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Overview
Editorial Reviews
Publishers Weekly
According to Dávila (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 Dávila shrewdly, "[b]ut not in the optimistic ways described by political pundits" (Dec.)
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"Davila's argument is compelling."
-San Francisco Chronicle
,
"Her invaluable scholarly treatment unearths the competing interests and race-inflected ideological tendencies behind characterizations of Latino political identity in the mainstream media."
-Publishers Weekly,
"The finest, fiercest and most piercing of our public intellectuals . . . Dávila is a force of nature. In Latino Spin Dávila elegantly unravels the media driven sleight-of-hand that simultaneously celebrates an uber-American (and almost entirely manufactured) Latino middle class while demonizing recent Latino immigrants and the poor folks who resemble them. On a line by line, idea by idea basis Dávila is simply without peer, her scholarship essential to our understanding of our New America."
-Junot Díaz,author of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao and Drown
"Arlene Dávila depicts the frenzied efforts of post-industrial America to corral more than 40 million diverse Latinos into a single homogenized market. Whether it's peddling consumer goods, monetizing art and culture, engineering barrio land development, or shaping a new political voting bloc, Latino Spin brilliantly dissects Hispanic-American reality in the 21st century."
-Juan Gonzalez,New York Daily News columnist and author of Harvest of Empire: A History of Latinos in America
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Meet the Author
Arlene Dávila is Professor of Anthropology and American Studies at New York University. Her previous books include Barrio Dreams: Puerto Ricans, Latinos, and the Neoliberal City and Latinos Inc: Marketing and the Making of a People.
Table of Contents
Introduction 1
Pt. I The Politics of Latino Spin
1 Here Comes the Latino Middle Class 25
2 Latinos: "The New Republicans (They Just Don't Know It)" 46
3 The Hispanic Consumer: That's "A Lot of Dollars, Cars, Diapers, and Food" 71
Pt. II Political Economy: Spaces and Institutions
4 The Times-Squaring of El Barrio: On Mega-Projects, Spin, and "Community Consent" 97
5 From Barrio to Mainstream: On the Politics of Latino/a Art Museums 119
6 The "Disciplining" of Ethnic Studies: Or, Why It Will Take Goya Foods and J.Lo to Endow Latino Studies 138
Conclusion: On the Dangers of Wishful Thinking 161
Notes 173
Bibliography 181
Index 197