Transnational Television and Latinx Diasporic Audiences: Abrazos Electrónicos in Four Global Cities 3031115260, 9783031115264

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Transnational Television and Latinx Diasporic Audiences Abrazos Electrónicos in Four Global Cities Catherine L. Benamou

Transnational Television and Latinx Diasporic Audiences

Catherine L. Benamou

Transnational Television and Latinx Diasporic Audiences Abrazos Electrónicos in Four Global Cities

Catherine L. Benamou Department of Film & Media Studies University of California, Irvine Irvine, CA, USA

ISBN 978-3-031-11526-4    ISBN 978-3-031-11527-1 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-11527-1 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2022 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and ­transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover credit: vertigo3d / Getty Images This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

To the vibrant memory of Stuart Hall

Acknowledgments

This project would not have been possible without the contributions of numerous individuals and funding from various institutions. Early funding for the Detroit portion of research was provided by a Faculty Research Grant from the Horace G.  Rackham School of Graduate Studies at the University of Michigan and a Sister’s Grant from the Institute for Research on Women and Gender (IRWG) at the University of Michigan, which covered focus groups conducted in the Detroit metropolitan area from 2005 through 2008. Additional funding for Detroit research was provided by a Cultural Diversity Studies Grant from the Academic Senate Council on Research, Computing, and Libraries (CORCl) at the University of California-Irvine. Substantial funding for the Los Angeles and Madrid portions of field research was provided by a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship (2010–2011) and a Special Research Grant from the Academic Senate Council on Research, Computing, and Libraries (CORCl) at the University of California-Irvine. Additional funding that greatly assisted the completion of the project was obtained from a UCI Advance Career Development Award and a Faculty Publication Grant through the Humanities Center at the University of California-Irvine. I am thankful to the Centro Hispano Colombiano, the Centro Hispano Peruano, and the Centro Hispano Paraguayo in Madrid, CHASS La Vida, the Detroit Public Library, and Project Head Start in Detroit, Safehouse in Ypsilanti (Michigan), We Count in Homestead (Florida), and Abriendo Puertas, Miami-Dade Community College, and Miami-Dade Public Library for allowing me to use their facilities as a research venue. I am deeply grateful to Michael Casas, Elizabeth Mota, José Nevarez, Esmeralda vii

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Pérez, Ruby Pruneda, Merilynn Rush, and Gisselle Vitaliti for their field research assistance in Detroit, to Elizabeth Mota for her assistance in Los Angeles, and to Randall Martínez, Juan Muhammad, and Valentina Scotti for their assistance in Miami. Additional research assistance with videotaping was provided by Leo Ogata, and the cataloguing of materials and data entry was provided by Samantha Carter, Jeannie García, Cecilia Joulain, and Annie Yaniga in California. Araceli Calderón and Leticia García assisted with the transcription of interviews. Peggie Winters in the School of Humanities and Melissa Camarena in the Office of Research at UCI helped to ensure that IRB approval for the study, once granted, proceeded without interruption. Carol Boyd helped to ensure continuity of IRB approval at the University of Michigan. I am grateful to Gilberto Blasini and Charles Ramírez Berg for their early support of this project. This study was greatly enriched by conversations with Leo Chavez and colleagues who participated in the “Urban Transformations in the Americas: Citizenship, Identity and Global Networks” symposium, co-organized with Horacio Legras with funding from the University of California Humanities Research Initiative (UCHRI) in 2011. I am also grateful for conversations with Fernando Martínez Santamaria in Madrid, Josetxo Cerdán and Iolanda Tortajada in Tarragona, Spain, Pedro Calderón Michel in California, and Fernando Arruda, Daniel Coronell, Roberto Cruz, and Helga Silva in Miami, which provided much insight into immigration and the activity of Spanish-language television (SLTV) in those areas. I am grateful to Sallie Hughes for her hospitality and research collaboration on the Miami portion of field research and also to the late Nadia Gold Sichel, and Angela and Nestor Cuadra for their support during my stays in Madrid. Cristina Venegas offered additional support to the Miami portion of research, Maria Byington and Milana Bernartt facilitated my contact with Globo Universidade in Rio de Janeiro, and Rodrigo Nascimento (Negócios Internacionais) provided valuable insights regarding Globo Internacional. I would like to thank Shaun Vigil for his early interest in this project, and my editor Camille Davies at Palgrave Macmillan for her patience and forbearance during the later stages of the journey. Raghupathy Kalynaraman provided prompt communications and ease of interaction during the final editorial stages. Donald Howes provided a thorough, multilingual, and multifaceted index at short notice. I have received much moral support and encouragement from my extended family in France and the United States, may this effort live up to their expectations. Finally, I am deeply grateful to all of the people who gave their time

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to share their views on SLTV and Portuguese-­language television (PLTV). There are also those who provided words of encouragement and helped instill the necessary stamina to muster through drafts of the manuscript: to my writing partners Roy Legette and Vania Smith-Oka in the National Center for Faculty Development and Diversity program; to the organizers Ilona Yim and Olga Razorenova and my writing partners Cindy Archer, Alice Silverberg, and Joseph Wu of the UC I Write program, and to Andromache Karanika, Nancy McLoughlin, Laura O’Connor, Rachel O’Toole, Allison Perlman, Jeanne Sheper, and Amanda Swain of the Women and Non-Binary Associate Faculty Initiative in the UCI School of Humanities, my heartfelt thanks.

Contents

1 Introduction:  Beyond Expanding Markets, Spanish-­ Language Television and Its Diasporic Latinx Urban Audiences  1 2 Not  So Niche: Innovation, Access, and Opportunity in the (Ibero) American Mediascape 43 3 Mediating Migration, from Telenovelas to Slow Reporting105 4 Barrio TV and Media Enfranchisement: Producing on the Ground, Transmitting Locally in Detroit and Los Angeles151 5 R  edefining Latinidad: Latinxs in Miami and Madrid and Brazilian Identity in Diasporic Perspective187 6 The  Permutations of Affect, Collectivized: Television as Ritual and Repository of Memory217

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Contents

7 Conclusion: Emerging Tendencies in SLTV235 Appendix: Chronology247 Index263

Acronyms

CEPI DACA DAPA DHS DMA ELTV FCC ICE INS MPP PLTV SLTV

Centro de Participación e Integración (Madrid) Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals Deferred Action for Parents Department of Homeland Security Designated Market Area English-Language Television Federal Communications Commission Immigration and Customs Enforcement Immigration and Naturalization Service Migrant Protection Protocols Portuguese-Language Television Spanish-Language Television

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List of Tables

Table 4.1 Table 4.2 Table 4.3 Table 4.4 Table 4.5 Table 4.6 Table 4.7 Table 4.8 Table 4.9 Table 4.10 Table 4.11 Table 5.1 Table 5.2 Table 5.3 Table 5.4 Table 5.5 Table 5.6 Table 5.7 Table 7.1

Television consumed according to technological device Television and sociality Multilingual viewing practices Reasons for watching ELTV Reasons for watching SLTV What topics would you like to see on SLTV that aren’t currently being shown? Country and/or region of origin of respondents Self-­identification of respondents in study Preferred language of respondents Current occupations and previous experience Leisure activities other than watching television Age, country of origin, and length of time in Miami metropolitan area Forms of self-identification on Miami questionnaires National origin of respondents in Madrid Languages and self-identification, respondents in Madrid Evaluation of representation of Latin American immigrants on Spanish television Importance given to watching television in Madrid What other countries would you like to get television from? (Madrid respondents) Opinions on bilingual television

164 165 166 167 167 168 170 171 172 173 174 193 197 205 206 207 208 208 241

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CHAPTER 1

Introduction: Beyond Expanding Markets, Spanish-Language Television and Its Diasporic Latinx Urban Audiences

Increasingly, Spanish-language media are having a noticeable impact on civic life and public policymaking in the territorial United States. Over the past half-century, Spanish-language television (SLTV) in particular has developed from an experiment in the transborder distribution and transmission of Mexican national television in Texas and California into a multi-billion-dollar industry with a broadcast signal spanning a major portion of North America and parts of the Caribbean, headquarters in Miami, stations in multiple cities including Chicago, Atlanta, Los Angeles, and New York, and offices in Latin America facilitating the work of correspondents. Providers of SLTV have diversified from two networks in the 1980s to a half-dozen networks. Beginning in the late 1990s, the SLTV audience located in cities and towns across the United States boosted SLTV ratings to surpass those of popular early prime English-language programs; more recently, SLTV networks have garnered first or second place in different ratings sweeps1 as the most viewed compared to all broadcasting networks, regardless of language. As well, it has been generally acknowledged that new generations of Latinxs, including those born and raised in the United States, are embracing the Spanish language in some form,2 pointing to the continued relevance of access to Spanish-language media content for audiences beyond first-generation viewers. This relevance is reinforced by the fact that SL media continue to provide information and a forum for cultural expression not available through other communication channels. Yet © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 C. L. Benamou, Transnational Television and Latinx Diasporic Audiences, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-11527-1_1

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SLTV programming seldom makes mainstream headlines in the popular U.S. press, and SLTV stars, hosts, news anchors, and reporters have only begun to be recognized within the mainstream English-language public sphere, even though individually, they have been the recipients of multiple professional awards and distinctions, including Emmys and Peabody Awards.3 A case in point is the fact that SLTV programs are still not listed in the popular English-language media publication, TV Guide. Moreover, a 2019 TV Guide article underscoring diversity in hiring in the revamped CBS news department under the new leadership of Susan Zirinsky failed to mention the hiring of any Latinxs by the network, including Emmy award-winning Univisión veteran Maria Elena Salinas, who is one of their leading correspondents (Rudolph 2019, 2–3). Meanwhile, the culturally and linguistically diverse, ever expanding audience for SLTV has often been treated as a “niche” audience, even as Latinx media consumers have been courted increasingly in the new millennium by the English-language media—especially the film, television, and social media industries.4 Recent examples of these overtures include Jane, the Virgin (CW, 2014–2017), Disney’s production of Coco (2017) and Encanto (2021), and Netflix’s production of One Day at a Time (2017–2020) and Gentefied (2020–2022). Spanish-language versions of English-language programming, such as ESPN Deportes and CNN en Español, have become available in articles and video material posted on their websites, as well as news updates on Twitter. Commenting on the recent wave of Anglophone media interest in catering to the Latinx market, multi-talented actress Rita Moreno who starred in One Day at a Time and attended the 2018 Imagen Awards quipped, “We could’ve told everybody a zillion years ago. And we have been. It’s just now they’re listening because they’re seeing the green bags” (“Exposure-Parties” 2018). The question is whether and how well Latinx audiences are being served by EL media and the difference made by the strategies and content of SL media. Historically, Latinx viewers have been overlooked by mainstream broadcast media and polling organizations: it was not until the 1990s that Nielsen inaugurated Hispanic ratings that would indicate just what types of programming, including Spanish-language programming, were being consumed by Latinxs (more recently, Nielsen substituted its Hispanic index by factoring Hispanic reception into its overall tabulation of media ratings). Pew Hispanic Research has also been instrumental in providing up-to-date information about Latinx media consumption and socioeconomic mobility. Until these initiatives, it was up to

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Spanish-­language media (from print to radio to television) themselves to keep track of growing market trends for their products (Veciana-Suarez 1987, 13, 18, 36). While the tracking of Latinxs as media consumers has improved, there has yet to be adequate inclusion of Latinxs in the English-language mediascape. In her acceptance speech upon receiving the “Outstanding Achievement in Television” Award at the annual National Association of Latino Independent Producers (NALIP) Media Summit, actress and producer Kate del Castillo stated, “Latinos are still the most underrepresented ethnic group in U.S. media.”5 Communications and cultural studies scholars have tracked Latinx underrepresentation in the commercial media over time. By 2012, the number of Latinx producers and directors in the media industries totaled just under 5%; Latinxs had slightly more success in other roles—that same year, 10.7% of all camera operators and video and film editors were Latinxs (Malavé and Giordani 2015, 111–112). At the same time, Frances Negrón-Muntaner found that Latinxs directed 3.7% of TV network pilots in 2012, owned only 2.7% of television stations in 2011, and represented fewer than 2% of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences membership in 2012, a figure that recently received a significant boost as part of a concerted effort to improve ethnic diversity within the Academy (Negrón-Muntaner 2014, 109–110).6 Meanwhile, in 2012, on the ascendant slope of my study, Elizabeth Méndez Berry found that only 7.3% of television news staffers were Latinx,7 a figure that has also seen modest improvement, yet not enough to attain a level that reflects the demographic share of Latinxs within the general population in major Designated Market Areas (DMAs). Latinxs currently represent 18.7% of the general U.S. population according to the 2020  U.S.  Census. More recently, a UCLA study revealed that only 5% of scripted broadcast roles on U.S.  EL television went to Latinx actors in 2018–2019 (“Share of Roles by Race, Broadcast Scripted Shows, 2018–2019 Season,” 2020). And a Government Accounting Office (GAO) audit of media industries in 2021 revealed that in 2019 only 14% of workers in “radio/television broadcasting, cable, and other subscription programming” were Latinx, whereas in 2018 only 4% of those occupying senior and executive management positions in media industries were Latinx (Cruz Davila 2022, 17).8 At a basic level, then, SLTV has provided an important source of employment for Latinx media professionals, especially those that are bilingual. In the discussion that follows, I will be drawing on the results of a mixed method, longitudinal study of the transnational circulation, local

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production, and diasporic reception of Spanish- and Portuguese-language television (PLTV) conducted in four cities: Detroit, Los Angeles, Miami, and Madrid, Spain, from 2005 to 2018. Throughout this book, I will be using the term SLTV to designate programming in Spanish that circulates and is addressed to Latin American and Latinx audiences geographically situated outside of Latin America. More concretely, I am referring to television that is transmitted, and partly created and packaged, from within the territorial United States by Hispanophone media enterprises9 and the investment of those enterprises in media circulating in Spain. I have excluded from consideration SLTV programming that has been dubbed or captioned for distribution in Spanish by certain Anglophone networks, such as HBO, Cartoon Network, or USA Network. I also have not included Hispanophone programming that is paid for by religious organizations. Research has been designed and data analyzed with an eye to identifying: (1) the positioning of SLTV media with respect to the broader dominant media in host countries (such English-language commercial media in the United States), taking into account that SLTV circulates in multilingual mediascapes in the cities studied (French, Arabic, Aramaic, and Korean in Detroit; Korean, Mandarin, Persian, Portuguese, and Tagalog in Los Angeles; Arabic, Aymara, French, and Guaraní in Madrid; Créole and Portuguese in Miami); (2) substantive changes to popular television genres and formats, and production practices in response to transnational transmission and the growing importance of diasporic viewership; (3) specific modes of audience participation in, and engagement with, these media, taking into account growing diversity and versatility in modes of access; (4) the possible impact of (2) and (3) on viewers’ sense of belonging and enfranchisement; (5) the role played by SLTV and PLTV in the formation of a transborder pan-Latinx mediated public sphere, alongside the migratory process of individuals; and (6) the vital importance of the multiethnic urban sphere in shaping and supporting SLTV discourse along with its sociocultural and political imprint: how does the transmission of SLTV into and across these cities influence the spatiotemporal, social, and affective dynamics of televisual texts, as well as the possible political effectivity of televisual consumption? Other heuristic questions include: To what extent is the history of migration correlated with the directions taken by the globalization of television? Why has PLTV seemingly followed a different path from SLTV, and what similarities, if any, do they bear? Conversely, what role does

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SLTV play in the formation of migrant subjectivity, expectations, and related processes of sociocultural identification and affiliation? Does—and, in theory, can—SLTV have a “centering” effect with regard to urban participation and enfranchisement, or do its practices, texts, and modes of consumption point toward urban fragmentation and a centrifugal movement away from a sense of “home” as a result of cultural globalization and neoliberal drivers of urban development (as described by Tomlinson 2013; Morely 2000, among others)? Is there anything qualitatively different about the consumption of linguistically and culturally specific media (targeting ethnic markets), as compared to the consumption of media “of reference” in today’s global mediascape? How do SLTV and PLTV compare with English-language television (ELTV) and mainstream Spanish national media with regard to use value, sociocultural relevance, and community building? To what extent is SLTV influencing the representation of Latinx communities and issues on ELTV, beyond the adoption and adaptation of SLTV formats (such as Ugly Betty, ABC 2006–2010) and the hiring of Latinx reporters and hosts? How do media professionals perceive and define the role, mission, and socioculturally meaningful contribution of SLTV with respect to the diasporic Latinx community? Is there a generational “divide” among viewers of SLTV and PLTV, and if so, how is it expressed (cf., e.g., the studies of Mayer 2003; Martínez 2007, Moran 2011; Retis 2007)? In what ways and why do Latinx viewers’ modes of access and media preferences tend to differ among urban locations? To what extent does the mode of technological access to SLTV and PLTV (cable, dish, internet, smartphone) matter to Latinx access to, and engagement with, programs in this age of media convergence accompanied by the trend toward the portability of viewing devices? Rita Moreno’s comment above raises additional questions that I will return to later in this book, namely: how do SLTV producers balance the need to continually bring in the “green bags” with the need to effectively address a population that, historically, has been underserved and disenfranchised? Beyond “selling” the Latinx market to advertisers, to what extent does the differential treatment of class, ethnicity, and immigrant identity on SLTV factor into its success? Keith Woods, cited in an anthology on race and news media, asserted that “too often, journalists conflate mission and money,” and recommended separating the “democratic mission” from the aim of “get[ting] [people] to use your product more;” the improvement of diversity in news coverage requires setting as one’s primary goal the certitude “that whoever is watching/reading/listening/

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clicking is getting the most complete story about themselves and everybody else” (Campbell et  al. 2012, 253). In the case of SLTV, it is the pursuit of a “democratic mission” that helps to boost consumption, especially as the demand for telenovelas begins to decline. At a very basic level then, SLTV provides a way for viewers to see what they are missing when they watch ELTV (and most Hollywood mainstream films): Latinx faces, gestures, linguistic expressions, ideas, and signs of affect, along with the knowledge that Latinx decision-makers and creators are mostly in charge of the media they see. One feature of the “self-­ representation” of SLTV is that those who are behind the scenes as creators and executives occasionally appear on screen in interviews. At different scales of realization, the spatial and symbolic orientation of SLTV transmission in support of diasporic Latinx communities forges new circuits of communication that extend beyond the programmatic boundaries of national and regional network television, as well as the formally or “officially” recognized boundaries of public spaces within the urban sphere. Because of its historically transnational orientation, SLTV assists in mapping and accounting for the deterritorialization experienced by recent immigrants to a higher degree than ELTV, and crews are sent (or recruited) on a much more regular basis to various locations across the hemisphere and in Western Europe, especially in Spain. An example is the soundbytes given by Venezuelan opponents of President Fernando Maduro demonstrating in the streets of Barcelona, intercut with vigorous protests in Miami, together with an interview with the father of self-declared transitional president Juan Guaidó in Madrid, Spain (Noticiero Telemundo, 2 February 2019). I mention this example first, because it is illustrative of the apparent equivalence of technostylistic treatment given by SLTV to Latinx-related events in Iberia and in the Americas, and second because, through an increase in international content, it helps to create the idea of a larger Hispanophone region that extends virtually from the Americas across the Atlantic to portions of Iberia (Sinclair 2005, 197). For Latinx viewers, SL and EL sources of televised news and entertainment tend to complement one another, with bilingual viewers most likely to navigate, and experience any possible overlap and cultural tensions between them. The perceptible differences between EL and SL media range from thematic content to production strategy and style in news and fictional programming, in addition to differences in language and sociocultural politics. In particular, there is a significant difference in the conveyance of affect, in the types of relationships that are struck between SL

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media professionals and their viewers.10 The content of information provided by SL media surpasses that of EL media in its historical relevance to the Latinx community—especially as the coverage of foreign affairs has declined in mainstream English-language media, and ethnic minorities still remain relatively underrepresented; this content is generated through diverse strategies, including community outreach, slow reporting (discussed in Chap. 3), and panels with Hispanophone experts. Beyond these qualitative differences, part of the “heat” of the Latinx market can be attributed to generally higher levels of media consumption among Latinx viewers as compared to non-Latinx viewers, across media such as film, radio, and television,11 along with the tight collaboration and ownership patterns among SL radio and television, which has allowed cross-­ marketing. With demographic changes in the electorate, the medium has also grown in national political heft, as reflected in the increasingly dynamic role that SLTV has played in U.S. electoral campaigns in the new millennium. An increasing number of candidates and elected officials, sporting a range of linguistic capabilities, have been featured in SLTV interviews, town halls, and debates, and such appearances are now considered an essential gateway to the Latinx electorate, especially given the vigor with which SLTV networks have striven to GOTLV (get out the Latinx vote).12 It is this vigor and adaptability, combined with the enduring liminal status, stylistic innovation, and discursive forthrightness of SLTV, matched with that of a significant portion of its viewership that form the focus of this book.

The Urban Mediated Sphere I chose the four cities as study sites based on (1) their importance as global cities, that is, as centers of international decision-making and trade, as gateways for national and international transit, and as privileged sites of knowledge production, cultural interaction and exchange13; these functions are often reflected in their mediated “self-representation” on film and television and in their social and spatial organization (the location of ports, markets, airports, and recreational sites, e.g.); to what extent have Latinx communities been included in these self-representations, and how have they been represented in relation to these institutional structures? (2) Concomitantly, these cities bear historical significance as destinations for Latinxs and other migrant populations, thereby generating a layered awareness of cultural and social diversity and difference,14 to what extent

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is this layering reflected in media representations of the city? (3) As a result of these migrations, they each harbor ethnic enclaves that, to some extent, favor Latinx (or other ethnic) entrepreneurship, thereby generating public-­private spaces for expression and social interaction15; these spaces become more significant when access to mainstream venues becomes more restrictive; what is the relationship between these public-private spaces and the vitality of SLTV as a local enterprise? (4) their ongoing role as technical, strategic, and creative hubs in the development and transmission of global media (Los Angeles, Miami, Madrid) and cross-border communications (Detroit); and (5) their national and global importance as repositories of modern cultural memory and as contemporary sites for Latinx cultural production, circulation, and political mobilization. What types of programming have furthered these goals? For example, since 2006, SLTV coverage of U.S.-based May Day protests in favor of immigration reform has focused on the largest demonstrations in urban areas across the country (thereby helping to register the actual scale of political mobilization, in contrast to the generally more fragmentary, and often dismissive representations of such protests on Anglophone commercial television). Like the protests themselves, the interurban coverage of this and other events figures the possibility of linking communities in an expanding mediated public sphere in meaningful contrast to the marginality, invisibility, and feelings of isolation that can prevail on a daily basis as a result of restrictive policies, socioeconomic disparities, and in some cases, intergroup discrimination.16 Interurban linkages in coverage across borders is an aspect of SLTV that viewers especially value and that can be traced back to the type of coverage provided by Spanish-language daily newspapers in the United States.17 In documenting these interventions, SLTV reflects—perhaps to a higher degree than ELTV—the type of networking that, as Manuel Castells has emphasized, characterizes urbanization in the twenty-first century (Castells 2010a). Yet, as I hope will become clear, interurban and interregional communications networks are not just products of globalization; they are intrinsic to the types of communication created within diasporic communities, as a result of the ways in which media consumers use new technology, building on existing non-electronic networks of communication and cultural circulation (such as performance, labor organizing, and musical memory). These types range from the video “letters” sent by way of independent media makers, home videomakers, and the taping booths provided by companies such as Videorola,18 to social media platforms and

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more recent real-time user-friendly applications and programs, such as Snapchat, FaceTime, and Skype. It is my contention that the urban sphere offers an optimal vantage point from which to study (1) the differential treatment of transborder migrants and diasporic Latinxs within host societies (including what can be termed their reglobalization),19 (2) the dynamics of media access and transmission in relation to sociocultural space (including insight into the persistent digital divide, even in major cities, which severely hampers socioeconomic advancement),20 (3) the crafting and circulation of media discourses (both fictional and news-oriented) around the migrant “image,” highlighting the agency of media professionals in forging new perspectives that exceed or reshape normative institutional expectations, (4) the mediation of ethnic and social identity in tandem with translocal communication (which often develops in tension with dominant media constructions of national identity and the nation-state, especially when crafted in direct response to “segregationist” and exclusionary border enforcement perspectives), and (5) in recent years, the interaction of SLTV with civic mobilizations, pressing for local and state-level policy initiatives to protect unauthorized immigrants from deportation, along with other causes of importance to urban Latinx communities, such as worker’s rights, gender equality, access to quality education and public health, and environmental justice. In particular, the dynamics of media access, the mediation of ethnic and social identity (as a priority), and the interaction of SLTV with civic mobilizations can enhance a sense of enfranchisement for viewers. As Saskia Sassen has noted: it is especially in large cities that we see simultaneously some of the most extreme inequalities as well as conditions enabling these citizenship practices. In global cities, these practices also contain the possibility of directly engaging strategic forms of power, a fact which I interpret as significant in a context where power is increasingly privatized, globalized, and elusive. (Sassen 2005, 81)

Moreover, around 80% of the population in Latin America currently lives in cities, indicating the role of the urban in shaping televisual discourse in programming for export, as well as the expectations and disposition of migrants prior to emigrating (although many recent waves of migrants are traveling directly from rural areas, increasing the challenge of adaptation and integration upon arrival). In both cases, SLTV has a role to

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play in transculturation, translocal communications, and accommodation in the host society. This role builds on the ways Latin American national television has historically articulated relations between the rural and urban centers of power and influence and mediated the experience of new migrants to large metropoles, such as Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo, Caracas, Bogotá, and Mexico City. The four metropolitan areas exhibit meaningful differences in terms of sociocultural demographics—part of what Arjun Appadurai has referred to as “ethnoscapes” (Appadurai 1996, 33); in motors of socioeconomic development, the spatial configuration of neighborhoods in terms of the use of public and private space, in the proximity of Latinx neighborhoods to metropolitan centers of political power, and finally, the multi-­ mediascapes that diasporic Latinx viewers, with varying degrees of access, enjoy. It should be noted, for example, that television producers working for the same network in different cities can take very different approaches not only to covering news pertaining to Latinxs and other communities but also to navigating within and depicting the local urban geography. News crews working out of Los Angeles cover vast distances up to a 75-mile radius while covering stories affecting Latinx in the metropolitan area. Local crews working for major networks in Miami tend to cover a tighter radius, working in city center, Hialeah, Doral, and occasionally in the southern portion of Broward County; interestingly, a similar logic informs the news coverage of Detroit. Certain special events, such as the marches for immigration reform, or the Cuban-American oriented Calle Ocho festival in Miami will work as a magnet to attract all SLTV media to one (often culturally symbolic) location in the local public sphere. Thus, Latinx ethnoscapes are profoundly tied to concepts of place, the tensions of socioeconomic relations, and politically charged spaces within the city, often reflected in these media. In considering the ways that the changing socio-economies of these cities have provided a home for SL media and their audiences, it is important to recognize that SLTV media transmission and consumption alike tend to take place within a transnational frame. SLTV and the diasporic communities it serves have benefited from the transborder flow of goods, communications, and people pursuing personal and collective goals of betterment. In these diasporic settings, individual and collective identities are reshaped (Clifford 1994), while active ties are often maintained to communities in places of origin. For us to fully understand the role of SLTV in its urban, diasporic contexts, it is important to recognize the

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ways that this frame is operative in an imaginary, transhistorical, as well as an actual historical sense. SLTV actively appeals to and helps to construct this imaginary, even as it facilitates the physical transborder movement of communication through media production and transmission. This has proven especially important in a post-NAFTA era of increasing restrictions placed on the movement of people, as contrasted with commercial goods (Saldaña-Portillo 2005, 754–757). The power to transform and reposition migrant subjectivity and sociocultural engagement in relation to scale, I contend, is one of the most compelling attributes of SLTV- and, to a lesser extent, PLTV as a medium, and it helps to explain how television works as a motivator for migration. These cities provide, together with other global cities such as Barcelona, Mexico City, New York, Rio de Janeiro, Buenos Aires, Lima, and Santiago (Chile), the spawning ground for a mediated Latinx public sphere that, while it is transnational in reach, also enables virtual and live exchanges to materialize among media professionals, performers, and diasporic viewers. Thanks to SLTV transmission, cities become networked within the U.S. nation-state, and translocal communications can be established between cities in the United States and locations in Latin America. Cities can become the incubators for what Stuart Cunningham has called ethnospecific global “sphericules,” which cannot be simply absorbed or circumscribed within the larger national public sphere (Cunningham 2013, 542–546), or they can become sites where discourses connected to national transmission become tailored for local consumption. Conversely, a sense of geocultural displacement, as well as shared attempts (albeit socioeconomically stratified) to “luchar por un sueño,” or struggle for a dream in the United States often undergirds the common ground among the stakeholders in SLTV, and their ethnically and linguistically distinct, yet socioeconomically similar neighbors. [As Appadurai 1996 has observed, ethnoscapes today reveal the deterritorialization of ethnic peoples in the wake of globalization.] With the hardening of immigration policy and the vulnerability of many immigrant ethnic communities to discrimination, detention, and the threat of deportation, bridges have been built among communities that previously competed fiercely for space and other resources. From another angle, the phenomenal presence of SLTV as enterprise, as production labor in action, and as communicative force in cities such as Tijuana and at other U.S.-Mexican border crossings,21 Bogotá (Colombia), Miami, and more recently, San Diego, California, has helped to transform

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these cities into sources as well as recipients of information and cultural influence on a global scale. For example, the airing of the telenovelas Yo Soy Betty la Fea (2001) and Café con Aroma de Mujer (1994)22 helped to place Colombia, and more specifically Bogotá, on the map as a source of entertainment programming. Flows related to the reformatting of Yo Soy Betty la Fea proceeded from Colombia to destinations as diverse as Mexico and Brazil, the Netherlands, Spain, Greece, and Turkey (Moran 2009, 107). Further north, a new Telemundo station in San Diego (Channel 20) provides news and information regarding the transborder metropolitan area. Although geographically “peripheral” to U.S. society at large, this station’s coverage of the urban borderland is helping to place a spotlight on much-overlooked socioeconomic phenomena along with the humanitarian fallout from trade agreements and border policy under the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and enforcement activities of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (respectively). Finally, as I will be arguing further below, increased scholarly attention to the role of cities as meaningful loci for collective and individual media engagement could help to remedy a persistent analytical and historical gap in the study of transnational economies and communications of scale, on the one hand, and local sites of media reception and interpretation, on the other. In particular, the analysis of urban and interurban production and transmission—a characteristic feature of SLTV—can increase the legibility of transnational processes of migration and media development at points of reception. Importantly, SLTV has helped to transform television flows into a transnational “magnetic field” for diasporic viewers, leading into global destinations that are already populated by, or might appeal to, Latinxs and Latin Americans such as Los Angeles, Miami, and Madrid. On the one hand, this “urbanizes” the televisual text, a facet that will be explored in Chaps. 4 and 5, on the other, these pathways work to convert those cities into powerful media metropoles, as well as multicultural cities. Here, it is important to bear in mind that the immigrants positioned within these vectors include acting talent and media professionals, as well as viewers—a factor that can and does alter the strategy and style of SLTV discourse, especially news coverage, and that is often incorporated reflexively into textual content. At times, SLTV reporters and anchors have included autobiographical statements about their own migratory trajectory in conjunction with portrayals of transborder migration.

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At the same time, it is important to recognize that the pathways of televisual transmission do not always correspond or align simultaneously with those of migration or market demand—the provision of ethnically tailored television to diasporic communities has occurred in somewhat syncopated, uneven fashion, reflecting the degree to which a range of factors—the known size of the captive audience,23 local power structures, technological infrastructure, market conditions, and government regulations (such as the FCC’s regulations regarding media ownership in single urban markets)24 can affect both the timing and geographical coverage of SLTV transmission to connect with its audiences. As a case in point, Detroit did not have a SLTV station until 2005, even though the 2000 census revealed a sizeable growth in that population, just as it revealed that Latinxs constituted more than 10% of the population nationwide. Thus, the presence of ethnically oriented electronic media can be slower to register than simpler forms of media that reflect community demographics and concerns in a more immediate way. When viewed through a transnational comparative frame, then, the meso-level of the urban sphere can help to reveal the geohistorical variability of immigration and mediatized globalization in concrete ways: it is where we can discern place-specific modes of media practice and consumption, place-sensitive content, as well as gaps in Latinx access and viewership as they have developed in response to sociopolitical, economic, and cultural trends at the national, regional, and municipal levels.25 Latinx viewers in Detroit have had far fewer options and more difficulty in accessing media of relevance, for example, than those who reside in Los Angeles or Miami, even though as a community, Latinx Detroiters share a lengthy history of residence in the city (exceeding one hundred years). The reasons for this lack of access will be explored in Chap. 4. Another example of site-specific information yielded at the meso-level (or what in actuality is the sum of multiple layers of human networks and activity) in my study is the importance for viewers of interethnic relations and a keen awareness of power differentials among immigrant groups. This can be more intense in cities such as Detroit and Madrid, where Latinxs are not in the majority, as contrasted with cities such as Miami and Los Angeles, where they are relatively well represented and more visible in local business and politics.26 (Madrid has a longer history of immigration from the African continent, and this has to some degree affected the visibility and socioeconomic positioning of Latin American immigrants within the ethnoscape.) Moreover, the creation of spaces for interethnic interaction is affected by the

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geodemographics of each city—the degrees of segregation, physical proximity, and overlap of different ethnic communities in relation to one another and to the majority population. In Detroit and Los Angeles, public schools and libraries constitute just such a space. As the Miami portion of my study revealed, there are also differential opportunities for physical transitivity and access to the urban public sphere. In one focus group it became clear that, while many tourists and coastal residents of Miami (Brickell, downtown, South Beach) might be familiar with Biscayne Boulevard (an assumption that was sufficient enough for a local newscast to dwell on improvements to pedestrian traffic in the area) many Latinx migrants working in a nearby semi-agricultural area were not, and several had never been to that part of Miami.

Conceptual Parameters This project has been conceived within the ambit of what James Clifford has called the “Greater Humanities,” an ensemble and “possible coalition” of “knowledge practices” that exhibits the shared attributes, precepts, and productive tensions that arise from the unstable boundaries currently defining social scientific, historical, and critical inquiry (Clifford 2013, 2–4). In the effort to support a transdisciplinary framework and at the same time get “beneath the surface” of SLTV as an ethno-­linguistically distinct, yet pluralistic and transnationally oriented medium, I have drawn from cultural studies approaches to media production and reception, social geography as it is linked to urban studies, ethnic studies, discourse analysis, genre studies, and documentary studies, as well as popular history. In the field of media studies, the study is aligned with critical media industry studies, especially the effort to “understand how particular media texts arise from and reshape midlevel industrial practices” (Havens et al. 2009, 237) even though in contrast to the emphasis on entertainment programming that Havens, Lotz, and Tinic propose (Ibid., 235–236), I will be concerned with news, as well as entertainment programming. Like Havens, Lotz, and Tinic, I see power in SLTV not as a form of economic control exerted by “media moguls,” but as “a form of leadership constructed through discourse that privileges specific ways of understanding the media and their place in people’s lives” (Ibid., 237). The distinctiveness of SLTV as a medium can be understood through both the diversity of practices and publics within it, and important rhetorical, stylistic, and cultural differences with regard to ELTV, a contrast that

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is best studied by way of a relational approach as delineated by French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, which links the notion of social difference to spatial relations. The following might apply to the relationship of SLTV to ELTV: “The idea of difference, or a gap, is at the basis of the very notion of space, that is, a set of distinct and coexisting positions that are exterior to one another and which are defined in relation to one another through their mutual exteriority and their relations of proximity, vicinity, or distance, as well as relations of order, such as above, below, and between” (Bourdieu 1998, 6). It is a contention of this book that deficiencies in access to pertinent information and ethnic presence within mainstream media flows contribute significantly to perceptions of “otherness” and marginalization, thereby enhancing the possibility of social isolation and discrimination, which can impede social advancement. In a climate of hate crimes, official scrutiny, and, especially during the Trump administration, increased threat of deportation, the Latinx working population has become more susceptible to mistreatment at large. A recent study revealed the damaging effects of anti-immigrant rhetoric on Latinx youth (Chavez et al. 2019), and hate groups have nearly doubled in number since the turn of the millennium, with palpable effects on the physical safety of immigrants and their families.27 As I will be exploring in the fourth and concluding chapters, the interstitial positioning of SLTV with respect to national media on both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border has provided a strategic opportunity and moral incentive to document acts of discrimination, hate crimes, fraud, and abuse (often exposed through the testimony of victims and their legal advocates), moving the medium, I argue, toward a position of advocacy rather than simply capitalizing on the gaps in representation left by the English-language media, where reports on these developments occur much less frequently and less in depth.28 Periodically, as part of its smorgasbord national morning news program, Univisión’s Despierta América includes a segment titled “Inmigración a Su Lado” (“Immigration on Your Side”) in which immigrants experiencing difficulties with legalizing their status are given expert advice from immigration attorneys, and often, the documents they need to reside and work legally in the United States (essentially, a “green card”). More recently, this assistance has involved the removal of orders of deportation meted out against law abiding residents, including victims of violence (refugees), and even parents of military veterans. Hence, SLTV, comprised of a handful of networks and dozens of local channels, has evolved into an institution in and of itself, albeit a

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shape-shifting one that is engaged in strategies of both market hegemony and at times, sociopolitical counterhegemony. This positioning and adaptation to market conditions and public policies in more than one national context can only be understood, I argue, by considering this medium on multiple scales of development and activity, from the local to the national and transnational levels, and this logic, which reflects the lived experiences of Latinx media professionals and audiences alike, has informed both the focus and the chapter structure in this book. In my research, I have been interested in how SLTV, in its effort to counteract a loss of recognition and isolation in multiple ways—from PSAs, to the documentation of ethnic and labor discrimination, neighborhood pop-ups, and slow reporting—might also increase a sense of enfranchisement. I define this broadly, to include the possibility of participation and sociopolitical expression in the public sphere, at one end of the spectrum, and actually possessing the right to vote and hold office, at the other. A related concept is the importance of SLTV to placemaking and cultural recognition, a function that counteracts the aimlessness and loss of orientation created by global movement and some modes of engagement.29 By such “modes of engagement,” I am referring to passively consumption-­oriented spectatorship that is encouraged by “culture blind” global marketing and distribution. By contrast, writing about African immigrants in France, Marie-France Malonga has posited television as a place of social and ethnic recognition, stressing how important it is in the psychosocial development of non-white youth, therefore, to “see themselves” on the screen (Malonga 2007). Viewing television programming that offers a sense of recognition helps to inscribe immigrants’ sense of place within the larger urban environment and national sphere. Within the transnational flow, this establishment of place and recognition is not a simple matter of textual content and reception (respectively). It is important to begin to identify the esthetic, psychosocial, and discursive factors that contribute to this sense of recognition in SLTV (in relation to oneself and by others), and how it might contribute to the process of sociopolitical enfranchisement off-screen. In evaluating spectatorship, I argue that psychosocial factors such as the need and desire of migrant viewers for certain types and functions of programming beyond entertainment need to be taken into consideration alongside the physical settings shaping the viewing experience. For example, in immigrant neighborhoods, the television set may become an artifact ensconced within modest attempts in public and private built

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environments to recreate a sense of “home.” Next, viewers’ engagement with the televisual flow—whether it is likely to appear as an uninterrupted “stream of images” or as discrete units of thematic content—tends to differ across geodemographic groupings, an area that is of central interest to ethnic television specialists, as well as marketing experts. I consider these differences in the context of metropolitan Miami. The challenge has been to consider how the transactions and interactions occurring in mediaspaces within urban areas are linked to the multiscalar dynamics of transmission, circulation, representation, and mediation within and across national and regional boundaries. For the purposes of media analysis, at the simplest level, scales “are frames through which cultural practices become intelligible” (Khandekar and Otsuki 2011, 130). Scale is defined here in both geophysical terms, as designating zones of transmission and reception, and in theoretical terms as the “social construction of space” and place that occurs through the process of mediation itself. The latter process entails the trajectory of textual elaboration in what Stuart Hall referred to as the “encoding-decoding” cycle of media texts (Hall 1981) and the experience of texts in the processes of production and reception, such that one can locate and analyze discourses pertaining to the diasporic experience across a scalar spectrum from local to transnational. Thus, geographic scale is not only that which “defines boundaries and bounds identities around which control is exerted and contested” (Smith quoted in Vargas 2012, 145; in other words, scale as determined by geopolitical borders and state-crafted policies regarding ownership and circulation of media production and content), but also that which can be invoked, re-worked, and re-imagined through a creative engagement with media texts. I have attempted to imagine this “creative engagement” as involving the agency of the media professional and of the viewer within each ethnoscape. An issue that is frequently discussed in critiques of ethnic commercial media is the question of how the vernacular becomes appropriated for mass distribution, and there is the question of the degree to which scale of broadcast, circulation, and consumption is related to the process of this appropriation. Néstor García Canclini has distinguished between popular culture with a capital “P,” indicating the industrial production and commercial circulation of culture for profit, and popular cultures (intended as plural) with a small “p,” indicating vernacular or “folk” culture that retains symbolic and use value at the grassroots level (García Canclini 1982, 151). One of the distinguishing features of SLTV is that, through its

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sociocultural outreach and hybrid incorporation of different genres, it navigates between these forms of cultural expression. Finally, there is the provocative notion that we study not only the various interrelationships of scales at the levels of media practice and textual discourse, but as Couldry and McCarthy have suggested, that we study “how media-caused entanglements of scale are variously experienced and understood in particular places” (Couldry and McCarthy 2004, 8, emphasis added). This is a task that is eminently appropriate to urban analysis. It is useful at this juncture to distinguish between the terms “global” and “transnational” to describe the transborder movement of programming. I will be using “global” to describe the international circulation of media texts, whereby programming design and content remain relatively unchanged from their original formulation (or resistant to external influence) and are simply translated into the target language either through dubbing or SAP.  In Latin America, these products are referred to as “enlatados,” or “canned” programming imported from abroad. The global category also includes the global marketing and adaptation of U.S.based television formats, such as MTV and “Big Brother” for consumption in different linguistic contexts. In Latin America, this type of programming has been available to viewers via cable subscription. In either case, Latin American viewers are aware that for the most part they are watching foreign-elaborated and inspired, not domestic programming. With other programs, such as the Argentinian telenovela Rebelde Way (2002–2003), which was reformatted for expanded transnational transmission as the Mexican-based Rebelde (2004–2006), casting and setting changes were made to export the program to a different urban, middle-­ class context, thereby transforming it into a global text for consumption across the Latin American region. The remake of Rebelde Way opened dozens of opportunities for the Mexican cast to appear on talk shows and music shows while sticking to the basic script, style, and original concept for the telenovela, increasing attention to gendered and altersexual identity, in addition to the innocuous paths taken by teen friendship at a private high school and public success through musical performance. The global success of the pop band, RBD, a made for TV tie-in for the telenovela, was such that rioting broke out during one of its tours to Brazil, where the Hispanophone group successfully hurdled over the language barrier to attract thousands of fans. Finally, there has been the global marketing of TV formats of various national origins for adaptation to foreign

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domestic markets, such as the abovementioned widely known and distributed Ugly Betty adapted from the Colombian original Yo Soy Betty La Fea (RCN, 1999–2001). One might also refer in the aggregate to the “global movement” of resources and labor, as communications and entertainment enterprises act on the (largely economic) need to expand their operations to production locations and postproduction hubs abroad. A correlate of textual impermeability is the relative indifference of production crews to the geocultural setting in which programs are produced—increasingly, foreign locations are chosen to reduce production costs, and postproduction can also be outsourced. Here again, there is a certain degree of “indifference” to the place of audience destination, as production settings in this global programming are chosen mainly for considerations of cost and convenience. Extreme examples of this are the “survivalist” and “bachelor(ette)” shows on ELTV, which take the cast (that seldom includes Latinx contestants) to “exotic” locations in Latin America while effacing all but the local geographical terrain. Incidental appearances by housekeepers and other service workers go unacknowledged and uncredited. What is at stake in these shows is the opportunity for the North American participants (whether from the United States or Canada) to build up their self-image and push their capacity for physical strength (or attractiveness) and psychic resilience beyond the everyday, with little to no regard for the people who serve them at these locations, or whose lives might be affected by their presence. The viewer is rewarded with a virtual vacation, without the tensions of “strangeness;” the residents of the foreign location are virtually absent from the frame, which can produce a sensation of alienation for viewers of these programs for whom these locations are a place of origin or primary geocultural frame of reference. By contrast, I utilize “transnational” to refer to international coproductions and the (re)crafting of programming with the destination market(s) and communities in mind. A good example would be the Telemundo-­ Globo remake, El Clon (2010), of the Brazilian telenovela O Clone (TV Globo, 2002) for the diasporic Hispanophone market. The remake, which was popular in the U.S.  Latinx market, also achieved a high degree of popularity in Spain, which has received waves of Maghrebian migration for decades: the telenovela incorporates themes of Muslim identities, gender roles, and social relations in the Arab world, and was shot on location in Fez, Morocco, as well as Miami, thereby delineating—and navigating— the transnational, transatlantic Hispanophone region referred to above.

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Most SLTV programming today falls into the category of the transnational by definition as a result of foreign and domestic co-ownership, the international recruitment of news crews and casting of entertainers, the choice of locations, the creation and sourcing of scripts, and even the development of characters and settings in fictional programming. When imported, it is self-consciously addressed to audiences outside of the original domestic market, whether the primary market is based in Mexico, Brazil, other locations in South America, or Spain; this has been the rule not the exception, of most telenovela production in Latin America as a region, from the 1990s onward (with the exception of Brazil). For telenovelas produced in Latin America, the inclusion of dialogue in French, Castilian, Italian, or English has been a sign of upwardly mobile goals attained by the lead characters (whether villain or ingénue), while for the Latinx audience abroad these programs sometimes illustrated the difficulties faced by migrants like themselves at U.S. and European destinations. Conversely, the presence of indigenous languages (Quechua, Nayarit, Mixtec) reinforces the existing socioeconomic gap between indigenous peoples and predominantly mestizo or EuroLatinamericans by remaining untranslated and relegated to the “background” of the soundtrack. As transnational television, SLTV is closely associated with a hybrid esthetic, not as a transitional move, but in the perennial effort to develop cultural capaciousness and as a reflection of the various interests—national and transnational, commercial, and communitarian—at stake. In recent years, as Juan Piñón has suggested, the boundary between the national and the transnational has shifted, and in some cases, becomes blurred, owing to coproductions and the reinforcement of high-end production values (Piñón 2014, 23–23). This may very well be the case in terms of production values, distribution strategies, and choice of formats; however, as Tasha Oren has observed, neither the “global” nor the “transnational” has supplanted the visibility or viability of the “national;” in effect, she asserts, international television formats actually open up a space where the national can come into view, and, it might be argued “reassert” itself (Oren 2012, 374). Interurban news coverage also creates new spaces for the “national” to appear. This process of resituating national programming within the transnational flow, I argue, increases rather than decreases the chances for hybridity to take shape within both the flow as a whole and the individual televisual text. For years, SLTV has been sustained through the importation of programming developed in Latin American countries combined with programming produced in and transmitted from the

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United States. What this means is that viewers of transnational television are consuming a source of national identification from outside the host country, together with pathways to national participation within the host country, a situation that can lead to cultural ambivalence for some viewers and to the dilemma of enfranchisement, which at the very least takes on a sociocultural, if not fully political weight and form. On the other hand, given the predicament faced by most migrants and refugees today, I have chosen to emphasize the degree to which participation in the mediated public sphere in these cities leads, albeit through forms of “emancipation” and advocacy30 to some kind of “enfranchisement” as contrasted with the emphasis placed on emancipation by Jûrgen Habermas (Edgar 2006, 47–48).31 While changes in legislation along with activism on the part of clergy and community leaders may lead to “emancipation,” and SL media and community organizations can provide a measure of “advocacy” in that direction, migrants often express their eagerness to exercise their rights as citizens, as I will discuss in reference to survey and focus group results in Chap. 4. As scholars of the phenomenon (Sassen 2005; Coutin 2000) have observed, the sentiment of citizenship is often expressed at the local and translocal levels in an extra-institutional manner and in national networks in a parainstitutional way. In the attempt to appeal to diasporic Latinx viewers, SLTV has functioned as a privileged vehicle for the retrieval and circulation of local and regional cultural forms beyond, as well as within national boundaries. Moreover, cultural discourses that are valued and consumed by diasporic viewers—such as dramas based on actual events—help to create bridges between the televisual text and the fabric of everyday life (Williams 1989, 4; Brunner and Catalán 1995, 27), lessening the sensation of fragmentation that might be created by the formal discontinuity of the televisual flow and impression of discontinuity and dislocation provoked by the migratory experience. As James Clifford observed, “diasporic cultural forms…are deployed in transnational networks built from multiple attachments and they encode practices of accommodation with, as well as resistance to, host countries and their norms” (Clifford 1994). An example of such a form is the worship of and popular iconography associated with the Virgin of Guadalupe. While in the popular Televisa-produced telenovela La Rosa De Guadalupe the messages of each episode conform to Catholic moral teachings and Mexican family values, the invocation of Guadalupe and display of her image in urban murals and marches in the United States convey a different message, that of cultural pride, values attached to

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motherhood, and a transborder community willing to fight for respect in the host society.32 In positing SLTV as a privileged representational space for diasporic Latinx communities, and hence, as a conduit for “diasporic cultural forms,” I wish to underscore (1) the specific ways in which the medium shares and actively takes part in the sociocultural space(s), attachment to particular “places,” and the public interactions of its diasporic viewers; and (2) the extent to which SLTV market positioning and its coverage of experiences and events in Latinx communities contest, buffer the impact of, and often provide a welcome, viable alternative to programming emanating from national, hegemonic sources, both public and private. Indeed, an interesting area of comparison involves the responsiveness of public media in Spain to immigrant issues, needs, and contributions, in contrast with the relative dearth of representations of immigrant diasporae on Anglophone public television in the United States. In addition to integrating various disciplinary perspectives, my book is also concerned with reframing Latin American and Latinx Studies approaches to cultural studies such that empirically traceable circuits of media transmission and migration are taken into critical and historical account. Part of that reframing means that diasporic Brazilians are to be included in Latinx Studies oriented analysis (which implies cross-linguistic viewing), and that ethnic and social differentiation within the Latinx diaspora (indigenous, Afro-diasporic, etc.) is recognized, especially as might affect region- and place-specific responses to media texts. To date, studies of indigenous media—which in practice have been quickly expanding throughout the Americas—have rarely overlapped with the study of national communications industries.33 This reframing favors the development of “grounded” rather than “applied” theory, that is, research methods and questions are revised and theory developed as data is being gathered, rather than established and structured beforehand, which allows for greater interactivity between the researcher and research subject, in tandem with the active inclusion of contextual factors in the research questions and conceptualization of findings (from open coding to concept to category). As Julianne Oktay has explained, as a multiphase approach to field work with pauses for reflection, grounded theory allows for “abductive” reasoning, or a “back and forth” between inductive and deductive logic applied to data analysis (Oktay 2012, 17). In part, this assists an “iterative, constant comparison” of findings as categories from different data sources (documentary, interview material, and survey data) are

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integrated, then updated with new findings (Silverman and Patterson 2015, 7–8). My research and analysis have yielded the following core concepts as critical to the interaction of SLTV with its Latinx diasporic viewers: access (to technologies, community networks, communication with the homeland, and institutionally generated information in the host society); advocacy (television as a vehicle for representation and empowerment, the notion that SLTV should act on behalf of communities and inform a Latinx electorate); affect (as it pertains to the development of narrative content, and to the migratory experience, the expressivity of media professionals, viewer engagement, and explicit response); education—many viewers evaluated media according to the degree to which they offered educational opportunities for themselves and their families; they seldom perceived SLTV as merely providing “entertainment;” enfranchisement (television as a vehicle for social participation and political expression, as a means of achieving a sense of belonging and exercising what Susan B. Coutin and Saskia Sassen have referred to as “informal citizenship”)34; place how geoculturally specific places figure in transnational and local media texts, how viewers define themselves in relation to urban space and their place of ancestry or origin, including place as metaphor; recognition (in addition to tributes and other forms of public affirmation granted to Latinx celebrities and public figures, the concept, introduced by Marie-­ France Malonga, indicates the degree to which viewers “find themselves” in media texts and therefore provides a measure not only of viewer engagement, but also of the sociocultural inclusiveness and porosity of media discourse; Malonga 2007).

The Scope of the Study My study consisted of random surveys administered to, and focus groups with viewers, interviews with urban planners, public librarians, government officials, and media professionals, ethnographic interactions within private-public research sites,35 and the mapping and textual analysis of media flows. These components have formed the basis for constructing a synoptic, flexible frame with which to track and interpret SLTV television practices, flows, and discourses across urban contexts. Each of the four metropolitan areas in my study is made up of cities that, while adjacent to one another, may exhibit contrasts in terms of transitivity, public culture, ethnic enclaves, and spaces for crosscultural

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interaction. In my field study, I decided to enlarge the sample within metropolitan areas to include adjacent communities, such as Ypsilanti (Michigan), Majadahonda (Spain), Santa Ana (California), and Homestead and Deerfield Beach (Florida). Some of these communities were formed by labor needs (Homestead, Majadahonda, Ypsilanti), others by the location of places of worship (Deerfield Beach), and yet others by a history of Latinx migration and rural employment (Santa Ana). The location of supportive non-governmental community organizations in these areas facilitated the continuity of research activity and allowed for a comparison of data between “satellite” and “core” metropolis. Temporally, my study spans more than a decade, launched in the period in the new millennium when a Spanish-language television station (WUDT, owned and operated by Univisión) began broadcasting in Detroit (2005), the immigration reform movement was gaining national public exposure (2006), “Latin” channel packages were carried by most U.S. cable and satellite dish services, Brazilian Lusophone television became available to subscribers through satellite dish (2004), and important modifications to Spain’s Ley de Extranjería, or Immigration Law (Ley Orgánica, 4/2000, 14/2003) went into effect. Moreover, in 2007, the first daily newspaper for Latin Americans, El Nuevo Ciudadano, began circulating and Canal+ began offering a digital TV package to Latin American viewers in Spain (Retis 2007, 6, 10). The period of research overlaps with the launching of television streaming services and experimentation with bilingual and EL television linked to SLTV providers (see the concluding chapter). It ends with attempts to appeal to new generations of viewers (Millennials and Gen Z) as an important targeted market, increased use of portable devices to access television, and an acceleration of detention and deportation of immigrants under President Donald Trump, with some consideration given to the first months of the Joseph R. Biden administration. The media practices considered range from transnational coproduction arrangements and programming and hiring decisions, the allocation of crew presence and approaches to documenting community events, and viewers’ own approaches to consuming and engaging with television. I have been scrutinizing televisual flows36 for the valence given to particular genres of programming (such as news and telenovelas), changes in format and the blurring of generic categories, what can be termed “technodiscourse,” or self-reflexive commentary on user-friendly distribution technology, textual constructions of national, cultural, and social identity, and

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finally, the thematic and esthetic content of PSA’s and paid advertising, as well as on-camera opportunities for in person interaction between SLTV talent and members of the viewing public. In a certain sense, each of these terms, “flow” and “practice,” implies an action as well as the embodiment of discursive content that takes a certain form, is imbued with certain values and precepts, and thus is open to interpretation.37 In the gleaning of audiovisual utterances, the range of themes considered includes Latinxs as part of the workforce and as part of the electorate, acts of discrimination and hate crimes, immigration policy and enforcement, related developments in immigrant sending countries (such as Colombia, Cuba, El Salvador, Honduras, Mexico, and Venezuela), immigrant-­initiated activities (such as caravans and rights movements), coverage of special events (such as annual celebrations of Cinco de Mayo, and tributes to departed celebrities), the globalization of Brazilian culture and regionalization of Latin American politics, the mediated articulation of multi- and bilateral relations among Spain, Latin America, and U.S.  Latinx communities, and the shaping of urban politics and social space. Since families and even entire towns can be separated by the migratory process, these topics can be presumed to be of interest to those who consume television at both the “domestic sending” and “transnational receiving” end of the flow. At the same time, the mediated form taken by these textual strands in SLTV and PLTV brings into relief the ways in which, as Michel Pêcheux has observed, “a discourse, by its very existence, marks the possibility of a destructuring-restructuring of these networks [of memory] and [social] trajectories” (Pêcheux 1988, 648). Like the viewers themselves, SLTV media professionals take on the role of social actors, and a distinguishing feature of SLTV is that professional-viewer interactions and on-air presentations are encoded to bring this dimension into relief, rather than minimize or efface it in the name of neutrality and objectivity. This emphasis has augmented in recent years as various forms of social exclusion and discrimination within immigrant communities have increased. I argue that these interactions move beyond the so-called will to ordinariness38 that has typified on-air professionals’ presentational style to attenuate the social and physical gap between performing and viewing subject and create an ambience of familiarity and immediacy. The approach to shooting and editing within much of SLTV has facilitated the creation of a shared, albeit mostly virtual, sociocultural space, premised on a tacit “social contract”

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between viewer and on-air interlocutor, that fuels the popular appeal of SLTV and possibly, its sociopolitical effectivity.

SLTV Scholarship in Hemispheric and Transatlantic Perspective The scholarship on SLTV and PLTV, as well as on Latinx representation in film and television generally speaking, has grown exponentially since the turn of the millennium. New pathways of study have been opened up in domains ranging from political economy, organizational industrial structure, and language politics to communications technology, cultural studies approaches to textual analysis, and reception studies. There is still ample room, however, for transdisciplinary approaches to the study of these media that bridge a consideration of industrial processes and policies with detailed textual analysis of programming, and the engagement with these texts by Latinx viewers. In preparing the terrain for my study, I have drawn from: (1) studies conducted in other geocultural contexts on the subject of migration and media (such as Naficy 1993; Morely 2000, Cunningham 2013; Malonga 2007); (2) cultural studies theories of televisual production and the functioning of the technical apparatus in dynamic relation to processes of representation and reception (Williams 1989, 1990; Couldry and McCarthy 2004; Davis 2015; Hall 1981); 3) cultural studies analyses of the urban sphere (Davis 2001; Herzog 2010, Young and Holmes 2010; Valle and Torres 2000); (4) urban histories (Axelrod 2009; Davis 2018); (5) theories of globalization and culture (Appadurai 1996; Castells 2010b; García Canclini 2002; Kraidy 2010; Tomlinson 2013); (6) theories of media reception (Ahumada Barajas 2007; Hall 1981; Plantinga 1999; Straubhaar 1991); (7) studies of Latinx representation in EL media (Aldama and Nericcio 2019; Beltrán 2009; Chavez 2011; DeSipio et al. 2000; Goldman 1998; Molina-Guzmán 2018; Ramírez Berg 2002; Santa Ana et al. 2020); (8) histories of the Latin American, Latinx, and Spanish media industries (Chicharro Merayo 2011; Dávila 2001; Fox and Waisbord 2002; Maxwell 1997; Noriega 2000a; Piñón 2013; Porto 2012; Rêgo 2011; Rivero 2005; Sinclair 1999; Straubhaar 2012; Wilkinson 2016). There has also been important work on regional media esthetics and identification (Johnson 2008; Maxwell 1997), televisual genres and viewing communities (Hamburger 2005; La Pastina 2003; Martínez 2007; Mayer 2003; Moran 2011; Nogueira Joyce 2012), and Latinx stardom,

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typecasting, and the sociocultural dynamics of fandom (Beltrán 2009; Ramírez Berg 2002; Negrón-Muntaner 2004; Vargas 2012) by way of a questioning of gendered constructions and a consideration of performative agency as a pathway to transforming ethnocultural power structures and patterns of discrimination. Additional studies have paid attention to the political effectivity of SL media (Amaya 2013; Costanza-Chock 2014; Perlman 2016; Ramos 2005), especially in the wake of a general trend toward media conservatism (since the 1996 communications act), neoliberal ownership policies, and socially exclusionary state and federal policies toward Latinxs.39 It is my hope that this book will contribute to these efforts, as well as the growing literature on urban public culture, Latinx media reception studies, and contextually situated ethnic media analysis. It adds to the chorus for the need to bridge the gap between industry level analysis (the political economics of television production and exports) and community level analysis where focus groups with nationally-, age-, and gender-­ specific populations have been conducted. Concomitantly, I have aimed to explore the perceived gap between what is known as “reception studies” and “ethnographic/consumption studies,” or what is essentially the gap between “a detailed analysis of the moment of textual interpretation” and an “exploration of the ways in which media goods are rendered meaningful insofar as they are positioned in a particular type of place within the home, the domestic timetable, the family’s communication ecology” (Press and Livingstone 2006, 180–181). However, I have chosen to examine media consumption not within the home, but rather in public-­ private spaces as discussed in Chap. 2. It is rarely the case that the analysis of these media takes place within a hemispheric, multiethnic, or transoceanic framework. Instead, it tends to be geographically divided between the study of national media in relation to global trends, and the consideration of popular culture, media production and reception, and social trends through a U.S. Latinx lens. Most of the studies of telenovelas have been researched and written from the vantage point of the exporting countries or have combined the tracking of telenovela transmission and distribution with the textual analysis of changes in format as a result of remakes in the direction of foreign markets. By contrast, to the extent that I analyze telenovelas, it is done from within the framework of transnational transmission and Latinx reception. On the whole, general studies of global media and transnational flows have been woefully deficient in covering the realm of Latin American and

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U.S.  Latinx media production and circulation40; meanwhile, there is a need for urban studies and Chicanx-Latinx scholarship to devote more focused attention to the role of television in the shaping of the urban experience, social relations, and cultural production. This book is, in part, an attempt to diminish those shortcomings.

The Shape of the Book Rather than structure this book city by city, or chronologically, beginning with changes in Latinx geodemographics and media technology at the turn of the millennium, and ending with developments following the most recent U.S. presidential election, I have chosen to organize chapters building on the aforementioned core concepts and clusters of media-related ideas (such as “flow,” “linguistic community,” “memory,” “migrant subjectivity,” “network,” and “vector”) in tandem with encouraging a comparative framework of analysis. In each of the chapters, I will be integrating primary data analysis with textual interpretation of specific programming genres and formats, with a view to devising a meso-level analytical frame throughout within which to consider relevant events in immigration policy, urban development, broadcast programming initiatives, and the formation of a Latinx public sphere. Following a brief overview of the development of SLTV since the first satellite transmissions, Chap. 2, “Not So Niche: Innovation, Access, and Opportunity in the (Ibero) American Mediascape,” will be devoted to a working definition of SLTV and PLTV and the formation of Latinx diasporic audiences and corresponding modes of spectatorship. Attention will be given in the history of SLTV to intermedial changes and influences, the confluence of technological and socioeconomic change, changes in geographic source of programming, and the demographic impact of migratory flows. There will also be a section on research methodology. Chapter 3, “Mediating Migration, from Telenovelas to Slow Reporting,” will explore the ways in which SLTV has contributed to the formation of migrant subjectivity, and conversely, how the presence of an expanding migrant audience has led to changes in SLTV production strategy and in programming format. In particular, I will be focusing on the inscription of the migratory experience in three strands of SL and PLTV programming: transnational telenovelas, low-budget films, or churros, on late-night television, and long-form feature news stories, utilizing what I call the technique of slow reporting. Slow reporting raises the question of whether

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SLTV is now overlapping with, or serving a complementary purpose to citizen’s media, as defined in dynamic relation to alternative media (Davis 2015). The focus is on transnational texts, as encountered by Latinx diasporic viewers. This chapter will build on some of the survey data, selected media texts, and analysis presented in a previously published essay (Benamou 2009). Chapter 4, “Barrio TV and Media Enfranchisement: Producing on the Ground, Transmitting Locally in Detroit and Los Angeles,” will analyze the role of SLTV media within the urban public sphere, with an emphasis on the coverage of Latinx neighborhoods, celebratory events, and the immigrant rights movement. Thus, I will be exploring the relevance of the concept of television as contributing to collective ritual and mobilization in the urban public sphere. I will draw on urban histories as well as observation of SLTV crews at work in Southwest Detroit and in and around Latinx neighborhoods in greater Los Angeles to consider the sociocultural effectivity of SLTV in portraying daily life “close to home,” as well as the concept of the neighborhood as a meaningful unit of sociocultural and political reference for diasporic Latinxs (along with other ethnic groups). I attempt to bring into relief the formation of a public-private sphere (in marked distinction to the blurring of private and public boundaries as a constitutive component of neoliberalism), the documentation of collective civic action, and the representation of the barrio as synecdoche for ethnic community in local media flows. Data from surveys and interviews with media professionals and urban planners will be incorporated into this chapter. Survey results are contextualized and presented in a fashion that permits a comparison between cities. Chapter 5, “Redefining Latinidad: Latinxs in Miami and Madrid and Brazilian Identity in Diasporic Perspective,” will explore the formation of Latinx identity, or Latinidad, from the perspective of diasporic viewers in Miami, Brazilian viewers in Los Angeles, and Latinx diasporic viewers in Madrid. The chapter opens with a brief consideration of approaches to Latinx nomenclature, highlighting the preferences and points of disagreement among various scholars, followed by the reception of SLTV in Miami across national groupings and urban geography. Areas of criticism of SLTV, especially among Cuban-American viewers, will be revealed. As well, the use of media by viewers to help forge and participate within transnational social fields (Levitt and Glick Schiller 2007) will be considered. This will be followed by an exposition and analysis of PLTV transmission and Brazilian diasporic (Brazuca) consumption of PLTV, SLTV,

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and ELTV in Los Angeles. A final section will discuss Madrid as a destination for Latin American migrants and their needs as viewers, as well as Madrid as a locus for the formation of a pan-Latinx diasporic public sphere in Europe. The mode of technological access to SLTV and PLTV, opportunities for sociocultural and political participation, and challenges confronted by the 1.5 and second generation of diasporic viewers as well as the impact of the cultural and social service initiatives of the Centros de Participación e Integración (Centers for Participation and Integration, CEPIs) of the Madrid Autonomous Community will be factored into the analysis of Latinx viewership and local media flows. Central to this chapter’s explorations will be the consideration of what difference language can make in defining the reach and popularity of SLTV? What emerging forms of Latinx sociocultural identification should media scholars be paying more attention to? How have global Lusophone media responded logistically and discursively to the presence of a growing Brazuca market? Data from focus groups in Miami and Madrid, as well as survey data are presented in this chapter. Chapter 6, “The Permutations of Affect, Collectivized: Television as Ritual and Repository of Memory” takes the study of how SLTV has been converted into a space for mourning and interlatinx solidarity as the basis for considering the affective dimensions of SLTV: its role as a spawning ground for memory texts and a channel for transborder communication. The chapter begins by focusing on the mediated public wake and funeral of the late Mexican composer and performing artist Juan Gabriel and contrasts this with the coverage of the funeral of vocalist Vicente Fernández and the tragic disappearance of forty-three students from the town of Ayotzinapa. The chapter will explore two facets of what can be termed “unregulated” affect: the funeral as public spectacle and more private uses of television as sounding board and a pathway to sanctuary. A concluding chapter will reflect on some of the challenges facing and innovations introduced by SLTV in the present conjuncture. Meaningful interventions in the areas of immigration rights and public health will be explored. Consideration will be given to the problem of colorism in Latinx broadcast media, as well as to the spaces opened by SLTV for bilingual broadcast communications, taking viewer opinions into account. I will also consider emerging practices that are reshaping the comparison and working relationship between ELTV and SLTV. A final comparison will be made among the cities where I conducted my research and their respective role in the expansion of SLTV and PLTV.

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An appendix will contain a composite chronology of SLTV events, indicating changes in immigration policy, community mobilization, technological innovation, and changes in SLTV ownership.

Notes 1. Launched by the A.C. Nielsen company in the early 1950s, sweeps are four-­week stretches scheduled four times a year during which television viewing data is collected in 210 television markets across the United States; local advertising rates are often based on this data; see Rocha (2004); see also, for example, Univisión Communications (2017). 2. By “some form,” I am referring to the use of Spanish along a spectrum from popular hybrid forms (such as Spanglish) and “heritage forms” to the desire to be able to utilize Spanish professionally through formal study at academic institutions. This is consistent with findings cited in the “executive summary” of a Nielsen report on the use of digital technology by U.S. Latinxs; see de Armas and McCaskill (2018, 3). 3. In 2018, Univision garnered 13 nominations for the 39th Annual News and Documentary Emmy® Awards, Telemundo received 5, and CNN Español 2; the awards ceremony was co-hosted by Ana Cabrera (CNN), and Univisión’s Teresa Rodríguez was awarded an Emmy for her work with the weekly Aquí y Ahora; The National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences, press releases 26 July, 2018 and 1 October, 2018. Because of its increasing significance from a market standpoint, SLTV has received mention for several decades in the trade press, notably Broadcasting and Cable, and less consistently, in Variety. For more on the discursive and political economic marginalization of Spanish-language television in the United States, see Amaya (2011). The discursive marginalization of Spanish-language media has a lengthy history in the Anglophone United States, as illustrated by Kirsten Silva Gruesz in relation to the early nineteenth-century press; Silva Gruesz (2017). 4. An example of this phenomenon is the decision to move a series of episodes on NCIS to Mexico and create a Mexican love interest (a Mexican Justice Department official) for heroine Abby Sciuto (Pauley Perrette) during May sweeps, 2010; Keck (2010). 5. 2017 Latino Media Awards and Gala, NALIP Media Summit, 24 June 2017, Los Angeles, California. 6. For the history of Latinx underrepresentation in U.S. media, see also the very informative chapters in Noriega (2000b). For Academy membership, which saw a 313% increase from 2015 to 2017, see Annual Report (2017).

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7. Elizabeth Méndez Berry, “Latino Media Fund,” unpublished report on funding for Latino media, 2012, cited in Dávila (2014, 10). 8. The GAO audit utilized 2014–2019 data from the American Community Survey Public Use Microdata Sample, provided by the U.S. Census Bureau as well as 2014–2018 data from Employer Information Reports provided by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (Ibid.). 9. This territory includes Puerto Rico, which receives signals from various Anglophone and Hispanophone sources, and is host to a range of SLTV crews and to Telemundo network, which together with Univisión takes up the lion’s share of the U.S. Hispanic media market and its advertisers. 10. On this point, see Kreutzberger (2001, 81). 11. For Latinx radio consumption, see Casillas (2014, 145); for film and television, see Pachón et al. (2000), and Martínez (2021). 12. In 2016, much was made, for example, of vicepresidential hopeful Senator Tim Kaine’s (D-VA) fluency in Spanish, in contrast to Joaquín Castro (D-TX), former Secretary of HUD under President Obama, who is English dominant, and therefore had more difficulty addressing SLTV audiences directly. 13. For a more focused, selective definition based on other criteria, see Saskia Sassen, The Global City: New York, London, Tokyo (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001). 14. My choice of the term “layered” is a reference to the fact that Latinx migration to all of these cities is nothing new; however, the source, rationale, and conditions of migration may have changed, as have residential patterns, to some extent. Within the United States, I found that there has been some migration among the three cities and New York, especially for the Detroit Latinx community, who, if recently arrived often had traveled there from another city. 15. Alejandro Portes and Rubén G. Rumbaut define ethnic enclaves as “areas of concentrated immigrant entrepreneurship;” for further discussion, see Portes and Rumbaut (2014, 40–43), see also 122–132; see also Shorris (1992, 244–258, 318–19). 16. For issues of “psychic insecurity” and other qualitative dimensions of the immigrant experience in Miami, including intergroup discrimination, see Aranda et al. (2014, 79–109, 199–241). These experiences apply to other urban áreas as well. 17. See the description of news coverage of the newspapers Noticias del Mundo, La Opinión, El Diario-La Prensa, El Diario de las Américas, and El Miami Herald in Veciana-Suarez (1987, 9–41). 18. For examples of these older technologies, see Knauer (2009), scenes of translocal communication in Alex Rivera’s The Sixth Section (speaker

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phone) and Sleep Dealer (interception, and Videorola), and Tânia Cypriano’s Grandma Has a Video Camera (homemade video letters). 19. By this I mean that migrant viewers become re-inscribed in processes of globalization following international migration; many transnational migrants are coming from a situation that is directly or indirectly impacted by processes of globalization in their home socioeconomies, especially in Mexico and Central America, in some Andean nations, and also in Cuba and Venezuela. Likewise, Spanish emigrants who return home and interact with the Latinx diasporic community participate in ongoing global relationships of trade, labor export, and cultural expression. The emigration of Spaniards to the Americas—especially to Argentina, Mexico, and the United States—increased at the turn of the new millennium. For the differential treatment of migrants in comparative urban spheres, see the growing literature on sanctuary cities, as well as the disparities in the granting of asylum to refugees of various nationalities in cities such as Atlanta, Orlando, and New York, discussed in Garcia (2019, 23–24). 20. Urban-level studies of the digital divide, such as those carried out by the Long Beach Media Collaborative (“Strengthening the Signal”) and Hernán Galperín and François Bar (“Connected Cities and Inclusive Growth”), have yielded deeper insight into geodemographic differences in media use than what national-level, aggregated statistics might suggest. Timothy Havens and Amanda D. Lotz have rightly expressed skepticism regarding the fulfillment of media “mandates” by broadband providers; Havens and Lotz (2012, 27–28). 21. On the subject of television reception in these areas, see Lozano (1996). 22. For Cafe con Aroma de Mujer, see Venegas (1998); for a compelling textual analysis of the adaptation of Yo Soy Betty la Fea, see Donohue (2011). 23. While broadcasting organizations get a lot of their audience information from Nielsen Communications polling, SLTV broadcasters have also developed their own approaches to gathering and updating their metrics. 24. Per the FCC, networks may not own more than two television stations in a single market; for details on how this affected SLTV sales and mergers, see Perlman (2016, 170). 25. For an insightful discussion of regional specificity and placemaking in ELTV, albeit pursued with a different thematic focus and methodological approach, see Johnson (2008). 26. This is a complex point and there are a number of factors that fuel what I am calling “interethnic awareness,” which will be discussed further in Chaps. 4 and 5. Miami has had the lion’s share of large, successful, Latinx-­ owned businesses; according to Hispanic Business Magazine in 1988, Miami-Dade had five of the ten largest Latinx businesses, see Shorris

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(1992, 322). In Detroit, many of the Latinx-owned businesses are what Shorris has called “shoebox businesses.” 27. See Southern Poverty Law Center (2018), which shows the number of groups as of 2017 at over 850 nationwide. 28. The perception of ELTV as inadequately addressing immigration issues and the need for SLTV to cover local issues have actually translated into changes in strategy for SLTV; see statements by Ron Gordon, president of Telemundo Television Station Group, in Morabito (2011). 29. Cultural recognition, as I use it here, is distinct from cultural proximity, which was formulated by Joseph Straubhaar to explain the success of national, as compared to imported television in Latin America; see Straubhaar (1991). 30. As Allison Perlman is careful to observe, “advocacy” concerns “efforts to reform the media through official channels” while “activism,” which involves “actions that exert external pressure on the media industries;” Perlman (2016, 10). 31. In a context of restrictive immigration policy, emancipation can take several forms. For those who have been victims of human trafficking, emancipation is of course just one critical step on the long, uncertain path to enfranchisement. 32. These ideas are strengthened by the role of many Catholic churches in providing sanctuary to unauthorized migrants. 33. There are a few exceptions, see Wortham (2013) and Zambrano Villareal (2017). 34. Both authors have expressed how, in recent processes of immigration and emigration, and in the face of actual barriers to “equal citizenship” as compared to others in the host or sending societies, some migrants have chosen to express themselves through acts of “informal citizenship;” see Coutin (2000, 586–587), and Sassen (2005, 85–86). 35. The hybridization of public and private is a core theme of this study and will be addressed further in Chaps. 2 and 4. I am using this term differently than John Caldwell, who uses it to refer to the ways in which media industries self-consciously bring the “private” out into the public for the purposes of self-promotion or create intermediate spaces where media professionals can interact; see Caldwell (2004, 171). 36. Unlike films and print media, which allow the consumption of a discrete text or the perusal, according to individual interest, of articles in an idiosyncratic sequence, respectively, television programs and other broadcast components (such as PSAs) are consumed, in a sequence or a “planned flow,” which, according to cultural historian and theorist Raymond Williams, is “perhaps the characteristic of broadcasting, simultaneously as a technology and as a cultural form;” Williams (1990, 86).

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37. Albert Moran has commented on how televisual flow may represent both “movement” or “activity” and “an entity or content that undergoes such a displacement;” Moran (2009, 13). 38. This term was introduced by John Langer, cited in Moores (2004, 26). 39. For the impact of media deregulation on communities of color, see Perlman (2016, 96–122 and 159–177). 40. Examples of studies that theorize globalization and do not take Latin America or the Latinx Diaspora into account are Morley and Robins (1995), Crane et al. (2002), and Parks and Kumar (2003). The lack of a more active conversation between Latin American, and European, Asian, and Middle Eastern scholarship on this topic is worthy of a study from the perspective of a “sociology of knowledge.”

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García Canclini, Néstor. 1982. Consumidores y Ciudadanos: Conflictos multiculturales de la globalización. Havana: Casa de las Américas. ———. 2002. Culturas Populares en el Capitalismo. Mexico City: Grijalbo. Goldman, Ilene. 1998. “Amor in the Afternoon: Latino Lovers on ABC Daytime Soap Operas.” Spectator 19 (1, Fall/Winter): 47–57. Hall, Stuart. 1981. “Encoding/decoding.” In Culture, Media, Language, edited by Stuart Hall, Dorothy Hobson, Andrew Lowe, and Paul Willis, 128–38. Birmingham: Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies; London: Hutchinson and Co. Hamburger, Esther. 2005. O Brasil Antenado: A Sociedade da Novela. Rio de Janeiro: Jorge Zahar. Havens, Timothy, and Amanda D. Lotz. 2012. Understanding Media Industries. New York: Oxford University Press. Havens, Timothy, Amanda D.  Lotz, and Serra Tinic. 2009. “Critical Media Industry Studies: A Research Approach.”  Communication, Culture, and Critique 2: 234–253. Herzog, Lawrence A. 2010. Return to the Center: Culture, Public Space, and City Building in a Global Era. Austin: University of Texas Press. Johnson, Victoria E. 2008. Heartland TV: Primetime Television and the Struggle for U.S. Identity. New York: New York University Press. Keck, William. 2010. “Keck’s Exclusives: NCIS: Mexico?.” TV Guide (May 3–9): 12. Khandekar, Aalok, and Grant Jun Otsuki. 2011. “Remediation and Scaling: The Making of ‘Global’ Identities.” In Global Media, Culture, and Identity: Theory, Cases, and Approaches, ed. Rohit Chopra and Radhika Gajjala. New  York: Routledge. Knauer, Lisa Maya. 2009. “Audiovisual Remittances and Transnational Subjectivities.” In Cuba in the Special Period: Culture and Ideology in the 1990s, ed. Ariana Hernández Reguant. New York: Palgrave-Macmillan. Kraidy, Marwan. 2010. “Hybridity in Cultural Globalization.” In International Communication: A Reader, ed. Daya Kishan Thussu, 434–451. London: Routledge. Kreutzberger, Mario. 2001. Don Francisco: Entre la Espada y la TV. Mexico City: Editorial Grijalbo. La Pastina, Antonio C. 2003. “’Now That You’re Going Home, Are You Going to Write about the Natives You Studied?’: Telenovela Reception, Adultery, and the Dilemmas of Ethnographic Practice.” In Global Media Studies: Ethnographic Perspectives, ed. Patrick D.  Murphy and Marwan M.  Kraidy, 125–146. New York: Routledge. Levitt, Peggy, and Nina Glick Schiller. 2007. “Conceptualizing Simultaneity: A Transnational Social Field Perspective on Society.” In Sociology of Diaspora: A Reader, ed. Ajaya Kumarsahoo and Brij Maharaj, 156–193. Jaipur: Rowat.

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Long Beach Media Collaborative. 2017. Strengthening the Signal. http://longbeachmc.org/category/strengthening-­the-­signal/. Lozano, José Carlos. 1996. “Media Reception on the Mexican Border with the United States.” In Mass Media and Free Trade: NAFTA and the Cultural Industries, ed. Emile G. McAnany and Kenton T. Wilkinson, 157–186. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press. Malavé, Idelisse, and Esti Giordani. 2015. Latino Stats: American Hispanics by the Numbers. New York: The New Press. Malonga, Marie-France. 2007. “Les stratégies identitaires des minorités noires face à la télévision française.” In Médias, migrations et cultures transnationales, ed. Tristan Mattelart, 57–71. Brussels: De Boeck/Institut national de l’audiovisuel. Martínez, Katynka Z. 2007. “Monolingualism, Biculturalism, and Cable TV: HBO Latino and the Promise of the Multiplex.” In Cable Visions: Television Beyond Broadcasting, ed. Sarah Banet-Weiser, Cynthia Chris, and Anthony Freitas, 194–214. New York: New York University Press. Martínez, Fidel. 2021. “Driving the Box Office. And yet…” Los Angeles Times, June 14. Maxwell, Richard. 1997. “Spatial Eruptions, Global Grids: Regionalist TV in Spain and the Dialectics of Identity Politics.” In Refiguring Spain: Cinema/ Media/Representation, 260–283. Durham: Duke University Press. Mayer, Vicki. 2003. “Living Telenovelas/Telenovelizing Life: Mexican American Girls’ Identities and Transnational Telenovelas.” Journal of Communication 53 (3): 479–495. Molina-Guzmán, Isabel. 2018. Latinas and Latinos on TV: Colorblind Comedy in the Post-Racial Network Era. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. Moores, Shaun. 2004. “The Doubling of Place: Electronic Media, Time-Space Arrangements, and Social Relationships.” In Mediaspace: Place, Scale, and Culture in a Media Age, ed. Nick Couldry and Anna McCarthy. New  York: Routledge. Morabito, Andrea. 2011. “Telemundo’s Gordon: NBCU ‘Extremely Committed’ to Local News.” Broadcasting and Cable 26 September: 24. Moran, Albert. 2009. New Flows in Global TV. London: Intellect. Moran, Kristin C. 2011. Listening to Latina/o Youth: Television Consumption within Families. New York: Peter Lang. Morely, David. 2000. Home Territories: Media, Mobility, and Identity. London: Routledge. Morley, David, and Kevin Robins. 1995. Spaces of Identity: Global Media, Electronic Landscapes and Cultural Boundaries. New York: Routledge. Naficy, Hamid. 1993. The Making of Exilic Cultures: Iranian Television in Los Angeles. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Negrón-Muntaner, Frances. 2004. Boricua Pop: Puerto Ricans and the Latinization of American Culture. New York: New York University Press.

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———. 2014. “The Gang’s Not All Here: The State of Latinos in Contemporary U.S.  Media.” In Contemporary Latina/o Media: Production, Circulation, Politics, ed. Arlene Dávila and Yeidy M. Rivero, 103–124. New York: New York University Press. Nogueira Joyce. 2012. Brazilian Telenovelas and the Myth of Racial Democracy. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. Noriega, Chon A. 2000a. Shot in America: Television, the State, and the Rise of Chicano Cinema. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. ———., ed. 2000b. The Future of Latino Independent Media: A NALIP Sourcebook. Los Angeles, CA: UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center. Oktay, Julianne S. 2012. Grounded Theory. New York: Oxford University Press. Oren, Tasha. 2012. “Reiterational Texts and Global Imagination, Television Strikes Back.” In Global Television Formats, Understanding Television Across Borders, ed. Tasha Oren and Sharon Shahaf, 366–381. New York: Routledge. Pachón, Harry P., Louis DeSipio, Rodolfo O. de la Garza, and Chon A. Noriega. 2000. “Missing in Action: Latinos in and Out of Hollywood.” In The Future of Latino Independent Media: A NALIP Sourcebook, ed. Chon A. Noriega, 20–29. Los Angeles: UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center. Parks, Lisa, and Shanti Kumar, eds. 2003. Planet TV: A Global Television Reader. New York: New York University Press. Pêcheux, Michel. 1988. “Discourse: Structure or Event?” Trans. Warren Montag, Marie-Germaine Pêcheux, and Denise Guback. In Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, ed. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press. Perlman, Allison. 2016. Public Interests: Media Advocacy and Struggles Over U.S. Television. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Piñón, Juan. 2013. “Televisión Hispana en Estados Unidos: Una Industria Que Crece y se Diversifica.” In In Zapping TV: El Paisaje de la Tele Latina, edited by Omar Rincón, 71–81. Bogotá: Friedrich Ebert Stiftung, FES Comunicación. ———. 2014. In “Corporate Transnationalism: The U.S.  Hispanic and Latin American Television Industries.” In Contemporary Latina/o Media: Production, Circulation, Politics, ed. Arlene Dávila and Yeidy M. Rivero, 21–43. New York: New York University Press. Plantinga, Carl. 1999. “The Scene of Empathy and the Human Face on Film.” In Passionate Views: Film, Cognition, and Emotion, ed. Carl Plantinga and Greg M. Smith, 239–255. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Portes, Alejandro, and Rubén G.  Rumbaut. 2014. Immigrant America, A Portrait. 4th ed. Berkeley: University of California Press. Porto, Mauro. 2012. Media Power and Democratization in Brazil: TV Globo and the Dilemmas of Political Accountability. New York: Routledge. Press, Andrea, and Sonia Livingstone. 2006. “Taking Audience Research into the Age of New Media: Old Problems and New Challenges.” In Questions of

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Method in Cultural Studies, ed. Mimi White and James Schwoch. New York: Blackwell Publishing. Ramírez Berg, Charles. 2002. Latino Images in Film: Stereotypes, Subversion, and Resistance. Austin: University of Texas Press. Ramos, Jorge. 2005. La Ola Latina: Cómo los Hispanos Están Transformando la Política en los Estados Unidos. New York: Raya/Harper Collins. Rêgo, Cacilda M. 2011. “From Humble Beginnings to International Prominence: The History and Development of Brazilian Telenovelas.” In Soap Operas and Telenovelas in the Digital Age: Global Industries and New Audiences, ed. Diana I. Ríos and Mari Castañeda. New York: Peter Lang. Retis, Jessica. 2007. Mass Media and Migration in Spain, Emergence and Consolidation of the New Media of the Latin American Diaspora. Unpublished Research Paper, English Translation, July 30. Rivero, Yeidy. 2005. Tuning Out Blackness: Race and Nation in the History of Puerto Rican Television. Durham: Duke University Press. Rocha, Sean. 2004. “How Does Sweeps Week Work?” Slate, February 16. Posted 6:50 p.m. http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/ explainer/2004/02/how_does_sweeps_week_work.html. Rudolph, Ileane. 2019. CBS Evening News Gets a Revamp. TV Guide Magazine (July 22–August 4): 2-3. Saldaña-Portillo, María Josefina. 2005. “In the Shadow of NAFTA: Y tu mamá también Revisits the National Allegory of Mexican Sovereignty.” American Quarterly Special Issue: “Legal Borderlands: Law and the Construction of American Borders, ed. Mary L.  Dudziak and Leti Volpp 57 (1, September): 751–777. Santa Ana, Otto, Celeste Gómez, Marco Juárez, Kimberly Cerón, Magaly Reséndez, John Hernández, Oscar Gaytan, and Yuina Hirose. 2020. “‘Druggies Drug Dealers Rapists and Killers:’ The President’s Verbal Animus Against Immigrants.” Aztlán 45 (2, Fall): 15–52. Sassen, Saskia. 2001. The Global City: New York, London, Tokyo. 2nd ed. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. ———. 2005. “The Repositioning of Citizenship and Alienage: Emergent Subjects and Spaces for Politics.” Globalizations 2 (1): 79–94. “Share of Roles by Race, Broadcast Scripted Shows, 2018-19 Season.” 2020. UCLA Hollywood Diversity Report. UCLA College of Social Sciences. October 21. https://ucla.app.box.com/s/ahmh7l2ycb013ap6bvl8m1lzxs0czqj7/ file/732709734828. Accessed 18 June 2021. Shorris, Earl. 1992. Latinos: A Biography of the People. New York: Norton. Silva Gruesz, Kirsten. 2017. Past Americana. Lecture Given at the “Scale” Conference, English Institute, University of California-Irvine, October 7. Silverman, Robert Mark, and Kelly L.  Patterson. 2015. Qualitative Research Methods for Community Development. New York: Routledge.

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Sinclair, John. 1999. Latin American Television: A Global View. New York: Oxford University Press. ———. 2005. “International Television Channels in the Latin American Audiovisual Space.” In Transnational Television Worldwide: Towards a New Media Order, ed. Jean K. Chalaby, 196–215. London: I.B. Tauris. Sleep Dealer. 2008. Directed by Alex Rivera. Maya Entertainment. Southern Poverty Law Center. 2018. “Hate Groups 1999–2017.” Diagram in Intelligence Report 164 (Spring): 37. Straubhaar, Joseph. 1991. “Beyond Media Imperialism: Asymmetrical Interdependence and Cultural Proximity.”Critical Studies in Mass Communication 8: 39–59. ———. 2012. “Telenovelas in Brazil: From Traveling Scripts to a Genre and Proto-­ Format both National and Transnational.” In Global Television Formats: Understanding Television Across Borders, ed. Tasha Oren and Sharon Shahaf, 148–177. New York: Routledge. The Sixth Section. 2003. Directed and produced by Alex Rivera. Tomlinson, John. 2013. Globalization and Culture. New York: Polity Press. Univisión Communications. 2017. Univisión Is No. 2 for the Entire Week. Press release. July 25. https://corporate.univision.com/corporate/press/2017/07/25/ univision-­no-­2-­entire-­week-­beating-­abc-­cbs-­fox-­among-­adults-­18-­34/. Valle, Victor M., and Rodolfo D. Torres. 2000. Latino Metropolis. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Vargas, Deborah R. 2012. Dissonant Divas in Chicana Music, The Limits of La Onda. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Veciana-Suarez, Ana. 1987. Hispanic Media U.S.A.: A Narrative Guide to Print and Electronic Hispanic News Media in the United States. Washington, DC: The Media Institute. Venegas, Cristina. 1998. “Land as Memory in the Transnational Telenovela.” Spectator 19 (1, Fall/Winter): 63–71. Wilkinson, Kenton T. 2016. Spanish-language Television in the United States: Fifty Years of Development. New York: Routledge. Williams, Raymond. 1989. “Drama in a Dramatized Society.” In Raymond Williams on Television, Selected Writings, ed. Alan O’Connor. London: Routledge. ———. 1990. Television, Technology and Cultural Form. Ed. Ederyn Williams, 2nd ed. New York: Routledge. Wortham, Erica. 2013. Indigenous Media in Mexico. Durham: Duke University Press. Young, Richard, and Amanda Holmes, eds. 2010. Cultures of the City: Mediating Identities in Urban Latin/o America. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press. Zambrano Villareal, Gabriela. 2017. Indigenous Media and Political Imaginaries in Contemporary Bolivia. Lincoln: Nebraska University Press.

CHAPTER 2

Not So Niche: Innovation, Access, and Opportunity in the (Ibero) American Mediascape

The nation-state continues to produce ‘standard’ maps of territory, administrative units, resources and population, but the cultural logic of neoliberal multiculturalism adds to the kinds of maps produced. —Sarah A. Radcliffe (2010, 299)

In this chapter, I will briefly trace the development of SLTV and its Lusophone counterpart, PLTV, as “media among media,” parallel to trends in Latinx migration, from the early years of transnational transmission to the recent present. Placing SLTV in contextual, historical perspective will help to fortify the conceptual toolkit and generate heuristic questions that will guide the analysis in the chapters to follow. In tracing this history, I will not be reiterating the findings of the excellent scholarship on the political economy of Latin American television (although I will certainly be drawing on them for context), as highlighting those aspects of SLTV and PLTV as encountered by, and meaningful to, Latinx diasporic communities in the United States and Spain. Following this overview, and a working definition of SLTV and PLTV, I will make some observations concerning diasporic spectatorship, prior to delineating the remaining core concepts and methodologies utilized in the research for this book. The opening sequence of the short, neorealist narrative film, Después del Terremoto (After the Earthquake, 1979)1 provides special insight into the dynamics of media usage and access for U.S. Latinxs in the mid to late

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twentieth century. In this sequence, a young Nicaraguan woman, Irene, takes a bus in San Francisco to an appliance store, where, after perusing a row of chattering television sets, she makes a forty-dollar deposit on a color TV. When her friend Louisa Amanda questions the practicality of her purchase (in English), “nobody needs a color tv, especially you, you work twelve hours a day, what are you going to do, carry it in your pocket and watch it while you clean?”—Irene retorts (in English), “you don’t understand, I never had a TV set!” In this brief exchange, the television set is semantically aligned with Anglophone culture and society, and Irene proffers the purchase as a sign that her hard-earned savings just might bring the American Dream within vicarious, if not actual, reach. Up to this moment, Irene has relied mainly on a local Spanish-language radio station for her daily media consumption [boleros (romantic ballads) and the occasional news bulletin] on a small transistor, while direct communication with her homeland appears limited to a few saved newspaper clippings, letters, and photographic slides projected at a family gathering by her newly exiled boyfriend, Julio.2 Irene presents her purchase of this television set—a durable good, with financing approved by an Anglo-American salesman—to Julio in the film’s last scene as a sign that since they last parted in Nicaragua, she has gained autonomy through her decision-­ making power as a self-supporting woman, that she is superándose (getting ahead). Whereas Louisa Amanda has expressed a practical concern—there might be more rewarding ways for Irene to spend her leisure time, such as evening classes: Julio objects to the purchase as a sign of blind materialism and a glaring lack of concern for the impoverished families that he and Irene have left behind in Nicaragua. The television set thus forms another node in the emergent ideological battleground between them, linking transnational gender and cultural politics to the existential dilemmas posed by exile, including strategies from afar to sustain meaningful community engagement.3 What indeed could the television do for Irene and her compatriots in the United States? Or for the millions facing the devastation of an earthquake and repressive government back home? Isn’t television just another, albeit more benign, instrument of American empire? This scene also raises the question of whether a gendered relationship to the apparatus is sufficient to explain Irene’s experience of televisual consumption in the semi-public environment of the appliance store.4 As a destination for Latin American migrants, in the late 1970s (the time frame of After the Earthquake), San Francisco’s Mission District still

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harbored remnants (Irene’s aunts’ tasty tamales, devotion to the Catholic saint San Antonio) of the life that Irene and Julio left behind in Nicaragua while providing a liminal space in which young migrants and U.S. Latinx citizens could shape an uncertain bicultural future. Even as Irene and others in her community were being powerfully interpellated as potential consumers by U.S. corporate advertising on national network television, places like the Mission remained largely outside its purview. The difference between the various Spanish-language media that Irene consumed and English-language television was not simply one of scale, technological advance, or of sphere of social interaction; it consisted of mode of address, cultural expression, and potentially, modes of sociopolitical engagement, in addition to the degree of recognition for diversity within the local population. In the film, Irene begins to negotiate the limits and opportunities afforded by two models of citizen-subjectivity: one, constituted through family and community ties built through informal communication networks and participation in local events (such as doña Mercedes’ birthday party), and the other, through consumption of a mass medium that, while it appears indifferent to the interests, needs, and experiences of Nicaraguan migrants, could connect them to power structures, public debate, modern commodities, and mainstream popular culture in a multi-generic flow that coursed through the U.S. as adoptive nation-state. As Néstor García-­ Canclini has observed, “to consume is to participate in an arena of competing claims for what society produces and the modes of usage [of that social product]” (García Canclini 1995, 44).5 In true neorealist fashion, Portillo and Serrano set their characters free before the end of the film, hence, in addition to the fate of Irene and Julio’s romantic relationship, we are left to ponder how Irene might choose to use this new medium, what claims she may wish to make as a hardworking Nicaraguan woman in Anglo-American society? There is, of course, a “fourth element” missing from this media equation, one that emerged in the shape-shifting interstitial space formed between commercial and public Anglophone national television and Spanish-language community-based media, and that, after fits and starts, began transmitting live to U.S.  Latinx communities in the mid-1970s: Spanish-language television (SLTV) via satellite, through the new Spanish International Network, thereby strengthening the possibility of advertising to a national “Hispanic” market (Dávila 2001, 62). Notwithstanding its commercial beginnings and corporate domination of its later development, this medium provided an important bridge between the two models

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of citizen-subjectivity in the U.S. context. As early as 1961, the Telesistema Mexicano [(TSM), which in 1973 would form the basis for Televisa] began transmitting programming to the United States through flagship station KWEX Channel 14  in San Antonio, Texas, and then in 1962, through KMEX Channel 34 of Los Angeles, California as part of the Spanish International Broadcasting Corporation (SIBC), which was co-­ owned by TSM’s chief executive Emilio Azcárraga Vidaurreta (Gutiérrez and Reina Schement 1984, 244-45; see also Castellot 1999, 130-31).6 In 1964, these stations carried a special broadcast of a bilateral meeting of U.S. President Lyndon B. Johnson and Mexican President Adolfo López Mateos in Los Angeles and Palm Springs, California, and in 1968, Telesistema Mexicano co-sponsored a Mexican Television Festival on San Francisco’s KTVU-Channel 2 (Castellot 1999, 143 and 162-63, respectively).7 Hispanophone viewers with newer TV sets or UHF converters could tune into these stations on UHF (Gutiérrez and Reina Schement 1984, 246, 251; Wilkinson 2016, 42-43, 65-67). In 1976, Spanish International Network (SIN, created by Azcárraga in 1961) launched satellite transmission of programming between Mexico and these U.S.-based stations (Gutiérrez and Jorge 1984, 244),8 the first commercial network to use this technology in the United States. For a time, programming had been sent from Mexico to KMEX and KWEX on videotape, then bicycled to outlying stations on a station-by-station basis (Gutiérrez and Jorge 1984, 245): Spanish-Language (SL) stations had yet to be linked to a U.S.-based broadcasting network that could generate and transmit its own programming to Hispanophone viewers located in different cities simultaneously. Local programming produced by these stations was limited to news reporting and public affairs talk shows and PSAs, while the bulk of news feeds, sports events (soccer and boxing), and entertainment programming (primarily telenovelas and shows de auditorio, or variety shows)9 was imported from affiliated networks (namely Televisa) in Latin America. For many Latinxs in the United States in the 1970s, television continued to represent a gateway into the “American way of life:” it was a means of instructing one’s children in English (via cartoons and PBS programming), a pathway to understanding American politics, discovering marketplace discounts, and of peeking, via sitcoms, into the households of diverse middle- and working-class Anglophone families. For women who became domestic workers after migrating, the realities of these households could be compared against the televisual images they had seen prior to leaving their place of origin. An excellent example of this reckoning is provided in

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Anayansi Prado’s documentary, Maid in America (2005), which portrays the struggle of domestic workers from Mexico and Central America living and working in Los Angeles, as well as in the fictional Bajo la Misma Luna (2010), which follows a young Mexican migrant (Kate del Castillo) along her work itinerary from East Los Angeles to Beverly Hills. Less than a decade later, viewers in the same San Francisco neighborhood would find more Spanish-language options on both public and commercial television, which complemented, and to a meaningful extent partially replaced, the specific communication functions associated with the “traditional” SL media that Irene consumed, such as newspapers and radio. This U.S.-based medium could reach 90% of U.S. Latinxs viewers first, by way of SIN affiliates in 1983 (Gutiérrez and Reina Schement 251),10 and then via NetSpan, which in the mid-1980s was comprised of WNJU Channel 47 in Linden, New Jersey, KSTS Channel 48 in San José, California, KVEA Channel 52 in Los Angeles, and WSCV Channel 51 in Miami (NetSpan,  Telemundo 2017). By the late 1980s, each of these transcontinental networks was consolidated into Univisión and Telemundo networks, respectively, with additional stations added in the southwestern and midwestern regions. The transnational medium benefited greatly from, and helped to fuel, the rising purchasing power of U.S.  Latinxs: from around $90 million in 1982 to nearly $150 million in 1994.11 The growth of SLTV was also helped by an exponential growth in Hispanic-­ owned small businesses—81%—between 1982 and 1987 (Wilkinson 2016: 117) which provided local SLTV stations with a stable advertising base. In turn, the medium’s growth in the United States benefited the global visibility of Latin American musical culture and sports, followed closely, but not as prominently, by politics. By 1996, the Televisa Group, which supplied most of the programming to Univisión, ranked 41st out of the fifty most lucrative international entertainment companies, second only in Latin America to Brazil’s TV Globo (which ranked 24th).12 A third Latin American company, Grupo Cisneros, ranking 49th, became co-owner with Televisa and Jerry Perenchio of Univisión network from 1992 to 2007 (Ford 1999: 99, and Cisneros Group of Companies 2017), demonstrating the power of transnational media partnership in the field of global communications and entertainment. The possibilities for the expansion of SLTV during this period were also boosted by the growth and concentration in national television enterprises in Latin America (the major programming source for SLTV) as consumer demand within Latin America

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rose exponentially in proportion to a per capita increase in access to television sets.13 For many years, the SLTV market inside the United States served as a secondary market for Latin American, and especially Mexican, media enterprises, and programming was distributed on the assumption that language, national identity, and familiar markers of regional Latinoamerican culture within televisual discourse would be sufficient to attract and hold the attention of the audience (cf. Rodríguez 1999). Despite the culturally “secondary” status of the Latinx market in relation to sending countries, however, the growing purchasing power of U.S.-based Latinxs meant that the latter began to drive the development of national television for Latin Americans inside home countries.14 In other words, while the exportation of programming in general resulted in the early “globalization” of Latin American programming, certain types of media globalization occurred thanks to Latinx diasporic viewing communities, including the travel of talent to Miami for live talk show appearances, the participation of popular telenovela stars in local community events, the choice of recording locations in the United States for fictional programming, and the conversion of Miami, Florida into a hemispheric production hub in the early 1990s. As well, casting practices for telenovelas changed by hiring actors from different national backgrounds to reflect a more pan-Latinx perspective in alignment with U.S. audiences (Dávila 2001). Eventually, these developments affected the cultural status of U.S. Latinxs in dynamic relation to Latin America and Spain. During this same period (early 1980s to mid-1990s), the self-identified Hispanic population in the United States grew from around 15 million to over 25 million people (“Hispanic Population Reaches Record 58 Million, U.S. Census,” 2017, see also Wilkinson 2016, 297) affording the U.S.based broadcasters with the audience base they needed to begin developing programming beyond the parochial confines of local newscasting and talk shows. On the one hand, as in Latin America,15 SLTV networks began creating shows slightly modeled on successful U.S. shows and formats, yet scheduled at times that did not conflict with prime time telenovelas; on the other, they were able to create new SL game and musical shows, as well as the occasional telenovela, that reduced their dependence on Latin American supplier networks (as a sign of this change, for example, the popular game show 100 Mexicanos Dijeron became 100 Latinos Dijeron, modeled after Family Feud; 100 Latinos Dijeron 2018). The 1980s wave of Latinx population growth was facilitated in part by 1) the growth of

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light manufacturing employment (in electronics as well as the garment sector) in urban areas (which soon would move across the U.S.-Mexico border and overseas), 2) authorized family reunification of migrants with residents and citizens already in the United States through the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act, and 3) new waves of migration prompted by increased hardship experienced by working and middle classes in several Latin American countries (namely Argentina, Brazil, Guatemala, and Mexico). As anthropologist Leo Chavez has observed, in countries with gaps between fertility and job growth, there is a need for immigration, and immigration often follows pathways “created by historical political and economic connections between countries” (Chavez 2011, 2-4). Compared to other industrialized countries, the United States hovers around replacement level [of fertility and jobs (Ibid.)], yet there are types of jobs for which it has been difficult in the twentieth and early twenty-first century to find labor.16 In addition to the geographical proximity of Central America and Mexico to the United States, the United States has been directly involved in their economies, and there has been increased U.S. media presence—especially in Mexico in the wake of the 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), reinforcing the creation of this pathway. SLTV access was facilitated at this time for Latinxs residing at a distance from the coasts by the acquisition of stations for SLTV use at new U.S. regional locations [especially following the arrival of Telemundo in 1987 (Wilkinson 2016: 125-26)], and by the spread of cable television following the 1984 Cable Act.17 In 1985, Televisa content became available to 348 television stations in the United States through the SIN network (Fadul et al. 1995, 84). It is important to note that, as a result of station acquisition and new immigration waves, SLTV viewership not only expanded numerically; it also became greatly diversified along ethnic, national, and gendered lines, and the industry was eventually able to take advantage of this diversity through the creation of “niche” markets for added providers, such as Azteca América and Telefutura by the turn of the twenty-first century. In addition to Mexican migrants and Cuban emigrants (leaving in response to the Mexican debt crisis and an abrupt change in Cuban government policy, respectively), the 1980s to 1990s migrant stream was made up of Central American refugees, fleeing from military and paramilitary activity in Guatemala and Honduras and the civil war in El Salvador, Colombians seeking relief from violence and economic uncertainties linked to the drug war, and South Americans, including Brazilians, moving out from under

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the burdens and shrinking opportunities associated with national debt crises. The Brazilian exodus has been movingly portrayed by independent filmmaker Tânia Cypriano in the documentary Grandma Has a Movie Camera (2006). As Arlene Dávila has observed, the diversity emanating from this wave posed a challenge for U.S.-based advertisers who had been employing a “one size fits all” model for the Hispanic market, based, on the one hand on a timeworn archetype of Hispanophone consumers as “moral and traditional,” and prioritizing “culture” over materialism (somewhat resembling Julio’s positioning), and on the other, on regionally limited marketing expertise designed mainly for Latinx consumers of Caribbean origin along the East Coast (Dávila 2001, 61-63). This marketing dilemma can be traced back to the post-World War II period when U.S. advertisers met with resistance to generic approaches to selling products in the Mexican market; as an article in one trade journal quipped, “Pedro García and mamacita would not be standardized like their Yankee brother” (Mulvey 1948, 58-60). A similar challenge would be posed for SLTV networks, headquartered in South Florida and California and broadcasting across the country: while local programming could, and still does, work to reflect urban demographics, capturing variations in language use, national origin, and ethnic identification, a new market assessment was needed beginning in the late 1980s, to craft nationally targeted programs and advertisements for an internally differentiated pan-Latinx audience. This pressure, coupled with discrepancies in SLTV ratings and coverage information from polling sources, led to the creation of the Nielsen Hispanic Television Index (NHTI), as well as intragroup (among subnationalities) hiring controversies for top SLTV management positions (see Wilkinson 2016, 132-35, 153-54, 160-62). Even today, although most performing talent, show hosts, and many news professionals are of Mexican and Mexican-American descent, reflecting the numerical and cultural predominance of Mexicans within the immigrant and U.S.-born Latinx population (Gómez et al. 2014, 51-55),18 a self-conscious effort by major SLTV networks has been made to ensure that the on-air staffing, geocultural discourse, and thematic content of nationwide SLTV programs are multi-­ accented, multi-national, and (still to a limited extent) multiethnic in composition. In particular, there has been an effort to recruit non-Cuban Hispanophone on-air talent (Puerto Ricans and Dominicans) who can speak to audiences at various U.S. destinations and are linked to different historical periods of migration. Finally, diversification had an impact on

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electoral politics as young Latinxs came of age and more Latinxs who had resided in the United States for a number of years became naturalized. Between 1986 and 2018, the number of eligible Latinx voters grew from 7.5 million to 29.1 million, or 12.8% of all eligible voters (Pew Research Center in Julián Samora Research Institute 2019, 18). Toward the end of the twentieth century, voting “blocs” of already enfranchised members of Latinx national groups began to wane and alliances across subnational groupings began to form around certain issues, such as immigration reform (González 1999, 154-172).

SLTV: A Pathway to Cultural Imperialism or Counterflow? “The crucial point is…that the United States is no longer the puppeteer of a world system of images but is only one node of a complex transnational construction of imaginary landscapes.”—Arjun Appadurai19 As Brunner and Catalán observed in the mid-1990s, the “function [of television] has an enormous reach…as does its role in the configuration of people’s daily lives, the consumption of goods and services advertised through this medium, and in the globalization of a new mass visual culture of North American and transnational origin” (Brunner and Catalán 1995: 20). Their emphasis as Latin American scholars on the global circulation of North American programming stems from the increased heft during that decade of U.S.-sourced programming within Latin American countries (in 1993, e.g., 56% of all TV programming in Chile came from the United States) in the wake of neoliberal economic policies (Ibid. 48). The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) also had an impact— according to Mexican scholar Enrique Sánchez Ruiz, over 75% of films airing on Mexican television in March 1995 were from the United States (Sánchez Ruiz 1998, 123).20 Ramón Reig has argued further that, in spite of “reverse imperialism” stemming from Televisa’s global flows into the United States, and, to a lesser degree, Europe, Latin American countries are still importing more than exporting programming, most of it coming from the United States (Reig 2011:120; on this point, see also Nestor García Canclini, cited in Wilkinson 2016, 195). U.S. exports of film and television grew from a $2.5 billion in 1992 to $10.4 billion in 2004, whereas the value of Latin American film and TV exports in 2004 was $757 million (Thussu 2010, 224-26).

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The tracking of U.S. programming flows into Latin America has led to a surge in scholarship on the adaptation of U.S. formats for Latin American and Iberian audiences (Rivero 2014, Navarro 2012, Torre 2012). One might say, then, that since the 1980s, when some Latin American and Spanish industries began to expand their program offerings, “import substitution” became an attractive, cost-effective path for television producers to pursue to regain media sovereignty. Most of the import substitution programming has involved reality shows, such as domestic versions of Cops, competition shows, sitcoms, and detective serials. Some U.S.-based enterprises began to export foreign-tailored versions of existing programming such as Big Brother and MTV musical performance programming. Others initiated coproduction of Latin American programming, including format adaptations (see Piñón 2014, 29-30). This approach to understanding expansion fits the “cultural imperialism” model of global television analysis, in which, as in the development of Latin American film industries, the culture industries, including television, have responded to domination from the North in the effort to create and secure a climate of cultural sovereignty. There is little doubt that the United States, which provided the very technology from which to build many Latin American television industries, has enjoyed a kind of discursive hegemony in the televisual field, and the volume of U.S.-exported programming to some extent supports this angle of analysis. The recent move by Netflix, Disney, and WarnerMedia to invest in the streaming of Spanish-language content to Latin America (Faughnder 2021) adds support to this view of U.S. hegemony. Viewed from outside Latin America, however, the mediascapes of North America (including Canada), Lusophone Africa, and Spain are just the latest market frontiers for SLTV and PLTV that have been expanding globally in their own right. For decades, entertainment programming has been exported from Latin America to parts of Western and Eastern Europe, Asia (such as South Korea for Mexican television and Japan for PLTV), Africa (especially PLTV), the former Soviet Union, and the Middle East.21 According to Denise Bielby and C. Lee Harrington, Latin America topped the list of media exports at the turn of the millennium, and Brazil led the way with the highest volume of production and exportation (Bielby and Harrington 2002, 218-19: see also Straubhaar 2012, 171). Daya Kishan Thussu has called such exports part of a “subaltern flow” in contrast with the “dominant” flow of global industrial product (Thussu 2010, 222-23). Much of the programming exported from Latin America consisted of

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telenovelas, which, Bielby and Harrington have noted, began to influence U.S. soap operas after the turn of the millennium (cited in Thussu 2010, 232; see also Carter 2006). Of equal interest is the intra-continental flow of telenovelas, which began to be exported from Mexico and Brazil in the 1970s and 1980s, Argentina and Venezuela in the 1980s (Mazziotti 1996, 93, 97, 125), and Colombia in the 1990s (Venegas 1998, 59) in tandem with domestic production for prime time in those countries.22 This multidirectional flow, together with a rise in domestic production (see Sinclair and Straubhaar 2013), helped to deflect the importation of Anglophone programming from North of the Rio Grande. Elizabeth Fox and Silvio Waisbord have attributed the dominance of Latin American prime time by domestic programming to a lowering of the cost of video production, the relatively higher ratings garnered by domestic shows, and to a limited extent, national quotas and protective regulations (Fox and Waisbord 2002, 15-16). Certain media enterprises, such as Rede Globo, Televisa, and Grupo Cisneros (which owns Venevisión) rose to international prominence owing to investments and program exports (see Ibid., 16, Sinclair 2005, 201), followed in the new millennium by Colombia’s RCN, RTI, and Caracol (Rincón and Martínez 2014, 172). In the 1990s, Televisa began investing in commercial networks in Chile and Peru, and through the Galavisión network, transmitting to Spain in the late 1980s (Fadul et al. 1995, 86-87). Also in the 1990s, the Brazilian SBT network began importing and dubbing Mexican telenovelas, later adapting scripts for Brazilian versions (Straubhaar 2012, 172). Such that, combined with the reinvestment by Televisa in Univisión as a result of its sale to Jerrold Perenchio in 1992, one could say that, if the 1980s was the “Decade of the Hispanic,” the 1990s was the “Decade of Mexican Media.” Meanwhile, Mexico remains as the main portal through which programming from Anglophone America flows to Latin America given its historic role as the center of the media translation and dubbing industry, further complicating the “cultural imperialism” model, as do the politics and esthetics of format adaptation. Vinicius Navarro has observed how format adaptations take place in a “space between cultures,” with “cultural negotiations” involved in what is a process of “creative imitation” (Navarro 2012, 26, 36; see also Straubhaar 2012, 148, and Rivero 2014, 195). At the same time, culture industries are particularly sensitive to economic downturns, even in major Latin American economies, such as Argentina. The response to these economic setbacks, however, has not been simply to import more programming, but to export talent, engage in

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coproductions, and even in format adaptations to keep national cultural efforts and discourse afloat.23 The growth of SLTV in the United States and Spain (which falls within what has been referred to as the “Latin Audiovisual Space” in Europe)24 has necessitated a distinction between global circulation, in which programming is packaged for distribution outside of the country of origin but with little regard for the specific audience profile and sociocultural dynamics of the viewing experience in the foreign context of reception (this was also the case for “canned” programming before satellite transmission began),25 and transnational and transborder transmission, respectively.26 Transnationally transmitted programming is inflected by, and timed for, distribution with the host countries’ reception context in mind. Transborder transmission involves the “passive” or “air” reception of television signals along geopolitical borders. Notable examples include the reception of Mexican radio and television in El Paso and San Diego and the reception of Canadian radio and television signals in Detroit and Buffalo, New York. This differentiation among modes of circulation and transmission has ramifications for 1) understanding the growth of SLTV—which relies on a transnational frame of reference—in a competitive global media environment; 2) what it means for television viewers to consume different types of media, and their orientation toward those media; and 3) the discursive construction of the programming itself, which, in the case of SLTV tends to be internally differentiated based on point of origin, place of elaboration, linguistic composition (bilingual vs. monolingual, e.g.), along with the geographical scope of representation and vectors of transmission. Thus, it is important to distinguish among “targeted transmission,” or market areas that, by design, are served by SLTV providers, and secondary or “blind” markets (the latter occur as a result of spilling over into peripheral geographic areas, or retransmission and global resale).

SLTV in the New Millennium The new millennium brought important turning points in the patterns of ownership, modes of transmission, and audience composition for SLTV. A demographic milestone was reached with the 2000 U.S. census, which revealed that self-identified Hispanic/Latinx respondents surpassed 10% of the total U.S. population (see Wilkinson 2016, 297), which, with an additional boost from the Nielsen Hispanic Television Index (NHTI),

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enabled SLTV networks to increase their appeal to major corporate advertisers (Ibid., 162). Changes in SLTV ownership in the United States at the turn of the millennium gave networks the heft they needed to diversify and increase the production of U.S.-based content,27 and some new players, such as Azteca América, LATV, and ESPN Deportes (Wilkinson 2016, 167) arrived on the scene. The growing heft of SLTV is also reflected in the acquisition by Univisión in 2003 of 63 radio stations through the purchase of Hispanic Broadcast Corporation (Ramos 2005, 46). The coproduction of telenovelas between Latin America and Spain began around 2005, aided by patterns of transnational investment and distribution arrangements between Spanish conglomerates, such as Prisa, and Latin American media enterprises, including Televisa, Cisneros (Venezuela), and Clarín (for the latter, see Reig 2011, 120-22, 130-34). In 2004, Brazil’s Globo television, which had utilized the “bicycle” method to distribute videotapes to Brazilians in the United States since the 1980s (mainly via retailers based in New York and Miami), began offering satellite transmission by subscription (along the lines of German and French national television, which were also offered via subscription at this time), in addition to news broadcasts via Time-Warner Cable in New  York, where it had an editorial office. The transmission of PLTV in the United States was aided by the peaking of Brazilian immigration at the turn of the new millennium in major DMAs (designated market areas),28 including the New York-New Jersey area, Miami-Dade-Broward, and Los Angeles. It was technically facilitated by the successful transmission of Globo television programming to the Brazilian diaspora in Japan (Nascimento 2022). Spanish-dubbed PLTV became available on Telemundo in the late 1990s and on MundoMax in the new millennium (Scolari and Piñón 2016, 19, 21). TV Globo also began to partner with Telemundo to co-produce telenovelas in the new millennium. Toward the end of the twentieth century, the increasing size and youth of the SLTV and PLTV audiences brought higher stakes and risks to the Latinx diasporic and Iberian markets,29 and several battles emerged in the United States over FCC rulings pertaining to changes in ownership. The increasing youth of the SLTV market also encouraged the growing proximity and overlap between the SL and bilingual music industry in Miami and SLTV as the “Latin Boom” unfolded with the rise of popular music stars such as Selena Quintanilla (whose career was cut short by her untimely death in 1995), Jennifer López, Ricky Martin, Enrique Iglesias, Gloria Estefan, Marc Anthony, and Shakira.30 This mutually beneficial

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relationship was reflected in musical awards shows—including for Mexican regional music—and special televised concerts and musical tributes. There was also a paradigm shift in terms of the language politics of the medium itself: in 2001, Telemundo launched a new bilingual channel, Mun2, designed to target generation Ñ, or the growing second- and third-­ generation Latinx youth market, accompanied by other new networks such as LATV and SíTV (later renamed NuvoTV, see Rojas and Piñón 2014, 2). This trend toward bilingualism increased as a reflection of the close contact of younger generations with Anglo culture and the competition of SLTV with ELTV, as well as the bilingual proficiency (and in many cases, preference) of the younger diasporic Latinx audience, even though Spanish has been retained across generations (even by third-generation Latinxs and beyond; Wilkinson 2016, 271-72). The 2010 census revealed that fully 60% of Latinxs were U.S.-born (Ibid., 269). The acquisition of Univisión by Perenchio Television Inc. (PTI) expanded ownership of the U.S. based network by Televisa (Mexico) and Venevisión (Venezuela) in the early 1990s, with an impact on prime time content, followed by the purchase of Telemundo by Sony Pictures and Liberty Media in 1997, then by NBC Universal in 2001, and the merger of Univisíón with Hispanic Broadcasting Corporation (a radio broadcasting network based in Dallas) in 2002-2003, followed by the sale of Univisión to a private equity firm, Broadcasting Media Partners, Inc. in 2007 (UCI PR Team 2007). It should also be mentioned that TV Azteca partnered with NBC and Telemundo (in succession) prior to launching the Azteca América network in 2000 (Wilkinson 2016, 191-92). Several of these changes were vigorously opposed by Latinx media and political advocacy organizations, retailers, and cultural organizations on the grounds that the mergers and acquisitions harmed healthy competition in the industry, would potentially reduce Latinx employment in SLTV, and generally went against the public interest, even as these groups were in principle supportive of commercial SL broadcasting in the United States.31 (There has always been something of a divide between the “purists” in Latinx media advocacy who reject corporate sponsorship and transmission insisting on independence as the key to authenticity, and those who recognize the importance of having commercial SLTV broadcasters as players in a lucrative market that otherwise has overlooked and often portrayed Latinxs in a negative light.) According to Allison Perlman, who devotes a chapter to the Univisión acquisitions in her book Public Interests, each case of merger and

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acquisition merits close examination as some important advocacy organizations, such as the National Hispanic Media Coalition (NHMC), did not always oppose or use the same arguments in their opposition to corporate aggrandizement; moreover, as Perlman astutely observes, the decisions by the FCC eventually favored regulation and protection for children, but not protection for the public interests of adults; such interests are broadly defined as “localism, competition and diversity” (Perlman 2016, 173, 179). In siding with major corporations in its decisions, the FCC repeatedly sent the message that 1) the cultural identity of ownership does not determine content and 2) the SLTV market is categorically separate from the English-language market and therefore should not be subject to the same rules and regulations as the latter (Ibid., 170; see also Wilkinson 2016, 234-35). This effective silo-ing of the SLTV market by the FCC only added to the differential treatment of SLTV within the EL public sphere (as discussed in the Introduction), based on the misguided perception of the SLTV market as a “niche” market, yet one where, paradoxically, major corporate interests could prevail. By 2010, Latinx purchasing power in the United States exceeded $1 trillion, and Latinx communities in major cities (such as Los Angeles, New  York, Miami, Houston, Chicago, Phoenix, San Francisco, Washington, D.C., Denver)32 would be served by three or more major SLTV networks—Univisión, Telemundo, and Azteca América, along with Estrella TV, LATV, and V-me (in Los Angeles) and Mega TV and América TéVé in Miami—soon to be supplemented by ESPN Deportes (2004) and MundoFox (2012) as additional menu options.33 ABC and Univisión also partnered in 2012 to launch the English-language Fusion network in 2013 (Westgate 2014, 88-89). In Spain, the availability of digital satellite technology allowed the launch of Latinx-targeted channels on Canal +, ranging from soccer coverage (Copa América de Futebol, São Paulo leagues), to national networks Ecuavisa Internacional (Ecuador), TV Record (Brazil), Cubavisión, Caracol TV (Colombia), TNT, and Telenovelas (Mexico) (Retis 2007, 10), reflecting the growing Latin American demographic in Europe. Latin American migration to Spain was encouraged partly by the involvement of the Spanish government in development projects in South America and partly by the increasingly restrictive immigration policy in the United States beginning in the mid-1990s, with the signing of the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act (IIRIRA).34 (Apprehensions of migrants at the U.S.-Mexico border

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rose exponentially during the 1990s, spiking to over 1,600,000 at the turn of the millennium; Payan 2020, 60). Innovations in digital technology at various phases of the creative and consumption processes—editing and special effects, new distribution, and viewing platforms and devices—would be embraced by SLTV media viewers, as well as major providers and producers, with young Latinxs found to be more likely than other demographic groups to use digital media (social and entertainment) on smartphones (see Fackler 2010; Perrin 2016, and Brown et al. 2016). As well, I have found evidence of viewer interest in image quality, with a majority of respondents in my sample acquiring high-definition television sets, regardless of how they received their television signal. Of those who did not have HD TV, a significant percentage said they were contemplating purchasing such sets.35 Within Latin America, there was increased circulation of programming via pay-per-view among markets in the region (de la Fuente 2005; Sutter 2005), international coproductions,36 and new vectors of influence by way of format adaptations (see, e.g., the discussion of Grey’s Anatomy’s intraregional adaptation in Rivero 2014, 163-64). Finally, coproductions were launched between Iberian production companies and Latin American television enterprises, bolstered by the trend initiated in the late 1990s whereby Ibermedia, a transatlantic funding consortium, began coproducing films for transnational distribution in the Hispanophone and Lusophone world. In 1992, Spanish national television (TVE) produced programming for, and featured programming linked to the Cadena de las Américas, a transatlantic media project launched to commemorate the quincentennial of the Spanish conquest of the Americas (Wilkinson 2016, 181). The results of these changes have not always been salutary for Latin American media industries: as Mari Castañeda points out, “international divisions of labor are restructuring national telenovela and soap opera industries and in some cases limiting the potential for such industries to emerge [in smaller countries] such as Guatemala, Nicaragua, and Turkey” (Castañeda 2011, 14). (Although it should be noted, programming from both Guatemala and Nicaragua was featured on the Cadena de las Américas, while it lasted.) While the degree of competition and ratio of foreign ownership by large media enterprises is definitely of relevance to both the composition of the transnational flow and the configuration of the mediascapes encountered in each of the four cities, I have preferred to consider corporate identity and reshaping through mergers as but one component of the

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SLTV “mandate,” which as Amanda Lotz and Timothy Havens have observed can be partly determined by advertisers, partly determined by the corporate and government power structures, and partly shaped by the consuming public (Havens and Lotz 2012). In place of a detailed political economic analysis, I have chosen to inquire into how viewers and media professionals view the differences among, and desired agenda for, these networks, favoring meso- and micro-levels of analysis and shedding light on the criteria of competition and diversity from their perspective. Then, to get more deeply into the mandate and the issue of the independent-­ commercial divide, I will be focusing mainly on the topic of localism in SLTV network broadcasting in addition to exploring the interrelated processes of migration, access, recognition, and enfranchisement. Several patterns can be discerned along this developmental trajectory that add guidelines and contours to the analytical frame of this book. First, although a portion of the SLTV and PLTV audience might have lagged at various points in their personal acquisition of audiovisual technology (especially in the early years of SLTV development), as compared with the dominant (in numerical and socioeconomic terms) population, SLTV and PLTV industries not only kept pace with technological advances in the communications field, they also took the lead in the deployment of new technologies, such as satellite transmission (Telesistema Mexicano-SIN), computer generated imagery (CGI) as part of prime time fictional programming (Globo Television), the creative use of high-key lighting (TV Globo), and digital streaming of news programming (Telemundo and Univisión).37 Moreover, despite a persistent digital divide in the United States along class and ethnic lines,38 Latinx diasporic viewers, especially in the 18- to 34-year-old range, have demonstrated a high level of receptivity to the adoption of new media platforms and mobile devices, a disposition that has influenced the creation of bilingual as well as SLTV youth-­oriented media. (Whereas in 1995, only 10% of U.S. residents used the Internet, fifteen years later, that percentage grew to over 70%, while the number of hours spent online per week increased more than ten-fold; Roberts 2010, 185). In our study in 2015, 87% of respondents in the Miami-Dade metropolitan area said they used more than one type of device (and often as many as three different types) to connect to the Internet, and 60% used social media at least occasionally, with 43% using social media constantly or on a daily basis.39 This digital savviness has boosted the possibility for interactivity to be built into both broadcast and digital transmission, especially for Univisión. Like Brazil’s TV Globo, which has used audience

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feedback to structure plotlines in telenovelas, Univisión has used its website for similar feedback with an impact on the plotline of the popular telenovela Rebeca (Wilkinson 2016, 225), and both short-term and long-­ form reporting have garnered robust streams of posts on Univisión’s Facebook page. Telemundo also has a fair amount of interactivity built into its main website (www.telemundo.com). Second, it is important to keep in mind the changing dynamics of multimedia distribution and usage: print and radio media continue to play an important role in the dissemination of community-specific information, regional market connectivity, and engagement with popular culture, alongside SLTV and PLTV in many Hispanophone and Lusophone diasporic communities today. Within the first decade of the millennium, many Latinx-oriented newspapers went online, increasing their market viability (“Moving Online” 2007). These dynamics vary across cities, and the differences among them need to be taken into account when analyzing viewer access to and engagement with SLTV and PLTV. In analytical terms, a space needs to be created for intermedial mapping and interpretation—how, for example, have Latinx documentary and narrative fiction filmmakers represented and addressed similar challenges facing the diasporic, media-consuming communities under study? Do SLTV and PLTV occupy complementary, frictive, or overlapping terrains of representation in tandem with print, radio, and/or film? Beginning in the late 1980s, U.S.-based corporate interests began to invest in SLTV leading to the possibility of linking SLTV to radio stations (especially in the wake of deregulation as a result of the 1996 Telecommunications Act), media convergence beginning in the 1990s, transnational coproductions strengthening ties with European, as well as Latin American television markets, and an overall distanciation from an ethnic “niche” model of development Yet the increased visibility of the medium within Latinx communities also brought sociopolitical claims to bear that did not always align with the agenda of corporate management where hiring and media content were concerned. These claims became most evident when petitions were made to the FCC objecting to station and network acquisition, the Univisión-HBC merger, and the establishment of SLTV duopolies in prominent markets such as Los Angeles. Where station and network acquisitions are concerned, the FCC has tended not to side with advocates of the concerned Latinx community, as with the controversial sale of SIN-operated stations to Hallmark in 1987, leading to the formation of Univisión, and the sale of Univisión network to Perenchio Television Inc. in 1992; as America Rodríguez has detailed,

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these sales did not lead to a significant reduction in the influence of Televisa over the network, the very issue (foreign control over a U.S.based broadcast medium) that prompted the Hallmark sale in the first place (Rodríguez 1999, 62-65).40 The Perenchio sale led to layoffs of personnel and the cancellation of some U.S.-based programs (Ibid., 65). The recent merger (in 2022) of Univisión with Televisa streaming operations poses new questions regarding the role and clout of Latin American enterprises in U.S.-based SLTV development. I have attempted to capture less visible, more immediate claims voiced by the SLTV audience by incorporating open-ended questions into my study (see Chaps. 4 and 5 for a presentation and analysis of some of these critiques and claims). In addition to a growing bilingual and English-dominant youth market, there have been social and cultural challenges to Latin American nationalist discourse transmitted by SLTV, to the extent that it has persisted, in view of 1) the increasingly pluri-national demographics of the Latinx population in the United States (totaling twenty countries, if Puerto Rico is included) and Spain and 2) the increasingly blurry line between the national and the foreign in Latin American television, as well as SLTV, because of the growing “presence of transnational capital, productions, and formats” (Piñón 2014, 23-24). I would add that regional economic integration and the accelerated transborder mobility of musical performance and transmission of sports events have contributed to 3) the permeation of media texts as regards regional, as contrasted with national identity (what is interesting is to consider the contrast between the regional consciousness in relation to the European Union and regionalism in the Americas); 4) the growing visibility of, and interest in, other “minority” discourses (such as indigenismo, afrolatinidad, and transnational feminist and LGBTQ+ movements); and 5) what researchers have called the “denationalization” of citizenship for many diasporic Latinx viewers who are refugees in the United States.41 How has SLTV responded to these opportunities and challenges? What is the extent of the discursive disjunction between Julio’s analog slide show of Nicaraguan social realities permitting a kind of translocal communication for several generations of immigrants in the family living room and SLTV, which would soon take on transnational communication about regional political events? Might we find some continuities between the consumption of these media and their textual content? The gravitation toward remembrance of  historico-political events, and the pressure for community advocacy exerted upon and through SLTV point to the latter, notwithstanding the trend toward

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corporate financing and vetting of televisual content. Both modes of communication that initiated through horizontal grassroots networks, such as Julio’s slide presentation and what Lisa Maya Knauer has called “audiovisual remittances,” or personal videos circulated to the homeland (Knauer 2009), and that initiated through transnational (corporate) media such as SLTV now form part of a media system that feeds what Manuel Castells has termed the “global public sphere” (Castells 2010, 43-44). New questions emerge regarding the role of these media in forging new types of social participation and citizenship—formal and informal—in the public sphere: given the meaningful (and growing) gap between the framing of interests and priorities attached to the mainstream nation-state and the needs and interests of Latinx communities,42 how do SLTV networks reconcile the corporate mandate to attract advertising revenue and engage power structures at top levels, with the equally pressing need to be responsive to community concerns? It is my intent to pursue this question by looking at different types of programming, especially news programming, in the chapters that follow. The role of media professionals in cultivating particular approaches to news coverage factors into this equation, as do the multiscalar dynamics of SLTV broadcasting. This question has been complicated by the massive changes taking place in televisual technology, vectors of media flows, and the scale of delivery platforms both during the period under discussion, and in the wake of the coronavirus, which has disproportionately affected Latinxs and communities of color. The latter has prompted a plethora of homegrown messaging, newscasts, and expert interviews—such that some digitally delivered programming (as on Facebook live) has come to resemble chats launched within specific neighborhoods. To what extent has the neighborhood, as figured in “barrio TV,” displaced the nation or even transnation as the forum of choice, and how is this tied to the current success of SLTV? Posing these questions raises the additional question of whether the ability to address emerging issues for the community may be driving SLTV viewership more than the factor of “cultural proximity.” (At the same time, and paradoxically, the negative impact of COVID-19 on moviegoing has intensified the activity of large corporate players in streaming services in the United States and Latin America, as mentioned above.) Addressing these questions requires a multifaceted approach that includes the mapping of urban mediascapes, a study of pro-viewer agency on the part of media professionals, and of media access and reception in public and public-private spaces within cities, as well as the tracking of media content

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over time. Prior to discussing the methods to be used in such an exploration, it is important to get a better grasp on what SLTV and PLTV represent within the global and national mediascapes that they inhabit.

Defining SLTV and PLTV What exactly is SLTV? And how might it differ from PLTV? Is SLTV basically a means of compensating for the timeworn dearth of Latinx representation in ELTV programming (which, while on the upswing, continues to be unstable)? Is it primarily a means of migrants of all ages to stay in touch with the homeland? Or does it represent something more complex: the layered landscape of transnational transmission, format adaptation, urban remapping, and the shaping of diasporic Latinx identity for millions of viewers? First, in concrete terms, SLTV comprises the infrastructure, decision-­ making, and programming emanating from studios and stations connected to large networks, such as Univisión, Telemundo, and Azteca América within the United States and Puerto Rico; and the programming that arrives at U.S. points of consumption via satellite transmission from locations in the Hispanic Caribbean and Central and South America, as well as via broadcast signal from Mexican locations near the U.S.-Mexican border. In Spain, SLTV is accessible via satellite and on the Internet. One can thus distinguish between “passive transmission” involving the casual consumption of network television from the “border zones” in Puerto Rico and the Southwestern United States and the “active transmission” of programming that is packaged and uploaded expressly for consumption by Latinx audiences inside the United States. (In the case of Spain, SLTV is manifested in transatlantic coproductions, as well as in programming that is produced by SLTV enterprises on Spanish soil.) In either case, Latinx viewers tend to make an active choice to consume SLTV, as well as in how to obtain it, as contrasted with ELTV programming (as pertains to borderlands reception, see Lozano 1996; for choices in response to SLTV news, see Hughes 2018, 54-55, 59; see also the data presented in Chaps. 4 and 5 for audience engagement with SLTV programming in the four cities being studied). A recent study by Nielsen revealed that Latinxs were 48% more likely to receive their television signal over-the-air (OTA), often in combination with streaming television on demand (SVOD) (“Overthe-Air TV Is Booming in U.S. Cities” 2019). In my study, 14% of viewers surveyed in Miami in 2014–2015 obtained their television over-­the-­air, as

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compared with 9% of respondents in Detroit and 24% of respondents in the Los Angeles metropolitan area. The lower percentage in Detroit may have to do with the fact that SLTV was only available for a very limited time over-the-air in that city (see Chap. 4 for a discussion of SLTV reception in Detroit). SLTV programming is primarily commercial in sponsorship and orientation, but it also can include public programming to the extent that there has been bilingual Latinx participation on public television channels in each of the dma’s under study. In the United States at large, however, the track record of inclusiveness regarding public Hispanophone and bilingual programming has been stronger for radio than it has for local television broadcasting, even on public access channels.43 (This paucity of local SL public television is largely the result of changes in media policy and funding sources, along with differences in style and modes of reporting within NPR and Pacifica, as contrasted with the Public Broadcasting Service.)44 Latino Public Broadcasting is in its sixth season of transmitting the VOCES series of Latinx-focused documentaries (“Background—About Latino Public Broadcasting” 2021) and has been a participating sponsor of subtitled SL documentaries on POV, such as Stateless, directed by Michèle Stephenson (2021). While initially the vast majority of SLTV programming was imported (as described above), with the growth of the U.S. Latinx audience over time, in the number and monetary heft of commercial sponsors, and the increased capitalization of U.S.-based SLTV networks, there has been a trend toward domestically produced programming (a kind of “import substitution” production of game and talk shows and telenovelas, along with expanded newsgathering capabilities). This growth in domestic programming has often been accomplished with transnational coproduction financing (especially for telenovelas), yet physically produced in the United States. Currently, the Latinx Hispanophone market for television advertisements is the largest in the Hispanophone world, followed by Spain and Mexico (Gómez et al. 2014, 53). Yet there is still considerable room for the growth of domestically produced SLTV, as voiced by respondents in my study. The diasporic Latinx market both is and is not the same market sought after by both ELTV and SLTV, given 1) the differential regulation of these media by the Federal Communications Commission, sparking and rekindling the historically divisive issue of market access by SLTV providers, Latinx entrepreneurs, and talent,45 and 2) the degree to which SLTV

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offers diasporic and other viewers something qualitatively different compared to ELTV: when asked if they would continue to view SLTV even if ELTV were to improve in the realm of Latinx representation, the vast majority of respondents who answered the question said they would continue to view SLTV (see Table  4.5). I argue that, even though market competition between SLTV and ELTV has been attenuated through corporate mergers, SLTV is at the very least in friction if not in active and obvious competition with ELTV.  As noted in the introduction, with few exceptions, members of the Latinx diaspora are not adequately addressed or represented in ELTV programming. In Spain, SLTV productions have manifested sporadically in the form of “at large” location productions by major SLTV enterprises, such as Univisión and Telemundo, with crews dispatched to various cities to cover special events (such as Holy Week in Seville and the Catalunya independence vote) or to film telenovelas set in Spain. The question arises as to whether this Iberian-located production is oriented toward Latinx diasporic and Spanish viewership in Spain, or whether it is being ultimately conceived and released for North and Latin American consumption. SLTV programming is also imported for commercial rebroadcast in Spain via cable and satellite [this is the case for some telenovelas such as El Clön (Telemundo/Caracol/Globo, 2010) along with ELTV programs, such as the popular Modern Family (Fox, 2009-)], or it can be accessed in the original version via digital satellite service (such as Canal+), and on Internet platforms. In my sample, many Latinx diasporic viewers in Spain relied on the Internet for their news from Latin America (see Chap. 5). The term Portuguese-language television (PLTV) refers to the transnational transmission of Lusophone (predominantly Brazilian) television that is accessed by way of Internet streaming and via satellite dish by Brazilian diasporic viewers located in the United States (TV Globo), and in Spain (TV Record), as well as Lusophone viewers connected through a TV Globo hub in Lisbon, Portugal and receiving a signal via satellite in Angola and Japan (Nascimento 2022). In general, PLTV tends to project a greater “national” profile than SLTV since it is sourced mainly from Brazil,46 which, with the largest national market in Latin America, has not been as pressured to court a diasporic market (in terms of creating and shaping program content) as have Hispanophone Latin American providers, notwithstanding the early and sustained presence of PLTV in the global televisual marketplace. While Lusophone markets in Angola, Japan, Portugal, and the United States are all of equal, strategic importance to

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the development of TV Globo, recent emphasis has been placed on global distribution via the network’s streaming platform Globo Play rather than on tailoring marketing strategies and program content to target audiences in those countries (Nascimento 2022). In any case, Lusophone identity has increasingly been defined in relation to Brazilian audiovisual culture as the culture “of reference.” Outside of Lusophone regions (mainly in Africa and Portugal), PLTV is also consumed in translation via SLTV networks in the Hispanophone world. This phenomenon made headlines in 1997–1998 with the broadcast of Rede Manchete’s Xica da Silva, dubbed into Spanish, on Telemundo network in the United States. It provides a good example of how a telenovela, centered on an Afro-Brazilian character and addressing the themes of enslavement and colonial rule, can hold both national and transnational appeal, given that the story of the legendary Xica was well known by Brazilian popular audiences47 and possibly resonated with the popular historical memory and interest of Lusophone African audiences, as well as with the sociocultural sensibility and concerns of a significant sector of the U.S. Latinx audience. An interesting question in the comparison of programming flows from Latin America northward is to consider the transnational legibility and appeal of national programming from Mexico, Colombia, and Venezuela, as compared and contrasted with that from Brazil (although the growth in transnational coproductions has affected televisual production in nearly all of the sending countries). Second, in terms of content, SLTV is distinguished by the fact that it comprises globally, transnationally, and translocally sourced material. On a given evening, viewers might watch news gathered in a nearby city neighborhood and along the U.S.-Mexican border, a dialogue between residents of Central America and the United States, unfolding events at another global location, and a telenovela produced in Mexico or Colombia for global export. The transnational dimension of SLTV builds actively on vectors of esthetic and narrative influence throughout the Latin American region over time. In the 1980s, there was the faxing of script pages from Caracas to Buenos Aires in the production of a telenovela (building on a lengthy history of the transnational sourcing of story material, Straubhaar 2012, 173). There has been the use of digital technology as well as high-­ key lighting setups perfected by Globo Television, which began to influence Mexican telenovelas in the late 1990s. And, around the turn of the millennium, talent for Mexican and Spanish telenovelas was increasingly recruited from other countries, especially Argentina, Brazil, Colombia,

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Cuba, and Venezuela, occasionally resulting in “accented Spanish” that departs from what can be described as the central Mexican norm.48 Third, SLTV is defined by its orientation: its very existence depends on its capacity to absorb and transmit as much of the world affecting its diasporic, transborder, and other Hispanofamiliar audiences as possible in an intelligible, compelling, and compassionate manner. In his characterization of a geocultural sea change in an era of migration and media globalization, Arjun Appadurai (1996, 31) pointed to a transition from a world “system” to a multinodal construct, and it can be argued that SLTV is particularly well suited to, and has historically benefited from, this change. It could even be said that one of the first effects of SLTV in all its forms was precisely to help transform the United States into a “node” in a larger network of flows, rather than a primary purveyor of global images, although the U.S. share of SLTV production has been growing. This recalibration has had an impact on the development of Hispanophone media within nation-states as well: although influential, strategically positioned, and home to both Telemundo and Univisión, Miami is not the only “headquarters” of SLTV in the United States, and Madrid is no longer the only “hub” of Hispanophone media in Spain, especially given the growth of regional television in the post-Franco era.49 Together, these factors help to explain the esthetic and discursive hybridity of SLTV overall. SLTV encompasses a wide range of genres and cultural forms, from “mass” industrial to popular and vernacular,50 and there have been gear shifts from stratified to dialogical news reporting, for example. Stratified reporting is anchor-focused, with reporters chiming in, whereas a dialogical approach supports conversational modes of presentation, often involving testimonials. This hybrid, often uneven quality of SLTV, I argue, has been retained, if not always energized in a neoliberal era of transnational transmission. SLTV’s discursive porosity (at times resembling code-switching in literature) not only permits the marketing of products across a broad and varied demographic; it is vital to the appeal of Hispanophone television to its Latinx diasporic viewers, both those who are seeking to become reattached to their place(s) of origin and those who aspire to another (perhaps more desirable) place while retaining and reconfiguring their identity in the host society. The medium has also striven for an effective means of addressing younger viewers, who as Kenton Wilkinson has noted may be engaged in a process of “retro-acculturation” (Wilkinson 2016, 4). The latter is a process of familiarizing oneself with the Spanish (or Portuguese) language so as to re-­engage with

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one’s parents’ culture of origin. Building interactivity into digital platforms aimed at attracting a “youth” market is only part of the SLTV media equation. There are other factors contributing to this hybridity understood not just as a pluri-esthetic amalgam of influences, but as a “space where intercultural and international communication practices are continuously negotiated in interactions of differential power” (Kraidy 2010, 435). There is the international sourcing of story material that may be transformed into national or transnational allegory, the liminality of SLTV with respect to the U.S. mainstream (whereby it shares subject matter and absorbs some of the formats of ELTV), its receptivity toward transnational format adaptations [such as Betty, La Fea (Colombia, RCN, 1999-2001) in Mexico and beyond],51 and its inclusion of multiple linguistic accents and musical genres in the attempt to appeal to an interregionally diverse, multigenerational audience all labeled as “Latinx” or “Hispanic.” More recently, SLTV has reached out to African-American actors and musicians in recognition of the “crossover” between Latinx and Afro-diasporic cultures and communities in the United States. (This outreach was encouraged not only by demographic trends in Hollywood, but also by the receptiveness of President Barack Obama to SLTV interviews especially between 2012 and 2016.) There are also signs that SLTV is opening up to the occasional use of English in its programming and advertisements, although it remains a predominantly monolingual medium, and experiments at bilingualism, such as NBC Universal’s Mun2 (as a sister network to Telemundo), now Universo, and Tr3s (Viacom-MTV) have been susceptible to rebranding and program content shifts (Rojas and Piñón 2014, 1, 6-7). Like the very urban spaces in which SLTV and PLTV are consumed, the medium itself, owing to its general commitment to educate as well as inform, coupled with its need to serve as a conduit for private commercial interests, blurs the boundaries of “private” and “public” discourse and activity. While this might be said of all commercial broadcast networks and some cable networks that feature news and documentary, the market positioning of SLTV and its efforts to serve socioeconomically disadvantaged and marginalized audiences have contributed to an abiding concern with the provision of access to public services and advice for day-to-day living, thereby redefining the boundaries that have been presumed to exist between these realms,52 especially in the wake of changes to the sociocultural role of the state in the neoliberal era. These changes include the privatization

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of formerly public enterprises and services, and the intervention by the state into what formerly would have been considered activities and forms of association pertaining to the private sphere, such as family relations. The creation of a Latinx public sphere through SLTV as a mostly privately owned commercial medium has become increasingly meaningful as there has been a reduction of support for such a sphere on the part of the U.S. state, especially between 2016 and 2021. Emerging uses and definitions of “public” and “private” at the local level will be expanded upon in Chap. 4; for the moment I wish to emphasize the categorical difference between the blurring of these lines by corporate and other large private entities in the wake of neoliberalism (i.e., the privatization of public services and resources, see Castells 2010, 38) and the attempt to ensure the formation of a public sphere at the meso- and micro-levels when traditional public avenues become unavailable or unreceptive toward diasporic Latinxs as a result of policy changes and modes of immigration enforcement. Such a restriction of the Latinx public sphere has been compounded of course by informal strategies of social and cultural segregation. At another level, scholars have observed how televisual enterprises have to some degree taken over, or anticipated, the role of the state in Mexico and Colombia (respectively), while, in the face of gaps left by local and national government in the United States, SLTV has proffered what can be called forms of media enfranchisement. Media enfranchisement refers to how, regardless of access to formal enfranchisement, viewers are provided with access to power and the means of exercising what has been termed “informal citizenship” (see Coutin 2000, and Sassen 2005) or “social citizenship” (Levitt et  al. 2007, 179). “Informal citizenship” denotes the exercising of one’s political voice, regardless of whether one is eligible to vote. A good example is the efforts of DACA recipients to push for immigration reform and a pathway to formal citizenship, which have frequently been covered by SLTV news.53 Exercising informal citizenship can carry certain risks—such as the case of the unauthorized immigrant in Livingston, New  York, who openly advocated for driver’s licenses for unauthorized immigrants in New York State and was contacted by ICE for deportation even though his case had been administratively closed (Shepherd 2017). The vulnerability of many who exercise informal citizenship only underscores the importance of media enfranchisement. Next, given the relative dearth of information about SLTV programming in English-language consumer publications and internet listings,54 there is greater pressure upon SLTV to self-promote, that is, to project its

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program offerings onto the public radar via the Internet, program bumpers, and on-air announcements of special events. Self-promotion due to the relative lack of mediascape visibility is made more critical by the historically lower rates for advertising garnered by SLTV, a pattern that has also been true for Spanish-language radio.55 (In the late 1990s, an executive in charge of advertising at Univisión in Los Angeles explained the low rates as being correlated with discriminatory misperceptions on the part of advertising agencies that Hispanic consumers would not purchase a “gourmet burger,” such as Carl’s Jr., or higher-end products because of their low-income status. As patterns of actual Latinx consumption have shown in the general market, nothing could be further from the truth.) Programs are also listed and commented upon in the timeworn SL circular TV y Novelas and in some local SL newspapers, such as La Opinión (Los Angeles) and El Nuevo Herald (Miami). Concomitantly, there is less opportunity for criticism to be written about SLTV programming in English, and for these commentaries to shape Anglophone and bilingual viewers’ opinions and expectations of SLTV programming.56 (Instead, the trade press has focused on the activities of corporate players in SLTV ownership and development, and critical commentary appears to be reserved, for now, for the SL popular press.) Interestingly, the multiple Emmys won by SLTV talent and enterprises have done little to reverse the trend of critical neglect in the EL trade and consumer press. A survey of Variety and TV Guide leading up to the 2018 Emmys confirms a relative lack of journalistic interest in this topic, compounding the pattern of underrepresentation perpetuated by the EL media industries, which has prompted a series of ongoing protests and petitions organized by the National Hispanic Media Coalition, most recently directed at streaming providers (National Hispanic Media Coalition 2018, see also Castillo in Hernández 2021).57 Sadly, the trend toward the compartmentalization of SL media has not been reversed by major networks’ attempts to reach younger Latinxs through EL sites and television networks targeting the Latinx market [such as NBC Latino, Fusion, and Fox News Latino (see Westgate 2014)]. Finally, it can be said that, given the transnational frame in which it is produced, circulated, and consumed, SLTV is distinguished from EL national television networks in its ability to pick up on the ways that its targeted viewers are socioculturally and economically repositioned during the process of migration. Through its narrative methods, performative style(s), and presentational discourse, it finds ways of resonating with the

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liminal space between here and there, and past and present circumstances as they are experienced by displaced and sociopolitically marginalized people. During competitive game, performance, or beauty shows, there is not only acknowledgment of the contestant’s place(s) of origin but an attempt to place them in live conversation with family members who could not attend. For example, in the final program of a dance competition show produced in Miami, Argentine telenovela actor Santiago Raymundo is greeted via split screen by his sister in Mexico City, his brother in Argentina, and his father in Madrid (¡Mira Quién Baila! 2018). Correspondingly, other distinguishing features of the medium include the depth, geographical breadth, and temporal duration of investigation in news reporting and a discursive inclination toward populism—beyond the inscription of popular culture that is the norm in modern television—in response to diverse claims made by various social sectors, especially the working poor, upon SLTV as a vehicle for gaining access to the local and transnational public sphere. The latter is most evident in the beauty competition show, the talk show, and the show de auditorio, such as Sábado Gigante, hosted for thirty years by Mario Kreutzberger, aka Don Francisco. This communicative capacity, enabling cultural co-presence as well as accommodating sociocultural ambivalence, will be explored further in Chaps. 6 and 7. To summarize, SLTV is a medium that • Began with the shipment of programming to stations on the West Coast and in Texas, soon followed by satellite broadcasts from Latin America to the United States. This helped to pave the way for the globalization of Latin American networks. Some Latin American broadcasting enterprises, such as Televisa, Azteca, and Milenio in Mexico, Venevisión (Venezuela), RCN, and Caracol in Colombia, and Globo and TV Record in Brazil, continue to furnish programming to U.S. networks and Iberian-based networks and satellite services. • In addition to programming from Latin American sources (mainly Brazil, Colombia, Mexico, and Venezuela, with additional programming coming from Peru and Chile), SLTV programming in the U.S. as a host country has been developed for national distribution affiliates in major Latinx metropoles and for redistribution in a “reverse flow” to Latin America. • SLTV also includes limited programming developed at the local level by affiliated stations outside the major hubs of decision-making and

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production. Most of the programming developed at this level involves news broadcasts and special events programming, such as the Cinco de Mayo parade in Los Angeles. • Although the globally sourced components help to distinguish SLTV from ELTV, I argue that, based on my study, local production in U.S. cities is critical to the ability of SLTV to compete with ELTV providers. • SLTV currently comprises nine U.S.-based and affiliated commercial networks—Univisión, Telemundo, Azteca, Milenio, LATV, V-me, Mega TV, América TéVé, and Estrella—that compete for the most part, yet also complement one another. • By law, these networks are currently majority owned by North American media conglomerates and companies, given FCC limitations on foreign ownership;58 at the same time, at the local level, television stations may be financially connected to, or at the very least be instrumental in cross-promoting SL radio stations and newspapers, thereby strengthening relations among all of these media. • As an interstitial, at times contradictory medium in its discursive composition, SLTV exhibits a high degree of cultural and esthetic hybridity, and it is slowly becoming open to multilingual communications. • Because it provides pathways to cultural and political education and enfranchisement, as well as access to cultural worlds beyond national boundaries, SLTV is instrumental in processes of “reglobalization” for viewers. • A main distinguishing feature of SLTV as compared to ELTV is in the way they come to “know” their markets. Whereas ELTV tends to assess its market through patterns of material consumption and leisure activity, SLTV also focuses on the diasporic audience’s social and cultural concerns, as well as issues of wellbeing. The qualitative effect of this difference on production practices and programming will be the subject of Chaps. 3, 4, and 6. • SLTV continues to enjoy commercial success in the United States and, to a lesser extent, in Spain even though within the last decade, it has been under pressure to compete with EL networks for secondand third-generation audiences, in addition to the Spanish-dominant viewing public. Hispanophone media continue to have a marginal presence on public television.

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By comparison, PLTV is a medium that • Stemmed from the incentive of Globo TV in Brazil to expand its market into Lusophone territories, introducing and expanding a Brazilian cultural hegemony that also had a positive effect on Globo’s ability to influence the direction taken by Latin American television in general. • The sale of telenovela episodes on videotape to retailers (largely Brazilian-­owned businesses) located in the United States was spurred by the emigration of Brazilians to the United States during the 1980s. • Globo’s transnational activities also included news reporting via satellite from its New York bureau, beginning in the late 1980s. • The establishment of a Globo hub in Lisbon, Portugal, facilitated transmission to African Lusophone nations. • TV Globo became available in the United States via subscription to cable and satellite access in 2004. • It is also currently available in abbreviated segments on the Internet, along with the dvd distribution of telenovelas and streaming on Globo Play. • Internet distribution also made possible a wider selection of networks to choose from for diasporic Lusophone audiences (Brazilian TV Manchete, TV Record added to the list). • Some cable providers feature local news and events of interest (independently produced) in Portuguese to the Lusophone immigrant community in the United States. • In the new millennium, TV Globo and other Lusophone networks began to engage in coproduction activity with Hispanophone networks to develop and adapt telenovelas based on popular international formats. SLTV audiences began to view telenovelas on SLTV that were originally produced in Portuguese, such as Xica da Silva (1996–1997) and Avenida Brasil (2012).

Research Design: A Relational, Transnational Frame The decision to focus on both SLTV and PLTV in this volume is motivated by three factors: 1) the increasing collaboration between SLTV and PLTV (as, e.g., between Telemundo and TV Globo) to create entertainment programming for global distribution; 2) the commercial broadcast of Brazilian programming (essentially, telenovelas) dubbed into Spanish on

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SLTV networks in the United States, and Spanish commercial television in Spain since around 1999; TV Globo is also featured on Univisión’s new Prende TV streaming platform (James 2021); and 3) the presence of a now sizeable Brazilian diasporic audience in the United States and in Spain that navigates effectively among English-language (ELTV), SLTV, and PLTV viewing options in a manner that is comparable to, and intersects with Hispanophone diasporic viewing, even as it requires a distinct approach to interpretation. On the other hand, I have attempted to venture beyond the criterion of language communities tout court to focus on the sociocultural spaces occupied by SLTV and PLTV in response to state policy, entrepreneurial competition, and the opportunity afforded by the movement, self-identification, and sociopolitical positioning of Latinx diasporic populations in a globalizing world. In other words, SLTV and PLTV do not simply designate media flowing to and within geolinguistically distinct regions (Sinclair 1998, cited in Han 2019, 36), or media reaching from the mainstream into “minority” spaces and communities, but rather, media that have gained a certain relevance for diasporic audiences situated in “multi-layered, multi-sited transnational social fields, encompassing those who move and those who stay behind” (Levitt et al. 2007, 157). Hence the importance of comparing the transmission and reception of these media in urban spheres in Spain and the United States where participation in these social fields and the effects of policy and competition can be brought into relief. In this transnational, multiethnic, and multilingual context, then, “cultural proximity”59 and “cultural shareability” (Singhal and Svenkerud, cited in Han 2019: 39) are but one ingredient in attracting viewing communities affected by displacement, resettlement, and interactions with power dynamics in the host country social sphere. In addition to the relationality of PLTV to SLTV and of social fields delineated by transnational media and diasporic viewing communities, there is the relationality of different types of media within the SL urban sphere and of SL media with respect to EL media. Within SLTV media, there seems to be a “self-consciousness” with respect to the purpose each medium—print media, radio, and television—fulfills within a given mediascape. Like television, SL radio and print media are also transnational in orientation, albeit in varying degrees, and they may overlap with one another, especially where reporting on immigration is concerned. Based on random surveys I conducted with SL media viewers, there appears to be a complementarity among these media that encourages

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multimedia consumption. Overall, independently of media convergence, and owing to each medium’s vital role within transnational ethnic social fields, the interrelationship of print, radio, and televisual media to one another seems to be of greater significance for understanding SL media as compared to their Anglophone counterparts. On the other hand, I also wish to call attention to how, notwithstanding the self-determination of Latinx mediated identity, there is a need to understand the ways in which Latinx images and narratives on SLTV are constructed in dynamic relationship—at times in contestation—to the narratives in Anglophone media. Discriminatory portrayals, some alluding to a “Latinx threat” have appeared across several EL media, with print media taking a prominent role toward the end of the twentieth century, as anthropologist Leo Chavez has described (Chavez 2001 and 2013), and radio and Internet taking over as the fora most vulnerable to discriminatory rhetoric at the turn of the millennium with the increased use of satellite access. In response to a perceived rise in extremism and disinformation on social media platforms, such as Facebook, the National Hispanic Media Coalition teamed up with other organizations to submit a letter to a congressional hearing on “Disinformation Nation: Social Media’s Role in Promoting Extremism and Misinformation” in March 2021 (Anti-Defamation League, et  al. 2021). A relational approach to SL media helps to foreground these contestations, along with the extent to which different SL media can be interconnected within mediascapes, and how, within specific urban mediascapes that are home to transnational ethnic fields, SLTV has come to enjoy a certain hegemony.

Field Methodology Bearing in mind the attributes of SLTV and PLTV, as well as the diversity within the Latinx diasporic audience, I have combined qualitative and quantitative methods to get at and assess the popularity and meaning of SLTV for diasporic viewers as well as to chart the positioning of SLTV within the mediascapes of four Latinx metropoles. Given my interest in multiscalar analysis, I designed the study to be place-specific, gauging the availability of different types of SL media in each urban mediascape, as well as the technology utilized to access a television signal, which helped to determine which type (broadcast, cable, or dish) of SLTV is being received. The first step in this analysis is the mapping of what cultural anthropologist Arjun Appadurai refers to as

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“mediascapes.” Appadurai defines these as comprising both “the distribution of the electronic capabilities to produce and disseminate information” and “the images of the world created by these media” (Appadurai 1996, 35). In my project, I expanded this definition to include photographic images on billboards, paper newspaper pages, and the built environment in which media consumption occurs, or “media space” (Couldry and McCarthy 2004). In addition to participant observation, viewers were asked whether they watched SLTV at the place of interview and the type of programming they watched. By engaging urban planners in conversations about the history and current trajectory of Latinx communities in these cities, I was able to cultivate the city as a meso-level unit of analysis in dynamic tandem with that of the workings of the media enterprise and diasporic Latinx viewership. By conducting research in “public-private” spaces I was able to capture viewer interactions with media at the level of the neighborhood. These are liminal spaces, figuring in cities between public institutions and strictly private domains, that tend to be overlooked by studies that focus on media consumption in domestic settings and that contribute concretely to the sociocultural ambientation of a neighborhood. Surveys and conversations with viewers were conducted in places as diverse as laundromats, supermarkets, restaurants, record stores, barber shops, and beauty salons. In such public-­ private spaces, viewers can experience programming as part of a larger community, rather than as a family or individual viewing unit, in isolation. By considering community-friendly points of access, it is possible to begin building collective and/or collaborative viewing into the equation. Questions on television and sociality were developed to help gauge this possibility. Early in my study, I adopted a mixed method approach to data gathering, in combination with a longitudinal time frame that would allow me to survey and compare the development of SLTV across urban communities over time. This longer time frame allowed me to evaluate the impact of meso-level actors more closely, as well as to identify emergent patterns in technological delivery, and in programming structure and content, in addition to the degree and type of audience engagement and media enfranchisement. Viewers were randomly surveyed (with a gift card incentive) in “public-private” spaces such as those listed above (where I also was able to participate as a viewer-observer given the accessibility of SLTV at these locations), as well as at public libraries. Conversations around qualitative aspects of representation, specifically regarding the migrant image

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and images of gendered violence (in young adult viewer and women’s groups, respectively), took place within focus groups where clips from a range of programs (evening news, dramatic series, and telenovelas) were shown. In keeping with the “meso-level” approach to surveying and documenting media delivery, outreach, and engagement, open-ended interviews were conducted with public librarians, media executives and professionals, and urban planners at their place of work. Media diaries were kept of media viewed in these cities to assist in mapping the mediascapes and gauging qualitative shifts in media programming. These mediascapes then formed the background against which the surveys, focus group notations, and interviews could be evaluated. Thus, a balance was struck between methods that yielded qualitative, as contrasted with quantitative results, based on a focused attention to meso-level and culture-rich research venues, combined with the randomness in urban survey-­gathering and notetaking. In developing a mixed method approach,60 I combined the analysis of quantitative data collected from field surveys with randomly selected viewers at a wide range of locations within each city, as well as the consultation of secondary demographic data (primarily from the U.S. census, Pew Hispanic Research, and Nielsen Communications, Inc.); with qualitative methods, applying a “grounded theory” approach to my own survey data, as well as focus groups utilizing sample clips from SLTV programming, interviews with media professionals, urban planners, government officials, and community representatives. Media ethnography and modified participatory action research61 supplemented these methods to assist in the interpretation and analysis of practices and texts. In addition to deepening the inquiry in relationship to research themes (public-private space, multilingual viewing patterns, the fictional vs. documentary construction of the migrant image, the mediation of affect, and the navigation of urban space and civic participation and enfranchisement in the host society), these strategies provided a synoptic view of changing demographics in relation to urban space, Latinx participation in the public sphere, government initiatives to assist immigrants with resettlement (Spain), community-based initiatives to improve the lives of those who remain vulnerable and marginalized (Spain and the United States), and the role of SLTV in reporting on local developments that affect immigrant communities. In the course of designing and conducting surveys, focus groups, and interviews in the field, I adopted a modified grounded theory approach that allowed interactions with my respondents to inform research

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strategies and questions over time. Grounded theory is a qualitative method that “begins with immersion in data, using inductive logic” and the “developing theory is then explored, expanded, and tested as the researcher returns to the field” (Oktay 2012, 17). The latter phase of testing (or theoretical sampling) uses deductive logic, but emerging concepts and categories continue to be extracted from the data through constant comparison and a return to the field sample until “the point of theoretical saturation is reached” (Ibid., 49). In designing and conducting field research, I was less interested in achieving a complete “saturation of theory” than in developing a study that would allow for 1) constant comparison of results among urban locations and with regard to 2) sense-making for participants with regard to SLTV as enterprise, as a source of advocacy and a sense of place, and 3) as a locus where one might discover a stream of discourses regarding the migratory experience. As the study progressed, questions were added to survey questionnaires, existing questions were revised, and focus group discussions recalibrated in response to categories and group dynamics arising in the earlier encounters. For example, a “context-driven” question was introduced early on in Detroit to underscore the importance of the technological device used in transmission and reception (antenna, cable, or satellite dish), thereby helping to distinguish specific access to SLTV rather than simply to ELTV, and modes of access utilized in Detroit as compared to other cities (see Table 1 in Chap. 4). Survey questions were also used in focus groups to allow comparison among cohorts and between cohorts and the views and sociocultural identities of the Latinx population surveyed at large. There was also a move toward “subject-driven” questions, such as viewers’ suggestions for what they would like to see on SLTV (Table 4.6), but couldn’t, how they felt about bilingual media, or whether they wished to vote in a U.S. election, illuminating the ways that aspirations, as well as achievements, shape viewers’ media preferences and sociocultural identities. In my study, in addition to immigrant respondents, many Latinx households were “mixed-status” households, including immigrants as well as non-immigrants and immigrants of different age groups. It thus became desirable to explore the ways in which viewer subjectivity and viewing practices tend to be “diasporic” in reach and character, meaning that media content can be filtered through transnational and national, as well as a local lens. Indeed, “diaspora” informs not just the content of SLTV media texts, many of which portray migration and discuss immigration

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policy, but also the process of viewing SLTV. This dimension is reflected in the reasons given for watching SLTV (see discussion below). In the remaining chapters, a concrete discussion of research results will be linked to multiscalar analyses of specific media texts and practices. Before proceeding, I would like to unpack the notion of the Latinx diasporic audience for SLTV, which has changed considerably since Irene tuned into her radio show in After the Earthquake.

Diasporic Audiences for SLTV: Not So Niche “Discourse is always shaped by an audience, by what Tzvetan Todorov calls the allocutaire—those to whom the discourse is addressed—whose potential reaction must be taken into account.”—Ella Shohat (2006,16) The means of capturing this audience reaction varies according to medium of expression. As Stuart Hall’s “encoding/decoding” model for television production and reception indicates, there is a dynamic relationship between the audience and televisual texts at critical points of articulation and enunciation. The first of these involves the immediate response of viewers to what they are viewing on the screen. Hall allows for the possibility of a “dominant” (the prescribed mode), mixed (“negotiated”), or “oppositional” mode of response on the part of the audience. The negotiated response is one marked by ambivalence—some aspects of the media text are supported, and others are resisted by the viewer. Ambivalence was frequently expressed by study participants toward ELTV in the United States and occasionally toward SLTV (see Chaps. 4 and 5). A majority of respondents in Detroit and Los Angeles said that they did not think that ELTV helped or gave sufficient recognition to the Latinx community. The second “moment” of television decoding in the production-reception cycle entails the filtering back of these responses to those responsible for designing and elaborating new programs (Hall 1981). Historically, this “moment” has been a weak link for SLTV given the relatively lower budgets for SLTV as compared to ELTV advertising (Dávila 2001, 182). In my study, I sought to capture each of these moments through random surveys and focus groups with SLTV viewers, as well as interviews with media representatives at the meso-level. In addition, I have identified what I term “diasporic viewing practices” or practices that reflect the demographic profile (age and language use) and migratory history of the audience and the transnational frame within which programming is generated and circulated. One of the defining characteristics of SLTV as a glocalizing

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medium is that the same programs might be decoded in quite different ways in different contexts of transmission—national and transnational, even by the same viewer as they transit through a geoculturally shifting social field. Not infrequently, viewers reported having seen programs in their country of origin, yet their reception of those programs, and more importantly of SLTV as a medium had changed since they first viewed them. What, precisely, is meant by Latinx diasporic audience? In general, Latinx-targeted media, like other “ethnic” media have been labeled “niche” media, designating a relatively finite, rather than expanding field of distribution and broadcast possibility. Given the current size and diversity of the Latinx audience, however, SLTV, as a set of different providers delivering programs in Spanish does not fit its characterization as a “niche” medium. If anything, it could be said that individual SLTV networks have pursued the “niche” concept within the SL television market to maximize their own reach and diminish competition, such as Milenio news in the Los Angeles dma targeting viewers of Mexican descent given its strong Mexican national content. Yet in most cases, the cultural specificity of the audience becomes complicated by circumstances surrounding migration and social insertion (with implications for gender and social class) and by the “youth” market. [The median age for Latinxs is nearly 20 years younger as compared to non-Latinx whites, increasing their economic impact over time (De Armas and McCaskill 2018, 3); according to 2016 census figures, that age was around 28 years (Julián Samora Research Institute 2019)]62 As has been made abundantly clear by ethnic media scholars and social scientists, there is no reliable way to simplify what the term “Latinx” or “Hispanic” means,63 no way to accurately generalize about the U.S. Latinx population; indeed, as Charles Ramírez Berg has pointed out, to do so would pave the way for the fabrication and perpetration of stereotypes (Ramírez Berg 2002, 16-17). Earl Shorris has taken a step further to question the existence of a Latinx market: “Latinos are so diverse in custom, income, and language that the term [Latino market] comprises several distinct markets and audiences” (Shorris 1992, 232). These markets might include those who wish to become incorporated in the host country, yet wish to maintain ties to the homeland, those who prefer to focus on assimilation or accommodation, those who migrated out of sheer necessity and those who traveled premised on aspiration, those who lack direct ties to the homeland, yet identify as Latinx and share concerns with those who migrated, and so on.

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While “diaspora” generally suggests traits such as shared language, culture of reference, and a sense of longing or other forms of attachment to a distant “homeland,” in global cities it also implies daily interaction with other ethnicities, and with displaced postcolonial, and marginalized populations. At the most basic level, “diaspora” refers to “expatriate populations abroad and generations born abroad to foreign parents who are or may be citizens of their countr[y] of residence” (Ionescu 2006, 8). There tends to be a “layering” of affiliation and identification based on recency of arrival, place of origin, and shifts in ideology attached to sociocultural identification. In some cases, people may prefer to identify with their country of origin, in others they may choose a pan-ethnic label, such as Latinoamerican, Latinx, or Hispanic, in yet others they may choose another form of affiliation, such as religion. A further, complicating factor is household composition. Some researchers, such as Kristin C. Moran (2011) and Louis De Sipio et al. (2000), have pointed to the multigenerational composition and viewing dynamics of many Latinx households. In immigrant neighborhoods, even in the absence of the actual sharing of a dwelling, there is an awareness of other generations, at times leading back to a homeland. (A recent Nielsen study reported that almost 40% of U.S. Latinxs live in multigenerational households; “Being Seen on Screen” 2020, 16) In such households, even if—because of digital savviness, or a preference for English—one does not feel compelled to consume SLTV or PLTV, there is what can be called “proximate” viewing, or an awareness of SLTV or PLTV by way of relationships to other family members who consume it. These adjacencies encourage, if nothing else, a critique of an assimilationist model that would show older generations clinging to SLTV and newer generations eager to abandon it as a sign of “foreignness” or the lack of ability to integrate, a shibboleth that was disproven in my study. The adjacencies produced by multigenerational households also encourage sociality surrounding the consumption of media, such that certain programs become an object of intrafamilial conversation (see Table 4.2). In my study, in addition to the sheer size of the diasporic Latinx population—at minimum, more than 35 million strong in the United States64 and around 2 million in Spain65—the persistence of what can be termed a “diasporic consciousness” within this population, their ongoing characterization as ethnoracially “other” in mainstream EL media, in the language of policymaking and dominant social discourse, and the barriers to political enfranchisement (especially in the United States)66 together have

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created the optimum conditions for the global expansion of Hispanophone (and to a lesser extent, Lusophone) electronic media. As well, the possibility has been created for alliances to be forged among diasporic ethnic groups and groups experiencing similar forms of discrimination which, with an increase in naturalization and voting eligibility, has had an electoral impact. (The gap between those “eligible to vote” and those “registered to vote” is still considerable, but it has been gradually closing, especially around the November 2020 election; see Igelnik and Budiman 2020, and Noe-Bustamante and Budiman 2020.) As for the application of “diasporic” to the viewers themselves and the inscription of migrant-oriented discourse on SLTV, by “diasporic” I am referring to the fact that, even though millions of people of Latin American descent are born and educated outside of Latin America, many remain attached through family and community ties, as well as by patterns of residence to those who have migrated, and continue to migrate, to destinations in Europe, Asia, and North America. By design, I kept the notion of a “diasporic” audience elastic, such that the study could incorporate more than just migrant viewers, but also viewers in various age groups—including English-dominant viewers—who are connected to the lives of migrants by familial, workplace, and neighborhood ties. Within the study is the farmworker in Homestead, Florida who may be more at home speaking Maya Quiché and therefore quite distanced from the bilingual, professional Cuban American in southeast Miami, a Puerto Rican family, with the older generation living on the island and the younger generation in New  York or Detroit, and an extended Nicaraguan family, with some members in Madrid, and others in greater Los Angeles. Since neither the model of the nostalgic migrant viewer, nor of the “gen-Ñ” model entirely holds,67 what I have hoped to capture in my study is the specificity of audience composition and response not only regionally, but in relation to urban locations: it is not only a question of identifying, for example, which nationalities are present in Detroit as compared to Miami, but also how various nationalities, ethnic, and age groups interact and receive the media they consume, and the degree to which those media are deemed to be helpful to adaptation, advancement, and enfranchisement in the host country. Built into the study instruments was a spectrum of self-identifying possibilities that would accommodate a complex definition of “Latinidad” or “Hispanidad” including: a) the distinction between “Hispanic” vs. “Chicanx” and “Latinx” as descriptors; b) the inclusion of subnational in addition to ethnosocial forms of self-identification; and c)

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the inflection of national and pan-Latinx forms of self-identification by “minoritarian” forms of ethnopolitical and ethnoracial identification; in particular, the presence of indigenous, Afro-diasporic, and North African (or Maghrebian) participants was noted. Participation in a transnational social field, as was the case for most viewers in my study, can lead to simultaneity in self-identification (choosing more than one label) as well as linguistic multi-tasking, or utilizing English- and Spanish- (or Portuguese) language media toward different ends (this will be discussed further in Chaps. 4 and 5). Research has indicated that residence patterns, sources of employment, motivations for migrating, and media engagement may be different for Latin Americans in Majadahonda, a suburb of Madrid, as compared to Madrid, and that intragroup dynamics are different for Latinxs in Los Angeles as compared to Detroit and Miami. Just how do we define and understand the media orientation of the diasporic Latinx “community” in each case? There is also a difference in direct exposure to the process of media making in these urban settings, with Los Angeles providing the site where Latinxs are most likely to have participated in, or witnessed, SLTV “in the making” of news and variety entertainment programming. What these audiences share is an interest in following multiscalar representations of the Latinx experience, from the local to the global, and the experience of what might be termed “cultural ambivalence” arising from the tension between the discourse of superarse (to improve one’s life, to get ahead), favored by the commercial, globalizing side of SLTV, and a discourse of sobrevivencia (survival), or recognition for the degree to which many viewers struggle, which is favored by local and translocal reporting, and demands that the medium do more than merely sell consumer products. These various facets—the engagement in multiple viewing communities through consumption across languages, scales of transmission and genres of representation, proximate viewing for younger generations and the sharing of programming in conversation, and the “negotiated” reception of televisual discourses in tension or contradiction—comprise what I refer to as diasporic viewing practices. Diasporic viewing also reflects the degree to which the world, along with a good deal of SLTV programming, has become “networked” as a result of globalization: as Manuel Castells has asserted, “the global process of urbanization that we are experiencing in the early 21st century is characterized by the formation of a new spatial architecture in our planet, made up of global networks connecting major metropolitan regions and

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their areas of influence” (Castells 2010, 2737). Part of the migration process for many people I interviewed in my study entailed a repositioning as the result of immersion in these networks. When asked if they would be interested in viewing television from another location, Angelenos provided answers as varied as (in alphabetical order), Afghanistan, Brazil, El Salvador, Guatemala, Israel, Japan, Mexico, Spain, and the United Kingdom.68 In the Miami focus group sample, several respondents reported having lived in other countries outside Latin America prior to migrating to the United States. The lack of homogeneity in the national SLTV audience and in patterns of media engagement across cities not only means that SLTV does not fit its characterization as a “niche” medium, it also doesn’t quite match the description of what Stuart Cunningham, working elsewhere, has referred to as an “ethnospecific sphericule” (Cunningham 2013). In place of a “sphericule,” the Latinx public sphere, which is partly (and very influentially) constructed in and through SLTV, is imbricated in and overlaps at the edges with other public spheres, including the mainstream EL public sphere, and spheres in the Latin American countries of origin from which programming is transnationally derived and recorded. Yet, as I have indicated above, this is not a “two-way” street—the EL mainstream public sphere has, for the most part, remained impervious to events and initiatives unfolding in the SL Latinx public sphere. Over time, the stakes attached to SLTV for Latinx diasporic viewers may change, yet not always in a “linear” progression toward or away from acculturation. Viewers in each city rated reasons for watching SLTV (or PLTV for Brazilians), and the answers given correlated with a range of simultaneous concerns and interests, indicative of the viewers’ immersion in transnational social fields. The importance attributed to reasons for viewing varied across cities, yet relatively high importance was given to being informed about the situation and rights of immigrants in the United States, staying informed about events in Latin America, and keeping track of events in the home country (see Table 4.5). U.S. television is just beginning to be aimed at, and inspired by, an abundantly present, ever-diversifying audience as public recognition of demographic change and the push to export programming have increased in the new millennium. As transnational media, SLTV and PLTV have unevenly kept pace: an emphasis on Afro-diasporic culture has begun to be manifested in television series and telenovelas on Globo and Record TV, and there is increasing evidence that a socially and ethnically diverse Latinx

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audience is being commercially sought after by SLTV’s advertisers in the United States.69 Increasingly, SLTV is considered as a desirable platform by politicians up for (re)election, reflecting an appeal to a range of ethnic backgrounds and linguistic proficiency. The past decade has also witnessed an attempt by U.S. network television to reach East Asian diasporic, as well as African-American viewers, as transnational Asian and African-­ American channels and -oriented content have begun to share the dial or digital menu with mainstream EL and SL broadcast programming. The same cannot always be said for national television in Latin American sending countries or in Spain,70 and this may form a point of distanciation of imported SL, from SL and bilingual programming developed in the host country for diasporic audiences. There is also differentiation according to genre—as Saida Rodríguez Pagán has recently observed, SL news programming tends to be more inclusive than telenovelas (Rodríguez Pagán 2021). Whether the contributions of these communities of color to the development of U.S. television are recognized and progressively built upon is still open to question, especially as concerns the longevity of innovative ethnic-oriented programming (the pulling of the dramedy One Day at a Time by Netflix is a case in point, see National Hispanic Media Coalition 2018; see also “Diversity in America” 2020 for recommendations on how to remedy persistent ethnoracial imbalances in representation on both sides of the camera in U.S. media).

A Note on Spectatorship In gauging SLTV and PLTV spectatorship, in place of the well-worn concept of screen identification, building on psychoanalytic theory, I chose to follow cognitive behavioral and social scientific models, especially given that my understanding of viewer response was derived from conversations in “public-private” settings rather than a supposition of the individual viewer in “private” domestic space. According to these models, a close match between viewer and representation, together with affective appeal, yields a dynamic of alignment of viewer with screen subject (whether anchor, reporter, interviewee, or fictional character).71 Early in Latin American television research, Joseph Straubhaar identified “cultural proximity” as a factor that can woo viewers away from imported television (Straubhaar 1991); while, working in another geocultural context, Marie-­ France Malonga has argued that “recognition” is vital to drawing racial and ethnic “minority” audiences to media texts (Malonga 2007). The

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dynamics of alignment often involve “cultural proximity” or “cultural shareability” (La Pastina and Straubhaar, cited in Han 2019: 39) at the very least, and at their optimum, “recognition,” or being able to see oneself in the people and surroundings on the screen. Given the complexity of the SLTV audience in terms of national origin and ethnosocial identification, the achievement of cultural proximity can be elusive, since to be fully effective, it involves more than the use Spanish (or Portuguese) as a common language (on this point, see Dávila 2001, 75-78, 178); on the other hand, recognition may require decisions (including hiring and casting) that work to bring the subject-viewer relationship more into alignment. Here, there is a difference between news programming, which can involve interviews with a wide pool of subjects, and other types of programming. Also, with certain types of programming (especially news programming) alignment and recognition may have less to do with culture and more to do with perspectives on the issues that matter to Latinx audiences (for the way in which this works with respect to telenovelas, see Han 2019). The issues that bear the potential for forming a Latinx “common ground” include socioeconomic justice (community building), education, public health (recently, coronavirus prevention and treatment), strengthening and sustaining family ties, and its corollary, immigration reform.72 Based on recent voter data, many Latinxs (70% of Latinx voters) voted for Joseph Biden and Kamala Harris because of 1) the coronavirus pandemic (55%), 2) jobs and the economy (41%), and 3) health care costs (32%, in that order); and 69% of the Latinx electorate said they were strongly in favor of the passage of a comprehensive economic stimulus bill to combat the negative impact of Covid19 (UnidosUS 2020). A 2014 Pew Research study found that Latinx voters’ prioritization of issues aligns closely with those of the Latinx population at large (López and Torres 2015). Embedded in the processes of alignment and recognition, and, allowing a brief return to Hall’s encoding/decoding model, are the phases (conceived by Jean Mitry) of perception, organization (narrative), and valuation (rhetoric) attached to the viewer (see Andrew 1983, 138), which become especially significant when gauging viewer response in focus groups. “Each of these stages…demands a different operation for the viewer. We might liken each stage to a threshold to its successor as we pass from the recognition of objects to the recognition of events, stories, or arguments, and finally to the recognition of a point of view and a system of value” (Ibid.)

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A particularly interesting example of the possibilities of recognition on SLTV, taking all of these criteria into consideration, is provided by elected officials’ attention to immigration reform. On Wednesday, 13 January 2021 only one week after the rioting broke out at the nation’s Capitol, Vice President-elect Kamala Harris presented early information about steps toward immigration reform under the new Biden-Harris administration (in English, then subtitled in Spanish) on Univisión’s morning show Despierta América (“Wake Up, America”). As Univisión’s Sunday weekly news magazine, Aquí y Ahora revealed on 17 January, the Despierta America preview of immigration reform was part of a longer, in-depth interview with VP-elect Harris, who appeared as the daughter of an immigrant parent (among other forms of sociocultural identification) with the network’s anchor of color, Ilia Calderón (of Colombian origin), who, given her own background, seemed almost a peer. The inclusion of additional excerpts from the interview brought into the foreground not only the proactive role of the media professional as a “translator” of, and messenger to, power, but also the boost for women of color of Kamala Harris’s new role as Vice President even before the inauguration. As with the timely coverage of these issues, the possibility of recognition between viewer and media professional, or between viewer and screen subject, can help to promote media enfranchisement. The advantage of media enfranchisement is that it can occur regardless of one’s citizenship status, or the treatment of that status by measurement devices such as the U.S. census (which was pressured by the Trump administration to release information about unauthorized residents—see Bahrampour 2021, Wang 2021). Media enfranchisement helps to activate instances of “informal citizenship,” as advanced by Susan B.  Coutin (2000) and Saskia Sassen (2005) (see above). Like informal citizenship, media enfranchisement is a processual phenomenon: it is not a question of “yes” or “no,” but of “how” can viewers be engaged so as to construct better social and environmental conditions for the community? Critical to the concept of enfranchisement is the notion of “public sphere.” In this book, I will be defining the public sphere in terms of both physical space within the city (streets, plazas, and subpublic spaces), and the mediascapes that provide opportunities for actual and virtual encounters among various social and institutional sectors as a result of metropolitan media transmission and the viewing experience in and of itself .73 The participation of Latinx communities in both physical and virtual electronic spaces is essential to their inclusion in the democratic process. Media

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enfranchisement is strengthened when the correlation between televisual discourse and events on the ground is at its tightest with enough porosity or discursive openness to enable the viewer’s sense of participation. This definition is consistent with Jürgen Habermas’s formulation (Edgar 2006, 124-26) with two important modifications: 1) that it is a space in which Latinxs and others of varying class and ethnic backgrounds can join in discussion and debate and 2) it implies that one remains open to the possibility that the interpersonal communication arising from these exchanges can grow in an era of mass consumption. We will see some examples of this enfranchisement at work in televisual inscriptions of the migratory experience, to be discussed in Chap. 3.

Notes 1. I signal the neorealist approach of this film less to make a claim regarding its positioning with respect to contemporary Latinx cinema, and the legacy of neorealism in Latin American cinema, than to call attention to the strategies that situate it with respect to lived historical experience. 2. In the film, Julio is part of the political opposition to the dictator Anastasio Somoza, whose methods of political repression (including torture) prompted many Nicaraguans to leave the country as refugees. 3. On this point, and for a nuanced discussion of the gender politics in Después del Terremoto, see Fregoso 1993, 96-105. 4. Cf., for example, Anna McCarthy’s analysis of television viewing at point of purchase in McCarthy 2001. 5. My translation, incorporating elements of the translation appearing in García Canclini 2001, 39. 6. The first Spanish-language television station in the United States was founded by José Cortes in San Antonio, Texas, in 1955. It soon gave way to control by the SIN network; Piñón 2013, 76. 7. According to Castellot, Telesistema Mexicano representatives offered full support to the general manager and director of production of KTVU during a visit by the latter to Mexico the same year. Viewers in San Francisco could also access international programming through KEMO Channel 20. Ibid., 163. 8. In the early 1980s, Televisa owned 75% of SIN; Ibid., 247. The technological and legal (FCC) conditions for this transmission were in place as of 1973; Parsons 2015, 678-680. 9. See López 1995, 272, n. 14 for historical background on, and national examples of shows de auditorio. For shows de auditorio on SLTV, see

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Wilkinson 2016, 128-29. For a description of early SL programming in the United States, see Gutiérrez and Jorge 1984, 250-51. 10. There are differing figures given for the percentage of the Latinx audience that could be reached, depending on the source; Wilkinson has shown the disparity, for example, between figures generated by Arbitron and Strategy Research Corp. prior to the implementation of the Nielsen Hispanic Television Index (NHTI) in the early 1990s (Wilkinson 2016, 135); and he also mentions the figure of 85% coverage of Latinx households for Univisión by late 1988 (Ibid., 121). 11. Hispanic Business (December 1994): 52, quoted in Ben-Amor 2001, 93. While there is little doubt that the growth in purchasing power can be attributed to Hispanic population growth during this same period, the existence of employment opportunities in light manufacturing, as well as service professions, deserves mention. 12. Rankings from Variety, 25-31 August 1997, quoted in Ford 1999, 99. 13. In the early 1990s, 15.3 million households in Mexico owned at least one television set (Wilkinson 2016, 187). In a different study, published in 1995, it was found that Argentina had 97% penetration of television sets, Brazil had 85%, Chile had 90%, Colombia had 83%, Mexico had 85%, Peru had 67%, and Venezuela had 88% (Schneier-Madanes 1995, 172, 177, 182, 186, 203, 216, and 230). 14. Hence, the demand for SLTV in the United States functioned as a kind of “remittance system” for Latin American television enterprises, in a way analogous to regular remittances sent by migrants homeward. 15. For a discussion of import substitution production in Brazil, involving the reduced scheduling of imported U.S. programs and in this case encouraged by government incentive and the formation of a strong central industrial base, see Straubhaar 1984, 229-234. 16. According to a Mexican diplomat stationed in Miami, Florida, most Mexican migrants began to arrive in that state in the 1990s, given job opportunities in farm labor, construction, and services; most of South Florida’s Mexican immigrants are located in Homestead; email communication, Mexican consular diplomat 2014. 17. The number of cable subscribers nationwide went from 16 million in 1980 to 53 million in 1990; California Cable and Telecommunications Association 2017. 18. In 2014, people of Mexican origin accounted for 64% of the total Hispanic population in the United States; Stepler and Brown 2016. And, according to figures provided by Alejandro Portes and Rubén Rumbaut, Mexicans constituted the largest group of new legal immigrants in 2011; see Portes and Rumbaut 2014, 95. 19. Appadurai 1996, 31.

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20. The remaining percentages are Mexican cinema, 19.25%, Latin American cinema, 2.48%, European cinema, 2.48% (Ibid.). 21. For the global destinations of telenovelas, see the essays in Allen 1995, Ríos and Castañeda 2011, Han 2019, 40-41. and Moran 2009. 22. As of 2002, domestic programming dominated prime time slots in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Mexico, Peru, and Venezuela (Fox and Waisbord 2002, 17). 23. On this point, and the uses of “culture as resource,” see Yúdice 2002, 17-18, and Yúdice 2003. 24. The “space” also includes France and Italy; see Armand Mattelart, Xavier Delcourt, and Michèle Mattelart, International Image Markets: In Search of an Alternative Perspective (London: Comedia 1984), cited in Moran 2009, 93. In several ways, this “Latin space” has been overshadowed by a) the formation of a common, supranational market linked to the European Union, in which German-language and other national televisions have become as accessible to Spain as “Latin”-sourced programming, and b) the flow of Latin American television to Spain since the 1990s has strengthened the transatlantic bond beyond what might have been possible among the Latin-rooted European countries. 25. For a definition and brief history of global circulation, see Moran 2009, 16-17. 26. For an analysis of crossborder reception, showing viewers’ preference for Spanish-language television, see Lozano 1996. 27. As Wilkinson points out, some of these ownership changes were facilitated by the 1996 Telecommunications Act, which expanded the allowable percentage of ownership to 35%; Wilkinson 2016, 164. 28. This is the term used by networks and polling organizations to refer to the geographical areas corresponding to actual broadcasting markets. In the case of the cities I am examining, the dma includes, but is not exactly coterminous with city limits, which is why I have chosen to broaden the frame of my field research to include metropolitan areas reached by the broadcast signal of SLTV networks. 29. As a sign of these “higher stakes,” advertising spending on SLTV increased from $220 million in 1992 to $3 billion in 2006 (Wilkinson 2016, 242). 30. For insight into aspects of the boom, notably as relates to the careers of Jennifer López and Ricky Martin, see Negrón-Muntaner 2004, 233-36, 241-46, and 253-59. 31. For a detailed account of the FCC battles, see Perlman 2016, 159-179. See also Wilkinson 2016, 93-114, and 154-59 for Univisión sales and 164-66 for Telemundo sale. 32. This listing is based on cities served by local SLTV stations, as well as the ranking of cities in terms of Hispanic population (these are first, second,

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third, fourth, sixth, eighth, eleventh, twelfth, and sixteenth largest in Hispanic population, respectively), according to Pew Hispanic Research based on tabulations of American Community Surveys for 2014; “Hispanic Population and Origin,” 2016. 33. The MundoFox network as initially designed was short lived due to ratings problems and underwent a name change to MundoMax when Fox International Channel sold its share to Colombia’s RCN TV in July 2015; see Malone 2015. 34. According to Marc Rosenblum and Doris Meissner, the IIRIRA “greatly (expanded) administrative authority for nonjudicial deportation decisions by DHS immigration enforcement officers and…(limited) grounds for relief from removal” (Rosenblum et  al. 2014, 2). Since 1996, there has been an increase in formal removals (including “expedited removals”) and “immigration-­ related criminal charges for unauthorized immigrants” (Ibid. 3, 14). The effects of the IIRARA on immigrants were aggravated by the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA) and the Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act (AEDPA), which together with the IIRIRA “limited noncitizens’ access to public benefits and legal protections” (Blizzard and Batalova 2019). In her well-researched memoir, Once I Was You, journalist Maria Hinojosa discusses how the IIRIRA criminalized many immigrants and set up impediments to the naturalization process; Hinojosa 2020, 157-58. 35. 84% of Detroit respondents said they had HDTV, and 6% said they were thinking of purchasing one; of those asked, 43% of Los Angeles respondents had a HDTV and 7% said they were thinking of purchasing one. 36. For coproductions and distribution arrangements between Colombia and Mexico, see Rincón and Martínez 2014, 170-73 and 182, n7. 37. According to Kenton Wilkinson, Telemundo claimed it was the first to transmit an entire newscast on the Internet, yet Univisión was more aggressive in establishing and making active use of the consumption of its digital presence (Wilkinson 2016, 224-25). 38. In 2009, the U.S. Bureau of the Census found that less than 50% of people with less than a high school education used computers, as compared to 95% of college graduates and people in households earning at least $75,000 per year; there was also a growing percentage gap between “white” and African Americans; see Roberts 2010, 186. 39. A significant portion of research conducted in the Miami metropolitan area was conducted in collaboration with Sallie Hughes, with the assistance of Juan Muhammad and Randall Martínez; focus groups were conducted at Miami-Dade College and the University of Miami as well as two local non-­ profits. Research results presented here pertain to pregroup surveys, as well

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as surveys at large. For details regarding the focus groups, see Hughes 2018 and Chap. 5 below. 40. Advocates filing appeals following the Hallmark sale included the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors, and the Mexican-American Bar Association; advocates protesting the Perencchio-Televisa sale included the League of United Latin American Citizens, the GI Forum, the National Hispanic Media Coalition, the Hispanic Chamber of Commerce, and Telemundo (Rodríguez 1999, 63, 65). 41. As Susan B.  Coutin has described, some migrants, such as Salvadorans, may have experienced a loss of rights in their country of origin even though they are citizens; see Coutin 2000: 589-591. Denationalization might also include the turn toward translocal citizenship in the greater Mexican community; see Fitzgerald 2000, 32-39. Puerto Ricans might also be considered denationalized citizens, insofar as the island of Puerto Rico remains a territory of the United States and voting in national elections is limited to Puerto Ricans who reside on the mainland; for a succinct discussion of Puerto Rican nationhood and cultural identity in historical context, see Negrón-Muntaner 2004, 3-9. 42. While it is inadvisable to generalize about Latinx needs and interests (and differences in experience have been emerging among those who are Spanish- as opposed to English-dominant), in terms of “need,” there are clear signs that at present, many Latinxs suffer from greater disadvantages in pursuing higher education, access to affordable healthcare and housing, vulnerability to various forms of fraud, and inequities in pay and benefits. The double burden placed on Latinx women is especially striking: according to 2016 census bureau estimates, the estimated child poverty rate was 22.1% for Latinxs, and the family poverty rate for Latinx female headed households was 35.7%, higher than it was for African Americans and nonHispanic white households; Julián Samora Policy Institute 2019. Moreover, according to the AAUW, “Hispanic women and Latinas” earn 54 cents for every dollar earned by men (lower than for Native Americans, African Americans, and women in general), “The Simple Truth about the Gender Pay Gap,” American Association of University Women bulletin. The increased restrictions on immigration, not to mention aggressive measures taken to apprehend, detain, and deport unauthorized immigrants and refugees over the past few years, coupled with the impact of the coronavirus, have only worked to aggravate these disparities and hardships. 43. Wilkinson has commented that SL programming through V-me is accessible on PBS affiliated channels and has correctly observed that it is marketed as SL public television (Wilkinson 2016, 273).

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44. For details on the history of the decline in the representation of ethnic minorities on public television, see Perlman 2016; see Casillas 2014 for a discussion of Latinx contributions to public radio programming, including bilingual public radio. The most notable example of a bilingual Latinx presence on U.S. public radio is Futuro Media Group’s Latino U.S.A., produced by Maria Hinojosa, which has been on the air since 2010. 45. Allison Perlman has related how the FCC ruled against community advocates’ arguments for an improvement in Latinx ownership and representation, on the grounds that SLTV is not in competition for the same market as ELTV (Perlman 2016). 46. See, for example, the table “Ownership of National Television Broadcasting Networks and Production Houses,” in Piñón 2014, 26. 47. An actual personage in Brazilian history, the story of Xica, the African slave who became the consort of the Portuguese governor of Minas Gerais, was first fictionalized in a novel by João Felicio dos Santos, then adapted into a screenplay for a homonymous film directed by Carlos Diegues (1976) prior to being “remade” as a television series with a story written by Agripa Vasconcelos and directed by Walter Avancini and Jacques Lagôa (Rede Manchete 1996). 48. Mexican and Venezuelan talent was recruited for telenovelas in Argentina beginning in the 1980s (Mazziotti 1996, 98-102). 49. For an informative discussion of how globalization affected television in Spain, see Maxwell 1997. 50. For a discussion of the ideological underpinnings of and discursive distinction among these cultural forms, see García Canclini 1982, 47-66. As García Canclini points out, the three categories of cultural production mentioned above are often found in an intermingled state; Ibid., 58-59. As will become clear in the chapters that follow, SLTV bridges and renders supple the boundary between these categories of cultural expression. 51. See Donohue 2011, 257-274, Torre 2012, 184, and Meza 2005 for an interesting discussion of Betty, La Fea’s adaptations both across and beyond the Americas. 52. For a classical definition of “public” as compared to “private” in the modern era, see Rex 1997, 212. In Chap. 1 above, I have also referred to how the juxtaposition of these terms applies in John Caldwell’s description of media industry gatherings. 53. Among the more important informal citizenship actions covered by SLTV were the 2006 immigration reform marches, which drew hundreds of thousands into the streets of 140 cities nationwide. For an excellent description of the marches, as well as subsequent actions by Dreamers leading up to the Dream Act, see Hinojosa 2020, 219-221, 238-242. 54. See the commentary by Amaya 2011, 183-184.

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55. See Casillas 2014, 209-210, 215; and advertising producers at a Hispanic media summit in New  York City, October 2010 complained about the chronically low budgets they were given to work with. As Wilkinson 2016, 262 has observed, advertising revenue can fluctuate in response to special events, such as political elections and World Cup soccer games, as was the case for Univisión in 2006. 56. Jonathan Gray has written about how TV criticism serves as an important “paratext” that can “set the parameters” for viewer engagement, see Gray 2011, 115. 57. Under representation of Latinxs and other people of color was also the subject of a special hearing of the congressional judiciary committee (“Diversity in America” 2020). 58. As of September 2016, the FCC established a “25 percent benchmark for foreign investment in U.S.-organized entities that control a U.S. broadcast, common carrier, or aeronautical fixed or en route radio licensee;” FCC 2016. 59. For a consideration of how “cultural proximity” between programming and viewer factor into patterns of spectatorship and the growth and resilience of national programming, see Straubhaar 1991, 39-59. 60. I have taken inspiration from three of the guidelines laid out by the Working Group at SUNY Buffalo (2012), as well as some of the precepts of grounded theory. 61. For an explanation of this method, see Silverman and Patterson 2015, 14-15. 62. The average age for Latinxs was 27.7 years old as of the 2010 census (compared to 36.8 for the population at large), Wilkinson 2016, 269. 63. For more extended discussions of Latinx categories of identification, see Dávila 2001, Oboler 1995, Amyot 1995, 92, and Fox 1997. See also Chap. 5 below. 64. This is the number of self-identified Latinxs in the U.S. census who have stated that they speak Spanish at home; from a Univisión analysis of 2014 ACLS data, see “Español in America” 2016. According to a Pew Hispanic report, Latinxs accounted for 54% of U.S. population growth between 2000 and 2014; see Stepler and López 2016. A more recent study has found that 23% of children speak a language other than English at home (Ryssdal 2019). 65. This figure pertains to documented immigrants; Observatorio de Inmigración-Centro de Estudios y Datos 2011, 43. The current Latinx diasporic population in the Community of Madrid is around 650,000; Observatorio de Inmigración-Centro de Estudios y Datos 2017, 4; cf. Instituto Nacional de Estadística 2017, which shows the population from

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four (Argentina, Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador) out of the twelve Latin American source countries as totaling 432,774 in 2016; Ibid., 4. 66. Voting permissions for noncitizens in Spain will be discussed in Chap. 5. 67. As Kenton Wilkinson has noted, the term “Gen-ñ” has undergone several definitions (Wilkinson 2016, 222); generally speaking, it refers to a postmigration generation of Latinx millennials. 68. This is an example of a change to questionnaires and survey content based on grounded theory: I began to look at transnational networking through SLTV in more detail after conducting research in Madrid, Spain, and Miami, Florida. 69. For an excellent historical account of how Latinx consumers were transformed into a market for corporate products, and the ways in which the “how to” market became just as important as the cultural content of marketing, see Dávila 2001: especially 56-87. 70. For more on racial stratification and eclipsing in Latin American-derived programming on SLTV, see Dávila 2001, 168-69. 71. Alignment is a term introduced by Carl Plantinga to describe the spectator’s experience of film representations utilizing a cognitive, rather than psychoanalytical approach to understanding spectatorship (Plantinga 1999). 72. In my study, these issues emerged in two areas of the survey questionnaire—the reasons for viewing SLTV, and issues that viewers felt should be addressed by both ELTV and SLTV; see Tables 4.5 and 4.6. 73. By “subpublic,” I am referring to spaces that are not readily visible to denizens outside of a given community. Alternative public spheres have often been created within neighborhoods with a heavy immigrant population because of the need to protect those who are unauthorized immigrants. I will be commenting more on such spaces in Chap. 4.

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Mulvey, Ruth. 1948. “Admen Find It Difficult to Standardize Mexicans.”  Ad Age 3: 58–60. Nascimento, Rodrigo. 2022. Negocios Internacionais, Rede Globo. Interview with author (via videoconference), 22 June. National Hispanic Media Coalition. 2018. “An Open Letter to Netflix,” 15 March http://www.nhmc.org/open-­letter-­to-­netflix Accessed 16 June 2018. Navarro, Vinicius. 2012. “More than Copycat Television: Format Adaptation as Performance.” In Global Television Formats: Understanding Television Across Borders, ed. Tasha Oren and Sharon Shahaf, 23–38. New York: Routledge. Negrón-Muntaner, Frances. 2004. Boricua Pop: Puerto Ricans and the Latinization of American Culture. New York: New York University Press. “NetSpan.” “Telemundo.” 2017. Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Telemundo edited 7 July 2017. Noe-Bustamante, Luis, and Budiman, Abby. 2020. “Black, Latino and Asian Americans Have Been Key to Georgia’s Registered Voter Growth Since 2016.” Hispanic Trends, “Fact Tank: News in the Numbers.” Pew Research Center. 21 December. Oboler, Suzanne. 1995. Ethnic Labels, Latino Lives: Identity and the Politics of (Re)presentation in the United States. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Observatorio de Inmigración-Centro de Estudios y Datos. 2011. “Informe Demográfico de la Población Extranjera en la Comunidad de Madrid,” January. ———. 2017. Informe Demográfico de la Población Extranjera en la Comunidad de Madrid, January. Oktay, Julianne S. 2012. Grounded Theory. New York: Oxford University Press. “Over-the- Air TV Is Booming in U.S. Cities.” 2019. The Nielsen company, 11 March https://www.nielsen.com/us/en/insights/news/2019/over-­the-­air­tv-­is-­booming-­in-­us-­cities Parsons, Patrick. 2015. “The Evolution of the Cable-Satellite Distribution System.” In Routledge Reader on Electronic Media History, ed. Donald G. Godfrey and Susan L. Brinson. New York: Routledge. Payan, Tony. 2020. “Actors, Strategic Fields, and Game Rules: Examining Governance at the U.S.-Mexico Border in the Twenty-First Century.” In North American Borders in Comparative Perspective, ed. Guadalupe Correa-Cabrera and Victor Konrad, 39–71. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. Perlman, Allison. 2016. Public Interests: Media Advocacy and Struggles over U.S. Television. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Perrin, Andrew. 2016. “Social Media Usage, 2005-2015.” Pew Research Center, 8 October 2015 http://www.pewresearch/internet Accessed 15 March. Piñón, Juan. 2013. “Televisión Hispana en Estados Unidos: Una Industria Que Crece y se Diversifica.” In Zapping TV: El Paisaje de la Tele Latina, ed. Omar Rincón, 71–81. Bogotá: Friedrich Ebert Stiftung, FES Comunicación.

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———. 2014. “Corporate Transnationalism: The U.S.  Hispanic and Latin American Television Industries.” In Contemporary Latina/o Media: Production, Circulation, Politics, ed. Arlene Dávila and Yeidy M. Rivero, 21–43. New York: New York University Press. Plantinga, Carl. 1999. “The Scene of Empathy and the Human Face on Film.” In Passionate Views: Film, Cognition, and Emotion, ed. Carl Plantinga and Greg M. Smith, 239–255. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Portes, Alejandro, and Rubén Rumbaut. 2014. Immigrant America: A Portrait. 4th ed. Berkeley: University of California Press. Radcliffe, Sarah A. 2010. “Re-Mapping the Nation: Cartography, Geographical Knowledge and Ecuadorean Multiculturalism.”  Journal of Latin American Studies 42/2 (May): 293–323. Ramírez Berg, Charles. 2002. Latino Images in Film, Stereotypes, Subversion, Resistance. Austin: University of Texas Press. Ramos, Jorge. 2005. La Ola Latina: Cómo Los Hispanos Están Transformando la Política en los Estados Unidos. New York: Rayo. Reig, Ramón. 2011. Los Dueños del Periodismo: Claves de la estructura mediática mundial y de España. Barcelona: Editorial Gedisa, S.A. Retis, Jessica. 2007. “Mass Media and Migration in Spain, Emergence and Consolidation of the New Media of the Latin American Diaspora.” Unpublished research paper, English translation. Madrid, Spain: Observatorio de las Migraciones y la Convivencia Intercultural de la Ciudad de Madrid, 30 July. Rex, John. 1997. “The Concept of a Multicultural Society.” In The Ethnicity Reader: Nationalism, Multiculturalism, and Migration, ed. Montserrat Guibernau and John Rex. Cambridge, England: Polity Press. Rincón, Omar, and María Paula Martínez. 2014. “Colombianidades Export Market.” In Contemporary Latina/o Media: Production, Circulation, Politics, ed. Arlene Dávila and Yeidy M.  Rivero, 169–185. New  York: New  York University Press. Ríos, Diana I., and Mari Castañeda, eds. 2011. Soap Operas and Telenovelas in the Digital Age: Global Industries and New Audiences. New York: Peter Lang. Roberts, Chris. 2010. “Personal Computers.” In Communication Technology Update and Fundamentals, ed. August E.  Grant and Jennifer H.  Meadows, 12th ed. Amsterdam: Elsevier/Focal Press. Rodríguez, América. 1999. Making Latino News, Race, Language, Class. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Rodríguez Pagán, Saida. 2021. Interview on The Laura Flanders Show, American Public Television. Excerpted in palabra, Twitter @palabranahj 1 July. Rojas, Viviana, and Juan Piñón. 2014. “Spanish, English, or Spanglish? Media Strategies and Corporate Struggles to Reach Second and Later Generations of Latinos.” International Journal of Hispanic Media 7 (August): 1–15.

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Rosenblum, Marc R., Doris Meissner, et  al. 2014. The Deportation Dilemma: Reconciling Tough and Humane Enforcement. New  York: Migration Policy Institute. Ryssdal, Kai. 2019. “Marketplace.” National Public Radio, 9 December. Sánchez Ruiz, Enrique. 1998. “El cine Mexicano y la Globalización.” In Horizontes del Segundo Siglo: Investigación y Pedagogía del Cine Mexicano, Latinoamericano y Chicano, ed. Julianne Burton-Carvajal, Patricia Torres, and Ángel Miquel. Guadalajara / Mexico, D.F.: Universidad de Guadalajara / Instituto Mexicano de Cinematografía. Sassen, Saskia. 2005. “The Repositioning of Citizenship and Alienage: Emergent Subjects and Spaces for Politics.” Globalizations 2/1 (May): 79–94. Schneier-Madanes, Graciela, ed. 1995. L’Amérique Latine et ses Télévisions, Du Local au Mondial. Paris: Anthropos/INA. Scolari, Carlos, and Juan Piñón. 2016. “Las narrativas transmedia en el mercado audiovisual latino de Estados Unidos, actores, contenidos y estrategias.” Comunicación y Sociedad 27 (Sep-Dec): 13–52. Shepherd, Katie. 2017. “Tales of Deportation in Trump’s America: Week Three.” BBC News, 31 March https://www.bbc.com/news/world-­us-­canada­39461852?ocid=socialflow_twitter Shohat, Ella. 2006. Taboo Memories, Diasporic Voices. Durham: Duke University Press. Shorris, Earl. 1992. Latinos: A Biography of the People. New York: W.W. Norton. Silverman, Robert Mark, and Kelly L.  Patterson. 2015. Qualitative Research Methods for Community Development. New York: Routledge. Sinclair, John. 1998. Latin American Television: A Global View. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ———. 2005. “International Television Channels in the Latin American Audiovisual Space.” In Transnational Television Worldwide: Towards a New Media Order, ed. Jean K. Chalaby, 196–215. London: I.B. Tauris. Sinclair, John, and Joseph Straubhaar. 2013. Latin American Television Industries. London: BFI/Palgrave Macmillan. Stepler, Renee, and Brown, Anna. 2016. “Statistical Portrait of Hispanics in the United States.” Pew Research Center, 19 April http://www.pewhispanic. org/2016/04/19/statistical-­portrait-­of-­hispanics-­in-­the-­united-­states/ Straubhaar, Joseph D. 1984. “Brazilian Television: The Decline of American Influence.” Communication Research 11/2: 221–240. ———. 1991. “Beyond Media Imperialism: Asymmetrical Interdependence and Cultural Proximity.” Critical Studies in Mass Communication 8: 39–59. ———. 2012. “Telenovelas in Brazil: From Traveling Scripts to a Genre and Proto-­ Format both National and Transnational.” In Global Television Formats: Understanding Television Across Borders, ed. Tasha Oren and Sharon Shahaf, 148–177. New York: Routledge.

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Sutter, Mary. 2005. “SONY Pencils in Animax Bow in Latin America, Toon Feevee Set to Start in July.” Variety Sunday, 15 May, posted 10 p.m. PT Thussu, Daya Kishan. 2010. “Mapping Global Media Flow and Contra-Flow.” In International Communication: A Reader, ed. Daya Kishan Thussu, 221–238. New York: Routledge. UnidosUS. 2020. “The American Election Eve Poll 2020.” Latino Decisions, November https://electioneve2020.com/poll/?utm_source=hpage&utm_ medium=banner&utm_campaign=adelante#/en/demographics/latino Venegas, Cristina. 1998. “Land as Memory in the Transnational Telenovela.” Spectator 19 (1): 58–71. Wang, Hansi Lo. 2021. “Immigration Hard-Liner Files Reveal 40-Year Bid Behind Trump’s Census Obsession.” National Public Radio, posted 15 February, 5:01 a.m. ET https://www.npr.org/2021/02/15/967783477/immigration-­ hard-­liner-­files-­reveal-­40-­year-­bid-­behind-­trumps-­census-­obsession Accessed 15 February 2021. Westgate, Christopher. 2014. “One Language, One Nation, and One Vision: NBC Latino, Fusion, and Fox News Latino.” In Contemporary Latina/o Media: Production, Circulation, Politics, ed. Arlene Dávila and Yeidy M. Rivero, 82-102. New York: New York University Press. Wilkinson, Kenton T. 2016. Spanish-language Television in the United States: Fifty Years of Development. New York: Routledge. Working Group at SUNY Buffalo. 2012. “Mixed Methods for Studies that Address Broad and Enduring Issues in Education Research.” Report. http://gse.buffalo.edu/gsefiles/documents/faculty/Mixed-­Methods-­Statement.pdf Xica da Silva. 1996. Directed by Walter Avancini and Jacques Lagôa. Rede Manchete, Brazil. Yúdice, George. 2002. “Las industrias culturales: Más allá de la lógica puramente económica, al aporte social.” In Pensar Iberoamérica: Revista de Cultura 1 (June-September). ———. 2003. The Expediency of Culture: Uses of Culture in the Global Era. Durham: Duke University Press.

CHAPTER 3

Mediating Migration, from Telenovelas to Slow Reporting

Latino immigration is the longest and largest immigration movement the United States has ever witnessed. —Cristina Benítez (2007, 1)

In this chapter, I will be examining some of the ways in which the migratory experience has been narrated and contextualized within SLTV and PLTV programming across various formats and genres—in great contrast with ELTV. One of the challenges for many Latinxs today is that, owing to persistent underrepresentation in Anglophone media, their visibility has come to depend on a certain statistical presence—the “Latino” vote, or the Latinx consumer, measured in the aggregate in terms of purchasing power or as an advertising market. Within the last decade, the U.S. Latinx market has topped all other Hispanophone markets for television, accounting for $8 billion in advertising revenue in 2012 (Malavé and Giordani 2015, 103) and it is currently estimated to represent more than $1.9 trillion in value overall (Murguía 2022). It should come as no surprise, therefore, that the targeting of Latinxs by commercial marketing campaigns has been steadily on the rise. This, combined with the disproportionately low ratio of Latinx participation in EL television productions (see Introduction), can lead to the observation that while U.S.  Latinxs may grow in their desirability as consumers, they have yet to be adequately supported and recognized as content creators. There are, of course, other statistics: those that pertain to the numbers of those arriving at U.S. borders and (mostly) © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 C. L. Benamou, Transnational Television and Latinx Diasporic Audiences, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-11527-1_3

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turned away, and those who have been detained, including children. During the Migrant Protection Protocols (“Remain in Mexico” policy) put in place by the Trump administration, over 70,000 migrants, the majority from Central America (O’Toole 2021) were forced to wait in shelters and encampments near the U.S.-Mexico border for their “lottery” number to be chosen so they could have their application processed for asylum. Still others (over 1400 by recent reports) found themselves deported and separated from their children (more than 5500) in 2017 and 2018 (Rose 2021). 19,000 migrant children were apprehended along the U.S.-Mexico border in July 2021 alone (Al Punto, Univisión, 8 August 2021) and there were more than 51,000 asylum requests as of mid-2021, more than were received in the entire years of 2018 and 2019 (Noticiero Univisión, 5 July 2021). 200,000 migrants were detained at the U.S.Mexico border in August 2021 alone (Noticiero Univisión, 17 October 2021). As of September 2021, there were over 14,100 children in U.S.  Health and Human Services custody (Haire 2021). Despite the important documentaries and feature films on the recent migratory waves,1 few approaches to news reporting or fictional dramatization can begin to capture the complexity and scale of this humanitarian crisis, not to mention the difficulty of access to many of the places where migrants of all ages sojourn or are confined. While attempts have been made in SLTV to cover events at the most sensitive points of border crossing (as discussed below), the exponential growth in migrant numbers has not led in any consistent fashion to increased media visibility beyond SLTV, and the experiential gulf between those who now reside in the United States and Spain and those who remain behind has been widening. At the same time, to a significant extent, SLTV and PLTV have derived their viability as transnational media from the mobility and diasporic character of their audiences; this importance can be measured not only in terms of revenue, but also in the evolving content of media texts, especially between the mid-1980s and the first decade of the new millennium, when transnational migration began to supplement or even displace rural-­ urban migration as a theme in telenovelas and extended series, and new approaches to news reporting and modes of media delivery began to take shape. Mexican telenovelas, in particular, began to feature characters that travel to or had just returned from the United States, stories of Latinx immigrant success were shared on talk shows, and teary eyed family reunions were eagerly awaited and applauded on Don Francisco’s Sábado Gigante (Univisión, 1986–2015). In the latter, a show de auditorio, the

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surprise element of the choice of audience member to be reunited with loved ones was reminiscent of the reality series This Is Your Life, hosted by Ralph Edwards (NBC 1952–1961), where family and friends were brought on stage to join the interviewee.2 SLTV not only had the power to transport viewers virtually across borders, but also appeared, for a time at least, to be able to petition successfully behind the scenes for green cards for lucky on-air viewer-subjects. These encounters move well beyond the cursory, pro-forma level of interactivity to achieve a certain level of emotional depth that encourages the viewer to position themselves in greater proximity with the screen subjects, such that it becomes virtually a three-way encounter. More needs to be known about the stories of those who now constitute the diasporic Latinx audience and about the strategies being developed by SLTV to tell those stories. Another dilemma, conversely, concerns the transformation of tragedies occurring during the migration process into spectacle, suppressing human interest in favor of media impact to ensure a broad audience for the effects of immigration policy, mistreatment, and sheer fate on migrant lives. Many of us have seen the shocking images in brief news segments, the trailer of a semitruck in which the human cargo trapped within has perished, a makeshift raft that carried Cuban balseros on their way to Florida, yet due to human error and/or inclement weather, was overturned. In September 2021, photos and television video captured mounted Border Patrol agents flogging Haitian refugees in Del Rio, Texas. As anthropologist Leo Chavez has stated, Media spectacles transform immigrants’ lives into virtual lives, which are typically devoid of the nuances and subtleties of real lived lives. The virtual lives of ‘immigrants’ become abstractions and representations that stand in place of real lives. Rather than actual lives, virtual lives are generalized, iconic, and typified and are turned into statistical means. (Chavez 2011, 9)

In the segments described above, we see traces rather than the palpable presence of migrant lives or the inscription of a migrant viewpoint. Moreover, images tend to be presented briefly in fragmentary segments, devoid of historico-political context. Statistics need to be supplemented by audiovisual discourse, and this discourse needs to be conducive to the giving of voice and media enfranchisement. The processes linked to the thematic inscription of migration, touching on the meso-level spheres of production, transmission, reception, and advertising or PSAs,3 have been

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instrumental in the formation of transnational migrant subjectivity, working to divert attention away from stargazing and aspiration to celebrities’ lifestyles, and toward sobrevivencia, or how to survive in daily life during and after arrival, and superarse or “getting ahead” and helping one’s children succeed within the host society. In other words, in a manner analogous to popular radio in the 1930s and 1940s, these media have developed effective forms of speaking directly to their viewers, rather than simply showing viewers what media enterprises think they wish to see. There have been profound effects on television spectatorship and the design of genre-­ based programming as a result. One of the most salient differences between ELTV and SLTV concerns the fact that SLTV, building on the presence of a strong diasporic audience, tends to be both elaborated and consumed within a transnational frame. In addition to diasporic audiences, many of the programs and modes of representation that I am about to analyze are also addressed to family members back home, who increasingly seek SL media as a means of getting in touch with loved ones who have left the country and, because of restrictive immigration policies and/or economic hardship, are unable to travel back and forth for a visit. Secondly, given the exponential rise in the restriction of movement of Latin American and Caribbean peoples at the U.S.-Mexico border since 2015, the social field that encompasses border crossing is a chronically disrupted space. As border scholars have observed, historically this disruption has resulted from increased militarization of the border and the vulnerability of migrants to organized crime (leading to a decrease in cyclical migration) especially since major points of entry were fortified in the 1990s, diverting the migratory stream to less populated areas (Heyman 2014, 112–115; see also Hennessy-Fiske 2021). One of the tasks of SLTV as a transnational medium has been to “mend” this disruption through reporting on displaced family members and the crossing itself. Some of the more tragic stories—both reported in news and reenacted in television dramas—involve migrants who are unable to return to bury their relatives when they have passed, celebrate the birth of a child, or who have their children removed from them by U.S. Border Patrol and ICE. In and of themselves, arduous emigration processes— such as those endured by Central American, Cuban,4 Haitian (Yates 2021), and Venezuelan migrants—create communication deficits, even in the age of cellphones, increasing the pressure on news media to record and transmit the faces, names, and voices of those who have emigrated and face an uncertain destination. On at least two occasions, Central American

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children that were abandoned by “coyotes” at or near the border have been identified and reunited with family members in the United States after their images were recorded and televised on SLTV. Thus, a certain burden of representation has been placed on SLTV to register human need and rearticulate family connections, literally with the camera, when there are broken links caused by the shifting circumstances of migration. At a more leisurely pace in news magazines or in shows de auditorio (variety shows), the interstitial positioning of SLTV in relation to “host” and “sending” socioeconomies is emblematized in televised conversations between family members on camera at the place of origin and emigrant members on the set of the TV studio in Miami or place of arrival, with the on-air host, reporter, or anchor as a facilitator of the transborder electronic “reunion.” These conversations, which tend to be highly emotive, are structured in shot-reverse-shot format, and occasionally, the two halves of the conversation are shown in split-screen displays. Thus, in terms of scale, SLTV literally “measures the distance” between home and destination, bringing parts of the diasporic subject’s personal past into synchrony with a widely witnessed public present while initiating a process of recognition between diasporic viewer and fellow diasporic screen subject.5 This facilitation of viewer to viewer-subject relations, the depiction of actual border crossing (occasionally represented within the frame), and a general agility in navigating among scales of representation—familial unit, local community, SL mediated public sphere, and international political economy—help to explain the sustained success of SLTV despite the fact that a progressively larger sector of the Latinx population in the United States is fluent in English, and the production sources of, and devices for accessing audiovisual entertainment have multiplied. In my study, the fact that many Latinx households were also “mixed-status” households increased the relevance of programming related to immigration policy and reform. Notwithstanding some criticism of the repeated focus on immigration by SLTV networks (López and Torres 2015), access to information about immigration rights and policies is the most popular reason for watching SLTV in all U.S. metropolitan areas in my study (for Detroit and Los Angeles, see Table 4.5). Most SLTV genres have been affected by the inscription of migration in some way, but the genres most affected include the show de auditorio, dramatic series, daily news and weekly news magazines, and telenovelas. In this chapter, I will be exploring three discursive tendencies related to the Latinx migratory experience as it has come to be articulated and encoded

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for SLTV. The first is the melodramatic emplotment of migration in the shape-shifting telenovela, occasionally testing the fragile boundary between the fictional and the real. Over the past decade, the telenovela itself has become increasingly mobile as crews have shot on location outside the producing country of origin, new niche global markets have been found in Southeast Asia, Africa, and Korea,6 and, as with the show de auditorio, the inscription of migration in the telenovela has been instrumental in  locating portions of production in the United States. These shifts in  location have tended to support the realism with which migration is depicted, reinforcing the credibility of portrayals for a diasporic audience. The second discursive strand is the revival of low-budget border-­ crossing action-adventure films aired in late prime and weekend programming slots in Mexico and the United States. These films bring longitudinal aspects of migration into play by tracking the protagonists’ physical journey across the border and (often) into Southern California. The arc of the story tends to follow a South-North trajectory to portray the causes or motives of migration, the outcome of the crossing itself, and attempts at escaping the grip of exploitative employers and Immigration and Nationalization Service (INS) agents to fulfill the migrant American dream. These churros, or low-budget commercial films, have also involved border crossing as a means of reasserting Mexican agency in the solution of regional problems. Of particular interest is the construction of gendered identity and relations in these films and the somatization in the migrant body of inequities in U.S.-Mexico relations and the struggle to overcome them. The third area of scrutiny is the intrepid chronicling of migrants’ journeys from Central America and Mexico to the United States, utilizing the news magazine format to expose current crises and policy issues through the lens of individual and collective human experience. A salient characteristic of these chronicles is the use of what I term “slow reporting” as an antidote to the sensationalistic or “spectacular” treatment of the migrant experience in ELTV news. Slow reporting has allowed for testimonio or the giving of testimony by immigrant subjects. These “slow reports” have had an impact on daily news reporting as the geotechnical capabilities of newsgathering have been expanded and reporters have ventured into border zones. Linking these three strands is an interpretive analysis of the melodramatic mode as it has been cultivated within this transnational cultural context, alongside a consideration of the degree to which the depiction of

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migration has contributed to format innovation and viewer engagement with SLTV and PLTV. At root, the inscription of migration as trope, as plot device, and as launching pad for dramatic characterization involves the evocation and communication of memory and affect. There are complex emotional matrices related to real-life perils, losses, discoveries, and readjustments, including a sense of longing as well as hope, disappointment, fear, and brief moments of joy upon reunification, which can rekindle a sense that superarse (getting ahead, as part of the migrant process) is within reach.7 If, on the one hand, this linkage to processes of memory and affect ties the inscription of migration in SLTV to melodramatic codes,8 it can also assist with the reduction of distances customarily imposed by geography and policy, as well as to what has been deemed uncharacteristic of television as a modern medium—the epic format—on the other. These features run against the grain of the distinction made by scholars in the 1980s between film and television, with the former lending itself to the adaptation of literature and other elite forms of culture, being consumed in one sitting, inviting contextual analysis, and the latter perceived as episodic, fragmentary, fleeting as a result of the emphasis on simultaneity, mass diffusion of information, and the extraction of affect without a corresponding search for historical or psychosocial causality.9 José Joaquín Brunner and Carlos Catalán take the leavening of television drama further, spelling out its implications for the construction of modern subjectivity: The drama of television resides precisely in this: in that it forms part of, reproduces, and prolongs ordinary daily life; there it is representing the ‘man without character;’ society in its superficial movements that little ‘dirty inferno’ where the mass human is able, in spite of everything to develop their free individuality at the price of all of the forms of alienation imposed by their medium. (Brunner and Catalán 1995, 33)

This description which echoes the treatment of melodrama in the late nineteenth- to early twentieth-century United States as well as in pre-­ feminist critical theory (see Sadlier 2009, 2–3)10 and belittles the televisual protagonist certainly lays the groundwork for the perception of the telenovela as “cheap drama,” albeit leaving room for viewers’ agency to define themselves against the pull of the medium. Yet, what if we were to interpret the “prolongation of daily life” differently and consider it as adding layers of complexity to televised drama? The inscription of migration,

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which I argue, lends itself to cinematic modes of discourse as well as to more standardized genres in television, resists this critical dismissal, and needs to be analyzed and evaluated in the light of the history of immigration policy and its impact on Latinx migrants in the host countries, the positioning of various broadcast organizations within the global marketplace, definitions of audiovisual genre, and viewers’ modes of engagement with these media.11 Moreover, with the narration of the migratory experience, whether in fictional or non-fictional form, the conventions and production practices attached to melodrama as a popular televisual mode can become challenged and modified, and the boundaries separating formats and genres may become somewhat blurred as a result. In keeping with the principal guidelines of “grounded theory,” some of the criteria used to evaluate the representations discussed in this chapter have been derived from the comments of participants in focus groups devoted to the “Migrant Image” in Madrid and Miami, as well as responses to specific questions on random questionnaires circulated in all four cities. Four precepts will guide the discussion of melodrama as a narrative vehicle in this chapter: as part of the transnational flow, it (1) helps transform the televisual text into a repository of cultural memory for viewers of SLTV; (2) serves as a transgeneric, staple mode of representing crises and challenges experienced by migrants both prior to migrating and upon arrival. As such, it provides the narrative glue that holds the collective interpretation of life’s events together; its long and deep association with SLTV means that it is a terrain familiar to both media professional and media consumer, and it is also recognizable and decipherable (and even “culturally shareable”) by curious non-Hispanophone viewers. Televisual melodrama is not only a site where the tensions among the national, the local, and the global are articulated and made manifest, it is also a communicative bridge that links viewers across national, expanded regional, and global realms of transmission and reception, working to shape new cultural and intercultural communities. Third, the televisual representation of migration raises anew the question of the relationship of melodrama as storyline, as performance, and as historical commentary, to the real. Thus, the coupling of melodrama with migration can open the possibility for pursuing the question of historical causality and the psychosocial effects of migration policy, both within and outside of media texts.12 Fourth, although I have found that, in the process of relocation and social adaptation, secularization occurs for some U.S.-bound migrants, the investment in melodrama is less about the transition from a “sacred,” “premodern”

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order to a modern secular society in which class standing is uncertain,13 than about spatiotemporal uncertainty—the loss of a sense of “place” changes within the structure and dynamics of the family, whether all are able to migrate or some are left behind (see Bouamama 2007, 45), the disappointment (and at times, trauma) of social exclusion experienced in face to face encounters and on a larger scale in relation to the nation-state (whether pertaining to the “host” or “sending” society; on the experience of social exclusion in the United States, see Heyman 2014, 117–119, and Coutin 2000, 587–588). Within the diasporic viewing context, the tension of the melodramatic text with the real introduces two interrelated pathways of interest to the analysis: the emphasis on television as an educational medium, and the preference, voiced by an overwhelming majority of the respondents in my study for stories and entertainment “based on real life” as opposed to “fiction.” (See Table 4.5.) Implied in the latter is the possibility of gauging whether news or other types of programming measure up to the perception or memory of lived experience, thereby providing a guideline for the degree to which television can provide a sense of recognition. On the other hand, the focus on the educational role of television, whether it applies to commercial or public television, can be traced back to the educational emphasis assigned to electronic media in the society of origin (see Rogers and Reina Schement 1984). It can be adduced that some migrant viewers bring the preoccupation with education to the televisual screen as an expectation within the new U.S. sociocultural context, as reflected in responses to questions in my survey (see Table 4.6, “Reasons for watching ELTV” and Table 4.7, “What you would like to see on SLTV?”). In this reception context, respondents are often concerned with the example that television gives to younger viewers and argue for changes to programming that are family friendly. The concern with education is also reflected in the popularity of melodramatic programming that is didactic in tone and/or structure, such as Mujer: Casos de la Vida Real (Televisa, 1985–2008), Decisiones (RTI/Telemundo 2005–2008), and La Virgen de Guadalupe (Televisa, 2002–), (see Table 4.8).

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Migration as “Serious Drama”: From telenovelas to shows de auditorio The slice of life, once a project of naturalist drama, is now a voluntary, habitual, internal rhythm; the flow of action and acting, of representation and performance, raised to a new convention, that of a basic need. —Raymond Williams14

As the preeminent vehicle for melodrama in modern post-WWII Latin America, the telenovela is by far the most widely consumed, lucrative, and influential genre in both SLTV and PLTV. And, as the fictional genre most likely to incorporate the use of new technology, the telenovela has helped to drive the development of national televisual industries in Latin America, not only in terms of technical sophistication but also in the nationalization of themes and audiovisual style (Martín-Barbero 1995a, 118–119). At the same time, the telenovela led the globalization of national television industries as it became the most exportable cultural product beginning in the 1970s and 1980s with exports from Latin America to Western Europe (including Spain) and Japan, followed by Eastern Europe, China, and Northern Africa (Ibid., 120; Martín-Barbero 1995b, 283). With the formation of Univisión and Telemundo in the 1980s, the telenovela became the “stock in trade” for transnational television industries linked to SLTV, second only to news in its appeal to diasporic audiences. One main historic difference between telenovelas in Latin America and on SLTV, and soap operas on ELTV, is that telenovelas are slated for prime time viewing during the “horario AAA” directly following the 6:30  p.m. news, between 7 and 10  p.m. Most of the viewers in my U.S. survey tuned in at that time. A second difference is that while soap operas approximate real time by lasting years even decades in duration, Latin American telenovelas and U.S. produced SLTV dramatic series are shorter in duration, from several weeks to one season and one and a half seasons in length. These scheduling practices favor family viewing and a more suspenseful plotline, leading potentially to more intensive engagement by viewers. They also increase the possibility of adapting the telenovela to contemporary historical themes, including migration. Finally, the prime time scheduling of telenovelas has helped to endow actors with star status, leading to their frequent appearance in Miami-based talk shows. This has helped to build diasporic audience engagement with the genre as actors appear in more than one telenovela.

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Four features in particular characterize the “classic” telenovela: (1) an oscillation between patriarchal and matriarchal authority (the latter is particularly strong in Mexican telenovelas), in which abuses of power and malevolence are often made evident; (2) the “Cinderella” narrative in which cross-class unions are made possible by an unveiling of the “innocence” of the unfairly maligned ingenue and the banishment of jealous or malevolent rivals, usually of privileged racial and social background; (3) often joined to this reconciliation of class conflict is a return to “traditional” values that are linked to rural life, discovered through the dramatic arc of rural to urban migrant subjects; and (4) a differentiation between “loyal” and “disloyal” domestic workers who bear nearly lifelong relationships to the ruling classes, which often plays an important role in the development and resolution of plot conflict introducing the theme of the evil effects of corruptibility, both for servile and ruling classes. Interestingly, the focus on the landowner and farm laborer/domestic servant in Mexican telenovelas did not disappear in the 1990s; it was revived in the wake of NAFTA and the commodification of refined and packaged agricultural products for export such as tequila and nopales (the latter has been cultivated largely for the Japanese market). Emphasis was placed on the image of the nation-state projected onto the rural product for export.15 What changed was the transnationalization of urban life, with rural-urban migrants traveling abroad to urban destinations in Europe and the United States. As well, the Latin American source for telenovelas became diversified, as Brazil, Colombia, and Peru entered the SLTV market, which until the new millennium had been dominated by telenovelas from Mexico and Venezuela. Despite the trend toward a global esthetic and the transnational circulation of formats and scripts, telenovelas from these countries are not interchangeable. Martín-Barbero has pointed to two tendencies in the Latin American telenovela: the first, found in Mexican and Venezuelan telenovelas, is marked by a lack of ambiguity in the delineation of social roles and a relative absence of historical complexity. The expression of emotion, especially in the Mexican telenovela is very pronounced.16 The second tendency, found in Brazilian and Colombian telenovelas, involves a more realist style of characterization and performance and the depiction of everyday life (Martín-Barbero 1995a, 115–117, b, 279–280). The inscription of migration has brought an element of realism to the Mexican telenovela, at times resulting in a hybrid esthetic, as location shooting in the

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United States is folded into more studio-oriented shooting in Mexico for the primary diegesis. As a staple genre within SLTV and PLTV programming, the telenovela has historically addressed the drama of rural-urban migration within its characterization and plot structure as well as in its targeting of migrant subjects as constituting a likely audience. In this section, I will be considering three variants of serial melodrama, first, the mainstream telenovela, in which it is possible to notice a trend toward inscribing crossborder migration, building from the architext of rural to urban migration in Latin American telenovelas and radionovelas present since the 1950s and 1960s. Accompanying this trend, which begins to take shape in the 1990s, is an increased attention to ethnic “minorities” in the wake of changes to the Mexican constitution, indigenous grassroots movements, and the commemoration of the centennial of the abolition of slavery in Brazil. This raises the question of casting and protagonism in the depiction of crossborder migration on prime time television, and I will examine the social transferability of migrant characterization from the “domestic” to the global context in variations on the telenovela. The other two melodramatic variants that I will examine here are “real life” telenovelas and the dramatic miniseries. The appeal of the telenovela to transnational migrant audiences (and to minoritized audiences within the domestic sphere) is increased I argue, by the trope of misrecognition in the plot, “the child’s ignorance of his (sic) parent’s identity, one sibling of another’s, or a mother of her child’s” (Martín-Barbero 1995b, 277), such that the struggle to resolve plot conflicts is accompanied by a “struggle to be recognized by others” (Ibid., emphasis in original). In other words, this appeal pivots around anxiety over the loss of social identity provoked by the migration process (and general barriers to socioeconomic participation for minoritized subjects). Another relevant attribute of the transnational telenovela (as contrasted with the U.S. soap opera) is that it depicts the necessity of collaborative if not collective action of sympathetic characters with the hero(ine) to resolve situations that are not reducible to interpersonal dynamics. It is the coworker or the com(p)adre who helps the momentarily blind and unwise protagonist to “see” the truth and who works assiduously to pull the protagonist out of the crisis. Of course, it is through just such collective action that Latinoamerican immigrants have confronted the obstacles they experience in the United States (for compelling examples of collective action in the historical sphere, see Heyman 2014, 127–129; Costanza-Chock 2014;

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and The Infiltrators 2019). Telenovelas, along with other programming, have also formed an object of social discourse as viewers discuss television with family, friends, and coworkers. Since its exponential rise in popularity, the telenovela has undergone renewal first through the formation of what can be called “format franchises” as certain telenovelas become remade in different national settings (such is the case with the legendary Colombian telenovela Yo Soy Betty, La Fea, 1999–2001), secondly through the introduction of “new social actors and professions” (Martín-Barbero 1995b, 281), and thirdly through geographic relocations (in essence a transnational approach to shooting locations) in response to the transborder migration of a large sector of the Latinx diasporic audience. In the process, challenges have been posed to gendered and ethnic subjectivity that to be understood require a frame other than “national product for global export.” Part of this renewal has involved broadening the generic scope of melodrama beyond narrative fiction into “real life” telenovelas (rather than “reality TV”). Even when there is no direct correlation between lived experience and the telenovela plot, the telenovela bears traits that enable it to engage the viewer in historical processes. As a form of melodrama, the telenovela is, as Esther Hamburger has suggested, a genre well suited to addressing national crises that affect a wide cross-section of citizens (Hamburger 2005, 7–12, 131–147). By personifying the crisis through the dramatic relations of a few characters, for whom national and transnational dilemmas are among a larger set of problems, telenovelas distill what are in reality complex situations featuring numerous protagonists and competing, rather than unified, power structures. Thus, they provide just enough of a psycho-ideological buffer so that the plotline is injected with a dose of reality, without forcing the viewer to take up a position in relation to the crisis being referenced and thereby avoid bursting the diegetic bubble that makes telenovela viewing so pleasurable. On the one hand, the viewer is relieved of having to shoulder the crisis, which in any case has its roots in structures and agencies outside the viewer’s immediate range of control. On the other, even if the melodramatic text does not depict the crisis from an emigrant’s perspective (as is usually done by news stories), it can obliquely chronicle the types of hardship or disenchantment experienced by significant sectors of the diasporic population and, through well-timed placement of culturally charged iconic signs, allow access, albeit indirect, to the deeper sociohistorical roots of the characters’ dramas. The solutions to these interpersonal dramas can therefore work synecdochically to deliver

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implicit, prescribed solutions to the crisis. These solutions are tied to character arcs and appear initially as a means of individual advancement or deliverance from suffering at critical turning points in the plot. These features are illustrated in the Mexican national epic Amor Real (Televisa 2003, Univisión 2005), which, enormously popular in the United States, allows migratory issues to be worked through in allegorical form. On the surface, Amor Real appears to reiterate the timeworn formula of an inheritance dispute between rightful and fraudulent heirs to a hacienda. The story is set in fictitious Ciudad Trinidad (referring to the port where Cubans and their Spanish colonizers did battle with English pirates) during the period leading up to the Cinco de Mayo (1862) victory, when Mexican patriots were able to rout French occupying forces led by Napoleon III and his Mexican collaborators. The galán (male romantic lead) Manuel Fuentes Guerra (Fernando Colunga) is a patriot who has inherited his late father Joaquín Fuentes Guerra’s landed estate and who marries the daughter of a fellow hacienda owner, hoping to repair the family’s rapidly dwindling fortune. Halfway through the plot, Manuel’s birthright to his name and estate is challenged when an impostor forges an altered version of his father’s will and rumors erupt about the former “profession” of his biological mother (Ana Martín) who has been posing as his maidservant. Upon being shunned by Trinidadian society and dispossessed of his home, Manuel flees with his mother in a horse-drawn carriage back to his rural town of origin, where a priest can be enlisted to testify to Manuel’s identity and his mother’s virtue in the eyes of God. They are discovered en route as they attempt to cross a river and are chased along the riverbank by troops sent by Mexican criollo traitors. The traitors are set on destroying both Manuel’s personal life and professional reputation as to them he is an intolerably upwardly mobile mestizo. The carriage overturns and, left for dead, Manuel escapes with his mother to an encampment of impoverished patriots that resembles more a redoubt of Pancho Villa’s rag-tag army than a garrison of homespun Mexican troops preparing to fight the French. The chief officer of the garrison, and we discover, of the Mexican resistance, is a “people’s leader” who lives among his troops and is committed to the achievement of social justice, as well as Mexican sovereignty. The encampment seems improvised enough—it is set up in the ruins of an old hacienda, and food is scavenged and shared— that it could just as well be a camp set up by border crossers as they make their way into Texas or Arizona, looking for work. This is a major turning point for Manuel, who comes to accept his mother’s silence about her past

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and goes from being a silk-stockinged patrician to a grassroots poncho-­ wearing combatant who is accepted and trusted by the rag-tag army. After a violent clash with the criollo and gachupín traitors who have taken the town and are clinging to Manuel’s wife like barnacles, the novela ends with a doubly redeemed Manuel able to return to claim his rightful place in his family and in local and national society. In thus conflating the sesquicentennial of Cinco de Mayo with the quasi-centennial of the Mexican revolution, emergent conflicts in the telenovela between the servile and dominant classes can be resolved in the mestizo figure of Manuel, son of a maidservant who is also a property owner. Building on the polysemy of the telenovela’s title, patriotic and filial love trump “royal” love. The resolution of the plot in Mexican territory allows the figural borderlands (where Manuel’s first redemption takes place) to be allegorically encompassed within “greater Mexico” rather than cut off from the nation-state al otro lado (on the other side of the border). In addition to historical allegory, migration has been inscribed in the “classic” telenovela utilizing more mimetic strategies of representation. When it does enter the telenovela plot directly, the migration story becomes a third or auxiliary line of emplotment that, in forcing a glance at the parallelism between the personal and the national, can foreground the work of the genre in bridging fiction and lived experience. Even when it is peripheral to the central plot, the migration narrative has become a pivotal site for the delivery of ideological content regarding national identity, class, and gender relations, especially since many of the featured emigrants are working-class women. This feminization of migrant protagonists in telenovelas not only reflects the increasing proportion of women to men in the migrant stream (a 2006 United Nations Population Fund study found that 69 percent of internal and international migrants from Latin America were domestic workers; Lindo 2006), but, ultimately working within, rather than against the predominantly conservative ideological codes of the telenovela, it also augments the vulnerability of the migrant subject to various forms of aggression and deceit. Subtended by patriarchal codes, the feminization of the migrant protagonist provides the pretext for various forms of rescue and a trajectory of repatriation, often with a happy ending. The third line of emplotment thus assists in the task of the primary diegesis to restore a sense of confidence, or at least attachment to the homeland, notwithstanding the persistent injustices to be found there. Two Mexican telenovelas featuring single, working-class women who encounter danger and misfortune al otro lado and return more worldly

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wise, albeit emotionally scarred, to their hometowns, deserve mention. In Amigas y rivales (Friends and Rivals, Televisa 2001) the secondary character Nayeli (Angélica Vale, who was later cast as Betty in La Fea Más Bella, 2006, the Mexican adaptation of Yo Soy Betty, La Fea) is a domestic worker in a wealthy household in Mexico City and dreams of romance with the bachelor son, galán Roberto (Arath de la Torre) of the benevolent patriarch, don Roberto de la O (Eric del Castillo). Nayeli’s future seems palatable if it were not for the neighborhood toughs who harass and try to assault her on her return home from work one evening. Shaken up by the encounter, she flees north to Los Angeles, where she rooms with a settled Mexican migrant who helps her to obtain work as a waitress in what appears to be a strip joint near Los Angeles airport. Unfortunately, her roommate’s benevolence stops there; one evening, he attempts to force himself upon her, whereupon she knocks him unconscious. Believing that she has killed him (which she hasn’t), she takes refuge in the apartment of a new Mexican-American friend, Johnny Trinidad (Johny Lozano, a Puerto Rican actor and former member of the Menudo band). In an interesting twist on the repatriation narrative, the Spanglish-speaking Johnny helps Nayeli to return to Tijuana, and he decides—with the best of intentions—to follow her to Mexico City. An aspiring boxer, Johnny manages through boxing connections to land a role in a telenovela shortly after he arrives. Johnny is all Nayeli needs to protect herself from the neighborhood thugs, even though, curiously, the two never appear to consummate their relationship. The original galán is not displaced, Mexico is shown to be a land of opportunity for U.S. Latinxs, and Nayeli’s relationship to her homeland is restored. Although Mexico clearly has its social problems and poor living conditions for hardworking people, it offers a web of protection and trust through family and work relations (Don Roberto sends Nayeli home with his chauffeurs) that is clearly absent from Los Angeles, where one’s human value is brutally diminished by untamed desire. An alternate yet ideologically consonant portrayal of feminine migration and Mexican globalization is given in Destilando Amor (Distilling Love, Televisa 2007), a highly Mexicanized remake of the Colombian transnational hit Café con Aroma de Mujer (Coffee with the Scent of a Woman, 1994). The latter was broadcast on Telemundo in 1995 and based on an actual scandal involving fraudulent coffee exports (see Venegas 1998, 63–64, 67–69). In the regionally popular Mexican remake, Teresa Hernández (Angélica Rivera, wife of former Mexican president Enrique

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Peña Nieto, 2012–2018) is a young rimadora (agave harvester) working on a hacienda near Tequila, Jalisco, who falls madly in love with galán Rodrigo Montalvo (Eduardo Yañez), the handsome heir to the hacienda. Teresa, whose nickname “Gaviota” evokes her cyclical migrancy as a farmworker, discovers that she is pregnant with Rodrigo’s child after he has returned to England to complete his studies as an agronomist, which will allow him to take tequila-making into the twenty-first century. Desperate to inform him in person of this good yet socially compromising news, Teresa accepts the dubious offer of a local “fashion photographer’ to work as a model in Europe. Bearing a false passport with the name Mariana Franco, Teresa arrives in Paris only to discover that the “fashion house” is in fact a brothel, and what awaits her is a miserable existence as a trafficked sex slave. Teresa escapes without tarnishing her sworn fidelity to Rodrigo and, with the help of a benevolent Italian restaurant owner, makes her way to London. After a fruitless search for Rodrigo in Oxford, Teresa spots Rodrigo (who is enrolled at Cambridge University) on a London street and in her rush to reach him, she is struck by a double-decker bus, severely injured and knocked unconscious. Saved by the Virgen de Guadalupe (like Nayeli, she is alone and unprotected by family or friends), she awakens in a Catholic charity hospital to find that she has lost her baby and contact with Rodrigo, yet she receives spiritual encouragement from an English nun. During her months of memory recovery and rehabilitation, Teresa learns English, French, and European history in addition to reading and writing. Lacking the money for a return ticket to Mexico, and having overstayed her European visa, Teresa has herself deported back home. However, instead of finding a beaming Rodrigo waiting for the spring agave harvest and ready to take her hand in marriage, she finds a deeply disillusioned man who, unaware of her pregnancy and having discovered abandoned “test shots” of a coquettish Teresa, has taken a Mexico City slicker as his wife. Years later, when Teresa returns to London as a successful public relations executive, she succeeds in negotiating a trade agreement between Mexican tequila producers and their G8 counterparts in London because she has found a position that allows her to fuse the proud memory of her rural origins with her metropolitan skills, while her love interest, the Cambridge-educated Rodrigo, must return to his hacienda to save the family legacy. The two can only be reunited, as in Amor Real, at their place of origin. Mexico is thus able to take the global stage without the sacrifice of the galán’s patrimony.

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Several features link these stylistically and historically distinct telenovelas. First, migration (or exile, in the case of Amor Real) is figured as a rite of passage in which the protagonists, male or female, must lose everything of value, especially their social identity, to appreciate what they have left behind. The profundity of this loss exceeds the nostalgia one might expect from a tale of migration and thus acts as a deep structural clue to an allegorical operation. Loss is invariably followed by reconciliation with the family and local community and by extension, the nation-state. In keeping with the didactic function of the Mexican telenovela, the rhetoric of self-­ improvement and good citizenship tends to preempt any narrative of collective social progress or political reform, notwithstanding the (feeble) referencing of social ills, lack of opportunity, even persecution, on the home front as a cause for departure. In addition to object lessons for women regarding the dangers that lurk beyond the nation’s borders, there is a discourse of superarse and hence the possibility of embracing globalization toward good end. This was reinforced in the case of Destilando Amor by the fact that both Eduardo Yañez and Angélica Rivera came from relatively humble origins, such that a career in telenovela performance, as for Johnny in Amigas y Rivales, represented a step up the socioeconomic ladder. There is more than simply a lesson here on how to succeed in a globalized capitalist society, for there is often a tendentious note—and an occasional hammering—of Mexican state discourse (doubly true for Rivera whose “real life” galán was politician Peña Nieto) within the didacticism. The theme of alienation and betrayal, material and spiritual impoverishment, and in some cases, death, experienced by migrants abroad can be traced back to Mexican film melodramas of the 1950s such as Alejandro Galindo’s Espaldas Mojadas (Wetbacks 1955) and 1970s and 1980s action-­ adventure films (to be discussed below). In the newer televisual versions, which border on Harlequin romance, migration is equated not only with the betrayal of one’s national origins—Mexican nationalism is clearly preferred to other forms of latinidad—but also, in the woman-centered subplots, with a departure from the physical and emotional safety of an autochthonous, timeworn form of patriarchy and a “Latin,” or more humane form of capitalism. Outside of this framework, one finds only the most barren modes of existence; spatial mobility (an apt metaphor for sociocultural mobility) is shown to be a fading illusion for the undocumented, and the only available avenues of survival for women involve the commodification of one’s body, and with that, a negative social impact on one’s future. Although both Nayeli (Amigas y Rivales) and Gaviota

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(Destilando Amor) are given the free will to craft their departures from Mexico, significantly, their agency in resolving their employment difficulties or confronting the dangers encountered upon arriving abroad is curtailed; whereas the power of paternalism, and, in the latter case, of the state and Catholic Church as beneficent institutions, is restored. The character arcs of Nayeli and Gaviota lead to achievements just short of moral value,17 which compromises the degree to which these narratives can be truly empowering for women viewers. Because the integrity of the Mexican nation-state is at stake, there is no transcendence possible in the migratory effort, or in global investment involving any transfer of patrimony abroad; there is only the possibility of a lateral move homeward, for those wise enough to choose it. Mexico is depicted as a viable, even attractive, space of return, where remuneration and career expectations are modest, yet where one is certain to find the protection and support of one’s boss, coworker, family, and true love, not to mention one’s authentic self: imperfect, yet visibly improved by exposure to global challenge. In the process, privatized versions of the paternalistic state, along with diplomacy that protects the nation’s interest—such as the National Tequila Regulatory Council in Destilando Amor or Manuel Fuentes Guerra’s sheltering of patriot fighters on his hacienda in Amor Real—prevail. In these telenovelas, migration is acknowledged as an unavoidable feature of contemporary Mexican reality, but it does not represent a significant stake or prevailing context for the plot. Further reinforcing the ideological status quo are the casting practices where the female migrant protagonists are concerned. Both Angélica Vale (Amigas y Rivales) and Angélica Rivera (Destilando el Amor) are phenotypically light skinned, reinforcing a tendency toward the privileging of EuroMexican actors, if not always characters, in Mexican telenovelas. This is the case even when the characters are supposed to be of indigenous descent, as in Si Tu Supieras Maria Isabel (Televisa 1997), which cast the fair-skinned Adela Noriega in braids in the title role of an indigenous woman from Nayarit who goes to work in Mexico City.18 This colorism and what can be called ethnic transvestitism is present even in migration-themed telenovelas that are set in the United States, such as Bajo el Mismo Cielo (Beneath the Same Sky, Telemundo 2015). In this telenovela, produced with the U.S. Latinx market in mind, a former gang member Adela (Maria Elisa Camargo) falls in love with unauthorized migrant Carlos (Gabriel Porras) who is starting his own business as a gardener while trying to keep his younger son Luis on a pathway to honest success. His older, disillusioned

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son Rodrigo has become  a leader in the same gang “La Colonia” and manages to escape from prison. Focalized through Carlos and Adela, it becomes a struggle of hard work and superarse without dishonesty, corruption (in the form of femme fatale Felicia), and delinquency. In centering their stories, this Bajo el Mismo Cielo departs from the “classic” telenovela; a particularly telling sequence shows Carlos reluctant to inform the police that his truck has been stolen (by Adela, who is trying to escape from gang members), for fear that his migratory status will be revealed, leading him to choose alternative microsocial paths to recover his truck. The incident reflects the distrust of authorities expressed by many first-­ generation unauthorized migrants, as described by Leisy Abrego (2014, 142–146). Adela, for her part does not seek medical help after being inflicted with a wound by her brother’s gang. Without invoking traditional forms of patriarchy, the telenovela thus explores the impact of various forms of “illegality” on the ability to obtain an education and reliable healthcare, as well as justice. In general, the colorism and classism characteristic of the “classic” telenovela are less evident in “real life” telenovelas, which carry less prestige and appear in non-prime time slots yet have achieved a greater degree of recognition—and following—among diasporic viewers. The most popular of these, Mujer: Casos de la Vida Real hosted by veteran telenovela and stage actress Silvia Pinal, features episodes based on testimonies sent to the producers by viewers.19 In contrast to the subplots in the “classic” telenovelas, the episodes explicitly attempt to appeal to diasporic viewers by featuring mostly feminine migrant perspectives without speaking through their elite benefactors and detractors or harnessing viewer empathy to a patriarchal positioning. At the same time, there is a tendency toward the sensational in these weekly dramatizations of reported incidents, such as the sexual captivity of young rural women in return for money paid to their father; a selfish mother who leaves her children with their grandmother in northern Mexico so that she can work in the fields in the United States, only to start a family with a new husband and never return; con-­ artist employment brokers who set up an office in Mexico to process “applications” from aspiring migrants and, after collecting hefty visa fees, disappear, and the sobering tale of a woman who, after waiting many months for word from her husband who left to work in New York, discovers that he was one of the many service workers who died in the 9/11 World Trade Center explosions, with no repatriation of the body or pension forthcoming. Unlike the “classic” telenovela, the series does not aspire toward seamless, naturalistic representations of characters and

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settings, nor does it interweave multiple plotlines around a central tale of heterosexual romance; rather, its own “esthetic of hunger” (to use the words of Brazilian filmmaker Glauber Rocha) appears to resonate with the usually modest circumstances of the protagonists, and intensity of emotion is geared to compensate for the technical limitations of the videography and editing work. The veracity of the stories and the modifications made in their staging are difficult to ascertain, but the selection and dramatization of these stories are unabashedly designed to morally instruct the audience. The series is populated by characters who strive for moral value, such as prudence, inner strength, and justice (Ahumada Barajas 2007, 87). At the end of each half-hour episode, Pinal returns (much in the style of the late Robert Osborne and his successors on TCM) to deliver a few words of caution and compassion before opening the next letter from viewers. Less heavy-handed in its didacticism, but equally dedicated to socially responsible programming and based on actual events, is the melodramatic crime miniseries Al Filo de la Ley (On the Edge of the Law 2004–2005), developed for Univisión by the Spanish-based Plural Entertainment (Prisa) and aired on Univisión in May and June 2004. The series boasts higher production values than the longer-running Mujer: Casos de la Vida Real because it was shot on film and the producers did not hesitate to experiment with unconventional angles, chiaroscuro lighting, or unusual cuts and dissolves, as well as the interrelation of parallel plotlines during writing and editing. The microdrama of the law office is fused in each of these plotlines with the cliffhanging suspense of detective work and courtroom battles. The series shows signs of U.S. television influence—it has the feel of a Latinx Law and Order (NBC 1990–2010)—and boasts a pro-actively pan-Latinx approach to casting and characterization. Principal actors, who play attorneys working in downtown Los Angeles, speak in Mexican, Cuban, and Colombian accents, while episodic actors and characters exhibit a range of backgrounds, from Mexican American to South American. The narrative matrix on which each episode is built consists of the arrival of a young, single attorney Valeria (Ximena Rubio) at a law firm where her ex-boyfriend Andrés (Jorge Aravena) and his new love interest Bárbara (Natalia Ramírez, who appeared in Yo Soy Betty, La Fea) also work. Hence the series offers a rare middle-class vantage point from which to portray diasporic Latinxs in the United States. It also offers compelling examples of the collective rather than individualistic approach to problem solving in telenovelas.

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In a pivotal episode (aired 25 May 2004), Valeria takes on the case of Susana Montalbán, who came to the United States from Mexico after marrying Rogélio, a U.S. citizen. The couple met while Susana was working as a waitress in Cancún, where Rogélio (who, as an “agringado,” prefers to be called “Roger”) was vacationing. Although the couple had a child after arriving in Los Angeles, Susana is still waiting for the residency papers that Rogélio promised her. What makes the wait worse is that Susana is tormented by her potentially violent and psychologically abusive husband, who regularly commands her to engage in involuntary sex. Susana faces a choice between obtaining her residency papers to which she is entitled and recovering her self-esteem and peace of mind by returning with her child to Mexico. After consulting Valeria and Andrés about the possibility of obtaining a divorce, Susana returns home, feeling empowered enough to leave temporarily with her son until her situation is resolved. Valeria begins to investigate the status of Susana’s residency application just as Roger, witnessing his wife’s arrival home from across the street, calls the INS. As Roger warns Susana not to leave, the INS agents enter and apprehend Susana. In the meantime, Valeria discovers that no application was ever filed for Susana, and, after an information-sharing session at the detention center, Valeria and Andrés decide to take the case to court. Armed with a private male lawyer, Roger (now clearly a “gringo” who is not to be trusted) challenges Susana’s accusations, claiming that she married him for residency papers and abandoned the home. Valeria makes the difficult decision to give the final summation, motivated by her desire to confront her memory of being raped by a masked stranger, which, in effect, interfered long ago in her romantic relationship with Andrés. Notably, rather than emphasize the tensions emerging between Valeria, Andrés, and Bárbara, which would be expected in a star-driven telenovela, the focus remains on the immigration case. The lawyers and Susana are essential to the central idea of presenting compassionate Latinx professionals who can assist the less fortunate members of their urban community, pointing to the benefits for someone like Susana of seeking help rather than silently struggling against an abusive husband or immigration regulations. (As Abrego has shown in her study of the way unauthorized immigrants cope with the stigma of illegality, such attempts to get help outside of the immediate community for first-generation immigrants are rare; Abrego 2014, 142–145.) The episode emphasizes the way in which, by focalizing the drama through women protagonists, Valeria can assume

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a supportive position as a listening professional and as a woman who herself has experienced male aggression. The viewers’ sympathy for Roger is severely compromised by his willingness to deport his own wife; it seems that he and the INS agents are “out to get” Susana and that Roger’s ability to bully her derives from his citizenship status and sense of masculine entitlement rather than from any physical prowess or moral superiority. During the detention interview, the camera framing emphasizes the ensemble of lawyers and their client, in which the telephone lines, signifying communication between free and incarcerated subjects, transect the frame, and the only character whose face is fully lit and in view is Susana’s. As we will see, from a formal standpoint, this discursive strategy resembles the interviewing techniques used by reporters in the news magazine Aquí y Ahora (Univisión 1998–present): a sympathetic Latina professional facilitates the revelation of the Latinx migrant experience to a pan-Latinx diasporic audience. The examples of Bajo el Mismo Cielo, Mujer: Casos de la Vida Real, and Al Filo de la Ley point to the possibility of a synergistic relation between recorded images forged from historical experience and the use of melodrama to attract spectators and involve them in the pathos of the migratory experience.

Telecinematic Takes on Border Crossing: Cine Fronterizo on Late-Night and Weekend Television In the late 1990s and into the new millennium, Mexican films produced in the 1980s about border crossing featuring popular actors began to be televised in late-night and weekend time slots, such as Univisión’s “Cine Especial” and “De Película.” These films, which can collectively be called cine fronterizo (borderlands cinema), comprise two subgenres: the action-­ adventure genre, populated by vernacular stars such as Andrés Garcia and Rosa Gloria Chagoyán, and a modified version of the road movie, featuring lesser-known actors cast in the roles of transborder migrants. Many of these films were produced by small companies located near the U.S.Mexican border where they could take advantage of the lower cost of production labor and locations in Mexico yet generate revenue in U.S. dollars.20 Some, like La Ilegal (The Illegal One, directed by Arturo Ripstein, 1979) and Los Triunfadores (The Golden Coyotes, directed by Javier Durán, 1978) were produced as B-fare by Mexico City-based companies on location in the United States. I argue that, notwithstanding the critical

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dismissal of these films owing to their habitual technical imperfection and their peripheral status in relation to Mexican art cinema (especially given the geographical removal of their production from commercial studios in Mexico City), they constitute a privileged site for examining popular resistance in the form of emergent feminine subjectivity, as well as the use of the gendered body as an allegory for the vulnerability, if not fragility of the Mexican nation-state. In La Ilegal, a young Mexican woman, Claudia Bernal (Lucía Méndez) falls in love with and becomes pregnant by a married filmmaker (Pedro Armendariz Jr.) who lives in Los Angeles. While she is waiting to give birth, the filmmaker arranges for her to live in a beach house in Malibu. However, once she gives birth, he takes the child from her and pays some men to rape and film her in compromising positions. Eventually, she is detained by immigration authorities, yet is defended by a Mexican-American attorney who helps her to remain in the United States to be close to her child. As in Amigas y Rivales, Los Angeles is portrayed as a site of corruption and exploitation and of isolation for new migrants. This theme is also present in Los Triunfadores, which was partially funded by the Mexican state through CONACITE 2. In the film, a young musician, Fernando (José Maria Napoleón), convinces others in his soft rock band to accompany him to the United States in search of fame and fortune. There, they meet up with Mexican ranchera star Antonio Aguilar (who also produced the film), who arranges performances for the group through his own connections, but also warns them of the pitfalls of seeking a career in the United States without documentation. After not getting paid by a club owner for their performances, the “gringo” owner calls the INS and the group’s hotel room is raided. Nearly all of the band members are deported and are shown walking toward Tijuana at the San Ysidro border crossing; Fernando, however, who was born in the United States and is a citizen, is drafted into the army and gets hit by friendly machine gun fire in Vietnam. Appearing as a “coda,” the scenes of the Vietnam war figure as narrative excess, underscoring the inviability of assimilation into the United States and the vulnerability of the Mexican body to external forces. As in La Ilegal, families become separated by the migratory process, the United States is a place of betrayal, loss, and isolation rather than success that literally takes the lifeblood from Mexican migrants. Produced on the cusp of the advent of the neoliberal state in Mexico (Ahumada Barajas 2007, 107–108), these films reflect a concern with sovereignty and the integrity of the body politic in an era of increased income and regional inequality (Ibid., 119–120), rising inflation, primary,

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public, and financial deficit, and the beginning of a trend toward devaluation of the Mexican peso (Meza 2019, 2–3). As enchantment with the Mexican “miracle” (owing to the discovery of petroleum) began to fade, fascination with the U.S. growth model began to pose a greater threat to the Mexican self-image. Not surprisingly, recourse to the Mexican patriarchal state, even if indirectly referenced, remains present in the plot resolutions of these films of the late seventies. This will be tempered through the resilience, even open resistance to Americanization shown by two feminine cinematic figures: popular action star Rosa Gloria Chagoyán and comedian Maria Elena Velasco. From her early days in Mexican low-budget features, Chagoyán emerged as a super heroine combatting drug smuggling and other forms of contraband along the U.S.-Mexico border. Wielding a semitruck, her fists, and occasionally, guns, in her iconic Lola la Trailera (1985–1991) trilogy, Chagoyán pushed the social and moral boundaries of women’s roles and gender relations in Mexican cinema during a period of material decline and rising emigration in the nation’s history. Chagoyán’s unique combination of patriotism and social irreverence, her affection toward the deviant and less fortunate, her skillful maintenance of feminine agency and independence while in character are constitutive of the politico-cultural status and effectivity of exploitation as a viable form of national cinema, in which the Mexican working class is repositioned and humanized in the wake of neoliberalism and immigration crackdowns. In Contacto Chicano (directed by Federico Curiel, 1979) Chagoyán is sent with her partner Tony Andrade (Gerardo Reyes) as a Mexican undercover agent named Linda Lince to investigate the murder of a Mexican deep-sea diver who worked as a mule for a diamond-smuggling ring run by the Italian Mafia in the United States. The two have their cover blown while visiting the home of a Chicano trafficker Carlos Gonzalez (Armando Silvestre) who has adopted an alias as an Italian. Linda’s life is saved by an African-­ American FBI agent (uncredited) posing as a domestic servant, but not before revealing Carlos’s true name and identity and the delivery of a mortal wound to the agent. The Mexican agents are then able to take control of the scene, after Chagoyán, finding herself without a gun, wrestles mano a mano with the blonde French lover (Livia Michell) of Carlos, who aims his gun at Tony, “lo siento hermanito” (“I’m sorry little brother”) indicating his willingness to sell out, even kill his Mexican “brothers” in exchange for money, a showcase house, a trophy lover, and the possibility of assuming a European, “white” identity. The kinetic

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dynamic of this encounter is evocative of confrontations taking place on the verge of plot resolution in blaxploitation films such as Shaft (directed by Gordon Parks, 1971) and Foxy Brown (directed by Jack Hill, 1974). Interestingly, however, the most unwieldy enemy in symbolic terms, if not the most socially powerful, is Gino/Carlos, who like Linda and Tony, is positioned between the subaltern African-American agent and the European gangsters to whom the Americas are but a convenient location to do business. This negative take on a Mexican-American character foreshadows the portrayal of Luis, Nayeli’s first host, in Amigas y Rivales and the portrayal of Chicano characters in other films of cine fronterizo, where they compete with newly arrived migrants for jobs (as in Gregory Nava’s higher budget art film El Norte, 1984) and are generally inhospitable toward Mexican newcomers as in Ni de Aquí, Ni de Allá (Neither Here nor There 1988). Like its blaxploitation counterpart, the popularity of low-­ budget cine fronterizo received a boost in the 1980s from video distribution and the existence in several U.S. cities of neighborhood film theaters catering to diasporic audiences.21 While both Chagoyán and Velasco favored a renewed interest in “México profundo” (deep Mexico) in contrast to the forging of a national identity based on external cultural models (Ahumada Barajas 2007, 108), Velasco in particular exposes the effects of neoliberalism on indigenous communities in films featuring her indigenous persona, the “India María.” Dressed in brightly colored skirts, a rebozo (traditional scarf), ribboned braids and huaraches (simple sandals), Velasco creates her own resistance to hegemonic modernization and subverts officialdom of all types through hybrid parody. In Ni de Aquí, Ni de Allá, a title that speaks to the double displacement during the 1980s of the indigenous subject, la India María leaves Mexico to work for an elderly American couple in order to help her grandfather, whose land is not yielding the crops he desires. Upon arriving in Los Angeles, she has her luggage confiscated by U.S. Customs because she is bringing in produce from Mexico, then, having lost contact with her new employers, she falls prey to a Soviet spy, who believes she has taken off with an important briefcase. She is then hunted by both the spy and the FBI, which provides the pretext for a series of misadventures in a modern shopping mall, where mechanical malfunctions thwart her pursuers, until she begins to search for employment throughout the city. In a scene that references the INS raids on workplaces in the wake of employer sanctions legislated in 1986, Velasco is chased and apprehended by INS agents at a restaurant where she works as a server. Yet there are also signs of

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promise, where, in a reflexive scene that shows the India Maria adrift in downtown Los Angeles, she saunters by the marquee of a movie palace that announces a performance by the legendary vocalist Vicente Fernández as well as “La India Maria.” It is a question of decentering the “center” to provide a new appreciation of Mexican popular culture, if only solidarity within the community would hold. In these churros it is less a question of resisting or dispensing with Mexican modernity than asserting the relevance of cine fronterizo to the reconstruction of Mexican modernity along the lines of social justice and ethical conduct. A productive role is found for subaltern subjectivities long silenced by, folklorized, or belittled by the state and corresponding cinematic discourses (de la Mora 2006; Ramírez Berg 1992), and mistreated and marginalized in the United States by exclusionary immigration policies and opportunistic agents of exploitation. In this context, it is interesting to compare the uses in these films of the female body. Whereas Chagoyán harnesses modernity to put up physical resistance to organized crime from both Mexico and the north, Velasco’s body is in nearly continual friction with U.S. modern apparatus and ways of life in Ni de Aquí, Ni de Allá, which provides a source of hybrid parody in her humorous escapades. The role of the clever “buffoon” has been incorporated into Velasco’s screen persona. Importantly, neither Chagoyán nor Velasco offers up their bodies as simply “to be looked at” through the masculine gaze (Mulvey 2000), and they each fend off sexual advances by unsympathetic characters. Chagoyán uses her buxom attractiveness in wiles to gain access to contraband or a confrontation with perpetrators, while Velasco flirts to get out of predicaments, yet her body is ultimately wielded as a tool for her buffoonery and situational resilience rather than to successfully attract romantic partners. Both provide examples of Mexican ingenuity in the face of foreign incursions and sources of exploitation. Even though the cycle of low-budget films began to wane in the late 1980s and early 1990s owing to U.S. restrictions on foreign companies operating in U.S. territory (Iglesias Prieto 1989, 119), de facto Mexican currency devaluation, and a decline in theatrical attendance, these films, especially those featuring Rosa Gloria Chagoyán and La India María (María Elena Velasco), obtained a second life on national and transnational television.

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Representations of Latinx Migration in SLTV News Programming, as Compared to ELTV News …journalism is not just presenting the news (of the day or the week, of a city or even a country), but telling meaningful stories about what is new or is happening in the world, understanding it in context, explaining it to others, and making it available so others can use it…for their needs. (van der Haak et al. 2012, 2926)

Beyond providing a pathway to an expanding global market for SLTV and PLTV and enriching the economic and cultural life of destination cities, Latinx immigration has continuously borne a strong semantic association in public rhetoric—much of it mediated—with U.S. immigration and border policy in general. As such, its mention usually comes charged with negative meaning—a phenomenon Hector Amaya associates with “citizenship excess” (Amaya 2013). Depictions of Latinx immigration in ELTV news date back at least as far as the Bracero Program which, between 1942 and 1964, officially allowed Mexican men to cross the U.S.-Mexico border to be temporarily engaged in manual, mainly agricultural labor. In televisual representations of braceros on network news, such as a 19 November 1963 NBC news report by Chet Huntley,22 there was an attempt to humanize Mexican migrants by showing their families and livelihood at their place of origin, yet, without direct statements by the migrants, little was done to dispel the timeworn impression of unkempt and poorly educated migrating “hordes” that for decades has played into the fears of white Anglo North Americans, to wit, that hard won prosperity and relative peace in a democratic society could be placed at risk by foreign laborers of color. It should be noted that this trope echoes the tone of anti-immigrant rhetoric directed at previous waves of immigrants from Eastern and Southern Europe; the difference lies in its persistence despite the regularization in status and aspiration toward citizenship for millions of Latinx immigrants. This persistence has contributed to a climate of inhospitality (often hostility) and has fueled steps to make immigration policy and enforcement more restrictive. From the mid-1970s to the turn of the millennium, as Leo Chavez has observed, the image of Latinxs (mostly single men) entering the United States became associated in mainstream English-language print media with mostly reactive representations and analyses of immigration and border policy: in particular, depictions of Mexican immigration to the United

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States tended to be “alarmist” (Chavez 2007, 104–123, 215–262).23 While the composition of the migrant flow has changed over the past decade or so (today, the migratory stream consists mostly of families and unaccompanied minors, see Migration Policy Institute 2021), the tendency toward vilification has remained deeply rooted. The mediated bias in the United States toward the foreign characterization of Latinxs and people of Mexican ancestry, specifically, and their outright criminalization as a rhetorical counter-rationale against immigration reform since 2001 (a criminalization made implicit by televised images of unauthorized immigrants being detained, yet not actually speaking on or off camera) became more acute as a result of public statements about immigration by federal government officials and actual immigration enforcement in targeted cities in the wake of Donald J. Trump’s campaign and presidency. A critical discourse analysis by Otto Santa Ana and collaborators (Santa Ana et al. 2020) of speeches and tweets issued between 2015 and 2017 by the former President found that he repeatedly “articulated racist statements about immigrants and Latinos, hence expressing constitutionally impermissible racial animus” (Ibid., 15). The study found that among the salient metaphors used by DJT were immigration as “dangerous waters” and as “war,” and the immigrant characterized as “invader,” as “enemy” and as “animal” (Ibid., 29–35). While it was certainly not the first time virulent anti-immigrant rhetoric had been used in the U.S. public sphere, as Santa Ana et al. point out, it was the first time in over a century that a U.S. President had spoken explicitly in public in such terms (Ibid., 20).24 As could be anticipated, these statements were accompanied by harsh actions: detentions of unauthorized migrants without a criminal record, of young people enrolled in DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, in effect since late 2014) of legal residents, and of veterans were on the rise after February 2017, leading then California State Attorney General Xavier Becerra to FOIA the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) for greater clarity on policy and enforcement (Shepherd 2017; see also Santa Ana et al. 2020, 16). These historic biases and the restrictionist policies that have accompanied them were not lost on many of my field research respondents, several of who took advantage of an open-ended question to send a message to the media and elected officials, in Detroit: “que no discriminen contra los hispanos” (they shouldn’t discriminate against Hispanics), “que hablen la verdad y que apoyen a los indocumentados” (“they should speak the truth and support undocumented people”), “deberían enfocarse más en los

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Latinos y tratarlos de ayudar con sus medios, mantenerlos informados” (they should focus more on Latinos and try to help them with their media, keep them informed); in Los Angeles: “mejorar la situación de los inmigrantes en el país—la educación” (improve the situation of immigrants in this country—education), “tratar de enfocarse en apoyar al inmigrante, muchos venimos a contribuir a este país” (try and focus more on supporting immigrants, many of us came to contribute to this country) “más conscientización sobre la inmigración” (more consciousness raising about immigration), “leyes migratorias y un gobierno más justo, sin tanta demogagia” (immigration laws and a more just government, without so much demagoguery), “pratiquen más igualdad” (they should practice more equality), and in Miami: “no estoy de acuerdo como tratan a los mexicanos, que merecen tener los papeles…” (“I do not agree with how Mexicans are treated; they deserve to have their [immigration] papers.”) The biases and deficits in the portrayal of Latinxs on ELTV led many study participants, when asked what they thought of ELTV, does it help or give sufficient recognition to the Hispanic community, to respond in the negative. Notwithstanding the severity of the Trump-era policies, and the significant presence of immigrants in major cities, as well as in rural areas, there has been a relative dearth of attention to immigration in the mainstream EL press and on television. Reporting on immigration in the English-­ language media has been sporadic, and most reports have a relatively short lifespan. With the exception of stories that “bleed,” either figuratively as in the Elián González affair, or literally, as in the semitruck tragedy in San Antonio, Texas, immigration has been given relatively low priority, even as thousands, and potentially millions of lives have been affected by executive orders, legal limbo, and the arbitrary interpretation of policy by law and border enforcement personnel. Like other stories in the news cycle, immigration stories are often dropped in the national mediascape to make way for other attention-grabbing events. During the summer of 2014, when thousands of Central American migrants, mostly women and children, arrived at the U.S.-Mexico border in the hopes of being granted asylum, ELTV began covering the “crisis,” at a pace that approximated that of Mexican television and SLTV in the United States. The coverage traversed several televisual platforms and appeared on the radio and in print media, familiarizing viewers with migrants’ biographical backgrounds, and widening the frame regarding the deeper roots of the exodus and the institutional inadequacies that fueled the abusive treatment of many migrants in

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detention. Yet this coverage was abruptly suspended in all EL media in September 2014—a month in which deportations at the border spiked to 30,000—in response, once again to the terrorist threat of ISIS in the Middle East. The Central American exodus no longer represented a “crisis,” especially given the postponement of former President Barack Obama’s executive action to grant protections for Dreamers and parents of U.S. citizens. On ELTV, terrorism routinely trumps immigration, altering the very language with which to describe detainees. Volunteer attorneys helping to process requests for asylum at makeshift detention centers near the border had to cope the fact that instead of “refugees,” DHS agents casually referred to women and children as a “National Security risk.” Paralleling the temporal ephemerality of EL immigration coverage, most ELTV reports are confined to the geopolitical United States, contributing to the construction of migrants, no matter how “humanized” onscreen, as a destitute, unwieldy mass of people that, for incomprehensible reasons was attempting to seep across our borders: a problem for which the DHS infrastructure has been ill-prepared. The narratives that emerged from the 2014 exodus were thus either fractured or limited in scope, and reporters were not particularly attached or engaged in the process of those they were interviewing. There have been other consequences from reporting on immigration as a “crisis,” in terms of what is made visible and what is silenced: according to Alexandra Délano, “if immigration is always cast as a crisis, it will always be treated as a new phenomenon, unrelated to a structural issue which is directly tied to U.S. foreign policy…it is from that idea of a crisis that more visible policies, such as the [border] wall, the National Guard, or the border’s militarization, emerge” (quoted in Taladrid 2021, 18). With the hypervisibility of the latter, the experiences of those who migrate, the support networks of NGOs that assist with providing shelter, potable water, and food, and the location of missing relatives fade into the distance. Reporting on SLTV, meanwhile, has cast the issue of unauthorized migration as indelibly transnational in scope, at the same time opting for the close accompaniment of migrants themselves to obtain a credible, intersubjective construction of events. Rapid changes in policy and style of enforcement, the alarmist official rhetoric, along with the widespread perception, fueled by fear, that large sectors of the Latinx immigrant community are “at risk” for detention, possibly, deportation, have all prompted a robust response from SL media, especially television. As mentioned in Chap. 2, it was on SLTV that Vice President Kamala Harris provided early

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information about steps toward immigration reform under the new Biden-­ Harris administration (in English, then subtitled in Spanish) on Univisión’s morning show Despierta América (“Wake Up, America”) on 13 January 2021, before the 22 January inauguration and only one week after rioting broke out at the U.S. Capitol. These differences between ELTV and SLTV reporting on immigration have occurred despite developments in the entrepreneurial context that encouraged a rapprochement. In the wake of the 1996 Telecommunications Act, which deregulated media ownership, and the cancelation of a bipartisan immigration reform bill in September 2001 (due to the immediate linkage of U.S.-Mexican border crossing to terrorist activity), the structural positioning of SLTV media with respect to dominant sites of policymaking and commercial power began to change—with complex and paradoxical results. On the one hand, corporate media mergers and acquisitions at the turn of the millennium meant that major SLTV providers such as Telemundo and Univisión fell within the purview of, or developed close organizational ties with, major U.S. ELTV providers such as NBC Universal and ABC (respectively). This proximity to the U.S. media mainstream opened access to greater broadcasting power and newer technologies, as well as enhanced opportunities for SLTV networks to host electoral forums and serve as the “go to” source on the Hispanic vote during national elections. In 2016, Univisión began hosting town halls on the electoral process, as well as interviews with political candidates as had occurred in 2008 and 2012. On the other, the lack of substantive immigration reform (with the exception of Obama’s introduction of DACA and DAPA in 2014) and the increased danger of crossing as a result of Tijuana and El Paso border closures25 enlarged the ranks of a disenfranchised and vulnerable population, such that, in the effort to serve the mostly Hispanophone audience with whom SLTV buttered its bread, the SLTV discourse of superarse became offset by the representation of sobrevivencia: the difficulty of making the journey, of making a living in the shadows at low-paying jobs, of confronting mounting discrimination, harassment, and violence in public, of avoiding sudden deportation and most recently, of contesting or resisting deportation orders. In the months following the 2016 presidential election, major U.S. SLTV networks shifted gears from engaging political candidates in general discussion and debate (summer and fall 2016) to issuing PSAs (to

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deter panic), covering Immigration Control and Enforcement (ICE) arrests and popular protests, interviewing detainees and sanctuary seekers, and inviting attorneys and immigration rights activists to weigh in on legal changes and offer advice on resisting and coping with detention. Given the broadening of the legal scope of who is at risk for detention and visa denial, and the escalation of racial and ethnic profiling in the United States after February 2017, SLTV embraced a rapid response strategy of actively documenting protests, sharing phone videos of ICE detentions, and directly addressing changes in policy, marking a de facto turn toward advocacy and engagement that is emblematized in Univisión news anchor Jorge Ramos’s emphatic declaration “no nos vamos a sentar, no nos vamos a callar, no nos vamos a ir” (we are not going to sit down, we are not going to remain silent, we are not leaving) in a bumper that followed the evening newscast. The idea behind the rapid response is to desmentir (contest) with audiovisual evidence and testimonios of witnesses the rabidly criminalized portrayals of immigrants sent on a slippery slope toward “terrorist targeting” in the conservative and alt-right media by reporting the pending deportations of immigrants with no criminal record, including DACA recipients, whether in detention or in sanctuary, in the daily news cycle. More gradually, in the years since the 2013 immigration reform bill was dropped by congress, other approaches to newsgathering and delivery were adopted by SLTV, that I have chosen to characterize as “slow reporting.” If rapid response has been designed to counter and cope with draconian measures such as the DJT administration’s bill introduced in August 2017 that threatened to cut legal immigration to the United States in half and require authorized immigrants to speak English upon arrival, slow reporting is designed to counteract the equally far-reaching limitations and pitfalls of English-language reporting on mainstream television. What I define as “slow reporting” is the process whereby reporters begin to chronicle events as they unfold, whether it is the immigrant exodus from Venezuela, the fallout from earthquakes or flooding, or Central American migrant caravans moving northward across a series of international borders to the U.S.-Mexico borderlands. Slow reporting is characterized by both the consistency with which certain reporters appear in association with certain geographies and events—their faces becoming the imprimatur of a type of reportage, as well as subject matter, and the displacement of reporters across the terrain covered by their interview subjects. Building on the transnational spatiotemporal parameters of immigration reporting,

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“slow reporting” (1) enhances reporter place-recognition and signature, (2) yields alternative narratives of the causes of migration and the human toll imposed by federal policy by experimenting with genres of historical retrieval and representation (from investigative reconstruction to the chronicle and the essay), (3) transforms both those who are interviewed and those covering the story into activists as the location of institutional power and risks for those who endure the journey are revealed,26 and (4) encourages transnational viewer engagement through cross-platform transmission, rebroadcast, and digital archiving. A last feature is that of repetition and archiving—the slow report is achieved within the broadcast not only over days or weeks, but longitudinally, as the crew revisits the scene, locates the protagonists after several months or a year. This contests the notion of disposability—indeed the ephemeral nature of most news material especially in the electronic and digital age—it becomes an effort to transform the report into historiography, a vital ingredient for change to occur, whether the recordings act as a catalyst for affect on the part of sympathetic and empathetic viewers, or whether they generate evidence that will assist in efforts toward policy change, in bringing about an inversion in values and priorities.

Localizing and Contextualizing the Journeys of Globalized Subjects The first step toward slow reporting has been place-based coverage in which reporters such as Issa Ochoa in Houston, Ivan Taylor in Dallas, Jaime García in Los Angeles, Pedro Rojas and Pedro Ultreras along the U.S.Mexico border have been able to establish trust with local residents, as well as gain ready access to legal counsel and policymakers. The longitudinal dimension of reporting, meanwhile, can translate onscreen into what Mariana Baltar has called the “intimacy pact,” or “a feeling of both direct simplicity and complicity” between reporter and subject (Baltar 2009, 133). The cultivation of this pact not only points to the presence of a “melodramatic imagination” (Peter Brooks, quoted in Ibid., 132) in news documentary; it encourages empathy on the part of the audience toward the migrant subject. To achieve “slow reporting,” small crews pushed beyond the perimeter of national borders into the confines of detention centers and places of origin in Central America and passage in Mexico in search of plausible

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explanations and a human face for the exodus, beyond the cold monotony of statistics and legislative battles, the grotesque distortions of mainstream and rightwing political rhetoric. As a result, the tone of reporting changed, and the geographical and social parameters of noticias testimonio (testimonial news) extended as reporters accompanied the brush of migrants with cartels and enforcement agencies, placing themselves and their crews at risk. Slow reporting has impacted spatial composition, the relationship of reporting to historical time, to voice, and recognition—transforming these media into a source of authorization, or at the very least, vehicles of communication between migrants’ sense of disempowerment and/or voicelessness, and those empowered to take action on their behalf. A good example is the episode from the popular news program Aquí y Ahora (Univisión) on the reunification of a Guatemalan mother, Lourdes de León, with her six-year-old son Leo, after three months of involuntary separation mandated by the U.S.  Department of Homeland Security (DHS).27 Univisión began documenting the separation at the time of Lourdes’ deportation, when her son was taken from her into detention at Eloy detention center near the U.S.-Mexico border (she was unsuccessful in being able to cross legally). For sixteen days thereafter, Lourdes, who returned to her home in San Marcos, after signing “voluntary deportation” papers, received no word of where her son was being held. She wrote multiple handwritten letters (shown on camera) to Homeland Security. Finally, when she found out he was at Eloy, she was allowed to speak by videophone to him briefly every eight days. The television crew accompanies her to the capitol city, where, after awaiting his release as an “undocumented Guatemalan,” requiring fingerprints and a medical exam, they are reunited, and they embrace. Several features of the construction of this episode are of interest; first, the narration by Lourdes of why she decided to leave San Marcos, the graphic depiction through an animated map of their voyage toward the U.S.-Mexico border, her conversations with Leo in real time, her fear the eve of his return that DHS wouldn’t put him on the plane, her long and anxious wait along with other parents, in a montage sequence, at the immigration office for her son, the intense embrace, the ride home as he plays with relatives, and the family celebration in San Marcos of Leo’s return. Several audiovisual strategies are utilized to steer our attention away from the institutional context of Leo and Lourdes’ separation and toward the emotional mother-son bond, and the wider familial wholeness that is restored at the end of the episode: Lourdes’

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handwritten letters to DHS (which for weeks did not receive any reply), the animated map showing the trip that they took together through Guatemala before arriving at San Luis Colorado, images of Lourdes’ home, her phone conversations with her son, the inclusion of the reporter-­ interlocutor in the frame with Lourdes, the montage sequence of the immigration waiting room upon his arrival, the interior of the bus they took home, the circle of family and friends gathered outside Lourdes’ home to celebrate the return. We are left with a sense of the trajectory of the migrant subject, not that of those who have profited from Lourdes’ ill-fated journey, nor the officials who took Lourdes or Leo into custody, nor even the attorneys who provided Lourdes with advice to get her child back. Visually and verbally, it is a circular trip, one with scarcity and anonymity (for example, an image is shown of children in detention with their backs turned, another of the sign at Eloy) at one end; an abundance of affection and a family’s protection, trust with a media professional at the other, punctuated by the prolonged two-shot of the mother-son embrace. The trust established between media professional and migrant subjects has also been effective in the investigative reconstruction. Reveal has involved collaborations between Univisión, PBS, and the Investigative Reporting Program at UC Berkeley to produce special reports such as “Rape on the Night Shift” (Reveal 2015). This program featured the testimonies of immigrant women custodians regarding sexual harassment and assault on the job in the effort to hold the contracting employers accountable. In both the Aquí y Ahora coverage of Lourdes and the Reveal documentary we see how an attitude of compassion toward migrant subjects translates into a role of advocacy on the part of media professionals. From the linkage of reporters with place, there developed signature reporting, such as that of Univisión’s Pedro Ultreras, in more longitudinal formats such as the chronicle and the audiovisual essay. In 2015, Ultreras began to chronicle the pilgrimage of Central American men who had lost limbs and other body parts from accidents aboard La Bestia, a series of trains that transport migrants from the Guatemalan border across Mexico to the northern borderlands with the United States. In their voyage for recognition of the difficulties they have endured, Ultreras accompanies them on a bus through Mexican checkpoints in Oaxaca to an unfriendly encounter with the border patrol in Texas. He begins by interviewing individual migrants at the Guatemalan border with Mexico about their past experiences of dismemberment from the train ride, their current challenges as handicapped people, and their hopes for the voyage. Close range

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videography is utilized during the bus ride to provide insight into how the migrants have managed to survive in the wake of personal tragedy. The encounter with authorities at the U.S.-Mexico border is shot at close range from the viewpoint of the migrants, as Ultreras remains embedded in the group. Despite the refusal of entry, Ultreras remained with the caravan until access to the United States was granted (“Cruzar Esta Frontera les Recuerda su Propio Infierno” 2015). Ultreras thus uses the camera as a witness to the border exchange, and in this case, such mediated witnessing brought positive results. In another example, reports gathered over nearly one year contributed first to a chronicle and then to an audiovisual essay. Like the dramatized portrayal in Cary Fukunaga’s fictional film Sin Nombre (Without a Name, 2009), Ultreras set out to document the journey of Central American minors on the train named La Bestia, focusing on the hurdles faced by, and different fates of, a young Honduran nicknamed Cordero (Delmer Flores) and a Salvadoran teenager nicknamed Venado (Jaime Ramos) on their way to the United States. Ultreras even boarded the train Cordero and Venado traveled on with the crew to show the vantage point of the migrants as they make their way through Mexico. Ultreras began tracking Cordero and Venado’s story in July 2014, at the first height of the Central American exodus. During 2014, there were 256,000 deportations of unauthorized immigrants, of which fully 60,000 were children, indicating the level of risk being taken by these teenagers. Whereas in Honduras broadcasts of the chronicle led to the Honduran first lady building a house for Cordero’s mother, in El Salvador cameras documented the extorsion of Venado’s grandparents of their home and life savings after he fell prey to a gang-related coyote near the Texas border in the Mexican state of Tamaulipas. The footage of family members was withheld from view until after the teens had reached the U.S.-Mexico border. While Venado was released, Cordero remained the property of human traffickers until he could escape. The transnational transmission of the voyage enabled family members in the United States to get wind of the teens’ plight, accelerating the latter’s ability to obtain asylum, while the exigencies of the chronicle itself facilitated the reunion of Cordero and Venado in Florida. (See “Cordero y Venado el Reencuentro” 2015.) The availability of a digital platform through Univisión enabled the reuse of this same footage to condense and compose an essay version of migratory events, in this case premised on the friendship, separation, forgiveness, and resilience shown by Cordero and Venado. The digital

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platform has also enabled the hosting of Facebook Live events, such as the “Plan de Reforma Migratoria Avanza en el Congreso” (the Immigration Reform Plan Advances in Congress) on 20 March 2021, in which, in the midst of a discussion between KMEX anchor Claudia Botero, an immigration attorney, and representatives of community organizations, the successful House of Representatives vote on the Dreamers’ Act (228 Yea to 197 Nay) is announced, and the cost of applying for residency is discussed.28 Importantly, the relationships developed during slow reporting have proven essential to today’s “rapid response” strategies. Beginning in 2018, for example, as the Central American migrant caravans made their historic progress by train, bus, and on foot to the U.S.-Mexico international border, the San Diego transborder Telemundo station began to deploy its 4-member crew in Tijuana, BC, to interview migrants and the local authorities about their experiences given the slowness of U.S. authorities to respond, if at all, to requests for asylum (Calderón Michel 2021). After January 2019, those with Homeland Security priority numbers were sent back to wait for their TPS appointments in Mexico (as mandated by the now infamous Migrant Protection Protocols policy), and the indefinite time period of waiting led many migrants to seek employment in the local urban labor market. Still others (over 1600 by recent reports, Rose 2021) found themselves deported and separated from their children. Those with Homeland Security priority numbers were sent back to wait for their TPS appointments in Mexico (as mandated by the now infamous Migrant Protection Protocols policy), and the indefinite duration of waiting led many migrants to seek employment in the local urban labor market. Still others found themselves deported and separated from their children. Not all Tijuana residents, and least of all, the mayor, were pleased with the pressure these exclusionary policies created on local municipal resources and the labor market, and the caravanistas soon found themselves scapegoated for a variety of “urban” problems (petty crime, violence, and more recently, the COVID-19 virus) which they themselves became victims of, living as they were in makeshift encampments more than in the spatially delimited established shelters for migrants. Thanks to the Tijuana Telemundo crew, in place since the reorganization of the San Diego Telemundo station in 2017 (Calderón Michel 2017), the San Diego-­ based editorial team was able to respond quickly to the need to gather direct information and local news regarding the Caravan crisis.

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More recently, in the aftermath of the flagellation and massive deportations of Haitians at the U.S.-Mexico border, Univisión developed a web of reporting on both sides of the border (Noticiero Univisión week of 20 September 2021), and a special report, “Exodo migratorio en la frontera sur” (Migratory Exodus on the Southern Border) that included Univisión anchor Jorge Ramos reporting from Tapachula, Chiapas, near the Guatemalan border, Pedro Ultreras from Ciudad Acuña, Francisco Cobos from the twin city of Reynosa, Texas, and Erica Porras reporting from a town in Guatemala where people had lost migrating relatives due to gang activity (27 September 2021). At the beginning of this chapter, I commented on how the inscription of migration has permeated nearly every aspect of SLTV.  Included has been the coverage of special events, such as the twentieth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks in September 2021. On Univisión, Jorge Ramos interviewed a Peruvian-born worker, Franklin Achahua who worked on the cleanup of the fallout from the towers in a nearby church. Achahua had to quit work four years ago due to health concerns. Social worker Rosa Bramble, sitting by his side, explained how difficult it is to recover from PTSD when one suffers from the uncertainty of being undocumented. Achahua then commented that there was an initiative in New  York in 2016 to legalize unauthorized 9/11 workers, but it was not successful. He is now petitioning President Biden to grant residency to the 9/11 workers who are still unauthorized. Meanwhile Telemundo featured an interview with a Colombian-born news correspondent whose birthday was on 11 September and who stayed in New York to work for several days non-stop covering the tragedy before returning home to Florida. Even though she was not yet a U.S. citizen at the time, the correspondent felt a strong identification as such while reporting on the scene. A question that arises in the context of rapid response and slow reporting is how reporters handle the issue of anonymity, as transparency can and has placed certain televisual subjects at risk. A range of strategies have been employed, from delaying the broadcast of footage gathered in slow reporting, to allowing migrants to speak off-screen or shown in shadow, to supporting migrants’ decision, as in the case of Achahua, to speak on camera. Aside from the production and delivery strategies, two features distinguish these various SLTV approaches to reporting on migration: first, although we get personal stories of migration in these reports, the reports make it clear that these are not isolated experiences, nor do people act on

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their own, but they are part of a larger network of those who experience hardship. This contrasts with the individualized experiences depicted in telenovelas  and many churros: it is through their isolation that many migrants become vulnerable to exploitation and even deportation. Thus, the news reports seem focused on resilience, even as they depict the perils of unauthorized migration. A second feature involves the staying power of the meso-level crew in the media enterprise to follow through on a story to register the impact on families of the migration process. In this sense it is more than capturing the “drama” of migration; rather the persistence of media coverage favors holding certain authorities and other parties, such as coyotes, accountable. The use of news media as a tool for witnessing events and articulating relationships among that which has become fragmentary due to policy and dangers encountered en route allows these media to become a part of a solution for many migrants. The pursuit of this possibility has political consequences that will be discussed in the last chapter.

Notes 1. These include Children in No Man’s Land (directed by Anayansi Prado, 2009), De Nadie (directed by Tin Dirdamal, 2005), Sin Nombre (directed by Cary Fukunaga, 2010), Bajo la Misma Luna (directed by Patricia Riggen, 2010), Casa Libre/Freedom House (directed by Roberto S. Oregel, 2008), “La Bestia” (blog entry, Rubén Rumbaut, 29 March 2014), and Los Infiltrados (directed by Alex Rivera and Cristina Ibarra 2020). 2. In his autobiography, Don Francisco (Mario Kreutzberger) discusses his close study of U.S. television to get ideas for his Sábados Gigantes, the Chilean precursor to the Miami-based Sábado Gigante (Kreutzberger Blumenfeld 2001, 41). 3. With the exception of election-related announcements (discussed in the concluding chapter), the reference to migration in PSAs is often indirect, tapping intensively into the discourse of “superarse,” or “getting ahead.” 4. Increasing numbers of Cuban emigrants, along with Haitians, are attempting to enter the United States by crossing the U.S.-Mexico border, sharing with many Central Americans the substandard conditions and suspense surrounding the obtainment of asylum. 5. This process is given a visual metaphorical expression in Palestinian filmmaker Mona Hatoum’s epistolary video essay, Measures of Distance (1988) in which she narrates a letter received from her mother in Beirut while playing the sound of actual conversations with her mother during a recent

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trip there in the background and showing pages of the letter, read in London, superimposed on the screen. Both mother and daughter are diasporic subjects, caught for us in an audiovisual palimpsest. 6. For Southeast Asia, see Timothy Havens, cited in Han (2019, 42); for Korea, see Ibid., 40–41. 7. For an interesting discussion of how the sense of loss provoked by migration is transformed into melancholia, see Schmidt Camacho (2008). 8. Jesús Martín-Barbero has gone so far as to say that in Latin America, there can be no access to historical memory without a collective imaginary that is deeply influenced by melodrama (cited in Alvaray 2009, 34). 9. See also Brunner and Catalán on a categorical distinction between televisual fiction and the modern novel (building on Mikhail Bakhtin’s explorations of the latter) (Brunner and Catalán 1995, 31–32). 10. For an interesting history of melodrama in Europe and the United States from its origins to its entree into cinematic practice, see Gledhill (1987, 14–28). 11. Amos Owen Thomas has identified four intersecting “environments” in which the impact of transnational media can be assessed: a “political-­ economic” environment, a “socio-cultural environment,” a “media-­ broadcasting environment,” and an “advertising/marketing environment.” The sphere of viewers’ reception falls at the intersection of all of these environments, but particularly the latter two; see Thomas (2006, 145). 12. Gledhill’s treatment of the history of melodrama among various art forms (Gledhill 1987) demonstrates the possibility of studying the impact of historical events and sociopolitical ideology on the directions taken by melodrama in European and American culture. 13. See Brooks, 1995, Cunningham 2000.  14. Williams 2014, 5. 15. For a discussion of production for export as an emerging theme of Mexican telenovelas in the new millennium, see Chávez (2006). 16. For more on the distinctive features of Mexican telenovelas, see López (1995). 17. According to Rafael Ahumada Barajas, moral values are achieved through free will and the conscious effort of a subject who is responsible for their own moral conduct. It is this conscious effort that tends to be lacking in telenovela characters who are often shown to be “trapped” by circumstance; they can then acquire inframoral values such as wealth, beauty, participation in community, prestige, and success; Ahumada Barajas (2007, 87–88). 18. For more on this subject, see Sweet (2021, 83). 19. Because of its lengthy history of being broadcast inside Mexico as well as the United States, Mujer: Casos de la Vida Real had been seen by the vast

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majority of respondents in my survey, including by those who did not customarily watch telenovelas or prefer them as a genre of programming. 20. In 1988, such films could be shot in four weeks, at an average cost of 250 million (old) pesos (Iglesias Prieto 1989, 111), or around U.S. $80,000. 21. According to Charles Ramírez Berg, there were more than 250 Spanish-­ language theaters in the United States in 1986 (Ramírez Berg 1992, 214). 22. Clips from this report appear in the documentary Harvest of Loneliness, directed by Gilbert G. González, Vivian Price, and Adrian Salinas, 2010. 23. There is a gender component to these depictions; Chavez also observes that women and children tend to be associated with press coverage of refugees; Ibid., 72–73. 24. On the effects of negative or hateful immigration rhetoric on Latinx youth, see Chavez et al. (2019). 25. This occurred in the late 1990s in the wake of the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act and the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty act as part of Operation Gatekeeper. Unauthorized crossing became rerouted through deserted areas in Arizona and Texas. 26. The definition of activism is of course different for the reporters and those offering their testimonios on camera—the first involves a relationship to the media enterprise and civil society, the second the very possibility of achieving migratory goals in spite of institutional and criminal obstacles. Both parties are engaged in speaking truth to power. 27. Hosted by Teresa Rodríguez and Ilia Calderón, Sunday, 12 August 2018, rebroadcast on Sunday, 19 August 2018. Aquí y Ahora is a weekly news magazine featuring 3 to 4 15–20 minute segments. 28. This act also included legislation to legalize farmworkers as essential workers.

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Baltar, Mariana. 2009. “Weeping Reality: Melodramatic Imagination in Contemporary Brazilian Documentary.” In Latin American Melodrama: Passion, Pathos, and Entertainment, ed. Darlene J. Sadlier, 130–138. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press. Bouamama, Saïd. 2007. “Mémoire familiale: les coûts invisibles de l’émigration.” In Mémoire(s) Plurielle(s), ed. Claudie le Bissonnais. Paris: Creaphis. Brooks, Peter. 1995. The Melodramatic Imagination: Balzac, Henry James, Melodrama, and the Mode of Excess. New Haven: Yale University Press. Brunner, José Joaquín, and Carlos Catalán. 1995. Televisión, Libertad, Mercado, y Moral. Santiago: Editorial los Andes. Calderón Michel, Pedro. 2017. NBC-Telemundo. Personal conversation with author, 19 July. San Diego, CA. ———. 2021. NBC-Telemundo. Telephone conversation with author. 19 July. Chávez, Daniel. 2006. “Globalizing Tequila: Mexican Television’s Representation of the Neoliberal Reconversion of Land and Labor.”  Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies 10: 187–203. Chavez, Leo. 2007. Covering Immigration: Popular Images and the Politics of Nation. Berkeley: University of California Press. ———. 2011. “Migration, National Identity, and Citizenship in a Transnational World.” In Migration and Identities: Conflict and the New Horizon, special issue: Conflict Studies in the Humanities, ed. Junji Koizumi and Mayumi Kodo. Osaka: Osaka University, Global COE Program. Chavez, Leo, Belinda Campos, et  al. 2019. “Words Hurt: Political Rhetoric, Emotions/Affect, and Psychological Well-Being among Mexican-Origin Youth.” Social Science and Medicine 228 (May): 240–251. “Cordero y Venado, El Reencuentro.” 2015. Aquí y Ahora, Univisión, posted 17 May. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kYamejgOq3c. Costanza-Chock, Sasha. 2014. Out of the Shadows, Into the Streets! Transmedia Organizing and the Immigrant Rights Movement. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Coutin, Susan B. 2000. “Denationalization, Inclusion, and Exclusion: Negotiating the Boundaries of Belonging.” Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies 7 (2, Spring): 585–593. “Cruzar esta frontera les recuerda su propio infierno.” 2015. Noticias Univisión, posted 8 November. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fsE3PgN1lrs. Cunningham, Stuart. 2000. “The ‘Force-Field’ of Melodrama.” In Film and Theory, An Anthology, ed. Robert Stam and Toby Miller, 191–206. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers. de la Mora, Sergio. 2006. Cinemachismo: Masculinities and Sexuality in Mexican Film. Austin: University of Texas Press.

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Gledhill, Christine. 1987. “The Melodramatic Field: An Investigation.” In Home is Where the Heart Is, Studies in Melodrama and the Women’s Film, ed. Christine Gledhill, 14–28. London: British Film Institute. Haire, Chris. 2021. “More Migrant Children Reunited with Family as Long Beach Shelter Inches Toward Aug. 2 Closing Date.” Orange County Register, 9 August. Hamburger, Esther. 2005. O Brasil antenado: A sociedade da novela. São Paulo: Jorge Zahar. Han, Benjamin. 2019. “Fantasies of Modernity: Korean TV Dramas in Latin America.” Journal of Popular Film and Television 47 (1): 39–47. Hennessy-Fiske, Molly. 2021. “From Bad to Worse on Border.” Los Angeles Times, 6 September. Heyman, Josiah McC. 2014. “‘Illegality’ and the U.S.-Mexico Border: How It is Produced and Resisted.” In Constructing Immigrant “Illegality:” Critiques Experiences, and Responses, ed. Cecilia Menjívar and Daniel Kanstroom, 111–135. New York: Cambridge University Press. The Infiltrators. 2019. Directed by Cristina Ibarra and Alex Rivera. Iglesias Prieto, Norma. 1989. “La Producción del Cine Fronterizo: Una Industria de Sueño.” Frontera Norte: 97–130. Kreutzberger Blumenfeld, Mario. 2001. Don Francisco, Autobiografia: Entre la Espada y la TV. Mexico City: Editorial Grijalbo. Lindo, Roger. 2006. “Mujeres, la mitad de los migrantes.” La Opinión Digital, 7 September. http://www.laopinion.com/print.html?rkey=000600906225425 192002. López, Ana M. 1995. “Our Welcomed Guests: Telenovelas in Latin America.” In To Be Continued…Soap Operas Around the World, ed. Robert C.  Allen. New York: Routledge. López, Cristina, and Jessica Torres. 2015. “Single-Issue Syndrome: How Sunday Shows Undermine Hispanic Inclusion.” Report. Media Matters for America. Posted 4 March, 4:56 a.m. EST. http://mediamatters.org/research/ 2015/03/04/report-­single-­issue-­syndrome-­how-­sunday-­shows-­u/202569. Accessed 17 July 2015. Malavé, Idelisse, and Esti Giordani. 2015. Latino Stats: American Hispanics by the Numbers. New York: The New Press. Martín-Barbero, Jesús. 1995a. “Les modèles.” In L’Amérique Latine et ses Télévisions, Du local au mondial, ed. Graciela Schneier-Madanes. Paris: Anthropos/INA. ———. 1995b. “Memory and Form in the Latin American Soap Opera.” In To Be Continued…Soap Operas Around the World, ed. Robert C.  Allen, 276–284. New York: Routledge. Meza, Felipe. 2019. “The Monetary and Fiscal History of Mexico, 1960–2017.” Working Paper. Macro Finance Research Program, Becker Friedman Institute, University of Chicago. January. https://bfi.uchicago.edu/wp-­content/ uploads/The-­Case-­of-­Mexico.pdf.

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CHAPTER 4

Barrio TV and Media Enfranchisement: Producing on the Ground, Transmitting Locally in Detroit and Los Angeles

All migration throws into question a past coherence and the human cost on balance depends on the conditions of reception, degree of recognition, and insertion in the host society upon arrival. —Saïd Bouamama (2007, 44) …the cultural economy is not a single superhighway, but a multitude of different local trajectories found at the sub-national level—in cities and regions in developing countries. The next frontier of knowledge generation therefore rests on understanding interactions, specificities and policies at the local level. —Yudhishthir Raj Isar (2015, 485)

As several scholars (notably Castells 2010, Appadurai 1996, Sassen 2001, 2002, 2019) have observed, the unevenness with which the latest wave of globalization has spread has led to the emergence of certain cities around the world as nodal points for global trade, decision-making, financial services, and communication, while the introduction of digital communications has led to the creation of new, virtual “port cities,” even where no coastal or air hub existed previously. On a macro level, SLTV has both

Portions of this chapter have been published in an article, Benamou (2022). © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 C. L. Benamou, Transnational Television and Latinx Diasporic Audiences, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-11527-1_4

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capitalized upon and contributed to the formation of interurban global networks, expanding from limited bilateral exchanges between Mexico City, Los Angeles, Miami, Caracas (Venezuela), and Santiago (Chile) to a multinodal network that has linked capital cities and many major metropolitan areas in the Americas and, on occasion, Spain. Within this network certain cities, such as Miami, have become major hubs, coordinating programming for the nation-state and for export, while others, such as Los Angeles, New York, Chicago, and Houston act as regional receptors and transmitters, and still others, such as Denver act mainly as receptors. Situated on a scale that is smaller than the nation-state yet, connected via digital transactions and electronic transmission to events taking place at a great distance, the global city provides a useful lens through which to observe the mediation of the migratory experience for diasporic peoples in their effort to gain a foothold in the host society, as well as connect back with the place of origin or ancestry. As media scholars including Couldry and McCarthy (2004) have noted, television tends to “mediatize” space, and it can play a pivotal role in sociocultural orientation by filtering and absorbing spatiotemporal relations on multiple scales of activity (see Moran 2009). Media productions conveyed through, generated within, and focused on the global city can thus play an important meso-level role in diasporic peoples’ “reglobalization.” At the same time, my research has revealed that, for the most part, this mediation of the global has not diminished the importance attributed by viewers to phenomenal “places,” both within host cities and in televisual texts. Indeed, some programming might be “too global” in that it exceeds the parameters that allow for an appreciation of scale and place, thereby diminishing processes of viewer recognition and enfranchisement. As a transnational medium with local components constituted through owned and operated stations in the United States, SLTV works to address the global while retaining the local experiential relevance of media texts for diasporic viewers. Focusing on the city as a portal for globally responsive media and building out from the local into other levels of representation and interaction can help to bring this dynamic into relief. This chapter explores the reciprocal effect of SLTV on the well-being and resilience of Latinx audiences in two global cities, Detroit and Los Angeles, taking field research conducted between 2005 and 2018 as a frame of reference. As a global city, Detroit is still driven by manufacturing, while an exodus of investment capital and middle-class residents from the center of the city has caused many problems in access to public

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services, quality of education, and political representation for those who have remained in ethnic neighborhoods. Los Angeles is home to light manufacturing, tourism, media production, and postproduction, and through two large coastal ports, international trade. SLTV, associated with a “brand economy,” has helped Detroit and Los Angeles retain their status as global cities even though, from the standpoint of what John Caldwell has referred to as the “spec economy” in media production, they may be perceived as in decline (Caldwell 2016, 33). Although Detroit has been host to a (niche) techno music industry, Los Angeles illustrates in a much more immediate sense than Detroit the way in which in “global cities…informalized jobs emerge simultaneously with modern, high-technology communication” (Staudt and Spener 1998, 23). These informal jobs have been the subject of U.S.-based telenovelas, such as Bajo el Mismo Cielo and the dramedy Gentefied (Netflix, 2020–2022), and they have become the periodic subject of SLTV news reports. It is at the urban level that the demographic diversity within the migratory flow, as well as the differentiation that allows media enterprises to succeed, became most readily apparent. I chose to compare these cities based on their historical importance as destinations for Latinoamerican migration, as well as certain socio-geographical similarities—they both have been home to durable manufacturing economies and urban sprawl and are situated relatively close to international borders—notwithstanding marked differences in public image. Los Angeles has been touted as a “media city,” home to a Latinx demographic near-majority (48.5%, U.S.  Census 2019b), while Detroit, with 7.7% Latinx population (U.S. Census 2019a) has been cast largely in terms of “Black vs. White,” as the “motor city” (rather than as a center for media production and transmission). In several respects, from the perspective of urban planning and composition of the Latinx community, Detroit and Los Angeles bear historic resemblances, even though they are thousands of miles apart and differentially positioned as markets with respect to SLTV media enterprises. While Detroit began with a “hub and spoke” development model and grid,1 and Los Angeles was initially designed according to a “garden cities” model in the modern era, both designs soon gave way to the growth of suburbs and urban sprawl throughout their metro areas (see Axelrod 2009, 19, 206, 296, 303, 373 note 15). In both cases, this sprawl can be attributed to the preponderance of the automobile industry, along with sociocultural factors and power brokering that contributed to ethnic segregation in settlement patterns over time (see Davis 2006; East LA

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Interchange 2015), sustained by the possibility of automobile commuting. Since the turn of the twentieth century, Detroit manufactured the cars that would eventually feed the privatized transportation appetite of Los Angeles, and Los Angeles produced the oil that could be used to fuel the cars (see Latino U.S.A. 2021). In both cities, suburb-­friendly freeways and parkways took precedence over center-friendly public transportation, especially in the post-World War II period. Both cities subsequently suffered a process of “white flight” from the city center and surrounding areas and, until quite recently, didn’t rebuild their city centers in a robust fashion with service industries and tourist attractions in the way that Chicago and Miami did, for example.2 Instead, some residential spaces were abandoned, neglected, or repurposed in an improvised fashion, and light industry was displaced, the city center reconfigured, partly by new freeway modifications that split up what were multiethnic neighborhoods, such as Southwest Detroit and Boyle Heights, to the east of downtown Los Angeles (the fragmentation of the latter is poignantly chronicled and mapped with testimonies from each of the affected resident groups in the documentary East L.A. Interchange 2015). Concomitantly, these cities became spatially divided along class and ethnic lines (both of these being subsumed discursively into so-called racial divisions, registered in political representation, and accentuated in crime dramas on commercial television), while increases in employment within city limits occurred mainly through the creation of low-wage jobs, as mid-level businesses relocated elsewhere,3 further exacerbating processes of racialization and income disparity—both real and perceived— between the city center and surrounding areas, especially between the urban core and suburban communities. (According to a recent UC Berkeley study, Los Angeles remains the sixth most segregated metropolitan area in the United States—Smith 2021.) In the wake of freeway building and demographic growth, Detroit and Los Angeles became agglomerations of small cities, some of them industrial hubs, as well as the counterpoles of new high-end communities built on farmland. The HBO series Hung (2009–2011) revolves around the latter, featuring a neighborhood of upper middle-class homes inhabited by phenotypically “white” characters, located on one of the lakes immediately north of Detroit, with the portrayal of city center limited to the picturesque, relatively devoid of inhabitants: steel and glass office buildings, the quaintly idyllic Belle Isle, and façades of 1920s buildings lining main arteries. Hung thus aptly illustrates how “[EL] tv shows intervene in their locations helping to

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reproduce a sense of place that naturalizes racial inequality” (Marez 2021, 10). Both cities have been driven by racial capitalism, with Detroit taking the lead. Under racial capitalism, “cities…are not attractors of labor and employment, but rather attractors of racialized human capital” (Dantzler 2021, 126). In the post-industrial period in both cities, Latinxs have provided a robust supply of low-wage labor. Considering the manifestations of racial capitalism in urban space, according to Dantzler, dispossession is a resulting form of racism, whereas displacement is a function of capitalism (Ibid., 119). We might extend these forms metaphorically to the mediation of urban space, with Latinx populations, especially in Detroit, subject to both image dispossession in the city at large and displacement of media consumption—but not representation—from the SL to EL media sector after 2008. Los Angeles provides an example of how this process might be reversed with the growing influence of SLTV on ELTV. Other factors have contributed to “decentering.” In many ways, Los Angeles, still a primary destination for immigrants crossing the California-­ Mexico border, has remained a “border city” even though geographically it is around a two hour-drive from the actual international border, while Detroit (and the Latinx sector within it) is situated at the busiest crossing point along the U.S.-Canadian border. (Los Angeles is one of the cities with the most immigrants, and it has the most mixed-status families of any city in the United States.)4 As a result, both cities are home to immigration enforcement activities and detention centers, as well as to a vigorous Latinx civic life, and pro-immigration reform movements. Enforcement activities have been attenuated in Los Angeles, which adopted a “sanctuary” policy, whereby police and local authorities do not routinely disclose the immigration status of residents to the federal government, even prior to the passage of the California Values Act on 1 January 2018 (“‘Sanctuary’ Cities Los Angeles County” 2021).5 The relevance of sanctuary status is heightened in Los Angeles, where in 2018 around 10% of the nation’s unauthorized population resided (from map, Migration Policy Institute 2018). Nevertheless, Detroit and Los Angeles share what David Spener and Kathleen Staudt have referred to as a process of “rebordering,” which they define both as a tightening of the physical border (such as Operation Gatekeeper or Operation Blockade in the 1990s,6 increased vigilance after 9/11 and the building of the border wall since 2017), and the result of policies pertaining to immigrants already in the United States, such that the border begins to “repeat itself” in cities where ICE arrests and detentions are carried out (Staudt and Spener 1998, 5; Spener and Staudt 1998,

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240–243). I apply the concept here to include divisions along ethnic and class lines created by freeway building, urban resource allocation, and gentrification as well as differences in media access, stymying the formation of what could be in essence culturally pluralistic spheres. By contrast, the scheduling of important holiday activities, as for the fiestas patrias (patriotic festivities, in relation to Mexico), Cinco de Mayo, and the feast day of the Virgen de Guadalupe, in central spaces that function as city squares—Clark Park in Detroit, and the Placita Olvera and other open spaces, such as the Plaza Mariachi, in East Los Angeles—has helped diasporic Latinx communities in these cities to retain the plaza, or city square as a prime site for sociality, solidarity, cultural affirmation, and exchange in the urban public sphere (on the cultural importance of the plaza, see Herzog 2006). In 2021 the November celebration of the Day of the Dead with altar installations was expanded out of historically Latinx neighborhoods, such as Boyle Heights, to Grand Park (near several courthouses and the LA Board of Supervisors in downtown Los Angeles). Placemaking activities such as these by Latinx residents have helped to restore a sense of the “center” to each city, while the coverage of these festivities by local SLTV has benefited the attractiveness of the plaza to the public and revealed community leadership in the organization of these events. The focus on these cities of destination helps us to observe the role of Hispanophone television in the navigation of the public sphere and access to power structures. Pairing these cities, one of which has a Spanish-­ language-­rich mediascape, and one of which falls short, has allowed me to bring into relief the contributions of SLTV to what I term media enfranchisement, or the degree to which one senses that one has a choice of, and easy access to, media of relevance to one’s community. Media enfranchisement enhances one’s ability to participate effectively in civic life, with an immediate impact on the quality of Latinx representation on the screen, and a potential impact on political representation at the local and national levels. Media enfranchisement is thus conducive to resilience, which Este and Ngo describe generally as the “ability to bounce back, recover, or successfully adapt in the face of obstacles or adversity” (2011, 28); for my purposes, I will be considering the response of SLTV to the challenges posed for Latinx communities by exclusionary immigration policy, and a shrinking physical public sphere,7 especially in the new millennium. To the extent that resilience is a “process involving risk and protective factors where protective factors enhance functioning” (Ibid.), I argue that SLTV

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can be considered a “protective factor” contributing to the resilience of its Latinx diasporic audiences. Together with the diasporic character of large segments of these communities, many Latinx viewers invest in local placemaking, such that programming that facilitates or assists with placemaking in these urban contexts holds a special appeal. (The interest of Latinx viewers in local news aligns with, and, in some ways surpasses a general interest in local news for a broad sector of the national population.)8 I have termed such programming, “barrio TV,” whether it consists of a talk show, urban reporting, or a dramatic series, although I will be focusing the present discussion on news programming. Finally, in arguing that access to SLTV, taking various forms (and especially barrio TV), can lead to media enfranchisement, I am calling attention to the viewer-as-subject’s agency in the creation of media texts, and the agency and open advocacy of Latinx media professionals on behalf of the community. This process of enfranchisement is multifaceted, involving actual encounters between community members and media professionals during the process of production, as well as the engagement with media texts that provide useful information, the proffering of educational opportunities, and viewer responses to controversial issues or documentary reports. While the production and consumption of SLTV take place within a transnational frame, it is at the local level, building out into other levels, that one can most readily appreciate processes of media enfranchisement. Media enfranchisement has grown in importance as the path to formal enfranchisement, or the right to vote has remained for many Latinxs, fraught with difficulty, even as Latinx participation in the electorate has grown.9 Among other hurdles, redistricting, based on the 2020 census may divide existing Latinx districts, as is the case with the 40th congressional district near Los Angeles (Mehta 2021). How do Detroit and Los Angeles compare as host cities to SL media? What styles and formats have proven most useful to assisting viewers with the affirmation of cultural identity and a sense of belonging? How has SLTV tackled controversial subjects of vital importance to these communities without falling prey to stereotyping? What can the viewing practices of diasporic Latinxs in urban contexts reveal about the capacity of SLTV to provide a sense of social well-being and belonging in a globalized world? To what extent does the success of SLTV also depend on the venues where it is consumed, on creative modes of access? These questions will inform the comparison of televisual production and reception in Detroit and Los Angeles below.

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The Urban Mediated Sphere If Detroit and Los Angeles exhibit linkages and similarities in their histories of urban development, there are some marked differences in the mediation of their respective urban spheres. The growing geodemographic fragmentation, at least in the case of Detroit (subject to intense gerrymandering and areas of neglect), led to a deficit in the mediatization of the city for city residents, even on public television. While the HBO Hung series and a few print publications attempted to glamorize life in the Detroit metro area, the city itself has been consistently portrayed on ELTV as a “dangerous,” inscrutable place, an image that has been projected at the national and international levels and that has negatively affected the portrayal of the Latinx community. Contributing to the media erasure of the city, some media productions have used Toronto as a stand-in location for Detroit, depriving the latter city of media-related revenue.10 Cutbacks in the Michigan Film and Digital Media Incentive (a tax incentive), capping it at around $25  million in 2011 and the program’s dismantlement in 2015 also hurt Detroit media production (“Detroit 187” 2011; Kirk 2021; Plyburn 2021). At the same time, the ELTV news emphasis on urban blight has belied the degree of cohesion within ethnic neighborhoods, and to some degree, efforts at dialogue and exchange among them. The same has been true, to a lesser extent in EL media at the urban level for Los Angeles. The notable exceptions to this tendency on ELTV, such as the extraordinary, kaleidoscopic Detroit 1-8-7 (ABC 2010) shot on location in Southwest, central, and eastern portions of the city and Resurrection Boulevard (Showtime 2000–2002) for East Los Angeles, and American Family (PBS 2002) and Gentefied (Netflix 2020–2022) for Boyle Heights have been rare and relatively short-lived. For U.S.  Latinxs, the public sphere in some cities is more open to culture-­affirming possibilities than in others, as is evidenced in a comparison of the SL mediascape in Detroit with that of Los Angeles. Billboards often serve as liminal elements, “announcing” to those in transit on major thoroughfares such as the I-75 or I-94 in Michigan or the I5, the 710, the 101, and the 405 in Southern California that a Hispanophone neighborhood or cluster of population is nearby. In a city such as Detroit, where the inscription of latinidad on television—as well as on billboards—is scant, print media, alongside AM radio, provide an important source of information and advertising, serving the local Latinx public in Spanish and bilingual editions. By contrast, the minute one enters the Los Angeles

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metropolitan area (which, for my purposes included parts of Orange, as well as Los Angeles County),11 one is interpellated by at least a handful of billboards advertising products and services in Spanish; if one turns on one’s car radio, one has the opportunity to listen to Latin music in various genres on more than a dozen FM stations and four AM stations, and two stations regularly carry news in Spanish. While parked or at work, one can stream the programming of at least four U.S.-positioned networks on one’s phone or tablet, and at home, one can easily tune into at least eleven cable SLTV stations (including three religious channels) on a television set or computer screen.12 This Hispanophone media menu permits not only uni- and potentially, bilateral access to one’s community, the nation, and the world, but a networked access to other communities within and beyond the metropolitan area. It is the multiscalar possibilities afforded by this aspect that provides the greatest sense of media enfranchisement, since it provides an effective platform for getting one’s opinions heard, along with vital information of direct relevance for one’s commute and one’s ethnic and social community. Los Angeles is home to KMEX, one of two original flagship stations for the Spanish International Network, linked to Televisa, the media conglomerate in Mexico. KMEX was established in the early 1960s. In the early seventies, it morphed into a key station for the Univisión network, which has undergone several changes in ownership and is now headquartered in the Miami, Florida, metropolitan area. One of its rival networks, Telemundo, which has its origins in Puerto Rico, has owned and operated a station—Channel 52 KVEA—in Los Angeles, which continues to influence the news content of the network. Telemundo is also headquartered in Miami and is now owned by Comcast/NBC Universal. As well, there is a TV Azteca station linked to the Mexican network, and a station that broadcasts SL programming for the alternative entertainment network, LATV. KWHY, a station that originally broadcast content from Galavisión (a sports-heavy network linked to Univisión and Televisa), became a breakaway station in the 1990s, when the new owners decided to shift the cultural focus from Mexico to Central America (reflecting a demographic shift in the Latinx diasporic population in the city of Los Angeles), even though it continued to feature afternoon films from Mexico’s “Golden Age” of the 1940s and 1950s. KWHY was taken over after the turn-of-­ the-millennium by MundoFox, which struggled to compete with the other SL networks for an audience, followed by Milenio, which transmits news programming largely focused on Mexico. Finally, in 2009, Estrella

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TV, carrying Mexican-inflected comedy and entertainment, was launched in Los Angeles; together with the other “alternative” network, LATV, it capitalizes on its outlier status to keep up with popular cultural trends, rather than center its attention on newsgathering and telenovelas. These networks and the KXLA station (a Korean-language station) that broadcasts news and cultural affairs programming targeting local Central American communities on Saturdays are complemented in the Los Angeles mediascape by three stations broadcasting religious fare, and a host of SL music radio stations, including KLOVE 107.5, linked to KMEX, along with the SL print daily La Opinión. La Opinión has been publishing news of relevance to the Latinx community for over a hundred years, yet recently abandoned paper sales to go digital. Together, these media serve over twenty Latin American nationalities and a broad spectrum of ethnicities and languages, including Mixtec and Portuguese, as well as Spanish, within the Angeleno Latinx community. It is not an exaggeration to say that SLTV production in Los Angeles has helped to compensate for a decline in EL film and television production as productions have relocated elsewhere in the United States and abroad (Miller et  al. 2001, 59–63; Curtin and Sanson 2016, 1). By contrast, Latinx Detroiters only had SL print media and a handful of AM radio stations when, in 2005, it had become clear from census and marketing surveys that the time was ripe to launch Detroit’s first Spanish-­ language television station, WUDT (Hispanics surpassed 10% of the population in the 2000 U.S. Census, and ACS updates in 2005 indicated that Latinxs comprised around 5% of the city’s population). Sadly, the 2008 recession, compounded by a jobs crisis within the Detroit auto industry, caused that initiative to seem less attractive, if not unfeasible, and local reporting and newscasting activity for the station ceased in 2008. While it lasted, the WUDT experiment was exemplary in addressing the needs and interests of the local community in southeastern Michigan. Thanks to the vision of its producer-anchor-reporter Jorge Avellán, WUDT modeled what can be called “barrio TV,” which translates into a more familiar style of reporting on events in Southeastern Michigan along with cultural offerings and health and educational resources within the Southwest Detroit Latinx community. Flanked by a 1- or 2-person crew, Avellán provided regular reporting on public health from local clinics, the formation of SHOC, or Spanish Healthcare workers Outreach Collective after an unauthorized woman found herself suddenly detained (turned over to I.C.E.) and separated from her infant daughter at a traffic stop,

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and the closure of local businesses in observance of an historic immigration reform march on 1 May 2006. WUDT was the first and only U.S. station to report on Latinx emigration to Canada in the wake of increased immigration enforcement. Alternatively, it played a didactic role in alerting the public to environmental and other risks, such as the serious hazards posed by using gas ovens to heat one’s home in winter. It also reported regularly on local cultural activities. Tellingly, the small production unit, proudly bearing the Univisión banner, participated in the Clark Park, or public square activities during Cinco de Mayo celebrations, where it covered an amateur talent show following the Cinco de Mayo motorcade. With the disappearance of the WUDT Univisión station, Latinx Detroiters were hard pressed to find local news about the community apart from very occasional bulletins on Hispanophone radio (devoted mainly to regional music genres and Notimex, the Mexican news radiocasting service) and any of the handful of print (and now digital) newspapers vying for advertisers and the public’s attention. In effect, the broader geographic scope of some of the print publications, including, in some cases, news from northern Ohio, as well as Lansing, the state capitol, and Western Michigan, gave print media a certain edge over the local Univisión broadcast, amplifying the size of the consumer market these media could offer to advertisers, as well as the range of news available to Latinx Detroiters. In addition to the Latino Press, which provides SL news on immigration and local politics, in the years during and since, an intrepid reporter for the Detroit Free Press, Niraj Warikoo, has provided critical reporting on immigration policy and enforcement for this community, and other ethnic communities that are home to immigrants across the metro area. Warikoo has also covered community response to government policies, and he has followed public protests. While print media can ensure that some vital information is circulating to and about the local Latinx community, it lacks the placemaking features of audiovisual media, which allow events to be contextualized through testimonies and images of the built environment, and it does not allow easily for enfranchisement through the mediation of anchors and reporters, and through the inclusion of local images in the national newsfeed, as occurred with the inclusion of WUDT footage in national coverage of the 2006 protest marches. In Detroit, the relative scarcity of Latinx images has historically led to a sense of marginality, stereotypes (racism and classism), and decontextualization (negative placemaking) over the airwaves of the districts most heavily populated by Latinxs (namely Southwest Detroit).

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In Los Angeles, barrio TV can be found consistently on local SLTV, such as the Univisión local newscast, where, on pre-COVID Wednesdays, KMEX anchor León Krauze set up a table, “La Mesa,” at different locations around the city to carry on casual conversations with the people he would meet in the neighborhood. Krauze termed his “La Mesa” interviews an “experiment in community journalism” (“un experimento en periodismo comunitario,” Al Punto 2022). On a regular basis, like local Spanish-language radio stations, the station welcomes immigration-related questions and provides the advice of an attorney, “Inmigración a Su Lado” (Immigration on Your Side). Local SLTV personalities have spoken at Get Out the Vote drives (Varsanyi 2006, 230–231), and local news teams from both Telemundo and Univisión have also accompanied marchers during the immigration reform marches along Broadway in the center city, and hotel workers’ strikes for wages and personal safety from assault in Long Beach. SLTV has covered local town halls on immigration reform, such as the town hall featuring Representative Luis Gutiérrez (D-Illnois) at a church in South Los Angeles in April 2011. A sense of history has been cultivated through the commemoration of local events, such as the fiftieth anniversary of the 1968 high school walkouts in East Los Angeles.13 During the World Soccer Cup, SLTV has covered the response of fans from particular nationalities by broadcasting from local bars and restaurants. And they have strengthened viewers’ sense of cultural affirmation by covering cultural activities in and near the historic Placita Olvera (such as at the Plaza de Cultura y Artes on North Main Street) during Cinco de Mayo and other festive occasions. Local musical groups have obtained public exposure through early morning performances on KMEX’s “Primera Edición” (“First Edition”) between 5 and 7 a.m. These initiatives have had positive resonance (albeit limited) with respect to ELTV: ABC 7’s Latina-hosted “Localish LA” Saturday news magazine has also focused on the cultural highlights and personalities that contribute to the Latinx texture of LA’s cityscape. As on WUDT, the local news provided by KVEA52 and KMEX34 is distinguished from their ELTV counterparts not only in the types of stories they cover, but in the structure of the flow and style of representation. Local SLTV newscasts often do not lead with crime stories as on ELTV, but with weather-related advisories, health-related, or immigration-related news instead. In addition to local Hispanophone experts on issues such as health, immigration reform, and forms of public assistance (interviewed in medium shot or medium-long shot rather than talking heads style), SLTV

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newscasts frequently include input from local community members who as witnesses to an incident or participants in a program or project offer their views in a shortened form of testimonio (or testimonial style). The latter is illustrated in a spring 2021 story on the vulnerability of sidewalk vendors to theft in Los Angeles, as concerned customers as well as the vendors themselves were interviewed on KMEX. Both approaches work to provide geosocial and cultural context for news stories, and in the latter case, a sense of place is attached to the news story that is critical to media enfranchisement. This sense of place is enhanced by videography that includes clear spatial markers (building façades, street signs) within the frame. Although clearly SLTV as a broadcast medium has not fared as well, in qualitative and quantitative terms, in the city of Detroit as compared to Los Angeles, this difference and the discontinuation of WUDT’s Hispanophone coverage are hardly a simple reflection of diminished demand for the medium. Rather, it is indicative mainly of the fact that local SLTV and its cable carrier, Comcast, were unable to get enough local businesses to sign onto the project and had to compete in the early stages of development with transnational SLTV flowing into the city via satellite, along with Hispanophone and bilingual print media for news and entertainment. Indeed, these differences in SL mediascape, I argue, stem less from the actual history of the Latinx diaspora in those cities, or the actual potential for a sizable media market, now worth more than $1.9 trillion nationwide (Murguía 2022, 2), than with perceptions of that market and of the Latinx population in those metro areas. (As of 2015 Latinxs were the fastest growing ethnic minority population in the state of Michigan; Martínez and Kayitsinga 2016, 6.) Dominant perceptions include the prevalence of crime in Latinx neighborhoods (which upon evolving into a stereotype effectively criminalizes Latinxs as a group), Latinxs as monochrome ethnics (thereby constituting little more than an ethnic “niche” market),14 and Latinxs as “low-income” consumers (and therefore not market-eligible for advertisers of “high-end” products and durable goods, such as automobiles).15 Importantly, these perceptions have had a measurable impact on publicly funded, as well as private corporate media programming, whereas both metro areas have audiences that are conducive to the incubation of radio, televisual, and digital media catering to Latinxs of all ages. Historically, such perceptions have had an impact on advertising spending on SLTV, which still lags behind ELTV in cpms, or the cost paid by advertisers per minute, and this only compounded the undercapitalization of WUDT.

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Modes of Access and Consumption In addition to intratextual strategies of participation through testimonio, SLTV viewers can feel themselves a part of a broader community by way of specific “modes of consumption,” which help to distinguish the SLTV audience from the ELTV audience and form part of what I have termed more broadly “diasporic viewing practices.” These modes of consumption include modes of access (as in receptor technology), the place and social context of consumption, and approaches to consuming programming in different languages. Modes of access and choice of medium differ for Detroit and Los Angeles. Detroiters placed a higher priority on television consumption as compared to Angelinos and were also viewing more television via satellite than their Los Angeles counterparts because of the difficulty in gaining access to local SLTV on cable after 2008. In my study, Angelinos, as part of an economy of scale, were able to afford cable television and its multiple Latinx offerings more easily than were Detroiters, who, if they could afford it, purchased a “Latin” package from satellite services (see Table 4.1). Some modes of consumption can assist with viewer enfranchisement. The first para-enfranchisement mode of consumption involves TV viewing in public-private places, such as grocery stores, barber shops, restaurants, and laundromats, as contrasted with the private living room or bedroom. These are liminal spaces, figuring in cities between public institutions and strictly private domains, that tend to be overlooked by studies that focus on media consumption in domestic settings and that contribute concretely to the sociocultural ambientation of neighborhoods. In public-private spaces, viewers can experience programming as part of a larger community, rather than as a family or individual viewing unit, in isolation. Occasionally, in such establishments more than one SLTV channel will be Table 4.1  Television consumed according to technological device Technology of reception Over-the-air Cable Satellite dish Other No Television No response

Detroit N = 166

Los Angeles N = 87

10% 26% 59% 1% 2% 1%

28% 34% 32% 3% 0% 6%

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shown if there are multiple television monitors. Programming viewed in such spaces has included news, telenovelas, and TV movies. Given the difficulty of private access for some viewers in Detroit, SLTV in public-­private spaces provided an important resource. By considering community-­ friendly points of access, it becomes possible to build collective viewing into the equation. A second mode involves the discussion of programming, regardless of how it is viewed, with one’s family, friends, and/or coworkers. This also provides a sense of collective and collaborative, rather than individual viewing such that SLTV programming becomes an object of discussion and debate, a vital part, in other words, of a Latinx public sphere. Most viewers in each city claimed they discussed programming with people they knew. In Detroit, 90% of respondents said they discussed television programming with other people, and 62% said they discussed programming with family, whereas 26% discussed it with friends and 9% with coworkers. In Los Angeles, even though a lower percentage (87%) said they discussed programming, a higher percentage (38%) said they discussed programming with friends and 30% said they discussed programming with coworkers, as compared to 52% who said they discussed programming with family (see Table 4.2). Programming discussed has included news, telenovelas, sports, talk shows, and court TV (e.g., Caso Cerrado, a Judge Judy type of show) in that order. In terms of linguistic viewing practices, most respondents (60% in Detroit and 57% in Los Angeles) consumed television in Spanish and English, and 8% of those in Los Angeles consumed it in Portuguese and English (see Table 4.3). This multilingualism, indicating that the linguistic horizon for diasporic Latinxs is a flexible one, is more than casual—most respondents had specific reasons for viewing television in English as compared to Spanish such that these practices were complementary to one Table 4.2  Television and sociality Degree and type of sociality Discuss with people Discuss with family Discuss with friends/neighbors Discuss with co-workers Don’t discuss No response

Detroit n = 196

Los Angeles n = 87

177 127 47 24 4 15

70 38 31 26 9 8

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Table 4.3  Multilingual viewing practices Detroit

Bilingual 118

Spanish only 64

English only 5

No response 8

Los Angeles

Trilingual 1

Spanish and English 49 English only 1

Spanish only 16 No time for TV 1

English only 8 No response 4

Portuguese and English 7

another. The sensitivity of Latinx viewers to different styles of representation and their agency in selecting from among different choices of television programming have been underestimated in public and academic discourse that treats SLTV as an ethnic “niche” medium. Latinx viewers are not indifferent to the qualitative contrast between SLTV and ELTV.  They not only showed an awareness of the differences between SLTV and ELTV types of programming; they tended to have different motivations for viewing each of them, as detailed in Table 4.4 “reasons for ELTV” and Table 4.5 “reasons for SLTV,” below. Viewers’ responses to the question of why they watched ELTV help to underscore the importance of education as a goal linked to televisual consumption, as many viewers stated they watched ELTV to improve their use of English, to learn about U.S. culture, and for the benefit of their children. Priorities for engaging in SLTV consumption varied, yet, as Tables 4.5 and 4.6 illustrate, staying informed remains a high priority, especially where immigration rights and policies and events in the home country are concerned. Although an emphasis on gaining knowledge about public services and local political power was not as prominent in Detroit as in Los Angeles (Table 4.5), this gap can most probably be attributed to the lack of local SLTV coverage in Detroit after 2008. Indeed, interest in obtaining local news and information about local resources was high on the list of Detroit priorities for improving SLTV (Table 4.6). In terms of the population at large, a general 2019 poll conducted by the Pew Research Center found that more people in the Detroit metro area obtained local news from television (47%) as compared to the Los Angeles metro area (40%), and around the same percentage follow local news closely (74% in the Detroit area as compared to 72% in the Los Angeles area) (Pew Research Center 2019). Despite cultures of technical innovation and communication in both cities, there are disparities in access to digital technology (a type of

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Table 4.4  Reasons for watching ELTV Reason

Detroit

Los Angeles

√ √

√

To learn English To learn about U.S. culture Different type of news Local news Educational documentaries For the children Sitcoms To watch sports—football, basketball To hear real voices in movies

√

√ √ √

√ √ √ √

√

Table 4.5  Reasons for watching SLTV Reason As a distraction from life’s problems To keep track of current events in home country To keep informed about events in Latin America To keep informed about situation and rights of immigrants in the U.S. To improve knowledge of public services and local political power To remember customs or cultural identity To maintain or improve use of Spanish To increase participation in U.S. Latinx/Hispanic community

Detroit ranking

Los Angeles ranking

4 3 2 1

5 3 4 1

5

2

7 8 6

6 8 7

rebordering), and, in the case of Detroit, access to cable television as well. Only 26% of Latinx Detroiters used cable, as compared to 34% of Angelinos. A majority (59%) of Detroiters used satellite dish and a meaningful percentage in each city (10% in Detroit and 28% in Los Angeles) accessed television “over the air” (OTA, see Table 4.1). Urban-level studies of the digital divide, such as those carried out by the Long Beach Media Collaborative (“Strengthening the Signal”) and Hernán Galperín et  al. (“Connected Cities and Inclusive Growth”), have yielded deeper insight into geodemographic differences in media use than what national-­ level, aggregated statistics might suggest (Downey 2017; Penzella 2017; Galperín et  al. 2017).16 Galperín’s study showed that portions of Los

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Table 4.6  What topics would you like to see on SLTV that aren’t currently being shown? city

Education

Detroit News for youth, Discovery in Spanish, schools, more news, educational documentaries, educational programming Los U.S. news, Angeles science for children, educational programs, the truth of the news, educational themes, instructional programs, news on other parts of the world, more informative programming, wars in Libya, Afghanistan

Identity

Locality Wellbeing (placemaking)

Variety

Cultural Local news, programming information about local resources, local news in Spanish, SL reality TV

Immigration (information); information about drug addiction, the natural environment, positive news, about exercise

Movies, comedy shows, music, Christian programming, boxing, more sports, more variety

More SL news, more cultural programming about towns in Mexico, about Hispanic immigrants, PL media (for Brazilians)

Immigration laws, programs about animals, family programming

Films, cartoons in Spanish, the telenovela Xica da Silva, more diverse programming, an SL Law and Order show, reality series for young people, more sports, basketball and UFC

More local news from Santa Ana, the community bulletin of events

Angeles—namely areas near downtown—are without any access to a digital signal, while nearly two-thirds of the residents of Los Angeles County had access to only one internet provider offering speeds that qualified for broadband status (Galperín et al. 2017). More recently, the City of Los Angeles has generated maps showing the percentage of Angelinos without Internet access and the percentage without access to a device that can be used to access the Internet (City of Los Angeles 2020). My study revealed a digital gap for Southwest Detroit—only 102 respondents out of 196 randomly selected residents reported using the Internet and, of those who

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responded, 23 said that it was the medium they were least likely to use; this in comparison with 54 out of 87 randomly selected respondents using the Internet in Los Angeles and only 4 respondents in the latter city reporting that it was the medium they were least likely to use. Notwithstanding this rebordering where the Internet and access to technologies of reception are concerned, as mentioned in Chap. 2, diasporic viewing reflects the degree to which the world, along with a good deal of SLTV programming, has become “networked” as a result of globalization. The desire to become a part of these networks emerged strongly in the study. When asked if they would be interested in viewing television from another location, Angelinos provided answers as varied as (in alphabetical order), Afghanistan, Africa, Asia, Brazil, Colombia, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Israel, Japan, Mexico, Nicaragua, Spain, Venezuela, and the United Kingdom. Detroiters wished to view programming from Africa, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Israel, Italy, and Mexico. The responses to questions about the rationale for viewing SL programs and the types of programming preferred and desired (Tables 4.5 and 4.6) are strongly indicative of the extent to which U.S. Latinxs in these cities position themselves as “global citizens,” thereby contributing in fundamental ways as significantly as any corporate enterprise to making these cities “global cities.” As paradoxical as it might seem, the presence of barrio TV, a construct that has accompanied SLTV in helping the viewer to position themselves in the world, provides a solid platform from which to build this global identity, aided by diasporic viewing practices. Corresponding to this hybridity in barrio to global televisual consumption is a certain degree of hybridity in the viewers’ own identities, where hyphenated and generic Latinx and Hispanic categories were chosen alongside, yet also exceeded, a sense of subnational identification.

The Diasporic Latinx Audience Who is the audience for SLTV? And what is its relationship to the medium? In the viewer surveys, I specifically designed my sampling technique to reach as wide a spectrum of Latinx viewers as possible. Surveys in Detroit were administered at a community college in Dearborn and at public-­ private locations Southwest Detroit, including Mexican town. As well, a focus group with surveys was conducted in Ypsilanti, Michigan. In the Los Angeles metropolitan area, surveys were administered as far west as Palms

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and Beverly Hills, and as far east as Covina, Garden Grove, and Santa Ana, with clusters of surveys conducted in Macarthur Park, Silver Lake, Boyle Heights, and East Los Angeles neighborhoods. Surveys were conducted using a gift card incentive, and people were interviewed both individually and in pairs (either couples or parent-child and grandparent-grandchild configurations). Based on census data, and as reflected in my study, Detroit and Los Angeles are both home to a Mexican-diasporic and Mexican-­ American majority, a sector that is complemented by Central and South Americans in each city (see Table 4.7). Whereas Detroit featured respondents from the Hispanophone Caribbean (7%), there were respondents who spoke indigenous languages (such as Mixe and Zapotec) 3%, and Portuguese (Brazilians) 8%, in Los Angeles. Proportionately, as the “minority” within the Latinx majority, Brazilians are better represented in the Los Angeles public sphere than their Caribbean counterparts in Southwest Detroit, given the local market for Brazilian music citywide and for foodstuffs, specific services, and soccer in “Brazilian” neighborhoods. In my study, an attempt was made to expand the options for self-­ identification to highlight the ethnic diversity in each community. It is important to note that a significant majority of viewers in each city opted for general pan-Latinx and Hispanic categories of identification, along with a few who chose hyphenated identities, which is indicative of settlement (linked to placemaking) and affiliation, even if informal, with other Latinxs in the city and U.S. nation-state. Proportionately more viewers in Detroit (33%) claimed nationality (other than United States) as a first form of identification, as compared to Los Angeles (20%) where social accommodation, incorporation, and a sense of cultural presence in the society at large were greater (see Table 4.8). In many cases, multiple forms of self-identification were used, at times pairing subnational with pan-­ Latinx forms of identification. In both Detroit and southern California, it Table 4.7 Country and/or region of origin of respondents

Country or region Mexico Central America South America Hispanic Caribbean U.S. No response

Detroit Los Angeles 50% 11% 2% 7% 11% 19%

46% 14% 9% 0% 18% 13%

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Table 4.8 Self-­ identification of respondents in study

Primary identificationa Hispanic Latina/o Mexican-American Chicana/o (North) American Central American Latin American Country of origin African-American White No response

171

Detroit Los Angeles 46 46 17 1 8 2 0 63 0 1 11

13 27 8 3 8 4 1 17 1 0 5

Does not preclude other forms of identification

a

was occasionally the case that households contained more than one nationality, favoring an inter-Latinx approach to discussion and analysis. These trends stand in contrast to research by scholars in Miami, Florida, where subnationality was not only embraced by viewers, but hierarchies among nationalities began to emerge (see Aranda et al. 2014; Hughes 2018, 50, 54–55). The contrast in self-identification between Detroit and Los Angeles in my study and Hughes’s findings is indicative of place-specificity with respect to intraethnic dynamics; although hierarchies among nationalities may also exist in the sociodynamics of Detroit and Los Angeles, they do not seem as pronounced. In terms of language preference, Spanish was the dominant language in Detroit (68%) with 28% claiming bilingual status and only 4% preferring English; in Los Angeles bilingual speakers predominated (44%) followed by Spanish speakers (38%) and Portuguese speakers (5%) and only 3% preferring English (see Table 4.9). This linguistic breakdown paired with preferred television viewing languages (Table  4.3) indicates that SLTV consumption cannot be attributed simply to linguistic competence in Spanish; rather it is a question of cultural identification and access to relevant information. Thus, although SLTV holds a special appeal for Latinx immigrants, it still reaches bilingual and proximate viewers acculturated or rooted firmly in the U.S. nation-state. Most of the viewers who were asked in each city stated that the media they consumed contributed to their sense of cultural identity.

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Table 4.9 Preferred language of respondents

Language Spanish Bilingual English Portuguese Bilingual (Portuguese-English) No Response

Detroit Los Angeles 125 55 8 0 0 8

33 38 3 4 3 6

Respondents in each city showed a wide range of occupations, as listed in Table 4.10. Not infrequently, respondents were qualified to do more specialized work, and several had professional degrees. The occupations shown here illustrate how the “brand economy” linked to SLTV is sustained by a robust craft labor economy (see Caldwell 2016, 38–40, 45, for the distinction between these regimes). As suggested, and as Table 4.5 shows, SLTV is more than just a distraction from life’s troubles: most viewers surveyed and interviewed showed other types of affective and intellectual investment in this medium. SLTV was a portal to keeping track of events in the home country, gaining knowledge of local services and local political power, keeping informed about rights of immigrants, and increasing participation in the U.S. Latinx community. Many respondents did not think that ELTV helped or gave sufficient recognition to the Latinx community. They also expressed a tenacity with respect to SLTV—even if Latinx representation improved on ELTV, they would continue to watch SLTV. Television was not the only leisure activity, however. Many of those who consumed SLTV also consumed other media (newspapers and radio) in Spanish. Popular newspapers in Detroit included Latino Press, El Central, and La Voz Latina; in Los Angeles, respondents read La Opinión and free circulars such as ¡Hola! and El Clasificado. In both cities, Spanish-language radio stations were chosen for the type of music they offered, rather than the news, which was usually obtained through television. Respondents also showed, through a range of leisure activities, an investment in placemaking, such that they participated in various ways in the urban sphere. These activities included visiting the public library, going to movies and museums, playing sports, and going on excursions (see Table 4.11). In terms of civic engagement, given the possibility of “informal” citizenship (defined in Chap. 2), the desire for enfranchisement can be as

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Table 4.10  Current occupations and previous experience Detroit occupations

Los Angeles occupations

Types of previous experience

Accountant Airline food service Asbestos removal Bank teller Barber Businessperson Butcher Car inspector Carpenter Cashier Cinematographer Composer Construction worker Cook Cosmetician Day laborer Factory worker Farmworker Financial aid officer Gardener Golf course worker Hotel clerk House or office cleaner House painter Hair stylist Homemaker Insurance salesperson Landscaping Laundromat attendant Librarian Mechanic Nail tech Office worker Restaurant server Salesperson Scientific engineer Secretary Stockroom worker Student Teacher Truckdriver Welder Window installer

Artist Auto body shop Babysitter Businessperson Cashier Child social worker Childcare worker (daycare) City of Santa Ana office Computer technician Construction worker Counselor Day laborer Dental assistant Electrician Film editor Gardener Hair stylist Homemaker Hotel worker House cleaner Landscaping Laundromat attendant Maintenance Manufacturer Marketer Mechanic Merchandise handler Nanny Nurse Nurse’s aid Painter Pharmacy technician Restaurant kitchen Restaurant server Salesperson Sample maker (garment) Seamstress Store clerk Student Tattoo artist Television actor U.S. postal clerk Warehousing

Architect Beauty consultant Bookkeeper Business administrationa Business services Carpenterb Casting for film and TV Computer technician Construction workera Day laborer Dentist Entrepreneur Estheticiana Factory workera Financial consultantb Forklift operator Hair stylistb Laboratory worker Lifeguard Masonry Massage therapist Nurse Nurse’s assistant Medical industry Office workerb Paralegalb Pastry chef Plastererb Physical education Receptionist Restaurant chef Restaurant shift manager Salespersona Secretarya Substitute teacher Seamstress Store ownerb Supervisorb Teacher Tile installer Therapist Typistb Weaverb

Both cities Detroit

a

b

Education

Reading

Reading, language learning, public library

City

Detroit

Los Angeles

Internet, listen to radio, go out as a family, friends

Listen to radio, family, Internet, church

Connectedness Listen to music, videos, DVDs, go to movies DVDs, videos, dancing, listen to music, movies, theater, museums

Cultural enrichment

Crafts, dancing, painting (art), singing, go out as a family

Crafts, dancing, cooking

Identity/ self-expression

Table 4.11  Leisure activities other than watching television Wellbeing

Paseo (excursion), live music, shopping, watch live sports

Ballet (lessons), play sports, exercise

Paseo (excursion) Play and attend sports, exercise/gymnasium, cooking, travel

Urban surroundings

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important in mediations of the public sphere as actual “official” enfranchisement, which can take place quietly as an individual act of conscience. SLTV has capitalized on this desire, offering a range of representations of informal citizenship along with the yearning for national belonging in the host country, together with voter education. Giving voice to Dreamers or those eligible for DACA has been especially effective in promoting a sense of enfranchisement, as Dreamers have been at the forefront of efforts to achieve a pathway to citizenship.17 In my study, the desire for enfranchisement was strong: 60% of respondents in Los Angeles, and 55% in Detroit expressed a desire to vote in an election, while only a little over 10% in Los Angeles and 15% in Detroit said they had no desire to vote. This was the case even when less than 30% of Angelenos and 32% of Detroiters said they had voted in their country of origin, and around 37% of Angelenos and 13% of Detroiters said they had voted in the United States. As for actual enfranchisement, the gap between Latinxs “eligible to vote” and “registered to vote” is still considerable, but it has been gradually closing; see Igelnik and Budiman 2020, and Noe-Bustamante and Budiman 2020. Arguably, the media, and SLTV in particular, have played an important role in increasing voter registration among Latinxs in the recent drive toward the presidential election (see Igelnik and Budiman 2020; Noe-­ Bustamante and Budiman 2020). The 2020 election saw a record number of Latinxs voting—16.5  million, a 17.7 percent increase over 2016 (NALEO Education Fund 2021). To summarize, Latinx viewers in both Detroit and Los Angeles have exhibited an active engagement with the public sphere, even though that sphere has not shown nearly as much recognition for Latinxs in Detroit as compared to Los Angeles. Through diasporic viewing practices, Latinxs have shown an interest in connecting with the world at large, in addition to staying connected to Latin America and one’s home country. SLTV remains an important resource for news and information, even when respondents are bilingual and choose to access television in English as well as Spanish (51 out of 87 viewers in Los Angeles and 37 out of 59 viewers asked in Detroit obtained their news from SLTV).

The Meso-Level: From Access to Advocacy Access to media of relevance is an important step to be taken toward sociopolitical enfranchisement. Yet is access sufficient in and of itself to promote media enfranchisement for Latinx viewers? Usually, not without

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the agency of media professionals in shaping televisual discourse in a direction that benefits the majority of Latinx viewers. By virtue of their association with large media organizations, combined with the bilingualism and proactivity of SLTV professionals in the sociopolitical sphere, SLTV media professionals have a relative ease of access to both Latinxs and non-Latinxs who occupy positions of influence and actual political power. I argue that there is a positive historical correlation between media enfranchisement and political empowerment for Latinxs, but even in the relative absence of Latinx political representation—as in southeastern Michigan, for example—Latinx anchors and reporters have a critical role to play in providing viewers and listeners with virtual access to power, and hence, with sociocultural accommodation and incorporation. Historically, SLTV media organizations have acted as “translators” of new government policies and the electoral process (contributing to a didactic mode of discourse and role) and they increasingly have served as purveyors of direct interviews with electoral candidates of all backgrounds. They have also proffered opportunities through people-in-the-street interviews, for community members to speak their own lived “truth to power.” At times, these functions are combined, as in a 29 July 2018 interview on “Al Punto” with congressperson Norma Torres (D-CA), who comments on—and protests—the separation of children from their parents at the U.S.-Mexico border intercut joined to an interview after a court hearing with a migrant mother who has been separated from her child. Thus, SLTV news programming has come to operate as a kind of virtual town hall, where viewers are able to hear what political representatives have to say, become educated on new policies, and speak their opinions through SLTV media crews as intermediaries. As in the “Al Punto” segment, it also lets viewers know who among elected officials is representing their interests. As a related issue, Hawkins McCrery and Newhagen have called attention to the “disjuncture” between the “opinion” and “process” spheres within the larger public sphere (2004, 190). Whereas the former “serves as a forum for discussion among citizens seeking to understand and be heard” and is mediated through the use of participatory media such as political talk shows, the latter consists of actual policymaking by elected officials and has been informed largely by the use of newspapers (Ibid., 190, 192–193). An important contribution of SLTV to media enfranchisement thus occurs through the encouragement of greater overlap between the opinion sphere and the process sphere, allowing for political efficacy among members of the opinion sphere and for mediated access to

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the public for those in the process sphere. A good example of the sociopolitical clout gained through this type of enfranchisement is the impulse given by the anchors of the weekly program “Al Punto California” (Univisión) in Spring 2021 to the creation of a bipartisan initiative led by Cesar Martínez (The Lincoln Project) and UCLA scholar Raúl Hinojosa to build popular support for comprehensive immigration reform under President Biden. In this case, highly efficacious members of the opinion sphere build pressure onto the process sphere in Washington, D.C., partly mediated by SLTV. While an effort has been made in national newscasts and news programs to feature representatives of conservative Republican as well as Democratic Latinx perspectives, ideologically speaking the Los Angeles programming, especially at KMEX, has leaned toward the progressive side of the political spectrum, as illustrated in “Al Punto California.” In 1994, when Proposition 187 was on the ballot in California (which would have prohibited access to education, non-emergency healthcare, and other public services to unauthorized immigrants), KMEX came out directly in opposition to the initiative, to the dismay of other commercial news outlets. This, followed by other initiatives that have been illustrated in “Al Punto California,” is indicative of the semi-autonomy enjoyed by local SLTV stations vis-à-vis national network protocol. Increasingly, it has become clear that pro-viewer agency and public advocacy have become one of the more vital ingredients to securing and retaining a diverse Latinx audience. While this advocacy was evidenced in prominent ways in the local Detroit newscast, it has surfaced at critical historical moments within the southern Californian and national SLTV news flow as well. In the Los Angeles metro area, the coverage of immigration reform marches, protests by DACA recipients in favor of a pathway to citizenship, and protests by sidewalk vendors regarding permit requirements at the municipal level have all provided an opportunity for pro-viewer agency. Public fora, like the forum on the executive action to expand DACA held in March 2015, sponsored by KMEX34 in place of its regular newscast, have provided viewers with an opportunity to express their opinions while staying informed (“Foro Sobre Acción Ejecutiva” 2015). On another front, in addition to its “rapid response” strategy mentioned in Chap. 3, the transborder Telemundo station in San Diego was able to capture the migrants’ perspective in caravans through slow reporting. To cover these caravans, they began gathering stories as far south as the Guatemala-Mexico border. Telemundo reporters were able to

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interview children as well as adults and to keep abreast of the situation they kept in regular touch with authorities as well as pro-migrant non-­ profits and the migrants themselves (Calderón Michel 2021). One of the stories featured a gay couple that was able to make it safely into the United States (Ibid.) For its part, Univisión dispatched an investigative reporter, Pedro Ultreras, to the frontlines of the caravans as he accompanied them on foot and by bus on their journey through Mexico and to the border, where he stayed to gather follow-up testimonies, providing a sense of how frustrating and even traumatic, rather than fruitful, the immigration agency’s responses were toward those seeking asylum. In Spring 2015, Ultreras joined a caravan of Central American men who had suffered accidents from traveling on “La Bestia,” the train that is used by migrants to travel through Mexico to the border; at the border, he documented the refusal of immigration authorities to let the amputees enter the United States (they eventually gained access). The importance of advocacy in Latinx communities, and of facilitating pro-viewer agency and advocacy by Latinx media professionals, has not been lost on local, regional, and national politicians. On a regular basis in 2020–2021, Los Angeles mayor Eric Garcetti delivered key points of his COVID-19 response addresses in Spanish (acknowledging that SL media, as well as the hispanophone audience have a vital interest in what he is about to say). Long Beach mayor Robert García has discussed immigration initiatives, such as the use of the city’s convention center to house unaccompanied minors, on SLTV.  And in early 2021, an anchor on Univisión’s “Al Punto California” debriefed congress people Nanette Barragán and Lou Correa on their witnessing of MPP refugees crossing the border to be admitted to the United States under asylum (as a hopeful sign of a reversal in immigration policy). As I hope to have shown, the choice of a multiscalar analytical frame, in which to consider the built environment, or “media space” in which SLTV is consumed, together with the identities and opinions of SLTV viewers and the treatment of their neighborhoods by local SLTV producers, all can help to re-contextualize that which has been stereotyped and often disparaged as a result of decontextualization. Re-contextualization has acquired a new urgency, given the negative, and unfortunately, lasting impact of presidential and associated rhetoric pertaining to Latinx communities circulating between mid-2015 (when Donald J. Trump was preparing to run for president) and January 2021 (when he left office). Inflammatory public remarks made by the latter, such as immigrants being

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labeled purveyors of drugs and “rapists” (Einenkel 2015, 2; Estrada et al. 2020, 2; Santa Ana et al. 2020, 15–16) have been countered by SLTV in various ways, including, but not limited to Univisión pulling its support for the broadcast of the “Miss Universe” pageant (Einenkel 2015), with NBC Universal eventually following suit. As well, the coronavirus pandemic has led, once again, to the pathologization of ethnic groups whether targeted as a root “cause” (Asian-Americans and New  York Latinxs) or labeled allegedly reluctant to obtain the vaccine (African-Americans and Latinxs),18 further adding to the need for re-contextualization. Regardless of whether SLTV can still be perceived as a “niche” medium (and I along with others have argued to the contrary), the results of my study presented here show that it has hardly worked as a self-contained silo; instead, from a reception standpoint, it has developed in active tension with EL and other SL media (Tables 4.4 and 4.5). SLTV is part and parcel of a range of activities that Latinxs engage in to be entertained and stay informed, and it has remained ahead of other media sectors in anchoring Latinx communities in urban space and covering important issues such as immigration reform, the vulnerability of those in the informal business sector, and more recently, coronavirus prevention. Moreover, as I hope to have shown, most viewers surveyed and interviewed showed a multifaceted investment in this medium, which, through pro-viewer agency and advocacy on the part of media professionals, plays an important role in representation and translation with respect to U.S. institutions and enterprises, as well as in facilitating translocal communication across borders. Whether cultivating “barrio TV” through in-depth portraits of places and people in Latinx neighborhoods, accompanying festive and/or political processions through a neighborhood, or translating power into more familiar terms, SLTV has helped to promote a sense of belonging, recognition, and enfranchisement—with and without an actual political vote— for millions of Latinxs and their allies in these cities. That Detroit lost its only SLTV station just as the Latinx political process was gaining traction and in the absence of a high priority placed on print media is a cause for concern. At the same time, as a diverse and complex population within the United States, Latinxs have shown a strong interest in sociopolitical participation through voting and other activities in the public sphere, along with an investment in the places where they reside, even though as a group, they have been seriously disadvantaged where access to good jobs and healthcare, freedom from profiling and stereotyping, and neighborhoods in compliance with environmental standards are concerned. These

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processes, of alternative access, agency, advocacy, and increased vocality are not without friction for the relationship of SLTV to larger enterprises, such as media conglomerates both north and south of the border. Yet, as I hope I have demonstrated, the choice of a meso-level, urban-based, and multi-method approach to understanding the multiscalar response of SLTV to pressing issues helps to illuminate how television, which is still the medium of choice for a majority of diasporic Latinxs, can be positively transformed in the direction of public education and participatory democracy. The next chapter will be devoted to considering how viewers in Miami, the Brazilian diaspora, and Latin American migrants in Madrid, Spain complicate the concept of Latinidad and point to new challenges for SLTV.

Notes 1. Julia Nevárez describes this model as involving a “dominant resource sector company largely based on transportation hubs” (Nevárez 2021, 16). The City of Long Beach in Los Angeles County was just such a city during its aerospace manufacturing period. 2. For more on the fate of Los Angeles’ city center in the post-industrial era. See Valle and Torres (2000, 7–9). 3. For Los Angeles, see Ibid., 6. Portions of the Detroit auto industry relocated to Canada to avoid union labor. 4. Marissa Montes, of the Loyola Law School interviewed in Take Two (2021). According to the U.S. Census Bureau, 36.9% of the Los Angeles city population was foreign-born in the period 2015–2019, compared to 6.2% for Detroit (U.S. Census Bureau 2021). 5. Los Angeles took measures to prevent local law enforcement from inquiring into immigration status as early as 1979; “Sanctuary City” (2019). 6. Operation Blockade, renamed Operation Hold the Line, was a border enforcement program at the El Paso-Ciudad Juárez border in fall of 1993 involving the stationing of multiple border patrol agents along the border; Operation Gatekeeper, inaugurated in fall of 1994, involved increased border enforcement at the San Diego-Tijuana border that included the augmentation of border patrol agents, the building of fencing and underground sensors (“Operation Gatekeeper” 2021 ) 7. As Johnette Hawkins McCrery and John E. Newhagen (2004, 187–188) have observed, the physical public sphere in the United States shrank significantly in the wake of the 11 September attacks; in many Latinx communities, this shrinkage has been compounded by the effects of immigration

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patrolling and enforcement and it has recently been exacerbated by the effects of the coronavirus. 8. The majority of respondents in a Pew Research Center study said they still got their news through television, and a meaningful segment of respondents also said they were interested in getting news about the local community; Pew Research Center (2019). 9. According to NALEO (National Association of Latino Elected Officials), there was a 17.7% increase in Latinx votes in the 2020 election, as compared with 2016; NALEO Education Fund (2021). 10. According to Miller et al., Toronto and other Canadian locations for production became desirable due to the weak Canadian currency (relative to the U.S. dollar) and up to 50% tax rebates on labor costs (2001, 61). 11. The decision to include these counties not only had to do with the reach of the broadcast signal for SLTV stations located in Los Angeles, but also for the sake of parity with research conducted in Detroit, Miami, and Madrid. 12. The number of SLTV and public access channels available will vary according to which cable or dish service one subscribes to. The offerings I describe above are based on Spectrum and Cox cable for the Los Angeles metropolitan area and Comcast for Detroit. 13. The walkouts were in response to the poor level of education, the preparation of students for vocational school rather than higher education, and the gross underrepresentation of Mexican Americans and Latinxs in the teaching staff. See Library of Congress (2014) and García and Castro (2011). 14. Regarding this point, see Hughes (2018), for an examination of intraethnic hierarchies emerging in the course of interpreting SL programming in focus group settings. 15. The latter perception was actually conveyed by the marketer of a ‘high-­ end” hamburger chain in the Los Angeles metro area to a public relations representative of the local Univisión station KMEX in 1997. 16. See also the skepticism expressed by Timothy Havens and Amanda D. Lotz (Havens and Lotz 2012, 27–28) on the fulfillment of media “mandates” by broadband providers. 17. For an excellent chronicle of activism by DACA recipients, see Jiménez Moreta (2021). 18. A recent NPR/PBS/Marist poll found that “while there was little racial difference in who wants the vaccine, there were sharp partisan differences” (Summers 2021).

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Downey, David. 2017. “Many in Long Beach Living Without the Internet.” Press-­ Telegram, Sunday, 29 October, A1, 10. East L.A. Interchange. 2015. Directed by Betsy Kalin. Bluewater Media. Einenkel, Walter. 2015. “Univisión Pulls Miss Universe Deal After Donald J.  Trump’s Insulting Remarks About Mexican Immigrants.” Daily Kos, Thursday, 25 June posted 10:14 a.m. PDT. www.dailykos.com/ story/2015/06/25/1396477/Univisión-­Pulls-­Miss-­Universe-­Deal-­After-­ Donald-­Trump’s-­Insulting-­Remarks-­About-­Mexican-­Immigrants. Accessed 26 June 2015. Este, David, and Hieu Van Ngo. 2011. “Resilience and Immigrant and Refugee Children and Youth in Canada.” In Immigrant Children: Change, Adaptation, and Cultural Transformation, ed. Susan S.  Chuang and Robert P.  Moreno, 27–49. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. Estrada, Emily P., Emily R. Cabaniss, and Shelby A. Coury. 2020. “Racialization of Latinx Immigrants: The Role of (Seemingly) Positive Newspaper Discourse.” Du Bois Review 17: 125–146. Foro Sobre Acción Ejecutiva. 2015. Univisión, KMEX34, 1 March. Galperín, Hernán, Kim, Annette M., and François Bar. 2017. “America’s Broadband Market Needs More Competition.” The Conversation, 5 March, 9:14 p.m. EST. https://theconversation.com/americas-­broadband-­market-­ needs-­more-­competition-­71676. Accessed 12 July 17. Garcia, Mario T., and Sal Castro. 2011. Blowout! Sal Castro and the Chicano Struggle for Educational Justice. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press. Havens, Timothy, and Amanda D. Lotz. 2012. Understanding Media Industries. New York: Oxford University Press. Hawkins McCrery, Johnette, and John E. Newhagen. 2004. “Conceptual Elasticity of the Public Sphere: Tracking Media and Psychological Determinants of Access.” In Media Access: Social and Psychological Dimensions of New Media Use, ed. Erik P. Bucy and John E. Newhagen, 187–206. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Herzog, Lawrence A. 2006. Return to the Center: Culture, Public Space, and City Building in a Global Era. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press. Hughes, Sallie. 2018. “The Latino/a Audience Unbound: Intraethnic Social Hierarchies and Spanish-Language Television News.”  Latino Studies 16 (1): 43–64. Igelnik, Ruth, and Budiman, Abby. 2020. “The Changing Racial and Ethnic Composition of the U.S.  Electorate.” Pew Research Center, 23 September. https://www.pewresearch.org/2020/09/23/the-­c hanging-­r acial-­a nd-­ ethnic-­composition-­of-­the-­u-­s-­electorate/. Accessed 21 January 2021. Isar, Yudhishthir Raj. 2015. “Widening Local Development Pathways: Transformative Visions of Cultural Economy.” In The Routledge Companion to

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the Cultural Industries, ed. Kate Oakley and Justin O’Connor, 477–487. London: Routledge. Jiménez Moreta, Cristina. 2021. “The Immigrant Youth Movement.” In Immigration Matters: Movements, Visions, and Strategies for a Progressive Future, ed. Ruth Milkman, Deepak Bhargava, and Penny Lewis, 107–120. New York: The New Press. Kirk, Megan. 2021. “State Senator Hopes to Bring Film Back to Michigan.” Michigan Chronicle, 15 July. https://michiganchronicle.com/2021/07/15/ state-­senator-­hopes-­to-­bring-­film-­back-­to-­michigan/. Accessed 17 December 2021. Latino U.S.A. 2021. City of Oil. Podcast. Futuro Media Group. Produced by Andrés Caballero, 8 January. https://www.latinousa.org. Accessed 10 January 2021. Library of Congress. 2014. “1968: East Los Angeles Walkouts.” A Latinx Resource Guide: Civil Rights Cases and Events in the United States. https://guides.loc. gov/latinx-­civil-­rights/east-­la-­walkouts. Accessed 8 January 2022. Marez, Curtis. 2021. “Precarious Locations: Streaming TV and Global Inequalities.” American Studies 60 (1): 9–32. Martínez, Rubén, and Kayitsinga, Jean. 2016. “Survey of Cooperative Extension Educators: On Serving Latino Populations in Michigan.” NEXO (Fall). Mehta, Seema. 2021. “Draft Maps Split Latino District Apart.” Los Angeles Times, Friday, 12 November. Migration Policy Institute. 2018. Unauthorized Immigration Populations by Country and Region, Top States and Counties of Residence, 2018. Accessed 26 January 2021. Miller, Toby, Nitin Govil, John McMurria, and Richard Maxwell. 2001. Global Hollywood. London: British Film Institute. Moran, Albert. 2009. New Flows in Global TV. Bristol: Intellect. Murguía, Janet. 2022. “Written Testimony of Janet Murguía, President and CEO of Unidos US.” “Race, Ethnicity, and the Economy: How Improving Economic Opportunity Benefits All.” Select Committee on Economic Disparity and Fairness in Growth. United States Congress. 20 January. NALEO Education Fund. 2021. Latinos Turn Out in Record Numbers in Election 2020. News release, 30 April. Nevárez, Julia. 2021. The Urban Library: Creative City Branding in Spaces for All. Switzerland: Springer. Noe-Bustamante, Luis, and Budiman, Abby. 2020. “Black, Latino and Asian Americans Have Been Key to Georgia’s Registered Voter Growth Since 2016.” Hispanic Trends, “Fact Tank: News in the Numbers.” Pew Research Center. 21 December. Operation Gatekeeper. 2021. Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Operation_Gatekeeper. Penzella, Paul. 2017. “Digital Divide.” Press-Telegram, Sunday, October 29, A11.

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Pew Research Center. 2019. For Local News, Americans Embrace Digital but Still Want Strong Community Connection. Report. Posted 26 March. https://www. journalism.org/2019/03/26/for-­local-­news-­americans-­embrace-­digital-­but-­ still-­want-­strong-­community-­connection/. Accessed 18 February 2021. Plyburn, Jay. 2021. “‘Hollywood of the Midwest’: Reviving Michigan’s Film Industry.” WZZM13.com, 19 May. https://www.wzzm13.com/article/entert a i n m e n t / h o l l y w o o d -­o f -­t h e -­m i d w e s t -­r e v i v i n g -­m i c h i g a n s -­f i l m -­ industry/69-­94939c75-­b22a-­416d-­a8bd-­cec6d9389ce5. Accessed 17 December 2021. Sanctuary City. 2019. Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sanctuary_ city#California. Accessed 15 December 2021. Santa Ana, Otto, Celeste Gómez, Marco Juárez, Kimberly Cerón, Magaly Reséndez, John Hernández, Oscar Gaytan, and Yuina Hirose. 2020. “‘Druggies Drug Dealers Rapists and Killers’: The President’s Verbal Animus Against Immigrants.” Aztlán 45 (2): 15–52. Sassen, Saskia. 2001. The Global City: New York, London, Tokyo. 2nd ed. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. ———. 2002. “Introduction: Locating Cities on Global Circuits.” In Global Networks, Linked Cities, ed. Saskia Sassen. New York: Routledge. ———. 2019. Cities in a World Economy. 5th edition. Thousand Oaks: SAGE Publications. Smith, Hayley. 2021. “Cities Growing More Diverse but Segregated.” Los Angeles Times, 28 June. Spener, David, and Kathleen Staudt. 1998. “Conclusion: Rebordering.” In The U.S.-Mexico Border: Transcending Divisions, Contesting Identities, ed. David Spener and Kathleen Staudt, 233–257. Boulder: Lynne Reiner Publishers. Staudt, Kathleen, and David Spener. 1998. “The View from the Frontier: Theoretical Perspectives Undisciplined.” In The U.S.-Mexico Border: Transcending Divisions, Contesting Identities, ed. David Spener and Kathleen Staudt, 3–33. Boulder: Lynne Reiner Publishers. Summers, Juana. 2021. “Little Difference in Vaccine Hesitancy Among White and Black Americans, Poll Finds.” National Public Radio, 12 March, Posted 5 a.m. ET https://www.npr.org/sections/coronavirus-­live-­ updates/2021/03/12/976172586/little-­difference-­in-­vaccine-­hesitancy-­ among-­white-­and-­black-­americans-­poll-­find. Take Two. 2021. “Biden and Democrats Take First Official Step Toward Immigration Reform.” KPCC.org Southern California Public Radio. Hosted by A.  Martínez. Posted 18 February. https://www.scpr.org/programs/ take-­two/2021/02/18/21571/. United States Census Bureau. 2019a. “Quick Facts, Detroit city, Michigan,” “Population Estimates.” 1 July. https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/ detroitcitymichigan.

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———. 2019b. “Quick Facts, Los Angeles city, California,” “Population Estimates.” 1 July. https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/losangelescitycalifornia. Accessed 18 May 2021. ———. 2021. “Quick Facts, Detroit city, Michigan,” and “Los Angeles city, California.” “Foreign born persons, 2015–2019.” 1 July. https://www.census. gov/quickfacts/fact/table/losangelescitycalifornia,detroitcitymichigan,losang elescountycalifornia,US/POP645219. Accessed 30 December 2021. Valle, Victor M., and Rodolfo D. Torres. 2000. Latino Metropolis. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Varsanyi, Monica W. 2006. “‘Getting Out the Vote’ in Los Angeles: The Mobilization of Undocumented Migrants in Electoral Politics.” In Latinos and Citizenship: The Dilemma of Belonging, ed. Suzanne Oboler, 219–246. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

CHAPTER 5

Redefining Latinidad: Latinxs in Miami and Madrid and Brazilian Identity in Diasporic Perspective

There is, in fact, no Latino market. Latinos are so diverse in custom, income, and language that the term comprises several distinct markets and audiences. —Shorris (1992, 232)

Over the years, the concept of Latinidad, at once a reference to cultural expression and a form of self-identification, has undergone redefinition. It derives its original meaning from the positionality of Latin America in relation to North America (particularly the United States and Canada), as well as the shared roots of the Spanish and Portuguese languages in Iberia as part of the Latin Mediterranean. Emphasizing the latter, French communication theorist Armand Mattelart and others have defended the creation of a bridge for cultural exchange between Latin America, France, and Italy, as part of a common audiovisual “space” (Mattelart et al. 1984). For the purposes of this book, I refer to Latinidad as it pertains to the claiming and elaboration of ethnic and cultural identity in the Latin American diaspora and Latinx United States. This chapter will build upon the demographic complexity exposed in Chap. 4 and the patterns of globalization of Latin American-sourced media discussed in Chap. 2, by considering the importance of emerging Latinx, Ibero-American, and Brazilian diasporic identities in the new millennium as creative sources of production material and audiences for Spanish- and Portuguese-language transnational media. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 C. L. Benamou, Transnational Television and Latinx Diasporic Audiences, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-11527-1_5

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More specifically, I will be exploring the challenges presented to Latinidad as the cultural currency for SLTV by processes of self-identification and media use by study respondents in Miami, migration to Spain beginning in the 1990s, and the arrival of thousands of Brazilians in the United States beginning in the 1980s, with a minor wave arriving in Spain in the 1990s and new millennium. As I will discuss below, each of these geocultural positionings generates tensions with the “mainstream” of SLTV in unique ways. As the quote from Earl Shorris above suggests, the task of defining Latinidad is not a simple matter, given the long history of immigration to the United States, as well as the factors of ethnicity and class that are tied to immigration from different national and regional origins, the sociocultural attributes of the chosen destinations, as well as the motivations for emigrating. For example, immigrants from Mexico and Guatemala, once primarily of the urban middle and working classes, or mostly mestizos, toward the new millennium began to include people of primarily indigenous origin for whom Spanish is a second language. Argentines, Brazilians, Chileans, Colombians, Ecuadorians, Peruvians, and Venezuelans who emigrated during the 1970s and 1980s were primarily of urban, middle-­ class background. This began to change at the turn of the millennium, as violence, natural disasters, and economic crises in rural areas began to prompt more people to choose land and sea routes out of their places of origin. One path to a working definition of Latinidad might begin with the ambiguity of the category in institutional terms—in 1976 congress passed a law that mandated the collection of data on “Americans of Spanish origin or descent,” which included immigrants from Spain, yet excluded the Portuguese and Brazilian diasporic population (Lopez et al. 2021). One marketing company circulated a survey in 2015 that listed “Spanish, Hispanic, or Latino” as a category entirely separate from “White (Caucasian),” “Black or African American,” and “Asian” confounding the difference and overlap between “ethnicity” and “race,” yet at the same time underlining the importance of the Hispanic market. The 2020 Census listed “Hispanic, Latino, or Spanish origin” as separate from questions pertaining to racial identity, allowing for a broader spectrum of racial identification within the ethnic category, including mixed race. Within the initial ethnic census category, respondents were able to specify national origin, including Puerto Rican.1 In academic discourse, there have been differences of opinion as to the appropriate label to be used with respect

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to the ethnic category. Writing in the 1990s, sociologist Geoffrey Fox advocated for “Hispanic,” perceiving Spanish-language and heritage as enabling an “imagined community,” of the kind associated by Benedict Anderson with nationhood, and reinforced by the growth of Spanish-­ language media in the United States (Fox 1996, 14–15, 39–40). According to Fox, the possibility of a “Hispanic nation” helps to differentiate the U.S. Latinx project from that of Latin American regional unity, as well as from the association of “Latin(o)” with “a nineteenth-century romantic nationalist idea” traceable to the Second Empire of Napoleon the III, when exiled and pro-independence Chilean author Francisco Bilbao and Uruguayan author José Maria Torres Caicedo each introduced the term “Latin America” in public fora (Ibid., 9–10, 13; see also Wallerstein 2005, 32). Sociologist Immanuel Wallerstein has pointed to the association of “Hispanic” with the history of affirmative action in the 1960s, as “Hispanics” became one of four groups to benefit from presidential executive orders (Wallerstein 2005, 33–34). Yet he also comments on the use of “Hispanic” in reference to Latinxs as an electoral group, with divisions becoming evident along party lines: “Latin@s are an identity group demanding rights they are denied and opportunities they do not have. Hispanics are the object of solicitation by the Republican Party. Centrist Democrats are not sure what this group is to be called” (Ibid., 35). For Wallerstein, “Latin@s” are also at “the heart” of a struggle between the United States’ embrace of free market initiatives such as NAFTA, and a Latin American push toward autonomy to consolidate the region, asserting sovereignty in the face of those initiatives (Ibid., 36–37).2 Social scientist Suzanne Oboler has addressed the arbitrariness and homogenizing effects of the term “Hispanic,” its denial of the specificity of experiences attached to Chicano and Puerto Rican populations, for example, and its institutional lumping together of people of different “races, classes, languages, national origins, genders, and religions,” not to mention circumstances of migration that in turn are associated with differences of race and class (Oboler 1995, 1–3, 15). The homogenizing effect of “Hispanic” has led to the portrayal of Latinxs as a seamless consumer market and to the construction of Latinxs as a “social problem” group (Ibid., 12–14). As Oboler reminds us, “labels are proposed from a political position and used by a particular social grouping according to the particular and changing social value attributed to them within specific contexts” (Ibid., xvi); hence, not only does it matter that “Hispanic” has been an official term designated by the U.S. state since the 1970s (Ibid., xiii), but it is important to

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explore processes of self-identification in relation to labels such as “Hispanic” and “Latino” (Ibid., xviii, 15). Writing for Al Día, Sabrina Vourvoulias has pointed to the significant indigenous populations in Guatemala, Bolivia, Peru, Ecuador, and Belize as a reason not to opt for the term “Hispanic” over “Latino,” given the Spanish colonial legacy implied in “Hispanic” (Vourvoulias 2012). Unlike Hispanic (in English), the term Latino raises the specter of gender bias, however, given the gendering of words according to the ending “o” versus “a” in Spanish; citing Chon Noriega, film scholar Charles Ramírez Berg has opted for the generic Latino and Chicano, differentiating Latina and Chicana portrayals and practices as needed (Ramírez Berg 2002, 6–7). Other media scholars, such as Yeidy Rivero, Arlene Dávila, and Mary Beltrán have inverted the masculine bias in “Latino” with the term “Latina/o” (Dávila and Rivero 2014; Beltrán 2009). Over the past decade, the debate over Latinidad has been focused increasingly on Latinx millennials and members of Gen “Z”3 not only because of their importance as a market for media and other products— the average age of Latinxs is 27 (Malavé and Giordani 2015, 2)—but also because of changes in self-identification noticed across generations. According to a recent study by Pew Research Center, whereas 97% of foreign-born adults of Hispanic ancestry identified as “Hispanic” or “Latino,” only half of those who were fourth generation identified as such (Lopez et al. 2021). Moreover, it is thanks to the newer generations that the debate around the terminology of Latinidad has been rekindled, with the official (Oxford English Dictionary) inclusion in 2015 of the term “Latinx” (Guidotti-Hernández 2017, 142), as a non-binary term replacing Latina/o and Latin@ (the latter making its appearance around 2004). The appeal of Latinx is not only that it is non-binary, but it “bears the load of recognition and diversity while representing the power of inclusion without speaking for everyone” (Ibid.). Yet roughly 3% of those of Hispanic or Latino ancestry describe themselves as “Latinx,” while 23% have heard of the term according to the Pew Research Center (Lopez et al. 2021). I will be focusing in the next section on the forms of self-­ identification and media usage mainly among Latinx millennials and Gen “Z” in the Miami metropolitan area. With the turn of the millennium, Miami went from harboring an “ethnic enclave” constituted primarily by Cuban immigrants to being an “immigrant metropolis where Hispanics dominate and African Americans and other blacks are residentially concentrated” (Aranda et al. 2014, 22).

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According to the most recent census, Miami-Dade County is 69.4% of Hispanic or Latino origin (U.S. Census Bureau 2021), and it is the metropolitan area that has the greatest proportion of immigrants in the United States (Aranda et al. 2014, 5). As a home to immigrants, Miami has been described as featuring “extreme diversity regarding the legal statuses of various immigrant populations” (Ibid., 82). These range from naturalized citizens and permanent legal residents to those with student and professional visas, refugees who arrived by land and sea, and unauthorized immigrants fleeing various forms of insecurity in their home countries. The city has also served as a “testing ground” for immigration enforcement programs and tactics (Ibid., 85),4 seriously affecting transitivity, participation in the public sphere (Ibid., 90–91), and quality of life for unauthorized immigrants and their families. As an interregional hub culturally and economically positioned between the United States and Latin America, Miami has also attained the status of a global city (Ibid., 4, Sassen 2012, 187),5 a status that is enhanced by the headquartering of major SLTV providers Univisión and Telemundo in the city. In addition to Univisión and Telemundo, Miami is home to Puerto Rico-based SL network Mega TV, V-Me network, América Teve, and Mira TV stations, and in 2014–2015, the period of Miami-based research, to MundoFox network. It has served as a base of production-distribution operations for Latin American suppliers to SLTV, such as Grupo Cisneros, and PanAmSat has a teleport located nearby where channels destined for Latin America can be uplinked (Sinclair 2005, 210). With its subtropical setting, Miami has also served as a location for the production of transnational telenovelas, coproduced (respectively) by Telemundo and Univisión. The city features an especially rich SL mediascape as home to two major SL daily newspapers (El Nuevo Herald and Diário Las Américas) and numerous Hispanophone radio stations on both the FM and AM dials. Miami is the third largest radio market in the United States (Laguna 2017, 58), a market that while fed by the continuation of radio culture within the Cuban exile community in the 1960s has evolved into a diverse selection of Latin music channels and talk shows oriented toward Cuban millennials (Ibid., 58–61, 63–65).6 The city currently boasts 27 FM stations that are Latinx-oriented. One of the unique features of Miami as a Latinx metropolis is that Spanish is abundantly found not only on SL media channels but in both oral and written form in the public sphere at large. Miami’s global status is also enhanced and sustained through the continuous ties that many Latinx Miamians maintain with friends and family in their

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countries of origin, such that they are able to engage in what researchers have called “transnational social citizenship” regardless of immigration status (Aranda et al. 2014, 30, see also 28).7 The results presented here are the product of two study components— a random survey administered in public-private spaces in Hialeah, West Miami, Little Havana, and Deerfield Beach8 and a collaborative study conducted with Sallie Hughes involving seven focus groups of mostly 18 to 34 year-olds at two community organizations and two college campuses. One of the organizations was a worker-led organization in Homestead, the other was a community service organization for low-income Latinxs near Little Havana. Random sampling was done, as in Detroit and Los Angeles, in public-private spaces in heavily populated Latinx neighborhoods and in a classroom setting at Miami Dade College Interamerican campus. The questionnaire used in Miami random sampling was the same as for Detroit and Los Angeles, with a modified version used in the classroom and focus groups.9 Those randomly surveyed ranged in age from 18 to 65 and older with most falling into the 18 to 34 age range (see Table 5.1). The focus groups as well as the general sample featured variations in gender, occupation, and length of time in the United States, as well as ethnic affiliation and forms of self-identification. In the Homestead focus group, some respondents identified as indigenous, for whom Spanish was a second language. Several respondents at the community service organization and Miami Dade College Interamerican campus near Little Havana carried a link to Afro-Cuban heritage through the practice of religion. Five of the focus groups were conducted with mostly homogenous subnational and regional groupings (Mexican and Central American, or South American, e.g.), and two were of randomly recruited mixed national origin (cf. Hughes 2018, 46–47). In terms of class status, four of the focus groups were mainly working class, two were mixed class status, and one was higher income and linked to university studies.10 Combined, the Miami research yielded 92 questionnaires on media preferences and frequency and modes of media usage, including questionnaires for 45 focus group participants. The questions informing the questionnaire included: (1) How important is television as a medium of communication? (2) In what language(s) is television consumed? (3) What are the opinions of respondents regarding local news in Spanish? (4) How could SLTV be improved? (5) What is their opinion of bilingual media? (6) What is the frequency with which respondents maintain ties to the homeland and what means of communication are used? In analytical terms, I wished to

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Table 5.1  Age, country of origin, and length of time in Miami metropolitan area Age range 18–34 35–49 50–65 Over 65

Country of origin 74 13 3 2

Argentina Colombia Costa Rica Cuba Dominican Republic Ecuador El Salvador Guatemala Honduras Mexico Nicaragua Peru Puerto Ricoa U.S. Venezuela No response

Length of time in Miami 2 9 1 29 1 1 4 8 15 3 1 1 3 11 2 1

Less than 1 year 1–5 years 6–10 years 11–20 years More than 20 years No response

6 23 15 27 15 2

Even though Puerto Rico is part of the territorial U.S., it is listed as a country of origin owing to language use—it is Hispanophone—and shared difficulties of Puerto Ricans with other Latinx groups in insertion into the host society (see Hughes 2018, 49) a

determine whether there were patterns emerging among U.S.-born and raised as opposed to first-generation respondents, any patterns emerging in relation to self-identification, especially as concerned Cubans as compared to those of other national origins, and patterns emerging in communication with the homeland related to length of time in the United States or generation. While recent migratory streams have greatly diversified Miami’s Latinx population, over half of Miami-Dade County’s Latinx population is still of Cuban origin (Gamarra 2018, 114). The Miami audience for Spanish-language television is mainly Cuban, Colombian, Nicaraguan, and Puerto Rican (Silva 2014). The first finding of interest concerns language of media use. While eleven respondents claimed they watched television in English (only), 24 watched in Spanish only, representing a lower percentage (26%) than for Detroit and Los Angeles, with the majority watching in both languages. Thirteen respondents in the Millennial to Gen Z range (18%) ranked television last among the media they consumed, behind newspapers, radio, and the Internet. Overall, the interest in television was lower with respect

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to other media, such as newspapers and radio, as compared to Los Angeles and Detroit (only 36 respondents placed television in uppermost importance). While over half of those who were born in the United States (n = 11) watched television in English only, four respondents, all of whom were born and raised in Miami, watched SLTV. While language and culture are affected (not just determinants in themselves) by choice of media language, there is also a difference in programming preference and access to information: those who watched in English only tended to seek entertainment programming and not to get their news through television. Of those who watched in Spanish, most used more than one channel to get their news—several (15) were using three or four channels in Spanish; however, opinions varied widely on the quality of local and immigration news, as well as the quality of news from the country of origin. A few Cubans who had lived in Spain prior to arriving in the United States preferred Spanish television to SLTV in the United States. Other Cubans objected to the fact that “they focus on the misery of people to make the news”11 (community service focus group); another, at Miami Dade College, complained that the programming on SLTV tends to be “for people from certain countries,” another also at MDC claimed that SLTV gave “a poor and worn-out image of Latinos…it’s a mockery of Latinos.” Another, in a community service organization group commented that “they only speak about bad things, it stresses me out.” Yet another in the same group expressed her distrust of television “it’s used to disinform.” By contrast, respondents in Homestead and from Central and South America in the Miami groups tended to appreciate the news they got from SLTV. A Venezuelan in the University of Miami group wrote “they always speak about our community with problems that matter.” A Colombian student in the same group wrote “they are very informative about the area and problems occurring around the world.” A Mexican at the Miami community service organization said that “news is very important,” while a Honduran at the same organization said that they liked the local news because it was “very clear.” A respondent in Homestead wrote “I find out about the information I don’t know to inform people about it.” Regardless of the opinions of local news, 69% of respondents who were asked (n = 68) felt that information provided by SLTV about the Latinx population as a whole was “alright” or “very useful.” Although the Cuban diaspora is well represented in SLTV local news given the Cuban majority and historical relationship to media enterprises in the metropolitan area, the question of how well represented the

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country of origin is on SLTV drew varied responses from Cubans, ranging from “I don’t like it” to “very useful,” with the majority seeing room for improvement. This variation and predominant skepticism, as counter-­ intuitive it may seem, may be indicative of the impact of emergent discourses and alternative positionings regarding the fate of Cuba and U.S.-Cuban relations, especially among millennials (Gamarra 2018, 123). A study of political opinions held by Miami Cubans centered around the 2016 election found that there was a need to revise immigration policy toward Cuba—even as “part of a broader, more comprehensive process of immigration reform that favors all Latinos,” and that most felt the long-­ standing economic embargo against Cuba should be lifted (Ibid.). Another study conducted in 2008 found that less than one-third of Cuban immigrants arriving after 1998 supported the embargo (Girard et  al. 2010, cited in Laguna 2017, 21). Albert Sergio Laguna has also referred to more liberal stances on the Cuban embargo among U.S.-born Cubans (Laguna 2017, 22). Thus, some Cubans may not feel themselves in alignment with the implicit (conservative) ideological leaning of much of SLTV coverage of Cuba. While SLTV networks covered steps taken by President Barack Obama to reopen channels of diplomatic exchange with Cuba during his second administration in December 2014, these networks have yet to entertain an open debate over the future of the embargo against Cuba and immigration policy. Relatively few respondents (20%) of all backgrounds (n = 92) offered suggestions for how SLTV could be improved; however, those who responded pointed, like Detroiters and Angelinos, to the need for more educational content, ranging from teaching skills to children, to documentaries and programs about science. One wished for programming like CNN in Spanish, another wished for animated films for children from other countries, like Spain and Brazil. Two Central Americans (Honduras and El Salvador) wished for programming about their countries of origin, and one Cuban who had lived in Spain wanted to see more news about other countries. Two respondents of Cuban origin would have liked to see programming devoted to the arts—music, ballet, literature, and “intellectual themes.” These comments, while still in the minority, reveal how challenging it is to meet the needs of an increasingly diverse Latinx audience, even though steps have been taken by local SLTV broadcasters to diversify both on-air and off-air staff. The latter is true of both Univisión 23 (Hughes 2018, 49) and of Telemundo 51, which hired Colombian, Nicaraguan, and Venezuelan reporters to better reflect the increasingly

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diverse Latinx population of Miami (Silva 2014). Telemundo 51 also covers the arts and the environment in addition to “hard news” and news about immigration (Ibid.). In her analysis of focus group data, Hughes pointed to intraethnic differences based on national origin and, to a lesser extent, class status in the interpretation of SL news clips, as well as intragroup differences in the emotional response to SL media representations of unauthorized immigration (reflecting differences in immigration status, motivation for migration, and modes of travel) (Hughes 2018, 54, 56, 59). These differences were especially evident when discussing the intended audience for SL news (identified by respondents as Cuban, Mexican, and Venezuelan, Ibid., 50–52) and when gauging empathy for Central Americans who experienced a particularly difficult migratory trajectory to the United States in a clip that depicted their petition for asylum at the U.S.-Mexico border 12 (Ibid., 50, 54, 56, 58–59). That clip drew recognition on the part of Hondurans and empathy on the part of Cubans at the community service organization, yet an anempathetic critical response from university students from South America who were concerned that its broadcast might attract negative perceptions of Latinx immigrants (see Ibid., 44). Hughes notes that only a news clip related to urban planning and local governance drew comments that “bridged national groups” (Ibid., 59). The responses to a Univisión clip about expanding space devoted to pedestrian traffic on Biscayne Boulevard 13 brought into relief geodemographic differences related to socioeconomic class and patterns of residence. It also raised questions concerning claims placed on public urban space, or as one respondent put it, a “Central Park-like” formation in downtown Miami. Respondents in Homestead felt the plan was a good idea because it would help ensure pedestrian safety. A respondent at the University of Miami expressed concern over the narrowing of lanes and the creation of traffic problems for those who lived in the nearby (high-­ end residential) area. Another respondent, at the community service organization, thought it was a lovely idea but was concerned about the effect it would have on parking. Others at the same organization thought the plan would be good for tourism but would affect parking for Miami residents. A respondent at Miami Dade College questioned the effect of the plan on the cost of parking, and two respondents expressed concern over the homeless in streets in that area, and how that might affect tourism. Another respondent at MDC thought it would be good for the environment, while yet another expressed concern over the allocation of taxpayer

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money, whether other needs were being met. Few respondents saw themselves as benefiting directly from the plan, and some (in Homestead and Miami Dade College) expressed a mistrust of city government. In addition to the question of the “greater good” vs. more narrowly defined self-­ interest, there is the question of Miami’s development as a global city that is friendly to tourists vs. broadly welcoming to immigrants and other less advantaged residents of color. In terms of social treatment experienced in the city, Central Americans reported feeling more discrimination and a lack of solidarity (even among Latinxs) compared to other groups. In response to the question, “How do people get along in Miami?” one Guatemalan respondent commented, “there are times when, as always, our own people, how do you say, our own Latino race there is always discrimination at jobs because the bosses apply high pressure. And many times, they say, no, well you’re an immigrant. So at times they tell you, I have the authority to…call the police on you or something. But I think that here in this organization we have learned a lot to value our own rights…One has to value oneself, with dignity and respect towards people.”14 The perspective on ethnic identification offered by the focus groups becomes complicated when patterns emerging in self-identification in the questionnaires are considered (see Table 5.2). Of the various national origins, Cubans and South Americans (and Venezuelans and Colombians Table 5.2  Forms of self-identification on Miami questionnaires

North American With country of origin (fill in the blank) With a region of the country (fill in the blank) Both countries (fill in the blank) As Latino/a As Hispanic From the Caribbean From Central America From South America As a member of an Indigenous group (fill in the blank) As Afro-descent or Afro-diasporic Other (e.g., mestizo, multiethnic, multiracial, etc.) (fill in the blank)

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within that group) were the most likely to prioritize national identity over other forms of self-identification. Even so, six Cubans (n = 29) identified primarily as “Hispanic” or “Latina/o,” one identified as “of the Caribbean,” one identified as both United States and Cuba, and one identified as “North American.” This pattern is complicated further by secondary identification15 as “from the Caribbean” (3), “Latina/o” (4), “Hispana/o” (1), and “Afro-diasporic” (1) in addition to national origin. Three Cubans identified secondarily as being from both Cuba and the United States. Among the South Americans (n = 14), four identified primarily as Latina/o or Hispanic, and three identified as being from both the United States and their country of origin. In terms of secondary identification, three chose “Latina/o” or “Hispanic,” and two chose “from South America.” Thus, there were signs that Cubans and some South Americans experience a greater possibility of accommodation, if not assimilation, in the national society through residence in the city. A higher proportion of Miami respondents chose “Hispanic” as a category of self-identification as compared to Detroit and Los Angeles: ten respondents chose Hispanic as a primary form of identification, and nine chose Hispanic as a secondary form of identification, as compared to fourteen primarily identifying with “Latina/o” and nine secondarily identifying with “Latina/o.” At the very least, these bi-national and regional forms of identification are suggestive that new lines of inquiry are needed to grasp the dynamics of identity, accommodation, and community building among Miami Latinxs beyond alignment with country of origin. Finally, the study revealed that, as Aranda, Hughes, and Sabogal documented in an earlier study (Aranda et al. 2014), Miami Latinxs are intensively engaged in communications with family members in their country of origin and in other countries throughout the diaspora. In addition to the countries of origin listed in Table  5.1, respondents were in regular contact with family in Canada, Spain, the United Kingdom, and Uruguay. Only three respondents (all U.S. born) said they never communicated with anyone in the Latin American country of origin. The majority of respondents were in contact with these countries at least once a month, while sixteen maintained contact at least once a week, and twenty were in contact on a daily basis. While the few (seven) respondents who said they were in contact only every few months or “rarely” had been in the United States 14 years or more, there does not appear to be any other direct correlation between length of time in the United States and frequency of contact with those in the homeland or diaspora. Potentially, this intensive

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web of translocal contact across borders increases the transnational reach of SLTV as respondents may discuss programming with family members, and it provides a new ground against which to consider respondents’ evaluation of programming, especially that which features their countries of origin. Do transnationally networked audience members feel more skeptical of representations of Latin America on local SLTV given the possibility of getting news from relatives abroad? Is the desire to get news from Latin America and the diaspora increased or decreased by these translocal personal communications? There are indications that there is a positive correlation between contact with people in the homeland and other countries of the diaspora and interest in SLTV news, although this needs to be studied further. A second area of “complication” with respect to Latinidad concerns the Brazilian diaspora in the United States and Spain. Unacknowledged in the categories provided by the U.S. census until relatively recently (2000), immigration of Brazilians to the United States began to accelerate in the 1980s when high inflation and a devaluated currency linked to the national debt crisis in Brazil led Brazilians to seek economic opportunities abroad. Further immigration occurred in successive waves, until the great recession of 2007–2008, when favorable economic conditions in Brazil and an unfavorable immigration policy in the United States led to a partial return exodus to Brazil. Brazilian immigration to the United States resumed and continued to accelerate after 2012, during another period of economic uncertainty in Brazil (Waters and Batalova 2022). In her ethnographic study of Brazilian immigrants in the Los Angeles metropolitan area, Bernadete Beserra linked emigration to the United States to the spread of Americanization inside Brazil via the media and consumption of commodities. She also stressed the importance of the acquisition of symbolic capital beyond economic well-being as a motivation for emigration (Beserra 2003, 10–11, 13, 33–34). This form of capital was sought not only through education, but also the pursuit of professional opportunities in the media and entertainment industries as well as a change in class status through marriage to U.S. citizens (Ibid., 37). While theoretically eligible for inclusion as Latinxs, many Brazilian diasporic people do not openly identify as such. In Tânia Cypriano’s documentary on the Brazilian diaspora in San Francisco, she observes that family members were reluctant to identify as Latina/o because they felt it might stigmatize them as members of an immigrant group (Grandma Has a Video Camera 2006). This sentiment is corroborated by Brazilian

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immigrant opinions in Beserra’s study (Beserra 2003, 60, 62–63, 218 n28). In my study in Los Angeles, most Brazilian diasporic respondents identified as Brazilian with two claiming North American identity, one identifying secondarily as Brazilian-American and one identifying secondarily as “Christian.” None identified as Latina/o. In Los Angeles, which as a metro area is the fifth most important destination for Brazilians in the United States (Waters and Batalova 2022), clusters of Brazilians reside on the West Side in the multiethnic neighborhood of Palms where other Latin American communities reside, and in Redondo Beach, although compared to other populations of Latin American origin, Brazilians tend to be dispersed throughout the metropolitan area (this finding matches that of Beserra 2003, 18, 73). They tend to support local Brazilian-owned businesses such as supermarkets, restaurants, medical and dental professionals, and service providers such as hairdressers and estheticians, which have played an important role in the formation of Brazilian quasi-enclaves. Like musical performances, soccer matches, and carnival celebrations, these businesses have given visibility to Brazilians in Los Angeles. The supermarket can function as an emporium where clothing, cds, and beauty products as well as foodstuffs are sold, and restaurants project soccer matches via satellite on a large screen around which not only Brazilians but others in the neighborhood congregate. Until 2004 when Brazilian television became available via satellite by subscription in the United States, diasporic Brazilians in the United States had a choice of watching television in Spanish or English. While some watched the news on SLTV, most reserved the viewing of SLTV for sports, and specifically, soccer. Even after 2004, soccer continued to lure Brazilian viewers to SLTV (Silva 2014). Prior to 2004, Brazilian telenovelas (essentially from TV Globo) could be purchased on VHS at Brazilian neighborhood stores or received via mail order in installments through a distributor in Miami. Apart from soccer, the occasional news bulletin from Brazil, and the inclusion of Brazilian musicians on music awards shows, SLTV has occasionally featured Brazilian telenovelas in translation, such as Xica da Silva (1998), O Clone (The Clone, 2002), and Avenida Brasil (2015), most broadcast on Telemundo network. Brazilians are not a regular feature of SLTV news and public affairs programming, however. Media consumption in Los Angeles reveals a range of positionings vis-à-vis not only the U.S. media context, but also Latinx culture within the United States. One respondent watched television exclusively in Portuguese unless there was a special program such as a film on ELTV. Half of the respondents

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watched in both Portuguese and English, with most of those receiving their news from TV Globo. Three respondents watched in English only, one of whom identified as “North American,” and two of whom didn’t prioritize television as a medium; one watched in three languages— English, Portuguese, and Spanish. Of those who watched in Portuguese there was a sense that television provided a means of maintaining ties to the home country and staying informed about events in Latin America, yet, given Globo’s heavy focus on Brazilian national coverage television was perceived less as a means of participating in the Latinx community. Half of the respondents, all of whom consumed some television in Portuguese, felt the media they consumed contributed to their identity as Brazilian diasporic people. This indicates that unless PLTV or SLTV is consumed, Brazilian respondents tend not to experience recognition or enfranchisement through television. Two Brazilian respondents appeared on television during the Alma awards (a media awards show sponsored by the National Council of La Raza, now UNIDOSUS), one of whom observed that “Latino culture is much more accepted now than in the past.” Another participant appeared on Globo’s Planeta Brasil, which, launched a decade ago, is a variety show dedicated to portraying Brazilians in the diaspora, featuring portraits of Brazilian immigrants, along with information about legislation, health, arts, sports, education, and leisure activities (Planeta Brasil 2022). In a study of over 1200 Brazilian adults in South Florida conducted by Global Media Commerce Group in Boca Ratón for the Brazilian Consulate General in Miami in 2014, most respondents had been in the area for over eleven years, most lived in Broward County followed by Miami-Dade (similarly dispersed as compared to the Los Angeles sample), most were from the Southeast of Brazil (Minas Gerais, Rio de Janeiro, and São Paulo), most were between 36 and 55 years in age (older on average than the Los Angeles sample). Of those who had children, the majority (89%) were raising their children bilingually, many were U.S. citizens (35%) followed by permanent residents (27%), most identified as Democrats and felt immigration reform should be a priority, and most (78%) used the Internet to get their news, followed by U.S. and Brazilian television (tied, 49% and 48% respectively)16 (Conselho de Cidadãos da Flórida 2014). In addition to the Internet and television, Brazilians in South Florida were able to get news through Portuguese-language newspapers. The Miami and Orlando metro areas represent the second and fourth most important

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destinations for Brazilians in the United States (respectively, Waters and Batalova 2022). Given the large domestic market in Brazil and access to Lusophone markets across the Atlantic (GloboSat operated a channel in Portugal, GNT Portugal, renamed TV Globo Portugal after 2006, see Canais Globo 2022), there was a considerable lag in TV Globo’s attention and provision of media access to the Brazilian diasporic audience in the United States with respect to the history of Brazilian immigration to the United States and the provision of SLTV to diasporic Latinx viewers. At the turn of the millennium, the Lusophone market in Africa and Portugal numbered in the millions,17 whereas the Brazilian diasporic population in the United States numbered in the hundreds of thousands (Beserra 2003, 6–7).18 The consumption of mail-order telenovelas at the turn of the millennium and of a TV Globo signal by Brazilian diasporic audiences after 2004 in the United States furthered the idea of “Greater Brazil,” albeit seldom accompanied by the acknowledgment of these audiences in Brazilian national media texts. In contradistinction to SLTV, where the targeting of the Latinx market has deeply affected the conception and elaboration of telenovelas in Latin America prior to export, Globo programming is created first with the Brazilian national market in mind, with built-in flexibility to “travel” to Lusophone and other audiences outside Brazil (Nascimento 2022). In addition to allegorical references in some telenovelas such as Vale Tudo (Everything Goes, 1988–1989), the first direct acknowledgment of the diaspora on Brazilian television appeared in the telenovela América (TV Globo, 2005), about a young unauthorized migrant to the United States and the family she left behind in Brazil. Vale Tudo is illustrative of the national structure of feeling (Williams 1977) experienced during the first wave of significant emigration from Brazil to the United States. Centering the action around young professionals who work for a fashion magazine and an airline corporation, it counterposes the globalization achieved through the creative class and business success achieved through hard work with the corruption linked to corporate globalization (respectively). More specifically, it portrayed the contrast between ethical labor relations in a small artisanal business (Raquel) with corruption and an autocratic style of management in the corporation (Odete Roithman and Marco Aurélio) and the testing of loyalty to Brazil on the part of a young executive (Affonso) who is offered a lucrative opportunity in France. Vale Tudo received high ratings inside Brazil, and, as a telenovela produced

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during the initial period of democratization after the end of the military government in 1985, it “expressed and articulated sentiments of disillusionment with a democratic transition that was characterized by substantial levels of continuity in relation to the authoritarian past” (Porto 2011, 61, 65). As the largest and most influential media enterprise in Brazil, TV Globo itself underwent a process of political opening and newsroom autonomy, especially between the years 1995 and 2001 (Porto 2012, 65–69). References to emigration also appeared in the enormously popular 2012 telenovela Avenida Brasil, although it involved the sojourn of one of the main characters, Nina/Rita (Débora Falabella) in Argentina, where the telenovela met with so much success that its final episode was screened at the Teatro Colón in Buenos Aires (Nascimento 2022). This is a good example of successful export on the heels of saturation within the domestic market. Avenida Brasil was the most popular telenovela among diasporic viewers in my survey. Until recently, in addition to Planeta Brasil, TV Globo offered Globo Noticia Américas, produced in New  York for Globo Internacional for distribution to diasporic audiences in the Americas (Jornalismo 2022). The weekly news program, which was also available in installments on a web-based platform, featured a mix of political and public affairs with health and wellness and cultural topics. For example, the 21 December 2019 program covered the congressional vote for former President Donald Trump’s impeachment, women’s entrepreneurship in Central America (a UN-based report), sleep patterns in menopausal women, Brazilian holiday carollers in Montreal hospitals and elderly care facilities, IT professional networking in Ottawa, and the visit of photographer Miguel Rio Branco to New York. Globo currently maintains an office in New York and a crew in Washington, D.C. for the purpose of covering events of interest in the United States and the region for transmission to Brazil (Jornalismo 2022). Brazilian public television has offered programming via satellite through TV Brasil-Canal Integración (Vassallo Lopes and Orozco Gómez 2013, 31), although none of my respondents reported having access to it. In addition to transnational television, there has been a Brazilian presence on the radio with the Brazilian Hour hosted by Sergio Mielniczenko, streaming live in English on Saturday and Sunday mornings on KXLU-LA 88.9. Launched in Los Angeles in 1978, the program which focuses on Brazilian music and cultural affairs has international distribution in five languages (Portuguese, Spanish, English, French, and Mandarin) and led to the creation of video interviews (“Brazilian Hour

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TV”) with Brazilian musicians featured on its website and distributed on YouTube (Brazilian Hour 2022). Once Spain opened its doors to immigrants in the late 1990s and began to forge trade and investment agreements with some Latin American nations, such as Bolivia, new waves of Latin American immigrants, many of them of indigenous background, began streaming into Spanish cities. Spain is now host to people of varied South American nationalities, mostly of Bolivian, Colombian, Ecuadorian, Paraguayan, Peruvian, and Venezuelan origin, as well as Cubans and Dominicans, and since 2006 has been a full-fledged member of the Organization for International Migration (OIM) because of “the migrant crisis in the border zones of Ceuta and Melilla, the increase in the activity of voluntary assisted return of migrants, and the increasing importance of immigration from developing countries to Spain” (Organización de Migración Internacional 2011).19 I chose to focus my research in the autonomous community of Madrid,20 which after Catalunya was the second most important destination for immigrants to Spain in 2016 (Instituto Nacional de Estadística 2017a). Unlike other autonomous communities in which Latin American migrants are left to their own devices or seek the assistance of NGOs, the autonomous community of Madrid established several publicly funded Centros de Participación e Integración de Inmigrantes (CEPIs), or Centers for Immigrant Participation and Integration, that are administered by the autonomous community in close collaboration with some consulates of Latin American countries for the purpose of assisting immigrants with their insertion into the local labor force and society. The CEPIs are open to people of all nationalities. There are seventeen CEPIs in the community of Madrid. I chose to work with three CEPIs—the Colombian, Paraguayan, and Peruvian CEPIs located in different parts of the autonomous community. Each of these CEPIs offered classes in various skills (including foreign languages), social and legal services, and free access to computers to enhance job prospects, education, and settlement not just for immigrants from those respective countries but for all immigrants who wished to seek assistance. Each of the CEPIs determines their own public programming designed to suit their clientele. In addition to access to the CEPIs, immigrants who establish residence in Madrid (empadronarse) and whose countries hold reciprocal voting agreements with Spain21 are eligible to vote in municipal elections (see Rodríguez Benot 2002, 20, “14 de diciembre” 2010). The new immigration law of 2000 (Ley de Extranjería LO 4/2000) also allowed immigrants to become

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union members, go on strike, and to participate in demonstrations (Rodríguez Benot 2002, 22–23). Random surveys were administered in and near the three CEPIs, and two focus groups were held at the Hispano-Colombiano CEPI. Together with Venezuelans, Colombians make up the majority of Latin American immigrants in Spain (Instituto Nacional de Estadística 2017b). Study respondents came from thirteen different Latin American countries along with Congo and Morocco (see Table  5.3). All but one respondent had been in Spain between one and eleven years, and all except two respondents were between 18 and 49 years of age. There was a considerable degree of linguistic diversity, including among Latin American immigrants. In addition to Castilian Spanish (the official language in the autonomous community of Madrid), multilingual respondents spoke Guaraní, Portuguese, Aymara, and Quechua in addition to Arabic and French (see Table  5.4). Several were studying other European languages such as English, French, German, and Italian. In Madrid, Latin American immigrants are commonly considered to come from “América,” a self-identifiable category. One respondent wrote “me siento americano porque nací en América” (I feel American because I was born in America). The category of “Hispanic” tends to evaporate in the Iberian context since the sharing of a language with the Castilian-­ dominant population in greater Madrid has not been sufficient to produce Table 5.3 National origin of respondents in Madrid

Argentina Bolivia Brazil Colombia Congo Dominican Republic Ecuador Guatemala Honduras Mexico Morocco Nicaragua Paraguay Peru Venezuela No response

2 5 1 3 1 1 3 1 2 1 1 1 2 6 2 2

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Table 5.4  Languages and self-identification, respondents in Madrid Language most comfortable using Castilian Guarani Bilingual (Arabic, French, Guaraní, Portuguese, Quechua)

No response

Self-identification 27 1 6

2

Country of origin Latin American Central American

13 15 3

South American Mestizo Indigenous (Quechua) Latina/o Spaniard As self (no group affiliation) As a foreigner No response

3 2 1 1 1 1 1 5

a change in self-identification toward Spanish identity, a sense of full sociocultural acceptance (many of these immigrants become racialized or suffer from a ceiling in socioeconomic achievement and lack of recognition in Spanish national media), or assimilation into Spanish national and regional society. While several respondents chose to identify with their country of origin, of those many chose to identify secondarily with a regional identity, such as Latin American, South American, or Central American, such that most respondents (62%) were attached to a regional identity. One respondent identified as indigenous from Latin America (Quechua), and two respondents identified as “mestizo” or mixed race. Only one respondent identified as Spaniard (see Table 5.4). Television did not constitute a site of sociocultural recognition and enfranchisement for most Madrid respondents. In Spain, Latin American immigrants have been featured in cinema (in films directed by Pedro Almodóvar, Montxo Armendariz, and Icíar Bollaín, e.g.), yet televisual representations of immigrants have been intermittent and sparse, save for police procedurals and a few workplace fiction series—such as Hospital Central and Al Filo de la Ley—after the turn of the millennium, when immigration from South America to the peninsula began to peak (for a discussion of these genres, see Smith 2009, 65–104). There was also a mini-series produced by Carmen Sarmiento for TVE, Mujeres de América Latina in 1994, on the heels of the 1992 Commemoration of Quincentennial of the Spanish Conquest. At the same time, because Spain is at the crossroads of migration streams from Sub-Saharan and Maghrebi Africa as well as Eastern Europe and Latin America, immigrant roles in

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film and television are not always filled by Latin Americans: indeed, a comparison is needed of the valence and particular characterization with which each of these migrant groups has been portrayed. Coproduction agreements with Latin American and SLTV enterprises in the United States [such as with the series Al Filo de la Ley (Plural Entertainment) and the telenovela La Reina del Sur (Telemundo/Antena 3/RTI Producciones 2011)] and simulcasts of special events have increased the possibility that Latin American immigrants might gain access to televisual portrayals in Spain, yet a strong commitment to diversity on Spanish national television has yet to take effect. When asked to evaluate the depiction of the representation of Latin American immigrants on Spanish television, only two respondents rated it as “very good” and many said they hadn’t seen enough of such representations to be able to comment (see Table 5.5). The question of whether there was a program or theme that they would like to see in Spanish media drew responses such as “more information about immigration,” “the immigrant as a source of help, not as a problem,” and “a Latino channel where you could get to know our countries.” In compensation for the dearth of representation on Spanish television, many respondents followed media from their native countries online or in the local print press (e.g., in Madrid, there is a newspaper in Guaraní, Periódico El Guaraní, serving the Paraguayan community in that city). A few respondents tuned in to Top Radio Latina and other stations to listen to Latin music and to Corazón Tropical radio for news from the Dominican Republic, and one tuned into “la Radio del Pueblo” (People’s Radio) for immigration advice. Two other respondents listened to radio from their countries of origin (Paraguay and Peru) on the Internet. As in the United States, many respondents were interested in news programming on television, which they obtained mainly on TVE 1 (the primary national channel, free-to-air) and on Telemadrid, a local public channel that has formed part of FORTA (the national federation of Table 5.5 Evaluation of representation of Latin American immigrants on Spanish television

Very good 2 Good, but could be improved 10 Mediocre 1 Terrible 5 Haven’t seen enough to comment 10 No response 6

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autonomous broadcasters) since 1989 (Maxwell 1997, 264). Although televisual offerings have expanded considerably since the early 1990s when audiences in Madrid were offered five free-to-air channels in addition to a pay channel, Canal +,22 most respondents did not give television a great deal of importance as a medium (Table 5.6). While six respondents were able to watch European television and ten watched television from Latin America via satellite dish or Internet, most respondents expressed an interest in getting television from other countries, including the United States (seven respondents; see Table 5.7). Although respondents held a range of occupations, a discrepancy was found especially for those who had training or experience in the medical and technical professions and their current employment in service-related working-class jobs. This discrepancy affects the degree of insertion experienced in Spanish society. Participants in a “migrant image” focus group appreciated a SLTV clip about raising the minimum wage in California given that immigrants tend to be employed in low-wage jobs. This was a theme that also resonated in the surveys—one respondent wrote that they should “create more jobs for people without papers, now they ask for so Table 5.6 Importance given to watching television in Madrid

Table 5.7  What other countries would you like to get television from? (Madrid respondents)

Very important Somewhat important Of little importance No response

Belgium Bolivia Brazil Central America Colombia Ecuador France Honduras Italy Nicaragua Paraguay Peru U.S.

6 11 13 4

1 3 1 1 2 2 2 1 2 1 3 3 7

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many things” and another asked for “equality in labor practices.” Focus group participants also found credibility in a clip from the telenovela Amigas y Rivales in which a young woman Nayeli (Angélica Vale) resists advances by her host Luis and turns to the Mexican-American boxer Johnny (Johnny Lozada) for help, although the Mexican cultural references in the décor of Johnny’s apartment were not familiar to participants. There was general empathy for Nayeli’s vulnerability due to her unauthorized status. Another topic that emerged during the focus group was the stereotyping of immigrants in the media. Reflecting on mainstream media in Spain, it seemed that media stereotyping of immigrants has applied more to Maghrebi and sub-Saharan African, than to Latin American migrants, foregrounding the extent to which, in both Spain and the United States, migrant (and refugee) populations in the neoliberal era have been racialized. In the same migrant image focus group, several participants mentioned the stereotyping of Maghrebi (mainly Moroccan) migrants, and one participant also shared the impression that in Spain there was a hierarchy of acceptance following a logic based on phenotype and religion, with Latin Americans and Eastern Europeans at the top as the most favored groups, Maghrebi migrants second, and sub-Saharan Africans last. The telenovela El Clon (Telemundo/Caracol Televisión/Globo, 2010), very popular in Spain, is of special interest as it features Moroccans as key characters as well as Moroccan settings and would appear to be an antidote to such stereotyping. At the same time, Madrid survey respondents (in response to an open-ended question regarding a message to local authorities) expressed a concern over the need to legalize the status Latin American migrants already working in Spain. Apart from a few feature films and the occasional television series, for many Latin American madrileños, mainstream media invisibility has accompanied what Susan Coutin has called the “legal nonexistence” of undocumented immigrants (Coutin 2000, in Kil and Menjívar 2006, 172). The turn of the millennium was a pivotal period that brought new waves of immigrants to the United States and Spain, along with a questioning of the use of Hispanic as a single term to describe Latinxs, a questioning that led to terminological changes on the U.S. census as noted above. Although Spanish media conglomerates such as Grupo PRISA invested directly in Latin American media (as with radio in Colombia,

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1999, Argentina, 2004, and Chile, 2006, and the V-Me SLTV network in the United States, 2009; Albornoz et al. 2020, 19, 23, 27–28, 32), and Spanish television (TVE and Antena3) entered into partnership with Latin American and SLTV networks to co-produce telenovelas, this did not create significant opportunities for Latin American representation in Spanish national television. And although the Quincentennial commemorations paved the way for new transatlantic efforts such as the Ibermedia consortium to foster co-sponsorships between Portugal, Spain, and Latin America in cinema,23 leading to the creation of roles for Spanish actors in the films of Alejandro González Iñárritu, Alfonso Cuarón, Guillermo del Toro, and others, roles were not as forthcoming for Latin American actors, other than for actors like Mexican Gael García Bernal, in Spanish cinema. This lack of reciprocity has been felt by Latin American immigrants who have turned to other media, such as radio or print, or who turn to the Internet to achieve a sense of connection with the homeland and of recognition in the Spanish context. For its part, TV Globo, which reached diasporic audiences indirectly by entering into coproductions and engaging in telenovela distribution arrangements with Telemundo in the new millennium, expanded its direct reach to the United States after a delay of nearly two decades in relation to Brazilian migration patterns. Telenovelas remain its most popular genre for export as they provide an object of conversation, and therefore approximation, between those in the diaspora and those in the homeland (Nascimento 2022). We can expect PLTV to continue to be provided to Brazilians in the United States, especially now that the population has reached over a half-million (Waters and Batalova 2022).24 In Spain, home to around 133,000 Brazilians (Ibid.), Brazilians’ experience of diaspora in Madrid is mediated through CEPIs, the Paraguayan CEPI in particular, along with access to TV Globo Internacional on the Internet and to TV Record, a competitor of Globo, via satellite. Of the groups who appear to be culturally disenfranchised in relation to transnational television in the United States and Spain, Central Americans and Brazilians stand out in importance. Meanwhile, the disaffection expressed by millennial Cubans in Miami toward SLTV is indicative not only of cultural skepticism during the difficult process of social adjustment upon migration but also of the need to revise coverage of Cuba on local and national SLTV news to better represent the current diversity—socioeconomically, ethnoracially, and in terms of political opinion—of the Cuban diasporic population. This is especially the case as millennials, both U.S.-born and immigrating from Cuba, now outnumber the exilic generation.25 Finally,

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greater access to the Internet, especially for Latin American migrants in Spain, points to the increased competition of web-based news sources with SLTV in the United States and Spanish television in Spain, especially for younger generations of migrants. Here it is not a question of simply replacing SLTV with the Internet, but of searching for ways in which SLTV can be better integrated with online activity to reach underserved audiences. There is solid evidence that this is already occurring—Univisión’s KMEX launched the web-based weekday news program Edición Digital California; the network regularly posts news videos on Facebook, and its streaming platform Prende TV recently became available through Vix. For its part, Telemundo posts news clips to its website, web-casts news on Facebook, and makes its programming available on Peacock, NBC’s streaming platform. Attention needs to be given to how each of these platform modifications changes access to relevant content and the viewing experience in qualitative ways.



Notes

1. These choices in the initial category of identification, which can include Brazilians, contrast with the category “Spanish-Hispanic origin” used in the last decades of the twentieth century; see Fox (1996, 28). 2. Suzanne Oboler has traced the popularity of the term “Latino” to grassroots political initiatives in cities like Chicago, Los Angeles, and New York in the 1980s (Oboler 1995, 177 n5). 3. Millennials include those born between 1981 and 1996, Gen Z refers to those born after 1996. 4. Examples include the deputization of local law enforcement officers to assist with immigration enforcement and the Electronic Monitoring Program (Ibid., 85, 88, respectively), whereby unauthorized immigrants with deportation cases pending wear an ankle monitoring device instead of being detained. 5. Among the attributes that qualify it as a global city, Miami has become a telecommunications hub, with fiber-optic cable connections to Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, Colombia, Jamaica, Italy, Mexico, and Spain (Sassen 2012, 184). For a map of Miami’s linkages to other major cities. See Sassen (2012, 183). 6. On the difficulties experienced by those who launched more moderately inflected programming on radio stations in Miami. See Descout (2007, 149–152). 7. Aranda, Hughes, and Sabogal have defined “transnational social citizenship” as a “form of being and belonging…that claims simultaneous social

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membership in two local spaces” (Ibid.). The linkage between these spaces transcends geopolitical boundaries. 8. Like Aranda, Hughes, and Sabogal, I define the Miami metropolitan area as including Miami-Dade county and southern parts of Broward county to reflect the designated market area for media as well as patterns of residence and transitivity in relation to employment. See Aranda et al. (2014, 39). 9. As in Detroit and Los Angeles, respondents in the random sample in Miami were enrolled upon answering a question as to the use of Spanish-­ language television in the affirmative. Both questionnaires included a combination of multiple-choice and open-ended questions. Once the focus groups were complete, the questionnaires from the random sample and focus groups were merged to analyze and present the data in what follows. 10. Icharacterized these two groups as mixed based on the previous occupations of some of the participants in contrast with current occupation and aspiration; these are the groups characterized as “middle class” in Hughes’ analysis (Hughes 2018, 47). 11. All of the translations from the Spanish provided here are my own. 12.  “Centroamericanos que Quedaron Mutilados no Lograron Entrar al País,” http://www.univision.com/ shows/noticiero-univision/ centroamericanos-que-quedaron-mutilados-no-lograron-entrar-al-­ pais-video. 13. “Proponen Nuevo Proyecto Peatonal en Downtown Miami,” http:// m i a m i . u n i v i s i o n . c o m / n o t i c i a s / m i a m i / v i d e o / 2 0 1 5 -­0 3 -­2 0 / proyecto-­peatonal-­biscayne-­green-­miami. 14. My translation from the Spanish. 15. Respondents were invited to “check all that apply” and were thus given more than one choice of identification; a few respondents listed up to three choices. 16. Unfortunately, there was no specification in the study as to whether this U.S. television was in English or in Spanish. 17. In 2015, Lusophone Africa featured a market of over 49 million and Portugal had a market of 10.37 million (“L’Afrique en 2015” 2017). 18. The Brazilian Ministry of Foreign Affairs estimated the Brazilian population in the United States to be around 799,000 in 2001 (Ibid., 6). 19. Spain had been a full member of the OIM from 1958 to 1979, but changed to observer status in 1979 (Organization de Migración Internacional 2011). My translation from the Spanish. 20. As part of the decentralization of Spain with the arrival of parliamentary democracy in 1978, the fifty provinces of Spain were organized into seventeen autonomous communities, which took over “administrative pow-

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ers and social services previously in the hands of the central state” (Maxwell 1997, 261). 21.  The countries that signed reciprocal agreements with Spain in Latin America are Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Paraguay, and Peru (“14 de diciembre” 2010). For more detailed information on this subject. See Vacas Fernández (2011). 22. The channels included TVE1 and 2, Telecinco, Antenna 3, and Telemadrid in addition to Canal + (Maxwell 1997, 265). 23. Ibermedia was launched in 1995  in San Carlos de Bariloche, Argentina and it covers the cosponsorship of fiction and documentary projects in twenty-three countries including Italy, Spain, and Portugal (“El Programa” 2022). For an analysis of the impact of Ibermedia on Latin American film industries, see Falicov (2012) and Falicov (2019). 24. According to the U.S. Census and the 2019 American Comunity Surveys, the Brazilian population in the United States reached 502,000  in 2019 (Ibid.); this figure is likely to be lower than what has been estimated by the Brazilian Foreign Ministry (Ministério de Relações Exteriores). 25. As Alberto Sergio Laguna points out, the “exile community” is essentially composed of those who arrived in the United States between 1959 and 1973 (Laguna 2017, 23). More Cubans migrated to the United States between 2000 and 2010 than in any previous decade (Duany 2011, cited in Ibid., 6). For the weight of these more recent migrants with respect to cultural sensibility and political views toward the island, see Laguna (2017, 20–22).

Works Cited 14 de diciembre. “La Consejera de Empleo, Mujer e Inmigración Presenta la Campaña Informativa Sobre el Derecho al Voto de los Inmigrantes.” 2010. Empleo, Mujer e Inmigración Anuario. Consejería de Empleo, Mujer e Inmigración, Comunidad de Madrid, 35. Albornoz, Luis A., Ana I. Segovia, and Núria Almiron. 2020. Grupo Prisa: Media Power in Contemporary Spain. New York: Routledge. Aranda, Elizabeth M., Sallie Hughes, and Elena Sabogal. 2014. Making a Life in Multiethnic Miami: Immigration and the Rise of a Global City. Boulder: Lynne Rienner Publishers. Beltrán, Mary. 2009. Latina/o Stars in U.S.  Eyes. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Beserra, Bernadete. 2003. Brazilian Immigrants in the United States: Cultural Imperialism and Social Class. New York: LFB Scholarly Publishing. Brazilian Hour. 2022. Produced by Sergio Mielniczenko. KXLU-LA 88.9 FM. http://www.brazilianhour.org.

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Canais Globo. 2022. Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canais_Globo. Conselho de Cidadãos da Flórida. 2014. Projeto Mapeamento “Conhecer para Melhorar”. Research Report. Boca Raton: Global Media Commerce Group. Coutin, Susan B. 2000. Legalizing Moves: Salvadoran Immigrants’ Struggle for U.S. Residency. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press. Dávila, Arlene, and Yeidy Rivero, eds. 2014. Contemporary Latina/o Media: Production, Circulation, Politics. New York: New York University Press. Descout, Émilie. 2007. “Les radios hispano-cubains et le groups cubains à Miami.” In Médias, Migrations et Cultures Transnationales, ed. Tristan Mattelart, 135–154. Brussels: Éditions De Boeck Université. Duany, Jorge. 2011. Blurred Boundaries: Transnational Migration between the Hispanic Caribbean and the United States. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press. El Programa. 2022. Programa Ibermedia. https://www.programaibermedia. com/el-­programa/. Falicov, Tamara L. 2012. Programa Ibermedia: Cine Transnacional Iberoamericano o Relaciones Públicas para España? Sistema Editorial y de Difusión de la Investigación (SIEDIN), Universidad de Costa Rica. ———. 2019. Latin American Film Industries. London: Bloomsbury/British Film Institute. Fox, Geoffrey. 1996. Hispanic Nation. University of Arizona Press. Gamarra, Eduardo A. 2018. “Café Conversations in Miami.”  Latino Studies 16: 113–128. Girard, Chris, Guillermo Grenier, and Hugh Gladwin. 2010. “The Declining Symbolic Significance of the Embargo for South Florida’s Cuban Americans.” Latino Studies 8 (1): 4–22. Grandma Has a Video Camera. 2006. Produced and Directed by Tânia Cypriano. U.S.-Brazil. Guidotti-Hernández, Nicole. 2017. “Affective Communities and Millennial Desires: Latinx or Why My Computer Won’t Recognize Latina/o.” Cultural Dynamics 29 (3): 141–159. Hughes, Sallie. 2018. “The Latino/a Audience Unbound: Intra-Ethnic Social Hierarchies and Spanish-Language Television News.” Latino Studies 16: 43–64. Instituto Nacional de Estadística. 2017a. “Saldo Migratorio por Comunidades Autónomas 2016.” “Cifras de Población a 1 de enero de 2017, Estadística de Migraciones 2016.” Notas de Prensa, Madrid, 29 June. ———. 2017b. “Inmigración de Población Extranjera por Nacionalidad 2015–2016.” “Cifras de Población a 1 de enero de 2017, Estadística de Migraciones 2016.” Notas de Prensa, Madrid, 29 June. Jornalismo, Rede Globo. 2022. Email Communication with Author, 22 July. Kil, Sang Hea, and Cecilia Menjívar. 2006. “The ‘War on the Border’: Criminalizing Immigrants and Militarizing the U.S.-Mexico Border.” In Immigration and

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Crime: Race, Ethnicity, and Violence, ed. Ramiro Martínez Jr. and Abel Valenzuela Jr., 164–183. New York: New York University Press. L’Afrique en 2015. 2017. Jeune Afrique 39. Laguna, Albert Sergio. 2017. Diversión: Play and Popular Culture in Cuban America. New York: New York University Press. Lopez, Mark Hugo, Krogstad, Jens Manuel, and Jeffrey S. Passel. 2021. Who Is Hispanic? Pew Research Center, 23 September. https://www.pewresearch. org/fact-­tank/2021/09/23/who-­is-­hispanic/. Malavé, Idelisse, and Giordani, Esti. 2015. Latino Stats: American Hispanics by the Numbers. New York: The NewPress. Mattelart, Armand, Xavier Delcourt, and Michèle Mattelart. 1984. International Image Markets: In Search of an Alternative Perspective. London: Comedia. Maxwell, Richard. 1997. “Spatial Eruptions, Global Grids: Regionalist TV in Spain and Dialectics of Identity Politics.” In Refiguring Spain: Cinema/Media/ Representation, ed. Marsha Kinder, 260–283. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Nascimento, Rodrigo. 2022. Negocios Internacionais, Rede Globo. Interview with Author (via videoconference), 22 June. Oboler, Suzanne. 1995. Ethnic Labels, Latino Lives: Identity and the Politics of (Re)Presentation in the United States. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Organization de Migración Internacional. 2011. 50. Spain: Brochure. Planeta Brasil. 2022. Globo Television International. https://globointernacional. globo.com/Americas/Paginas/planeta-­brasil.aspx. Porto, Mauro. 2011. “Telenovelas and Representations of National Identity in Brazil.” Media, Culture and Society 33 (1): 53–69. ———. 2012. Media Power and Democratization in Brazil. New York: Routledge. Ramírez Berg, Charles. 2002. Latino Images in Film: Stereotypes, Subversion, Resistance. University of Texas Press. Rodríguez Benot, Andrés. 2002. “Principios Inspiradores y Caracteres Generales de la LO 4/2000, de 11 de Enero, Sobre Derechos y Libertades de los Extranjeros en España y su Integración Social.” In La Ley de Extranjería a la Luz de las Obligaciones de España en Derechos Humanos, ed. Juan Antonio Carrillo Salcedo, 15–35. Madrid: Akal Ediciones/Santa María de La Rábida: Universidad Internacional de Andalucía. Sassen, Saskia. 2012. Cities in a World Economy. 4th ed. Los Angeles: Pine Forge Press. Shorris, Earl. 1992. Latinos: A Biography of the People. New  York: W. W. Norton and Co. Silva, Helga. 2014. News Director, Telemundo 51, Miami, Florida, Telephone Interview with Author, 30 September.

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Sinclair, John. 2005. “International Television Channels in the Latin American Audiovisual Space.” In Transnational Television Worldwide: Towards a New Media Order, ed. Jean K. Chalaby, 196–215. London: I.B. Tauris. Smith, Paul Julian. 2009. Spanish Screen Fiction: Between Cinema and Television. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. U.S.  Census Bureau. 2021. Miami-Dade County, Florida, Population Estimates, 1 July. Vacas Fernández, Felix. 2011. El Reconocimiento del Derecho al Sufragio de los Extranjeros en España: Un Análisis desde el Derecho Internacional. Colección Cuadernos Bartolomé de las Casas, 49. Madrid: Dykinson. Vassallo Lopes, Maria Immacolata, and Guillermo Orozco Gómez. 2013. “Síntese Comparativa dos Países Obitel em 2012.” In Memória Social e Ficção Televisiva em Países Ibero-Americanos: Anuário Obitel 2013, ed. Maria Immacolata Vassallo Lopes and Guillermo Orozco Gómez, 23–92. Porto Alegre, Brazil: Sulina. Vourvoulias, Sabrina. 2012. “Latino or Hispanic?” Latino News and Opinion Al Día News, 20 April. Accessed 14 July 2012. Wallerstein, Immanuel. 2005. “Latin@s: What’s in a Name?” In Latin@s in the World-System: Decolonization Struggles in the 21st Century U.S.  Empire, ed. Ramón Grosfoguel, Nelson Maldonado-Torres, and José David Saldívar, 31–39. Boulder: Paradigm Publishers. Waters, Jaret, and Batalova, Jeanne. 2022. “Brazilian Immigrants in the United States.” Migration Information Source (Migration Policy Institute), 4 August. https://www.migrationpolicy.org. Williams, Raymond. 1977. Marxism and Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

CHAPTER 6

The Permutations of Affect, Collectivized: Television as Ritual and Repository of Memory

In the introduction to this book, I commented on how vernacular culture has been actively incorporated into the discursive matrix of SLTV in an attempt to appeal to its Latinx migrant audiences. Together with the dynamics of affect on and off-screen, this inclusiveness has led to the compatibility of the medium with certain rituals, in which SLTV facilitates the participation of viewers in ritual activity strongly tied to a sense of regional, national, and ethnic identity. Included in this inscription of ritual is the annual devotional celebration on 12 December of the powerful cultural icon and Mexican patron saint, the Virgen de Guadalupe, observed by mainly Mexican Americans and Central Americans in the United States and customarily transmitted live on SLTV with the portrayal, via split screen, of devotees at midnight mass in cathedrals located in Mexico City, San Antonio, Denver, and Los Angeles.1 It should be noted that recognizable musical celebrities (Lucero, Banda Recodo) and telenovela actors (such as Enrique LaGuardia) often participate in the celebration in Mexico City and at some of the U.S. locations. In its SLTV “call-and-response” iteration, the broadcast is a ritual culmination of a televisual chronicle over several weeks’ time of the icon’s transborder journey to Catholic parishes (currently totaling around twenty in Los Angeles alone) in Latinx populated areas across the United States. In addition to the “real time” representations of this ritual on SLTV, Televisa has invested in the telenovela series La Rosa de Guadalupe, focused on common problems of mostly © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 C. L. Benamou, Transnational Television and Latinx Diasporic Audiences, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-11527-1_6

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middle-class teens and young parents and the guidance provided by devotion to the Virgen as a pathway to a successful Deus ex machina resolution (foretold by the mysterious appearance of a white rose in the hands of the person in need of comfort and healing) by the end of each program. While not focused like other religious televisual programming on conversion, preaching, or testimonials of faith, La Rosa de Guadalupe, like the annual televised celebration itself provides a highly effective transborder space for devotees scattered throughout North America to take part in an imagined transnational cultural and religious community, to return to the “source” of that devotion as the image of the Virgen near the altar inside the Cathedral is revealed in Mexico City. In ideological terms, La Rosa de Guadalupe tends toward the conservative nationalism that was at the heart of Televisa from the early days of its development (Rodríguez 1999, 31). The symbolic power of the Virgen, as a syncretic representation of European and indigenous cultures in North and Meso America, often captures the interest even of viewers who are not actively practicing the Catholic faith. This power derives on the one hand from the history of the Virgen whose image was revealed to an indigenous person, Juan Diego, at Tepeyac, an indigenous holy site near Mexico City in 1531 (Lafaye 1976, 10, 225)2 and on the other, from Mexican migration to the United States which contributed to transborder worship. La Rosa de Guadalupe was one of the most popular programs for viewers in Detroit and Los Angeles and had also been viewed by respondents in Miami and Madrid. While SLTV has not been primarily aimed at second- or third-generation Latinxs, the representation of devotion to La Virgen in this manner is that rare type of programming (aside from popular musical programming) that bridges the audience gap, for example, between recently arrived mexicanos and U.S.born Chicanxs, who have long sought refuge and inspiration in the icon.3 The celebration of the feast day of the Virgen also provides an effective means of soldering the bond between celebrity fans and celebrities, providing an opportunity for physical proximity inside the Mexico City Cathedral as well as privileged access to another facet of the celebrities’ personae. The type of televisual viewing involved in these rituals is thus at once nostalgic for recent migrants, looking back at family-oriented practices in the homeland, and future-oriented, as young people appreciate the meaning and social power of the celebration, while the aspirations of celebrities appearing out of their customary role, yet still donning a protective public persona seem more accessible to viewers through their personal acts of devotion. Less visible to nationwide viewers of SLTV, yet still

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of importance to a large Latinx community is the celebration of the Virgen de la Caridad del Cobre, the patron saint of Cuba, which bears political as well as spiritual relevance to the Cuban exiled community in Miami and other parts of the U.S. East Coast. As with the Virgen de Guadalupe, the symbolic capital of the Virgen del Cobre has been increased by her significance to Cuban celebrities, notably the late Cuban emigré vocalist Celia Cruz. The televisual observance of both the Virgen de Guadalupe and the Virgen de la Caridad del Cobre (to a lesser degree) highlights the importance of the transnational capabilities of SLTV in figuring Greater Mexico and Greater Cuba, respectively. The remainder of this chapter will be devoted to a consideration of the spatiotemporal and psychosocial dimensions of televised acts of mourning and coping with loss within Latinx diasporic families and communities. On the one hand, this will locate the analysis more specifically in historical terms focusing on moments of loss, trauma, or crisis, and the return to those moments on the air; on the other hand, it will focus our attention more intensively on the forms taken by affect in the unwieldy, yet frequently traveled on-air circuit between fan and celebrity, conjugated, like the devotion to la Virgen, through the collective lens of family and community. While the attention devoted to the telenovela in the popular press as well as in the scholarship on Spanish- and Portuguese-language television has contributed to the commonplace that affect resides at the heart of this medium, both in terms of its appeal to its viewers and in the distinction between SLTV and ELTV modes of representation and performance and audience address, and while pathos suffuses telenovelas as a genre as well as testimonio as a documentary mode of narration (as discussed in Chap. 3), pathos assumes a particularly expansive and complex dynamic in collective rituals attached to another strand of SLTV practice: the coverage of celebrity funerals. The pathways taken by pathos both on and off screen within these ritual spaces do not conform to the usual viewer-subject dynamics characteristic of telenovelas, and, in a larger sense, of melodrama. First, the rituals involved are in part extra-textual and are not confinable to any particular television format occupying a niche within the SLTV flow. Second, pathos in audiovisual melodrama tends to involve a particularly close bond between individual viewers and chosen performers/characters on screen with whom they can align themselves. Instead, the circle of participation in these rituals is broadened to include a “community of viewers” and often, media professionals themselves. In particular, the ability of media professionals to emote with others on screen

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provides a vital, mediating link between viewers, the departed celebrity, and those responsible for organizing the funeral proceedings, providing the ritual with a sense of immediacy. As with reenactment in televisual documentary, affect in these rituals “refers to the experiential mode of engagement and the valorizing of felt connection…[it] is not an individual psychological state, but a social and cultural force” (Koivunen 2016, 5271). Moreover, the activation of collective memory is a key ingredient to the vectors of affect in relation to the narrative of loss. Especially in the case of musical celebrities, this activation is fueled by the performance of a repertoire of well-known songs, and the “community” can span North and Latin America and the Hispanic Caribbean. While one might take these tendencies as a particular sign of excess, I prefer to consider them as indicators of a larger transnational and transocial world of which SLTV is now an integral part, as well as the symbolic power of the celebrities themselves, which varies in intensity and cultural breadth. Rituals of loss and mourning are not only susceptible to cultural influence and encoding, but are also, as Alicia Schmidt Camacho has indicated, deeply woven into the fabric of the migrant experience (Schmidt Camacho 2008). This helps to explain the synecdochal power of celebrity funerals, as the mourning of the celebrity can “stand in” for and activate the feeling of loss toward family members separated by the migratory experience. Even though the inscription of these dimensions of affect in the Latinx diaspora is explored outside of the confines of the telenovela as text, it will become readily apparent that the events I will relate are suffused with melodrama, and perhaps even, the makings of telenovela plots. For this portion of the project, I have used television and social media flow analysis coupled with biographical research, intermedial analysis stemming from the reciprocal influence and synergy between the transborder Latin music industry and SLTV, and an emphasis on the spatiocultural dynamics of interurban and/or translocal representation and reception. On the morning of 28 August 2016, the multi-talented and much beloved singer, composer, and performing artist Alberto Aguilera Valadez, best known publicly as Juan Gabriel, died at the age of 66 from coronary arrest in his home in Santa Monica, California. The night before, Juanga (as his fans like to call him) had performed to a large, vocal audience at the Forum in Inglewood, home to thousands of Latinxs, many of them immigrants, in southwestern Los Angeles. Within an hour of the news of his death on social media, fans gathered outside of his home to share their favorite songs “Noa Noa,” “Querida,” “Así Fue,” “Por qué me haces

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llorar,” “Amor Eterno,” and so on and bid their Juanga farewell, an event that was duly recorded by local TV crews from KMEX, KVEA, the Telemundo station, and later, KHWY, at the time the local outlet for MundoFox. Almost immediately, Spanish-language radio stations in Los Angeles, such as KLAX, La Raza 97.9, Que Buena FM94.3, KSCA 101.9 (owned by Univision), KRCD Recuerdo FM 103.9, and K-Love KLVE FM 107.5, began playing a full repertoire of Juanga’s most popular musical hits, including theme songs that he had composed and performed for telenovelas. It is not an exaggeration to say that this radio tribute transformed a large portion of Los Angeles and parts of Orange County into a Juan Gabriel soundscape as his songs played in gardener’s trucks, in kitchens and restaurants, on construction sites, commuters’ cars, and in small businesses throughout the area. Although Juan Gabriel maintained a home in California, and, it was later discovered, one of his biological sons, João Gabriel Alberto Aguilera resided there, there was little question for the media and for the Divx’s fans that his corpse would be sent to Mexico for proper burial; one was reminded of the controversy generated by the burial in 1953 of Mexican Golden Age screen icon, Jorge Negrete in Los Angeles, where he had retired. Hence, the crowds gathering in Santa Monica were merely waiting for a chance to see Juanga’s casket on its way to LAX. During the following week, the crews of the major Spanish-language networks in the United States and in Mexico were displaced to four locations within Mexico, the prestigious Palacio de Bellas Artes in Mexico City, where Juan Gabriel had given three performances, the last one in 2013; Guadalajara, Mexico, where he was scheduled to perform following the Los Angeles concert; Parácoara, Michoacán where he was born 7 January 1950, and where his mother’s remains are buried; and Juárez, Chihuahua, Mexico, the border city where Juan Gabriel migrated with his mother as a small child, obtained his stage debut at several nightclubs during his adolescence, including the Noa Noa nightclub, and where he owned, and continued to occupy, the very house where his mother had worked as a domestic. This multi-site coverage created a circular transnational circuit of newsgathering and public mourning from Mexico to Los Angeles and Miami, Florida, where members of Juan Gabriel’s immediate family, four of his sons and their adoptive mother Laura Elena Salas, resided.

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While the four Mexican locations for these media operations were inspired by the trajectories and timeworn places of Juan Gabriel’s life and career, the U.S. centers of SL broadcasting reflected both his place of death and the family believed to be in charge of his legacy (a place of intimate mourning), and the media markets most closely connected to Juan Gabriel’s transnational identity—Los Angeles, the largest Mexican diasporic media audience4 long served by KMEX, and Miami, the corporate headquarters for the two largest SL networks as well as the heart of the Latinx musical recording business. A cloud of uncertainty reigned over the airwaves and in the streets across Mexico and Latinx U.S. as everyone waited to learn the actual dates of formal tributes planned in Juárez and Mexico City, as well as the resting place of Juan Gabriel’s remains. Parácoara, Juárez, and Mexico City all vied—on air—for this privilege, with different sociocultural connotations and potential for symbolic remembrance attached to each location. Entire evening news hours were devoted to the subject of Juan Gabriel’s loss (more, e.g., than had been devoted to Pope Francisco’s recent visit to Mexico and more than would be devoted to the canonization of St. Teresa on 4 September), as well as the possible circumstances of his burial. The coverage of public mourning coursed through various news cycles, only to be interrupted by the visit of GOP Presidential candidate Donald Trump to Mexico City to meet with President Enrique Peña Nieto, followed by candidate Trump’s anti-immigration speech in Phoenix, Arizona. In the meantime, a scandal was revealed regarding the transportation and disposition of the corpse: the hearse seen leaving the Aguilera residence in Santa Monica did not contain any of Juanga’s remains; rather it was driven to LAX and parked in an airport hangar. Leaving from a back entrance and unseen by most fans was another hearse containing what appeared to be a cardboard box. Upon following the hearse onto the 10 and 5 freeways, a local Univisión reporter discovered that this hearse was taken to a funeral parlor in Anaheim, where Juan Gabriel’s remains were cremated. The ashes were then taken to Miami for transportation by the family to Mexico via the El Paso-Juárez bridge. The on- and off-air mourning, including by on-air SL news reporters, redoubled as millions of Mexicans and fans in the United States reacted to the revelation that they had effectively lost the integral body of Juan Gabriel upon his departure from his concert in Los Angeles. On Saturday, 3 September, the ashes were finally made available for a public homage to Juan Gabriel in Juárez, attended by an estimated

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250,000 people; as the hearse proceeded from his house to the airport for transportation by the Mexican air force to Mexico City for a national tribute and wake at the Palacio de Bellas Artes, hundreds of people, including SL media professionals along with fans from Texas, Oklahoma, and California, precipitated themselves on the passing hearse. The day of the memorial at the Palacio de Bellas Artes, an estimated one million chilangos (residents of Mexico City) filled the streets to accompany the passage of the hearse down the Avenida Juárez to the Palacio. Inside, a Telemundo crew transmitted the live tribute rendered by Iván and the mariachis (who had also performed at the last Los Angeles concert) to his adoptive father, with the urn of ashes front and center stage. Univisión dispatched not only its national news anchor, María Elena Salinas, but also its Los Angeles correspondent Jaime García to the space outside the Palacio where acquaintances gathered to offer their remembrances of performance, intimate labor, and friendship alongside Juan Gabriel. On 7 September the ashes were removed from the Palacio to be taken back to Ciudad Juárez. Media commentators and interviewees attempted to capture the magnitude of this ten-day plus media event: the regional Mexican musical star from Long Beach, Lupillo Rivera, characterized Juan Gabriel as the “Michael Jackson of Mexico;” others likened the size and national prominence of the homenaje in Mexico City to that of actor Mario Moreno “Cantinflas” in 1993, while the transnational significance of JuanGa’s passing has approached that of screen star Pedro Infante, after his tragic airplane accident in 1957, in breadth and depth;5 indeed, Infante’s larger than life image graced the stage of Juan Gabriel’s 2013 concert at Palacio de Bellas Artes in Mexico City. Aside from the immersion of transnational SL media in this event, and the nearly constant sound of fans singing their favorite Juanga compositions in the streets of these and other cities around the world, there are a number of frames with which to understand the geodemographic dimensions of this process of public mourning, as well as the deep emotional impact of Juanga’s loss on the pan-Latinx community and the politics and economics of the diffusion of his iconosonic memory in the mediated public sphere. The first and most immediate frame of analysis concerns Juan Gabriel as a Divx among Divas: there is the importance of reading Juan Gabriel’s public mourning in the context of media rituals and posthumous televisual homages rendered to Latina divas in years past, beginning with Selena

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Quintanilla (1995), Celia Cruz (2003), and Jenni Rivera, sister of Lupillo (2012). The Quintanilla family helped to produce a musical special on Univisión in 2005 commemorating the tenth anniversary of Selena’s untimely death and has continued to render tribute on television including the recent Selena: The Series (2020–21), created by Moisés Zamora. In mid-July 2003, Celia Cruz was publicly mourned both in Miami and at an elaborate funeral service at New York’s St. Patrick’s Cathedral attended by fellow Latinx musicians that was transmitted live, followed by interviews conducted with fellow musicians in the circum-Caribbean. Following ample news coverage of vocalist Jenni Rivera’s tragic airplane accident in December 2012, a public memorial was covered live by SLTV and recorded by some ELTV stations at Universal Studios in Los Angeles. Each of these events created a precedent but was surpassed in scale and duration by the events celebrating Juan Gabriel’s life and career in 2016. In terms of precedents, as Deborah Vargas has commented (Vargas 2012, 207–210), the tenth anniversary commemoration of Selena Quintanilla’s death on Univisión gave rise to transvestite and transgender performances of Selena’s repertoire at gay clubs, including in Mexico City, underscoring the degree to which “Selena’s brown soul constitutes a queer sonic circuit that continually crosses back and forth across geographic, gender, and genre borders” (Ibid., 210). More visibly and for a longer duration, Juan Gabriel’s musical persona and performative style have contested the heteronormativity associated with national and regional popular musical genres, as well as the sociocultural discontinuities created by the U.S.Mexico border. Meanwhile, the dual location of Celia Cruz’s funerals, foregrounding her ties to the Cuban diaspora (Miami) and to the Caribbean Latinx musical community and home of salsa music (New York) prefigured the multi-sited significance of acts of mourning linked to Juan Gabriel, raising the question of where it might be best to lay him to rest. SLTV coverage of acts of remembrance mapped and mediated the affective and biographical distance between his birthplace, Parácoaro, Michoacán where his mother is buried, Ciudad Juárez where he started his musical career, Miami, the heart of the Latinx recording industry and where his adoptive children reside, Los Angeles, home to much of his Mexican-American fanbase, and Mexico City, home to many mariachis, where he challenged gender and class norms in a historic 1990 performance at the Palacio de Bellas Artes. The second frame concerns the structural links and material and discursive intertext between SL television and the transnational SL music

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industry. The strength of the cross-marketing potential and use of television as a venue for Latinx musical performance is emblematized in the fact that the tenth annual Latin Grammies, broadcast on Univisión network in 2013, attracted 10 million viewers, more than any other show that evening in the U.S. media airspace. During his career, Juan Gabriel was the recipient of six Latin Grammy awards, including a posthumous award for “Traditional Pop Vocal Album.” While his songs frequently topped the charts in Mexico, he was the winner of three “Latin Song Writer of the Year” awards from the American Society of Composers, Authors and Performers (ASCAP) in 1995, 1996, and 1998 and was inducted into the Billboard Latin Hall of Fame in 1996. Widespread recognition in the United States began with a “Lo Nuestro” excellence award in 1991,6 with “Lo Nuestro” awards being televised on an annual basis on Univisión. Juanga’s televised appearances in concert as well as on awards shows on SLTV helped generate an archive of footage that could be used in the posthumous tribute although restrictions on Juanga’s image would soon be imposed by his heirs. Juan Gabriel’s televisual legacy also includes songs that were composed and recorded for telenovelas, such as “Yo Te Recuerdo” (Mariana de la Noche, 2003) and “Inocente de Ti” (Inocente de Ti, 2004). As in the cases of Selena, Celia, and Jenni, there is little question that Juanga’s appearances on SLTV throughout his career helped to boost and maintain the transborder reach of his popularity. The third frame is to consider the expressive and interpretive vectors proceeding from Juan Gabriel’s public persona as a Mexican performing artist. Juanga cultivated a Mexican bolero and regional music tradition, yet progressively opened his music up to possibilities of transculturation and pan-Latinx appreciation. This is exemplified in his performance of the song “La Frontera” in a duet with Mexican vocalist Julión Alvarez, which is converted into a transborder experience segueing into gospel singers and a hip hop variation sung by Colombian-American musician J. Balvin on the Vevo music video platform (“La Frontera” 2015). Significantly, “La Frontera” figures the U.S.-Mexico border as an idyllic, interstitial space: “Everyone shows respect and everyone lives their lives, the most beautiful, the most divine thing, is that it is very honest and increasingly more united… Everything is different and that is thanks to the people, on the border, on the border, on the border.”7 In another pan-Latinx move, Juanga performed “Yo Te Recuerdo” as a duet with Marc Anthony, with the latter’s vocals being utilized to introduce a salsa accompaniment to the orchestral track (“Yo Te Recuerdo” 2016).

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The next, transnational frame is to consider the loss of Juan Gabriel, the momentary disappearance of his body, and the attempts at, and frustration of, a transborder funeral as yet another disruption of Greater Mexico as viewed from within the context of human migration, social and intimate relationships, and cultural expression. Just as the mourners of Pedro Infante could not contain their grief at the symbolic passing of the Mexican national project of the “Golden Age” (Rubinstein 2001), the passing of Juan Gabriel and the disappearance of his body on the U.S. side of the border seemed to represent the eclipse of transborder movement and subjectivity as a phenomenal possibility. Hence the role played by sustained coverage of the mourning in shifting the ballast of representation toward television itself as if to suture the disjointed acts of mourning and popular legacy of Juan Gabriel’s music on both sides of the border. Juan Gabriel’s astronomical success within the United States during the 1990s coincided roughly with the militarization of the U.S.-Mexican border and the implementation of Operation Gatekeeper in 1994 (months before the NAFTA trade agreement became official), shifting the policy and enforcement focus to apprehending migrants at the border, and the geo-focus of unauthorized crossing to the Sonoran-Arizonan desert, a situation that became compounded in the new millennium by the death of hundreds of Central American migrants making their way through Mexico, which itself began to enforce its southern border with Guatemala, on the notorious train La Bestia, a journey documented in De Nadie (2005), dramatized in Sin Nombre (2009) and captured in long-form reporting on Univisión and Telemundo. The dream of Latinx migrants’ return to the homeland has been inscribed, at least verbally if not figuratively in a series of media texts, from the years of the Bracero Program in the early 1950s, to the realist cinematic portrayals of Mexican border crossing by Robert Young and others in the 1970s, to the transborder B movies produced for late-night Mexican and SL television and for video distribution in the 1980s (discussed in Chap. 3), to the laments given in popular literature, corridos, independent documentaries, and televisual testimonios given by Latinx migrants on SL television in the 1990s into the new millennium. Alicia Schmidt Camacho has proposed an examination of social and cultural discourses that produce “migrant melancholia…an emergent mode of migrant subjectivity that contests the dehumanizing effects of the unauthorized border crossing…. Migrants do not only mourn the deaths of their conationals, or the violating injuries of theft, coerced labor, and sexual assault that can define the

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passage north; migrant melancholia also marks the loss of a social contract, the democratic ideal anchored in the Latin American nation-state” (Schmidt Camacho 2008, 286), and I think we can safely add, of the democratic ideal promoted, yet recently imperiled by the punitive immigration policies of the U.S. nation-state. Schmidt Camacho includes in her consideration of migrant melancholia the effects of English-only policies at work and other public environments, as well as the fracturing of the sending family as parents travel north to find work while protecting their children from a dangerous crossing by leaving them with extended family in their countries of origin. In his concert performances and compositions, Juan Gabriel showed special sensitivity toward the dramas surrounding this form of melancholia by inscribing himself as a migrant subject. The song “Yo Te Recuerdo” perhaps accomplishes this best: In addition to the natural cycles of daybreak and twilight, it evokes the detailed memory of a countryside as well as a person. As such it holds a special appeal for those who migrated from rural areas, including farmworkers in the United States,8 complementing the role of Mexican telenovelas in evoking rural memory through a focus on rural patrimony (Vassallo Lopes and Orozco Gómez 2013, 89). The fifth frame involves considering these events in the context of queer family and LGBTQ+ transborder networks. Much of the controversy following the funeral(s) concerned the verification and competing definitions of paternity. At the time of death, Juan Gabriel was known to have six sons, a biological son, Luis Alberto Aguilera (Guadalupe), four adopted sons, Jean, Hans, Iván, and Joan (in 2013, Iván was named as custodian of Aguilera’s business transactions), and João Gabriel Alberto Aguilera, born 3 December 1992 to Juan Gabriel and Consuelo Rosales, a domestic worker in the United States. These children have been divided not only by contestations of proper distribution of inheritance, but by what can be interpreted as definitions of family, community, and historicocultural approaches to the mediation of Juan Gabriel as Mexican musical icon. In addition to queer family, there is the way in which Juan Gabriel, who was never openly “out” as a LGBTQ+ person, lent himself to the celebration of queer spaces and performativity on both sides of the border, even as his music held strong appeal for cisgender listeners. As Ingrid Barrera of Telemundo commented, he “broke down social barriers because he brought sequins to mariachi music in a country of machismo” (Zuñiga, Jr. 2016).9 The queerness of Juanga’s performative style is not simply an additive to his public persona but is constitutive of his transborder

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popularity and has been conducive to the materialization and circulation of pan-Latinx interpretations of his music. The sixth frame is to take an ethnographic approach and consider the degree to which SL media capture what might be termed “cultures of mourning,” or acknowledging the continued presence of the departed through the display of memorabilia and offerings or ofrendas. Included in the ofrendas for Juan Gabriel is the singing of his most popular songs in public. As with the sites where ofrendas were left for Selena and Jenni Rivera in Corpus Christi, Texas and Long Beach, California (respectively), performances and offerings enacted outside the official space of the Palacio de Bellas Artes (such as at Juan Gabriel’s star on Hollywood Boulevard) create liminal spaces where a conversation can take place with the late Juan Gabriel and new transborder subjectivities can emerge. The liminality of such spaces of mourning, bridging the distance between the spiritual and the physical, the older and the younger, and the past and the present normally associated with the annual “Day of the Dead” festivities is explored in the film La Ofrenda/Days of the Dead by Lourdes Portillo and Susana Muñoz (1985). To this dynamic is added the creation, through televised remembrance, of a liminal space between Mexico and the United States. Seventh, there is the bifurcation of mourning into the capitalization on Juan Gabriel’s death, notably the copyrighting of memory imposed by Iván Aguilera as executor of Juan Gabriel’s estate, and the continued attempts of other musical artists and the public to invoke and behold the legacy of Juan Gabriel in what have become melancholic acts, and, from one perspective, a drive for open access. Among the latter, there is the open-air performance of “Amor Eterno” by the East Los Angeles band La Santa Cecilia in Plaza Garibaldi, Mexico City on 17 January 2017, which was quickly transformed into a vigil for Juan Gabriel. There is also the initially frustrated attempt (due to copyright issues) to posthumously stage the musical Amor Eterno “El Musical” at the Teatro San Rafael in Mexico City. Just as popular culture bears the “potential for reifying and challenging dominant narratives, at times simultaneously” (Laguna 2017, 19) so rituals of mourning and loss can involve the appropriation of cultural symbols in hegemonic and counterhegemonic ways. By way of contrast to the coverage of Juan Gabriel’s passing, which built on and promoted processes of transculturation, the possibility of pan-Latinx nationhood, the inscription of indigeneity (Juan Gabriel’s origins in Parácoara), and the blurring of the boundary between cisgender and LGBTQ+ publics, there is the recent

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coverage of the passing of Mexican music icon Vicente Fernández Gómez in December 2021. Fernández, who set the late twentieth-century standard for regional ranchera music and helped define the charro (Mexican horseman) esthetic, passed away early in the morning of 12 January, the feast day of the Virgen de Guadalupe. SLTV stations suspended their usual programming10 to cover the transfer of the casket bearing his remains from Guadalajara to his ranch outside the city in the state of Jalisco. There, viewers were able to witness a wake at which Fernández’s son, Alejandro Fernández, who had performed the evening before in Mexico City, led the on-air audience within the frame in singing one of Don Chente’s signature songs, “Volver” (“To Return”). The choice of this song underscores the extent to which mourners were invited to tap into a process of nostalgia for the stability of the patriarchal modern state centered in rural Mexico, as the musical torch was passed before the public’s eyes from father to son. A portrait of the Virgen de Guadalupe flanked the casket placed at the front of the amphitheater, a visible sign of the family’s spiritual leanings, but also working to seal the ritual in national significance. Two days later, owing to the importance of Fernández to fans in the United States, the family granted Univisión access to space of the casket once it had been transferred to the burial site on the ranch, allowing one last on-air farewell. As with Juan Gabriel, SLTV crews also covered the process of mourning and remembrance at popular sites in the United States, such as Fernández’s star on Hollywood Boulevard and the Plaza Mariachi in Boyle Heights. Like Juan Gabriel, Fernández’s origins in a small town, Huentitán, Jalisco endowed his life’s trajectory with an unlikely yet admirable success story, as well as the ability to instantly evoke nostalgia for rural Mexico. However, unlike the vernacular modernism and melancholia surrounding Juan Gabriel’s legacy and departure, the reverence of the camera and centering of the proceedings at the Jalisco ranch tie the process of Fernández’s mourning into the ideals and ethos of the Golden Age associated with Mexican charro culture as emblematized in the image of screen idols Jorge Negrete and Pedro Infante, who inspired him. The televisual coverage of Fernández’ passing thus gave new life to the concept of Greater Mexico centered on the heteronormative national popular. This coverage greatly overshadowed the coverage beginning on 9 December of the passing of popular screen and telenovela actress Carmen Salinas. These media events, with their peaceful assemblies of fans and intratextual linkages working in favor of spatiotemporal continuity stand in stark contrast to other portrayals of loss and mourning on SLTV.  SLTV was

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instrumental in investigating and reporting on the abduction and disappearance in Iguala, Mexico, on 26 September 2014 of 43 students of Ayotzinapa Rural Teachers’ College who were on their way by bus to Mexico City. In the immediate aftermath, testimonials by student survivors, the students’ parents and public statements by state and federal government officials were transmitted. It is known that six people died as the result of an attack by police on students at the scene (Althaus and De Córdoba 2014).11 Yet as the investigation unfolded, it became clear that no sense of closure would be forthcoming, and the parents and remaining students expressed their grief and outrage in public protest. The protests grew in scope and intensity after the first disclosure of a mass grave near Iguala did not yield relevant results, and, as some journalists have argued, the 43 students immediately came to represent some of the 30,000 people who had disappeared in Mexico in recent years.12 The next explanation proffered by state officials that the students had been killed at a Cocula garbage dump was first left in doubt by the findings of a group of Argentine forensic experts. Complicating the resolution of the case was the apparent involvement of law enforcement in the abduction of the students. Among those who have been arrested in the case are 44 police officers, as well as leaders of the Guerreros Unidos gang. Also arrested were the mayor of Iguala, José Luis Abarca and his wife María de los Angeles Pineda Villa (“2014 Iguala Mass Kidnapping”  2022). Yet even though a bone unearthed at a river in Cocula was found to match one of the disappeared, an investigation by a team assembled by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights was unable to yield the whereabouts of the rest of the remains and any certainty as to the offending parties involved, other than evidence of a government cover-up in the early stages of the initial investigation (“After Ayotzinapa Chapter 2” 2022). Most recently, ten government functionaries were indicted, the announcement being made over footage of families protesting the disappearances, and Jesús Murillo Karam, former Attorney General, was arrested, accused of orchestrating the cover-up, which brought terrible consequences for the fate of the students (Noticiero Univisión 2022; see also Associated Press 2022). While the multiscalar dimension of SLTV permits the conversion of local and national events into transnational newsgathering, as in the case of the Ayotzinapa students, it is precisely owing to the scale and cost of television, compared to other media, that there are limited opportunities within the international realm to telescope in beyond the immediate aftermath and the press conference to generate coverage of acts of collective

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mourning. This has been especially evident in the case of feminicide in Juárez since the turn of the millennium (and now generally affecting Mexico) and of the deaths of fifteen Mexican journalists in 2022. Beyond brief reports on the evening news, recent coverage of these events has been limited to grief channeled into public protests in Mexico City. Such limitations, beyond bringing into relief the emotional impact and media appeal of rituals surrounding the passing of transnational figures such as Selena, Celia Cruz, Jenni Rivera, Juan Gabriel, and Vicente Fernández, are in part reflective of the shift in emphasis at Univisión toward news occurring within and affecting the United States (Coronell 2014). The latter helps to explain the extent to which SLTV has become devoted to the portrayal of migrant melancholia. This is illustrated eloquently in the pilgrimage of Central Americans who had lost limbs during the migratory journey north through Mexico to reach the U.S.-Mexico border and petition for entry into the United States, covered by Univisión in March 2015. In this case, the revisitation of losses sustained by the migrants in testimonials gathered by investigative reporter Pedro Ultreras was transformed into leverage for a more positive outcome with permission eventually granted to amputees to enter the United States. While the permission was not initially forthcoming, the testimonials offered an important opportunity for viewers to empathize with the migrants. The portrayal is also poignantly given in the sustained coverage of the tragic death of 53 migrants as the result of confinement inside a crowded and hot trailer-truck near San Antonio, Texas in June 2022, featuring interviews with relatives in Mexico and Guatemala, and on-site documentation of acts of mourning and remembrance. In addition to creating a shared transnational space for public mourning by close relatives and compassionate strangers, the coverage (by both Univisión and Telemundo) opened a gateway to investigative reporting on the perils linked to human trafficking and the risks taken on a daily basis by young Mexican and Central American migrants. By individualizing several of the victims through the interviews, the coverage encouraged sympathy and understanding toward those affected.

Notes 1. In Los Angeles, the celebration has been shown both in the main Cathedral in downtown Los Angeles and the smaller church in the Placita Olvera. 2. According to Jacques Lafaye, the worship of the Virgen de Guadalupe in Mexico is the product of a fusion of the worship of the goddess Cihuacóatl-­

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Tonantzin (which in Nahuatl means “wife of the serpent” and “Our Mother,” respectively) with the worship of Our Lady of Guadalupe of Extremadura by the Spanish conquistadores (Ibid., 212–215, 217–218). Gloria Anzaldúa has traced the Virgen de Guadalupe to the indigenous deity Coatlalopeuh, or “she who has dominion over serpents;” the Spanish syncretization with Our Lady of Guadalupe was enabled by the “desexing” of Tonantsi/Guadalupe, that is, a continuation of the splitting of the deity, initiated by the Nahuas, from her “dark” guises associated with the power of the serpent (Anzaldúa 2012, 49–50). 3. This popular appeal is evidenced in the frequency with which La Virgen appears emblazoned in city murals, as well as tattoos and handcrafted jewelry and small, devotional paintings. See also Anzaldúa (2012, 51–52). 4. The size of this particular Latinx market segment in the United States is around 34 million; Malavé and Giordani (2015, 2). 5. For an excellent critical historical analysis of Pedro Infante’s funeral in Mexico City, 1957, see Rubinstein (2001). 6. “Juan Gabriel” (2022). 7. My translation from the Spanish: “Todos respetan y cada quien vive su vida, Lo más hermoso, lo más divino, Es que es muy franca y cada vez más unida… Aquí todo diferente, Y esto es gracias a la gente, En la frontera, en la frontera, en la frontera.” 8. I am grateful to Charles Ramírez Berg for this observation. 9. For more on the significance of Juan Gabriel to the Latinx LGBTQ+ community, see Martínez (2021). 10. There was a hiatus in Telemundo’s coverage so as to transmit the Miss Universe pageant that evening. 11. One of the most authoritative sources on the subject in English is the twoyear investigation led by Anayansi Diaz-Cortes (Reveal) and Kate Doyle (National Security Archive) as reported in the three-part series “After Ayotzinapa” 2022. 12. Anayansi Diaz-Cortes in “After Ayotzinapa Chapter 1: The Missing 43” (2022).

Works Cited “2014 Iguala Mass Kidnapping.” 2022. Wikipedia. “After Ayotzinapa Chapter 1: The Missing 43.” 2022. Produced by Anayansi DiazCortes. Reporting by Anayansi Diaz-Cortes and Kate Doyle. Reveal. 15 January. https://revealnews.org/podcast/after-­ayotzinapa-­chapter-­1-­the-­missing-­43/. “After Ayotzinapa Chapter 2: The Cover-Up.” 2022. Produced by Anayansi Díaz-­ Cortes. Reporting by Anayansi Díaz-Cortes and Kate Doyle. Reveal. 22 January. https://revealnews.org/podcast/after-­ayotzinapa-­chapter-­2-­the-­cover-­up/.

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Althaus, Dudley, and José De Córdoba. 2014. “Mystery of Missing Students in Mexico Shines Spotlight on Troubled City.” Wall Street Journal, 9 October. Anzaldúa, Gloria. 2012. Borderlands, La Frontera: The New Mestiza. 4th ed. San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books. Associated Press. 2022. “Mexico Arrests Former Official in Case of 43 Missing Students.” Los Angeles Times, Saturday 20 August, A3. Coronell, Daniel. 2014. Vice-President of News, Univisión Network, interview with author, Miami, FL, 23 September. De Nadie. 2005. Directed by Tin Dirdamal. “Juan Gabriel.” 2022. Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juan_Gabriel. Koivunen, Anu. 2016. “Affective Historiography: Archival Aesthetics and the Temporalities of Televisual Nation-Building.”  International Journal of Communication 10: 5270–5283. “La Frontera.” 2015. Sung by Juan Gabriel, Julión Alvarez, and J. Balvin. Vevo. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NI4Z9BeHQ8I. Lafaye, Jacques. 1976. Quetzalcóatl and Guadalupe: The Formation of Mexican National Consciousness 1531–1813. Translated by Benjamin Keen. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Laguna, Albert Sergio. 2017. Diversión: Play and Popular Culture in Cuban America. New York: New York University Press. Malavé, Ideliss, and Esti Giordani. 2015. Latino Stats: American Hispanics by the Numbers. New York: The New Press. Martínez, Fidel. 2021. “The Latinx Files: Remembering Juan Gabriel.” Los Angeles Times, 26 August. Noticiero Univisión. 2022. Univisión, 18 and 19 August. Rodríguez, America. 1999. Making Latino News: Race, Language, Class. Thousand Oaks: Sage. Rubinstein, Anne. 2001. “Bodies, Cities, Cinema: Pedro Infante’s Death as Political Spectacle.” In Fragments of a Golden Age: The Politics of Culture in Mexico Since 1940, ed. Gilbert M. Joseph, Anne Rubinstein, and Eric Zolov. Durham: Duke University Press. Schmidt Camacho, Alicia. 2008. Migrant Imaginaries: Latino Cultural Politics in the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands. New York: New York University Press. Sin Nombre. 2009. Directed by Cary Fukunaga. Vargas, Deborah R. 2012. Dissonant Divas in Chicana Music: The Limits of La Onda. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Vassallo Lopes, Maria Immacolata, and Guillermo Orozco Gómez. 2013. “Síntese Comparativa dos Países Obitel em 2012.” In Memória Social e Ficção Televisiva em Países Ibero-Americanos: Anuário Obitel 2013, ed. Maria Immacolata Vassallo Lopes and Guillermo Orozco Gómez, 23–92. Porto Alegre, Brazil: Sulina.

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“Yo Te Recuerdo.” 2016. Sung by Juan Gabriel and Marc Anthony. Vevo. https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=ubgrcXB72Fk. Zuñiga, Jr., Edgar. 2016. “Mexicans Say Heartfelt Goodbye to Their ‘Amor Eterno,’ Juan Gabriel.” NBC News, 7 September. https://www.nbcnews.com/ news/latino/mexicans-­say-­goodbye-­their-­amor-­eterno-­juan-­gabriel-­n643826.

CHAPTER 7

Conclusion: Emerging Tendencies in SLTV

No nos vamos a sentar, no nos vamos a callar, y no nos vamos a ir. —Jorge Ramos (“We are not going to sit down, we’re not going to be quiet, we’re not going to leave.” This statement by Univisión anchor Jorge Ramos was iterated regularly on the air after he publicly confronted presidential candidate Donald Trump in Nevada, summer 2016 following the latter’s pejorative remarks regarding Mexican immigrants. All translations from the Spanish in this chapter are my own) ICE keeps our bodies moving in linear motion, sucking out life and filling their space with fear and longing …. —Ashley Solis Pavón (In Fruits of Labor 2021) Do not fear living your life, going to the market, taking your children to school: this is not a monarchy, it’s a republic. —Kevin de León (“No temen vivir su vida, ir al mercado, llevar sus hijos a la escuela: esto no es una monarquía, es una república.” This statement was made in a PSA aired on Univisión network’s KMEX, 4 July 2017. At the time, Kevin de León was state senator from Los Angeles and the president of the California State Assembly)

On a special program commemorating the twentieth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks on 11 September 2021, Univisión anchor Jorge Ramos and correspondent María Antonieta Collins interviewed correspondent Blanca Rosa Vilchez, who had covered the aftermath of the twin tower collapse in 2001. Vilchez comments that she hadn’t found a way of explaining until then why she remained working on the scene in lower Manhattan instead of going to be with her six year-old daughter that day, “porque había que © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 C. L. Benamou, Transnational Television and Latinx Diasporic Audiences, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-11527-1_7

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buscar víctimas” (“because it was necessary to find victims”). This prompts Ramos to observe that “what we do in Spanish-language news isn’t just reporting every day, it goes further, it’s a form of social labor.”1 Part of this social labor is the provision of media enfranchisement, and at critical times, advocacy, even though this might appear to go against the impartiality associated with broadcast news reporting. The need for such social labor is clear: although around three-quarters of the Latinx population in the United States are U.S. citizens (Malavé and Giordani 2015, 3), Latinxs have continued to face various forms of discrimination, underrepresentation in the media, and a relative lack of political representation. The situation is especially critical for immigrants, whose status and well-being were negatively affected by the increasingly restrictive immigration policy toward refugees, migrants, and even legal residents (including those who aspired to become citizens) under President Trump. Whereas unauthorized immigrants have experienced increasing difficulties in seeking employment, health care, driver’s licenses, and traveling outside of their place of residence, all immigrants still face the possibility that at any moment an encounter with law enforcement in non-sanctuary cities can escalate rapidly into an encounter with ICE with an uncertain outcome.2 During the Trump administration, there was even apprehension for immigrants about attending court dates for fear of detention by ICE (Noticiero Univisión 2017a, see also Associated Press 2021). As Representative Adriano Espaillat (D-New York) has stated, this intimidation affects U.S. society at large: “we need these people to continue reporting crimes, to be a productive part of the United States” (Noticiero Univisión 2017a).3 A recent Pew Center poll found that four out of ten (39%) Latinxs “worry that they, a family member or someone close to them could be deported,” whereas over half (53%) of legal Latinx residents worry that they or someone close to them could be deported (Moslimani 2022). Aside from the threat of detention and deportation, the lack of an effective pathway to citizenship for many immigrants and the tremendous backlog in applications for citizenship by green card holders have aggravated the formal disenfranchisement of millions of Latinx immigrants. A backlog of nearly one million applications by legal residents for citizenship status has meant that many Latinxs and other immigrants now find themselves in an intermediary zone between disenfranchised unauthorized immigrants and fully fledged citizens enjoying electoral power, even though they have complied with application requirements.4 Nevertheless, over the past decade, thousands of immigrants in the United States, including many Dreamers (who, as DACA recipients, number over 200,000) have chosen to exercise their

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freedom of speech even though they have yet to be granted the legal right to work (non-DACA recipients), obtain educational support, and vote in the United States, an aspect eminently illustrated by the immigration reform protests that began May 1, 2006, along with subsequent protests (around labor conditions, environmental justice, and gun violence, e.g.) even at the risk of exposing one’s identity, and hence immigration status.5 Beyond PSAs such as the ones cited above, SLTV has documented abuses, including wage theft, against immigrants, and it has covered the immigration reform movement, setting in motion an audiovisual “call and response” among annual marches taking place in cities such as New York, Detroit, Chicago, Las Vegas, Phoenix, and Los Angeles by way of a montage or split-screen display, accompanied by bilingual interviews with marchers and community leaders on the ground,6 conveying the idea— and the reality—that immigrant communities are not restricted to the coastal and seasonal agricultural growing areas, nor are political trends spawned exclusively in the nation’s capital and centers of industry and capital investment. Public actions initiated by DACA recipients have also received SLTV attention. As Sasha Costanza-Chock and others have documented, since the 2010s there has been a steady rise in Latinx organized response to anti-immigrant state policies and in the use of social media in these organizing efforts (Costanza-Chock 2014; Jiménez Moreta, 2021). There has also been a growing schism between national and local policies toward immigrants: to counter the increasing restrictions placed on immigrants, their families, health providers, and employers at the national level, cities within the counties of Madrid and Los Angeles, for example, have taken the lead in designing and funding programs that offer legal and other forms of public assistance to immigrants in need, thereby adumbrating what a more tolerant and inclusive national society might look like. They have also legislated protections for undocumented immigrants, creating safe spaces within the city, thereby diminishing the likelihood of detention by immigration authorities. In both Spain and the United States, residence in certain cities (or states) increases the chances that one might be able to obtain access to public services and education, as well as “sanctuary” from detention and family separation. One factor worth tracking is how local public initiatives and protections of this kind, favored by pro-immigrant constituencies in local electoral politics, and reinforced by media coverage and advocacy, hold the potential for increasing transitivity and the creation of spaces that broaden social interaction in the urban public sphere, and by extension, on camera, on-mic representations

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in  local SLTV media. A recent report in Media Matters for America showed a decline in cable news appearances by DACA recipients, following a reversal in federal protections from deportation (Alderman 2017). Regardless of immigration status, Latinxs, especially those with darker complexions, are increasingly vulnerable to bullying in public and hate crimes, including violence so severe that it can be deadly. The Southern Poverty Law Center which has been tracking hate groups and violations of civil rights since the 1960s showed a total of 954 active hate groups in the United States, including twelve in the Los Angeles metropolitan area alone (eighteen in Southern California), seven in the Detroit metropolitan area, and two in Miami-Dade, five in South Florida (Southern Poverty Law Center 2018). The anti-immigrant rhetoric and hate speech associated with the Trump administration led to anti-Trump marches in July 2017, which were covered by SLTV in Los Angeles, Austin, Chicago, and New York (Noticiero Univisión 2017b). Another type of coverage—that in favor of COVID-19 prevention— emerged especially given the high level of sensitivity of Latinx communities to the virus and to the negative economic impact of various lockdowns, which paved the way for “masked-person-in-the-city” and “expert testimony from the hospital” interviewing techniques. As the new U.S. Senator from California, Alex Padilla, stated in a 2021 (AP) interview, “From the beginning, communities of color, the essential workers, which Latinos disproportionately make up, are at increased risk because of the nature of their work. We’re contracting it, and it impacts us disproportionately compared to other communities” (Medina 2021). Advocacy on the part of Latinx journalists and media has had a positive effect on ELTV coverage of the virus, as a Latina nurse, Dulce Castellanos, was shown to be the first nurse getting the vaccine in California, interviewed on ELTV for ABC network, as well as in Spanish for the Noticiero Univisión (2021) with statistics sharing between the two networks to bolster the Latinx focus. Reporting in early 2021 on CNN (Don Lemon’s CNN Tonight), and on NPR (Morning Edition, 1 February), as well as on Univisión and Telemundo addressed the problem of equitable access to and Latinx opinions regarding the COVID-19 vaccine during the federal rollout. Throughout much of 2021, SLTV continued to take the lead on COVID-19 pandemic reporting. Coverage of COVID-19-related news has been amplified for Los Angeles by the program Al Punto California on KMEX Channel 34 (Al Punto California 2021, both segments), as well as by an increase in Latinx

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staffing at local Los Angeles broadcast news stations in recent history. The coverage by Al Punto California, in particular, shows how advocacy often can dovetail with information gathering: in one segment, “‘La Situación Es Muy Grave’”(The Situation is Very Serious), a hispanophone doctor, Erika Flores, shared with viewers the importance of having hispanophone staffing at local hospitals to meet with families and facilitate communication with patients about to undergo more drastic life-saving measures, while she also alerted people to the availability of resources in their language for assistance from the county with rent and food (Al Punto California 2021, segment 2). In addition to news coverage, there was outreach by the anchors of the KMEX34 (Los Angeles) news team to hold a public dialogue regarding COVID-19 with local Hispanophone medical experts via zoom on the station’s website following the local and national evening news (during the week of 8 February 2021). The question is raised anew of whether SLTV can be effective as a medium of political contestation and debate, and where and how this positions the media professional, as compared to the media subject and viewer. Martín Becerra has suggested a way in which this effectivity might be possible: one of the advantages of media concentration, he argues is that “with the economy of scale, it is possible to innovate products and new content, and even to develop strategies that don’t seek to make a profit, as long as there are obligations or a mandate of diversity (which does not come about “naturally”);” moreover, concentration “reinforces the autonomy of media in the face of external political and economic pressures” (Becerra 2015, 56, my translation from the Spanish). In the attempt to reach its audience, SLTV does indeed exhibit such a “mandate of diversity.”

Challenges for SLTV A number of challenges confront the future development of SLTV. First, aside from hate crimes, economic inequality, and environmental justice, there has been a growing concern with lack of opportunity and discrimination based on skin color: in a recent Pew study, 57% of Latinx adults interviewed said that skin color shaped their “daily life experiences,” and 48% said that discrimination based on “race or skin color” was a “very big problem” in the United States (Noe-Bustamante, et al. 2021). Although staffing at SLTV stations has been progressively diversifying in terms of nationality and accent, less progress has been made to hire and give

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prominence to media professionals with non-white phenotypes, affecting processes of media recognition for a large cross-section of viewers. This is an area of activity that needs to be improved upon to help retain the relevance of the medium for diverse Latinx viewers. The relative absence of media professionals of color compounds the potential of a class-based hierarchy between media professional and media viewer. A second area of concern involves meeting the needs of the growing rural and mid-country population of Latinx immigrants and their families (Kayitsinga 2022, 6–7). Such communities are underserved by U.S. media in general, including SLTV.  Since the demand in any single area is not great enough to warrant corporate investment in an owned and operated station, there is the question of whether public television can be improved to serve these communities, or whether ethnic television in different languages can share a channel, as with KXLA in Los Angeles. Taking public television in a multilingual direction would also help to address the demand, voiced by study respondents, for more educational television. Third, there is the question of language politics and the ability of SLTV to cater to billennials (bilingual and bicultural millennials)7 in a highly competitive marketplace. The ability to reach billennials is rendered significant by the fact that the median age for Latinxs in 2020 was 29.8 years of age (Kayitsinga 2022, 11). My study was designed multilingually to accommodate people of different backgrounds and linguistic abilities. Questionnaires were circulated in Spanish and Portuguese in addition to English. Notes were carefully taken regarding the demographic profile and programming preferences of those who chose any of these options to see if there were any patterns especially regarding the English questionnaire option. As we saw in the case of Miami, those who chose to answer in English and did not watch SLTV tended not to get news programming on television. Yet it was equally important to register viewer opinions regarding bilingualism in the media since this is an area that has been fraught with difficulty yet bears the potential for audiencebuilding and innovation. Even though in U.S. media markets there is a dearth of free-­to-­air options on the television dial that can actually be called “bilingual,” there was ample support for bilingual media among U.S. respondents regardless of language preference (see Table 7.1). Only one respondent in the study thought there should be less bilingual television. Bilingual experiments on free-to-air networks have been short-lived: LATV went from being a bilingual network in 2001 to a mostly SL network by 2007 (Rojas and Piñón 2014, 2), and an experiment with bilingual programming utilizing SL captioning with English-language programming on Telemundo in the 1990s ended during that decade

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Table 7.1  Opinions on bilingual television City

Important to Important for general Should be more me social wellbeing bilingual TV

Should be about the same/doesn’t matter much

Detroit Los Angeles Miami

38 17

36 19

NA 11

6 6

31

26

NA

9

(Ibid., 1). Unimás, a cable network affiliated with Univisión featured bilingual programming such as the popular Lucha Underground (masked wrestler) series only to discontinue it in 2019 (it has since migrated to the El Rey web-based network; Frank 2022). The more successful bilingual networks have been Universo (formerly Mun2, launched in 2001) catering mostly to Mexican-American audiences (Rojas and Piñón 2014, 6) and Tr3s (Viacom/MTV, launched in 2006) offering bilingual music video programming. Efforts to capitalize on the millennial and Gen Z Latinx audience through English-language cable programming such as NuvoTV (2004–2015) and Fusion (2013–2021) have not met with lasting success in what has become the streaming era. The need to develop programming with linguistic flexibility targeting Latinx millennials and Gen Z is encouraged by the fact that “ethnic loyalty—or the commitment to ethnic heritage—is promoted by parents and grandparents who practice dual-cultural socialization with their children” (Padilla 2006, cited in Rojas and Piñón 2014, 4). Although fluency in Spanish for younger generations may not be maintained, bilingual programming can facilitate cultural retention. The development of linguistic flexibility (allowing for accented Spanish and Spanglish), as in reality competition shows on Univisión (Avilés-Santiago and Báez 2019) also brings SLTV more into alignment with what billennials experience in everyday life (Chávez 2014 in Ibid., 131). Finally, developing more linguistic flexibility in programming, moving away from a “standard language ideology” of maintaining neutral Spanish on SLTV (Avilés-Santiago and Báez 2019, 130) may help SLTV become more inclusive of Lusophone viewers in the diaspora. It is unclear whether linguistic flexibility will be sustainable (let alone expandable), at least in the case of the major networks such as Univisión, given its recent merger with Televisa, which de rigueur favors a Spanish-only format. There is also the factor of geographic reach: keeping programming in

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Spanish allows programming from SLTV networks to be consumed by Hispanophone viewers outside the United States. A last area of challenge concerns representations of political campaigns and the electoral process. Latinxs constitute the fastest growing sector of the electorate (Morning Edition 2021), yet they are seldom acknowledged in political coverage by ELTV.  Beto O’Rourke and Julián Castro, two presidential hopefuls who appeared in debates early in the 2020 election campaign, decided to leave the race before the Iowa and New Hampshire caucuses—the latter because of a paucity of funding. Even so, there was a lack of attention to Latinx-related issues—immigration policy, human rights north and south of the U.S.-Mexico border, the cohesiveness of families in the wake of draconian immigration policies and outsourcing of staffing during detention—by the journalists on debate panels. While questions regarding Middle East and Eastern European policy abounded, none of the questions addressed to candidates concerned U.S. policy toward Latin America. Given Latinx interest in voting regardless of the ability to vote (see Chap. 4), together with the growth of the Latinx electorate, SLTV has a role to play in educating viewers regarding political candidates and the electoral process. In addition to SL interviews with bilingual candidates and occasional translations of interviews conducted in English, there is a need for campaign coverage and continued town halls with candidates, as initiated by Univisión during the 2016 election cycle.

Innovations In addition to language, there are the importance of technology and the adaptation of SLTV to the digital mediascape, especially demonstrated in the case of Miami (discussed in Chap. 5). In addition to publishing news and making videos of news items available on the web as is the case for most SLTV providers, there have been other innovations in SLTV. These include the creation of a special “Digital Edition” (Edición Digital California) at 12:30  p.m. weekdays of statewide news on KMEX-34 (Univisión). Univisión is now offering streaming content through its partnership with Televisa on the Vix platform, although it is unclear how much of this content will be U.S.-produced. It is important, however, to distinguish among different types of digitization and their effects on the maintenance of a Latinx public sphere. As Jostein Gripsrud has observed, there is a difference between broadcast television availing itself of digital platforms for enhanced “push” distribution of regularly scheduled

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programming, as in the case of Edición Digital California, which still retains the possibility of broadcasting as “a cultural form where audiovisual material is disseminated … in a continuous, sequential form—a flow—from some central unit to a varying number of anonymous people who receive the same material at the same time;” and VOD, as in the case of Vix, Globo Play, and Peacock, which is a “pull” technology, offering a menu of media content off-schedule and at viewers’ discretion (Gripsrud 2010, 9, 20). The former allows participation in a mediated public sphere in which interactivity can take place through texting and Facebook posts in real time (thereby reducing anonymity); the latter is a more atomized form of consumption whereby online sphericules might be created revolving around specific programs at viewers’ initiative and leisure.8 This atomized viewing, unlike broadcast television broadly defined (Ibid., 9), blurs the boundaries associated with scale of transmission and consumption, a sense of which is needed for enfranchisement to occur. For its part, Telemundo has innovated by directly influencing the content of ELTV: the inauguration of a television station (Channel 20) in San Diego in July 2017 launched regular transborder news reporting for the first time, supplementing the timeworn “proximate” accessibility of broadcast signals in the TJ-SD metropolitan area with reporters actually stationed on both sides of the U.S.-Mexican border, ensuring by design the daily flow of news and information throughout the area.9 Owing to their common ownership by NBC Universal/Comcast, Telemundo and NBC have been able to share a newsroom there where EL staff lean on the SL team for news especially concerning Tijuana and immigration patterns and policy (Calderón Michel 2021). Hopefully, more Telemundo stations will be able to initiate such collaborations. When viewed in comparative perspective, Detroit and Madrid are the cities where there is the most room for the growth of SLTV and Latinx-­ oriented media. Even without corporate investment on the part of SLTV enterprises, the situation could be improved if the offerings of public television, in both Detroit and Madrid, were diversified. Advocacy needs to be done on behalf of the Latinx and Latinoamerican communities (respectively) so that it is clear that they are meaningful stakeholders in public media. Spaces for bilingual productions also need to be created in both cities. Public television addressing a Latinx audience, beyond the broadcast of the annual Voces series produced through Latino Public Broadcasting, is also lacking in Los Angeles and Miami, where the presence of SLTV and the production of barrio TV are more robust. However, spaces for local

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public discourse and multilingualism could also be cultivated through healthy competition both among privately owned networks and public broadcasting in those cities. Where national, as contrasted with local reporting is involved, the challenge of addressing an increasingly socioculturally complex, mobile, and unevenly distributed audience places new pressures on SLTV business strategy and audiovisual discourse at the network level. It is my hope that, in addressing these pressures, a space can be retained for the placemaking that has been associated with local SLTV—as the cases of KMEX34, WUDT, and Telemundo Channel 20 so eloquently illustrate—and for programming that has a culturally and linguistically hybrid rather than uniform character.

Notes 1. “Lo que hacemos en las noticias en español no es simplesmente reportar todos los días, va más allá, es un labor social.” 2. The threat of an encounter with ICE increased in 2020 with the deployment of special tactical units, usually associated with anti-smuggling operations, to sanctuary cities, including Detroit and Los Angeles (Dickerson and Kanno-Youngs 2020). 3. “Necesitamos que esas personas siguen reportando crimenes, que sean parte productivo de Estados Unidos.” 4. As of late September 2018, according to the Department of Homeland Security, around 800,000 applications were awaiting consideration. Moreover, a new rule was announced that would disqualify legal residents from obtaining citizenship if they had been recipients of public services. 5. A good example of this risk-taking is the hotel workers’ protests and petition to city council for added protection from harassment and overwork, organized by the Long Beach Coalition for Good Jobs and a Healthy Community between 2016 and 2018, https://laane.org/blog/campaigns/ hospitality-­tourism/. 6. The role of media coverage in these marches and the ongoing immigrant rights movement has been documented and analyzed in Costanza-­ Chock (2014). 7. According to Avilés-Santiago and Báez (2019, 132), the term “billennial” was coined in 2015 by Univisión. I am grateful to Kathryn Frank for this reference. 8. As Gripsrud points out, even though these online forums may appear to be powered by viewers, they still “tend to be run or ‘infiltrated’ by production companies and networks” (Ibid., 21).

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9. The station has two staff reporters stationed on the Tijuana side of the border, and the signal carries as far as Ensenada, Baja California; Calderón Michel (2017).

Works Cited Al Punto California. 2021. Univisión Network. Hosted by Gabriela Teissier, Produced by León Krauze. Los Angeles, CA, January 10. Alderman, Julie. 2017. “After Trump Rescinded DACA, Recipients Made Up Less Than 10 Percent of Cable News Guests.” Media Matters for America. Posted 6 September 1:18 p.m. PDT https://www.mediamatters.org/ blog/2017/09/06/after-­t rump-­r escinded-­d aca-­r ecipients-­m ade-­l ess-­1 0-­ percent-­cable-­news-­guests/217856. Associated Press. 2021. Migrant Arrests at Courts Limited. Los Angeles Times, April 28. Avilés-Santiago, Manuel G., and Jillian M.  Báez. 2019. “‘Targeting Billenials:’ Billennials, Linguistic Flexibility, and the New Language Politics of Univision.” Communication, Culture, and Critique 12: 128–146. Becerra, Martin. 2015. De la Concentración a la Convergencia: Políticas de Medios en Argentina y América Latina. Buenos Aires: Paidós. Calderón Michel, Pedro. 2017. Conversation with Author. San Diego, CA, July 19. ———. 2021. NBC-Telemundo. Telephone Conversation with Author. July 19. Chávez, Christopher A. 2014. “Linguistic Capital and the Currency of Spanish in Hispanic Advertising Production.”  Journal of Communication Inquiry 38/1: 25–43. Costanza-Chock, Sasha. 2014. Out of the Shadows, Into the Streets! Transmedia Organizing and the Immigrant Rights Movement. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Dickerson, Caitlin, and Zolan Kanno-Youngs. 2020. Border Patrol Will Deploy Elite Tactical Agents to Sanctuary Cities. New York Times, February 14. Frank, Kathryn M. 2022. “Lucha Libre Hybridity as Millennial/‘Billennial’ Programming Strategy and the Legacy of Lucha Underground.” Paper Presented at Panel “Another Latinx Boom? Paradoxes and New Paradigms of Latinx Screen Visibility,” Society for Cinema and Media Studies Conference, April 2. Fruits of Labor. 2021. Directed by Emily Cohen-Ibañez. Produced by Tracy Rector, Aurora Guerrero, and Richard Ray Pérez. Gripsrud, Jostein. 2010. “Television in the Digital Public Sphere.” In Relocating Television: Television in the Digital Context, ed. Jostein Gripsrud, 3–26. Oxon/ New York: Routledge. Jiménez Moreta, Cristina. 2021. “The Immigrant Youth Movement.” In Immigration Matters: Movements, Visions, and Strategies for a Progressive

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Future, ed. Ruth Milkman, Deepak Bhargava, and Penny Lewis, 107–120. New York: The New Press. Kayitsinga, Jean. 2022. “Latino Population Growth: Community Racial-Ethnic Makeup and Socioeconomic Well-Being in the Midwest.”  NEXO 25 (2, Spring): 6–15. Malavé, Idellis, and Esti Giordani. 2015. Latino Stats: American Hispanics by the Numbers. New York: The New Press. Medina, Jennifer. 2021. “Padilla Ready to Tackle Trump Trial, Pandemic and to Push the Envelope.” Orange County Register Tuesday, January 19, 1, 7. “Morning Edition.” 2021. Segment on President Biden’s speech to UnidosUS, National Public Radio, July 26. Moslimani, Mohamad. 2022. Around Four-in-Ten Latinos in U.S.  Worry That They or Someone Close to Them Could Be Deported. Pew Research Center, February 14. https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-­tank/2022/02/14/around-­ four-­in-­ten-­latinos-­in-­u-­s-­worry-­that-­they-­or-­someone-­close-­to-­them-­could-­ be-­deported/. Noe-Bustamante, Luis, Ana González-Barrera, Kadijah Edwards, Lauren Mora, and Mark Hugo Lopez. 2021. Majority of Latinos Say Skin Color Impacts Opportunity in America and Shapes Daily Life. Pew Research Center, November 4. https:// www.pewresearch.org/hispanic/2021/11/04/majority-­o f-­l atinos-­ say-­skin-­color-­impacts-­opportunity-­in-­america-­and-­shapes-­daily-­life/. Noticiero Univisión. 2017a. KMEX, Univisión Network. Enny Pichardo Reporting, July 2. ———. 2017b. KMEX, Univisión Network. Liliana Escalante Reporting, July 2. Padilla, A.M. 2006. “Bicultural Social Development.”  Hispanic Journal of Behavioral Sciences 28 (4): 467–497. Rojas, Viviana, and Juan Piñón. 2014. “Spanish, English or Spanglish? Media Strategies and Corporate Struggles to Reach Second and Later Generations of Latinos.” International Journal of Hispanic Media 7 (August): 1–15. Southern Povery Law Center. 2018. Active Hate Groups. Interactive Map. www. splcenter.org/hatemap.



Appendix: Chronology

2022 April The Biden administration announces its decision to rescind Title 42, the rule whereby immigrants (including those with asylum cases) were not allowed into the United States owing to the alleged need to protect U.S. residents from the spread of the coronavirus. This was to take effect on 23 May, but Title 42 remained in place due to a court order until 15 November, when a federal judge ruled it invalid. March Univisión announces that Prende TV will become accessible on Vix. 31 January Univisión merges with Televisa to form a new company. 13 January Telemundo launches T-Plus, a new content brand aimed at Anglophone Latinxs. 2021 31 December Univisión discontinues the EL network Fusion. 30 September Noticias Univision launches a podcast for the evening Noticiero, based on the televised newscast. 16 July A Federal judge in Texas rules that the DACA program is illegal after nine states (including Texas) sued, preventing new enrollments until Congress takes action (Galván 2021). 13 April Univisión and Televisa announce plans to merge before the end of the calendar year; management will remain with Univisión (James 2021b). © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 C. L. Benamou, Transnational Television and Latinx Diasporic Audiences, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-11527-1

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March Univisión launches a free streaming platform, Prende TV, with more than 40 entertainment channels in Spanish (James 2021a).

2020 Globo Television launches its streaming service, Globo Play, in the United States (Nascimento 2022). 14 February The Trump administration announces that BORTAC elements of Border Patrol units are to be deployed in Sanctuary Cities across the United States (New York Times 2020). 10 February Courts have reversed a decision by the Trump administration and Homeland Security to prohibit the use of a free hotline for detainees in DHS facilities. DHS/ICE was sued by the nonprofit organization in December in response to the removal of the hotline, which allowed detainees to contact their attorneys and families (All Things Considered 2020b). February Wade Davis and Searchlight Capital Group announce plans to acquire the majority share in Univisión from a private equity group (Fadul and Leree 1995). 18 January A Central American migrant caravan of around 2000 people is stopped at Guatemala-Mexico border by national guard (Noticiero Telemundo; All Things Considered 2020). 17 January 17 congressional democrats visit the refugee camp in Matamoros of asylum seekers and are appalled at the conditions they find there. Interviews with Barragán and others, as well as representative from mayor’s office and resident in the city. Food is distributed to shelter (Noticiero Univisión). 15 January Plans are announced to expand Adelanto detention facility in California, despite accusations of neglect through poor healthcare provision and excessive use of solitary confinement. Trump administration announces plans to send asylum seekers to Guatemala (regardless of whether or not they are Guatemalan) (All Things Considered 2020a). Discussion of gender discrimination in democratic party turns to Angela Rye, head of black congressional caucus, questions why more attention isn’t paid to the fact that Julián Castro, Cory Booker, and Kamala Harris have all withdrawn from presidential race. How are democratic candidates going to rally support from a broad constituency? (Chris Cuomo show, CNN).

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2 January Julián Castro announces his withdrawal from the presidential race (Via email and twitter account of Julián Castro).

2019 31 December New York State is one of the several states to issue driver’s licenses to undocumented residents, with restriction of information sharing with DHS (James 2021a). August Brazilian government complies with request from United States to facilitate the deportation of unauthorized Brazilians living in the United States by permitting airlines to board Brazilians even if their passports have expired (Atestado Compulsorio: Brasil atende EUA e autoriza deportação à força de brasileiros ilegais 2019). 16 July The Trump administration announces that it will deny asylum to a majority of migrants crossing the U.S.-Mexico border (O’Toole 2019). 15 July The Saban Group announces its plans to sell Univisión amidst internal organizational troubles and increasing competition from rival Telemundo (James 2019). 13 July Thousands in cities across the United States protest the detention of children and families in inhumane conditions by Homeland Security, calling for the closure of detention facilities (Cavano et al. 2019). 4 June The U.S. House of Representatives votes 237–187 to pass the American Dream and Promise Act of 2019, which would give a pathway to citizenship to over 2 million unauthorized immigrants, including Dreamers (Sonmez 2019). 26 May It is discovered that a sixth child died in the custody of the DHS (James 2019). 2 May A third child has died in Department of Homeland Security Custody (Noticiero Univisión). 6 April Federal officials say it could take up to two years to identify thousands of children separated from their families at the U.S.-Mexico border (Jacobs 2019). April A Northern California judge blocks the Trump administration’s “remain in Mexico” for asylum seekers at the U.S.-Mexico border (Shear et al. 2019). With the recess of the Spanish parliament, the “Proposición de Ley para Descendientes de Españoles Nacidos en el Extranjero” is no longer eligible for a vote. Instead, there is a Ley Memoria Histórica that allows descendants of Spaniards residing abroad, including Cubans, to apply for Spanish nationality (Medina 2019). January The Trump administration begins to implement the Migrant Protection Policy (“Remain in Mexico”) program in Southern California,

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This policy requires asylum seekers to stay in Mexico, while their petitions for asylum are being considered (O’Toole 2021).

2018 29 October Announcement that Trump administration has sent 5200 additional troops to the U.S.-Mexico border. July Federal Judge orders DHS to reunite all children with their parents by 26 July. However as of 6 August, 712 children still had not been reunited with their parents, and over 400 parents had been deported without being reunited with their children. 24 April Washington, D.C. judge rules that DACA recipients still have 90 days to renew status and apply for DACA, against decision by government to cancel DACA.

2017 25th anniversary of telephone texting. 22 November FCC announces plans to end net neutrality (meeting is scheduled for 14 December). July NBC-Telemundo open a station in east San Diego with a signal that reaches into Baja California, and joint English-Spanish language preparation of news coverage. 2015 8 September Live broadcast of Univisión’s Despierta América with Don Francisco at the inauguration of the Avenida Don Francisco at 168th Street and Broadway in New York City. 20 August Telemundo announces that it is bestowing the Premio Tu Mundo on Don Francisco (Mario Kreutzberger), and that the last show of Sábado Gigante will be on Univisión on 19 September. This is the longest running show on Spanish-language television. 23 July Border patrol agents cancel a trip to meet with DJT at the border after consulting with their national union. Trump calls out a Telemundo reporter after the latter asks a question about his remarks regarding Mexicans immigrants. 29 June NBC terminates its business relationship with Donald Trump following negative remarks he made about Mexican immigrants during his presidential campaign. The Miss U.S.A. and Miss Universe pageants will

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not be broadcast as planned. Trump responds that he is considering suing both the network and Univision (Associated Press 2015). 25 June In a historic series of broadcasts, León Krauze on KMEX34 6 p.m. news announces that commercial relations with the Miss Universe enterprise have been broken following Donald J. Trump’s offensive commentaries regarding Mexican immigrants. On the 6:30 p.m. broadcast of Noticiero Univisión, Maria Elena Salinas announces the termination of the contract with Donald J. Trump and the cancellation of the broadcast of the Miss U.S.A. pageant on 12 July. 20 June “Violación de un Sueño” (“Rape on the Night Shift”) a news special on sexual harassment and assault of women custodians in office building maintenance, airs on Univisión at 7 p.m., part of a joint investigation between Univisión, ABC’s Frontline, and the Center for Investigative Journalism at UC Berkeley. 7 April 71 cities join Los Angeles and New York in sending supportive documentation to federal court re: Executive Actions on immigration reform. 31 March “20 Años Sin Selena,” live broadcast from Corpus Christi on Univisión’s Despierta America. 1 March In place of the regular news at 6  p.m. KMEX 34 holds a “Foro Sobre Acción Ejecutiva” accepting call-ins to panel. Reports are made of businesses being seized from someone who qualifies for DAPA.

2014 KMEX-34 (Univisión) is awarded an Emmy for best 6 p.m. News Show for Los Angeles metropolitan area. 20 November An executive action to expand DACA and introduce DAPA (Deferred Action for Parents) is announced by the Obama administration. September Chile, Colombia, Mexico, and Peru form the Alianza del Pacífico to strengthen commercial ties (Torrens 2014). April The Podemos left-wing party is founded in Spain, building on the anti-austerity movement that emerged in 2011 (Tremlett 2015).

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2013 June The U.S.  Senate passes a comprehensive immigration reform bill, S.744, the Border Security, Economic Opportunity, and Immigration Modernization Act on a bipartisan vote, 68-32, but it languishes for a year, failing to pass the House.

2012 American Jobs Act is signed, extending unemployment insurance, pathways to work for those in low-income families, inaugurating a school construction initiative focusing on large urban school districts, and cutting taxes to benefit 250,000 Hispanic-owned small businesses (Obama for America 2012). October Univisión and ABC announce that they will base a new English-language cable network in Miami DMA, oriented toward Latinx market; this will take shape as Fusion, which is available through a website, rather than cable (Hanks 2012). August Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program is launched, giving those aged 16-31 who arrived in the United States as children protection from deportation and authorization to work and study in the United States. Fox network (in partnership with Colombia’s RCN) launches Spanish-­ language MundoFox in Los Angeles (Hanks 2012). Under the leadership of Silvio González, Planeta’s Antena 3 merges with La Sexta to form Atresmedia Group, which develops and transmits TV dramas, news, films, and light entertainment to a national Spanish audience (Carmona 2009). Univisión becomes the first Spanish-language media provider to be carried by Hulu.

2011 Surveys conducted by Pew Project for Excellence in Journalism reveal that more people in the United States obtain their news from online, as compared to print media sources, especially those in the 18- to 29-year-old age group, who are twice as much likely to do so. Television prevails as a news source over both online and print media (O’Dell 2011).

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15 May Thousands take to the streets in Madrid to protest austerity measures, and the occupation of Puerta del Sol by grassroots organizations, collectively known as the 15-M movement and including immigrants-­ rights groups, begins.

2010 14 December Nielsen discontinues radio ratings. July Brazilian President Luis Inácio (Lula) da Silva announces plans to launch a state-run television station that will broadcast to African countries (Arenas 2011). 2009 Spain’s Grupo Prisa invests in the V-Me SLTV network in the United States (Albornoz et al. 2020). June–July TV Globo Internacional becomes available to New  York viewers through Time-Warner Cable (TV Globo Internacional Now Available for Time Warner Cable Customers in NYC 2009).

2007 Spanish-language newspapers in the United States, such as Al Día consider the possibility of publishing online content, including podcasts (The Next Level: Hispanic Newspaper Websites Establish Themselves Online 2007). Ad spending on social networking sites exceeds $700  million and is expected to reach over $2  billion in 2010; however, less than 2% of U.S. social network advertising is spent on the Hispanic market. 29 March Broadcast Media Partners acquires Univisión Communications, Inc. 2006 An agreement is signed between the Government of Spain and the International Organization for Migration (OIM), delineating the objectives of their collaboration and expansion of joint programs and activities. 27 June The Univisión board of directors agrees to sell Univision Communications to a consortium of investors for 12.3  billion dollars (Associated Press 2006). 1 May Around 2 million people take to the streets across the United States to march for immigration reform (Valle and Torres 2012).

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February TV Globo Internacional launches a public services program “Cidadão Global” (Global Citizen) that provides information about services available through Brazilian Consulates to Brazilians residing abroad.

2006 4 June. House of Representatives passes the American Dream and Promise Act, which would grant a pathway to citizenship for Dreamers and other unauthorized immigrants (Sonmez 2019).

2005 One in seven U.S. inhabitants is of Hispanic origin, according to the U.S. Office of the Census, and Latinxs accounted for most of the population growth (Jelinek 2005), growing three times as fast as the remainder of the population, especially at the younger end of the spectrum (Rahimi 2005). July Anthony Villaraigosa becomes the first Latinx Mayor of Los Angeles, California. April Discovery Communications launches two Spanish-language cable channels, Viajar y Vivir and Discovery Kids en Español (Discovery Lanza dos Canales en Español en Estados Unidos 2005). March CNN en Español launches a series on Colombian cinema on its program Ojo Crítico (Programa de CNN se Centrará en Cine Colombiano 2005) Telemundo premieres a telenovela, La Ley Silencio, set and recorded in Dallas, Texas (Telemundo Estrenó La Ley Silencio 2005). 2004 Hispanic voters represent 8 percent of all voters in the presidential election, with 3  million more voting than in the 2000 presidential election (Ramos 2004). Mexico takes second place as the recipient of remittances from migrants abroad (Amador 2005), with the doubling of total remittances during the Vicente Fox sexenio to $16  billion 613  million dollars during 2004 (Soto 2005). Globo Television launches transmission of its programming to the United States via two operators, Comcast and Atlantic (Nascimento 2022).

2003 September TV Globo Internacional begins promoting and covering Brazilian Day festivities in New York City (TV Globo Internacional Now Available for Time Warner Cable Customers in NYC 2009).

  APPENDIX: CHRONOLOGY 

255

2000 Azteca América network is launched (Wilkinson 2016). 40% of the U.S. Hispanic population is foreign-born (Wilkinson 2016). Commercial Internet becomes available in Brazil. It becomes possible to access the Internet over mobile phones (Thussu 2010). A new Ley de Extranjería (Immigration Law) or LO 4/2000 is inaugurated in Spain, which focuses more than the previous law (LO 7/1985) on giving immigrants certain rights, beyond controlling the influx of immigrants (Benot 2002).

1997 CBS acquires controlling interest in Telemundo’s Miami-based channel Telenoticias (Rodríguez 1999). Nicaraguan Adjustment and Central American Relief Act (NACARA) is passed (García). European Union revises its “Television without Frontiers” directive, which is later amended in 2007 (Thussu 2010).

1996 The “Illegal Immigration and Immigrant Responsibility Act” is signed into law under the Clinton Administration. It led to a significant increase in deportation of both unauthorized and permanent resident immigrants and to restricted access to asylum for Central American migrants (Lind 2016; García). A new Telecommunications Act expands the percentage allowable in corporate ownership of media in individual markets.

1995 PanAMSat launches third satellite, PAS-4, becoming the first private company to provide global satellite services (Thussu 2010).

1994 1 October Operation Gatekeeper is launched, as announced by Attorney General Janet Reno, under the Clinton Administration. It involved the building of fences, installation of sensors, and increase in border patrol

256 

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personnel near the Tijuana-San Diego border, diverting border crossing to the Arizona desert (Operation Gatekeeper). A thirteen-part series, Mujeres de América Latina, produced by Carmen Sarmiento is telecast on Spain’s TVE national network. Each episode focuses on a different country. This comes on the heels of intensive cultural exchanges occurring during the quincentennial year of the Spanish conquest of America (Carmona 2009). 1993 GEMS Television is launched and is primarily targeted to a Latina audience; in 2001, it was purchased by NBC Universal and rebranded as Mun2, a bilingual sister network to Telemundo, then rebranded in 2015 as NBCUniverso and again in 2017 as simply Universo (Universo (TV channel)). 70% of HBO’s programming is dubbed into Spanish for distribution through HBO in Spanish (Amyot 1995). 1992 Univisión and Telemundo pay $20  million to A.C.  Nielsen Company to develop a new methodology for gathering more accurate information about Latinx media consumption, which leads to the introduction of the National Hispanic Television Index (Kristin 2011). Televisa purchases the majority share of stock in the Peruvian Radiobroadcasting Company (Fadul and Leree 1995). Televisa purchases half the shares of Pan-American Satellite, Inc. (Pan Am Sat) (Fadul and Leree 1995). Spain launches Hispasat (Thussu 2010).

1991 Univisión moves its headquarters from Los Angeles to Miami (Wilkinson 2016). Televisa purchases 49% of the stock of Megavisión network (Chile) (Fadul and Leree 1995). The Mexican conglomerate Televisa is offered for sale on the Mexican stock exchange.

1988 Televisa launches Galavisión network to begin transmitting directly to Europe, especially to Spain (Fadul and Leree 1995).

  APPENDIX: CHRONOLOGY 

257

1987 January Telemundo begins its first national broadcast, with stations owned in Miami, Los Angeles, New York, and San Juan, Puerto Rico, and transmission to other stations in Chicago, Hartford, and Texas (Veciana-­ Suarez 1987). August Hallmark and First Chicago acquire SICC stations, renamed Univisión (Wilkinson 2016).

1986 The National Hispanic Media Coalition is founded. KVEA—Channel 52 station in Los Angeles joins the Telemundo network. At that time, its programming included U.S. and foreign movies, a musical program, a cooking show, and sports in addition to telenovelas  and it captured 37% of the Hispanophone audience (Veciana-­ Suarez 1987). The Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA) is passed by Congress, providing amnesty to some unauthorized immigrants, but leading to increased detentions and enforcement in workplaces and fines imposed on employers of unauthorized immigrants.

1985 Televisa’s programming is transmitted to 348 stations in the United States (Fadul and Leree 1995). Brazil’s Globo television network becomes one of the four largest networks worldwide, behind the three major U.S. networks, ABC, CBS, and NBC (dos Santos 2009). Brazil launches Brazilsat (Thussu 2010).

1980 SIN has 100 affiliated stations (Wilkinson 2016).

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1976 July Spanish International Network (SIN) launches live satellite transmission of programming from Mexico to Spanish-language stations in the United States (Wilkinson 2016).

1968 Release of the U.S. government mandated Kerner Commission Report which found diversity to be lacking in mass media, and that  a role was played by these media in urban riots in 1967. August WXTV, a Spanish-language station built by the Spanish International Television Corporation begins broadcasting to greater New York City (Wilkinson 2016).

1967 SIN begins distributing TV programming in color (Wilkinson 2016).

1966 WJNU-Channel 47 in New Jersey begins broadcasting Spanish-language programming. Twenty years later, 80% of its programming was in Spanish, the other 20% was leased out to Japanese, Greek, and other foreign-­ language broadcasters (Veciana-Suarez 1987).

1965 Globo network is founded in Brazil, coinciding with the spread of military rule.

1961 Mexican media magnate Emilio Azcárraga Vidaurreta creates the Spanish International Network (SIN), which will begin distributing Mexican television programming to the United States. Spanish International Network investors purchase San Antonio’s KCOR-TV, the first fulltime Spanish-language television station (Wilkinson 2016).

  Appendix: Chronology 

259

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Index1

NUMBERS AND SYMBOLS 100 Latinos Dijeron, 48 ¡100 Mexicanos Dijeron!, 48 A ABC, 5, 57, 136 ABC 7 (Los Angeles), 162 Achahua, Franklin, 143 Aguilar, Antonio, 128 Aguilera Valadez, Alberto, see Gabriel, Juan (Juanga) Ahumada Barajas, Rafael, 145n17 Al Día, 190 Al Filo de la Ley (On the Edge of the Law, Univisión, 2004), 125–127, 206, 207 Al Punto California, 238, 239 Alma awards, 201 Amaya, Hector, 132

American Dream and Promise Act (2021), 142 American Family (PBS, 2002), 158 American Society of Composers, Authors and Performers (ASCAP), 225 América TéVé, 57, 191 América (TV Globo, 2005), 202 Amigas y rivales (Friends and Rivals, Televisa 2001), 120, 209 Amor Real (Televisa, 2003, Univisión, 2005), 118–119 Anderson, Benedict, 189 Anthony, Marc, 55 Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act (AEDPA), 91n34, 146n25 Appadurai, Arjun, 10, 51, 75, 76 Aquí y Ahora (Univisión, 1998–), 31n3, 87, 127, 139–140, 146n27

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 C. L. Benamou, Transnational Television and Latinx Diasporic Audiences, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-11527-1

263

264 

INDEX

Aravena, Jorge, 125 Arbitron, 89n10 Argentina, 18, 33n19, 53, 71 Avancini, Walter, 93n47 Avellán, Jorge, 160 Avenida Brasil (Telemundo, 2015), 200 Avenida Brasil (TV Globo, 2012), 73 Ayotzinapa Rural Teachers’ College, student abduction and murder, 230 Azcárraga Vidaurreta, Emilio, 46 Azteca América, 49, 55–57, 63 B Bajo el Mismo Cielo (Beneath the Same Sky, Telemundo, 2015), 123–124, 127, 153 Bajo la Misma Luna (Riggen, 2010), 47, 144n1 Baltar, Mariana, 138 Bar, François, 33n20 Barragán, Nanette, 178 Barrio TV enfranchisement, 179 examples of, 160, 162, 175 forum of choice, 62 global identity, aid in creation, 169 news programming, 157 public television, effect on, 243 Becerra, Martín, 239 Beltrán, Mary, 190 Benítez, Cristina, 105 Beserra, Bernadete, 199, 200, 202 Bestia, La, 140, 141, 178, 226 Biden, Joseph, 86, 143 Bielby, Denise, 52 Big Brother, 18, 52 Bilbao, Francisco, 189 Bilingual music industry, 55–56 Billboard Latin Hall of Fame, 225

Botero, Claudia, 142 Bouamama, Saïd, 151 Bourdieu, Pierre, 15 Bracero Program (1942–1964), 132, 226 Bramble, Rosa, 143 Brazil Americanization, 199 cultural globalization, 24 culture of reference for PLTV, 65 emigration, 22, 49, 55, 202 GloboSat, 202 media exportation, 52 national programming, 66 Rede Manchete, 66, 93n47 satellite transmission of media, 24 SBT, 53 talent recruitment, 64 telenovelas, plot themes, 115 transnational programming, 20 TV Record, 57, 65, 71, 73, 84, 210 See also Brazilian diaspora; TV Globo Brazilian diaspora demographics, international, 203 demographics, Miami, 200 Greater Brazil, 202 immigration, US, 199 media access, lag in, 202 media consumption, Los Angeles, 199 satellite programming, 203 self-identification, 188 SLTV consumption, 202 streaming radio, 203–204 telenovelas, Brazilian, 200, 202–203 Brazilian Hour (KXLU-LA), 203, 204 Broadcasting and Cable, 31n3 Broadcasting Media Partners, Inc., 56 Brooks, Peter, 138 Brunner, José Joaquín, 51, 111

 INDEX 

C Cable Act (1984), 49 Cabrera, Ana, 31n3 Cadena de las Américas, 58 Café con Aroma de Mujer (Coffee with the Scent of a Woman, RCN 1994, Telemundo 1995), 12, 120 Calderón, Ilia, 87, 146n27 Caldwell, John, 153 Canal+, 24, 57, 65, 208 Caracol TV, 57, 65, 71, 209 Cartoon Network, 4 Casa Libre/Freedom House (Oregel, 2008), 144n1 Castañeda, Mari, 58 Castells, Manuel, 8, 62 Castillo, Eric del, 120 Castillo, Kate del, 3 Castro, Joaquín, 32n12 Catalán, Carlos, 51, 111 CBS news, 2 Central, El (Detroit), 172 Centros de Participación e Integración de Inmigrantes (CEPI), 204 Chagoyán, Rosa Gloria, 127, 129–131 Chavez, Leo, 49, 107, 132 Children in No Man’s Land (Prado, 2009), 144n1 Chile, 51, 53 Citizen-subjectivity, 45, 46 Clarín, 55 Clasificado, El (Los Angeles), 172 Clifford, James, 14, 21 Clon, El (Telemundo-Globo, 2010), 19, 65, 209 Clone, O (TV Globo, 2002), 19, 200 CNN en Español, 2, 31n3 Cobos, Francisco, 143 Coco (Disney, 2017), 2 Collins, María Antonieta, 235 Colombia, 11, 12, 25, 49, 53, 57, 66, 68, 69, 80n22, 89n13, 91n33,

265

91n36, 95n65, 115, 169, 209, 211n5, 213n21, 251, 252 Caracol TV, 57, 65, 71, 209 immigration from, 51 media themes, 25 national programming, 66 RCN, 91n33 state function, anticipation of, 69 talent recruitment, 64 telenovelas, plot themes, 115 Comcast/NBC Universal, 159 Communications networks, 8, 11, 12 CONACITE 2, 128 “Connected Cities and Inclusive Growth” (Galperin and Bar), 33n20, 167 Contacto Chicano (Curiel, 1981), 129–130 Co-productions economic downturns, response to, 53 transnational, 19, 24, 58, 60, 64 US networks, 52, 211 Cops, 52 Corazón Tropical, 207 Correa, Lou, 178 Cortes, José, 88n6 Costanza-Chock, Sasha, 237 Couldry, Nick, 152 Coutin, Susan B., 23, 87, 92n41 Cruz, Celia, 224 Cuba, 25, 33n19 Cubavisión, 57 Cunningham, Stuart, 11, 84 Curiel, Federico, 129 CW, 2 Cypriano, Tânia, 33n18, 50, 199 D DACA, see Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals

266 

INDEX

Dávila, Arlene, 50, 190 Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) enfranchisement, 175 immigration reform, 69, 177 informal citizenship, 236 media coverage, SLTV, 177, 237, 238 Obama, Barack, 135, 136 Trump administration, 133, 137 Decisiones (Telemundo, 2005–2008), 113 Délano, Alexandra, 135 De Nadie (Dirdamal, 2005), 144n1, 226 Designated market area (DMA), 3, 55, 80 Despierta América (Univisión), 15, 87, 136 Después del Terremoto (After the Earthquake, Portillo and Serrano, 1979), 43, 88n3 Destilando Amor (Distilling Love, Televisa 2007), 120–121 Detroit audience composition and identification, 82 barrio TV, 160 billboards, 158, 159 Central, El, 172 class/ethnic divisions, 154–155 crossborder communications, 8 Detroit 1-8-7 (ABC 2010), 158 Detroit Free Press, 161 Diario de las Américas, El (Miami), 32n17, 191 digital technology, access to, 166, 168, 169 economic challenges, 153 enfranchisement, 175 Hung (HBO, 2009–2011), 154, 158 immigration reform movements, 155

inter-ethnic interaction, 13 language preference, 171 Latino Press, 161, 172 Latinx community recognition, ELTV, 79 Latinx demographics, 153 leisure activities, 172 local SL coverage, improving, 166 mediascapes, 153–155, 158, 160–161, 163–169, 172, 177, 179 multilingual mediascapes, 4 multilingual viewing, 165 occupations, 172 over-the-air media consumption, 63–64 place-making, 156–157, 161 primary border crossing, US-Canada, 155 print media, 158 public televison, 243 racial capitalism, 154–155 rebordering, 155–156 SL media access, 13, 78–79, 159, 160, 243–244 SL media scarcity, negative effects, 161–162 SL programming, discussion of, 165 transborder programming, 54 urban geography, 10 urban growth, 153–155 urban mediatization, 158 US immigration policy, reaction to, 133 viewer agency and advocacy, 177 Voz Latina, La, 172 WUDT, 24, 160–161, 163 Detroit 1-8-7 (ABC 2010), 158 Detroit Free Press, 161 Diario de las Américas, El (Miami), 32n17, 191 Diario-La Prensa, El (New York), 32n17

 INDEX 

Diegues, Carlos, 93n47 Dirdamal, Tin, 144n1 DiSipio, Louis, 81 Disney, 2, 52 DMA, see Designated market area Don Francisco, 71, 144n2 Durán, Javier, 127 E East L.A. Interchange (Kalin, 2015), 153, 154 Ecuador, 57 Ecuavisa Internacional (Ecuador), 57 Edwards, Ralph, 107 El Salvador, 25, 49, 92n41 Emmy Awards, 2 Encanto (Disney, 2021), 2 "Encoding-decoding" model, 17, 79, 86 Espaillat, Adriano, 236 Espaldas Mojadas (Wetbacks 1955), 122 ESPN Deportes, 2, 55, 57 Estefan, Gloria, 55 Estrella TV, 57, 159–160 Ethnoscapes, 10, 11, 13, 17 European study market, see Madrid F Facebook, 211 FaceTime, 9 Family Feud, 48 FCC, see Federal Communications Commission Fea Más Bella, La (Televisa, 2006), 120 Federal Communications Commission (FCC), 13, 33n24, 55, 57, 60, 72, 93n45, 94n58 Felicio dos Santos, João, 93n47 Fernández Gómez, Vicente, 229

267

Films and documentaries allegorical representations, 128 Bajo la Misma Luna (Riggen, 2010), 47, 144n1 Casa Libre/Freedom House (Oregel, 2008), 144n1 Children in No Man’s Land (Prado, 2009), 144n1 churros, 110, 131, 144 cine fronterizo (borderlands cinema), 127–131 cine fronterizo, decline of, 131 Contacto Chicano (Curiel, 1979), 129–130 De Nadie (Dirdamal, 2005), 144n1, 226 Después del Terremoto (After the Earthquake, Portillo and Serrano, 1979), 43, 88n3 East L.A. Interchange (Kalin, 2015), 153, 154 Espaldas Mojadas (Wetbacks 1955), 122 female body, contrasting uses of, 131 Foxy Brown (Hill, 1974), 130 Grandma Has a Movie Camera (Cypriano, 2006), 33n18, 50 Harvest of Loneliness (González, Price and Salinas, 2010), 146n22 Ilegal, Lal (The Illegal One, Ripstein, 1979), 127–129 Infiltrados, Los (The Infiltrators, Ibarra and Rivera, 2019), 117, 144n1 Lola la Trailera trilogy (Fernández, 1985–1991), 129 Maid in America (Prado, 2005), 47 Ni de Aquí, Ni de Allá (Neither Here nor There, Valesco, 1988), 130 Norte, El (Nava, 1984), 130

268 

INDEX

Films and documentaries (cont.) Ofrenda, La/Days of the Dead (Portillo and Muñoz, 1989), 228 patriarchal state, 129 “Rape on the Night Shift” (Reveal, 2015), 140 Sin Nombre (Without a Name, Fukunaga, 2009), 141, 144n1, 226 Stateless, 64 Triunfadores, Los (The Golden Coyotes, Durán, 1978), 127, 128 Flores, Delmer, 141 Format adaptations, 52, 53, 58, 63, 68 Fox, Geoffrey, 189 Fox International Channel, 91n33 Fox News Latino, 70 Foxy Brown (Hill, 1974), 130 France, 16 Fukunaga, Cary, 141, 144n1 Fusion, 57, 70, 241 Futuro Media Group, 93n44 G Gabriel, Juan (Juanga) American Society of Composers, Authors and Performers (ASCAP), 225 bifurcation of mourning, 228–229 Billboard Latin Hall of Fame, 225 burial place, on-air competition for, 222 cultures of mourning, 228 death of, 220 divx among divas, 223–224 fans gathering at home, 220, 221 Latin Grammies, 225 LGBTQ+ transborder network, 227–229

migrant melancholia, 226–227 news coverage, 222 public homage, 222–223 public persona, 225 radio tributes following death, 221 return to Mexico, 221 scandal, 222 SL broadcast locations, Mexico, 222 SL broadcast locations, US, 222 SLTV/SL music interconnection, 224–225 transborder frameworks, 225–226 Galavisión, 53, 159 Galindo, Alejandro, 122 Galperín, Hernán, 33n20, 167, 168 Garcetti, Eric, 178 Garcia, Andrés, 127 García Canclini, Néstor, 17, 45, 93n50 García, Jaime, 138 García, Robert, 178 Gentefied (Netflix, 2020–2022), 2, 153, 158 Global City, The (Sassen), 32n13 Global Media Commerce Group, 201 Global programming, 18, 19, 54 Globo Noticia Américas (TV Globo), 258 GloboSat, 202 GNT Portugal (GloboSat), 202 González, Gilbert G., 146n22 Gordon, Ron, 34n28 Government Accounting Office (GAO), 32n8 Grandma Has a Movie Camera (Cypriano, 2006), 33n18, 50, 199 Gray, Jonathan, 94n56 Grey’s Anatomy, 58 Grupo Cisneros, 47, 55 Grupo PRISA (Plural Entertainment), 55, 125, 209 Guatemala, 49, 58

 INDEX 

H Habermas, Jürgen, 21, 88 Haiti, 108, 143 Hall, Stuart, 17, 79, 86 Hamburger, Esther, 117 Harrington, C. Lee, 52 Harris, Kamala, 86, 87 Harvest of Loneliness (González, Price and Salinas, 2010), 146n22 Hatoum, Mona, 144n5 Havens, Timothy, 33n20, 59 HBO, 4 Hill, Jack, 130 Hinojosa, Maria, 91n34, 93n44 Hispanic Broadcasting Corporation (HBC), 56, 60 Hispanic Business, 33n26, 89n11 Hispanic population growth, 48, 54 Historical development, SLTV 1960's, 46 1970's, 46 1980's, 47–49, 53, 60 1990's, 47–48, 53, 55, 56, 58, 60 2000's, 54, 56 2010's, 57 content diversification, 55 corporate advertising, 55 EL media, influence on, 53 expansion of programming, 47 globalizaiton of programming, 48 import substitution, 52 mergers and acquisitions, opposition to, 56–57, 60 Mexico as programming portal, 53 net media importer, 50–51 secondary market, 48 streaming services, 24, 52, 59, 62 technological innovation, 58 transmission modes, effects of, 54 ¡Hola! (Los Angeles), 172 Honduras, 25, 49

269

Hospital Central (Telecinco, 2000–2012), 206 Hughes, Sallie, 190–192, 195, 196, 198 Hung (HBO, 2009–2011), 154 Huntley, Chet, 132 I Ibarra, Cristina, 144n1 Ibermedia, 58, 213 ICE, see US Immigration and Customs Enforcement Iglesias, Enrique, 55 Ilegal, Lal (The Illegal One, Ripstein, 1979), 129–130 Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act (IIRIRA), 57, 146n25 Imagen Awards, 2 Immigrant protections, local/national schism, 237–238 Immigration Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act (AEDPA), 91n34 Argentina, 33n19 border arrivals and apprehensions, 105–107 Brazil, 49 child separation, 106, 108, 176 Colombia, 49 criminalization of, 133 El Salvador, 49 ELTV depictions of, 132 France, 16 globalization and media consumption, 13 Guatemala, 49 Honduras, 49 Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act (IIRIRA), 57

270 

INDEX

Immigration (cont.) immigrant protections, local/ national schism, 237–238 Immigration Reform and Control Act (1986), 49 informal citizenship, 23, 62, 69, 87, 172–175 “Inmigración a Su Lado” (“Immigration on Your Side”), 15, 162 Interethnic awareness, 13–14 Ley de Extranjería (immigration Law, Spain), 24 mediascapes, 134 Mexico, 33n19 Migrant Protection Protocols, 106 mixed-status households, 109, 155 Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA), 91n34 social labor, 236 Spain, 19 tragedy as spectacle, 107 Trump administration, 15, 24, 87, 106, 133, 236–238 US border policy, mediation with, 132 vilification of, 133 See also Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA); Immigration policy; Migration Immigration and Nationalization Service (INS), 110 Immigration policy anti-immigrant rhetoric, 132 Brazil, immigration from, 199 immigrant response to, 11, 34n31, 197 migration and media, 111 mixed status households, 109 Spain, Latin American immigration to, 57

Immigration Reform and Control Act (1986), 49 Import substitution, 52, 64 India Maria, see Velasco, Maria Elena Infiltrados, Los (The Infiltrators, Ibarra and Rivera, 2019), 117, 144n1 Informal citizenship, 23, 62, 69, 87, 172–175 “Inmigración a Su Lado” (“Immigration on Your Side”), 15, 162 Investigative Reporting Program (UC Berkeley), 140 Isar, Yudhishthir Raj, 151 J Jane, the Virgin (CW, 2014–2017), 2 Japan, 52 Johnson, Lyndon B., 46 K Kaine, Tim, 32n12 KHWY (Los Angeles), 221 KLOVE 107.5 (Los Angeles), 160 KMEX (Los Angeles) barrio TV, 162 Covid19, coverage of, 238, 239 DACA, 177 digital access, 242 Dreamers' Act, 142 Gabriel, Juan (Juanga), death and burial coverage, 221, 222 ideology, editorial, 177 origins of, 46, 159 videotape from Mexico, 46 Krauze, León, 162 Kreutzberger, Mario (Don Francisco), 71, 144n2 KSTS (San José), 47 KTVU (San Francisco), 46, 88n7

 INDEX 

KVEA (Los Angeles), 47, 159, 162, 221 KWEX (San Antonio), 46 KWHY (Los Angeles), 159–160 KXLA (Los Angeles), 160, 240 KXLU-LA 88.9 (Los Angeles), 203 L Lafaye, Jacques, 231n2 Lagôa, Jacques, 93n47 Laguna, Albert Sergio, 195, 213 Langer, John, 35n38 Latin Audiovisual Space, 54, 90n24 Latin Grammies, 225 Latinidad Brazilian diaspora, 199–200 challenges to identification, 187–188 Detroit, 158 gender bias, 190 Hispanic, 188–190 Mexican nationalism, 122 millennials and Gen Z, 190, 193 self-identification, 82, 188 Latino Press (Detroit), 161, 172 Latino Public Broadcasting, 64, 243 Latino U.S.A. (Futuro Media Group), 93n44 Latinx diaspora Afro-diasporic cultures, crossover, 68, 84 audience composition and identification, 80, 81, 169–171 bilingualism, 56 Brazil, 22, 65, 74 communications networks, 8 content creators, recognition as, 105 cultural forms, 21–22 demographic diversity, 153–154 denationalization, 61 EL media, marginalization in, 2

271

ELTV depictions of, 132, 134 ethnic and social differentiation, 22 family members, communication with, 198–199 globalization of programming, 48 loss and mourning, 220 marginalization and discrimination, 15 market definition, 64–65, 189 market positioning, SLTV, 68 market trends, 3 market value, 105 media platforms, 59 mediascapes, 10, 12–13, 17 mediated public sphere, 11, 152 migration and SLTV genres, 109 migration and transnational media, 106 multilingual viewing, 165–166 racial capitalism, 154–155 SLTV, community support, 4–5 SLTV, definition of role, 4 Spain, 209 systemic underrepresentation, 105 telenovelas, classic vs. real life, 124 transborder migrants, 9 transnational frameworks, 10, 12, 108 transnational programming, 19 US border policy, mediation with, 132 viewer interaction, 23 viewership, 4, 82 viewing practices, 79, 164, 169, 175 vilification of, 133 See also Immigration Latinx staffing, 328 LATV, 55–57, 159, 160, 240 Law and Order (NBC 1990–2010), 125 León, Kevin de, 235 León, Lourdes de, 139

272 

INDEX

Ley de Extranjería (immigration Law, Spain), 24 Liberty Media, 56 Liminal spaces, 45, 68, 71, 76, 158, 164, 228 Lola la Trailera trilogy (Fernández, 1985–1991), 129 Long Beach Media Collaborative, 33n20 López, Jennifer, 55 Los Angeles ABC 7, 162 American Family (PBS, 2002), 158 audience composition and identification, 80, 82, 169–171 Ayotzinapa Rural Teachers’ College, student abduction and murder, 230 barrio TV, 162, 243 barrio TV, effects on ELTV, 162 billboards, 158 Brazilian Hour (KXLU-LA), 203 Brazilian immigrants, self-­ identification, 201 Clasificado, El, 172 class/ethnic divisions, 154–155 Covid19 coverage, 238 digital technology, access to, 166, 169 economy, 153 enfranchisement, 175 EstrellaTV, 160 Gentefied (Netflix, 2020–2022), 2, 153 global media hub, 8 ¡Hola!, 172 immigrant destination, primary, 155 immigration reform movements, 155 inter-ethnic interaction, 13 KHWY, 221 KLOVE, 160

KVEA, 47, 159, 162, 221 KWHY, 159–160 KXLA, 160, 240 KXLU-LA 88.9, 203 language preference, 171 Latinx community recognition, ELTV, 79 Latinx demographics, 153 LATV, 159, 160 local news, SLTV, 162 loss and mourning, 220, 229 (see also Gabriel, Juan (Juanga)) mediascapes, 160 mediascapes, multilingual, 4 mixed-status households, 155 multilingual viewing, 165 network availability, 57 networked SL communities, 159–160 occupations, 172 Opinión, La, 32n17, 70, 160, 172 over-the-air media consumption, 63–64 PLTV satellite transmission, 55 public television, 243 racial capitalism, 154–155 rebordering, 155–156 regional SL media node, 152 Resurrection Boulevard (Showtime 2000–2002), 158 Rosa De Guadalupe, La (Televisa, 2008–), 218 sanctuary policy, 155 SL media coverage, Juan Gabriel death, 222 SL programming, discussion of, 165 SL programming, ideological leanings, 177 SLTV mergers, 60 SLTV networks, 1 transnational frameworks, 12 TV Azteca, 159

 INDEX 

urban geography, 10 urban growth, 153–154 US immigration policy, reaction to, 134 viewer agency and advocacy, 177 See also KMEX (Los Angeles) Loss and mourning celebrity funerals, 219–220 Cruz, Celia, 224 cultural symbols, appropriation of, 228 Fernández Gómez, Vicente, 229 liminal spaces, 228 Negrete, Jorge, 221 Quintanilla, Selena, 223–224, 228 Rivera, Jenni, 224, 228 SLTV coverage, scale and cost, 230–231 See also Gabriel, Juan (Juanga); Ayotzinapa Rural Teachers’ College, student abduction and murder Lotz, Amanda D., 33n20, 59 Lozano, Johny, 120 Luchar por un sueño, 11 Lucha Underground, 241 M Madrid African and Latin American immigration, 13 audience definition, 82 Centros de Participación e Integración de Inmigrantes (CEPI), 204 Corazón Tropical, 207 demographics, Latinx, 187, 202 digital media access, 202 global media hub, 8 immigrant acceptance and stereotyping, 209

273

Latinx immigration, 202, 204 Latinx self-identification, 206 media access, 202 media consumption, country of origin, 205–206 media consumption, television, 200 media representation, immigrants, 196–197 mediascapes, multilingual, 4 public television, 243 Radio del Pueblo, la, 207 Rosa De Guadalupe, La (Televisa, 2008–), 218 SL media options, 13 SLTV expansion, 242–244 Top Radio Latina, 207 transnational frameworks, 12 Maid in America (Prado, 2005), 47 Malonga, Marie-France, 16, 23, 85 Martín Barbero, Jesús, 115, 145n8 Martin, Ricky, 55 Mateos, Adolfo López, 46 Mattelart, Armand, 187 McCarthy, Anna, 152 McCrery, Johnette Hawkins, 180n7 Measures of Distance (Hatoum, 1988), 144n5 Media consumption access, 45, 49 acculturation, 47, 84 EL mediascape, inclusion in, 3 global mediascapes, 5 immigration and globalization, 13 modes of engagement, 16 multimedia distribution, 60 Pew Hispanic Research, 2 spectatorship, 16, 87 viewer enfranchisement, 164, 172 Media enfranchisement access and agency, 161, 175–176 community networks, 159 discourse, 107

274 

INDEX

Media enfranchisement (cont.) informal citizenship, 69 process of, 157 processual phonomenon, 87 social labor, 236–237 status independent, 87 survey strategy, 76 See also Place-making Media Matters for America, 238 Mediascapes competition and foreign ownership, 58 definition, 76 Detroit, 153–155, 157–158, 160–161, 163–169, 175, 177, 179 ethnospecific, 11, 84 geographic differences, 160 immigration, 134 Los Angeles, 160 Miami, 198 multilingual, 4 SL market. perceptions of, 163 transnational frameworks, 10–12, 67, 70–71 underrepresentation, 3 urban variability, 9–10, 17 See also Media consumption; Media enfranchisement Mediated public sphere, 4, 8, 11, 21, 109, 223 Mega TV, 57, 191 Meissner, Doris, 91n34 Melodrama Al Filo de la Ley (On the Edge of the Law, Univisión, 2004), 125, 127, 206 film, 122 governing rules, 111–113 historical memory, 145n8, 145n12 interpretive analysis, 110–112 loss and mourning, 220

migratory experience, 123, 127 Mujer: Casos de la Vida Real (Televisa, 1985–2008), 113, 124–125, 127, 145n19 news reporting, melodramatic imagination, 138 pathos, 219–220 telenovelas, 110, 114, 120–121 Méndez Berry, Elizabeth, 3 Méndez, Lucía, 128 Mexico CONACITE 2, 128 globalization, 33n19 media importation, 52 media themes, 25 Milenio, 80, 159 national programming, 66 programming portal, 53 RBD (pop band), 18 Spanish International Network (SIN), 45–47, 59, 159 state function, co-optation of, 69 telenovelas, plot themes, 115 Telesistema Mexicano (TSM), 46, 59, 88n7 TNT, 57 transborder distribution, 1 transnational programming, 20 US SLTV as secondary marke, 48 See also Televisa Miami, 198 América Teve, 191 audience definition, 84 barrio TV, 243 census data, 191 Cuban immigration, 190–191, 210 demographics, Brazilian, 202 Diario de las Américas, El, 32n17, 191 family members, communication with, 199–200 global media hub, 8, 152, 191, 211

 INDEX 

immigrant metropolis, 190 Latinx urban access, 13–14 media appearances, 48, 114 Media usage, 192–193 mediascapes, multilingual, 4 Miami Herald, El, 32n17 Mira TV, 191 MundoFox, 57, 91n33, 159, 191, 221 network availability, 57 Nuevo Herald, El, 70, 191 over-the-air media consumption, 63–64 PLTV satellite transmission, 55 public television, 243 radio stations, 191 self-identification and ethnicity, 188–190 SL media coverage, Juan Gabriel death, 228 SL media, digital access, 59 SLTV news, 199 SLTV, attitudes toward, 191 SLTV, potential improvements, 195 study demographics, 187–188 Telemundo headquarters in, 159 transnational frameworks, 12 unauthorized immigration, responses to, 190–191 urban geography, 10 US immigration policy, reaction to, 134 V-Me, 191 WSCV, 47 Miami Herald, El (Miami), 32n17 Michigan Film and Digital Media Incentive, 158 Mielniczenko, Sergio, 203 Migrant Protection Protocols, 106, 142 Migration in action films, 110, 122, 127 chronicling of, 110

275

EL media coverage, 135 loss and mourning, 220 migrant melancholia, 226–227, 231 road movies, 127 social identity, loss of, 116 in telenovelas, 109–110, 119–120 telenovelas, ideological disapproval, 123–124 telenovelas, thematic elements, 123–124 transborder frameworks, 225–226 transnational SLTV reporting, 135–136, 143 US border, militarization of, 226 Milenio, 71, 80, 159 Minas Gerais, 93n47 Mira TV, 191 Mitry, Jean, 86 Modern Family, 65 Montes, Mariss, 180n4 Moran, Albert, 35n37 Moran, Kristin C., 81 Moreno, Rita, 2, 5 MTV, 18, 52 Mujer: Casos de la Vida Real (Televisa, 1985–2008), 113, 124–125, 127, 145n19 Mujeres de América Latina (TVE, 1994), 206 MundoMax (MundoFox), 91n33 Mun2 (Telemundo-NBC-Universal), 56, 68, 241 N NAFTA, see North American Free Trade Agreement Napoleón, José Maria, 128 National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences, The, 31n3 National Association of Latino Elected Officials (NALEO), 181n9

276 

INDEX

National Association of Latino Independent Producers (NALIP), 3 National Council of La Raza (UNIDOSUS), 201 National Hispanic Media Coalition (NHMC), 57, 70 Nava, Gregory, 130 Navarro, Vinicius, 53 NBC, 56 NBC Latino, 70 NBC-Universal, 56, 136 NCIS, 31n4 Negrete, Jorge, 221 Netflix, 2, 52 NetSpan, 47 Nevárez, Julia, 180n1 Newhagen, John E., 180n7 News and Documentary Emmy Awards, 31n3 NHTI, see Nielsen Hispanic Television Nicaragua, 58 Ni de Aquí, Ni de Allá (Neither Here nor There, Valesco, 1988), 130–131 Nielsen, A.C., 2, 31n1, 31n2, 63, 81 Nielsen Hispanic Television Index (NHTI), 50, 54, 89n10 Noriega, Adela, 123 Noriega, Chon, 190 North American Free Trade Agreement (1994, NAFTA), 11, 12, 49, 51, 115, 189 Noticias del Mundo (New York), 32n17 Noticias testimonio (testimonial news), 139 NPR, 64 Nuevo Ciudadano, El, 24 Nuevo Herald, El (Miami), 70, 191 NuvoTV, 56, 241

O Obama, Barack, 68, 195 Oboler, Suzanne, 189, 211 Ochoa, Issa, 138 Ofrenda, La/Days of the Dead (Portillo and Muñoz, 1989), 228 Oktay, Julianne, 22 Once I Was You (Hinojosa), 91n34 One Day at a Time (Netflix, 2017–20), 2, 85 Operation Blockade (Operation Hold the Line), 155, 180n6 Operation Gatekeeper, 146n25, 155, 180n6, 226 Opinión, La (Los Angeles), 32n17, 70, 160, 172 Oregel, Roberto S., 144n1 Oren, Tasha, 20 Organization for International Migration (OIM), 204 Oxford English Dictionary, 190 P Pacifica, 64 Padilla, Alex, 238 Parks, Gordon, 130 PBS, see Public Broadcasting Service Peabody Awards, 2 Pêcheux, Michel, 25 Peña Nieto, Enrique, 120–121, 222 Perenchio Television Inc. (PTI), 56 Perenchio, Jerold, 47, 53 Perlman, Allison, 34n30, 56, 93n45 Perrette, Pauley, 31n4 Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA), 91n34 Peru, 53 Pew Hispanic Research, 2, 91n32, 94n64

 INDEX 

Pew Research Center, 166, 181n8, 190, 236, 239 Pinal, Silvia, 124 Piñón, Juan, 20 Place-based coverage, 140 See also Slow reporting Place-making audiovisual media, 161 centering, 156 ELTV, 33n25 leisure activities and, 172 local news, 157, 162 national/local tension, 244 self-identification, 16, 170 Planeta Brasil (TV Globo), 201, 203 Plantinga, Carl, 95n71 PLTV Brazil as reference culture, 65 consumption via translation, 66 definition, 65 divergence from SLTV, 4 engagement, 11 features of, 73 global expansion, 52 market positioning, 68 media consumption, 200–202 mediated public sphere, 4 melodrama, 110–111, 114 national profile, 65 satellite transmission, 55 scholarship, 26 spectatorship, 85–88 technological innovation, 59, 60 transnational media, 84, 106 translation via SLTV, 66 viewing options, 81 Polling Hispanic ratings, introduction of, 2 Nielsen, 31n1, 31n2, 33n23, 63, 81 Nielsen Hispanic Television Index (NHTI), 50, 54, 89n10

277

NPR/PBS/Marist, 181n18 Pew Hispanic Research, 2, 91n32, 94n64 Pew Research Center, 166, 181n8, 190, 236, 239 ratings sweeps, 1 Population growth, Hispanic, 48, 54 Porras, Erica, 143 Portes, Alejandro, 32n15 Portugal, 65, 66 Prado, Anayansi, 47, 144n1 Prende TV (streaming service), 74, 211 Price, Vivian, 146n22 “Primera Edición” (“First Edition”), 162 Public broadcasting barrio TV, 243 Brazil, 200 education, 113 Latino Public Broadcasting, 64, 243 mediatization deficit, 158 multilingual service, 240 NPR, 64 Public Broadcasting Service (PBS), 64, 92n43, 140 SL and bilingual service, expansion of, 242–244 SL presence on, 64, 72 Spain/US comparision, 22 Public Broadcasting Service (PBS), 64, 92n43, 140 Public Interests (Perlman), 56 Puerto Rico, 32n9, 63, 92n41, 191 Purchasing power, Latinx, 47, 57, 70, 89n11, 105 Q Quintanilla, Selena, 55, 224, 228

278 

INDEX

R Radcliffe, Sarah A., 43 Radio del Pueblo, la, 207 Ramírez Berg, Charles, 80, 190 Ramírez, Natalia, 125 Ramos, Jaime, 141 Ramos, Jorge, 137, 143, 235, 236 “Rape on the Night Shift” (Reveal, 2015), 140 Rapid response, 137, 142, 143 Raymundo, Santiago, 71 RBD (pop band), 18 RCN, 71, 91n33 Rebeca (Univisión, 2003), 60 Rebelde (Televisa, 2004–2006), 18 Rebelde Way (Azul Televisión/Canal 9, 2002–2003), 18 Rede Manchete, 66, 73, 93n47 Reglobalization, 9, 152 Reig, Ramón, 51 Reina del Sur, La (Telemundo/Antena 3/RTI Producciones, 2011), 207 Research design assimilationist model, critique of, 81 audience definition, 80, 82 conceptual framework, 14 data gathering, mixed method, 76–78 "encoding-decoding" model, 17, 79 field methodology, 22, 75–79 rationale, 4, 73–75 spectatorship, 16, 85–88 viewer model, 82 Resurrection Boulevard (Showtime 2000–2002), 158 Reveal (Center for Investigative Reporting), 140 Reyes, Gerardo, 129 Riggen, Patricia, 144n1 Ripstein, Arturo, 127 Rivera, Alex, 32n18, 144n1 Rivera, Angélica, 120, 123

Rivera, Jenni, 224, 228 Rivero, Yeidy, 190 Rodríguez Pagán, Saida, 85 Rodríguez, Teresa, 31n3, 146n27 Rojas, Pedro, 138 Rosa De Guadalupe, La (Televisa, 2008–), 21, 217–218 Rosenblum, Marc, 91n34 RTVE, 206 See also Televisión Española (TVE) Rubio, Ximena, 125 Rumbaut, Rubén G., 32n15 S Sábado Gigante (Univisión, 1986–2015), 71, 106, 144n2 Sábados Gigantes (Canal 13, 1962–2013), 144n2 Salinas, Adrian, 146n22 Salinas, María Elena, 2, 223 Sánchez Ruiz, Enrique, 51 Santa Ana, Otto, 133 Sarmiento, Carmen, 206 Sassen, Saskia, 9, 23, 32n13, 87 SBT, 53 Scale adaptation, multi-scalar response, 16 cultural ambivalence, 83 definition, 17 deterritorialization, 6, 109 entanglements of scale, 18 mediatization, 152–153 migration, 12 multi-scalar networking, 159–160, 230 re-contextualization, 178 sociocultural engagement and migration, 11 vernacular, appropriation of, 17 Schmidt Camacho, Alicia, 220, 226, 227

 INDEX 

Selena: The Series (Netflix, 2020–2021), 224 Shaft (Parks, 1971), 130 Shakira, 55 Shohat, Ella, 79 Shorris, Earl, 80, 188 Shows de auditorio (variety shows), 46, 71, 106, 109, 110 Si Tu Supieras Maria Isabel (Televisa, 1997), 123 SIBC, see Spanish International Broadcasting Corporation Silva Gruesz, Kirsten, 31n3 Silvestre, Armando, 129 SIN, see Spanish International Network Sin Nombre (Without a Name, Fukunaga, 2009), 141, 144n1, 226 SíTV, 56 Sixth Section, The (Rivera, 2003), 32n18 Skype, 9 Sleep Dealer (Rivera, 2008), 33n18 Slow reporting, 28, 110, 137, 143, 177 SLTV, see Spanish-language television Snapchat, 9 Sobrevivencia, discourse of (survival), 83, 108, 136 Solis Pavón, Ashley, 235 Sony Pictures, 56 Southern Poverty Law Center, 238 South Korea, 52, 110 Spain African and Latin American immigration, 13 Canal+, 24, 57 Clon, El (Telemundo-TV Globo, 2010), 19 co-productions, 63, 207 digital media access, 211 Galavisión, 53

279

Grupo PRISA (Plural Entertainment), 55, 125, 209 Hispanophone media investment, 4 Hospital Central (Telecinco, 2000–2012), 206 immigrant acceptance and stereotyping, 205–206 international content, 6 Latin Audiovisual Space, 54 Latinx diaspora, 57, 209 Ley de Extranjería (immigration Law), 24 Maghrebian immigration, 19, 209 mediated relations, 25 media underrepresentation, Latin America, 209–211 Modern Family, 65 Mujeres de América Latina (TVE, 1994), 206 network availability, 57 Organization for International Migration (OIM), 204 Reina del Sur, La (Telemundo/ Antena 3/RTI Producciones, 2011), 207 SLTV availability, 64 SLTV, local production, 65 SLTV rebroadcast, 65 telenovelas, co-production with Latin America, 55 Televisión Española (TVE), 58 transnational frameworks, 67 transnational migration hub, 210 transnational programming, 20 See also Madrid Spanish International Broadcasting Corporation (SIBC), 46 Spanish International Network (SIN), 45–47, 59, 159 Spanish-language television (SLTV) active consumption, 63 advocacy, 15, 21

280 

INDEX

Spanish-language television (SLTV) (cont.) anti-immigrant rhetoric, response to, 178–179 citizenship, expression of, 21 communications networks, 8, 11, 12 complementary nature of, 6 content, 64 co-productions, 19, 24, 52, 54, 58, 60, 63, 64, 207 core concepts, 23 Covid19 coverage, 238–239 critical neglect, 70 cultural ambivalence, 21 cultural expression, 1 definition, 3, 63 diasporic cultural forms, 21, 22 digital access, 242–243 distinctive nature of, 14 employment, 3 enfranchisement, 4, 5, 9, 16, 21, 23, 69 engagement, 11 features of, 71–72 format adaptations, 52, 53, 58, 63, 68 Hispanic small business growth, effect on, 47 historic expansion, 1 hybrid aesthetic, 20, 67–68, 115 immigration reform movement, 237 immigration rights, access to information, 110 interstitial positioning, 15, 45, 109 language politics, 240–242 mandate of diversity, 59, 239 marginalization of programming, 2 market positioning, 68, 136 mediated public sphere, 4, 8, 21, 109, 223 migration and genres, 109 multinodal network growth, 151–152

network availability, 57 niche market, 2, 57 non-coast markets, meeting needs, 240 orientation, 67 political/electoral process, coverage of, 242 popular vs. popular culture, 17 rapid response, 137, 142, 143 reglobalization, 9, 33n19, 152 relevance, 1, 4–5 ritual, inclusion of, 217–220 scholarship, 26 scope of study, 23–26 self-promotion, 70 slow reporting, 28, 110, 137, 143, 177 special event coverage, 143 spectatorship, 85–88 talent as social actors, 25 transnational cultural context, 110, 220 transnational media, 47, 84, 106, 108–109, 152 viewer agency and advocacy, 177, 178 viewing options, 81 See also Historical development, SLTV; Latinx diaspora; Mediascapes; Research design; Scale; Telenovelas Spectatorship, 16, 85–88 Spener, David, 155 Stateless, 64 Staudt, Kathleen, 155 Strategy Research Corp., 89n10 Straubhaar, Joseph, 26, 85, 86 Streaming services historical development, 24, 52, 59, 62 investment, 52 Prende TV, 74, 211 radio, 203–204

 INDEX 

SL underrepresentation, 70 Telemundo, 59 television on demand (SVOD), 63 TV Globo, 73, 74 Univisión, 59, 74, 242 Vix, 211, 242, 243 “Strengthening the Signal” (Long Beach Media Collective), 33n20, 167 Study market, Europe, see Madrid Study markets, US, see Detroit; Los Angeles; Miami Superarse, discourse of (getting ahead), 83, 108, 111, 122, 124, 136 T Taylor, Ivan, 138 Technodiscourse, 24 Telecommunications Act (1996), 60, 90n27, 136 Telefutura, 49 Telemundo 9-11 coverage, 143 Avenida Brasil, 203 Bajo el Mismo Cielo (Beneath the Same Sky, 2015), 123–124, 127, 153 bilingual programming, 240 Café con Aroma de Mujer (Coffee with the Scent of a Woman, 1995), 120 consolidation, 47 co-productions, 19, 207, 210 Decisiones (2005–2008), 113 digital access, 65 digital feedback, 60 Emmy Awards, 31n3 expansion, 49, 57 market reorientation, 67 mergers and acquisitions, 136 Miami, headquarters in, 159

281

Mun2 (with NBC-Universal), 56, 68, 261 network infrastructure, 63 rapid response, San Diego station, 142 Reina del Sur, La (2011), 207 slow reporting, 177 Sony Pictures, acquisition by, 56 Spain, 65 streaming services, 59 telenovelas, Brazilian, 200 transborder reporting, 12, 243 TV Azteca, collaboration with, 56 TV Globo, collaboration with, 55 Xica da Silva (1996), 200 Telenovelas Al Filo de la Ley (On the Edge of the Law, Univisión, 2004), 125–127, 207 América (TV Globo, 2005), 202 Amigas y rivales (Friends and Rivals, Televisa 2001), 120, 209 Amor Real (Televisa, 2003), 118–119 Amor Real (Univisión, 2005), 118–119 audience feedback, 60 Avenida Brasil (Telemundo, 2015), 203 Avenida Brasil (TV Globo, 2012), 73 Bajo el Mismo Cielo (Beneath the Same Sky, Telemundo, 2015), 123–124, 127, 153 Brazilian diaspora, 199–200 Café con Aroma de Mujer (Coffee with the Scent of a Woman, RCN 1994, Telemundo 1995), 12, 120 characteristics, classical form, 115 Clon, El (Telemundo-Globo, 2010), 19, 65, 209

282 

INDEX

Telenovelas (cont.) Clone, O (TV Globo, 2002), 19, 200 colorism, 123 Decisiones (Telemundo, 2005–2008), 113 decline in demand, 6 Destilando Amor (Distilling Love, Televisa 2007), 120 divergent plot themes, 116 diversification, 115 Fea Más Bella, La (Televisa, 2006), 120 hybrid aesthetic, 115 ideological basis of, 123–124 loss and mourning, 220 melodrama, 110, 114, 116, 123–124 Mexican, 106, 115, 118–121, 123–125 migrant audience, appeal to, 116 migration and, 109–110, 123–124 Mujer: Casos de la Vida Real (Televisa, 1985–2008), 113, 124–125, 127, 145n19 pathos, 219 “real life,” 116, 117, 124 Rebeca (Univisión, 2003), 60 Rebelde (Televisa, 2004–2006), 18 Rebelde Way (Azul Televisión/Canal 9, 2002–2003), 18 Reina del Sur, La (Telemundo/ Antena 3/RTI Producciones, 2011), 207 renewal of form, 117 Rosa De Guadalupe, La (Televisa, 2008–), 21, 217–218 rural-urban migration, 116 Si Tu Supieras Maria Isabel (Televisa 1997), 123 soap operas, differences from, 114, 116–117

Vale Tudo (Everything Goes, Rede Globo, 1988–1989), 202 Xica da Silva (Rede Manchete, 1996), 66, 200 Yo Soy Betty La Fea (RCN, 1999–2001), 12, 19, 68, 117, 120 Telesistema Mexicano (TSM), 46, 59, 88n7 Televisa Amigas y rivales (Friends and Rivals, 2001), 120, 209 Amor Real (2003), 118, 120 co-productions, 55 Destilando Amor (Distilling Love, 2007), 120 digital access, 242 expansion, 56 export programming, 47 Fea Más Bella, La (2006), 120 Galavisión, links with, 159 globalization, 71 international investment, 53 international ranking, 47 Mujer: Casos de la Vida Real (1985–2008), 124–125, 127, 145n19 Rebelde (2004–2006), 18 reverse imperialism, 51 Rosa De Guadalupe, La (2008–), 21, 217–218 Si Tu Supieras Maria Isabel (1997), 123 Spanish International Network (SIN), collaboration with, 49 Spanish International Network, links with, 159 Univisión, 47, 53 Televisión Española (TVE), 58, 210 Television stations ABC 7 (Los Angeles), 162

 INDEX 

KMEX (Los Angeles), 46, 142, 159, 162, 163, 177, 221, 242 KSTS (San José), 47 KTVU (San Francisco), 46, 88n7 KVEA (Los Angeles), 47, 159, 162, 221 KWEX (San Antonio), 46 KWHY (Los Angeles), 159–160 KXLA (Los Angeles), 160, 240 Mun2 (Telemundo-NBC-­ Universal), 56, 68, 241 WNJU (Linden), 47 WSCV (Miami), 47 WUDT (Detroit), 24, 160–163 Testimonio, 110, 137, 146n26, 163, 164, 219, 226 This Is Your Life (NBC, 1952-1961), 107 Thomas, Amos Owen, 145n11 Thussu, Daya Kishan, 52, 53 Time-Warner, 55 TNT, 57 Top Radio Latina, 207 Torre, Arath de la, 120 Torres Caicedo, José Maria, 189 Torres, Norma, 176 Tr3s (Viacom-MTV), 241, 68 Transborder media border as interstitial space, 225 communications, 10, 12 enlatados, 18 global vs. transnational media, 18–19 migration, 142, 177 ritual observance, 219 SLTV, development of, 1 transborder media, 67, 243 transnational frameworks, 70–71 Transborder programming, 54, 61, 63, 243 Transborder reporting, 12, 243 Transnational frameworks, 10–12, 70–71

283

Transnational programming competition and foreign ownership, 58 complexity, 63 context sensitivity, 54 co-productions, 55 definition, 19 enfranchisement, 16 global consumption, 18–19, 63 market diversification, 61 Triunfadores, Los (The Golden Coyotes, Durán, 1978), 127, 128 Trump administration, 15, 24, 87, 106, 133, 236–238 Trump, Donald, 24, 133, 222 TSM, see Telesistema Mexicano TV Azteca, 56, 71, 159 TV Brasil-Canal Integración, 203 TV Globo afro-diasporic cultures, 84 América (2005), 202 audience feedback, 59–60 Avenida Brasil (2012), 73 Brazilian diaspora market, 210 Clon, El (2010), 209 Clone, O (2002), 19 co-productions, 19, 210 digital access, 202 globalization, 71 Globo Noticia Américas, 203 international ranking, 47 market expansion, 73 news consumption, Brazilian diaspora, 202 Planeta Brasil, 201, 203 Spain, 65 streaming services, 73 technological innovation, 55, 59 Telemundo, collaboration with, 55 telenovelas, 202 Vale Tudo (Everything Goes, 1988–1989), 202 TV Globo Portugal (GloboSat), 202

284 

INDEX

TV Guide, 2, 70 TV Record, 57, 65, 71, 73, 84, 210 TV y Novelas, 70 U Ugly Betty (ABC, 2006-2010), 5, 19 Ultreras, Pedro, 138, 140–141, 143 Unimás, 241 Universo (Mun2), 68, 241 Univisión 9-11 coverage, 143, 235 Al Filo de la Ley (On the Edge of the Law, 2004), 125–127, 211 Amor Real (2005), 119–120 Aquí y Ahora (1998–), 31n3, 87, 127, 146n27 collaboration, PBS and UC Berkeley, 140 consolidation, 47 co-productions, 196 Despierta América, 15, 87, 136 digital access, 65, 242 digital feedback, 60 Emmy Awards, 2, 31n3 “Exodo migratorio en la frontera sur” (Migratory Exodus on the Southern Border), 143 expansion, 57 Facebook, 211 Fusion, 57 Galavisión, links with, 159 international ranking, 47 Latin Grammies, 225 market reorientation, 67 mergers and acquisitions, 136 polling, 50 Prende TV (streaming service), 211 Rebeca (2003), 60 Sábado Gigante (1986–2015), 106 sale of, 47, 53, 56, 60 slow reporting, 177

Spain, 65 streaming services, 59, 60, 73 Vix, 211, 242 Urbanization, Latin America, 9, 10 USA Network, 4 US Border Patrol, 107, 108, 140, 180n6 US Census, 3, 54, 56, 92n42, 199, 209 US Department of Homeland Security, 12, 133, 139, 142, 244n4 US government American Dream and Promise Act (2021), 142 Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act (AEDPA), 91n34, 146n25 Border Patrol, 107, 108, 140, 180n6 Bracero Program (1942-1964), 132, 226 Cable Act (1984), 49 census, 3, 54, 56, 92n42, 188, 199 Department of Homeland Security, 12, 133, 139, 142, 244n4 FCC, 13, 33n24, 55, 57, 60, 72, 93n45, 94n58 Government Accounting Office (GAO), 3, 32n8 Health and Human Services, 106 Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act (IIRIRA), 57, 146n25 Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), 69, 108, 137 Immigration and Nationalization Service (INS), 110 Immigration Reform and Control Act (1986), 49 Migrant Protection Protocols, 142

 INDEX 

NAFTA, 11, 12, 49, 51, 115, 189 Operation Blockade (Operation Hold the Line), 155, 180n6 Operation Gatekeeper, 146n25, 155, 180n6 Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA), 91n34 Spanish immigration, 33n19 Spanish-language media, impact of, 1–2 Telecommunications Act (1996), 60, 90n27, 136 Trump administration, 15, 24, 87, 106, 133, 236–238 See also Immigration policy US Health and Human Services, 106 US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), 69, 108, 137, 236, 244n2 US, Study markets, see Detroit; Los Angeles; Miami V Vale Tudo (Everything Goes, Rede Globo, 1988–1989), 202 Vale, Angélica, 120, 123 Variety, 31n3, 70 Vasconcelos, Agripa, 93n47 Velasco, Maria Elena, 129–131 Venevisión, 56, 71 Venezuela, 25, 33n19, 56, 66, 115, 137–138 Viacom-MTV, 68 Videorola, 8

285

Vilchez, Blanca Rosa, 235 Vix, 211, 242, 243 V-Me, 57, 92n43, 191, 210 VOCES (Latino Public Broadcasting), 64 Vourvoulias, Sabrina, 188–190 Voz Latina, La (Detroit), 172 W Wallerstein, Immanuel, 188–190 Warikoo, Niraj, 161 WarnerMedia, 52 Wilkinson, Kenton, 67, 95n67 Williams, Raymond, 34n36, 114 WNJU (Linden), 47 Woods, Keith, 5 WSCV (Miami), 47 WUDT (Detroit), 24, 160–161, 163 X Xica da Silva (Rede Manchete, 1996), 66, 200 Y Yañez, Eduardo, 121, 122 Yo Soy Betty La Fea (RCN, 1999–2001), 12, 19, 68, 117, 120 Youtube, 204 Z Zirinsky, Susan, 2