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ethnic diversity mean there is both an empirical and representational
growth in Latina and Latino bodies. Recent increases in population,
market power, and cultural influence demand that the U.S. Latina
and Latino population be acknowledged in its richness, complexity,
and multiplicity. According to the 2000 U.S. Census, “Hispanics” have
increased their share of the total population by 38.8% from the last
census, resulting in major population shifts in some parts of the United
States. In the summer of 1996 Latinos surpassed Blacks as the second
largest ethno-racial group in U.S. classrooms, for example. 1 While 1971
was the last year Anglo Americans reproduced at a rate to replace their
proportion of the total population (Hacker, 2000), the proportion
of the population that calls itself Hispanic or Latina and Latino is
increasing at a rate 5 times faster than other populations (Davis, 1999).
As of early 2003 the U.S. Census officially declared “Hispanics” the
largest U.S. minority.
The “browning of America” has forced the U.S. government and
corporations to rethink fixed hierarchical constructions and classifications
surrounding U.S. populations and notions of citizenship
while simultaneously mobilizing industry to reconfigure approaches to
marketing and consumption in terms of particular formations of bodies,
populations, and consumer communities. Although the entertainment
industry recognized decades ago the need to rearticulate their products
to accommodate shifting domestic terrain of racial, ethnic, linguistic,
and economic heterogeneity, this most recent formulation and strategy
is quite distinct in its intensity, strategy, and broad cultural legitimacy
(Dávila, 2001; Halter, 2000). A historical approach to the study of
Latinidad suggests that this is not the first time that Latinidad has
been represented as a highly marketable commodity in the United
States—the 1940s, for example, also saw such a period. Yet, the most
recent proliferation of Latina and Latino bodies in public culture,
along with the particular demographic trends and marketing developments
that connect to its current mobilization, demands that the
contemporary formation and marketability of Latinidad be addressed
as a novel historically and culturally specific phenomenon.
As a sign that constructions and organizations of the contemporary
notion of the U.S. Latina and Latino population have changed over
time, marketers acknowledge their purchasing power and conceptualize
this target audience quite differently that in the past. Nonetheless,
traces of a previous approach remain because the Latina and Latino
population is considered one of the last “unifi ed” or homogenous target
markets in the United States. 2 Prior to the 1990s, the entertainment