Identities in Transition

The Enkidu Summer Conference 2007

June 1 - 5, 2007

Mexico City

in:

The Role of Spanish-Language Media in the formation of Pan-Latino Identities in the United States

Ken Henriksen

Department of Language, Literature and Culture

Aarhus University

Denmark/Dinamarca

The Role of Spanish-Language Media in the Formation of Pan-Latino Identities in the United States Ken Henriksen Assistant professor Department of Language, Literature and Culture Aarhus University Denmark The proposed paper explores the ways in which Spanish language media contribute to the formation of pan-Latino identities in the United States. Traditional approaches to transnational identity formation focus on how linkages between immigrants and the sending country are maintained through constant exchanges of information and goods. These approaches have thus documented that the entry into a new, at times, alien social environment does not represent a break in the ties with their societies of origin. However we also have to recognize the multiple horizontal linkages and connections that immigrants often sustain with each other and with non-immigrants in the host society. Transnational identity formation should thus be viewed as a dialogical process involving internal and external opinions and processes, as well as the immigrants’ self-identifications and outsiders’ ethnic and cultural categorization. In the proposed paper I study what types of Latino communities Spanish language media construct. 

The focus is on how Spanish language media reproduce and contest dominant stereotypes, and on the role they play in the formation of Latino identities and communities. Many recent studies have documented how people of Latin American descent are labeled in terms of negative stereotypes that categorize them as criminal, violent, and undesired Others (Johnson 1990; Schmidt 1997; Kearney 1998; Berg 2002; Henriksen forthcoming). However, many cities and places in New York, Florida and the south-west have become attractive multiethnic Spanish media markets. Because of the huge immigration of people from many different Latin American countries the Spanish-language media today have to take into account an extremely diversified readership (Fox 1996). In this way the media serve as liaison between the different groups, and it assumes an important role in the formation and maintenance of pan-Latino alliances and communities, which might contest or go beyond dominant stereotypes. Whereas dominant images of the Latino Others contribute to their exclusion and marginalization, Spanish-language media may have a more inclusive role. 

The question is to what extent alternative forms of identification play a role in the establishment of emergent types of membership and citizenship? In the discussion of this question the proposed study draws on Critical Discourse Analysis (Fairclough 1992; 2005), and on recent contributions to trans-nationalism and collective identity formation (Hall 1990; Gracía Canclini 1995; Basch, et al 1995; Baía 1999). Based on this literature the proposed paper argues that the Latino identities are, in part, constituted by the pan-Latino communities and identities that are constructed in the media. These identities are, thus, formed inside textual representations, not outside of them (Hall 1990).

About Ken Henriksen

2003. Ph.d. Copenhagen Business school (Project: Ethno-political Practice in post-revolutionary Nicaragua. The Miskitu population on the Atlantic Coast) 2006: Assistant Professor. Aarhus University.