Abstract
Are we really fly-off-the-handle histrionic? Are we really only all body: as working arms or hypersexualized bodies? Are we really only American dreamers? Have we internalized values other than those of our parents and grandparents? Are we losing touch with our ancestral culture? Where do we find our Latinidad – our Latino-ness today? Has this changed in our browning of America, and if so, how do we re-regard mainstream culture with its central ingredients of TV? Does an arrival also mean our erasure?
These questions are the core of Frederick Luis Aldama and William Anthony Nericcio’s book Talking #browntv: Latinas and Latinos on the Screen. As is evident from the questions, the authors have written the book from their own subjective perspective and as a dialogue between themselves about the representations of Latina/os in American television and film from the twentieth century to the present day. One part conversation, one part critique, one part visual cultural studies, and one part rant against the culture industry profiting off warped caricatures of Latina/o subjectivities. (blurb)
The authors argue that while 18% of the US population are Latinxs, only 3% are represented on screens across the US, thus not reflecting ‘the majority racial and demographic makeup of the US’ (p. 3). The book is split into Introduction, five substantive chapters and Conclusion (called Coda). Chapter 1 (or as the authors call it, Section 1), ‘Towards of Theory of Brown Televisual Imaginary’, is the authors’ attempt to theorize the presence and absence of Latinos on American TV. In Chapter 2, ‘Pinche Paradoxes’, Aldama and Nericcio ‘tease apart the ways that we are at once absent and present, as well as put under a microscope how those who have made it (Eva Longoria and Sofia Vergara, for instance) do little to complicate the #browntv landscape’ (p. 5). Chapter 3, ‘Sombreros to Pistoleros’, explores a range of genres – ‘from Westerns to zombies to sci-fi – that concretize the modern racialized consciousness of what it means televisually to be Latinx’ (p. 5). In Chapter 4, ‘From Niños and Teens to Comidas’, the authors focus on characters in cartoons and films that drive divisions between ‘us and them’ (p. 5). The final substantive chapter, ‘Fear, Loathing, and the Latinx Threat’, ‘considers how TV shows like Border Wars (2010–2015), Border Security: America’s Frontline (2016–), and Homeland Security USA (2009) construct a Latinx threat narrative, exploring how these shows reveal how what used to be considered only an Arizona problem (the SB 1070 ‘law’ to justify carceral-state mechanisms that targeted our people) is now a national problem’ (p. 5). The book is written in a very accessible way and raises a lot of pertinent questions.