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BOOK PRESENTATION & DISCUSSION:
LATINOS. INC. :The Marketing and Making of a People

Author : Arlene Dávila, New York University

 
THE BULK OF LATINO PROGRAMMING COMES FROM LATIN AMERICA BUT THE ADVERTISING IS MADE IN THE U.S. FOR A U.S. LATINO AUDIENCE

Three of the most exciting things that I found while doing this investigation that I would like to approach people to think about was first of all the political economy of the industry, it’s so fascinating to learn the history, the roots in Latin America, the existing roots and political economy of those roots that have been so much at play since the origin of this industry in the sixties that conceived of this Hispanic Nation as always larger than but always within the United States.

So there’s this common boundary but also this extension because still today as you know the bulk of the U.S. Latino media does the programming. Even though all the Hispanic advertising is done for the U.S. Hispanic market by U.S. Hispanic marketing agencies --.the irony is the bulk of programming, most of the programming, still comes from Latin America. So you have these two cultural fields of cultural production working in parallel and contradictory fashion with some entrepreneur saying, well -- there’s a unique Hispanic Nation and you have to hire U.S. Hispanic, unique people, you know, this kind of authenticity of what U.S. Latino image is all about and then you have this other entrepreneur saying oh but there’s this larger encompassing Latin America and Latino and what works here would work in Mexico, Argentina, Puerto Rico and so forth...

And it’s interesting to think about in terms of cultural policy and what does it mean versus nationality -- nationalism. In other words, to go behind the micropolitics of the image because it seems to me that a lot of us -- you know, what Marta told me -- what a lot of us who have been working in the media have been looking at for so long is really the images, the politics of the image and one of the things that I was most interested in and would love to have written about this and perhaps wasn’t able to was the whole political economy of the industry and how we perhaps -- you know, all of this you know, from Telemundo to --- there’s so much to learn from looking and probing the political economy of this industry and the micropolitics in it -- not just the images but what goes on behind it.


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