Marketing Latin/America: Latinos as Consumers in the U.S. Marketplace

Latinos Inc.: The Marketing and Making of a People. By Arlene Dávila. Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 2001. 287 pages. $55.00 (cloth). $22.50 (paper).

Today 50 percent of all bookings at Radio City Music Hall are Hispanic artists. Salsa outsells ketchup in the Midwest. Nachos beat hot-dogs at movies. What's happening? Simple: A cultural and marketing phenomenon known as the U.S. Hispanic market.

This selection from a Bromley Aguilar Associates media kit, with which Arlene Dávila begins the first chapter of Latinos Inc., does not simply lay out the "truth" behind the so called Hispanization of American culture, but it does nicely introduce the cultural moment of the "Latin Boom" and illustrate the linkage being forged between community identity and marketplace presence as the most significant indicator of Hispanic progress and power in the United States. Thus, Latinos Inc. begins with the presentation of the seemingly "simple" idea that the influx of Latin American immigrants and the increase of U.S. born Latinos can provide U.S. industry with new markets, which provides an opportunity to deconstruct the implied value of equating identity with purchasing power in order to critique the notion that there is anything authentic behind movie-house nachos and similar means of addressing the cultural tastes of Latinos. And, even more importantly, the book confronts directly the belief that there is such a thing as "the U.S. Hispanic market."

Arlene Dávila's text is a welcome full-length study of how the intersections of American consumer culture and Latin American immigrant imagination impact the Latino/a community in the United States. The reinvented "Latin" that has recently become the darling of contemporary media has been equally critiqued within academic discourse. However, this study is arguably the first to illuminate the far reaching and deeply powerful cultural entanglements felt amongst Latin American immigrants and Latinos/as born in the United States generally and then to situate those entanglements within the advertising industry. Dávila's main purpose in showing this complex relationship is to reveal the biases both within the U.S. dominant culture's view of Latinos/as as well as those located in parallel Latin American media industries. Thus, she solidly locates U.S. Latino/a images and communities derived from the marketplace within an American studies broadly conceived and firmly located within the transnational study of the links amongst the "Americas."

In Latinos Inc. Dávila overlaps a variety of methods to reveal the complexity of the very processes at the heart of "creating" the Latino/a as a U.S. consumer. For example, she solidly grounds her work in the methods of cultural anthropology and employs ethnographic research, interviews, and the responses of focus groups in order to provide an "inside" view of a little known sphere. She weaves this material with her own readings of television commercials and other advertising images, created both by non-Latino adverting companies and by Latino cultural insiders, wherein she effectively critiques the spinning of "Latin identity" or "Hispanic culture" for particular sales strategies. She also travels familiar avenues and methods of Latino/a studies in order to contextualize her findings. Thus she considers how such elements as the terminology of "Hispanic" versus "Latino," the politics of language, the domain of citizenship, Pan Latino/a identity versus nationally derived identifiers, and racialization and class experience within Latin America versus the United States both affect and are affected by the commodifying structures of advertising. Finally, she locates her work within the broadly conceived domain of comparative ethnic studies by examining how the creation of Hispanic "ethnic" identity and identifiers is not new but reflects the constant desire by the United States' mainstream to invent an appropriately packaged "American-ethnic." Thus Dávila considers like portrayals of African and Asian Americans in dominant media in order...