Ask the Author: Rielle Navitski on Latinx Representation in Film and Media

To celebrate National Hispanic Heritage Month, we asked Rielle Navitski, coeditor and coauthor of Latinx Media, about the importance of Latinx representation in film, television, and digital media, as well as her experience leading this project. Latinx Media is available now as an open-access textbook, free to download!

What inspired you and your coeditor Leslie Marsh to undertake this project?

The project arose from my exploration of new teaching and research interests in the area of Latinx media, which were in turn fueled by growing awareness of the significance and increasing size of the Latinx community locally (about a quarter of students in Clarke County’s K-12 schools are Latino/Latina/Latinx/Hispanic) and across Georgia. Though this is not widely known, since 2000 the Latinx population has been expanding most rapidly in the Southeast, and not only in locales we traditionally associate with this demographic, such as Miami, Florida, but across the entire region. According to the Pew Research Center, the South has accounted for nearly half of all Latinx population growth since 2010.

I am trained as a specialist in Latin American cinema, and in light of these demographic shifts, it made sense to turn my attention to US-based Latinx media. While Latin American Studies and Latinx Studies are distinct intellectual traditions (notably, the US government encouraged the development of Latin American Studies during the Cold War in order to help advance US interests in the region, while the origins of Ethnic Studies programs can be found in student activism such as the Third World Liberation Front Strikes that took place in the San Francisco Bay Area in the late sixties), there are also important points of contact if one considers the impacts of immigration and the circulation of media across borders.

When I began to design a course on the topic of Latinx film and visual culture (I also incorporate aspects of popular art such as murals, printmaking, comics, lowriders, and even tattoos into the class), I found that amidst the considerable body of groundbreaking scholarship on Latinx media, the writing was often pitched toward an academic audience rather than a student readership. There were accessible books that focused mostly on stars and stereotyping, such as Mary Beltrán’s Latina/o Stars in U.S. Eyes and Charles Ramírez Berg’s Latino Images in Film, and there were a few textbooks available, but these tended to be expensive, between $50 and $100, which is naturally a financial burden for students and thus becomes an educational equity issue, since those who can easily afford the book are more likely to succeed in the class.

I also wanted a text that considered multiple media (including television and digital media) and attended to the specific histories of different national-origin groups rather than assuming a single homogenous Latino/Latina/Latinx/Hispanic experience. For instance, the Mexican American and the Cuban American communities are characterized, in general, by vastly different migration patterns, socioeconomic profiles, and political leanings, and I hoped to reflect this complexity in the course. Recruiting over a dozen up-and-coming and distinguished scholars to contribute to the book proved essential to accomplishing this, and they deserve the lion’s share of the credit.

After I applied for and won an Affordable Course Materials Grant from UGA to pursue this project, I reached out to my colleague Leslie Marsh, chair of the Department of World Languages & Cultures and Director of the Center for Latin American and Latino/a Studies at Georgia State University, to inquire if she would be interested in collaborating on an Affordable Learning Georgia grant application to create a free open-access textbook on this topic, and things evolved from there.

Why did you decide to publish Latinx Media as an open-access textbook? Is there any correlation between this decision and the content of the book?

If funding opportunities had not been available from the Affordable Learning Georgia initiative and the Affordable Course Materials Grant at UGA, it’s unlikely that I would have opted to pursue the project, especially as this is a fairly new area for me. (UGA’s Latin American and Caribbean Studies Institute and Georgia State’s Center for Latin American and Latino/a Studies also provided important support once the project was underway). The fact that I could draw on these resources to coordinate a project that would benefit the state’s students as well as interested readers—we really did strive to make the individual pieces short and accessible so that even non-students could find them engaging and useful—was key for me.

Was there anything you learned in your research that surprised you?

It probably shouldn’t have surprised me, given the vexed political status of the island, but I was unaware of the controversy around the ineligibility of Puerto Rican films to compete for the Best Foreign Language Academy Award, made official in 2011. Discussed by Dalina A. Perdomo Álvarez and Pedro Noel Noreste in their chapter on Puerto Rican cinema on and off the island, this issue may seem small, but it really highlights the problematic dynamics of how the notions of “foreign” and “national” are alternately and inconsistently applied to Puerto Rico to the detriment of its citizens, as we saw with the disastrously neglectful federal response to Hurricanes Irma and María in 2017.

What new understandings of Latinx creators in the TV and film industries do you hope students will gain after reading Latinx Media?

I hope to encourage appreciation for the sheer creative, social, and historical complexity that informs the biographies and works of Latinx media-makers. Although labels such as Latinx and Hispanic are important identification points, encouraging solidarity and organizing around shared goals, they also gloss over significant inequalities between people of Latin American origin.

How does colorism in media affect those in the Latinx community, and how does it affect the broader American audience’s understanding of Latinx culture? Are there any solutions to combat this issue?

Unfortunately, I think it goes hand in hand with long-time stereotyping of Latino/Latina/Latinx people through the prevalence of the so-called “Latin look,” defined by dark eyes and hair but also by European-looking features and hair texture and a light skin tone. This “look” marked racial/ethnic difference as something “exotic” and appealing while maintaining an implicitly white beauty standard. I do think that individual celebrities’ ability to craft their personas through social media (though this is certainly not an unmitigated good) offers them the opportunity to communicate more complex narratives of identity to fans. The growing (but still limited) number of Latinx executives in positions of power, including those who started out as performers (this is a topic discussed in the roundtable between four top Latinx media scholars included in the book), is also having some impact on casting practices.

Does type casting racially ambiguous actors as either Black or Latina/o add to the misunderstanding of race within the film industry?

Well, of course one can’t fault the actors for casting practices that are based on notions of race that assumes a rigid Black/White binary that simply does not address the complexity of race and color in Latin America and increasingly in the United States as well. I do think that awareness is growing with, for example, the controversies around casting in Jon M. Chu’s In the Heights, namely the lack of Afro-Latinx actors in main roles despite the demographics of the Latinx community in Washington Heights and New York as a whole, where people of Dominican origin are the single largest immigrant group.

What rising Latinx star or creator do you have your eye on?

I’m curious to see what Linda Yvette Chávez does post-Gentefied with her overall deal with 20^th Television and her script for I Am Not Your Perfect Mexican Daughter, which is slated to be directed by America Ferrera and should be going into production shortly.

Where will your research and writing take you next?

It’s very tentative, but I’m currently pursuing an idea that emerged from conversations around this book. A colleague at Georgia Tech, Juan Carlos Rodríguez, was brainstorming with Leslie and me about the textbook and began speaking about how Atlanta itself could be considered a Latinx media capital. I’m interested in exploring the insights that a spatial analysis (for instance, what forms of Latinx media production emerge near each other in specific locales, and how do they cross-pollinate or interact?) might offer us, as opposed to a linear history of Latinx media’s development as a whole.  

Rielle Navitski is an Associate Professor in the Department of Theatre and Film Studies at the University of Georgia. She is the author of Public Spectacles of Violence: Sensational Cinema and Journalism in Early Twentieth-Century Mexico and Brazil (Duke University Press, 2017) and co-editor of Cosmopolitan Film Cultures in Latin America, 1896-1960 (Indiana University Press, 2017). Currently she is working on a book manuscript entitled “Transatlantic Cinephilia: Networks of Film Culture Between Latin America and France, 1945-1965” (under contract, University of California Press).

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