Abstract
Holling and Calafell’s edited volume applies Ono and Sloop’s (1995) theory of vernacular discourse to the study of Latin@ communication. Spanning multiple Latin@ nationalities, media, venues and critical methodologies, their volume attempts to grant expression to the variety of forms that Latin@ vernacular discourse (LVD) assumes within the United States as well as challenge the manners in which LVD is understood within a typical Western framework. As the title suggests, their book demonstrates that Latin@ discourse cannot be assumed to be univocal, despite the shared experiences, heritages and culture of the various Latin nationalities. Overall, the book raises the problematic issues of identity, form, heritage, stereotypes, rhetoric, performance and others that become visible within LVD.
Following an introduction by the editors, the book is divided in three sections. The first, ‘Locating Foundations’, comprises three chapters establishing the need to rethink contemporary Latin@ communication studies through the LVD lens. In Chapter 1, Alberto González chronicles how Latin@ communication studies developed as a discipline within the National Communication Association in the United States. Although González’s informal narrative is placed first on chronological grounds, the stage for the collection’s vernacular approach is not set until Chapter 2, written by the editors, which provides the theoretical framework for understanding the vernacular in Latin@ communication studies. In Chapter 3, Teresita Garza sets up a metaphor for vocality in Latin@ communication studies by analogizing the discipline to the myth of Coyolxauhqui, to show that vocality takes form in different cultural media. However, the metaphor is stretched too thin at times, and the chapter tends to follow a circular structure of myth-explication/theory/myth-explication that complicates the reading.
The second section, titled ‘Acts of In/Exclusion’, covers four chapters highlighting contemporary expressions of Latin@ discourse in the United States. The most intriguing facet of this section, and perhaps the most fertile for future research altogether, is how this section analyses not only LVD but also the vernacular spaces in which it is found. Darrel Enck-Wanzer’s Chapter 4 demonstrates how the New York Young Lords challenged essentialist views of gender and sexuality both textually and iconographically. The chapter is especially helpful in demonstrating how the vernacular manifests itself in visual media. Similarly, in Chapter 5, Anguiano and Chávez analyse the personal narratives about citizenship and identity that pro-Development, Relief, and Education for Alien Minors (DREAM) Act activists present on an online forum. This chapter insightfully underlines the Internet’s potential for constructing civic and ethnic identities as well as mediating them. In Chapter 6, Córdova draws largely from post-colonialists Bhabha and Foucault to argue that the singing of the US National Anthem in Spanish exhibited counter-hegemonic undertones. The fact that the performance of the anthem was in Spanish, however, was not the only anti-colonial manoeuvre. By focusing on the place of LVD, Córdova seamlessly weaves the purchase of the physical place of LVD into our theoretical constructs of vernacular discourse. Sowards and Pineda investigate how Latinidad was defined and expressed by the TV show Ugly Betty in the United States in Chapter 7. The authors trace the emergence of the show in the United States from its Latin American roots and how the production of the show was driven primarily by capitalist aims. The authors’ argument that Latinidad becomes subject to a ‘trope of authenticity’ provides a useful understanding of how televised Latinidad transforms genuine Latinidad and reifies stereotypes through commodification.
The last section, titled ‘Trans/National Voices’, comprises four chapters analysing LVD as it encroaches upon and transgresses political, social and metaphysical boundaries. In Chapter 8, Roberto Avant-Mier explains how music serves as a place of national expression. Using CDA, the author’s analysis grants us a unique methodological approach for studying how LVD manifests in the music scene. Taking a more metaphysical turn, in Chapter 9, Christopher Westgate analyses Lila Down’s transcendence of ethnically sexualized stereotypes through her commitment to a nonsexual, music experience. Westgate makes music itself the site for contesting ethnic boundaries and forming new, imagined identities. Such an approach quite nicely ties in an ideological approach to LVD that broadens our concept of ethnic identity construction beyond bodily markers. In Chapter 10, Lisa Calvente unpacks the negative impact of a dialectical understanding of race on US citizens of Latin American descent through a personal narrative. This chapter provides a fresh perspective of traditional racial categories that have left Latin@s without their own ‘race’ and in a state of an ‘included exclusion’. Her affective approach to the identificational fluidity among US-born Latin@s and the ways in which traditional racialization has caused this fluidity bears significant import for communication studies as well as the social scientific approaches to Latin@ studies. Finally, Chapter 11 by T. M. Linda Scholz explores how ‘testimony’, speaking on behalf of others, is a legitimate rhetorical transaction insofar as it invites the listener to participate in the lives of those for whom testimony has been given and voices their own otherwise subaltern voice(s). In essence, this chapter is a microcosm of the entire volume, for in the collection we find the academy attempting to elevate Latin-ness, letting them speak for themselves by ‘speaking’ for them.
The last section of the book is an appendix of ‘Further Readings’ that provides a listing of resources categorized by subjects related to communication studies that will benefit researchers interested in delving further into Latin@ communication or Latin@ studies in general. This section in particular will be useful for supplying readings for advanced undergraduate courses or graduate seminars studying Latin@ communication.
Holling and Calafell’s volume shows a subtle awareness of an ‘ethnography of speaking’ in its analysis of how Latin@ identity is constructed or contested discursively in multimodal ways and in a variety of settings. Indeed, anyone interested in inquiring more about how identity discourse both frames and is framed by economic processes, cultural histories, (trans-)national politics, as well as meta-pragmatically in everyday interactions by those performing ethnic identities, will find this book to be an intriguing introduction to LVD as a critical lens for such inquiries.