Accentuate the Positive

Mestizaje, Middlebrow, and Museums

Latinidad provides a useful terrain to conceptualize how difference operates in our present conjuncture. Like any group, there exists no essential Latina/o subject, and the ties that bind have been loosely gathered since the initial encounter between Europeans and indigenous peoples. Out of such origins, a people arise from an amalgam of differences that have come to be defined as racial, ethnic, religious, geographic, gender, sexual, class, nationality, etc. The mestizaje, or mixture of indigenous and Spanish ancestry is itself a myth that obscures the entrenched hierarchical relations between White and Indian, and erases the more interesting transcultural features of the hemisphere embodied in African, Asian, Jewish, and non-Spanish European populations. Yet, like other ethnic and racial groups in the United States, Latinidad maintains an assumed coherence as a viable unity—an assumption often reproduced by academics (Mayer, 2004). However, a small group of dedicated scholars have built a growing body of work interrogating features of Latina/o unity while producing compelling studies of specific cultural texts and communication processes (Beltrán, 2008; Mayer, 2003; Molina Guzmán, 2010a; Valdivia, 2003). Emergent scholarship on Latinidad in communication and cultural studies presents a complex picture of contemporary manifestations of difference. Rather than relying on an assumed unity of Latinidad as a variable, key scholarship in this area investigates poetics and politics of Latina/o coherence.

This productive arena of inquiry helps scholars move beyond the positive/negative binary that characterized cultural criticism in the 1970s and 80s that saw representation as either stereotypical or rehabilitative. Valdivia (2010) remarks, “positive and negative are judgment calls that cannot be guaranteed across a range of representation, audiences, effects, time, or constituencies” (p. 76). She argues for a relational approach where features of a text are brought in dialogue with a range of related discourses and representations. This is in line with approaches that interrogate the Latina/o problematic, or the particular ideological constructs that rationalize and organize specific articulations of Latinidad, such as citizenship, religion, race, or gender (del Río, 2006). In such a formulation, mestizaje does not mean just one thing, either positive or negative. Rather, guarantees of the “brown race” are broken apart and communication scholars conceptualize Latinidad as a fluid, conjunctural unity that is always rendered in relation to other political, economic, and cultural conflicts and interests.

Articulation (Laclau, 1977, Slack, 1996) provides a productive way to approach the organization of human difference and to uncover the particular conflicts and interests hidden under the assumed coherence Latinidad. As a cultural studies approach to social inquiry, articulation seeks to understand how and under what conditions unities arise from different elements. Stuart Hall (1996a) writes that articulation problematizes “the form of the connection that can make a unity of two different elements, under certain conditions” (p. 141). For the study of Latinidad, articulation posits that we understand the conditions and purposes under which general market media and cultural texts define, shape, and unify a Latina/o people. For this reason, the joining of a textual with extratextual analysis can shed light not just on the outcome of social processes in the articulation of Latinidad, but on the social processes themselves. Also, articulation brings us back to the persistence of positive and negative as an evaluative criteria among some cultural producers and some critics: while scholarly understanding of the nature of representation moves beyond the trappings of binaries; advocacy groups, critics, and media producers themselves may still work to confront “negative” stereotypes and replace them with “positive” alternatives. Many critics and producers provide more nuanced understandings of representational quality, but a reliance on the positive/negative binary appears as a persistent pattern in contemporary discourses. This, of course, does not mean that scholars should then, in a corresponding manner, understand resulting texts as positive or negative. But the attempt by producers to create affirmative and rehabilitative texts, in relation to professional, institutional, and economic extratextual features, articulates Latinidad in a particular way that must be investigated. In other words, “good depictions” of minority groups are more complicated and convoluted than the positive/negative evaluation—they are the articulation of different, sometimes contradictory strands into a unity that deserves close investigation rather than hasty adoration. By studying the extratextual elements and production history of Americanos, I aim to consider not only the textual features of the exhibit, but also how a middlebrow and commercial collaboration articulates Latinidad in a conjunctural way that is neither positive or negative, the result of a negotiation of middlebrow multiculturalism, the tension between bottom-up and top-down interests, and institutional tensions.

The institutional location of Americanos might best be understood through Lisa Henderson’s notion of the multicultural middlebrow. Henderson’s (1999) ethnographic study of the WHYY women’s literature call-in program, Storyline, suggests that while producers of the program wanted to engage in an affirmation of multicultural and feminist discourses, they were unlikely to enter more critical discussion of race and class inequality. Henderson (1999) argues that the democratizing power of the program is “restricted not only by the debilitating threat of funding cuts…but also by the ambivalent (if no less determining) practices of its professional-managerial producers” (p. 348). The multicultural ethos of the program made room for indulging in diversity and identity, but the middlebrow assumptions and production location limited discussions of power. Thus, the multicultural middlebrow, as a structure of feeling, consists of a “practical consciousness in organizational life” (p. 331) that ultimately “circumscribes discursive possibilities” (p. 348) and shapes cultural production. Laced within the multicultural middlebrow is a form of supportive representation for marginalized groups that marks a central contradiction of liberal multiculturalism: the desire to affirm diverse identities leaves little room for a direct confrontation of hierarchical relationships that define and maintain difference. Such strategies, found throughout mainstream U.S. institutions but especially in middlebrow cultural practices, may support the ideologies known as the American Dream.

In their study of The Cosby Show, Sut Jhally and Justin Lewis (1992) write that the “American Dream is much more than a gentle fantasy; it is a cultural doctrine that encompasses vast tracts of American life” (p. 139). The assumption of an egalitarian society creates a symbolic reality where those who work hard enough, regardless of their background, can move up the system based on merit and achieve economic success. News stories often promote narratives of ethnic minorities who have achieved economic success (Campbell, 1995). In discourses of the American Dream, the representation of minority success stories help create the idea that there are no rules, no limits—only opportunity (Campbell, 1995; Lewis, 1991). Because of a proximity to immigration discourses, Latinidad is especially fertile territory for the propagation of American Dream narratives. Over the decades, Latina/os have been treated as a new people over and over again, ignoring the historic arc of identity and history of much of the Southwest, which was Spanish Mexican territory for centuries. The constant reintroduction of Latina/os in general market media lends a kind of “newness” that often renders the group without history or the baggage of the Black/White racial binary (Monlina Guzmán, 2010b).

A museum exhibit, with its middlebrow modes and academic affectations, may not be the kind of place where one would expect the peddling of something as politically pedestrian as the American Dream. As with The Cosby Show, such ideologies more conceivably operate in commercialized spaces like network television. However, museums have long played a role not just in archiving the national imaginary, but also in categorizing people and artifacts (Bennett, 1995), and more recently, balancing public service with private funding (Wu, 2002). According to Tony Bennett (1995), a museum must be approached in a Gramscian sense, “as forming a new set of relations between state and people that is best understood as pedagogic” (p. 91). Museums like those that belong to the Smithsonian Institution, function to define a people and to incorporate them into the power relations of the state. Thus, we should expect museums to exhibit pervasive national ideologies like the American Dream, which rationalizes broad participation in capitalism, legitimizes dominant institutions, and stabilizes potential unrest, to function as central elements of cultural exhibition. The national museum serves a site of negotiation of such discourses, and a place where the internal dynamics of Latinidad come together within the context of political and professional resistance and authority. Even within Latina/o cultural museums, formed after the civil rights struggles of the 70s, the meaning of Latinidad is under contestation. In conversations with dealers, curators, and artists, Arlene Dávila (2010) discusses how racist hierarchies, funding structures, and institutional dynamics prefer Latin American forms over U.S. Latina/o art and topics in community museums across the country. She also notes that community resistance to such trends demonstrate “that ethnic-based claims that embrace a community vision may constitute on of the most important challenges to the Eurocentric orientation” (p. 137) in culture and the arts. Americanos sits within such a milieu: it articulates Latinidad from a place of community and cultural contention, within the institutional structure of museums and the cultural structure of middlebrow aspirations.

The Politics of Latina/o Cultural Exhibition

The production history locates Americanos within a politics of representation that offers a counter narrative to existing regimes of representation. The project arose from ferment among some Latina/o artists and media professionals who grew tired of stereotypical imagery that appeared not only in popular culture, but also in literary/artistic expressions. The Smithsonian National Building Museum organized a small traveling exhibit in 1999 titled El Nuevo Mundo: The Landscape of Latino Los Angeles, which debuted before Americanos. El Nuevo Mundo featured over 100 photographs of Latina/o Los Angeles taken by Chilean photographer and sociologist, Camilo José Vergara. On a trip to photograph African American neighborhoods in the city, Vergara found creativity in how new Latina/o immigrants were transforming the urban architecture of Los Angeles. He spent six years documenting the social landscape of these Latina/o barrios and business districts. When El Nuevo Mundo came to Los Angeles, the exhibit was met with angry responses from many Latina/o citizens and activists. In LA Weekly, editorial cartoonist Lalo Lopez (2000) remarked, “Anyone venturing outside L.A. knows the bad rap this city already has, and a show like this only feeds into the stereotypes” (p. 71). Protesters demonstrated outside the Museum of Natural History and assembled a counter exhibit across from the museum in Exposition Park while passing out handbills declaring, “These photographs are degrading caricatures of Latino L.A. We will not stand for more insulting negative images!!!” The museum swarmed with controversy. While Vergara’s photographs capture the gritty reality of economic hardship experienced by a large swath of Latina/os and garnered positive reviews on the East Coast, in Los Angeles, protesters’ displeasure speaks to an exhaustion over negative imagery—even if those images capture an element of the lived reality of Latinidad.

After encountering some of the images from El Nuevo Mundo and other texts that that he thought cast Latina/os in a negative light, Manual Monterrey first approached Olmos Productions about organizing a photography project in 1996 that would replace stereotypical imagery of gang members and poverty with rehabilitative images of everyday Latina/os (Moreno, 1999). This origin has much to do with the imagined audience of the exhibit, which includes both Latina/os and non-Latina/os.

But as Karen Davalos (2001) notes, the relationship between the museum visitor and the cultures on display in cultural exhibition is fraught with hierarchies of power when cultural workers assume an Anglo audience. Davalos (2001) remarks that the “exhibition of subordinate people and cultures simultaneously sanctions and promotes the superior status of the imaginary ‘citizen’ and those who desire to become him” (p. 41). This serves as a central dynamic in the museum’s role in constituting difference at the level of race and nation. Because Americanos keeps the Anglo reader in mind, such hierarchical relations are not absent from the logic of the project. But unlike the milieu of museums in Davalos’ study of Latina/o art or Gaspar de Alba’s (1998) analysis of the exhibition of transgressive Chicano art, Americanos sits at a intersection where multiculturalism forms a ruling ideology at the Smithsonian, and clearly given the reaction in Los Angeles, the mode of multiculturalism would need to be reworked to please corporations, curators, and citizens.

Monterrey teamed with Olmos, who approached Time Warner for assistance, and soon had 60,000 photographs commissioned from professional photojournalists and a multimedia project facilitated through Time Warner properties (Cardenas, 1999). As a whole, the project is a well-integrated attempt to construct and present Latinidad to general audiences. The political effort in Americanos is clear: combat negative stereotypes and cultural invisibility by featuring images daily life informed by human universalism. In the exhibition brochure, photographer Rita Rivera comments to visitors:

By revealing our commonality through the daily rituals of home, family, and community, others can see that Latinos are a vital part of America and that we are more than the stereotypes portrayed in most of today’s media. I hope that this exhibition can show America that we are all the same. (Goldson, 1999)

In Rivera’s comments, the effort to overcome negative stereotypes can fit neatly into the discourses of assimilation and inspirational multiculturalism. Rather than pushing Latina/os into the dominant paradigm of Anglo assimilation, Americanos promotes a multicultural vision of the U.S. where we are “all the same” in our collective diversity. Such a maneuver is made possible through an emphasis on the “daily rituals” of Latina/o family and community life.

Americanos filled an urgent need at the Smithsonian Institution, which came under severe criticism in the mid 1990s for neglecting the Latina/o community in its programs and exhibits. A pivotal moment in this history comes in 1994, when an internal study titled Willful Neglect: The Smithsonian Institution and U.S. Latinos (1994), lambasted the Smithsonian for purposefully ignoring the Latina/o experience in the United States and denying Latina/os the right to feel valued and recognized as part of the national community. The report provided a barrage of recommendations, including that the Smithsonian create a visible Latina/o presence in its museums, projects, and permanent collections. In response, the Center for Latino Initiatives, now called the Smithsonian Latino Center, began operations in 1998 to fund and curate Smithsonian research and exhibition activities. Although Americanos was already in production at this time, the traveling exhibit presented the Smithsonian with the opportunity to publicly, if implicitly respond to the Willful Neglect report with a major multimedia exhibition of national scope. Bringing the exhibit to the National Museum of American History granted Americanos the legitimacy and authority of a major exhibit. However, because the project did not originate from the offices of Smithsonian curators at American History or Latino Initiatives, it does not speak in full response to the Willful Neglect report. Nor could it, as these events unfolded rather quickly and Americanos was an early effort of Latino Initiatives. But the exhibit should be read within the context of the Willful Neglect report, and in the Smithsonian’s ongoing efforts to do more to represent that Latina/o community as part of the national imaginary.

Time Warner’s involvement in Americanos testifies to the urgency felt among corporations, especially media conglomerates, to target their products, messages, and services to the growing Latina/o population. The collaborative efforts of Americanos also speak to the pressures that nonprofit institutions and organizations face as conservative policy preferences transform the federal government’s approach to public funding for the arts and humanities. As demonstrated by the political rancor around controversial Smithsonian exhibits, most notably the debates around the Enola Gay exhibit in the mid-1990s, Smithsonian curators and collaborators are likely to encounter vehement reactions from the public, advocacy groups, and government officials upset at revisionist narratives and elements of the story forgotten (Hasian, 1998, 2004). Although the Smithsonian Institution garners public funding, U.S. federal dollars are restricted to operating costs for what the museum already owns. Increasingly, corporate partnerships make new Smithsonian exhibits and acquisitions possible, and these relationships with private entities grow in importance as arts and humanities allocations are consistently submitted to the federal funding chopping block as budget deficits soar and cultural wars ignite around specific issues. This triangulation of public culture among civil society, nonprofit cultural institutions, and corporate sponsors is encouraged by the state and forces arts and humanities administrators to submit to an entrepreneurial ethos (Miller & Yudice, 2002). With corporate sponsorships come tensions between the profit-centered sensibilities of business and the scholarly and public service orientation of nonprofit cultural institutions.

In 1991, the Smithsonian revised a policy that banned corporate logos, leaving decisions with museum and program directors. Acknowledging the risk of corporate involvement, former Smithsonian president I. Michael Heyman (1998) remarked that the appearance of corporate logos allows “a corporation the full measure of public goodwill for having funded that important exhibition or program,” but that “no amount of money, from any source, should be able to purchase the content of the Smithsonian’s exhibitions or other programs” (p. 12). Corporations likely understood Heyman’s balancing act between curatorial control and the need for outside funding, but took the opportunity to link with the Smithsonian Institution as highly beneficial to their brand associations and are likely to push to have a visible brand presence among exhibitions and projects. In 1995, Ford Motor Company became interested in the Ocean Planet exhibit as a way to promote sports utility vehicles to visitors who might be interested in the outdoors. Ford initially wanted an Explorer model parked in the rotunda of the National Museum of Natural History, but had to settle for a vehicle at the museum entrance after Heyman made it clear that the first request was out-of-bounds (Trescott, 1998). Ford advertising manager Randy C. Stewart acknowledged that the Smithsonian Institution could not be too commercial, but remarked, “I had to make it commercial enough to sell more of our vehicles” (Dunham, 1995). So long as the budgetary process of a partisan Congress determines government funding and corporations look for innovative ways to build brand identity, the Smithsonian and other nonprofit organizations face ongoing threats and opportunities that come with corporate underwriting. Thus, beneath the politics of representation in Americanos exists a more subtle negotiation between citizenship and consumerism that is at the core of concerns over corporate intervention in arts, humanities, and education funding. Because of the involvement of Time Warner as a collaborator before the project appeared at the Smithsonian’s offices, Americanos arrives, at least in part, from corporate logics. Because power over the modes of communication “is an integral aspect of political and economic power” (McChesney, 1997, p. 6), Time Warner’s involvement in the construction of Latiniadad had a hand in framing the project.

When the exhibit debuted at the National Museum of American History, wall panels were painted white with deep blue accents, and were arranged to guide museum visitors through the six different thematic sections winding through a large, open, and brightly lit rectangular room. Minimal descriptive text accompanied the photographs at the beginning of each new section. The words of Carlos Fuentes, Sandy Alomar, Lea Yberra, Celia Cruz, and Congressman Xavier Becerra contextualize the photographs in both English and Spanish. A majority of the photographs are presented in color, with some also in black and white. The images mix portraits and group shots. Some are formalist in presentation, while most present realist, journalistic images of everyday Latina/o life: baptisms, soccer matches, workers in the fields, punk rockers, and workers. Some fit the popular, general market image of a Latina/os, while many seem purposely to defy the dominant regime of representation of the “brown” race. When Americanos came to the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County in December of 2000, the design evoked a warm, perhaps tropical space. Gold paint mixed with deep blues and orange accents, with the overhead lighting dimmed to allow for more intimate illumination of the photographs through small spotlights. The bright colors evident in both the exhibit design and in the photographs themselves, mix with salsa sounds from the Atlantic recording to suggest strategies of tropicalization, the trope of representation that exoticizes Latina/os through stereotypes of excess: sexualized bodies, macho men, curvaceous women, bright colors, and rhythmic music (Molina Guzmán & Valdivia, 2004). Frances Aparicio and Susana Chávez-Silverman (1997) describe the differences between a hegemonic tropicalization that offers “a mythic idea of latinidad based on Anglo (or dominant) projections of fear” that is “intricately associated to the history of political, economic, and ideological agendas of governments and of social institutions” (p. 8), and a sort of radical tropicalization that arrives from the transgressive politics and oppositional strategies of Latina/o cultural workers who transform “hegemonic tools into discursive weapons of resistance” (p. 12). Given the social change impetus behind the Americanos project as well as its institutional location and corporate sponsorship, the exhibit design evokes a bit of both: tropicalization from above and from below.

Elements of hegemonic and radical tropicalization present in Americanos speak to issues germane to museum exhibits and documentary photography. Recent cultural studies of museum exhibits have shown how the tension between subaltern and official voices flow into the ideological struggle over individual and national identity, especially in regard to historical representation, collective memory, and heritage museums (Gans, 2002; Hasian, 2004). Tamar Katriel (1993) remarks that in Israel, museums that evoke collective memory and national heritage function as powerful sites for ideological assertion about the construction of the individual, the national community, and the other—a process facilitated by “a variety of institutional and pedagogical endorsements” (p. 70). The authoritative voice and ideological function of the museum as storyteller and official chronicler came under attack as scholars became interested in public history in the 1960s and 1970s, resulting in the growth of living history museums and public historians who told stories of everyday life (Miller, 2005). Other forms of nonprofit media that represent the past have also come under popular and scholarly scrutiny. Studies in visual communication examine how collective memory and national identity are constructed and contested in historical representation (Anderson, 2001; West, 2002). Americanos evokes a certain kind of memory by articulating a diverse Latinidad that challenges stereotypes from the past, but it does not historicize the Latina/o experience in any purposeful way; the exhibit tells the story of contemporary life in the U.S. As a result, Americanos frames Latinidad more journalistically than historically, operating with a documentary lens focused on the present. In this way, the exhibit can be considered a social documentary, which encourages social improvement through public education.

Social documentaries increase “our knowledge of public facts, but sharpen it with feeling; put us in touch with the perennial human spirit, but show it struggling in a particular social context at a specific historical moment” (Stott, 1986, p. 19). Since the early work of John Grierson and Lewis W. Hine, who sought to dramatize social issues and document everyday life in film and photography to help guide citizens through the complexities of democratic life in the 1920s and 30s, social documentaries have been used for social reform, especially in the case of photography (Barnouw, 1993; Stange, 1989). The use of social documentary photography and the contexts of the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County and the Smithsonian Institution contextualize Americanos within the politics and poetics of museum exhibition and social change media, and fits within Bennett’s (1995) assertion of the pedagogical role of museums. Americanos navigates these arenas by offering a larger memory of the Latina/o experience through the representation of diverse identities and experiences, but doing so within the limiting and enabling structures of institutional affiliation, corporate sponsorship, and professional production values. Like the social documentary tradition, Americanos makes an emotional appeal to visitors through the depiction of everyday life.

In summary, attention to the history and context of the Americanos project reveals an effort on the part of Latina/o cultural producers to create a generous but coherent vision of Latina/o life in the United States that must negotiate with corporate sponsorship, institutional responses to criticism, collaborative production, and professional values. As an early partner, Time Warner brings the dual interests of commoditization and corporate community relations to the project, with Americanos scattered about into so many Time Warner subsidiaries. Furthermore, the Willful Neglect report and the hostile response to El Nuevo Mundo in some locations suggests that the affirmative framework of Americanos solved some problems for the Smithsonian Institution, providing a bright solution to the dark entanglements of internal and external criticism. These extratextual elements of the project combine with the professional limitations imposed by photojournalism, museum curatorial work, and the tradition of social documentary photography to suggest that while intentions behind Americanos are bold, transgressive, and nuanced, the determining conditions of the production process, defined by the hopefulness and depoliticized multicultural middlebrow, may create a vision of Latina/o life that legitimizes dominant ideologies in the U.S. and discourages resistance to those ideologies.

I proceed with an examination of the exhibit in light of its extratextual context. I analyze features of some photographs and accompanying text through the lens of articulation. This is not meant to be a complete study of every feature of the exhibit, or to rehash the rhetorical analysis of Calafell and Delgado, but to understand the articulation of Latinidad that sits at the center of an interesting and determining project history, institutional location, and production partnership. Articulation asks for a consideration of the conditions under which discourses are unified. By first examining the conditions that give rise to Americanos, and second examining how the exhibit imagery gathers various strands of Latinidad into a coherent whole, the analysis that follows brings production in dialogue with textual features. Through a close reading of the exhibit as it appeared at the Los Angeles Museum of Natural History in 2000 and 2001, I identify two significant textual features of Americanos that make sense from the institutional history and production motives of the project. First, Americanos articulates a coherent, but diverse Latinidad, which defies stereotypes of the “brown race” and fulfills the Smithsonian’s goals of better representing the Latina/o experience. Second, by largely eluding depictions of political struggle and structural inequality, Americanos fits in with the sensibilities of institutions rooted in liberal multiculturalism and corporations interested in creating mobility narratives supportive of the American Dream.

Americanos Somos Todos: Diversity and Coherence

Olmos’ claim that Americanos somos todos (Sanches, 1999), or “we are all Americanos” encapsulates two important aims of the exhibit: 1) to present the diversity of Latinidad as a cultural signifier; and 2) the project’s attempt to build a coherent cultural unity for Latina/os. By inscribing Latinidad with both internal diversity and palpable coherence, the exhibit stands as a contestation of stereotypical regimes of representation and affirms liberal U.S. multiculturalism. While the name “Americanos” calls for Latina/os’ inclusion within the discourse of America in the U.S. national imaginary, it also asserts a more resistive hemispheric identity. The term can work as a critique of the imperial usage of the term in U.S. discourses, but the earnestness of the multicultural appeal, articulating group diversity and coherence, appears throughout the exhibit. In the exhibit brochure, Olmos comments:

Why did we call it AMERICANOS? There are several reasons. One is that too often Latinos are seen as strangers in this land, and as Latinos, we often think of “Americanos” as the others in this country, not us. We, our neighbors, and our children need to see that we are an integral part of U.S. society. We want a title that would recognize and honor our bilingual heritage and would be easily understood in both English and Spanish. And, finally, we wanted to illustrate that, much like a quilt intricately woven with many beautiful fibers, Latinos are a proud and diverse people woven from indigenous, Spanish, European, African, and Asian roots. (Goldson, 1999)

Olmos’ statement orients visitors to photographic images and provides a clear rationale not only for the naming of the exhibit, but also for its existence and public circulation. Americanos proposes a new, generous Latinidad that can combat racist regimes of representation and fit Latina/os more easily into a national imaginary that embraces multiculturalism. Photographs’ depiction of diversity within Latina/o life as the indigenous, Spanish, European, African, and Asian mixture—or mestizaje—is clearly evident throughout the exhibit. Olmos describes the term “Americanos” to be a unifying and healing label, explaining, “Americanos are everyone” (O’Brien, 2000).

Statements from exhibit producers make it clear that Americanos aims to combat existing stereotypes and that this form of resistance results from Latina/o self-representation, facilitated by the Smithsonian and corporate sponsors. But the exhibit also engages in what Hall (1996b) calls the politics of representation, which “gives questions of culture and ideology, and the scenarios of representation—subjectivity, identity, politics—a formative, not merely expressive, place in the constitution of social and political life” (p. 443). Americanos’ simultaneous creation of a coherent, yet internally diverse Latinidad works within the politics of representation to make the case for a cultural category, a community, and racial/ethnic solidarity with “no guarantees” (Hall, 1996b, p. 443). This way, Americanos challenges stereotypes and represents Latinidad as a radical hybrid (Valdivia, 2003), where a new mixed identity is created out of the already hybrid cultural conditions associated with Latin American heritage. This radical hybridity confronts U.S. sensibilities about racial and ethnic difference, which are conditioned by the Black/White binary notions of identity (Domke, 2001; Valle & Torres, 2000). Americanos employs diverse racial and cultural signifiers within the exhibit to challenge essentializing stereotypes of the brown race of Spanish-speaking Catholic immigrants.

In a few strategic images, Americanos uses the physical features of photographic subjects to speak to the internal diversity of Latinidad. In some cases, the exhibit provides information regarding the national origin of photo subjects, providing small narratives from curators as to the depiction, but racial identity works only through imagery. In a photograph found in the Family/Familia section, which is made up mostly of darker skinned Latina/os, Alberto and Marcela Prystupa and their two children appear together with a studio backdrop. The children, with blond hair and light skin, sit on their parents’ laps in a candid shot where the family appears to be preparing for a formal photography session. Two-year-old Guadalupe’s blond hair becomes the focal point of the photograph, as her mother tends to her hair and the family members’ eyes are cast downward toward her. In another photograph, a close up of a child’s face focuses on his blue eyes, red freckles, and very pale skin. The boy, from New Jersey, looks directly up at the camera and his head nearly fills the entire shot. Depth of field pulls his eyes and freckled nose into perfect focus as his ear and part of his shoulder blend into the background. These features of cultural whiteness—radiant blond hair, light skin, blue eyes—work within the exhibit to suggest that Latina/os are a diverse group because some Latina/os are white.

Interestingly, the subjects in these photographs do not appear in public settings or among other Latina/os. They are alone. Separated from notions of community or any social context and depicted in private spaces and represented in close-up focus, Whiteness stands out as an isolated signifier. The same kind of isolation works with features of blackness in several photographs, including a close-up of an Afro-Latino man holding up a small Cuban flag. The racial features depicted here differ sharply from a majority of the mestizo subjects whose imagery might be considered stereotypical signifiers of a brown race: rodeo vaqueros, bronzed farm workers, Our Lady of Guadalupe iconography, and old men rolling cigars. But through the association of whiteness with more familiar Latina/o images throughout the exhibit, an open and generous Latinidad that includes multiple racial positions creates a larger vision that embraces the hybridity, ambiguity, and diversity of Latina/o life. The use of Whiteness implicitly critiques the failure of popular and informational texts to account for the diverse totality of Latinidad. This presentation offers an alternative to the imagery of the El Nuevo Mundo exhibit, which critics and protesters found stereotypical because of its focus on brown-skinned working class Latina/os.

Many other images of everyday cultural life play a key role in Americanos’ articulation of diversity, including: a Latina/o Rabbi handling a Torah; a punk Mexicano complete with a spiked Mohawk who stands against a bright yellow background; and an Argentinean surfer who poses with his board in California. The exhibit represents gender broadly and with great diversity, with a myriad of subject positions presented for men and women. Women are both seamstresses and astronauts, and men are day laborers and congressmen. The myth that Latina/os are all recent immigrants is contested through several images of Latina/o World War II and Vietnam War veterans and even a Latina Border Patrol agent. The associations made in such photographs—that Latina/os are involved in institutions and activities that defy stereotypes—broaden the possibilities of Latinidad by contextualizing Latina/os within cultural practices that are often associated with Anglos. Together with images that construct Latina/os as resembling the diversity of America, these photographs complement photographer Rita Rivera’s comment that “we are all the same.” This also mirrors Calafell and Delgado’s (2004) claim that Americanos represents the transcultural dimensions of Latinidad. So what we have here in these sets of images is a very clear articulation of a diverse community, united in their shared ancestry, but defying racial, ethnic, socioeconomic, professional or religious essentialization. As an antidote to the debates around the El Nuevo Mundo exhibit, Americanos seems to render Latinidad as impervious to stereotypes.

The Politics of Latinidad: The American Dream and Multiculturalism

The explicitly stated political project of Americanos articulates a diverse and transgressive Latina/o unity, but also infers a welcoming, multicultural U.S. mainstream into which Latina/os fit. The central way the exhibit articulates an affirmative, hopeful Latinidad and mainstream United States society occurs through mobilizing merit-based social mobility myths of the American Dream, a powerful ideological discourse in the U.S. that deflects the meanings associated with class structures and encourages stories of social ascendancy, especially for ethnic and racial minorities. Economic success stories about ethnic and racial minorities uphold the status quo and give people reasons to argue against social programs aimed at alleviating social, political, and economic inequality. As Jhally and Lewis (1992) contend, the American Dream can be found everywhere in popular culture, and while it is evoked regularly, its meaning often functions on the level of myth. As I have argued, Americanos does engage in the politics of representation and articulates a Latinidad that contests negative stereotypes that contribute to Latina/o marginalization. But this project also makes use of imagery that connects Latina/os to the U.S. national imaginary without disrupting the hegemonic order that benefits from current racial, economic, and gender hierarchies. Benign multiculturalism and the American Dream set limits for the political impact of the Americanos exhibit, steeping Latinidad in the universalism of the human experience and narratives of social ascendancy and economic obedience.

The section on labor provided the strongest association with the American Dream. Photographs of farm workers, oyster harvesters and truck drivers are juxtaposed with images of financial, educational and career-oriented success: high school graduates, portraits of several celebrities, and medical doctors. Dr. Carolina Reyes, who is married to Congressman Xavier Becerra of Los Angeles appears in two images: one at work in a hospital, and another at the dinner table with her family in Washington, D.C. Dr. Reyes and Rep. Becerra are joined with their three children in their upscale home in the second image. Rep. Becerra’s thoughts about his own parents appear on a panel wall in the Family/Familia section of the exhibit:

María Teresa and Manuel married in Mexico and moved to California. Manuel helped build our nation from the ground up, laying pipe and concrete. While raising four children, María Teresa worked and attended night school to learn English . . . They were able to buy their first home. Now in retirement, Manuel and María Teresa own many homes. They are an American success story and they are my parents.

Becerra’s position as a U.S. Congressional Representative amplifies this American Dream narrative about his parents. But this story is also about the farm workers, oyster harvesters, and truckers in other photographs. Becerra’s narrative associates the images of manual laborers with photographs of doctors, White House staff members, and astronauts. The mingling of these images might suggest the contradictions of the U.S. economic and political order that retains Latina/os in disproportionate poverty decade after decade. Instead, because of the way these images are associated together, the photographs stand as moments of time within a singular narrative of social promotion. In other words, the exhibit assembles images that suggest the same American Dream narrative told by Becerra: whereas one might begin doing the dignified work of manual labor, if one works hard enough, the opportunity for education and better employment enables individuals or their children to achieve economic and social improvement.

While the many depictions of Latina/o crossover celebrities also work within the American Dream, several images of Latina/os with the U.S. national flag strongly associate Latina/os with generational sacrifice for the imagined national community. Veterans from World War II and the Vietnam War are shown in remembrance of their fallen comrades. But perhaps the most compelling image of the entire exhibit features a woman wearing a Gap T-shirt who is shown sewing a U.S. flag in a textile factory, with stars and stripes spilling down from her sewing machine at a factory in Texas. The image exemplifies the version of Latinidad articulated in the exhibit: Latina/os belong within the U.S. national imaginary; the U.S. is a multicultural nation; and the woman’s long hours at the helm of this sewing machine contribute to the viability of the American Dream, on both the community and individual levels. Her hands spread out among the stars; the worker’s economic and symbolic contribution to the U.S. national imaginary is the flag itself, a signifier for the nation. The seamstress and sweatshop worker sutures the very nation together, so that one day, as a payoff for her labors, her children will be afforded an opportunity to rise above the textile factory and join the ranks of the congressmen, lawyers, and doctors who are so well represented in the exhibit. While for some the sewing machine may stand as a form of oppression rather than a necessary step toward realizing the possibilities of American meritocracy, the joining of this image with the others creates a coherent narrative of the pride in work, and the dreams of a people.

So in subtle ways, Americanos articulates a coherent people in such a way as to imbue a sense of optimism and aspiration that the exhibit producers intended and the Smithsonian sought after the withering critiques of the late 1990s. But Americanos also works in such a way through exclusion—a dearth of depictions of political activism and structural inequality. Such an absence is typical of mainstream articulations of multiculturalism. At the same time, the exhibit features many of the elements of Ella Shohat and Robert Stam’s (1994) notion of polycentric multiculturalism. Shohat and Stam argue that multiculturalism functions as an open question and point of departure for cultural workers, critics, and scholars, but that institutional and corporate-managed efforts to deepen our understanding of difference often dissolve into benign projects that celebrate diversity without confronting relations of power. By engaging in the politics of representation through the ideological work of articulating a Latina/o imaginary, Americanos lives up to many of Shohat and Stam’s arguments for polycentric multiculturalism: it is an empowering text for the disempowered; on the surface the exhibit “thinks and imagines ‘from the margins’” (p. 48), it critiques dominant discourses; it rejects “a unified, fixed, and essentialist concept” (p. 49) of identity; and the exhibit encourages solidarity based on shared values rather than through the narrow definitions of identity politics. The direct address of the textual elements, the scheduling of community events, and the use of visitor comment cards also suggests a limited “reciprocal, dialogical” (p. 49) approach that treats museum visitors as evolving, learning, and contributing subjects. A core element that makes polycentric multiculturalism a radical political project remains incomplete in Americanos. The failure to include instances of political struggle and historical context limits the transgressive potential of the images and epigraphs to contest relations of power, and speaks to the structuring effect of the multicultural middlebrow. The exhibit’s success in disputing dehumanizing stereotypes, cultural marginalization, and erasure of the Latina/o experience relies upon idealized imagery. The absence of dissent and the promotion of affirmative imagery suggest the kind of benign multiculturalism that celebrates difference without speaking to the historical and contemporary power dynamics that shape both the Latina/o experience and the conditions of living in the U.S.

Very few photographs depict any form of organized, community resistance to legal, economic, and cultural subjugation. While the labor movement has been important in the histories of Latina/o civil rights movements, only one image makes an association with collective struggles for economic justice. A small group of union employees, mostly women, are depicted protesting unfair contract negotiations at the University of Southern California. The descriptive label under the photograph reads, “USC food service and housing workers on strike.” The exhibit also features images of political activists, but it does not make associations with their oppositional politics: Chicano poet, artist, and founder of the Rebel Chicano Art Front José Montoya sits at his desk; Teatro Campesino founder Luis Valdez, long time playwright of Chicano resistance, sits at the edge of a stage. The portraits appear beside other artists and celebrities, including Andy Garcia, Carlos Santana, Gloria Estefan, Marc Anthony, and Rita Moreno. Without the explanatory context of Montoya or Valdez’s work, a mode of address found elsewhere in the exhibit, the portraits rely on interpretive resources of audiences who might recognize their work and their active resistance to entrenched political and economic power.

The erasure of political activism enables middlebrow multiculturalism to be promoted without the complexities of transgressive racial, economic, or gender politics. This absence points to non-profit institutional sensibilities that avoid contentious policy debates or direct advocacy in favor of human universalism and multiculturalism, such as in Henderson’s (1999) study of Storyline. Textual evidence suggests that Americanos evokes a structure of feeling that articulates the class-based middlebrow sensibilities of exhibit producers and their imagined audience together with benign multiculturalism. Statements from Americanos contributors, such as Mark Hinojosa, a photography editor at the Chicago Tribune, testify to the codes of human universalism: “When you strip the language and physical characteristics away . . . we’re very mainstream . . . we’re very much the core of America” (Moreno, 1999, p. C1). The framework of multiculturalism allows for a politics of representation based on hopeful imagery that strips away not language or physical differences, but the history and possibility of an oppositional project that confronts real relations of power. For Time Warner and its advertisers, an aspirational market demographic, devoid of politically resistive entanglements, stands as perhaps the perfect synergy.

Conclusion

This study suggests that a central concern for scholars of celebratory general-market representations should lie in how, and under what conditions, cultural producers articulate unity and difference in general, and Latinidad in particular. In the exhibit brochure, photographer Rita Rivera comments, “I feel that I am letting people see what I see, that Latinos are beautiful, diverse, and intelligent,” while Olmos expresses hope that “Americanos will express a true commitment to community, pride and love of family and culture, remembrance of our past, celebration of our present, and hope for the future” (Goldson, 1999). These sentiments of producer intentionality, stated plainly as part of the text, work with the exhibit images to carefully suggest a coherent Latinidad that defies mainstream expectations because of its internal diversity. Producers point to the liberating possibilities of a vernacular rhetoric of self-definition for non-essentialized minority groups in the U.S that Calafell and Delgado (2004) gathered in their textual analysis of the project’s photography book. But given the production context of the exhibit, can we still understand the Americanos as vernacular? More than anything, what this analysis demonstrates is the tension that exists in cultural texts between the articulation of Latinidad that arrives from industry and mainstream institutions, and a claim of self-definition from a subaltern logic that can celebrate culture while also contesting power. This tension between versions of Latina/o life “from above” and “from below” defines Americanos, and it thus must be used as way to contest the assumptions and guarantees of both cultural production and scholarly analysis of such representations of difference and unity. Consideration of structures of feeling, institutional history, and the consequence of context should enter our own relational thinking of cultural production, representation, and reception.

While previous exhibits were faulted for the gritty, if not realistic, representation that reinforces dominant narratives about deviant Latina/os, the Americanos exhibit responded by taking a hopeful, affirmative, and celebratory approach. In many ways, this is understandable given the previous backlash to El Nuevo Mundo and what scholars have termed the burden of representation—when there are so few images in a group, especially in major museums, that the relatively few texts must do the cultural work representing many constituencies. We are at a moment when it seems we are under-satisfied by realistic imagery. Celebratory depictions perpetuate unrealistic hopes. For Latina/os, racist regimes of representation and scapegoating appear persistent and cyclical according to economic ebbs and flows. It appears we need to ask ourselves as critics, scholars, and audiences what we really want from representations of media, popular culture, and in other venues such as museums. What would make us happy, given that we react to both stereotypical imagery and hopeful imagery? This is the state of the art in the cultural politics and poetics of Latinidad.

There could perhaps not be a better time to ask such a question. The burgeoning symbolic power of Latina/o self-representation creates the possibilities for articulating not only a broad vision of Latinidad, but also the possibility of promoting oppositional meanings that critically address the race and class structures that shape conditions of existence in the U.S. Like Americanos, other instances of the so-called Latin pop explosion of the late 1990s and 2000s avoid critical politics and relations of power with similar strategies-erasing histories and memories of political struggle and thus doing little to encourage individual and collective action that might challenge powerful institutions, corporations, laws, and government agencies. Perhaps the scope of the Americanos project and the burden it held to define a people to a nation do not allow for both a politics of representation and a confrontation of power relations. But at this conjuncture, when the space has opened for Latina/o cultural workers to articulate Latinidad with the breadth and depth that it deserves, missed opportunities may not be easily corrected. It should come as no surprise that the immigration marches of 2006 and 2007 were met with nativist and stereotyping responses that mirrored the moral panic over Latina/o identity during the immigration debates of the early 1990s. The radical hybridity that constitutes Latina/o life in the U.S. can reshape the politics of difference in decades to come. But such efforts, and the production processes that create them, must cultivate an even larger memory that includes challenges to dominant systems of politics, economics, and culture if a true transformation of relations of power is to take place. Americanos stands historically as an important effort, perhaps a first step, in creating a larger vision of Latinidad, and of the nation. But so does the El Nuevo Mundo exhibit. The challenge will be producing and then critiquing more complex possibilities for Latina/os - of raising more difficult questions rather than presenting hopeful, beautiful answers.