Social hierarchy in local Spanish-language print media: The discursive representation of Latino social actors in the United States

Abstract

This study critically examines the discursive construction of social hierarchy in local Spanish-language print media with the goal of determining the extent to which these representations challenge those found in the mainstream media. It focuses on the ways in which four linguistic and two sociosemantic constructs represent Latino social actors in local Spanish-language print media. It finds two patterns in the representation of Latino social actors, each of which leads to the establishment of a particular social hierarchy. The first pattern reifies a traditional Us/Them hierarchy by representing Latinos as subordinate social actors to Anglo Americans. The second pattern represents Latinos as equal or dominant to Anglo Americans and thus levels or reverses the traditional Us/Them hierarchy. The latter pattern is indicative of the potential for local Spanish-language print media to challenge the putative subordinate position of Latinos in the United States.

Keywords

Critical discourse analysis Latinos in the United States social hierarchy Spanish-language print media Us/Them

Introduction

As of the 2010 Census, there were 50.5 million people of Hispanic or Latino origin in the United States (Ennis et al., 2011: 2). As a result, the United States now constitutes one of the world’s largest Spanish-speaking populations (https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/mx.html). Stories covering the arrival of Latino immigrants have been a mainstay in the English-language media in this country since the turn of the 21st century. As many studies have shown, the arrival of ‘others’ is a prime topic of coverage for the majority media in many Western countries in which groups of social actors are represented to the advantage of the majority group (Crespo Fernández and Martínez Lirola, 2012; Martín Rojo and Van Dijk, 1997; Van Dijk, 1988a, 1988b, 1989, 1991a; Van Dijk et al., 1997). Characteristic of this coverage is the positive representation of the majority group and the negative representation of minoritized groups. Such representations ultimately reinforce social hierarchies that support the dominant position of the majority group and the subordinate position of minoritized groups. In short, the discursive representation of social actors both reflects and is reflected by the subalternity of minoritized groups.

While there is no doubt that the majority press in many countries represents this social hierarchy (Van Dijk, 1988a, 1988b, 1989, 1991a, 1991b), it requires complication because it has not taken into account the wide offering of media created by and for non-majority groups. For example, Otheguy et al. (2000) have noted a Spanish-language media boom in the United States, coinciding with an increase in the potential number of Spanish-language media consumers, especially during the first decade of the 21st century (Hugo López and González-Barrera, 2013). Critical discourse and media studies have largely been carried out on the discourse of the media of majority groups; considerably less work in these fields has focused on the discourse of the media of minoritized groups. Consequently, social hierarchies from the point of view of majority groups are well known, as these are the points of view most often represented by media created by these groups, while very little is known about the discursive representation of hierarchies from the point of view of such groups. In the context of the United States, while studies have shown that the mass media in this country represent social actors such that the Anglo majority maintains its powerful dominant position and minoritized groups such as Latino immigrants maintain subordinate positions (Santa Ana, 1999, 2009, 2010), it is unclear what the role of minoritized media is in challenging these representations.

It is even more imperative to consider the representation of social hierarchy in minoritized media because of their potential to reach enormous audiences and, consequently, communicate particular ideologies to their readers, listeners, and viewers. For example, several authors have found that Spanish-language media in the United States (the print industry, radio, and television) carry out several social functions, such as contributing to a sense of community (Carreira, 2002; Molina Guzmán, 2006; Okamato et al., 2011; Rodríguez, 1999; Vargas, 2009), keeping readers abreast of events in their home countries (Gutiérrez, 1977; Veciana-Suárez, 1987), teaching readers sociocultural information about the United States (Gutiérrez, 1977; Strom, 2013b), maintaining the Spanish language (Cashman, 2009; Potowski, 2004), and constituting a vital source of health information (Vargas and DePyssler, 1999). Suro (2004) has also found that Spanish-language media serve as a valuable ethnic institution. Through phone surveys of 1316 Latinos to determine their language preferences for media consumption, he concludes, ‘The Spanish-language media play an esteemed role as spokesmen [sic] for the Latino population and … have a significant influence in the formation of Hispanic identities’ (p. 2). From these studies, one can infer that media in Spanish contain ideologies that represent, promote, and teach the Latino community. However, what still remains to be seen is how the representation of social hierarchy in these media may afford the Spanish-speaking community the opportunity to challenge stereotypical discursive practices in the United States. This study underscores how Spanish-language print media allow Latino social actors several positions in the social hierarchy, thereby constituting a first step toward dismantling the traditional hierarchy that placed Latino immigrants in a subordinate position vis-a-vis Anglo Americans.

Theoretical background

Critical discourse studies

Critical analyses of the discursive representation of social actors have focused largely on the ways in which the majority media represent minoritized groups. They have found a pattern of representing majority groups as dominant by emphasizing their good and positive actions, while representing minoritized groups as subordinate by emphasizing their bad and negative actions or by not mentioning them at all. These studies also suggest the potential complication of the Us versus Them binary, given that there are divisions within the Them group.

For example, Teun van Dijk (1988a, 1988b, 1989, 1991a, 1991b) and colleagues (Van Dijk et al., 1997) have analyzed the discursive representation of minoritized groups in the print media of the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, Germany, France, Spain, and the United States. Analyses of grammatical structures, headlines, and content have led to the following conclusions: ethnic minorities are not a frequent topic of news coverage; in the case that ethnic minorities are included in the news, they are represented as having problems or causing problems for the majority group and are nearly always associated with negative situations, such as drugs, violence, protest, and failure to assimilate to majority culture.

From this research, Van Dijk (1998, 2007, 2008b) argues that the press follows a pattern for representing social actors in a hierarchy that he calls the ideological square, which consists of two actors, Us (the majority group) and Them (minoritized group(s)), in four scenarios: (1) emphasize the positive aspects of Us, (2) emphasize the negative aspects of Them, (3) de-emphasize the positive aspects of Them, and (4) de-emphasize the negative aspects of Us (Van Dijk, 2007: 28). Through the use of the ideological square, the media establish and reinforce the hegemonic structure whereby the powerful majority group occupies a dominant position and minoritized groups occupy a subordinate position.

Studies from Latin America have demonstrated a somewhat more complex representation of minoritized groups that initially appears to follow a binary division based on Us versus Them, but where Them is not a static group. Rather, several authors show that the subaltern group is heterogeneous and comprises a complex hierarchy wherein certain groups are dominant vis-a-vis others, while still subordinate to the Us group.¹ Soler Castillo and Pardo Abril (2007) consider the representation of social actors in textbooks from the 20th and 21st centuries in Colombia. The authors found a clear preference for discursively representing White social actors as the dominant group and representing all other social actors as subordinate. However, within this subaltern group, Afro-Colombians occupy a subordinate position to indigenous groups because they are discursively hidden and negated. Similarly, Belvedere et al. (2007), after analyzing print news and parliamentary debates in Argentina, find that those of European descent occupy a privileged and dominant position in society. All other social actors constitute a subordinate group. Notwithstanding, Asian immigrants are discursively subordinate to immigrants from other Latin American countries because the former are represented in overwhelmingly negative terms resulting from their alleged exploitation by the latter in factories.

Postcolonial studies

It is useful to consider postcolonial studies in a critical discourse analysis of the representation of social hierarchies because it sheds light on the complex social and historic background of many minoritized groups throughout the world as a result of colonization and imperialism. Many scholars in this field have spoken about the formation of social hierarchies where colonial or imperial powers socially, economically, politically, and linguistically control others. In the most traditional sense, the social actors representing the colonial and imperial power constitute(d) the powerful dominant group, while the social actors subjected to colonial or imperial control constitute(d) the subordinate group living in the colony and away from the metropole, or the center of the colonizing/imperial force. However, for some scholars, for example Spivak (1988), such taxonomies are essentialist. McLeod (2007) notes that the positions of and relationships between social actors in the postcolonial period can hardly be categorized in an essentialist manner, given that they are ‘much more complex and variable than that implied by the simple, stark polarity of colonizer and colonized’ (p. 3). Indeed, Coronil (1999) proposes ‘multiple positionality’ for social actors depending on contextual factors:

In my view, subalternity is a relational and a relative concept; there are times and places where subjects appear on the social stage as subaltern actors, just as there are times or places in which they play dominant roles. Moreover, at any given time or place, an actor may be subaltern in relation to another, yet dominant in relation to a third. And, of course, there are contexts in which these categories may simply not be relevant. Dominance and subalternity are not inherent, but relational characterizations. (p. 44)

From this, in postcolonial and imperial contexts, there is space for groups that had previously been categorized as subordinate to occupy a dominant position. The following section outlines previous studies that point to both a traditional and non-traditional social hierarchy in the context of the United States.

Spanish in the United States

Latinos currently constitute the largest minoritized group in the United States. Spanish, although spoken by hundreds of millions worldwide, constitutes a linguistically subordinate position in the United States: ‘Although both Spanish and English languages are colonial in origin … Spanish takes on the characteristics of subalternity in the historical context of Anglo American domination of the hemisphere’ (Lomas, 2008: 294). This linguistic subordination results in the social subordination of Latinos to Anglo Americans in the United States, a hierarchy akin to that described by postcolonial studies and found in many critical discourse studies. However, the situation of Spanish in the United States also constitutes a departure from the traditional sense of colonialism and imperialism because Latino immigrants residing in the United States occupy the ‘belly’ or the center of the empire (Lomas, 2008: 13). This is a strategic position in the context of challenging and resisting domination: ‘The movements of deconstruction do not destroy structures from the outside. They are not possible and effective, nor can they take accurate aim, except by inhabiting those structures’ (Derrida, 1974: 24). In other words, although Latino immigrants nearly always occupy a subordinate position in the social hierarchy produced by colonialism and imperialism, they have the greatest potential to dismantle this hierarchy by physically occupying the space of the dominant group.

Studies concerning the representation of Latino immigrants in the English-language media have focused on how advertising creates a ‘targeted market’ (Dávila, 2012; Wilson et al., 2012), how news reporting (print and television) establishes a number of (mostly negative) identities for Latino immigrants (Molina Guzmán, 2006; Okamato et al., 2011; Santa Ana, 1999, 2010), and how the mainstream media in general reify the hegemonic structure through negative representations of Latino immigrants and positive representations of Anglo Americans (Hill, 1995, 1998; Santa Ana, 200). To be sure, many studies have concluded that Spanish and, consequently, the Latino immigrants who speak Spanish inhabit a subordinate linguistic position vis-a-vis English, and Anglo American speakers of English (Barrett, 2006; Hill, 1995, 1998; Zentella, 1995, 1997, 2003), thereby underscoring the complicated relationship between (putative) racial differences and language (Bucholtz and Hall, 2004, 2005). Finally, studies concerning Spanish-language media specifically are limited and have largely addressed preferences for consumption (Carreira, 2002; Potowski, 2004; Suro, 2004), with the exception of Lipski (1985), who addressed the phonological features of radio broadcasting in Florida, and Cashman (2008), who analyzed small talk in Spanish-language news reporting in Arizona.

Critical discourse studies of Spanish-language media in the United States are limited to three: Delbene (2008), Strom (2013a), and Strom (2013b). Delbene (2008) analyzed the ideological effect of ‘illegal’ and ‘undocumented’ in two Spanish-language newspapers in the Washington, DC, metropolitan area, Washington Hispanic and El Tiempo Latino. She found that illegal and undocumented were indicative of dehumanizing and humanizing practices, respectively. The author concludes that the newspapers likely confront editorial decisions based on their readership: most readers are unauthorized immigrants, for whom the author suggests that newspapers must adopt a humanizing discourse. On the other hand, Latinos who are US citizens comprise part of the readership, and it is for these readers that Delbene posits that the newspapers adopt a dehumanizing position.

The studies by Strom (2013a, 2013b) focus on the representation of power and ideology in news articles from Spanish-language newspapers published by and for the Latino community of Minnesota. Strom (2013a) presents a case study of two local news articles. An analysis of grammatical structures indicated that both articles reproduced stereotypical ideologies and power structures by presenting Latinos as non-agentive social actors. Strom (2013b) considered 24 local Spanish-language news articles and found that although some articles discursively represented stereotypical ideologies, all articles challenged, to differing extents, the negative discursive representation of Latino immigrants typically found in the US mainstream media. Overall, the findings of these studies both corroborate and challenge those found by previous critical studies of the representation of minoritized groups.

Methodology

This study focuses on Spanish-language print media in the Midwest of the United States. While newspaper consumption has decreased drastically in other markets since recent widespread access to the Internet, print media continue to be a viable source of news for the Latino community in the United States (Molina Guzmán, 2006; Okamato et al., 2011). At the time of data collection, Minnesota had five newspapers, three radio stations, and one television station written and broadcasting entirely in Spanish. While the presence of Spanish-language media in this state is moderate compared to other cities (e.g. New York City, Miami, Los Angeles), it is substantial considering its Latino population. As of 2012, Latinos accounted for over 250,000, or 4.7%, of the state’s 5.3 million total population (The Hispanic Databook, 2012), up from just over 53,000 of a total 4.3 million in 1990 (Pew Research Center, 2012). Well over 93,000 of this population are foreign-born, and over 136,000 cite speaking Spanish at home. Although Minnesota is far from being home to the most numerous Latino population in the country (it is the state with the 28th largest Latino population in the country; Pew Research Center, 2011), the current research was carried out in this region for two reasons. First, very little research has been carried out on Spanish-language media in the Midwest of the United States, giving an incomplete understanding of the function and potential effect of the representation of Latino immigrants in Spanish-language media in this country. Second, given that other studies have indicated the increasing presence of non-Latino owners of large Spanish-language media outlets (Perlman and Amaya, 2013), and the fact that some of the largest Spanish-language news outlets continue to represent Latinos negatively (Delbene, 2008; Molina Guzmán, 2006) or not at all (Okamato et al., 2011), it is important to consider whether smaller, local media owned by Latinos are able to provide alternative representations that promote equality for Latino immigrants in the United States.

As noted earlier, Barrett (2006), Hill (1995, 1998), Santa Ana (1999, 2009, 2010), and Schwartz (2006) have shown how negative sentiments against Latinos are reenacted linguistically in the United States. This ‘Hispanophobia’ (Zentella, 1995, 1997, 2003) is likely present to differing degrees in certain regions, based on a number of factors such as state language policy and access to bilingual education, among others (Cashman, 2009). Although to the best of my knowledge no study has addressed language attitudes toward Spanish in the Midwest of the United States, the lack of an English-only policy, coupled with the presence of many bilingual Spanish-English schools and increased legislation supporting drivers’ licenses for unauthorized immigrants in Minnesota, suggests Hispanophobia is probably not as extreme as it is in other states, such as Arizona (Cashman, 2009).

The Spanish-language texts comprise 24 local Spanish-language news articles selected for a larger project concerning the expression of ideologies across the visual and verbal modes (Strom, 2013c). The newspapers in which the articles appeared are La Prensa/Gente de Minnesota [The Press/People of Minnesota],² which, at the time of data collection, had a weekly circulation of 15,000 and was aimed primarily at first-generation Latino immigrants, and La Conexión Latina [The Latino Connection], which had a bi-weekly circulation of 5000 and was aimed at the Ecuadorian population in Minnesota.

The analytical framework for this study is based on the assumption that there is a dialectal relationship between discourse and society. The research questions that guide the analysis are as follows: In local Spanish-language news articles, how are Latino social actors discursively constructed and to what extent do these constructions follow or complicate the traditional understanding of social hierarchy? The overarching framework is based on the approaches of three scholars in critical discourse studies who consider the discursive representation of social actors: Norman Fairclough’s (2001) dialectical-relational approach, Teun van Dijk’s (1998, 2008a) socio-cognitive approach, and Theo van Leeuwen’s (2008) social actors approach. The analysis is complemented by Coronil’s (1999) conception of social hierarchy throughout.

Data analysis is divided into two complementary stages that together include six discursive constructs. The first stage consists of a sociosemantic analysis, which takes into account the ways in which social actors are represented semantically. In the second stage, discursive constructs were analyzed to account for the ways in which social actors are represented grammatically.

The first sociosemantic construct analyzed was individualization, a term adapted from Van Leeuwen (2008) that considers the representation of social actors through the use of titles, credentials, or institutional affiliations, among others. The analysis of individualization included recording the names and titles used to identify all Latino social actors in the 24 articles and then compiling the number of times they received full or partial individualization. For comparison, the titles and names of non-Latino social actors were also recorded. Genericization was analyzed similarly in that all terms used to refer to groups of Latinos were recorded. Patterns in collocations were noted to determine groups of similar terms used to represent Latino social actors. Finally, the sociosemantic analysis included differentiation, which was analyzed in terms of the ideological square. It was first recorded which social actors (if any) were aligned with Latinos and which social actors were aligned against Latino and their allies.

The second stage of analysis consists of a grammatical analysis of two constructs: agency and passive constructions. With regard to agency, the subject and object of all transitive constructions were identified, followed by determining how many times Latinos were the subject and object of transitive verbs. Passive constructions were first identified, and then it was determined whether the construction obfuscated the positive actions of Latino groups or the negative actions of groups opposing Latinos. The first person plural pronoun was analyzed both as a sociosemantic and as a grammatical construct. The analysis of the first person plural pronoun included identifying the pronoun and its various manifestations: the pronoun itself, nosotros; first person plural verb conjugations (and the accompanying reflexive pronouns in the case of reflexive verbs); and the possessive adjective nuestro/a.

Finally, each discursive construct was analyzed vis-a-vis Coronil’s (1999) conception of social hierarchies. Discursive constructs were said to represent a hierarchy that corroborated Coronil’s idea if they represented traditionally ‘othered’ groups in non-subordinate social positions. Conversely, discursive constructs were said to represent a more traditional binary if they represented the majority group as dominant and the minoritized group as subordinate.

Results

The results are presented as follows: the two discursive constructs that represent a traditional social hierarchy are presented first, followed by the four discursive constructs that represent an alternative social hierarchy.

Traditional social hierarchy

The first pattern that arose in the data was the discursive representation of social actors that led to a traditional social hierarchy through passive constructions and individualization. I first present the analysis of passive constructions, which reinforced a traditional social hierarchy the most. I then present the analysis of individualization, which reinforced the traditional social hierarchy while also presenting a slight variation on this hierarchy.

Passive constructions

Passive constructions have the ability to hide processes. With regard to the ideological square, passive constructions hide the negative actions of Us, or the majority group, and similarly hide the positive actions of Them, the minoritized group. The overwhelming majority of passive constructions found in the 24 local news articles analyzed for this project follow this representation, thus suggesting that this discursive construct serves to reinforce the traditional social hierarchy where the majority group is dominant and minoritized groups are subordinate.

Spanish has two passive constructions, both of which are achieved by maintaining the transitive verb and deleting the agent phrase. The most frequent use of passive constructions in the data was hiding the negative actions of the majority group, as evidenced in Example (1a):

(1a) Algunos clientes nos dijeron que sus dos hijos fueron afectados.

[Some clients told us that their two children were affected.] (Trabajadores exigen que Cub Foods pare las represalias, violencia y abusos de derechos humanos, 2011)

(1b) Algunos clientes nos dijeron que la seguridad de Cub Foods afectó a sus dos hijos.

[Some clients told us that Cub Foods security affected their children.]

In this story, several janitors and their allies are protesting at a local supermarket chain, Cub Foods, after being fired suddenly during the middle of their shift. During the peaceful protest, security personnel representing the supermarket arrived and dispelled the group by using pepper spray. The comments in (1a) come from shoppers who were not involved in the protest but were present at the time of the incident. The result of the passive construction is twofold. First, it hides the negative actions of Cub Foods security (1b), which represents the majority group. Second, by shifting the focus from the agent to the patient of the action, (1a) emphasizes the victimization of Latino immigrants. This is one example of many found in the data that corroborate Van Dijk’s conclusions that not only does the press emphasize the negative aspects of events involving minoritized groups, but also that they hide how the majority group is often at fault for causing such events.

Passive constructions also hide positive actions of Latino social actors:

(2a) Se hizo el llamado a Lunds para hacer una contribución económica a trabajadores quienes se quedaron desempleados

[A call was made to Lunds to make an economic contribution to the workers who were left unemployed] (Méndez, 2011)

(2b) Los trabajadores de limpieza y aliados de CTUL hicieron el llamado a Lunds

[Janitors and allies from CTUL made a call to Lunds]

This story is similar to that in Example (1a) because it involves the unfair treatment of janitors by supermarket chains. In this case, a local upscale supermarket, Lunds, fired workers after a long period of decreasing salaries and increasing the workload of its janitors. The janitors gathered for an informational meeting shortly thereafter to determine how they would protest the situation and also how they would support each other during their unemployment. Interestingly, although this story is written by and for Latino immigrants, it still hides the positive actions of Latino immigrants, especially the powerful actions they have taken to stand up against negative treatment by the majority group. This is perhaps indicative of the pervasive nature of these constructions, such that writers may not realize they are using them to the detriment of their own social group.

To conclude, passive constructions follow the expected discursive representation of Us and Them and thus reinforce the traditional social hierarchy where the majority group is dominant and the minoritized group is subordinate. The sociosemantic construct individualization also reinforces this hierarchy, while presenting a variation on the representation of Them.

Individualization

Individualization is defined as the use of terms of reference that denote unique identities that place social actors in the foreground, including given name, given name and surname, or a name plus a title (including ‘pseudo titles’, e.g. ‘the activist María González’). It is indicative of social hierarchies by representing social actors as part of the forefront or background of society: greater individualization places social actors at the forefront of society, while lesser individualization places social actors at the background of society. Following the ideological square and the traditional understanding of social hierarchies from postcolonial studies, it is expected that Latino immigrants in the United States would occupy the background of society. Discursively, this would be manifested as Latino social actors receiving less individualization than other social actors, a finding that came to bear in the results.

In global terms, 8 of the 24 articles analyzed for this project did not afford any individualization to Latino social actors because they were not mentioned in the articles. In the remaining articles, Latinos are represented with various levels of individualization, with few examples of full individualization and the remaining examples of low individualization. Examples (3) and (4) are instances of low individualization for Latino social actors:

(3) María concluye

[María concludes] (Dávila, 2011b)

(4) El trabajador José

[the worker José] (Dávila, 2011b)

From these examples, it is clear that, short of not mentioning these social actors at all, this type of individualization does little to foreground them. In this way, limited individualization maintains these Latino social actors in the background and reinforces the traditional social hierarchy where minoritized groups are othered.

Few examples afford Latino social actors full individualization. In Examples (5) to (7), Latinos receive full names and titles (both ‘pseudo titles’ in the cases of (5) and (6), and ‘real titles’ in the case of (7)):

(5) Jesús Castillo, trabajador de limpieza y miembro de CTUL

[Jesús Castillo, janitor and member of CTUL] (Trabajadores exigen que Cub Foods pare las represalias, violencia y abusos de derechos humanos, 2011)

(6) Adriana Espinosa, una trabajadora de limpieza

[Adriana Espinosa, a janitor] (Trabajadores exigen que Cub Foods pare las represalias, violencia y abusos de derechos humanos, 2011)

(7) Pastor Patricio Cabello Hansel, Iglesia de San Pablo Luterana

[Pastor Patricio Cabello Hansel, Saint Paul Lutheran Church] (La huelga de hambre llegó a su fin, 2011)

The social actors in Examples (5) to (7) are authorized Latinos;³ in fact, the only Latino social actors afforded full individualization in La Prensa/Gente de Minnesota and La Conexión Latina are authorized. What is more, in the data analyzed for this investigation, all non-Latino social actors were afforded full individualization. From this, it appears that Latino social actors occupy distinct social categories based on their immigrant status. From Examples (3) and (4), unauthorized Latino immigrants are the most backgrounded and thus most othered social actors in the data. On the other hand, authorized Latino immigrants occupy an intermediary position between unauthorized Latino immigrants and Anglo Americans because they are always represented by a full name (Examples (5) and (6)), but only at times with real titles (Example (7)). Given that social actors from the majority group always receive full individualization, they are discursively foregrounded and maintain their dominant social position. In this way, the ideological square is reified in local Spanish-language news articles. However, the data also corroborate Coronil’s (1999) argument that the traditional binary dominant/subordinate must be complicated. In this project, while Latino social actors most frequently occupy a subordinate social position, within this position unauthorized Latinos are subordinate to authorized Latinos. Furthermore, authorized Latino social actors occupy the same social position as the majority group when they are fully individualized.

A confounding factor in the analysis of individualization is the reporting practices of La Conexión Latina and La Prensa/Gente de Minnesota. Both newspapers include full names of sources only in the case that the person is an authorized immigrant; surnames are omitted so as not to jeopardize the safety of unauthorized immigrants. In the data set analyzed for the current project, this appears to be the reason for omitting full names in 4 out of the 24 total articles. Thus, instead of purposefully backgrounding unauthorized Latino social actors, the newspapers may simply be protecting them by providing only their given names. In this way, individualization does not take on nearly as passive a role as initially thought for unauthorized Latino immigrants in the United States. Nonetheless, the effect of individualization remains the same, especially when considering which social actors receive greater individualization than authorized Latino immigrants.

To summarize, individualization represents Anglo Americans as the most prevalent social actors through full individualization; it represents authorized Latino immigrants as occupying the same position as Anglo Americans through occasional full individualization; and it represents unauthorized Latino immigrants as the most backgrounded, and therefore most othered, social actors through limited individualization. The following section presents the discursive constructs that challenged this traditional social hierarchy.

Alternative social hierarchy

Four discursive constructs represented social actors in a more complex fashion than the traditional binary division represented by individualization and passive constructs. These alternative social hierarchies took two forms in the data: the first included a leveling of divisions, where social actors from different groups were represented similarly; the second included a reversal and complication of the Us/Them hierarchy.

Genericization

For this project, genericization is the use of terms of reference to denote groups of social actors (vs, e.g., individual social actors). Although these terms usually appear in the plural, they may also be realized as singular mass nouns, for example, gente [people].

Overall, the term local Spanish-language print media used most frequently to denote groups of social actors is trabajadores [workers] and its variations (see Table 1). By referring to those who comprise their primary audience in terms of their contribution to the labor force, these newspapers represent them based on their profession, rather than their ethnicity or membership in groups not accepted by the dominant group. For example, Van Dijk (1991a) has found that ‘if minorities appear at all in the news, then it is mostly … as members of controversial organizations or groups … They seldom appear in ‘normal’ roles, such as workers, students, employers, union members, etc.’ (p. 85; emphasis added). In this way, the sociosemantic construct genericization challenges typical representations found in mainstream media that tend to note the stereotypical roles of minoritized social actors by representing them not as members of controversial organizations, but rather in ‘normal’ roles as workers. Moreover, the frequency of trabajadores [workers] in these newspapers has the effect of creating a new pattern of representation, one that shifts them from a traditionally subordinate position to a position equal to that of other non-Latino social actors.

Table 1.

Frequency of referring terms that collocate with trabajador [worker].

Referring term	Number of articles in which term appeared
Trabajadores [Workers]	8
Trabajadores de limpieza [lit. Sanitary workers]	6
Ex-trabajadores [Ex-workers]	4
Trabajadores inmigrantes [Immigrant workers]	2
Trabajadores latinos [Latino workers]	1
Trabajadores indocumentados [Undocumented workers]	1
Empleados [Employees]	1

Other terms used to denote Latino immigrants more closely corroborate Van Dijk’s (1988a, 1989) findings by referring to these social actors in a more undifferentiated fashion that does little to take into account their different origins. While there are many fewer occurrences of these terms and their collocations than trabajadores [workers], their presence constitutes a conflicting representation of Latino immigrants. For example, inmigrante [immigrant]⁴ (and its collocations comunidad inmigrante [immigrant community] and inmigrantes indocumentados [undocumented immigrants]) and chicanos y mexicanos [Chicanos and Mexicans] focus on the migrant status, legality, ethnicity, and place of birth of Latino social actors. Because these categories are rarely used to refer to Anglo social actors, it sets Latino social actors apart from them in a negative fashion by utilizing terms that carry negative connotations (in the context of the United States). In this sense, genericization functions as a sociosemantic construct that reinforces a traditional hierarchy because it represents Latino social actors with unnecessary negative terms while no such negative terms were used to reference groups of Anglo social actors.

Genericization functions most frequently as a sociosemantic construct that represents Latino social actors similarly to how Anglo social actors are represented in the mainstream media. In doing so, it levels and eliminates the traditional social hierarchy where Latino social actors are represented as subordinate to Anglo social actors. At the same time, other terms used to refer to groups of Latino social actors function similarly to referring practices found in the mainstream media that perpetuate the Us/Them hierarchy. Similar to the outcome produced by genericization is that produced by the discursive construct agency, which affords agency to Latino and Anglo social actors with the same frequency.

Agency

While agency indicates which social actors are subjects and participants in activities, it is useful to distinguish between high and low transitivity, as this is the greatest indicator of a social actor’s place in a social hierarchy: ‘The grammatical and semantic prominence of Transitivity is shown to derive from its characteristic discourse function: High Transitivity is correlated with foregrounding, and low Transitivity with backgrounding’ (Hopper and Thompson, 1980: 251). Following this line of thought, traditional understandings of social hierarchies (e.g. the ideological square and postcolonial studies) would predict that Latino social actors would not be subjects of highly transitive verbs because they rarely occupy the foreground of society. Instead, they should either not be subjects of transitive verbs or at most be subjects of verbs of low transitivity.

Of a total of 102 highly transitive verbs analyzed, Latinos were agents of 57, indicating that not only were they agentive in a majority of the texts I analyzed for the current investigation, but that they were also the most highly agentive social actors in the majority of highly transitive verbs. This does not follow what Van Dijk (1988a, 1988b, 1989, 1991a) has found regarding agency for two reasons. First, he notes that minoritized groups are rarely subjects of transitive verbs. In contrast, data from this study indicate that Latino immigrants are the subjects of over half of the total transitive verbs. Second, Van Dijk found that when minoritized groups were subjects of transitive verbs, they were either negative situations or not highly transitive. Neither of these findings were corroborated in the current investigation, as evidenced in the following examples:

(8) los activistas … recogieron decenas de firmas para una petición que consiste en parar las deportaciones en el Condado de Hennepin

[the activists … gathered dozens of signatures for a petition that consists in stopping deportations in Hennepin County] (La campaña No Más Deportaciones lanza mensaje, 2010)

(9) los ex-trabajadores de Chipotle llevaron a cabo una protesta

[ex-workers of Chipotle carried out a protest] (Dávila, 2011a)

(10) CTUL … ha organizado varias delegaciones a las oficinas centrales, protestas, marchas, y una conferencia de prensa

[CTUL … has organized various delegations to the central offices, protests, marches, and a press conference] (Trabajadores de limpieza iniciarán huelga de hambre, 2011)

Given that Latino social actors were equally as agentive as non-Latino social actors, the traditional social hierarchy no longer holds for this discursive construct. Instead, it suggests a leveling of the social hierarchy where Latino social actors and other social actors are represented similarly, rather than in subordinate and dominant positions, respectively. The sociosemantic analysis of genericization also suggests the leveling of the traditional social hierarchy where minoritized groups occupy an ‘other’ group and a majority group occupies a powerful Us group.

First person plural pronoun ‘nosotros’

The analysis of the Spanish first person pronoun, nosotros, determines which social actors are included and excluded in local Spanish-language news (Fairclough, 2001). This, in turn, is indicative of a social hierarchy in which the included group occupies a dominant position and the excluded group occupies a subordinate position. Previous research has found that dominant groups constitute the Us group, while minoritized groups constitute the Them group (Van Dijk, 1998, 2007, 2008b; Van Leeuwen, 2008). In this line, it is reasonable to expect that the referents of ‘us’ would be the dominant group, while the referents of ‘them’ would be the subordinate group. Given that they occupy a dominant position in US society, it would be expected that Anglo Americans would be the lone referents of nosotros; conversely, Latino immigrants would be excluded from nosotros as they occupy a subordinate position.

Across both newspapers, those social actors included in the first person plural pronoun nosotros vary widely and may refer to unauthorized Latinos, authorized Latinos, all immigrants, or even other ethnic groups fighting on behalf of Latinos. Overall, nosotros serves to challenge the traditional social hierarchy by providing an alternative hierarchy where Latino immigrants occupy a dominant position and Anglo Americans occupy a subordinate position.

The most radical alternative hierarchy represented by the first person plural pronoun nosotros includes only unauthorized Latino immigrants, a group that is discursively excluded from the majority press. While not noted explicitly, the article from which Example (11) is taken implies that Chipotle workers were fired for not having documentation. The voice that speaks in the following example is identified as ‘El trabajador José’ [José the worker]:

(11) las próximas generaciones de trabajadores que podrían pasar por lo mismo que hemos nosotros pasado

[the next generations of workers who could go through the same thing we ourselves have gone through] (Dávila, 2011b; author’s emphasis)

This example constitutes a complete reversal of the ideological square because it places unauthorized Latinos, who would traditionally occupy the Them position, in the Us position. At the same time, all other social actors, including Anglo Americans who would traditionally occupy the Us position, are placed in the Them position.

Another way in which nosotros challenges traditional social hierarchies is through its inclusion of both authorized and unauthorized Latino immigrants. Following newspaper protocol, only a first name is given if a social actor is unauthorized. Thus, I assume that the speaker in Example (12) is an authorized immigrant because her full name is given later in the article. In this way, her use of nosotros includes herself, an authorized immigrant. However, she also includes other social actors when she uses the first person plural pronoun:

(12) Estas condiciones pésimas de trabajo afectan a todos en nuestras comunidades

[These awful working conditions affect everyone in our communities] (Trabajadores de limpieza de tiendas realizan marcha, 2010; author’s emphasis)

The other social actors included in nosotros are those janitors who were fired from Supervalu who, according to later editions of La Prensa/Gente de Minnesota and La Conexión Latina, were unauthorized. Because nosotros refers to the janitors who worked at Supervalu, the first person plural pronoun includes both authorized and unauthorized Latino immigrants. This use of the first person plural pronoun represents an alternative hierarchy where Latino immigrants are included in the Us group and all others are included in the Them group.

Finally, the first person plural pronoun provides an alternative social hierarchy by including all immigrants in the Us group:

(13) Es por esto que como inmigrantes tenemos que unirnos nuevamente para salir a la calle a marchar este primero de mayo

[For this reason we have to unite [us] together again as immigrants to go out to march this May first] (Villaruel, 2011; author’s emphasis)

It appears that the author, Cristian Villaruel, spoke these words, as the quote is not attributed to another speaker. The first person (possessive) plural pronoun, in this case, refers at least to Latino immigrants, as Villaruel is a Latino immigrant. The article later refers to massive layoffs from 2009 by International Business Machines (IBM), a group that manufactures and sells computer hardware and software, which affected several different immigrant groups. Villaruel urges these immigrants to stand up to this negative action by IBM by marching on 1 May. Instead of presenting immigrants as others, they are presented in Example (13) as Us. In this way, nosotros refers to all immigrant groups laid off from IBM, thereby challenging the essentialist understanding of social hierarchy provided by postcolonial studies.

Still other examples point to the necessity of complicating the traditional notion of social hierarchy. In Example (14), nosotros includes immigrants and other non-immigrant social actors in an article that applauds the ability of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) to win several requests for the workers it represents, including the ability to work the day shift, better health care, and support for using only environmentally sound, or ‘green’, products:

(14) ‘Nuestro nuevo contrato hará que nuestros trabajos sean empleos verdes’, dijo Blanca Pineda, una trabajadora de limpieza

[‘Our new contract will make our jobs green’ said Blanca Pineda, a janitor] (‘La unión hace la fuerza’, 2010; author’s emphasis)

Following the same reasoning given above, Blanca Pineda is an authorized Latina immigrant. However, her use of the first person plural pronoun here also includes members of SEIU Local 26, which is a heterogeneous group comprising immigrant and non-immigrant members from several ethnic groups.

Examples (11) to (14) point to complex and shifting social hierarchies while supporting Coronil’s (1999) conclusions that social actors may occupy various social positions. What is more, the examples support the reversal of the ideological square in which the former Them becomes Us and the former Us becomes Them.

Differentiation

The sociosemantic construct differentiation indicates how a text discursively establishes a social hierarchy by associating social actors with one another and distinguishing them from others: ‘Differentiation explicitly differentiates an individual social actor or group of social actors from a similar actor or group, creating the difference between the “self” and the “other,” or between “us” and “them”’ (Van Leeuwen, 2008: 40).

Two patterns arose regarding differentiation in the 24 articles analyzed for this project: first, the most frequent differentiation involves Latino social actors and their non-Latino allies in contrast to anti-Latino non-Latino social actors (who are typically Anglo Americans). The second pattern, although less common, is differentiation where Latino social actors stand alone in contrast to non-Latino social actors.

The most common social hierarchy established by differentiation from the data for this investigation was a division where Latino social actors and their non-Latino allies were Us, and anti-Latino non-Latinos were Them. From Table 2, the hierarchy most frequently represented through differentiation resulted from a local store, Target, and three local supermarkets, Lunds, Byerly’s, and Cub Foods, firing Latino janitors without prior notice. The analysis of the first person plural pronoun nosotros indicates that Latino social actors and their various allies constitute Us, while these stores constitute Them. Previous studies have shown that the opposite would be expected, where large corporations who carry out negative actions against Latino social actors are Us and the Latino social actors are Them. For this reason, this social hierarchy challenges the traditional understanding of alterity.

Table 2.

Alternative social hierarchy created by discursively differentiating between Latino social actors and their allies versus anti-Latino non-Latinos.

Situation	Us	Them
Latino janitors fired from several local supermarkets and stores without warning	Latino janitors, Centro de Trabajadores Unidos en la Lucha (CTUL) [Center for Latinos United in the Fight], Mario Colloly Torres, State Senator Patricia Torres Ray, Pastor Patricio Cabello Hansel, Pastor Grant Stevenson, State Representative Keith Ellison, State Representative Jim Davnie, Minneapolis City Council Member Gary Schiff, Bishop Craig Johnson, Pastor Jay Carlson, Pastor Justin Linden-Ayers, Pastor Brad Froslee	Target, Lunds, Byerly’s, Cub Foods
Latinos fired from local fast food chain Chipotle without warning	Ex-Chipotle workers, CTUL	Chipotle
Latino construction workers underpaid or not paid by construction company Mulcahy Inc.	Latino construction workers, lawyers for Miller O’Brien Cummins	Gary Mulcahy, Mulcahy Inc. construction company
Mariano Pérez Espinoza is incarcerated and scheduled for deportation for allegedly being in the country without proper documentation	Mariano Pérez Espinoza, Libertad de los Inmigrantes de MN [Freedom for Minnesota Immigrants]	US Immigration, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), Shawn Neudauer (representative and spokesperson for ICE)

Other examples of differentiation create a social hierarchy where Latino social actors alone are Us, while anti-Latino non-Latino social actors are Them (see Table 3). In one alternative hierarchy, Latino social actors were represented as Us when they protested against the Minnesota House of Representatives and Vehicle Services, among others, for not being eligible to receive drivers’ licenses due to their lack of documentation. This is one of the most radical alternatives to the traditional understanding of Us/Them because it does not include any non-Latinos in the Us group and, as such, constitutes the greatest potential for future changes in traditional understandings of social hierarchization.

Table 3.

Alternative social hierarchy created by discursively differentiating between Latino social actors and anti-Latino non-Latinos.

Side 1	Side 2
Inmigrantes indocumentados [undocumented immigrants]	Transportation policy, the Minnesota House of Representatives, Vehicle Services, the Department of Public Health
Latinos indocumentados [undocumented Latinos]	US government
Chicanos y mexicanos [Chicanos and Mexicans]	Proponents of 287g [Immigration and Nationality Act] in Minnesota House of Representatives
Spanish-speaking Latinos in Lino Lakes	Lino Lakes City Council

To summarize, this linguistic and sociosemantic analysis of 24 local Spanish-language news articles underscores the distinct representations of social actors and various resulting social hierarchies. While some constructs perpetuated the traditional binary of powerful majority group and subordinate minoritized group, other constructs presented alternative social hierarchies. The constructs ordered from those that established the most traditional hierarchy to those that established the least traditional hierarchy are passive constructions, individualization, genericization, agency, the first person plural pronoun nosotros [us], and differentiation.

Conclusion

The first research question asked how Latino social actors are discursively constructed in local Spanish-language print media. In general, Latino social actors represent a heterogeneous group that occupies various positions that are characterized at times as dominant and other times as subordinate. The 24 news articles analyzed for this project represented Latino social actors as dominant through the use of genericization, agency, first person plural pronouns, and differentiation; the same articles represented Latino social actors as subordinate through the use of individualization and passive constructs. Initially, then, it appears that the representation of Latino social actors in local Spanish-language media is not static, but rather is dynamic.

Initially, then, the data support Coronil’s (1999) idea of a heterogeneous subaltern group that occupies variously subordinated positions which are characterized at times as dominant and other times as subordinate. Considering Latino immigrants in the United States as a heterogeneous subaltern group is rather critical because it allows space for challenging the ideologies found in the mainstream English-language media. For example, because Latinos are a minoritized group in the United States, it would be expected that they would be Them, as they often do in the mainstream English-language media. However, the sociosemantic construct differentiation established Latino social actors as Us, and as such challenges their traditional subordinate position. In this way, it is necessary to consider the representation of minoritized social actors in minoritized media because they provide alternatives to what is found in the mass media.

The second research question asked to what extent the representations of social actors in local Spanish-language media follow or complicate the traditional understanding of social hierarchy. Four discursive constructs – genericization, agency, first person plural pronouns, and differentiation – complicated the traditional Us/Them binary by representing Latinos as dominant social actors vis-a-vis Anglo American social actors or by representing all social actors equally. At the same time, individualization and passive constructs followed the traditional Us/Them binary by representing Latinos as subordinate social actors.

The presence of discursive constructs that presented alternative social hierarchies indicates the potential for local Spanish-language newspapers to challenge the subordinate position of Latino social actors in the United States through what Derrida (1974) calls a deconstruction from the inside: ‘The movements of deconstruction do not destroy structures from the outside. They are not possible and effective, nor can they take accurate aim, except by inhabiting those structures’ (p. 24). In other words, although Latino immigrants occupy a subordinate position in the social hierarchy produced by colonialism and imperialism, they have the greatest potential to dismantle this hierarchy by physically occupying the space of the dominant group. A first step toward the dismantling of the social hierarchy resulting from US colonialism and imperialism is the recognition of the complex positions occupied by Latino social actors. Given the dialectical relationship between discourse and society, a possible outcome of the representation of this alternative social hierarchy would be the reflection of this hierarchy in society. While this is unlikely given the limited reach of La Conexión Latina and La Prensa/Gente de Minnesota, it is a step in the direction of establishing a new social hierarchy.

To conclude, this study considers the construction of social hierarchy through the representation of Latino social actors in local Spanish-language media. By indicating the alternative social hierarchies represented by Spanish-language news articles, this study underscores the impact local minoritized media may have on challenging the traditional social binary that places Latino social actors in a subordinate position.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank an anonymous reviewer for feedback on the manuscript. Any errors that remain are my own.

Funding

This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.

Notes

Author biography

Megan Strom is a Visiting Assistant Professor of Spanish at Luther College in Iowa, the United States. Her research focuses on the representation of ideology in Spanish-language media in the United States and the ways in which these media can challenge the negative representations of Latino immigrants in the mainstream English-language media.

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