In Search of Belonging: Latinas, Media, and Citizenship by Jillian M. Báez (review)

Jillian M. Báez's In Search of Belonging : Latinas, Media, and Citizenship examines the ways in which Latina audiences perceive and engage with mediated representations of Latinas in mainstream and Spanish-language media. Báez conducts ethnographic research with a diverse group of Latina women in Chicago in order to explore the ways in which Latina audiences use media as a means to assess, contest, and "talk back" to issues concerning their representation, sense of belonging, and place within the national imaginary. Báez argues that Latina audiences use media as a gauge to assess their place within the nation. Her findings reveal that Latina audiences read media images through the lens of citizenship and view media consumption as belonging. In this way, her study speaks broadly to the ways citizenship is experienced in our contemporary and mediated world.

The methodology, history, and terminology outlined in Báez's introduction underpin her layered study of Latina audiences. She combines in-depth interviews, multisited participant observations, and focus groups in order to investigate the viewing practices and media perspectives of thirty-nine Latinas in Chicago. Though the majority of participants identify as Latinas of Mexican or Puerto Rican national origin or heritage—an element that allows Báez to feature Chicago and its long history of Mexican and Puerto Rican parallel migrations, settlement patterns, and political coalitions as a particular site of place-making—the study also includes several participants of hybrid ethnicities along with a variety of identifications within class, age, and generation. Báez offers a historical sketch that includes the representation of Latina/os in music, television, radio, and magazines throughout the twentieth century; the political and economic friction that marks relationships between the US and Latin America; and the competing notions of what it means to be Latina/o and how being Latina/o is valued. Her historical outline informs her contemporary fieldwork, conducted primarily in the mid-2000s, and her exploration of concepts such as active audiences, "talking back," race, sexuality, "the Latina gaze," and (cultural) citizenship.

Chapters 1 and 3 reveal the ways in which Latina bodies are racialized, (hyper)sexualized and, as a result, "treated as constantly on display and available for consumption" (82). Chapter 1 focuses on how Latina audiences define Latina beauty in relation to representations of race and gender in US and Latin American media. As whiteness stands at the pinnacle of racial hierarchies in both contexts, Báez provides a detailed and critical sketch of the "whitening" practices undertaken by Latina celebrities and noncelebrities alike. Challenging an idealization of whiteness, her findings suggest that participants "talk back" to their media representations by calling for a more racially diverse ideal of citizenship, a critical move that not only contests European beauty regimes, but also, Báez argues, is a form of neo-mestizaje.

Chapter 3 explores the ways in which Latina audiences engage with the "long-standing and ubiquitous" (83) trope of hypersexuality that marks representations of the Latina body. According to Báez's findings, Latina participants make sense of these images in three ways: through critique, respectability, and "self-tropicalization," a subversive strategy wherein Latina participants engage in a conscious exoticization of the self in order to shift an external, Eurocentric gaze to a self-imposed one (107). Both chapters offer rich historical outlines of race and class (chapter 1) and hypersexuality (chapter 3) as they are constructed in the US and Latin America. Moreover, each chapter includes novel insights into the similarities and differences among Mexican, Puerto Rican, and what Báez, borrowing from Frances Aparicio, calls "intraLatina" subjects regarding perspectives on beauty, representation, and citizenship (58). Though both chapters applaud the ways in which Latina audiences actively engage with and "talk back" to media that purport to represent them, they also reveal the tension within participant responses that oscillate between challenging and reproducing hegemonic notions of Latina womanhood.

In Chapter 2, Báez adds another...