Contemporary Latina/o Media: Production, Circulation, Politics ed. by Arlene Dávila and Yeidy M. Rivero (review)

Until recently, scholarship on Latina/o media has focused on representations of Latinos in film, television, music, and the news. While these approaches have yielded useful analyses of how Latinos are depicted in various media, they have also downplayed the institutional contexts in which these representations are produced and consumed. Contemporary Latina/o Media addresses this imbalance by examining how media are produced for Latinos, how Latinos consume this work, and the implications of these patterns of consumption and production on Latinos’ abilities to exercise their citizenship rights. By shifting our attention to the global political economy, this collection of seventeen essays offers an interdisciplinary social science intervention into a field that has been dominated by literary and cultural analyses.

Contemporary Latina/o Media is divided into three sections: production, circulation, and politics. The section on production establishes why this intervention is especially timely. In the past ten years, a pan-Latino market has emerged in the United States as the deregulation of communications industries has eroded the distinction between national and foreign media, a combination that exposes how “Latino media” is the product of transnational processes. As Arlene Dávila notes in her useful introduction to the collection, “addressing ‘Latino media’ means analyzing at least two industries: one with roots in Latin America and the other with roots in Hollywood” (2). The essays in this section demonstrate how the transnational nature of Latina/o media has shifted the ownership of media outlets away from Latinos and toward Latin American corporations. As a result, Latino media has been “Latin Americanized,” obscuring the presence of English-dominant Latinos and forgoing local concerns in favor of blander themes that are adaptable to larger audiences.

While the essays in the production section focus on the global market factors that shape Latino media, those in the circulation section attend to the media policies that affect distribution. In this section, Latino radio, which enjoys a larger listenership than the mainstream radio market, receives special consideration. Mari Castañeda shows how the deregulation of radio markets has transformed Latino radio from a separate market with a public interest mission into a commercial format that de-politicizes its content in order to attract advertisers. Examining Arbitron, the company that produces ratings for the radio industry, Dolores Inés Casillas reveals how listener surveys underreport Latinos because of linguistic and racial oversights in their measuring methodologies, errors that obscure Spanish-language radio’s impact on the U.S. market.

Radio is one example of a medium that Latinos consume at a rate that differs from other U.S. populations. Throughout this collection, there are several reports of differential consumption. Frances Negrón-Muntaner explains these differences in a chapter that distills the findings of a Columbia University study titled “The Latino Media Gap.” For example, Latinos consume broadcast television at higher rates, and they are more avid cell phone users than other populations. This focus on media consumption can lead one to mistakenly view Latinos as passive consumers, but the essays in the politics section of the book contest this view. This section reveals how undocumented youth have repurposed online videos to “come out” in the manner of gay rights activists, how consumers of media negotiate and contest the representations that they watch, and how fans of Latina/o celebrities form online counterpublics that engage the political issues associated with a star’s persona.

Throughout the collection, scholars warn us that “Latino” is never a fixed entity but can only be understood in its particular constructions. Therefore, we must always examine how these instantiations connect to a global political economy in order to determine their motives and politics. Contemporary Latina/o Media provides scholars with a much-needed resource for rethinking media studies and will undoubtedly emerge as a touchstone volume on its topic. Scholars of Latino/a media will seek it out for several of its groundbreaking essays, and students at...