Feb 08 2010
Latinos, Inc.
Arlene Dávila’s Latinos, Inc. studies the American conserumer’s market and how it establishes an image of those of Hispanic heritage. Even the very word Hispanic was developed by the government, as show in the presenters’ video, and packs everyone of the countries below Texas as the same. It has been criticized for its “elitist evocations of Spain”. Then to add onto this, marketing agencies have made those of Hispanic descent as figures to be “the whiter the better”, the more American they look, the more potential they have to be marketed. And about the “salsa outselling ketchup” idea, I think that it is somewhat disturbing that a figure such as food consumption is one of the reasons to convince America to pay attention to a group of people. New Englanders added tomatoes to an Indonesian and Asian sauce and called it ketchup for Pete’s sake. But I digress.
Advertising agencies can try to break the stereotypes and misconceptions, but it still comes down to what the client wants. As states, “These clients have the ultimate word and can approve the execution of an ad for this market, even when they may have little familiarity with their target audience.” The image of an “ignorant surburban gringo”, Dávila says, is what prevails in these clients, but is dismissed because of his/her personal lack of sophistication and manners. These attitudes must not be dismissed. Where are these images coming from? Advertising perhaps? If not, advertising is not helping.
There is also the problem of political correctness. Dávila recounts a story where a client is concerned about an ad for yogurt where a man tells his son that “back in his country fruit was plentiful and mangos were just taken from a neighbor’s yard.” The client was worried that this would offend Latinos because it would depict them as thieves. The client had not idea that this behavior was normal. The client was making an ad for a group of people he was afraid to offend yet knew nothing about. By being politically correct, the man was not willing to find out about this culture and he unknowingly acknowledged the existence of a stereotype.
The presenters’ for this week’s reading brought in pictures of magazine covers and various advertisements depicting famous Latino people. One ad depicted Penelope Cruz, who I found out to actually be Spanish. She was in a L’Oreal ad, for natural, “deeply conditioning” makeup. This ad reminded me of Dávila’s words: “…the construct of the fashion-conscious, sexy, and made-up but moral Latina promoted by Hispanic marketers is ultimately still predicated on the same type of concerns, namely, on the threatening sexuality that pervades both Anglo and Latino prototypes of Latinas and is always in need of some sort of accommodation.” Dávila states that there is a conception that Latina women overdress and have a great interest in colorful cosmetics. I wish I could’ve seen this ad in color. Another magazine cover depicted NCIS’ Cote de Pablo. The problem I had with this ad was after I found out she plays an Israeli in NCIS. In the show she plays the “naïve to anything American” immigrant. I found this ad to tie into the old idea that Latinos could play Native Americans and Middle Easterners, because in America, Hollywood and the rest of America couldn’t tell the difference. The ladies on the covers of magazines and ads are all women approved by non-Latino audiences, and I doubt any of these magazines would put a foreign actress, say, an actress famous in the Dominican Republic, on their cover. That actress in unknown to the rest of America, thus Latinos in the United States will never see her face. In order for Latino girls to have role models, those role models must be American enough, which is very troubling.