The Latina Box
As a first-generation Latina student, I am still in the early stages of my communication career. My goal is to create content that is representative of my Latinx culture in a way that empowers and uplifts rather than continue to mold the culture into the common stereotypes that have been created around Latinxs. However, with many cultures and genders portrayed in the media, common stereotypes begin to arise and they aren’t necessarily all positive. Teresa Correa discusses the portrayal of Latinas in media and researched whether “stronger media identification with the audience affects the type of frames used to depict Latinas” (Correa, 2010).
In Correa’s Literary Review, she introduced the various stereotypes that are often correlated with Latinx individuals, but more specifically women. It’s important to note that all Latinx individuals are and physically look very different. However, it has been noted that usually Latinxs themselves represent Latinxs in less stereotypical ways and English speaking media often focuses more on creating those stereotypes and boxing Latinxs into them. For example, Latina women are often all portrayed as curvy, sexy, religious, with a lot of attitude, and long hair. What we fail to notice is that Latina women all look and are different.
Correa’s methodology and research portion mentioned that her approach in conducting her research was comparing two Miami-Dane county news sites. She decided to go for both a qualitative and quantitative approach. One of the news sites she used was The Miami Herald that is intended to be for English speakers, and the other being El Nuevo Herald that is meant to cater to the Spanish speaking audience. From these two news sites, she gathered a sample of articles that specifically talked about Latinas. Her focus was looking at the title of the articles, the images used, and the language that depicted the Latinas talked about to determine the type of perception these news sites have on Latina women.
The results from Correa’s research most definitely determined the difference between the depiction of The Miami Herald had versus the depiction El Nuevo Herald had on Latina women. She concluded that the English speaking news site portrayed Latinas as a burden to society correlating them to words like crime, gangs, immigrants, and others. On the other hand, El Nuevo Herald mentioned them as being hardworking and family oriented.
Dissecting this research article definitely shed light on the choice of words and images one uses when speaking about certain cultures. In my case, I notice that the Latinx community is often shed in a negative light when it comes from English speaking news sites and media. As a future content creator, it is important for me to keep a note of the keywords used and how they frame and contribute to the depiction and stereotype of Latinx individuals.
