the Female Body GOVERNING

Disciplining the Ethnic Body 225
corporeality without ever encountering actual Latina and Latinos or
Latina and Latino bodies or culture. Moreover, given the contradictions
and globalization of the capitalist marketplace, few Latina and
Latinos and even fewer Latin American men and women can afford
to buy these globally commodifi ed artifacts of Latinidad, even though
many of them take part in their production. Investigating the production
and mobilization of a gendered Latinidad as implicated in the global
marketing and the manufacture of global corporealities is important.
Contemporary discourses of Latinidad draw on historical types and
classifi cations of Latina bodies through a system of difference even while
it engages Latinidad to sell products in the global marketplace through
standardization. While this contemporary proliferation of Latina bodies
may open spaces for new formations, vocality, and action, they nevertheless
build on a history of “tropicalization,” exoticization, racialization,
and sexualization of Latina bodies—of Latina bodies as foreign, out
of control, and threatening to social order, the body politic, and the
health of the country.
The fi ctional representations of Latina sexual excess and bodily
contamination often reaffi rm public health discourses. Maria Ruiz’s
work (1996, 2000) analyses the overlap between Hollywood fi lm and U.S.
health concerns, especially as demonstrated through health pamphlets
and videos aimed at the Latina and Latino population. Contemporary
hysteria about immigrants and migrant workers often single out the
potentially infectious pathogens carried by “illegal” border crossers.
Marie Leger and Maria Ruiz (in press) warn that “the symbolic and
material convergence of blood, borders, and bodies in the context of
Latino cultural commodities and movement across national borders . . .
highlight contradictions in the contemporary status of Latinos in the
U.S.” Thus, while Latina and Latino bodies are commodifi ed and desired
within mainstream cultural products, they are simultaneously labeled as
dangerous to the stability of U.S. national identity and as a result Latinas
and Latinos are politically and economically marginalized through
federal, state, and local government policies.
Consequently public policy discourses often position the Latina
and Latino population as mostly immigrant, inherently diseased and
sexually uncontrollable, a discourse of bodily pathology that affirms
many of the Hollywood representations discussed in this chapter. Not
coincidentally, the demographic increase in the Latina and Latino
population is often framed as a public health problem. Indeed Ruiz
(2000) documents that the Latina population is often constructed as
a threat to dominant U.S. national identity because of the relatively
high birth rate of Latinas as compared to other segments of the U.S.