The evolution of the Latin look
You won't believe which supremacy is influencing it
A few weeks ago, I published a piece in Latino Rebels about how Hispanic Heritage Month needs to escape its American traits to actually serve Latinxs. Writing about the influence of America on Hispanic Heritage month got me thinking about the idea of the “Latin look” and how it has shifted in recent years towards whiteness.
In “Latinos, Inc.: The Marketing and Making of a People,” Arlene Dávila writes about the images that produce what we consider Latinx culture, especially the idea of the Latin look and “Walter Cronkite Spanish.” Walter Cronkite Spanish is a whole thing I’ll save for the next time I watch more than five minutes of Univision.
The Latin Look, Dávila notes, is a generic pan-Hispanic look that those in the media have come to define and propagate. It was developed in the 1970s and 1980s when nationwide TV campaigns aimed at Latinxs gained traction as marketing strategies. To appeal to the wide array of Latinxs with different countries of origin and regional cultures, media and marketing executives molded a look and idea of whom a Latinx was to target all Latinxs.
*It’s interesting to note that the Latin look came about around the same time that the U.S. federal government and Latinx interest groups were putting considerable effort into creating the idea of the pan-ethnic Hispanic identity, culminating with the introduction of the “Spanish/Hispanic origin” option in the 1980 census.*
The look became so well understood that Dávila, who spoke with countless people in the Latinx marketing industry for her book, says, “even when not everyone may readily know how to define it, or agree with the representability of this construct, everyone I spoke with took for granted and made constant reference to some sort of generic ‘Latin look’ that any Hispanic can recognize and identify upon seeing.”
This look was explained by a casting director as “long straight hair, olive skin, just enough oliveness to the skin to make them not ambiguous. To make them Hispanic.”
Yet for the U.S. Latinx market, Dávila writes that the images need even more characteristics.
“Images for the U.S. Hispanic market have to be both aspirational (in the sense of showing beautiful, educated, or accomplished individuals) and also representative. Blondes and Nordic types, which are common in Latin American ads, supposedly would not work for U.S. Hispanics, who, as minorities, I was told were looking at ads for representation and confirmation.”
The ideal Latinx look had to effectively fit into the narrative of mestizaje, which says that — unlike the Anglo-Americans who refused to mate with indigenous populations and instead exterminated or displaced them — Latin Americans were nice enough to mate with indigenous peoples and were thus able to assimilate them out of their inferior cultures and into a better, mixed one. This idea of “mejorar la raza” was supposed to show Latin America’s moral superiority over the United States.
Yet, “mejorar la raza” still holds whiteness as the superior quality and through this upholds the racial hierarchy. It was never about benevolently helping dark-skinned Latinxs improve themselves, it was and continues to be about whitening the race to erase the indigenous and Black aspects.
Indigenous and Black features then are not seen as representative of Latinx culture and are erased from Latinx cultures’ media portrayal. This required Latinxs to be both Latin enough and not too white that they are no longer representative. But, as it happens with anything that plays by the rules of the racial hierarchy, Latinx portrayal is shifting towards whiteness.
Dávila notes that people in the marketing world have said the generic Latin look has become whiter in recent decades and thus less representative of Latinxs. In trying to move away from the stereotypical Latinx look of the past, (what was described to Dávila as the “dark, mustached, Mexican type” that was common in the eighties), the media industry has created a new stereotype, this time a whiter one.
It’s a shift that unfortunately makes sense when one understands that whiteness was always what was valued by mestizaje. And it’s hard to reverse unless people begin to unlearn the idea of white superiority and to actively understand and work against the subconscious forces that make us prioritize whiteness.
When a movie about Latinxs has only light-skinned and mestizo leads, the directors will never say it was a deliberate choice. Instead, it’s a choice that is ingrained and socialized into us from a young age. The In the Heights movie directors won’t say they cast only light-skinned leading actors on purpose, but if the directors weren’t making a conscious effort to go against colorism in their movie, their movie was destined to give in to it because society’s default ideal choice of who should be cast in a movie is a choice that has been influenced by white supremacy.
To make it more complicated, even awareness of white supremacy can be tricky if the actions that follow it have scrupulous motives. When people with more recognizable “ethnic” features appear in media, they are often there to signal cultural authenticity. They are never presented for generic appeal and thus are always relegated to a purely visual cue, rarely receiving speaking parts or major roles in any form of media.
So the Latin Look has to balance three factors: the assumed median mestizo look, the racial supremacy of whiteness and the cultural authenticity that indigenous and Black Latinxs provide. And you can witness the Latinx media trying to figure this balance out in the current casting of commercials, TV shows, movies and news anchors. Viewed as a whole, the media will put out something with an indigenous or Black Latinx every once in a while, but in between those instances, they’ll flood Latinx media with whiteness and mestizaje.
There hasn’t been enough of a drastic shift in U.S. Latinx media portrayals for us to say we’ve made meaningful progress. The Latin look of a few decades ago is still going strong and might even be more subservient to white supremacy, while also using indigeneity and blackness as authenticity tokens, because those who control Latinx media haven’t made enough of an effort to combat the passive forces of white supremacy.
The difficulty of pushing against the Latin look and white supremacy will always be that white supremacy’s influence has to first be acknowledged and then actively unlearned and fought. If Latinx media portrayal is left on autopilot in a white supremacist society, by nature it will move towards whiteness.