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| 1 Introduction Mapping the Place of Latinas in the U.S. Media If the 1980s was, as media marketing professionals declared, the decade of the Hispanics, then Latinas have so far owned the new century.1 Demographic shifts along with the globalization of deregulated media markets have dramatically increased the number of Latina/o media outlets, advertising dollars, and focus on Latina/o audiences.2 For instance, while overall U.S. advertising revenue declined sharply after the September 11 terrorist attacks, spending on advertisements in Latina/o media has steadily increased, although it still remains a small segment of the overall market.3 In particular, advertising and marketing professionals have increased their focus on 18- to 34-year-old Latinas, who are often portrayed by the media as avid consumers of everything from baby diapers to mascara.4 I begin this book by reaffirming the claim that Latina performers, producers, and audiences are thus an essential part of global media culture. Along with an increase in media and cultural visibility, there has emerged a vibrant field of scholarship, Latina/o Communication Studies, so named by Angharad Valdivia in her 2008 book by the same title.5 I situate myself within both Latina/o studies and media studies to answer Valdivia’s provocative questions: What are the contemporary politics of media representations about Latinas/os? And what are audiences asking the media to do in their representations? Throughout the book, I map out the symbolic value assigned to Latinas in a media landscape that remains simultaneously familiar and strangely new. Latina lives continue to be represented through media archetypes and tropes that have existed since the birth of popular film in the early 1900s, yet the new century also has opened more complex representational spaces. Latinas are political advocates, global figures, and producers of their own media stories. I unpack the representational stakes by turning to online audience discussions and blogs about mainstream media depictions of Latina bodies. Through online audience writings about Latina media repre- 2 | introduction sentations, I chart the complex demands on ethnic women’s bodies to stand in for their specific ethnic communities and serve the economic imperatives of globally integrated media industries.6 In particular, I document the lives, bodies, and voices of Latinas in the mediascape by engaging in a series of case studies. First, I examine newspaper and television news stories about the Elián González custody case (1999– 2000) to understand the changing ethnic, racial, and gender roles that Cuban women played in the controversy. My focus then moves to analyzing celebrity tabloid coverage of Jennifer Lopez (2002–2004) to study Latina sexuality and identity and its surveillance in popular culture. The following two case studies shift attention to mainstream media produced by the iconic Latina celebrity Salma Hayek. I explore the production and reception of Mexican identity in the art-house movie Frida (2002) and the global production of Latina multiculturalism in the television series Ugly Betty (2006) to illustrate the powerful constraints surrounding representations of Latina lives. The book ends by turning attention to Hollywood depictions of and public discourses about domestic Latina labor and Latina immigration amid the anti-immigration backlash by analyzing Jennifer Lopez’s Maid in Manhattan (2002) and Paz Vega’s Spanglish (2004). Together the case studies provide a fertile terrain for charting the changing representational geography of U.S. and global media productions—a mediated terrain where racially ambiguous but ethnically marked feminine bodies sell everything from haute couture to tabloids, and where the lives of ethnic women are the focus of news, media gossip, movies, and online audience discussions. Ethnicity, and specifically minority female ethnic sexuality, can be savored, commodified, packaged, and safely distributed for the consumption of audiences throughout the world. That said, I move away from a simplistic representational analysis of media stereotypes toward a more complicated discussion of the English- and Spanish -language media as global institutions that contribute to popular knowledge about ethnicity, race, and gender.7 Underlying my study of the growing demand for multicultural women, their cultural labor, and their stories is recognition of the tumultuous context of a decade defined by increasing tensions about immigration and the associated changes in demographics, both of which are often perceived as threats to established definitions of U.S. citizenship and nation.8 Examining the tension between the culture industry’s demands for ethnic female sexuality and the continuing backlash against ethnic and racial minority women, Dangerous Curves positions Latina bodies...

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