Available From UC Press

Both Hollywood and corporate America are taking note of the marketing power of the growing Latino population in the United States. And as salsa takes over both the dance floor and the condiment shelf, the influence of Latin culture is gaining momentum in American society as a whole. Yet the increasing visibility of Latinos in mainstream culture has not been accompanied by a similar level of economic parity or political enfranchisement. In this important, original, and entertaining book, Arlene Dávila provides a critical examination of the Hispanic marketing industry and of its role in the making and marketing of U.S. Latinos.

Dávila finds that Latinos' increased popularity in the marketplace is simultaneously accompanied by their growing exotification and invisibility. She scrutinizes the complex interests that are involved in the public representation of Latinos as a generic and culturally distinct people and questions the homogeneity of the different Latino subnationalities that supposedly comprise the same people and group of consumers. In a fascinating discussion of how populations have become reconfigured as market segments, she shows that the market and marketing discourse become important terrains where Latinos debate their social identities and public standing.

Arlene Dávila is Assistant Professor of American Studies and Anthropology at New York University.She is the author of Sponsored Identities: Cultural Politics in Puerto Rico(1997).

"Davila has entered the back rooms of a new and important sector of the advertising industry, shedding light on the people and businesses that are working to exploit the marketing hot buttons of Hispanic USA. Latinos, Inc. could become a scholarly milestone, a vivid portrayal of the strange marriage between cultural anthropology and merchandising strategies that forms an elemental ingredient of U.S. consumer society."—Stuart Ewen, author of PR! A Social History of Spin

"A work derived from prodigious fieldwork that sets a standard for the ethnography of cultural institutions in their varied corporate forms and market participations. Latinos Inc. provides a rich, fascinating, and fresh empirical venue for theories of identity and ethnicity in the U.S."—George Marcus, author of Ethnography Through Thick &Thin

"An insightful and compelling account of Hispanic marketing and television as it becomes a significant force in U.S. corporate media. In its rigorous attention to the culture of marketing, Latinos, Inc. fills a significant void within the literature on mass communications, marketing, and television studies."—Chon A. Noriega, author of Shot in America: Television, the State, and the Rise of Chicano Cinema

"Davila is the first to show us the world of Latin media through the eyes of advertising and programming professionals; the first to comprehend how Spanish language network television has reconfigured Latino identity; and the first to fully delineate the plurality and heterogeneity of Latino audiences. She enables us to understand the formative role played by advertising and commercial culture in shaping the contours of contemporary Latino/a identities. Latinos, Inc. sets a new standard for scholarship in ethnic studies and cultural studies."—George Lipsitz, author of The Possessive Investment in Whiteness : How White People Profit from Identity Politics