New Media and U.S. Latinx identity (Ch. 3)

Copyright © 2020. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved. 3 New media and U.S. Latinx identity Technological and media convergence1 has provided new opportunities for the expression of identity online. People from different backgrounds can find a corner of the Internet where they can affirm their identities. Ethnic, racial, sexual, and other minority groups, previously socially isolated, can build community online and organize (Shirky, 2009). Technological and media convergence opens up space online for these groups, and also for the mobilization of political constituencies. Campaigns and other political groups can use digital tools to reach voters and tap into grassroots energy. These next two chapters focus on the most recent literature in the field of communication related to the interrelated topics of identity construction online and political mobilization. What is not clear in academic literature is the bridge between these two topics—specifically the role identity construction plays in online political mobilization, especially for U.S. Latinx populations. My survey of the recent research shows the gap in the work done in this area. A key theme I raised in Chapter 1 is the idea that computer-mediated communication, especially online social platforms, represents both a totalizing and disruptive force on Latinx identity formation. Online media can be used by actors to create large Latinx markets in politics or commerce. Online media can also be used as a disruptive force where other actors can question or challenge Latinx identity formation. I used the works of Latinx scholars used in Chapter 2 to synthesize and uncover the distinct facets of Latinx racial formation in the United States: the minimization of difference, denationalization, and racialization. Their work mostly focuses on the era of mass electronic communication. They show how the communication technologies of that time, including Spanish-language news, marketing and advertising, knowledge production in surveys and research, Census taking, and political organizing, played an important role in constructing U.S. Latinx identity. New technologies will undoubtedly produce new Soto-Vásquez, Arthur D.. Mobilizing the U. S. Latinx Vote : Media, Identity, and Politics, Taylor & Francis Group, 2020. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/tamiu-ebooks/detail.action?docID=6028737. Created from tamiu-ebooks on 2020-05-29 15:07:09. Copyright © 2020. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved. 36 New media and U.S. Latinx identity variations of racial identity, and the Latinx racial project will evolve as new communication technologies are adopted and utilized. It is much less clear how online platforms, with their contradictory tendencies toward reification and fragmentation, will shape Latinx identity formation. I attempt to bridge that gap in this chapter. I am not advancing a technologically deterministic argument here. The development and use of electronic media mid-century did not directly cause new iterations of Latinx identity to form and be reinforced. Social diffusion of technology posits a more complex interaction between people and tech. Actors, especially those with power, use new technologies to advance their agendas in new ways. This was clear in Dávila’s example of Cuban immigrants who decided to use their experience as marketers in Cuba to create a new market of Latinx consumers through television and magazine media (Dávila, 2012). For those interested in reifying Latinx racial identity in the United States, the tools of digital communication are powerful ones. Technologies are not neutral artifacts. Politics and ideology are always embedded into their design and use (Winner, 1980). Technologies are also used according to the ideology of political action associated with the times. As Dávila points out, television advertisements were an effective tool in the era of assimilation to create a distinct but still U.S. Latinx audience. The news media, as Mora (2014) and Rodriguez (1999) mention, was also an effective tool in both the assimilation era and the current one. The current era, whether it is a fragmented or newly reenergized protest era, also sees actors using social media to advance agendas. Social media is not massified like radio or television, where one person or group has the power to broadcast to many. Rather, the Internet is a network where information flows via strong and weak ties. The features of social media, especially algorithmic information segregation, sort communicative spaces where people are more likely to share political, ideological, and demographic similarities. This is precisely why it is unclear whether the current era will be one of fragmentation or renewed protest. Technologies are used to advance agendas; they are tools, after all. Rather than fetishize the communications platforms themselves, it’s important to focus on the politics embedded in them. There has recently been an increase of digital-first companies creating social media content for the U.S. Latinx millennial market (Aldama, 2013). Sharp video production and virility designed into the content are exemplified by videos like “7 songs at every Mexican party” or “12 reasons why Walter Mercado is the Beyoncé of Spanish TV.” This media feels novel and fresh for a generation of Latinxs who grew up watching telenovelas with their grandparents. People get excited over Soto-Vásquez, Arthur D.. Mobilizing the U. S. Latinx Vote : Media, Identity, and Politics, Taylor & Francis Group, 2020. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/tamiu-ebooks/detail.action?docID=6028737. Created from tamiu-ebooks on 2020-05-29 15:07:09. Copyright © 2020. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved. New media and U.S. Latinx identity 37 the prospect of representation in media. Yet, representational politics are usually limited as commercial products since they only articulate gaining a position in the current hierarchical power structure. These new developments in media from the 2010s onward will reshape the articulations of homogenization, denationalization, and racialization, but it is unlikely that there will be any overwhelming change in the balance of power or in any embedded systems of racial difference. Latinxs’ political agenda is limited in the United States if the population cannot imagine agendas beyond representational politics. The project of unity has influenced the desire to mobilize the Latinx vote in the 2010s. The effort to speak to a broad Latinx political audience and unite different national factions around Latinx issues was adopted by the legacy organizations discussed earlier. Voto Latino has taken a youth-oriented, digital-focused effort to mobilize the Latinx vote, and other organizations have since followed suit. This identification as youth-focused and digital-content-oriented has allowed Voto Latino and organizations like it to attract significant corporate partnerships and foundational funding. The vision of a united Latinx polity is being remapped via networked communities connected digitally. In the first section, I consider how new media possibilities, affordances, and strategies associated with the Internet converge with U.S. Latinx naming practices. I then follow up with the general navigating of online worlds by young Latinxs and then civic culture specifically. It might seem possible to liken the division between old and new media to the division between offline (or analog) and online (or digital) media. This division is not actually useful. The current media ecology is a hybrid system with interconnected parts of old and new media (Chadwick, 2013). Thus, in the literature I have selected to review in this chapter, it will be evident that the identity of U.S. Latinxs is formulated and contested in networks of traditional media production alongside audience feedback and new media content. Most of the works I review are focused on non-political activities, again reiterating our collective gap in knowledge. A key theme that emerges through the literature in this chapter is the transformation of identity as traditionally understood into identity as commodity. The process of commodification is when objects, goods, services, and even ideas are transformed into tradable objects in a market place. A prominent feature of late capitalism is the creeping commodification of all aspects of life, including identity. Through media consumption and production, identity can also be consumed. The following sections in this chapter show some research-based examples of this process. Soto-Vásquez, Arthur D.. Mobilizing the U. S. Latinx Vote : Media, Identity, and Politics, Taylor & Francis Group, 2020. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/tamiu-ebooks/detail.action?docID=6028737. Created from tamiu-ebooks on 2020-05-29 15:07:09. 38 New media and U.S. Latinx identity Copyright © 2020. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved. Naming in a networked society Those who follow Latinx politics in the United States may have noticed the rise of the identifying term Latinx, which is generally used as a replacement for the terms Latino and Latina in English-speaking communities of Latinxs in the United States. The -x in Latinx symbolically eliminates the gendered language conventions of the Spanish language —the -o in Latino meaning masculinity, and the -a in Latina meaning femininity. I default to using the term Latinx in this book. As the next section shows, even the act of naming a population ties in uneasy and contentious politics. According to Salinas and Lozano (2017), the term has found the most currency in higher educational institutions. The term Latinx was used online for the first time in 2004. Google Trends, as of 2019, indicates that the use of Latinx sharply rose in 2016 and has maintained common use since. In their article, Salinas and Lozano position Latinx as a term that is intersectional, meaning that it is inclusive of multiple identities. They claim that the term comes from indigenous populations in Mexico, which would be evidence of a flow of identity making coming from Latin America into the United States. This is noteworthy because scholars usually think of cultural flows emanating from the United States and imposing themselves onto the rest of the world. The rise of the term Latinx has also, somewhat predictably, provoked a reaction against it. New articulations of identity are inherently destabilizing to cultural and political hierarchies. Thus, new terminology inspires intense reactions to its destabilizing power. For example, some critics have argued that it does not linguistically make sense, and others don’t see a need to introduce another term naming Latinxs. While not a focus of this study, the term Latinx demonstrates the flexibility of Latinx identity. Its usage by specific ideological audiences, those with gender-neutral and leftist politics, further shows how political agendas are formed in networks, in this case academics and activists, and inserted via online interaction into the supposedly non-political practice of naming and categorizing people with heritage from Latin America in the United States. Rinderle and Montoya (2008) set out to determine if there were salient demographic and/or cultural factors that influenced Latinxs’ identification with one ethnic label. They found that the most salient, significant indicators of ethnic identification were class and language. Language might predict identification because language preference in this case probably approximates Americanization, or the extent to which a Latinx person feels closer to their U.S. or Latin American Soto-Vásquez, Arthur D.. Mobilizing the U. S. Latinx Vote : Media, Identity, and Politics, Taylor & Francis Group, 2020. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/tamiu-ebooks/detail.action?docID=6028737. Created from tamiu-ebooks on 2020-05-29 15:07:09. New media and U.S. Latinx identity 39 national identity. Those from higher classes also tend to identify with pan-ethnic terms. This might be because pan-ethnic labels were formed in elite, educated spaces. Higher-class Latinxs may also base their articulation of identity on their personal experiences in elite or cosmopolitan spaces. The nexus of U.S. Latinx identity and mass media production is well established in the literature. Arias and Hellmueller (2016) surveyed the scholarship produced since the 1970s about U.S. Latinxs and the news media. They found that before the 1970s, there was almost no research conducted on Latinxs in the United States. Following the civil rights era, there was a movement to establish Mexican American/Chicano studies departments in U.S. universities. The development of these programs led to an increase in research on Latinxs and the news media. Research since then has primarily discussed four issues: Copyright © 2020. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved. (1) contextual factors and statistics of the growth of the Hispanic population in the United States; (2) the birth of the term “Hispanic” in comparison to the term of “Latino” as a demographic label and selfethnic identity labeling; (3) the pivotal role of media in popularizing the term “Hispanic between 1975 and 1994, and then news media framing on Hispanics between 1994 to 2015; and (4) attitudes toward Hispanics primed by news media that impact local immigration policies. (Arias, Hellmueller, 2016) Each of these research strains has direct ties to the political discourse around Latinxs. The discussion of Latinxs as the “sleeping giant” arises out of the real notion that Latinxs are a growing sector of the population. The differences between the labels Hispanic and Latino are important distinctions since they evoke racial and class cleavages. The media also clearly plays a role in both the perception of Latinxs and in constructing, often via stereotyping, what a typical Latinx person is like. Finally, the rise of nativist anti-immigrant politics is partly associated with the presentation of Latinx immigrants as dangerous and law breaking. Most of the theoretical sources I utilized in the previous chapter address at least one of these research issues listed by Arias and Hellmueller. The challenge for scholars of Latinxs and media is to move beyond the old production logic, which focuses on how cultural hegemony is extended through media by producers and passively received by audiences. For example, the authors rightly conclude their article by advocating for an image-based content analysis approach in Soto-Vásquez, Arthur D.. Mobilizing the U. S. Latinx Vote : Media, Identity, and Politics, Taylor & Francis Group, 2020. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/tamiu-ebooks/detail.action?docID=6028737. Created from tamiu-ebooks on 2020-05-29 15:07:09. Copyright © 2020. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved. 40 New media and U.S. Latinx identity research rather than an analysis of text, which is a vestige of the old media system. New media properties, such as YouTube and Instagram, are often text-light, meaning that the most important information is conveyed images, not words. This presents a challenge for scholars to analyze the media produced on those platforms. There is some interesting research in this new media era. Chavez (2013) studied the Latinx television audience in a post-broadcast network era. His work focused on the development of mun2 (now rebranded as NBC Universo), a bilingual network targeting Latinx youth. Mun2 was a subsidiary of Comcast NBCUniversal and was like many of the national, regional, and local networks targeting Latinx audiences that emerged after the Telecommunications Act of 19962 (1027). Previously, the television marketplace for Spanish-language media was dominated by Univision and Telemundo. Mun2 was launched by NBCUniversal (NBCU) to capture what they saw as a new market of young Latinxs. When Comcast acquired NBCU, mun2 became a part of its parent company’s asset portfolio. This also enabled further corporate synergy, which delivered content and advertisers to the network, effectively subsidizing mun2—an advantage not available to its competitors. The main strategy around mun2 involved defining its audience as emblematic of the “new Latino.” According to industry lingo, the “new Latino” is someone who is bilingual in English and Spanish, young, and tech savvy. This was understood in opposition to other Latinx audiences who primarily watch Univision and Telemundo. Those audiences were categorized as Spanish dominant and less socially mobile or cosmopolitan. Perhaps in the mind of the marketers, while the parents were watching Sábado Gigante, a popular Saturday program on Univison, their kids wanted to watch Saturday Night Live on their smartphones Monday afternoon. There is a real generational difference at play here too; second and third generations of U.S. Latinxs tend to use more English. The marketing discourse of the “new Latino” was further institutionalized by Nielsen when they released their report entitled State of the Hispanic Consumer in 2012. Almost ten years after the launch of mun2, the idea of the new Latinx audience is enmeshed even further in media production. This will be even more evident in the most recent research on U.S. Latinxs and online media. The “New Latino” and online expression A common rite of passage for Latinas in the United States is the quinceañera, a symbolic passage from girlhood to womanhood traditionally celebrated on a young girl’s 15th birthday. While in Latin Soto-Vásquez, Arthur D.. Mobilizing the U. S. Latinx Vote : Media, Identity, and Politics, Taylor & Francis Group, 2020. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/tamiu-ebooks/detail.action?docID=6028737. Created from tamiu-ebooks on 2020-05-29 15:07:09. Copyright © 2020. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved. New media and U.S. Latinx identity 41 America the term refers to the person, in the United States it has come to mean the party or celebration of her birthday. This is reflective of the transformation of the quince from a folk practice in Latin America to a performative one in the United States (González-Martin, 2016). In the United States, a small cottage industry of quince planners (similar to wedding planners) has emerged online via personal blog pages. These blogueras don’t simply provide cultural knowledge and advice; they transform the quince into a performance where U.S. brands and products play a key role. For example, these online blogs often enter into sponsorship agreements with U.S. companies interested in multicultural marketing. According to González-Martin, the promotion of honey as the hot new food item for quinces is directly due to marketing by the National Honey Board indirectly promoted through the quince planners (57). The production of quince information online in the U.S. context also exemplifies two features of online culture: remixing and configurability. González-Martin states that websites often deliberately call out some aspects of quinces as “outdated.” They instead advocate for Latinas to make the celebration their own, in effect remixing the ritual with cultural capitalism. Latina youth thus navigate both tradition and U.S. consumerism via cultural expression, all with an eye on how the performance of the quince will be mediated via social media. It should be clear that Latinx youth use social media to navigate their daily lives in multiple ways. Researchers have recently begun to appreciate how the modes of interaction among youth of color, especially Latinx youth, differ from those of majority populations. A dominant discourse in new media literature in the 2000s was focused on the so-called “digital divide” between different demographics of people (Pearce, Rice, 2013). Evidence now suggests that the digital divide is not as prevalent as it was a decade ago, but digital inequality exists in other ways (Van Deursen, Van Dijk, 2013). Most people in the United States have access to the Internet. It just so happens that, for Latinx youth, this access often comes through a mobile device (Brown, López, Lopez, 2016). It is worthwhile in this case to understand the differentiating practices, habits, and pathways constituting a divide when using mobile phones as the main point of access. In terms of access, data from the Pew Hispanic Center indicate that the access divide is closing; Internet use among U.S. Latinxs increased by 14% between 2009 and 2012—from 64% to 78%. Increased mobile phone use, aided in part by more sophisticated feature innovation and affordable pricing, has played a pivotal role in closing the gap. Eighty-six percent of Latinxs report owning a cellphone, including 49% who report owning a smartphone. These levels are equivalent to—or Soto-Vásquez, Arthur D.. Mobilizing the U. S. Latinx Vote : Media, Identity, and Politics, Taylor & Francis Group, 2020. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/tamiu-ebooks/detail.action?docID=6028737. Created from tamiu-ebooks on 2020-05-29 15:07:09. Copyright © 2020. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved. 42 New media and U.S. Latinx identity higher in some cases—than other population groups. Among Latinxs, there remain some access divides, most of which are intuitive. Youth, higher income, and higher education levels positively correlate with access. For Latinxs who do not access the Internet, over two-thirds are foreign born. And even mobile phone access is not perfect. PCs and phones simply have different technological affordances. Imagine trying to write an essay for school on a mobile phone. In this case, we can say that the Internet access divide has closed but the affordances divide is still an issue. Besides being unable to do things like write an essay on a phone, having Internet access restricted to digitally enclosed applications like Facebook and Instagram represents a limited experience. Young Latinxs may be getting a simplified, corporate-driven version of the Internet—one quite different from its promise of technological liberation. And the identity formed in such an environment will not be the same as if it were formed in a theoretically neutral public sphere. Putting aside the access issue, there are other interesting trends and research into the unique pathways, practices, and skill sets being developed by Latinx youth. As outlined by the Digital Youth Project in Hanging Out, Messing Around, and Geeking Out (Mizuko, 2013), Latinx youth participate in digital culture just like other youth do according to danah boyd in her chapter on friendship (87–92). However, despite enjoying Internet access points through school and libraries, Latinx youth are challenged with uneven access. This presents issues when it comes to creative content production. Time constraints and access can interrupt artistic inspiration. Adult-led learning is also a barrier to creative production. In the same book from Mizuko, Tripp and Herr-Stephenson investigate how Latinx youth navigate limited or uneven access points to create content. Their ethnographic study focuses on Latinx youth who participate in a media production project through their schooling. While differentiating between adult-driven creative production and “fun, for themselves” creative production, these youth developed access strategies that involved smart use of school resources, the deployment of social capital to access friends’ technologies, and the creative repurposing of other technology. Access at a superficial level seems consistent among Latinxs and other more privileged groups. However, access points are either highly policed by adults (at school, in the home) or technologically limited (older tech, lack of Internet connection), which presents important considerations around the question of digital divides. Katz (2014) has theorized how Latinx youth serve as social brokers between their familial life and the community at large. Katz Soto-Vásquez, Arthur D.. Mobilizing the U. S. Latinx Vote : Media, Identity, and Politics, Taylor & Francis Group, 2020. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/tamiu-ebooks/detail.action?docID=6028737. Created from tamiu-ebooks on 2020-05-29 15:07:09. Copyright © 2020. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved. New media and U.S. Latinx identity 43 observes how children of immigrant families activate their unique socio-linguistic positioning in society to navigate mainstream society for their Spanish-dominant older relatives. In turn, they generate for themselves a unique skill set of intercultural communication. Particularly in this study, Katz investigated how youth brokered the health, financial, and administrative needs of their families by accessing community resources. For example, bilingual children were often relied upon to broker phone conversations when the caller did not speak Spanish. Katz reported that these calls were primarily translation brokerages. They were fairly common and usually adequately brokered. Issues arose when children were asked to broker printed media, as this often required high developmental barriers and competency in both languages. Brokering immigration forms, medical forms, and other documents laden with technical language often proved an anxietyinducing cognitive load for Latinx youth. Katz concludes by suggesting that social brokering has negative effects on both maturation and educational pathways for Latinx youth, but potential positive effects on media literacy and intercultural dialogue. Yosso (2005) also discusses how people on the margins have alternative sources of capital not traditionally recognized by dominant cultural institutions. She discusses how students of color bring different knowledges and means of navigating institutions from their backgrounds. She terms navigational capital as the ability to move through institutions like higher education with agency despite pervasive challenges. In a similar vein, Marchi (2016) investigated Latinx youth who read, analyze, and translate the news for their immigrant parents. She argued that their role as social brokers who interpret the news for their parents both flips the notion of the digital divide generationally and represents citizenship training. News interpretation among Latinx youth is a flipping of generational interaction: while in mainstream families the parents might educate their children about democracy and the news, in Latinx families it is the opposite. Latinx youth work as democratic chaperones to their elders living in a foreign land. For Marchi, this also doubles as their introduction to American democracy. Navigating U.S. politics as a Latinx What happens once networked Latinxs participate in U.S. politics? In other words, how do Latinxs in the United States navigate online spaces that intersect with established media and political institutions? Some recent research provides interesting findings. Political scientist Stokes-Brown (2018) provided a helpful breakdown of the role Latinxs Soto-Vásquez, Arthur D.. Mobilizing the U. S. Latinx Vote : Media, Identity, and Politics, Taylor & Francis Group, 2020. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/tamiu-ebooks/detail.action?docID=6028737. Created from tamiu-ebooks on 2020-05-29 15:07:09. Copyright © 2020. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved. 44 New media and U.S. Latinx identity played in the 2016 election. It should be noted that 1.5 million more Latinxs voted in the 2016 election than in the 2012 election. However, this large increase is mostly due to population growth and the maturation of a young population. The turnout rate of Latinxs dropped from 48% in 2012 to 47.6% in 2016. Leading up to the election, Latinx pundits observed that the Clinton campaign was doing little to mobilize Latinx voters. The pundits pointed to a poll showing that most Latinx voters did not think Trump was serious about his immigration policies. A sustained, Spanish-media effort from the Clinton campaign could have sharpened that issue, the pundits argued (Phillip, O’Keefe, 2016). So, what did the Latinx vote do in 2016? It broke overwhelmingly for Hillary Clinton and the Democratic Party. However, this wasn’t much of a surprise. What was surprising was that the rise of a nativist, heavily racialized candidate like Donald Trump did not drive more Latinxs to the polls or turn away the minority of Latinxs who vote Republican. In addition, Latinxs could not be relied upon by the Democratic Party as an electoral “firewall” against the GOP in places like Arizona and Florida. Stokes-Brown also provides evidence that in the 2016 election, Latinxs did not demonstrate the “group consciousness” political actors expected of them. She notes that the rhetoric against Mexicans by Donald Trump was not mobilizing for other nationalities of Latinxs. This is perhaps due to Trump singling out Mexicans first in his rhetoric. The Clinton campaign, according to Stokes-Brown, also made an error in 2016 by not selecting a Latinx vice presidential nominee. Stokes-Brown cites evidence that an ethnic candidate can be a mobilizing force for Latinxs. The 2016 election is notable regarding not just how Latinxs voted but how Latinxs were talked about. Cisneros (2017) argues that the discourses around Latinxs during elections, particularly presidential elections, shape the broader political consciousness of Latinxs. In the 2016 election, Cisneros identified two dominant narratives around Latinxs. The first is the notion of the Latinx vote—or as it has been called by other scholars, the “sleeping giant” narrative. The second narrative is casting Latinxs as criminals, rapists, and socially deficient and in need of public assistance. Chavez (2013) has called this phenomenon the Latino threat narrative. Interestingly, Cisneros sees the rhetoric around wooing the Latinx vote, typically used when discussing Republican candidates, as symbolic. He states that the gendered and sexualized nature of this metaphor of ‘wooing’ is important because part of what this narrative does is feminize this Soto-Vásquez, Arthur D.. Mobilizing the U. S. Latinx Vote : Media, Identity, and Politics, Taylor & Francis Group, 2020. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/tamiu-ebooks/detail.action?docID=6028737. Created from tamiu-ebooks on 2020-05-29 15:07:09. New media and U.S. Latinx identity 45 Copyright © 2020. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved. ‘Latino vote’ as already constituted and ready to be attracted by the right mix of appeals or the right (male) politician. (516) Latinxs in this frame are feminized by Democrats. Their feminization goes hand in hand with the passivity inherent in the sleeping giant narrative. By this logic, all it would take would be the right candidate to attract Latinx voters. The threat narrative, however, does the opposite. The two narratives end up being two sides of the same coin. Latinxs are either a (masculine) threat that needs to be addressed violently or a fetishized (feminine) passive force that needs to be seduced. Both narratives share the same logic and “present Latinos as a singular and homogenous community, defined by common and essential demographic, linguistic, cultural, and ideological factors” (517). Both of these narratives were very common in the 2016 presidential campaign. Anguiano (2016) identified a similar pattern in how Latinxs were presented as either a voting bloc to be wooed or a problematic community. She particularly takes issue with how the Democratic Party developed its outreach plan to Latinx voters. This famously included the Clinton campaign’s release of a communication detailing “7 Ways Hillary Is Like Your Abuela.” According to Anguiano, this is a perfect example of what has been termed “Hispandering.” Hispandering usually refers to the superficial presentation of Latinx cultural signifiers (food, dress, etc.) as a discourse directed at Latinxs. Within the Latinx community online, there was a significant debate among those who tweeted #notmyabuela and those defending Clinton, including prominent figures like civil rights icon Dolores Huerta. Hostile language directed toward Latinxs gets the most academic and popular coverage. Hispandering, however, gets much less. The reaction against the Clinton campaign for their Hispandering also exemplifies how online networks can bring new voices to political debates. Further, the use of cultural signifiers into political marketing further exemplifies the transformation of identity into commodity. Differences in online communication are also present in the interactions of members of Congress who are Latina and their constituents. Gershon (2008) studied the official website communications of female, African American, and Latinx members of Congress. While Congress is still overwhelmingly white and male, there has been a recent increase in diverse representation. For example, during the 2018 primary elections in Texas, voters elected two Latina candidates who ended up winning in the general elections. Gershon found that non-white and Soto-Vásquez, Arthur D.. Mobilizing the U. S. Latinx Vote : Media, Identity, and Politics, Taylor & Francis Group, 2020. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/tamiu-ebooks/detail.action?docID=6028737. Created from tamiu-ebooks on 2020-05-29 15:07:09. Copyright © 2020. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved. 46 New media and U.S. Latinx identity female members of Congress added a race and gender perspective to general policy issues. In effect, these members of Congress translated “neutral” policies into ones that had racialized or gendered implications. White or male members of Congress did not do this kind of contextualization. Organizations that represent Latinxs in national policymaking also engage in a similar mode of communication. Smith and Abreu (2018) reviewed the memorandum of understanding (MOU) established between the Hispanic Leadership Organization and Comcast in relation to their proposed merger with NBCUniversal. The FCC used the language found in MOUs like this one Comcast negotiated to justify approving the merger. The MOU established that Comcast would increase content made for Latinxs, opportunities for Latinxs to create content, and leadership positions for Latinxs within the new corporate entity. In this case, advocacy groups were representing the interests of Latinxs. The advocacy groups argued for more representation in the conglomerated media landscape on behalf of Latinxs and in doing so, they adopted the neo-liberal language of increased consumer choice. Smith and Abreu argue that the MOU was not honored and no significant changes around media representation of Latinxs occurred. The MOU also relied upon the common racialization of Latinxs discussed in Chapter 2. The authors state, “The categorization of Latina/o-owned and Latina/o-oriented media treats it merely as a form of capital in achieving diversity standards required by the FCC—or put more simply, ‘a box to be checked’” (14). The Hispanic Leadership Organization (consciously or not) entered into an agreement with Comcast that further entrenched the racialized commodification of Latinxs in the United States. In addition, the racialization in the MOU enabled further consolidation of the media landscape under the guise of increasing diversity. The research summarized in the previous sections considers how Latinxs in the United States navigate online spaces that intersect with established media and political institutions. Within these networks, Latinx identity is contested, reframed, updated, and commodified. It is not the case that identity homogenization is a simple, unidirectional process where elite actors and institutions shape Latinxs into perfect consumers of U.S. politics and ideology. Instead, Latinx subjects simultaneously receive essentialized narratives about themselves and selectively perform aspects in advantageous moments. Online, hybrid media networks enable the use of culture capital for Latinxs in ways not previously possible. These moments of performance vary by class and institutional circumstances, such as middle-class Latinas preforming quince culture online or Latinas in Congress giving intersectional Soto-Vásquez, Arthur D.. Mobilizing the U. S. Latinx Vote : Media, Identity, and Politics, Taylor & Francis Group, 2020. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/tamiu-ebooks/detail.action?docID=6028737. Created from tamiu-ebooks on 2020-05-29 15:07:09. New media and U.S. Latinx identity 47 context to policy issues. In summary, these works point to a postmodern system of racial performance. In this system, we preform our identity as Latinxs through media consumption and personalized new media. Culture then becomes a form of immaterial capital, or as I have said before—a commodity. Notes 1 Defined as the merging of various previous separated technologies, industries, and media onto one platform. Consumer electronics, telecommunications, information technology, and media industries all were founded separately. Through corporate mergers (such as AT&T and Time Warner) and the Internet, media and technology have converged onto mobile phones and computers. 2 The Telecommunications Act of 1996 deregulated media ownership. After its passage, companies were allowed to own multiple stations and media properties in one market. This led to a rush of conglomeration and the seeking of new media markets, such as bilingual Latinx media. Copyright © 2020. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved. References Aldama, F. L. (2013). Multimediated Latinos in the twenty-first century: An introduction. In F. L. Aldama (Ed.), Latinos and narrative media: Participation and portrayal (pp. 1–31). New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan. Anguiano, C. A. (2016). Hostility and Hispandering in 2016: The demographic and discursive power of Latinx voters. Women’s Studies in Communication, 39(4), 366–369. doi:10.1080/07491409.2016.1228385 Arias, S., & Hellmueller, L. (2016). Hispanics-and-Latinos and the U.S. media: New issues for future research. Communication Research Trends, 35(2), 4–21. Brown, A., López, G., & Lopez, M. (2016, July 20). Hispanics and mobile access to the Internet. Retrieved November 02, 2018, from http://www.pewhispanic. org/2016/07/20/3-hispanics-and-mobile-access-to-the-internet/ Chadwick, A. (2013). The hybrid media system: Politics and power. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Chavez, C. A. (2013). 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