Latino Spin
Public Image and the Whitewashing of Race
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- $24.99
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- $24.99
Publisher Description
Winner of the 2010 Distinguished Book Award in Latino Studies from the Latin American Studies Association
Illegal immigrant, tax burden, job stealer. Patriot, family oriented, hard worker, model consumer. Ever since Latinos became the largest minority in the U.S. they have been caught between these wildly contrasting characterizations leaving us to wonder: Are Latinos friend or foe?
Latino Spin cuts through the spin about Latinos’ supposed values, political attitudes, and impact on U.S. national identity to ask what these caricatures suggest about Latinos’ shifting place in the popular and political imaginary. Noted scholar Arlene Dávila illustrates the growing consensus among pundits, advocates, and scholars that Latinos are not a social liability, that they are moving up and contributing, and that, in fact, they are more American than “the Americans.” But what is at stake in such a sanitized and marketable representation of Latinidad? Dávila follows the spin through the realm of politics, think tanks, Latino museums, and urban planning to uncover whether they effectively challenge the growing fear over Latinos’ supposedly dreadful effect on the “integrity” of U.S. national identity. What may be some of the intended or unintended consequences of these more marketable representations in regard to current debates over immigration?
With particular attention to what these representations reveal about the place and role of Latinos in the contemporary politics of race, Latino Spin highlights the realities they skew and the polarization they effect between Latinos and other minorities, and among Latinos themselves along the lines of citizenship and class. Finally, by considering Latinos in all their diversity, including their increasing financial and geographic disparities, Dávila can present alternative and more empowering representations of Latinidad to help attain true political equity and intraracial coalitions.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
According to D vila (Barrio Dreams), the huge and heterogeneous Latino population has been treated to facile and contradictory representations in the public sphere as both "problem" (immigrant) and "opportunity" (voters, consumers). Her invaluable scholarly treatment unearths the competing interests and race-inflected ideological tendencies behind characterizations of Latino political identity in the mainstream media. Those scholars, pollsters, marketers and policymakers hitching Latinos to an image of the American middle class have larger motivations and interests to satisfy, the more partisan of which use Latinos to narrow the permissible definition of the "patriotic American" in the first place. Obscured in pervasive media portraits of the "equation-altering" Latino vote is the fact that only 18% of Latinos went to the polls in 2004 and their relative lack of representation in government points to their overwhelming disenfranchisement. The image of the "Latino middle class" masks as much as it reveals, not least the embattled state of the American middle class as a whole. Latinos are indeed "at the heart of the remaking of America," argues D vila shrewdly, "ut not in the optimistic ways described by political pundits"
