not suggesting that U.S. Latinos could only identify with U.S.
made products by U.S.-based Latinos. An extensive literature has already
shown how highly problematic and reductionist it is to attempt to ascertain
levels of authenticity in different media products, particularly in the current transnational context characterized by new patterns of media flow and
warned against dismissing the localized meanings people find in global
texts (Ang 1996; Wilk 1995). On the other hand, it is naive to ignore the
embedded inequalities that are forged by this common Latin American
media market, in particular, the segregation of U.S. Hispanics to the level of
13
consumer rather than producer of representations of Latinidad. As many
critics have argued, U.S. Latinos hence become doubly subordinated, in
consequence invisible both in mainstream media as well as in the media
that so openly declares that it is meant to represent them (Wilson and
Gutiérrez 1995). Neither of these media provide spaces for probing U.S.
Latinidad by acknowledging or showcasing differences among U.S.-based
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Latinos and Latin Americans in ways that could potentially facilitate critical dialogue about the racialization of U.S. Latinos, or what it is to be Latino
in the United States. These issues are never part of a Mexican novela.14
Ironically, it is Univision’s rival Telemundo that despite its pronouncements that it will provide a more complex representation of what it means
to be Latino in this country, has most clearly articulated the dominant
assimilationist view of the Spanish TV networks. This is because in contrast
to Univision’s Latin American–centered world, Telemundo has adopted a
new philosophy about what it means to be Latino in the United States—
evident in its new slogan, “The Best of Both Worlds”—that makes direct
reference to Latinos’ partial involvement in the United States and the Anglo
world. Yet, what exactly is the “best” of these worlds that are increasingly
encountering each other through Latinos, and on which basis are these
traits considered the “best” of each world?
A cursory view of Telemundo’s 1998 promotional video would seem to
hold that it is flan, Chihuahuas, and guayaberas that Latinos have to offer to
American Collies, T-shirts, and apple pie. With the equivalence that flan +
apple pie = Telemundo, Collie + Chihuahua = Telemundo, ketchup + salsa =
Telemundo, and Santa Claus + The Three Kings = Telemundo, the network’s 1998 advertisement touted it as the symbiotic union of American
and Latin American culture. Yet, it is the extremely and purposely emotional video clip of Telemundo’s philosophy, shown during its marketing
presentations to Hispanic advertising agencies and other prospective
advertisers, that is most revealing of the new management’s vision of contemporary Latino culture. Loosely divided into three sections, distinct
images are shown harmoniously blending into one another to tell the story
of Latinos’ involvement in two cultures, two traditions, and two languages.
The Latino world shows Latinos dancing with friends and family to a band
of Mexican ranchero–type musicians (whose rhythms are nonetheless
more salseado). The words “The Journey” and “The Joy” are superimposed
softly over the images, as if reinforcing the feeling of enjoyment communicated by the multigenerational images of young heterosexual couples
dancing and of young children playing and dancing with an elderly grandmother figure. A second section, introduced by the words “The Struggle,”
“Two Traditions,” “Two Cultures,” “Two Languages,” moves to a more
urban environment, and into a transitional state that is now communicated
by a Mexican mural and a low-rider car that dominate the scene against
which young Latinos, some dark, some indigenous looking, greet friends
and stride around the neighborhood. This is a world where everyone still
knows one another and that is still dominated by enjoyment as depicted by
the young Latina girl shown dancing to a more Americanized rhythm, that
although not heard is signaled as such by the bouncing of her body. It is also
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a more sexualized world but nonetheless a world of rules; a young Latino is
shown respectfully greeting a young woman who is accompanied by
another young man with a kiss to her hand, while openly flirting with a presumably unattached young woman with a cuddle to her face. The third and
last section, introduced by the words “The Dream,” takes us to a more suburban environment. The opening scene depicts a little girl drinking from a
water fountain in a park. This scene is quickly followed by an image of life
in corporate America. Here, the same Latino models, the old and the young
who have traded their hanging-out clothes for business suits, are now
walking busily and seriously around a corporate headquarters. The active
verbs “Hope,” “Climb,” “Reach,” and “Arrive” are now shown along with
a soft, nondescript aspirational tune, with violins replacing the more Latin
rhythmic marked music, as if to stress Latinos’ successful incorporation
into a “nonethnicized” world.
I do not think that I would be reading too much into this video clip to argue that it embodies the vision of the reborn Americanized Hispanic citizen
in concert with dominant values of American citizenry, as well as the
ghetto-to-corporation aspirational image of Latinos disseminated by the
Spanish TV networks. As if reminding Latinos, “Yes, keep your culture but
keep it packaged,” it reflects back to us the hierarchy of values on which the
Anglo and Latino unity is ultimately predicated. This is far from the station’s claim that, as the clip states, it will provide a
world without frontiers, where your words don’t need to be translated, that
has the best of you on screen, that belongs to you and that you would want to
give away to your children, and that is inspired by you.
Back to considering Telemundo’s new mission, a look at its opening programming confirms that the station’s philosophy of Latino representation
is far more daring than its implementation. Indeed, most of the new programming under the new management are Spanish derivations of old
American sitcoms or game shows, such as The Dating Game or The Newlyweds Game and Who’s the Boss, while its variety and entertainment shows
are no different from Univision’s, relying as they do on Latin American specials such as concerts and pageants. Moreover, not unlike Univision, Telemundo is also directly tied to the Latin American media market, ensuring
the same linguistic programming synergy between the U.S. Hispanic and
Latin American media markets. The most noted example of this trend is Telemundo’s programming partnership with Televisa’s biggest rival, Mexico’s TV Azteca, producer of some of the network’s most successful novellas
15
such as “Mirada de Mujer.” In this way, Telemundo’s original programs
have not departed from the dominant trend of relying on imported Latin
American talent and from filming in Mexico because of lower costs. The
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Latin version of Charlie’s Angels, the failed Angeles (canceled after a short
run), which claimed to showcase “Latina power,” is a good example of this
trend. The artists playing the three female detectives are from Mexico, Argentina, and Colombia, where they had artistic and modeling careers prior
to their recruitment for the show, and the episodes are filmed in Tijuana by
an American production company.16 Meanwhile, in an attempt to broaden
the show’s appeal, Rey y Reyes is set in Rio Lobo, an imaginary U.S. Latino
city somewhere between the U.S.-Mexico border, and Angeles is set in the
“not-so peaceful town of Costa Brava,” an unspecified coastal town in the
United States, markedly stripped of history or regional flavor. These are
shows that are supposed to take place in the United States, yet most of the
street, road, and landscape signs are in Spanish, everyone speaks Spanish,
and the character’s Latinidad is devoid of ethnic or national background as
a nonissue. While the actual national backgrounds of the actors were made
public in press releases and magazine articles, and their national accents
are perceptible in the show, they are nevertheless meant to represent “generic” Latinos whose histories and ethnic backgrounds are never developed in the show.
Replacing this original lineup, Telemundo is currently producing shows
that are seeking to draw more closely from tensions and experiences of
Latinos in the United States. Among them, the 1999 Up-front renewed Solo
in America, which I will discuss in greater detail later, and introduced Los
Beltranes, a Latino version of Archie Bunker featuring a racist, homophobic
Cuban bodega owner in Los Angeles, with a Chicano son-in-law and a gay
Spaniard neighbor. This show constitutes a novel development, a comedy
based on intra-ethnic tensions among U.S. Latinos, and it remains to be
seen how this trend develops in the future. For now let us consider the networks’ treatment of language and what it suggests about the possibilities
for expanding, or at least, complicating the public representation of Hispanidad/Latinidad in the Spanish TV networks.
Language and The Terrain of Latinidad:
Toward the Best of One or Two Worlds?
As said, central to maintaining this programming synergy between the
Latin American and U.S. markets is the Spanish language, which prompts
us to consider its treatment and projection by the networks. Not only is
Spanish the most powerful catalyst for the flow of television shows between the U.S. Hispanic and Latin American markets, helping to consolidate the unity of a transnational Spanish-speaking media community,17 but
it is also a central political symbol that unifies U.S. Latinos and Latin Americans, as well as a primary vector of Latinness in the United States. It is therefore not at all surprising that both networks have largely made Spanish
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central to their operations and self-presentation, treating it as an issue of
“cultural citizenship” whereby the maintenance and protection of Spanish
is construed as central to Latinos’ right and entitlement to maintain their
culture in the United States. This is evident in the stations’ emphasis on featuring only so-called “correct” and “generic” Spanish, in their abstention
from Spanglish, and most of all, in their self-appropriation of the role of
guardians and instructors of the language within the larger Hispanic community. Expressions such as “tu idioma,” “nuestro idioma,” and “la herencia
del idioma que nos une en hermandad” are their common discursive devices.
Indeed, the networks’ emphasis on Spanish is not ill-founded. After all,
they are operating in a context in which, from the standpoint of many corporate advertising clients, Spanish and culturally specific advertising and
programming are not only unnecessary but also an impediment to Latinos’
assimilation into U.S. society—their incorporation without vestiges of
“tainted” culture or language. In the words of a Los Angeles accountexecutive of Mexican background, referring to his previous experience as
brand manager for a major pharmaceutical corporation, “From their [corporations’] standpoint, our marketing presentations confirm their suspicions that Latinos don’t want to be Americans, and what they say is ‘let
them eat English,’ ‘let them be American.’” In this context, the networks’
historically stubborn insistence on Spanish as the conduit of Latino/Hispanic identity, their reticence against bilingual programming, or against
featuring Spanglish or mixing languages, also needs to be considered in
relation to the stations’ self-appointed role as public guardians of the language that is seen as the embodiment of Latino identity, an identity that is
not only shunned by some but also considered a threat to U.S. national
imagery.
What we cannot assume, however, is that language and cultural visibility always equate with social gains or political entitlements, nor can we forget that, as noted by Flores (with Yúdice, 1993), the commercial use of Spanish is not about the recognition of Latinos but about constituting them as
contented consumers. The question then is whether what the networks air
necessarily provides for an unqualified notion of cultural citizenship as
involving the expansion of “claims to entitlements” (Rosaldo and Flores
1997) or whether it also represents a reformulation of the frameworks of
recognition and debate, destabilizing pervasive constructs of citizenship,
nation, and race. Specifically, we need to inquire whether what the Spanish
TV networks project actually extend the coordinates around who and what
is considered an American and promote a more complex view of what it
means to be Hispanic/Latino in the U.S. or whether, instead, it helps validate dominant norms of good American citizenship in ways that reproduce
rather than challenge dominant race/class and gender norms at play in
U.S. society.
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Consider the networks’ promotion of the so-called generic Spanish, or
what the industry calls “Walter Cronkite Spanish,” or the unaccented
generic or universal Spanish, supposedly devoid of regionalism or of traceable accent, as the primary venue for addressing U.S. Hispanics. As any
standard form of language, “Walter Cronkite Spanish” is of course not an
empirical fact but a “discursive project,” reproducing particular language
ideology and social distinctions (Woolard 1998). This is clearly evident in
that some accents and modes of speech are privileged over others in the
industry’s definition of “standard Spanish.” Specifically, the so-called Walter Cronkite Spanish, has largely served as a cloak for the “Mexicanization”
of the language, a development that is not at all unfounded. Given that
Mexican Americans constitute 65 percent of all Hispanics and that it is
Mexican soap operas and programming that dominate the U.S. Hispanic
airwaves, it is Mexican language, accent, and mannerisms that are generally favored as the embodiment of generic Hispanicity. What we therefore
have is the dissemination of a media register of a sociolect of mostly upperclass Mexican Spanish, where Mexican (namely from the capital) mannerisms
and accents are more likely to be accepted as representative of the market,
whereas Caribbean Spanish is hardly heard in generic advertisements and
is highly edited in the Hispanic networks’ programming. This was the case
with the Cuban Cristina Saralegui and Puerto Rican Raymond Arrieta,
highly popular Univision entertainers, both of whom have publicly revealed
the pressure they faced to tone down their accents. Cristina, who has
achieved considerable influence in this industry, struggled and was able to
keep her Cuban accent and have it accepted as a trademark of her TV personality, but Raymond had to shed his “Ay bendito,” a common Puerto Rican
18
expression, after the first filming of his Univision program Lente Loco.
The stations’ preoccupation with language purity has also led to the
inauspicious containment of language difference among U.S. Latinos, for
whom language is not only an issue of different Spanish accents but also,
most critically, of levels of competence, ability, and ease with both English
and Spanish. As a case in point, the stations’ traditional concern over the
use of “correct” Spanish, while central to the validation of a central axis of
U.S. Latino culture when juxtaposed to its treatment of Spanglish or code
switching, also functions to subjugate language and cultural difference
among Latinos. As Ana Celia Zentella’s (1997) study of language use
among New York Puerto Rican children notes, neither “English” nor
“Spanish” can fully describe the range of language use among Puerto Rican
children whose linguistic repertoire can range across a bilingual/multidialectal spectrum, which although differentially valued or stigmatized in
relation to dominant culture, functions as a set of linguistic resources and,
in their view, does not invalidate their claim to a Puerto Rican identity. As
she and others have noted, Spanglish is at the heart of a wealth of U.S.-
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generated literary production, some of which has even gained recognition
in mainstream scholarly and artistic circles, as well as of music and expressive forms, such as Latin hip-hop and rap, which are central to Latinos’
experiences and identities in the United States. Yet on the networks, it is
only “correct” Spanish that is reciprocally and symbiotically connected to a
Hispanic/Latino identity, with the result that Spanish is used in a way that
corrects rather than validates people’s linguistic repertoires. Perhaps the
best example of this strict correlation of Latinos with Spanish is provided
by the promotion of the few English programs for Latinos in Univision’s
cable network, Galavision, as shows “for the Latino who also speaks English.” Not only does this announcement veil the reality of code switching
and mixing between English and Spanish but it also parts from and reinforces the very notion that all Latinos speak Spanish and that while some
“may additionally speak English,” English is ancillary to their speaking
Spanish, which in their view, is what should rightly define anyone as a
Latino/Latina.
Yet another problem with the Spanish TV networks’ preference for socalled correct language is that it promotes a bounded vision of Spanish, one
that contains difference and keeps it “in its place,” reinforcing distinctions
among those whose background and education have given them the cultural capital of “correct speech” and those who lack it. Here, it is important
to note that while Spanish is indeed regarded in dominant society as a
threat to English and to U.S. national integrity, it is nonetheless relatively
better accepted when it is contained in grammar, properly spoken, and in
“its place,” than when left “unbounded” as in Spanglish, code switching,
and bilingualism. Accordingly, unlike the “correct Spanish,” which is more
likely to be considered a sign of ethnicity not at odds with U.S. dominant
ideals of upward class-mobility, Spanglish is more readily associated with
linguistic pollution and social disorder as the language of a “raced” underclass people (Urciuoli 1998). In this way, the networks have historically featured the Spanish that, because it is bounded within sanctioned grammatical rules, can serve for class mobility or, as stated by the letter of one of the
readers quoted at the start of this article, that which “would benefit people
in their jobs.” The Spanglish or broken English such as that spoken by some
Puerto Rican or other Latino guests in Cristina is covered with a “blip” or
corrected by the host’s demands that they speak Spanish. I am not implying
that all Latinos would like to hear Spanglish in the airwaves; in fact, while
Spanglish is embraced proudly by some Latinos, it most often is generally
19
treated with disdain. The relevant and problematic issue is that concerns
over language purity subordinate the status of everyday language, particularly Spanglish, as faulty speech, contributing to this same disdain among
Latinos toward their languages and, by extension, toward themselves rela20
tive to the bearers of “correct speech.” In fact, everyday language is also
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Davila / Language and Culture in the Spanish TV
derided in the few existing bilingual shows that are being so touted as
examples of the networks’ more inclusive approach to U.S. Latinos. Telemundo originally claimed that it would reach out to the English-dominant
Latino through programming,21 but this goal has been replaced by a more
conservative approach to language difference, in which rather than serving
as a mainstay of some programs, English appears only in the form of
Spanglish, which is selectively used as a “condiment,” and mostly limited
to comedy shows.
In Solo in America, which revolves around the language and culture clash
between a divorced, Venezuelan, Spanish-speaking Latina and her two
bilingual and bicultural teenage daughters in Brooklyn, one of the main
comedic devises is the mother’s scolding of her daughters’ tainted Spanish.
The mother is shown constantly reminding them, in ways that insinuate the
evils of becoming too Americanized, or polluted perhaps? Most important,
although the youth are supposed to be fully bilingual, they are only shown
speaking short phrases, and mostly single words in English or Spanglish.
The actual meaning of their speech, however, is almost always conveyed by
the context, by an immediate translation by their mother, or else by a deliberate rephrase in Spanish. The result is constructions such as “Mom, I can’t
believe que tu a mi me mentiste,” (Mom, I can’t believe that you lied to me);
“Frank, no se porque te abrí la puerta, tu no entiendes nothing,” (Frank, I don’t
know why I let you in, you don’t understand anything); or “Mom, have you
decided? Que vas a hacer? Vas o no vas a Chicago?” (Mom, have you decided?
22
What are you doing? Are you going to Chicago or not?), in which English
words or phrases are peripheral to the sentence’s meaning. This is rarely
how English is used by code switchers who are likely to incorporate whole
sentences and clauses in English and switch fluently between Spanish and
English as appropriate. The program’s treatment of Spanglish hence echoes
Jane Hills’s (1999) discussion of mock Spanish among Anglo speakers of
English, although here, it is English among native speakers of Spanish
whose use is marked by its dual indexicality. On one hand, the use of English is meant to convey a symbolic connection with the acculturated Latino;
on the other, indirectly, it is a debasement of Spanglish and its speakers.
What these shows do for the native Spanish speaker, the main audience for
the show, is to digest Spanglish and English; anything that is not “correct”
Spanish is never meant to convey the burden of the dialogue but used
rather as a comedic device.
This derided treatment of Latino’s English and Spanglish speech is also
evident in Galavision, Univision’s cable network, whose mission as stated
to me by a sales representative was to “provide programming alternatives
for Latinos irrespective of language,” which has so far included only two
shows for English-dominant Latinos, Funny is Funny and Comedy Picante,
featuring Latino comedians whose material almost always pokes fun at
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Latino culture à la Paul Rodriguez and John Leguziamo. Without denying
the potentially subversive content of some of this comedic material, it is still
worrisome, given that Latinos, along with blacks, have traditionally been
relegated to the role of buffoons or entertainers in the mainstream media,23
and that it is mostly or solely in comedy-style shows that English-dominant
Latinos are heard of or showcased.
Ultimately, despite their claim of Latino representativity, the Spanish
networks have shown a limited ability to transform the range of what is
accepted and promoted as “Latino” on the airwaves, beyond the Spanishdominant and trans–Latin American norm. As we saw, claims of Latino
representativity have been reduced to programs that leave unchallenged
the flows of media production for Latinos—programs filmed in Los Angeles or Miami but importing talent from Mexico or Puerto Rico—or that do
little to address the “invisible” audience of English-dominant Latinos
beyond mocking English and Spanglish or its Latino speakers. Nonetheless, let us for a moment consider the dissimilar tendencies that are implied
in their programmatic statements in relation to the public projection and
perhaps the future conceptualization of Latino/Latina identities in this
country.
Briefly, we are faced with, on one hand, the growing interconnectedness
of the media environment and the synergy between U.S.-based and Latin
American populations and, on the other hand, with the possibility of more
U.S.-based bilingual/bicultural media initiatives. As we saw, these initiatives draw on either an expansive and widespread definition of Latino
identity beyond the realm of U.S. national boundaries, or else on the United
States rather than on Latin America as the primary reference point for
Latino identity, with arguments about the need for bilingual productions
functioning as a means for expanding who and what is represented as
Latino on the airwaves. Yet, as we have seen, neither discursive proposition
presents a challenge to normative ideals of U.S. cultural citizenship. This is
an issue neither of language nor of the relative connections between the
United States and Latin America that are forged by these representations.
As we saw, the dominance of imported Latin American programming continues to limit the spaces for showcasing U.S.-Latino sensibilities on race,
identity, or politics. Meanwhile, proposals for programs that represent and
hence establish U.S. Latinos as an intrinsic component of U.S. Hispanic/
Latino culture have fallen short of addressing the multiplicity of Latino
experience in the States in ways that reflect, rather than mock or deride,
these expressions and that do not end up prioritizing dominant U.S. norms
of race, language, and culture. These norms accommodate cultural differences but only when neatly “packaged” and in their place. Both of these
approaches hence surface closer to each other than the networks’ philos-
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Davila / Language and Culture in the Spanish TV
ophies would have it: they both prioritize the harmonious integration of
Latinos devoid of politics and difference.
Mostly, both modes of representations part from the discourse of
authenticity that equates language (be it Spanish or English or Spanglish)
with representation, thereby subsuming, race, class, and different subjectivities and backgrounds to this one issue. The result is an overemphasis on
the same linguistic difference that over and above other indexes of difference, marks Latinos as outsiders within the dominant norms of the white
and monolingual U.S. national community. In the process, Spanish is reinscribed as the authentic and sole property of Latinos, never to be part of the
larger, monolingual “national community.”
Ultimately, the fact remains that any media developments regarding the
representation of Latinos are likely to be affected more by the numerous
interests “jumping on the bandwagon” of the Hispanic market than by the
ways in which Latino communities conceptualize themselves or their identities. Simply put, language means money, and this equation is likely to
continue to affect the correlation of Latinos with Spanish, impairing
attempts to broaden the media’s definition of Latinos, or at least what they
sell as “Latinos” to marketers and corporate clients. After all, Spanish is the
one variable that effectively attests to the “uniqueness” of the U.S. market
and that sustains the need for culture- and language-specific programming
and advertising. Because if it is not language per se that makes Latinos
“Latinos,” what then is the need for ethnic specific media and programming in the first place? Could Latinos not just be targeted by appealing to
culture and lifestyle as with African Americans or other U.S. market segments, or perhaps simply ignored as a culturally specific niche altogether?
These are just some of the concerns that may explain the few innovations in
the media airwaves and that moreover are likely to continue to impair
attempts to broaden the media’s definition of Latinos, beyond the current
dominant image of the Spanish speaking and thus “authentic Hispanic.”
These processes also hinder my ending this discussion with anything
approximating a conclusion, as the outcome of these processes and of the
culture battles in the media remain to be seen. What is certain, however, is
that contestation over the Spanish networks’ legitimacy and programmatic
content will continue and that it is not likely to be over in the foreseeable
future.
Notes
1. For the purposes of this article, I use “Latinidad” to convey the definition and
discourses of Latino/Latina identity as a pan-ethnic term encompassing every
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person of Latin American background in the United States, irrespective of nationality, class background, or race. I will also be using “Hispanic” and “Latino”
interchangeably, as is done by most people in the Spanish media industry, although it
is by the name “Hispanic” media that this industry is most commonly known. The
dominance of this name is due to the business preference for the officially censussanctioned category of “Hispanic,” over “Latino,” a term of self-designation more
connected to social struggles and activist (Lopez and Noriega 1997). “Hispanic” is
also used to mark the importance given to the Spanish language as the key marker of
Hispanic/Latino identity. Overall, however as I argue below, both terms are used
equally to sell, commodify, and market populations of Latin American background
in the United States.
2. Some examples include the new publications Latina, Latin Girl, and Urban
Latino.
3. Unlike “Latino,” which could be potentially applied to any person from Latin
American origin, Hispanic ties Latin American–based populations to the one thing
they all share in common, Spanish and their origins in Spain. The one exception is of
course Brazil and Brazilians who, although geographically part of Latin America,
people in the Hispanic media and marketing industry exclude from their definition
on their basis of their language.
4. Debates about the representativity of any media are of course common in
broadcasting, which is inherently meant to exclude entire segments of its putative
public on the basis of race, class, or regional background. However, unlike the general market television networks that never claim to be fully representative of any
segment of the U.S. public, even when they in fact do prioritize the views of Washington, New York, and Los Angeles, the Hispanic networks function under the
premise, and actively promote themselves, as the “spokesman” for the totality of
U.S. Latinos.
5. Obviously, although Sony’s involvement was interpreted as signs of an
“American” takeover, Sony is a Japanese, not an American company, and as such a
minority partner given U.S. regulations over foreign ownership of television networks. Furthermore, concerns over the takeover by American corporations of Spanish networks that would lead to their “assimilation” are certainly not new. Similar
concerns were voiced when Univision was bought by Hallmark in 1986; although
its subsequent reacquisition by its former owners, along with its present management, and the little substantive programmatic changes made by Hallmark, which
maintained its programming connections to Mexico’s Televisa, exempted it from
the type of criticism triggered by Sony’s purchase of Telemundo. Prior to the current sale, Telemundo for its part was always in the hands of U.S. corporate holders,
having initially been founded by Reliance Capital Corporation, controlled by Saul
Steinberg, a Wall Street financier in 1986. The debate over whether Telemundo
would become assimilated stemmed mostly from the advent of a powerful programming company into the Spanish TV networks and rumors about the development of bilingual programs (Esparza 1998b).
6. Both of the networks conducted up-front presentations for prospective
advertisers for the first time in 1998, pointing to their renewed efforts to market
themselves and define their “uniqueness” in this new context. This section is largely
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Davila / Language and Culture in the Spanish TV
based on videos and observations of these up fronts, analysis of their media kits,
and interviews with people involved in their programming.
7. See Univision’s (1999) “The U.S. Hispanic Market in Brief,” (part of its marketing kit). This document stresses that 90 percent of U.S. Hispanics speak Spanish,
that two-thirds of U.S. Hispanic adults are foreign born, and that 47.6 percent of the
Hispanic population is Spanish-dominant. However, with regard to the percentage
of foreign-born Hispanics, it is only among adults that this percentage is as high as
two-thirds of the population, not among youth, which the same report claims is the
fastest growing segment of the total Hispanic population. Similarly, the range of
Spanish speakers subsumes the Latinos who speak English or are bilingual. The
point here, however, is not Un...
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