Latina/o Communication and Media Studies Today: An Introduction

摘要

Not long ago, in the late eighties, as I tried to develop a syllabus that included Latina/os [then known as Hispanics] for a "minorities and media" class, there was very little material one could assign. One could choose from the occasional data on Hispanic media and the already developing literary analysis written by Chicanas such as Gloria Anzaldua or more personal testimonials such as Cherrfe Moraga. As well, some of the work by Charles Ramirez Berg and Chon Noriega was beginning to show up both in Chicano Studies anthologies and some film studies collections, especially the ones with a focus on race. Clint Wilson and Felix Gutierrez's Minorities and Media: Diversity and the End of Mass Communication (Sage, 1985) stood out as a lonely voice in the attempt to come to terms with commonalities of media treatment of ethnic populations. As well, Federico Subervi-Velez's dissertation on issues of politics, ethnic assimilation, and mass media was just about finished and would launch his long trajectory studying these important issues. Scholarship on ethnicity, acculturation, and rhetorical approaches to identity formation of Hispanics was in its infancy with the groundwork being laid out by Conquerwood (1985) among others. In sum, there was relatively little work on Latina/os and communications or the mass media, including the mainstream research areas of television, advertising, and journalism and the press—all three areas with a growing tradition in regard to African Americans and the media. In the few collections where there was an attempt to talk across ethnicities, Latina/os were distant second in relation to African Americans in terms of scholarly attention. The academic discourse did not differ much from popular discourses wherein the imagined racial diversity of the U.S. nation was treated as binary—that is, Black and White. In this schema, Latina/os, as well as other ethnic groups such as Asian Americans and Native Americans, among others, fell beyond the scope of public discussion and academic research.