Contemporary Latina/o Media Contemporary Latina/o Media Production, Circulation, Politics Edited by Arlene Dávila and Yeidy M. Rivero a NEW YORK UNIVERSITY PRESS New York and London NEW YORK UNIVERSITY PRESS New York and London www.nyupress.org © 2014 by New York University All rights reserved References to Internet websites (URLs) were accurate at the time of writing. Neither the author nor New York University Press is responsible for URLs that may have expired or changed since the manuscript was prepared. CIP tk New York University Press books are printed on acid-free paper, and their binding materials are chosen for strength and durability. We strive to use environmentally responsible suppliers and materials to the greatest extent possible in publishing our books. Manufactured in the United States of America 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Also available as an ebook Contents Introduction 1 Arlene Dávila Part I. Production 1. Corporate Transnationalism: The US Hispanic and 21 Latin American Television Industries Juan Piñón 2. Converging from the South: Mexican Television in the 44 United States Rodrigo Gómez, Toby Miller, and André Dorcé 3. NuvoTV: Will It Withstand the Competition? 62 Henry Puente 4. One Language, One Nation, and One Vision: 82 NBC Latino, Fusion, and Fox News Latino Christopher Joseph Westgate 5. The Gang’s Not All Here: The State of Latinos in 103 Contemporary US Media Frances Negrón-Muntaner 6. Latinos at the Margins of Celebrity Culture: 125 Image Sales and the Politics of Paparazzi Vanessa Díaz Part II. Circulation, Distribution, Policy 7. Anatomy of a Protest: Grey’s Anatomy, Colombia’s 149 A corazón abierto, and the Politicization of a Format Yeidy M. Rivero >> v vi << Contents 8. Colombianidades Export Market 169 Omar Rincón and María Paula Martínez 9. The Role of Media Policy in Shaping the US Latino 186 Radio Industry Mari Castañeda 10. Lost in Translation: The Politics of Race and Language 206 in Spanish-Language Radio Ratings Dolores Inés Casillas 11. The Dark Side of Transnational Latinidad: 223 Narcocorridos and the Branding of Authenticity Hector Amaya Part III. Cultural Politics 12. “No Papers, No Fear”: DREAM Activism, New Social 245 Media, and the Queering of Immigrant Rights Cristina Beltrán 13. Latina/o Audiences as Citizens: Bridging Culture, 267 Media, and Politics Jillian Báez 14. Un Desmadre Positivo: Notes on How Jenni Rivera 285 Played Music Deborah R. Vargas 15. Marketing, Performing, and Interpreting Multiple 303 Latinidades: Los Tigres del Norte and Calle 13’s “América” María Elena Cepeda 16. Latinos in Alternative Media: Latinos as an 322 Alternative Media Paradigm Ed Morales 17. On History and Strategies for Activism 337 Juan González About the Contributors 349 Index 354 Introduction Arlene Dávila If you have been reading the business news headlines, you would think that Latin@s are being showered with an unbounded selection of new media choices. Just ten years ago, talk of Latino media could be safely reduced to a handful of TV channels, dominated by Univision and Tel- emundo, a larger number of radio networks, a variety of more localized venues such as cable stations, and print news. Today, however, there’s a dizzying discussion of new TV channels, unbounded celebration of Latin@s as the “new” media market, and the entry of big media players anticipated to “transform” what we understand as “Latino media.” Yet neither communications nor media scholarship has kept up with these transformations, leaving us with few answers to overarching ques- tions in the field of Latino media and communications. We know little about what really may be “new” about current media proposals, about whether Latin@s are being offered more varied representations and opportunities for jobs and access to media markets, and about the ways they are consuming and mobilizing new media for political aims. These are exactly some of the questions that this volume seeks to answer by calling attention to issues of production, circulation, distribution, and consumption. It does so by going beyond debates over images and >> 1 2 << Arlene Dávila representation that, while important, have tended to dominate discus- sions of Latino media to explore a more uncharted terrain involving the larger political economic dynamics at play. The volume focuses on Latino/Latin American media flows because what we regularly define as “Latino media” has historically been the product of transnational processes involving ownership and the impor- tation and circulation of talent and content from Latin America. It has also been dominated by the importation and translation of program- ming ideas (from the United States to Latin America, particularly from the 1940s to the 1960s), the buying and selling of scripts across the region (beginning in the 1940s and continuing into the present), and, more recently, the selling of programming formats, all intended to sustain a larger and hence more profitable hemispheric market (Rivero 2009; Oren and Shahaf 2011). In other words, addressing “Latino media” means analyzing at least two industries: one with roots in Latin America and the other with roots in Hollywood, not to mention two industries that are also linked to at least three distinct language media worlds in Spanish, in English, and in Portuguese (translated into Span- ish) (Rivero 2009). Traditionally media scholars have tended to split Latin American and Latino media industries in their analyses, clearly separating the two regions and populations in their studies in ways that have tended to downplay the intricate connections between Latino and Latin America media at the level of production, circulation, and consumption. Instead, our analysis adopts a transnational focus to place these dynamics at the foreground of any contemporary analysis. The volume’s focus, however, is US Latin@s and how they are being inserted into these processes, and affected by the continued Latin Americanization of genres, products, and audiences, as well as by the whitewashing of “mainstream” Holly- wood media, where Latin@s, like most racially diverse communities, have been consistently bypassed. Beyond this common emphasis, the volume is purposefully broad. It focuses primarily on Spanish-language television and radio, which are the two dominant nationwide market- ing and media outlets for US Latin@s, but it also touches on the state of Latin@s in mainstream prime-time TV, and to a lesser extent on regional, digital, and alternative media that have been generally more accessible to locally based communities. Introduction >> 3 At the same time, we are very aware of the limitations of this project, and present it as a start of a larger and much-needed debate. In particu- lar, the anthology reflects a continued dominance of Mexican and Mexi- can American media, a product of Latino demographics, but also of the continued dominance of Mexican exports in Latino media. We were sur- prised by the continued scarcity of analyses looking at Cubans in Miami, notwithstanding the key role that Cuban Americans have played in the development of transnational Spanish-language media and the rising role of Miami as a “Latin Hollywood.”1 The lack of research on the involve- ment of Dominicans and other Latin@ groups in the development of alternative media is also another important void in the current scholar- ship, which we hope our volume helps to fill by inspiring more work in the future. Then there is the fact that when Latin@s are close to 16 percent of the total US population and mass media imbricate every single aspect of Americans’ lives, it is impossible for this or any single volume to pro- vide a fully comprehensive treatment of contemporary “Latino media” or Latin@s and the media. For this, we need to escape the very category of “Latino media” that has historically constrained analysis, limiting it to media that are supposedly marketed and packaged to Latin@s, in isola- tion from all the different media to which they are exposed and which they consume on a daily basis, from mainstream network TV, to video games, to outdoor media, to the Internet, and so on. In fact, some chap- ters provide glimpses of this larger media landscape that remains largely understudied, though as a general rule our focus remains on media mar- keted, packaged, and circulated as “Latino media.” We chose this focus because it assists our analysis of the Latino media landscape at a time when new investments and developments pose questions about what may be some of the social, cultural, and political implications of these supposedly “new” media investments. This emphasis also facilitates an exploration of the problems and limits of “Latino”-specific media and of most of the corporate-driven productions and representations of Latini- dad at a moment when, despite their invisibility in most media venues, Latin@s and most racial “majorities” are no longer numerical “minori- ties.” In sum, our intention is to have more attention paid to the political economy and cultural politics of Latino media within media, communi- cation, and cultural studies while encouraging more work to fill the enor- mous voids in these growing fields of study. 4 << Arlene Dávila Likewise, we focus on the traditional rubrics of production, circu- lation, and cultural politics, well aware that politics embeds all stages of media production and circulation and that, as Stuart Hall’s famous encoding/decoding essay once noted, these “separate” dynamics are ultimately intertwined. Matters of circulation, distribution, and policies affect decisions about production, while production processes are deci- sive in what is ultimately consumed and circulated as “Latino media.” Our use of these rubrics is, then, strategic. Specifically, we seek to think through the transnational trends fueling the growth of “Latino” media initiatives in the United States; issues of policy and political economy that constrain the circulation of media products; and the everyday cul- tural politics related to all facets of media use and how they affect mat- ters of representation, democracy, and the creation of new Latin@ pub- lics and politics.