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

In Search of Belonging: Latinas, Media, and Citizenship by Jillian M. Báez. University of Illinois Press. 2018. $99.00 hardcover; $26.00 paperback; $23.40 e-book. 202 pages.

The book In Search of Belonging: Latinas, Media, and Citizenship, by Jillian Báez, illustrates the complex relationships Latinas develop with media texts in the context of their local neighborhood experiences in Chicago. The ethnographic approach employed by Báez provides her access to deep and meaningful insight into gender, class, and ethnicity from the women at the center of her story. Báez's book takes its place among a growing body of literature in communication and media studies by authors who center the Latina/o experience to expand what we know about how audiences interact with media across ethnic, racial, economic, and geographic lines. Attention to Latina/o audiences and their sophisticated relationship to national and international media texts has been, until recently, an underdeveloped area of study. Notably Angharad Valdivia, Mary Beltrán, Arlene Dávila, and others have provided foundational work in the field that continues to inspire a growing number of recent projects that have moved the literature forward.¹

In Search of Belonging is in dialogue with the emerging work in the field making connections to current scholars as well as providing historical references to frame her narrative. The experiences of women in Chicago are compared with audience studies that focus on the experiences of audiences in New York, Texas, and California, emphasizing how space serves as an interpretive lens.² Further, her introductory self-reflection enables the reader to understand the interpretive framework grounded in cultural studies as she explains how she gained access to the communities contextualizing the keen observations throughout her fieldwork.³ The participants include thirty-nine Latinas between the ages of eighteen and fifty-five who reside in predominantly Latina/o neighborhoods in Chicago. More than half are of Mexican and/or Puerto Rican heritage, and all identify as working or middle class. Báez engaged in the primary fieldwork during 2005–2007, when she had access to community-based organizations and other locations that provided space to conduct participant observation. Much of the interview data comes from twenty semistructured interviews and five focus groups. Báez describes how she interacted with the women: "Being perceived as Latina because of my Spanish surname, physicality, and use of Spanish and Spanglish did offer me access to participants that would have been difficult otherwise."⁴ The ability to be seen as Latina allowed Báez to gain the trust of the participants, who were willing to share their experiences with someone with whom they could identify. Although the fieldwork was conducted more than a decade ago, the relationships that the women have with media remain constant. Báez is able to connect participant observations and interview data to the contemporary context by referencing current literature in Latino media studies. While the popular celebrities and movies have changed since her fieldwork, the way the women describe their interactions with media texts provide insight into how women negotiate meaning in their specific locality in Chicago.

In Search of Belonging begins with a detailed introduction that provides a strong theoretical lens to guide the analyses that emerge in the five chapters that follow. Báez draws on cultural studies' emphasis on the need to understand that media imagery of Latinas has been a site of struggle moving between invisibility, hypersexuality, domestic work, and other common narrative devices that have contained Latina representation. Her key theoretical interlocutors in reception studies include bell hooks, whose "oppositional gaze" she develops in connection to Stuart Hall's negotiated readings, as described in "Encoding/Decoding."⁵ Báez applies these concepts to help explain the participants' ability to "talk back to media through the discourse of belonging."⁶ Throughout the book, Báez provides context for the...