Latino Spin: Public Image and the Whitewashing of Race

by Arlene Dávila

Overview

Winner of the 2010 Distinguished Book Award in Latino Studies from the Latin American Studies Association

Follows the Latino public image and its impact on U.S. national identity

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780814720073
Publisher:	New York University Press
Publication date:	10/01/2008
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	224
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.60(d)

About the Author

Arlene Dávila is Professor of Anthropology and American Studies at NYU. Her books include Culture Works: Space, Value and Mobility Across the Neoliberal Americas (2012) and Latino Spin: Public Image and the Whitewashing of Race (2008), both available from NYU Press.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments vii Introduction 1 Part 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 Part 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 About the Author 211

Editorial Reviews

"A must read for students as well as a general public concerned with the future role of Latinos in U.S. society. Dávila also lays the foundation for understanding events that have occurred since the books publication."

Journal of American Ethnic History

"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

"A wonderfully written book that cuts through the & spin often used to typecast the U.S.s largest minority group. Offering a fresh and insightful take on race in America, Arlene Dávila addresses popular images of Latinos and shows us the limitations of both negative portrayals and the attempts to respond to them. In this tour de force, Dávila goes beyond simply describing bias to offer a transcendent vision of Latinos that challenges racism and captures the complexity of this diverse community."

Mark Sawyer

"Arlene Dávila depicts the frenzied efforts of post-industrial America to corral more than 40 million diverse Latinos into a single homogenized market. Whether its 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

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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