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

Preface to the 2012 Edition

Since the publication of Latinos, Inc. in 2001, Latinos have become the largest ethnic minority group in the United States. Latinos are growing at four times the rate of the total population; one in six Americans is Latino/a, and Latinos now make up 16 percent of the population. Similarly Hispanic marketing is now a more than five billion dollar industry whose growth outpaces general market advertising, and with shares of media dollars allocated to the Hispanic market continuing to increase notwithstanding the recession and the major cuts in overall advertising spending.¹ After all, Latinos are now the undisputed largest minority group in the United States, and advertisers have continued to take notice.

Unfortunately, it is not only Latino demographics and Hispanic marketing that have seen steady and unprecedented growth. Outpacing both is a rise in anti-immigrant and anti-Latino sentiment at the level of public policy and public discourse. That it co-exists alongside the marketing love affair with Latinos is undoubtedly the most significant development since the book's original publication. Indeed, Latinos, Inc. appeared a little over a week before September 11, 2001 and the attacks that would so quickly transform the United States’ political landscape. My original research documents the ascendant boosterism around Latinos’ marketing power that had led many marketing pundits to conclude that Latinos were on the brink of reaching the mainstream. Soon after 9/11, however, comments about Latinos being hot and offering salvation to corporate America seemed spurious and deceptive. Ten years later it is obvious that the esteem of marketers seldom translates to making it in the political realm, even when the market remains a powerful gauge for measuring political power. Back then, we were urged by New York City's mayor, Rudolf Giuliani, and by many public officials to show our patriotism and resilience by going shopping and consuming as usual. Today, though in a less sanguine manner, we are still told that consumers can solve the economic recession by going shopping and deeper in debt.

Thus we have an opportune moment to reflect on Latinos, Inc. since its initial publication, not only in relation to what has been an increasingly charged political climate for anything Latino-related, but also in light of major developments in Latino/a media and in the development of exciting new Latino/a and ethnic studies scholarship that examines the media and the commodification of culture more broadly. I follow David R. Roediger's tenet that when framing a text for new readers, the scholar's key task is to bring new issues into the reconceptualization of a study, not into its editing (Roediger xiv) and have therefore left the original text untouched while highlighting what lessons may be especially relevant today, particularly in relation to contemporary scholarly debates and today's media market.

I set out to write Latinos, Inc. at a time when the attendant discussion on Latino/a and ethnic media revolved around issues of representation and the pervasiveness of negative stereotypes. As I write these pages, the backlash over ABC's quick cancellation of the TV comedy Work It and the statement by Puerto Rican actor Amaury Nolasco's character that since he's Puerto Rican, he would be great at selling drugs, has brought renewed awareness to the pervasiveness of such stereotypes and the need to keep a critical eye on matters of representation. Until the arrival of Latinos, Inc., however, few works had looked beyond the images and representations to analyze their production, circulation, and consumption. In fact, huge gaps existed in the literature around issues of political economy, production, and circulation in Latino media.

In anthropology, the discipline I was trained in, a surge of interest relating to the media hardly touched on U.S. minorities, even as the field of cultural studies was just beginning to pay attention to ethnographic methods and analyses. Latinos, Inc. filled these gaps in the scholarly literature, fed as it was by a growing intellectual trend toward interdisciplinarity and comparative ethnic studies. This trend has continued to grow, although not to the extent I had hoped and imagined. While the last decade has seen anthropology and cultural studies shift significantly toward more global, transnational, and interdisciplinary analyses, to a large extent disciplinary conventions remain. Anthropology continues to favor studies that are regionally based over U.S. racial and ethnic analysis, while interdisciplinary cultural studies are still largely dominated by textual and historical analysis and less open to ethnographic research. Consequently, while exciting new works on Latino/a media and the entertainment industry have appeared, some of the areas that Latinos, Inc. sought to analyze in simultaneity—such as dynamics of political economy and of visual culture—remain segregated pursuits. Political economy is the primary focus of social science and communications scholars, and matters of content and visual analysis remain the dominant purview of humanity-based cultural studies scholars. In this regard, I believe that Latinos, Inc.s call for an interdisciplinary focus is as persuasive today as it was when the book was originally published. Latinos, Inc. holds up well alongside some of the exciting new scholarship on Latino/a media, not only as a rare instance of investigating institutions and structures of power, but as a testament to the local, national, and transnational dynamics that can be accessed through interdisciplinary ethnographic research.

In particular, Latinos, Inc. underscores the central role played by corporate culture and marketing discourse, not only in shaping and mediating identities but also in setting out the very frameworks of public discourse and political debate. When the book was initially published, neoliberalizing processes were just beginning to attract the attention of interdisciplinary scholars. Discussions focused on Latin America, where the 1990s turn toward privatization and a market-based economy had made neoliberalism the dominant economic and political doctrine throughout the region. Yet the neoliberalizing processes at play in the U.S. and beyond, and the privatization of culture as a global phenomenon, were less acknowledged. In the last decade, however, Foucault's prescient insights about homo economomicious as eminently governable and the central unit of a neoliberal art of government are visible everywhere, as merit, entrepreneurship, and marketability trump matters of equality, social rights, and wellbeing. In this regard, Latinos, Inc. can also be read as a project documenting the rise of neoliberalizing logics—not only in the conceptualization of Latinos as the fastest growing U.S. racial group but also in the very notion of who makes a deserving American citizen or even a human subject of any worth. These are developments that have been exacerbated in the last decade, pushing scholars to search for the proper analytic concepts with which to theorize the intersection where cultural and racial identities meet the marketing and commodification of culture. A particularly tricky issue within this debate is the need to account for culture's changing and dynamic nature, and for the ways in which culture is neither entirely subsumable nor immune to processes of commodification. In other words, our analyses require vigilance about the processes of commodification that are always in play and attentiveness to the strategies through which people are constantly creating new meanings and politics. Another issue is the need to recognize how shifting notions of subjectivity and evaluation become widespread through the generalization of economic measurements and logics into more domains of social life.

Indeed, the last decade has seen an expansion in the number of cultural domains that are rendered commodifiable and new marketing realms in which Latinos are regarded as the new and hottest commodity. Latinos are now the subjects of new trends in urban design and are treated as both consumers of new trends and the creative inspiration for new urban design solutions (Londoño 2011). Similarly, commercial biotechnology, medical research, and financial services have become involved in crafting knowledge of and ideas about Latinos as objects and subjects of their marketing strategies (Kahn 2010, Montoya 2011). Marketing is increasingly central to pharmaceutical companies who, as my colleague Helena Hansen explained during one of our talks, tend to market the disease first to segmented market niches before introducing the cure. This may explain why Latinos, Inc. has had such an unlikely readership, not only among anthropologists and interdisciplinary scholars, but also among marketers, health professionals, political scientists, art historians, linguists, historians, and, most excitingly, activists: because the industries and institutions involved in marketing Latinos and commodifiying definitions of Latinidad have continued to expand, but not the analysis of how marketing discourse across these spaces is shaped nor how it operates to racialize and objectify its subjects.

In part, the void in analysis is not limited to Latinos. Historians of mass culture have produced important research on the role of marketing research and discourse in shaping averaged Americans (Cohen 2003, Igo 2008), but contemporary analyses of the work marketing does in contemporary culture remain more elusive. To some extent, this is due to the protected and proprietary nature of much of this research and to the difficulties of accessing corporate spaces of power. Or perhaps marketing discourse is less scrutinized because of its very naturalization and imbrication in everyday life. Yet if there's one lesson that should come out of Latinos, Inc., it is the accessibility of marketing as a field of study, given that as secretive as marketing insights are intended to be, marketing is nevertheless a field predicated on publicity. We could even argue that Hispanic marketing has become more accessible and evident in public discourse since the publication of Latinos, Inc. Ten years ago I had to travel to conferences to access marketing pundits beyond New York City; today, presentations and interviews with leading U.S. marketing pundits are easily accessible through podcasts. Thus in my view, there is no reason why institutions and processes of commodification and marketing discourse as produced across a variety of fields—whether in finances, medicine, education, or the arts—should not be garnering more attention from academics as central mechanisms shaping not only the dominant political discourse about people as objects and subjects in public society, but also the intense commodification of new realms of social life.

Other realms where Latinos, Inc. continues to have special relevance is in consumer rights and equity, issues that have become extremely contentious as a result of the mortgage crisis and the global recession. Today, greater awareness exists about the systematic discrimination that Latinos and other minorities suffer at the hands of financial service and mortgage providers, to the point that even when purchasing soda, cigarettes, junk food, or alcohol, minorities are more likely to have to pay more. They are also at greater risk of being duped when filing for bankruptcy (Bernard 2012). The issues that Latinos, Inc. raised about the politics of consumption, especially its questioning of the then attendant consumer-citizenship dyad, where greater consumption choice was linked to greater participatory democracy and to the rise of consumer politics as the key battleground for citizenship are today more urgent than ever. In particular, the book conveys a sobering message about the romanticization of consumers and consumption politics, and a reminder of how these spaces are often heavily mediated by racial and ethnic hierarchies that impede minorities’ full access to equality in the market. And this situation remains, notwithstanding the millions that are regularly spent on finding the correct marketing spin for minorities.

Latinos, Inc.’s emphasis on the need for structural transformation in the media and the marketing industry, and on how racial politics will continue to pervade all representations (whether negative or positive) as long as structural factors remain untouched, are also worth repeating. In this area, the lesson is quite simple: neither racism nor social inequality can ever be addressed solely through images; hence, it is not more or better ads that Latinos need but fairer and more accessible media markets. Within advertising and media, Latinos especially need substantive transformations in a global media industry that continues to dismiss Latinos as mere consumers rather than as active stakeholders who are worthy of jobs, opportunities, participation, and equity in these highly profitable cultural industries. The continued relegation of Latinos in general media is especially evident in the National Latino Media Council's annual Television Network Report Cards, measuring employment of Latino actors, writers, producers, directors, and executives, which last year reflected a decline in Latino diversity at the four major TV networks, ABC, NBC, CBS, and Fox (NALIP 2010). A recent study showed that while the Latino population has almost tripled in the last decades, Latinos enjoyed greater star power in the 1960s than they do today, where growing gaps are evident between Latinos’ demographic growth and their rate of employment in writing, directing, and other sectors of the industry (Negrón-Muntaner et al. 2012). In 2008 Latinos held only 6.4 percent of all roles in film and television, including as extras and in supporting roles. In 2012, the percentage of Latino TV and film executives was less than .1 percent (ibid 2012). Latinos are invisible even on talk shows, where the same study shows that they comprise only 2.7 percent of all guests.

Yet as Latinos, Inc. showed, Hispanic and Latino/a media are not any better at providing opportunities for Latino/a talent, relying as they do on cheaper imported programming and Spanish-language productions, and excluding bilingual and English-dominant Latinos as producers, actors, and consumers. The Spanish-language media universe also remains as whitened a space as when the book was originally published. Except that this racial exclusivity is even more scandalous today considering the exponential growth in the number of Latinos who are identifying themselves in racial terms, either as Afro-Latino or as American Indian (Decker 2011). Intriguingly, as I discussed in Latinos, Inc., where particular Latino groupings are reduced to specific marketable traits, there is a rising tendency to associate race with language—namely, Spanish with whiteness, or with the more whitened generic Latin look, and bilingualism, Spanglish, and English with Afro-Latinos. Accordingly, the few Afro-Latino representations are concentrated in the more limited realm of bilingual cable programming, such as in MTV's Tr3s, (a stylized version of tres, or the number three in Spanish) as if to convey that race is the property of young urban Latinos, while the Spanish TV universe revels in the generic Latin look, or on what my colleague Juan Pinon calls the güero (white blonde) look. The popularity of the Cuban actor William Levy, dubbed the Latin Brad Pitt for his uncanny resemblance to the actor, provides a notable example of this trend. Not surprisingly, it is white Spanish-language actors who are succeeding in Spanish language television, like Levy and the highly successful Sofia Vergara, who are also more likely to cross over into general market media. There, they are quickly racially marked as Latinos by their hyper-accented English, their voluptuous bodies, and the characters they play who are reminiscent of the hyper-sexual spicy señoritas and Latin lovers of the past. These differences seem more palatable and entertaining to mainstream audiences than the commonplace inclusion of less marketable and markedly Latino/a actors and characters. Unfortunately, such actors are largely excluded from the opportunities Spanish language TV facilitates for the likes of Levy and Vergara.

Still, Latinos’ racial diversity and their awareness and politicization of these identities are not the only trends that continue to be ignored by the media and marketing industry. Racial/ethnic/national hierarchies at play in Latino representation and documented in Latinos, Inc. have remained largely untouched, as has the dominant ethnic division of cultural labor that makes Anglo-American corporate elites the major beneficiaries and stakeholders of the Latino media-sphere. Indeed, the last decade has continued to see the takeover of the Latino media by large corporations and a reduction of Latino involvement in ownership (Pinon 2011). In particular, reports from the Free Press, a nonpartisan media organization, demonstrate how the growing consolidation and centralization of ownership has been accompanied by a decrease in minority ownership of commercial broadcast stations to a mere 1 percent, along with a greater involvement of global advertising conglomerates in Hispanic advertising and marketing (Turner and Cooper 2007, Chavez 2012).

In spite of a boom in new Hispanic and Latino-oriented initiatives, and following Univision and Telemundo's success and profitable take on the Latino media market, new efforts have largely followed a predictable dominant model. This involves the continued importation of content and programing, mainly soap operas, from Latin America, the new trend of importing Latin American talent and actors to feed Miami's rising Spanish-language productions and the development of new productions through less expensive Latin American-based partners. The Spanish language media's reliance on dubbed mainstream Hollywood content, especially films, also continues apace. A recent example of the trend toward new Latin American acquisitions is the Murdoch News Corporation's Fox partnership with the Colombian television company RNC (the creators of the highly successful Ugly Betty) resulting in MundoFox, a new Spanish language network for the U.S. market fed largely by the higher production values that Colombia supposedly represents in opposition to Mexico, which has been the traditional supplier of programming. Juan Pinon notes that Colombia's rise is because of its less monopolistic climate for producing content, in contrast to Mexico where Televisa's firm control of most media production has rendered it less open and attractive to U.S. investment (Pinon 2012). Interestingly, Colombia's rise is often linked to its supposedly more generic, or less accented Spanish, and its greater programming quality veiling the structural factors underpinning Colombia's new role as a cheaper and more attractive choice for the increasingly global Latino/Latin American media market. The geopolitics involved in these global media flows and what they suggest about the United States’ shifting investments and interests in the region are suggestive and ripe for future analysis. These historical conditions echo the transnational geopolitical factors that contributed to the Cubans’ pioneer role in Hispanic marketing in the 1960s, as documented in Latinos, Inc.

For now, the point is that as a result of the new investments for producing Spanish-language programming, we have seen the Pan-Latin Americanization of the Latino/Latin American media landscape. Changes in the production of soap operas, such as the transnational hiring of actors and the inclusion of talent from different Latin American nationalities within the same production, while still casting a Mexican actor in the lead to appeal to the largest Latino demographic, are notable examples of this trend. The end products, however, remain almost as indistinguishable as the previous media landscape since actors are still inserted into a squarely white and upscale world, and required to lose accents and avoid regionalisms in order to conform to what remains a sanitized and generic media space. Consequently, the language politics Latinos, Inc. described continue to be highly contested. In particular, activists, producers, and others advocating for more media choices for Latinos continue to be frustrated. These options are more available than they were ten years ago, with the advent of bilingual networks like Nuvo TV (formerly Si TV) and Tr3s, but they are limited to adaptations of already existing Latin American shows, mainly novelas and North-American films, or to cable offerings (as for example Tr3s), or to reality TV formats, and most recently, to the addition of English subtitles and captions to Spanish language programming. Still lacking are original productions that focus on the needs and realities of the U.S. Latino market and that provide employment and creative opportunities for U.S. based Latino producers and actors. The new 24-hour news channel proposed by Univision/Disney will do little to meet the demand for outlets for U.S.-Latino creative talent and productions, relying as it will on a primarily news format.

In fact, the language politics Latinos, Inc. described have now assumed hemispheric dimensions, as is especially evident in Puerto Rico. There, Univision's entry to the local media market left local actors outraged at the station's demands that actors lose their Puerto Rican accents and avoid regionalisms, renewing debates around the media giant's threat to the vernacular culture and to local actors’ ability to find employment on the island instead of relocating to the station's production studios in Miami (Rivero 2004). Nevertheless, awareness of Latinos’ linguistic and cultural diversity is far more palpable than it was in 2001, while appeals to Hispanic marketing as a linguistically homogenous space are becoming less sustainable. These trends raise interesting questions as Hispanic marketers continue to broaden their market beyond language and project themselves as interlocutors and mediators for a mainstreamed Latinization of U.S. culture. Mainstreamed Latinization is the operative goal here. Marketers may disguise their intent by promising Latinos empowerment and representativity, but their output is primarily intended to make Latino culture more palatable to mainstream audiences, with the hope that, one day, it could be a profitable marketing tool for the general market.

In a similar manner, the discussions around cultural citizenship that informed my original inquiry have undergone an important reevaluation. Latinos, Inc. came out in the midst of buoyant discussions around cultural citizenship. Even as these discussions tended to equate an increase in cultural visibility with political empowerment they pointed to the cultural foundations of citizenship (in regards to race, gender, sexuality, language, etc.) that affect its neutral and juridical functioning. Yet if something has become unambiguously apparent in the past ten years, it is the materiality and the very real and devastating political impacts of citizenship. Today, citizenship is no longer simply theorized as a culturally constructed category. It is also representative of a juridical and political status that is made material not only through documents, be they social security numbers or voting cards, but is also increasingly reified and objectified in public discourse. Most importantly, the growing rates of deportation and the rise in anti-immigration policies demonstrate the multiple workings of citizenship: how it is regularly deployed to separate families, criminalize and deport people, and disenfranchise voters how it maintains an apartheid system between those with citizenship, and hence human rights, and those who lack it, who are increasingly considered less than human. These dynamics of citizenship, in all its restrictive and material effects, were not as present in previous discussions of cultural citizenship that focused primarily on the politics of representation, particularly on the resistance these politics helped generate without necessarily attending to how these politics could also be co-opted, contained and appropriated by political interests or by the market as Latinos, Inc. also showed. Today, in contrast, there is a renewed and welcome return to both the symbolic and the material components of citizenship, and a growing literature on the spaces of power where it is produced, reproduced, and policed. Latino studies scholars, in particular, are examining the processes of deportation, border control, policing, and the immigration system to showcase the discursive and material dimensions of citizenship while exposing how power operates through institutions, policies, and practices to shape representations as well as their political effects (Chavez 2008, Rosas 2012, Gonzales 2012, LeBrón 2012, Magaña 2008).

Indeed, Latinos, Inc. was written as a critique and response to the growing boosterism about Latinos’ coming of age that throughout the 1990s equated their visibility and popularity in the media with their political enfranchisement. This boosterism, misguided when I was writing the book, is obviously more so in the contemporary moment dominated by a rabid anti-immigration discourse and the rise of a range of anti-immigrant policies at the local, state, and national level. These developments have been steady and consistent throughout the 2000s. In fact, Arizona's SB 1070 was preceded by a string of anti-immigrant legislation that included bills against bilingual education; voter identification bills; Prop 300 that barred university students who are not U.S. citizens from access to in-state tuition rates or financial aid; and by bills sanctioning employers. Following Arizona, Alabama, Georgia, South Carolina, Indiana, and Utah, other states have developed their own antiimmigrant laws that criminalize any aspect of social life for undocumented people, while the stalemate around a much needed comprehensive national immigration reform at the national level persists. These anti-immigrant policies have been enacted at great economic cost to most states in massive losses of jobs, workers, and investment, a price that so far these states seem willing to pay in order to preserve some spurious sense of racial purity and keep their scapegoat at bay.

Ironically, marketing has continued to grow in the midst of such a harsh climate. The Association of Hispanic Advertising Agencies estimates that Hispanic purchasing power exceeds 1 trillion and that has doubled since the 1990s. Despite lower incomes, Hispanic households continue to spend more on telephone services and on basic consumer goods such as clothes, food, housing, utilities, and transportation (Ahaa 2012). These numbers still lag behind the percentages corporations direct to the general market. My contacts confirmed that Hispanic marketing still lacks accessibility to white corporate America: despite new economic indicators not available ten years ago that confirm Latinos’ consumer habits, corporations still need convincing that Latinos are a worthy target. Corporate America continues to expect Latina(o) bodies to be discounted. Corporate clients are unwilling to pay and invest in planning and research, and regularly devalue the expertise of Hispanic marketers seeing it as the result of their authentic and essentialist connection to consumers rather than as products of their marketing knowledge and insight (Chavez 2012:11) Consequently, the Hispanic marketing has become quite vulnerable to competition from general market agencies, eroding Latinos’ control and access to the most profitable sectors within the industry.

In this way, the fundamental questions that Latinos, Inc. raised—lack of minority control and ownership of the media, Latinos’ general inferiority in the eyes of corporate America, and the class and racial disjunctions that exist between producers and consumers—remain pressingly unresolved. In fact, they have worsened. One would think that Latinos have limitless media options available to them, based on the number of new Spanish language channels, new radio stations, and other media that now court them, but, as noted earlier, these developments have been accompanied by a growing consolidation and centralization of ownership in non-Latino hands. The enormous growth and influence of Univision, especially after its purchase of Hispanic Broadcasting Corporation, the largest owner-operator of Spanish language radio stations in 2003, and its subsequent purchase by a private equity consortium led by billionaire Haim Saban, is a case in point (Perlman and Amaya 2012). These consolidations have been the direct result of wider trends toward deregulation and privatization facilitated by legislation greatly prejudicial to minorities at the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). Specifically, such trends have led to a preference for cheaper nationally syndicated programming, which has limited the diversity of programing and content and shrunk the circulation of localized perspectives and the hiring of minorities.

At the heart of this gap is contemporary racism and the rise of neoliberal multiculturalism. Indeed, since the publication of Latinos, Inc., many works, including my own, have documented the rise of colorblindness in dominant post-civil rights U.S. discourse, along with the rise of neoliberalism and the narrowing of notions of citizenship and belonging. In this context, the politics of multiculturalism are best understood as a veil supporting a larger project that disavows racism and runs counter to its continued existence and reproduction. Therefore, Latinos, Inc.s warning against equating increased visibility with political empowerment is more urgent than ever, especially when visibility is accompanied by the sanitization and whitening of Latinos, and by a narrowing of Latinos’ political and racial subjectivities around what may be profitable but is not necessarily the most representative or politically empowering. In other words, signs of today's pernicious and aggravated racism can be seen when corporations continue to court Latinos while ethnic studies and the teaching of Latino history and literature is ruled illegal as in Arizona; when Latinos undergo a sharp rise in harassment and harsh treatment by authorities as evidenced by the nationwide-notorious cases of Arizona's Sheriff Joe Arpaio and the East Haven, Connecticut police department; when public debate grows more tolerant of racist attacks against Latinos, as we saw during the Republican primaries and in the candidates’ dismissals of such key Latino issues as the Dream Act and the status question in Puerto Rico. This racism profits from allusions to representation even as it carefully protects institutional bases of segregated white space power through projects that interpolate racial others, not always coded in strict racial terms, but which nonetheless continue to undergird more racial inequality.

Latinos, Inc.’s findings are especially significant for illustrating how race and racializing processes are not limited to assessments based on traditional definitions of race around phenotype, or to overt manifestations of racism. Instead, racializing processes are regularly embodied in culturalist understandings around morals, values, and emotional dispositions, and in idealized notions of Latinos as sensitive people and docile or brand-loyal consumers who appear unthreatening to the dominant racial order and who respond more to the operations of colorblind racism than to any intrinsic Latino cultural trait.

This brings me to the comparative analysis that also informed Latinos, Inc. and led me to some unsurprising conclusions about how Blacks and Asian Americans are similarly affected by marketing discourse. Ethnic marketing treats these different constituencies quite similarly, as culturally bounded and distinct groups that can easily be reduced to particular marketing gimmicks, be they language, tropes of family and community, a particular attitude or disposition, or even a specific color. As such, differences among these district ethnic/racial groupings proved to be in direct conversation with the specific racialist tropes that have historically circulated about each of them. Still, as with Latinos, representations of Blacks and Asian Americans are racialized because of the structural conditions that mark and exclude them from a putative mainstream society. It is this continued marginalization that renders representations of minorities, even those that are supposedly positive, to continue to be anchored, read, and consumed according to stereotypes or to these groups’ unequal societal standing. Once again, equity in matters of access, control, and ownership within the media market and in society at large, remain necessary preconditions for disabling all stereotyped representations.

In terms of how the media landscape has changed, I recall my concerns before the publishing of Latinos, Inc. about whether my research could keep up with the advent of Internet marketing but concluded that the dynamics at the heart of Latino representation remained largely unaffected. As said, change demands structural transformation, not a new media or marketing strategy. Still, as I think through the current context, I am overwhelmed by the changes in the media landscape, most specifically, the rise of Facebook, Twitter, and other social and digital media, and of online communities, all of which have produced a far more complex media landscape than existed when I wrote the book. The most exciting new media development is the rise of digital technology and of social media that provide platforms for uprisings and social movements like Occupy Wall Street, which are bringing attention to the plight of the 99 percent and to massive gaps in economic and income equality.

In particular, social media and digital technology have boosted Latino activism by providing outlets for issues and voices that are largely neglected by the mainstream press. These include the Dream Act and the fight over ethnic studies in Arizona, as well as a variety of local issues that are seldom covered in a climate where corporate takeovers and consolidations disconnect the press from communities and their immediate concerns. The Dreamers tagline, undocumented, unafraid, and unapologetic, has become a nationwide rallying cry of many youth, thanks to videos on YouTube, while social media has turned Arizona's ethnic studies ban into a national and international issue. Social media has also eased some dominant language barriers in both mainstream and Spanish-language channels by providing a space where vernacular Spanglish and spontaneous, unaffected communication are used in place of mediacrafted and policed language—whether it be official or generic English or Spanish, or commercially manufactured Spanglish.

Nor can we ignore the reality that digital and social media have become important new marketing tools to reach Latinos. Celebrity culture, where TV stars, musicians, and personalities attain excessive preeminence in everyday culture, has also permeated the Hispanic/Latino media market. All major networks use social media to turn stars into powerful household names and to find new ways for delivering advertisements to viewers. A good example is Telemundo's Club de Noveleras, an online social community that offers extra content and marketing deals to registered users. Additionally, most of the major Spanish-language network soap stars, entertainers, and media personalities have Facebook and Twitter accounts linking thousands of fans to their pages. Marketers covet this access, which is regularly used for promotions. In other words, these personalities are not using Twitter to urge Latinos to stand up for themselves the way Piolin, the Los Angeles radio personality, did during the 2006 mega marches where thousands of undocumented immigrants took to the streets, largely galvanized by Spanish language radio (Casillas 2010). The Facebook posts of Ana Maria Poloof Caso Cerrado, are mainly intended to promote her show. These go out to over 520,000 fans along with inspirational messages or details about her battle to quit smoking.

Most significantly, debates around privacy and the practice of weblining, where companies use data aggregation to target particular services, opportunities, and products to particular groups, or alternatively, to deny them to others based on their use of digital media, are especially alarming (Andrews 2012). These trends raise questions about the social implications of digital media that resonate with Latinos, Inc.’s preoccupations with the political potential of so-called Hispanic and Latino/a specific media. A key issue is how these media simultaneously create a powerful presence for the aggregated and highly heterogeneous Latino/a populations, as an imagined political community that can be strategically and politically summoned and mobilized, while also helping subjectify Latinos’ interests as consumers whose needs are best met by the market and by more carefully targeted offers. In this way, the lessons of Latinos, Inc. still apply today when thinking about the social, political, and cultural implications of marketing in the age of Facebook and other social media: to keep in mind the larger structural and political factors shaping the media landscape and its impact on people's ability to engage in empowering cultural politics through new types of media. These issues demand that we protect the Internet as a free and accessible space by insuring net neutrality protections, privacy, and universal accessibility to high-speed Internet services. These matters are central to safeguarding the media's political and democratizing potential, and they demand vigilance given their vulnerability to corporate and government interests and policy mandates.

When originally published, Latinos, Inc. was honored by generous reviews from major journals in anthropology, communications, sociology, ethnic history, and American studies. Some raised other issues that are worth considering. Ellen M. Gil-Gomez, writing for the American Quarterly, asked for more discussion of the Internet, then just beginning to have an impact (Gil-Gomez 2002). Rafael Reyes-Ruiz, writing for American Anthropologist, wondered if I was describing a fluid situation and whether, as the industry becomes more sophisticated, matching the continued growth of Latino/a populations, a reassessment of the political implications of the industry is called for, and I could not agree more (Reyes-Ruiz 2003 ). Marilyn Halter hoped for more discussion of Latinos in crossover media and felt that I paid too much attention to corporate intellectuals. She would have liked to see interviews with consumers and would have liked me to acknowledge more openly some of the positive outcomes of multicultural inclusion (Halter 2002). Lisa Penaloza wished I had delved more deeply into the subjectivity of corporate intellectuals and considered on-the-job conflicts and the contradictions that may arise from marketing Latinidad.