Deploying Latinidad: Citizenship, Activism, and Media Advocacy from the 1980s to the Present

Abstract

This dissertation offers a genealogy of Latino media activism and advocacy by examining the efforts of major media advocacy organizations and Twitter users beginning in the 1980s to the 2000s. It specifically centers on the media advocacy and activist efforts of five major organizations: the Committee Against Fort Apache, the National Hispanic Media Coalition, the League of United Latin American Citizens, Latino Public Broadcasting, and the National Association of Latino Independent Producers. In addition, the dissertation examines post 2010s media activism facilitated by new media technologies. It seeks to answer the following research questions: How have contemporary media activists and advocacy organizations pressed for increased employment of Latinos in English-language media from the 1980s to 2019? How have they contested stereotypical depictions of their community on screen and the airwaves? How have processes of media deregulation and neo-liberalization altered media advocacy and activism? And how have new technologies and social media impacted contemporary Latino media activism?

The dissertation relies on extensive archival research of the above-mentioned organizations, in-depth interviews with the founders and staff of these organizations and Latino media makers, textual analysis, readings of broadcasting policy and court documents, and discourse analysis of newspapers and Tweets. The main argument guiding this research is that Hispanic (1980s), Latino/a (1990s), and Latinx (2010s) media activism under neoliberalism is a venue in which Latinidad and citizenship are constructed, deployed, and contested. Through negotiations with and challenges to the industry, media activist organization rely on the Hispanic/Latino/Latinx citizen consumer to challenge the power of media empires in the fight for ethnoracial diversification. Consequently, this project traces the transformation of the militant Latino citizen to the respectable, civil rights citizen in the 1980s; the deployment of the Latino citizen consumer in the 1990s; the battle for Latino citizenship in public broadcasting in the late 1990s and early 2000s; and the shaping of the Latinx digital citizen consumer in the 2010s.

At stake in these discussions are the ways in which media activists have weaponized Latinidad as a discursive device for leverage in their fight for inclusion in the media industries. Thus, the notion of “deploying Latinidad” suggests a tactical, war-like position that media activists have had to adopt to attempt to alter their systemic exclusion in the media industries. Accounting for these varied histories of ethnoracial media activism is essential for our understanding of how well-equipped contemporary media activists may be to challenge the representational disparity that continues to exist for communities of color.