Core Response #3 - Daniela

     Being that this is the designated week in which we are looking critically at race and ethnicity as represented on television, I found this week's readings very flat; leaving me wanting something a bit more critical. The Gray and Han readings, I felt, would have made more sense last week where we talked about TV + Audiences, especially considering the lack of discussion we had on race and class within those readings. I can't help but think about the moment in Esposito's article "What does race have to do with Ugly Betty" when they said, "Should a person of color speak of race, he or she is made to feel angry" (Esposito 523). With that being said, I want to focus my response this week on Esposito's piece and recognize that much of what I have to say comes from a place anger and frustration.

    I am obviously biased in my choice of readings to focus on this week because I am a first generation Mexican American.  Despite the fact that I rarely leave the house, I am reminded of this fact every day in my exchanges with my white roommate and even in conversations with my Mexican mother. Although I found Esposito's paper to be redundant at times, one point I am glad they made throughout their paper is the fact that as people of color, we are constantly being reminded of the fact that we are not white. Esposito does this by focusing their discussion on Ugly Betty around the concept of meritocracy, the belief that no matter a person's race or economic standing, one can "pull themselves up by their bootstraps" and achieve the "American Dream". Whatever the hell that means anymore.  

     Television shows like Modern Family and really any network show where there are a handful of non-white persons drowning in a sea of white people have followed this idea that being an American is an equalizer (here I am also thinking about Han's argument) and that racial barriers don't exist. Esposito pointed to tropes on how Latinx, particularly Latinx women, are represented on screen. One particular stereotype that has negatively affected myself is the trope of the overly sexualized Latinx woman. Time and again from Carmen Miranda to Salma Hayek, I have been made to feel ugly, inferior, and a "Consuela" (the name is actually Consuelo but I guess Americans cannot handle that concept) or a frumpy maid because my breasts are not causing me major back pain. Not only are brown-skinned (i.e. unable to pass for white) Latinx people made to feel inferior because we are already outside of Western beauty standards: "defined as 'white, thin, upper-class, straight femininity'" (Esposito 527), but if we do not fit into "36-24-36" hot Latina stereotype, we simply fall outside the realm of respectability. Sometimes it feels like we are outside the realm of humanity. 

    I know this response seems less critical of the reading and a bit more of a tangent, but what I have been discussing comes from growing up with these shows being the only representations of Latinx people I had on screen. Even when wanting to escape into novelas, all I saw were gorgeous light skinned Mexicans throwing glass or themselves on screen. I remember watching La Fea Mas Bella (the orioginal Ugly Betty) and just being utterly disgusted at what was allowed to be seen as beautiful on screen. Even though it took place in Mexico, Letty (Mexican Betty) who is supposed to be seen as ugly was dressed in more traditional and conservative attire, while her beautiful foil Alicia had blond hair and a body that could rival Jessica Rabbit. The only acceptable form of beauty Mexican women could achieve seems to be a mix of whiteness tinged with exoticism. All throughout my life I was constantly reminded that I was outside of normality while those within it rarely if ever recognized their privilege of whiteness. Esposito ends her piece by arguing that "this construction was born out of this nation's discourses on race, which are contradictory and ask that we pretend not to see differences even though they have become part of national policies" (Esposito 532). Even as white and non-Black people had a reckoning over the summer wherein they realized racism is in fact real and there are hierarchies even within different shades of Black and brown, I can't help but worry that people will begin to sink back into the comfort they had and have built for themselves regarding race. Will I be writing about race until the day I die, instead of being the Spongebob scholar I dreamed of as a child? Yes. Not because I necessarily can't, but because to ignore the way race envelops my life would be a disservice to myself and to others.