Public Sphere Reading Response

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Do not use extensive summaries of the reading(s). Move right to the discussion ( at least 4 paragraphs).  

1.The readings from week 3 are essentially critiques from Habermas’s theory of the Public Sphere. After briefly explaining the theory of the public sphere, use examples from two of the three reading from week three (Cunningham, Davila, Amaya) to articulate a critique.  Based on this critique, conclude by briefly discussing a role or function TV has in the broader public sphere.

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International Journal of Cultural Studies http://ics.sagepub.com Popular media as public 'sphericules' for diasporic communities Stuart Cunningham International Journal of Cultural Studies 2001; 4; 131 The online version of this article can be found at: http://ics.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/4/2/131 Published by: http://www.sagepublications.com Additional services and information for International Journal of Cultural Studies can be found at: Email Alerts: http://ics.sagepub.com/cgi/alerts Subscriptions: http://ics.sagepub.com/subscriptions Reprints: http://www.sagepub.com/journalsReprints.nav Permissions: http://www.sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav Downloaded from http://ics.sagepub.com at UNIV CALIFORNIA SAN DIEGO on December 17, 2008 01cunningham (ds) 2/5/01 8:49 am Page 131 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. Downloaded from http://ics.sagepub.com at UNIV CALIFORNIA SAN DIEGO on December 17, 2008 01cunningham (ds) 132 2/5/01 8:49 am Page 132 I N TERN ATI O N A L journal of CU LTU RA L st udies 4(2) 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’. Downloaded from http://ics.sagepub.com at UNIV CALIFORNIA SAN DIEGO on December 17, 2008 01cunningham (ds) 2/5/01 8:49 am Page 133 Cunningham ● 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 Downloaded from http://ics.sagepub.com at UNIV CALIFORNIA SAN DIEGO on December 17, 2008 133 01cunningham (ds) 134 2/5/01 8:49 am Page 134 I N TERN ATI O N A L journal of CU LTU RA L st udies 4(2) 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 Downloaded from http://ics.sagepub.com at UNIV CALIFORNIA SAN DIEGO on December 17, 2008 01cunningham (ds) 2/5/01 8:49 am Page 135 Cunningham ● 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 Downloaded from http://ics.sagepub.com at UNIV CALIFORNIA SAN DIEGO on December 17, 2008 135 01cunningham (ds) 136 2/5/01 8:49 am Page 136 I N TERN ATI O N A L journal of CU LTU RA L st udies 4(2) 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 Downloaded from http://ics.sagepub.com at UNIV CALIFORNIA SAN DIEGO on December 17, 2008 01cunningham (ds) 2/5/01 8:49 am Page 137 Cunningham ● Popular media as public ‘sphericules’ 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. Downloaded from http://ics.sagepub.com at UNIV CALIFORNIA SAN DIEGO on December 17, 2008 137 01cunningham (ds) 138 2/5/01 8:49 am Page 138 I N TERN ATI O N A L journal of CU LTU RA L st udies 4(2) 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. Downloaded from http://ics.sagepub.com at UNIV CALIFORNIA SAN DIEGO on December 17, 2008 01cunningham (ds) 2/5/01 8:49 am Page 139 Cunningham ● Popular media as public ‘sphericules’ 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 Downloaded from http://ics.sagepub.com at UNIV CALIFORNIA SAN DIEGO on December 17, 2008 139 01cunningham (ds) 140 2/5/01 8:49 am Page 140 I N TERN ATI O N A L journal of CU LTU RA L st udies 4(2) 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. Downloaded from http://ics.sagepub.com at UNIV CALIFORNIA SAN DIEGO on December 17, 2008 01cunningham (ds) 2/5/01 8:49 am Page 141 Cunningham ● Popular media as public ‘sphericules’ 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. Downloaded from http://ics.sagepub.com at UNIV CALIFORNIA SAN DIEGO on December 17, 2008 141 01cunningham (ds) 142 2/5/01 8:49 am Page 142 I N TERN ATI O N A L journal of CU LTU RA L st udies 4(2) 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 Downloaded from http://ics.sagepub.com at UNIV CALIFORNIA SAN DIEGO on December 17, 2008 01cunningham (ds) 2/5/01 8:49 am Page 143 Cunningham ● Popular media as public ‘sphericules’ 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. Downloaded from http://ics.sagepub.com at UNIV CALIFORNIA SAN DIEGO on December 17, 2008 143 01cunningham (ds) 144 2/5/01 8:50 am Page 144 I N TERN ATI O N A L journal of CU LTU RA L st udies 4(2) 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. Downloaded from http://ics.sagepub.com at UNIV CALIFORNIA SAN DIEGO on December 17, 2008 01cunningham (ds) 2/5/01 8:50 am Page 145 Cunningham ● Popular media as public ‘sphericules’ 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 Downloaded from http://ics.sagepub.com at UNIV CALIFORNIA SAN DIEGO on December 17, 2008 145 01cunningham (ds) 146 2/5/01 8:50 am Page 146 I N TERN ATI O N A L journal of CU LTU RA L st udies 4(2) 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. Downloaded from http://ics.sagepub.com at UNIV CALIFORNIA SAN DIEGO on December 17, 2008 01cunningham (ds) 2/5/01 8:50 am Page 147 Cunningham ● Popular media as public ‘sphericules’ 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] Downloaded from http://ics.sagepub.com at UNIV CALIFORNIA SAN DIEGO on December 17, 2008 147 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: http://tvn.sagepub.com Published by: http://www.sagepublications.com Additional services and information for Television & New Media can be found at: Email Alerts: http://tvn.sagepub.com/cgi/alerts Subscriptions: http://tvn.sagepub.com/subscriptions Reprints: http://www.sagepub.com/journalsReprints.nav Permissions: http://www.sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.nav Citations http://tvn.sagepub.com/cgi/content/refs/1/1/75 Downloaded from http://tvn.sagepub.com at UNIV CALIFORNIA SAN DIEGO on February 9, 2010 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. 75 Downloaded from http://tvn.sagepub.com at UNIV CALIFORNIA SAN DIEGO on February 9, 2010 76 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 Downloaded from http://tvn.sagepub.com at UNIV CALIFORNIA SAN DIEGO on February 9, 2010 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. Downloaded from http://tvn.sagepub.com at UNIV CALIFORNIA SAN DIEGO on February 9, 2010 77 78 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 Downloaded from http://tvn.sagepub.com at UNIV CALIFORNIA SAN DIEGO on February 9, 2010 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– Downloaded from http://tvn.sagepub.com at UNIV CALIFORNIA SAN DIEGO on February 9, 2010 79 80 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 Downloaded from http://tvn.sagepub.com at UNIV CALIFORNIA SAN DIEGO on February 9, 2010 Davila / Language and Culture in the Spanish TV 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 Downloaded from http://tvn.sagepub.com at UNIV CALIFORNIA SAN DIEGO on February 9, 2010 81 82 Television & New Media / February 2000 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 Downloaded from http://tvn.sagepub.com at UNIV CALIFORNIA SAN DIEGO on February 9, 2010 Davila / Language and Culture in the Spanish TV 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 Downloaded from http://tvn.sagepub.com at UNIV CALIFORNIA SAN DIEGO on February 9, 2010 83 84 Television & New Media / February 2000 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. Downloaded from http://tvn.sagepub.com at UNIV CALIFORNIA SAN DIEGO on February 9, 2010 Davila / Language and Culture in the Spanish TV 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.- Downloaded from http://tvn.sagepub.com at UNIV CALIFORNIA SAN DIEGO on February 9, 2010 85 86 Television & New Media / February 2000 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 Downloaded from http://tvn.sagepub.com at UNIV CALIFORNIA SAN DIEGO on February 9, 2010 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 Downloaded from http://tvn.sagepub.com at UNIV CALIFORNIA SAN DIEGO on February 9, 2010 87 88 Television & New Media / February 2000 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- Downloaded from http://tvn.sagepub.com at UNIV CALIFORNIA SAN DIEGO on February 9, 2010 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 Downloaded from http://tvn.sagepub.com at UNIV CALIFORNIA SAN DIEGO on February 9, 2010 89 90 Television & New Media / February 2000 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 Downloaded from http://tvn.sagepub.com at UNIV CALIFORNIA SAN DIEGO on February 9, 2010 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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Running Head: PUBLIC SPHERE

1

Public sphere
Name
Institution of Affiliation
Date

PUBLIC SPHERE

2

According to Habermas, the bourgeois public sphere can be conceived as the sphere of
private people who come together as a public. The public sphere thus is the public or private
individuals who come together to debate on issues regarding state authority. The public sphere
has undergone numerous developments. The public and the private sphere were integrated.
Economic developments such as capitalism were vital in the growth of the public sphere. In the
eighteenth century, the public sphere involved the use of reason in a rational-critical debate
which checked the state’s domination or unauthorized use of power. The bourgeois public
sphere ultimately crumbled due to economic and structures resulting in the feudaliza...


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