Latinos, Inc.: The Marketing and Making of a People

Rating:
Summary: Latinos Inc. review
Review: Americans buy more salsa than ketchup. This factoid illustrates well the fact that Latino culture and its products are becoming increasingly popular in today's American consumer sphere. In her book, Latinos Inc., The Making and Marketing of a People, Arlene Davila examines the processes and dynamics behind the marketing of Latino products and culture, and how the marketing practices associated with Latino culture are affecting the Latino population of America.

Davila frames the academic context into which this book fits. While there is a glut of marketing and advertising studies in general, ones pertaining specifically to Hispanics are noticeably lacking. She pompously generalizes the ones that do exist as "uncritical," stating that one after another they either assert Latino's "coming of age" or commodification in American society. It is in this framework that she fixes her more critical eye on the Latino marketing industry.

Davila does an excellent job of articulating the plight of Latino and other minority consumers. She details how advertising has marginalized Latinos and other minorities by relegating them to the status of "the other." This builds and reinforces racial hierarchies that serve to keep Latinos lock in an inferior status. While contemplating these divisions, Davila wonders aloud "whether the United States will ever truly be one nation." She emphasizes the oxymoron of a segmented and divided United States with her mantra of Latinos as a "nation within a nation."

Davila highlights the contradiction between the interests of advertisers and consumers in advertising. For advertisers, advertisements are a vehicle to make money. For consumers, they are a vehicle to represent themselves and have their voice heard by a larger audience. These interests often come into conflict with one another as prudent advertising sometimes calls for the misrepresentation or overgeneralization of Latino communities while prudent representation requires accuracy and destruction, not the building and reinforcement, of racial and ethnic stereotypes. Almost without fail, the interests of the advertising agencies win out, as they are the creators of the advertisements themselves.

Davila indeed has a sharply honed eye for criticism. In Latinos Inc. she is very adept at pointing out the wrongs of situations. By the end of the book, Davila has built a long list of these wrongs. However, she offers precious little in the way of solutions. For instance, in her lamentations about our divided nation, she points out what hasn't worked as a force uniting Latinos with the rest of the population (citizenship or consumership), but doesn't speculate about what could work to unit the entire population. Another example is her adamant denunciation of both advertiser's generalization and segmentation of the Latino population. She derides both of these advertising techniques and destructive and counter-productive for Latinos, yet offers nothing as an alternative to these approaches. She leaves the reader wondering if there is a happy median between generalization and segmentation on the representation spectrum, or of if the entire is invalid and an entirely different advertising paradigm is necessary. She sees bad advertising, but what is good advertising?

Davila's examination of the Latino marketing industry is Latino-specific, to be sure, but at times it could just as easily pertain to the advertising industry in general. As such, at these instances the book struggles to distinguish itself from the rest of the glut of advertising studies. For instance, she tries to that the Hispanic marketing industry is "uniquely revealing" because Hispanic advertising's need to "empathize, charm, appeal, or shock a potential consumer in thirty or sixty seconds entail a great deal of simplification and typification...bring to the surface the tropes, images, and discourses that have become widespread and generalized representations of Hispanidad." It seems that this observation can apply to any of the hundreds of generalized groups represented in advertising.

While Davila convincingly argues that the New York's Latino high diversity makes the city an appropriate focus of her study, readers may be left wondering if her study would not have been better served with a wider geographical focus. It is possible that Davila arrived at some erroneous conclusions based on this limited focus. She speaks of the political disenfranchisement of the Latino community, but in fact there are some unacknowledged segments of the Latino population outside of New York that wield considerable political influence. For instance, in 1998 in Texas, 20% of its U.S. House representatives and 19% of the representatives to its state house and are Latino (Marin, 1999 and State of Texas, 2001). George Bush enlisted the help of the Latino advertising agency Sosa, Bromley, Aguilar, & Associates to propel him to a landslide 1998 Texas gubernatorial and subsequent 2000 U.S. presidential victories (the agency helped Bush garner 49% of the Latino vote in Florida) (ABC News.com, 2001 and Hart, 2000). For comparison, Bush won 18% if the Latino vote in New York (ABC News.com, 2001). The Latino political climate of New York is not indicative of that elsewhere in the entire U.S. Nonetheless, Davilia relies heavily on examples from New York Lation political scene to back up her arguments. At the least, the counter evidence calls these arguments into question.

To Davila's credit, she successfully accomplishes her stated goal of examining the nuanced dynamics behind the Latino marketing industry. While informative and painstakingly researched, the book is neither entertaining nor exceptionally useful. Aside from the chapter on consumer focus group discussions, she doesn't do a good job of relating the very consumer-oriented subject, the dynamics and processes behind advertising practices, to the consumers themselves. This failed link leaves the book with very little relevance to anyone outside of the advertising industry.

Rating:
Summary: Latinos Inc. review
Review: Americans buy more salsa than ketchup. This factoid illustrates well the fact that Latino culture and its products are becoming increasingly popular in today's American consumer sphere. In her book, Latinos Inc., The Making and Marketing of a People, Arlene Davila examines the processes and dynamics behind the marketing of Latino products and culture, and how the marketing practices associated with Latino culture are affecting the Latino population of America.

Davila frames the academic context into which this book fits. While there is a glut of marketing and advertising studies in general, ones pertaining specifically to Hispanics are noticeably lacking. She pompously generalizes the ones that do exist as "uncritical," stating that one after another they either assert Latino's "coming of age" or commodification in American society. It is in this framework that she fixes her more critical eye on the Latino marketing industry.

Davila does an excellent job of articulating the plight of Latino and other minority consumers. She details how advertising has marginalized Latinos and other minorities by relegating them to the status of "the other." This builds and reinforces racial hierarchies that serve to keep Latinos lock in an inferior status. While contemplating these divisions, Davila wonders aloud "whether the United States will ever truly be one nation." She emphasizes the oxymoron of a segmented and divided United States with her mantra of Latinos as a "nation within a nation."

Davila highlights the contradiction between the interests of advertisers and consumers in advertising. For advertisers, advertisements are a vehicle to make money. For consumers, they are a vehicle to represent themselves and have their voice heard by a larger audience. These interests often come into conflict with one another as prudent advertising sometimes calls for the misrepresentation or overgeneralization of Latino communities while prudent representation requires accuracy and destruction, not the building and reinforcement, of racial and ethnic stereotypes. Almost without fail, the interests of the advertising agencies win out, as they are the creators of the advertisements themselves.

Davila indeed has a sharply honed eye for criticism. In Latinos Inc. she is very adept at pointing out the wrongs of situations. By the end of the book, Davila has built a long list of these wrongs. However, she offers precious little in the way of solutions. For instance, in her lamentations about our divided nation, she points out what hasn't worked as a force uniting Latinos with the rest of the population (citizenship or consumership), but doesn't speculate about what could work to unit the entire population. Another example is her adamant denunciation of both advertiser's generalization and segmentation of the Latino population. She derides both of these advertising techniques and destructive and counter-productive for Latinos, yet offers nothing as an alternative to these approaches. She leaves the reader wondering if there is a happy median between generalization and segmentation on the representation spectrum, or of if the entire is invalid and an entirely different advertising paradigm is necessary. She sees bad advertising, but what is good advertising?

Davila's examination of the Latino marketing industry is Latino-specific, to be sure, but at times it could just as easily pertain to the advertising industry in general. As such, at these instances the book struggles to distinguish itself from the rest of the glut of advertising studies. For instance, she tries to that the Hispanic marketing industry is "uniquely revealing" because Hispanic advertising's need to "empathize, charm, appeal, or shock a potential consumer in thirty or sixty seconds entail a great deal of simplification and typification...bring to the surface the tropes, images, and discourses that have become widespread and generalized representations of Hispanidad." It seems that this observation can apply to any of the hundreds of generalized groups represented in advertising.

While Davila convincingly argues that the New York's Latino high diversity makes the city an appropriate focus of her study, readers may be left wondering if her study would not have been better served with a wider geographical focus. It is possible that Davila arrived at some erroneous conclusions based on this limited focus. She speaks of the political disenfranchisement of the Latino community, but in fact there are some unacknowledged segments of the Latino population outside of New York that wield considerable political influence. For instance, in 1998 in Texas, 20% of its U.S. House representatives and 19% of the representatives to its state house and are Latino (Marin, 1999 and State of Texas, 2001). George Bush enlisted the help of the Latino advertising agency Sosa, Bromley, Aguilar, & Associates to propel him to a landslide 1998 Texas gubernatorial and subsequent 2000 U.S. presidential victories (the agency helped Bush garner 49% of the Latino vote in Florida) (ABC News.com, 2001 and Hart, 2000). For comparison, Bush won 18% if the Latino vote in New York (ABC News.com, 2001). The Latino political climate of New York is not indicative of that elsewhere in the entire U.S. Nonetheless, Davilia relies heavily on examples from New York Lation political scene to back up her arguments. At the least, the counter evidence calls these arguments into question.

To Davila's credit, she successfully accomplishes her stated goal of examining the nuanced dynamics behind the Latino marketing industry. While informative and painstakingly researched, the book is neither entertaining nor exceptionally useful. Aside from the chapter on consumer focus group discussions, she doesn't do a good job of relating the very consumer-oriented subject, the dynamics and processes behind advertising practices, to the consumers themselves. This failed link leaves the book with very little relevance to anyone outside of the advertising industry.

Rating:
Summary: The best new work in media studies is from an anthropologist
Review: Why are Latinos at the center of a pop-culture phenomenon in the United States? Arlene Davila argues it is not do to their rapid population growth, but the growth of their media image thanks to aggressive marketing and commercial advertising. Her second book to explore the commodification of Hispanic cultures, Latinos Inc.: The Marketing and Making of a People, is a detailed analysis of the abundant images targeting Latino populations in the U.S., the worldviews of the executives who manufacture those images, and the clients who buy them. Davila seeks to explore the mechanics by which a population, situated in the midst of economic globalization, becomes a market.

Davila conducts her fieldwork in several New York City ad agencies managed by Latinos and whose principal interest is to target Latinos. Her technique includes interviews with executives and creatives, and participant observation at national marketing conventions. There is also some use of focus groups to examine the folk perceptions of these propagated images among individuals of different Hispanic nationalities.

The author questions in whose interest these commercials are being made, for ultimately they serve the ad client and not Latinidad. She concludes "the commercial representation of U.S. Latinos has sustained particular hierarchies of representation that are indicative of wider dynamics affecting contemporary Latino cultural politics" (p.20). Her work is sweeping in its scope, hence my review is limited to the construction of "Latino" and "Hispanic" as representative identities and linking it to the critiques she aims at the executives and creatives of the ad agencies. This not a book where audience response plays a large role, rather it is one that gives extensive coverage to the ad agencies themselves, and the knowledges they use to construct mass produced images.

The categories of "Hispanic" and "Latino" are invented and by definition presuppose some intrinsic difference, relative to Anglos. This intrinsic difference is what makes ethnic-specific marketing plausible and it is how ad agencies pitch their services to clients. Thus, the notion of a pan-Latino identity-that individuals from all Spanish speaking countries have a shared culture-originated in the United States from the Cuban intellectuals who so dominate the Latino advertising industry. Further complicating the matter, the category of "Latino" is constantly in flux, as is illustrated by a current trend towards ads that opt for whiter versions of Latinidad, reconfiguring Latino traditions within the borders of the American middle-class.

Davila shows there is a propensity for ads and TV programming to use unaccented, "good" Spanish, and never that increasingly common mixture of English vocabulary and Spanish language-Spanglish. Such observations form the cornerstone of Davila's critique: ad agency executives or creatives who claim to have made some sort of liberating political accomplishment are immediately compromised due to the manufactured nature of the category which supposedly indexes the population they are trying to represent.

While on the one hand, the book does speak to scholars of the broad genre of interdisciplinary studies, it is definitely aimed at Latino advertising executives and marketing insiders as well. In this text several biting critiques leveled at the preconceptions of the advertisers and their clients are present, and here I will address three of the most prominent. The first is that the growing influence of Hispanic music and food on American popular culture represents a "coming of age" (p.3) for Latino populations. Davila indicates that this equates economic empowerment with political enfranchisement without the transference of any actual power, only the illusion of the potential for that power.

Second is the belief that through marketing and advertising it is possible to right old wrongs by correcting the stereotypes of the past (e.g. the Frito Bandito). In fact, Davila argues, the stereotypes are either repackaged in a slightly permutated form or simply replaced with new kinds of stereotypes, rather than removed all together. They may be no longer dirty, lazy thieves, but are instead emotional, religious, and familial. This sort of lose-lose scenario is especially grim considering the effects it has on U.S. born Latinos, who are typically much more likely to absorb and internalize commercialized identities than are recent immigrants, thereby making themselves more responsive to future exposure to the same forms.

Third, she notes the overall failure of the advertising world relative to the truly great potential it has as a political tool, especially considering the many agency executives and creatives she met sympathetic to her agenda. For all their self-affirmations, they have not actually effected any positive changes and meanwhile, real minority access to media outlets is falling precipitously.

Latinos Inc. succeeds in broadening the discourse on race in the U.S. as well as interjecting anthropological methodology into a realm dominated by interdisciplinary scholars. This work illustrates the great promise and possibilities of media studies, a genre by no means lacking in interesting and prolific output, but one which is sorely in need of a coherent methodology that goes beyond simply reading the "texts" of popular culture. I am thinking here of figures such as Neil Postman, Michael Parenti, and John Fiske, all of whom are fascinating in their own right and with important things to say, yet their works do not have the rigor of Davila's

Rating:
Summary: The best new work in media studies is from an anthropologist
Review: Why are Latinos at the center of a pop-culture phenomenon in the United States? Arlene Davila argues it is not do to their rapid population growth, but the growth of their media image thanks to aggressive marketing and commercial advertising. Her second book to explore the commodification of Hispanic cultures, Latinos Inc.: The Marketing and Making of a People, is a detailed analysis of the abundant images targeting Latino populations in the U.S., the worldviews of the executives who manufacture those images, and the clients who buy them. Davila seeks to explore the mechanics by which a population, situated in the midst of economic globalization, becomes a market.

Davila conducts her fieldwork in several New York City ad agencies managed by Latinos and whose principal interest is to target Latinos. Her technique includes interviews with executives and creatives, and participant observation at national marketing conventions. There is also some use of focus groups to examine the folk perceptions of these propagated images among individuals of different Hispanic nationalities.

The author questions in whose interest these commercials are being made, for ultimately they serve the ad client and not Latinidad. She concludes "the commercial representation of U.S. Latinos has sustained particular hierarchies of representation that are indicative of wider dynamics affecting contemporary Latino cultural politics" (p.20). Her work is sweeping in its scope, hence my review is limited to the construction of "Latino" and "Hispanic" as representative identities and linking it to the critiques she aims at the executives and creatives of the ad agencies. This not a book where audience response plays a large role, rather it is one that gives extensive coverage to the ad agencies themselves, and the knowledges they use to construct mass produced images.

The categories of "Hispanic" and "Latino" are invented and by definition presuppose some intrinsic difference, relative to Anglos. This intrinsic difference is what makes ethnic-specific marketing plausible and it is how ad agencies pitch their services to clients. Thus, the notion of a pan-Latino identity-that individuals from all Spanish speaking countries have a shared culture-originated in the United States from the Cuban intellectuals who so dominate the Latino advertising industry. Further complicating the matter, the category of "Latino" is constantly in flux, as is illustrated by a current trend towards ads that opt for whiter versions of Latinidad, reconfiguring Latino traditions within the borders of the American middle-class.

Davila shows there is a propensity for ads and TV programming to use unaccented, "good" Spanish, and never that increasingly common mixture of English vocabulary and Spanish language-Spanglish. Such observations form the cornerstone of Davila's critique: ad agency executives or creatives who claim to have made some sort of liberating political accomplishment are immediately compromised due to the manufactured nature of the category which supposedly indexes the population they are trying to represent.

While on the one hand, the book does speak to scholars of the broad genre of interdisciplinary studies, it is definitely aimed at Latino advertising executives and marketing insiders as well. In this text several biting critiques leveled at the preconceptions of the advertisers and their clients are present, and here I will address three of the most prominent. The first is that the growing influence of Hispanic music and food on American popular culture represents a "coming of age" (p.3) for Latino populations. Davila indicates that this equates economic empowerment with political enfranchisement without the transference of any actual power, only the illusion of the potential for that power.

Second is the belief that through marketing and advertising it is possible to right old wrongs by correcting the stereotypes of the past (e.g. the Frito Bandito). In fact, Davila argues, the stereotypes are either repackaged in a slightly permutated form or simply replaced with new kinds of stereotypes, rather than removed all together. They may be no longer dirty, lazy thieves, but are instead emotional, religious, and familial. This sort of lose-lose scenario is especially grim considering the effects it has on U.S. born Latinos, who are typically much more likely to absorb and internalize commercialized identities than are recent immigrants, thereby making themselves more responsive to future exposure to the same forms.

Third, she notes the overall failure of the advertising world relative to the truly great potential it has as a political tool, especially considering the many agency executives and creatives she met sympathetic to her agenda. For all their self-affirmations, they have not actually effected any positive changes and meanwhile, real minority access to media outlets is falling precipitously.

Latinos Inc. succeeds in broadening the discourse on race in the U.S. as well as interjecting anthropological methodology into a realm dominated by interdisciplinary scholars. This work illustrates the great promise and possibilities of media studies, a genre by no means lacking in interesting and prolific output, but one which is sorely in need of a coherent methodology that goes beyond simply reading the "texts" of popular culture. I am thinking here of figures such as Neil Postman, Michael Parenti, and John Fiske, all of whom are fascinating in their own right and with important things to say, yet their works do not have the rigor of Davila's