Core Response 1 - Sabina

The readings for this week made one thing clear: there is no longer a need for “representation”, at least not the “representation” that upholds the hegemonic powers being forced onto us now. As Jess Butler notes in “For White Girls Only?” and Jennifer Esposito notes in “What Does Race Have to Do With Ugly Betty?”, much of the conversation around race and ethnicity centers whiteness. If we aren’t talking about a white subject, we are making the white viewer/reader more comfortable by neutralizing the “other”. What I mean by this is that often television uses “non-threatening” racially ambiguous, mixed, light-skin, or straight up white actors and position them as “exotic” and “American” In Butler’s piece, they label Jennifer Lopez (white latina who appropriated Blackness to get her fame and racialized in the US as “latina”) and the Kardashians (white Armenian women) as “women of color”. Jennifer Lopez is visibly “Latina”, yes, but what does that even mean? Twitter user gatx_negrx explains: 

“The discourse we have now about race actually wouldn't work when JLo was on the come up. She was racialized as “Latina”. Proximity to whiteness confirmed, for sure, but even in her rom-com, she was always some strange ambiguous exotic beautiful non white woman of some color. She embodied a white supremacist ideal for what a Latina could look and had to look like in order to be on screen. She was still not white. No one internalized her as such. I’m not saying this to say she doesn’t possess privileges because of her proximity but to remind ourselves that race is a process that is done to us, not a static fact, dependent on context space and history.” 

Here, gatx_nergx explains that racialization changes over time, and in the US context at that start of her popularity, J.Lo was “not white”, but “Latina”. They also explain that this same rationale would not stand today, alluding to whiteness JLo has possessed all along. Why is the American Latinx community so averse to claiming whiteness? Further, what defines “brownness”? Why is American Latinidad obsessed with “Brown representation”? Who does this benefit? If we keep centering Mexican/Mexican-American stories in the discourse around “latinidad” and “brownness”, doesn’t that reproduce white supremacist logic that attempts to erase Blackness and indiginety from existence? I think some of these answers can be found in the ways television and media (de)racializes “latinidad” and props up ambiguous bodies with cultural signifiers (religion, Mexican conchas, language use, etc...). 

The following quote from Butler’s piece embodies some of the frustration I have with talks about “representation”: 

“Such containment does not just apply to black women: as Isabel Molina-Guzmán (2010) shows, mainstream media representations of Latina bodies as inherently exotic, foreign, and consumable work to affirm traditional notions of the United States as a white, Anglo-Saxon Protestant nation (7). Thus, while postfeminism can and does make space for women of color within its boundaries, it strictly regulates and polices the forms their participation may take.” Butler, Jess (50)

Butler is correct in saying that postfeminism creates strict boundaries for women of color, obviously. However, Butler makes an important distinction between Black women and Latina women, but never considers their important overlap: Black Latina women. If we are going to break the analysis down into just “African-American” and “Latina”, you reproduce the same harm that you are warning against: “strictly regulating and policing the forms Black Latina’s may take” and upholding dominant white ideas of Latinidad. 

In “What Does Race Have to Do With Ugly Betty?”, Esposito gives an overview into how Betty Suarez “overcomes” her “looks, class, and race” (529) and explores how she is positioned as a racialized “other” in a world of whiteness (and Whilelmina). Her Mexicannes is described in great detail, her father’s immigration story used as another signifier of Brownness, and Marc’s whiteness is used to emphasize Betty’s non-whiteness. But Betty is a lightskin latina, making her easier to sell to American audiences. Same with her sister, Hilda Suarez (played by Ana Ortiz) and the rest of Betty’s family. The only person of a different RACE is Whilelmina Slater (Vanessa Williams), a Black woman. Now, this makes me wonder - where are the Black Latinas in Ugly Betty? How would Ugly Betty be different if her family was Black and Honduran instead of light and Mexican? 

We must question our conversation around “Latinidad”. I have no interest in stories that continue to reproduce violent stereotypes in the interest of white dominance, or stories that claim to be “representational” yet stick to the same tropes in casting, writing, and production. 

What does race have to do with Ugly Betty? Well, “latino” is not a race, so not much, but ethnicity sure does.