Term Paper on Latina Stereotypes
in Television
The age of technology has brought about double-edged sword to the domain of
gender and cultural identity. Today’s media, specifically television and film,
played the greatest role in developing the world's stereotypes, images, and
creation relating to everything from what love is to what women are not. Latin
America being our closest neighbor, the media has enticed and assaulted,
chagrined and glorified Latin American women in television programs and soap
operas. One advantage of this dichotomous criterion is the clear fact that at
least there is an awareness of Latin American culture. Latin American women are
not all but invisible, like Asians or Middle Easterners in American television,
but can in fact found a powerful identity for themselves and even cross
obstacles in their roles. But this exposure has not come at great cost. The fact
is that Latino women, whose portfolios display obvious talent, beauty, and
acting skill, felt that they needed to anglicize their names shows both how
unlucky Latino actors have been and how far we have improved.
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There certainly do exist a dichotomy and racial projection upon Latin women.
Today, Latin women are repeatedly subjected to stereotypical descriptions.
Ranging from the "bootylicious" and "ghetto fabulous", Latina actors are branded
"firecrackers" or "hot tamales," clearly ingratiating the heat, fire, and
sensuality stereotypically projected upon Latinos. It is difficult to find a
review of Salma Hayek not with reading somewhere that she is hot-blooded or
simply hot. Her work seems to take a back seat, and she is treated more like a
Mexican Pamela Anderson even despite her work clearly shows great acting skill.
Throughout the history, women have often been cast as one-dimensional
characters, either a "good girl" or a "bad girl." Even sad, they were so made to
resemble in these parts that they became even more than just "positive or
negative" portrayals. Particularly in the rise of the "positive" Latino image of
the sultry, desirable, talented, and exotic Latin woman all of a sudden
transformed into objectification. They were no longer women, but had become more
like statues or fascinating animals.
This is particularly true with Latin women in film. Nearly every portrayal until
very lately has been one of the poor Hispanic struggling to get along. Even as
an upper-class scientist and doctor in "The Cell," Jennifer Lopez' character
went home after work and illuminated a joint in her stereotypical "fly-girl"
apartment while watching TV in bed. "The Wedding Planner" at last showed her as
a luxurious, upper-crust entrepreneur, but in that movie she did not even play a
Hispanic woman, the character was Italian. Although things are getting better,
one has to ponder where are the opera-attending, caviar-eating,
champagne-drinking, Latino attorneys and businesswomen, much less the ordinary
modern Latino who is not a single mother who dwells in the ghettos and neglects
her kids to go find more break. Is there ever would be women who are neither
Madonna nor whore, or who are both at the same time? Subsequently, for that
matter alone, for what reason has the whorish or “mouthy firebrand” become so
common in what Latin personification exists while the "good girl" is now so
uncommon?
Many Latino actors are restricted to their own cultures and the material offered
within them. Those parts are inclined to resolutely compel the Madonna/whore
dichotomy. Latin cinema has amply banked on American themes and then taken them
a phase further. Latino sensual indulgence becomes unrestrained discrimination.
Care giving, ardor and munificence is turned into a damsel. Emotion for music
and dance is turned into the "unintelligent but gifted" dancer who can do little
else. And no matter what the role she is all but always dependent upon men. Not
with a man to nurture there is any good, and not with a man to rip-off there is
any bad. Latino women in TV and operas are almost never able to portray any
intensity, significance, or value unless validated first by their pertinence to
a man.
Women are in general presented as a function of male ambition and are too
recurrently, even today, the object of misconstrue, hideous misogyny. New
efforts made by directors of the programs does makes an effort to present women
in a more favorable light, but it still tend to confine them to the erotic and
or the romantic character. Actually, they are never really presented as beings
with ideas: the ones who think, the ones who communicate, the ones who dream
keep on to be the male characters. At the very best, a female character might
serve as a catalyst, so the male character can contemplate, articulate, perform,
and perceive. “To the degree that we women begin to speak about ourselves, male
film makers will begin to realize how closed and negative their approach is, and
only then will they begin to change it" (Pick, 78).
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An official governmental reviews presented to the UN and NGO reports show that
there has been a growth in the number of women entering media organizations at
the professional level and there is a growth in the ratio of women students
graduating from journalism and mass communications courses. The women and media
situations in both Asia and Latin America regions correspond to this trend. But,
there remains to be a continued negative portrayal and representation of women
that may be linked to the lack of implementation of national media codes and, in
some cases, even the lack of existence of such codes. In addition, women keep on
to have restricted access and participation in decision-making in the media
industries and governing authorities and bodies that oversee conception and
execution of media policies. Women media practitioners keep on to face
gender-based idiosyncrasy including sexual harassment at the work place.
In Latin America and the Caribbean, women assert that giant multimedia
organizations control different kinds of media resulting in unequal
representation of all social actors. Women’s right to communicate is an
inalienable human right that requires a plurality of information sources and
media besides a democratic and transparent administration of communication
policies, equity and gender justice. Wilson & Gutiérrez (1995) in the concluding
chapter of their book Race, Multiculturalism and the Media, argues three forces
that instigate the dynamics between the mass media and an augmenting racially
diverse population. The forces they quote are the development of racial
diversity in the US, the technological advances in communication media, and the
targeting of audience segments by the media. Regarding the latter force, they
thereafter argue that “in order for a portion of the audience to be segmented it
must be identifiable, measurable, accessible, and substantial enough to be
potentially profitable”. Latinos in the United States are an essential part of
and influenced by the three above-mentioned forces.
Older men are usually depicted with younger women, and women typically appear
without male partners. All elderly are commonly pictured as inept, feeble and
foolish. Even though from the late 1980s Black operas shows began to increase
considerably, casts have generally been white or black, and never Latino, Native
or Asian. The few minority roles in dramatic TV have frequently been of
criminals and drug addicts, exploiting vehemently the sex criteria. This pattern
has intensely strengthened, and apparently been reinforced by, the similar
racial stereotyping common in "reality TV" police shows and local TV news
programs. The normal alternative role for Latino Americans women has been more
boringly a commentary, or more boldly, a sextet. Ram'rez-Berg (1990), commenting
upon the wider cinematic tradition of Latino women portrayal, has identified the
bandit or greaser, the mixed-race slut, the buffoon (male and female), the Latin
lover and the alluring Dark Lady, as six hackneyed tropes. The problematic issue
is that even if Latino women are given more TV space, will the first phase
merely privilege the audience with negative roles in a wider spectrum?
Another important aspect is the news hour, where the representation, or the part
as may be called is limited to the whether forecast and like type of
insignificance, thereby, reducing the potential exposure that the Latino women
may very well be able to portray if given a chance. As time went on and racial
news values and priorities remained the same or comparable despite the change in
faces, did the boundaries of this progress begin to become more evident. At
around the same time, majority of news bulletins, especially locally, was
becoming different into infotainment, with lengthy weather and sports reports
instituted into the half-hour. Maybe television news over the longer term will
be increasingly unoccupied of its conventional importance in the United States,
and will become more a reassertion of community and custom, with Latino women
depiction and other ethnic minority newscasters as a rather indeterminate entity
within the endeavor.
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With respect to the cable and TV channels, is an example of Univision,
effectively dominated by Mexico's near-monopoly TV giant Televisa. Its
entertainment programs are mostly a secondary market for Televisa's products,
and while they are certainly popular, they have had little direct echo of
Chicano or other Latino women, or the case may be of the whole race, life in the
United States. Its news programs have been dominated by Cuban political
expatriates, whose fascination with the Castro regime and whose repeated evasive
action of Chicanos and Mexican issues have often lifted hackles within the
largest Latino group. At the same instance, as Rodr'guez (1996) has shown,
Univision's news program has cultivated for commercial reasons of mass appeal a
pan-ethnic Spanish that over time may disputably contribute to a pan-Latino U.S.
cultural identity, rather than the Chicano, Caribbean, Central and South
American remnants that establish the Latino minority. This whole discussion is
the apparent evidence of the fact that not only the other TV and cable programs
gave little room to the women but also the Latin based channels depicted the
women as mere part filling in major instances.
Apart from for a grasp of public figures led by Bill Cosby, CNN’s Bernard Shaw,
talk-show hosts Oprah Winfrey and Geraldo, and reasonably influential
behind-the-camera individuals such as Susan Fales, Charles Floyd Johnson, and
Suzanne de Passe, and local newscasters, the racial casting of television
organizations has been clearly leisurely in changing. Cable television has the
strongest proportion of minority women, but this should be read in association
with its lower pay scales and its minimal original production schedules.
Distinctively in positions of senior authority and main role, television is
still copiously a white enterprise.
In as much as the proportion of black and Latino viewers was higher than the
national average, and since between them they accounted in 1995 for at least
$300 billion consumer spending a year, the economic logic of advertising by the
mid-1990s appear to point in the direction of increasing inclusiveness in TV.
Yet, what remained to be acknowledges is the clash between economic logic and
inherited culture would work out. This has thus gained a little understating on
the part of casting more of the Latino women in programs and host for the
operas. Thus the viewer ship produced a sort of increased changes of augmenting
and highlighting the role that the Latino women played in the serials apart from
the cook and the typist and the nurse, to a more sophisticated role encompassing
the passionate relationships, but supremely the fiction of feelings.
The picture for Latino women in the TV and operas circuit is not very bright,
but it is in development. With a strong background and foundation, Latinos are
setting new standards not only for other Latinos in media context, but for
actors and directors around the globe. And the noteworthy fact is that the
Latin-American women are finding their voice not just as sex symbols,
firecrackers and hot tamales, but are seeing themselves and also being seen as
important contributors to the international art world.
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