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population. Often cited within this discourse of bodily pathology are
undocumented, migrant, poor, and working-class Latinas living in
urban areas. During the early 1990s conservative politicians targeted
African American and Latina women, suggesting that all women on
public assistance be required to use Norplant, a surgically implanted
long-term birth control device. Within this discourse Latinas are
pathologized as reproducing out of control and in need of sexual selfregulation.
Reifying the narrative of feminine pathology, road signs
U.S. Interstate 5 on the U.S.-Mexican border visually warn motorists to
slow down by foregrounding a Latina woman dragging a child across
the freeway (Ruiz, 1996).
Another example of the discourse of pathology that marks Latina and
Latino bodies is the fast growth in HIV infection rates among the Latina
and Latino population during a time when the general HIV infection
rate in the United States is decreasing. Currently, HIV/AIDS cases in the
Black and Latino gay male population outnumber those in the White
gay male population (Centers for Disease Control, 2000). Although the
HIV/AIDS infection rate does not necessarily support border hysteria
or the century-old pathologization of the border (Inda, 2002; Stern,
1999), it does highlight the systematic regulation of access to health
care for a growing number of dangerous health conditions facing the
Latina and Latino community. More than 32% of U.S. Latinas and
Latinos lack health insurance, and Latinas and Latinos account for one
quarter of the nation’s 44 million uninsured (American Health Line,
2000; Hargraves, 2002).
The contemporary global visibility of Latinidad in popular culture
shares a discursive space with the public discourse. Both contribute to
the production of a normalizing discourse about ethnic, racial, and
national identity grounded in the gendered and racialized narratives
of fear and desire circulated through the commodifi ed hypervisibility
of Latina bodies and the public discourse regarding the growth in the
Latina and Latino population in general (Inda, 2002; Ruiz, 2000). These
oppositional and complimentary representations point to the ongoing
need to remain critical and vigilant about the multipronged forces of
global commodifi cation, corporeal (re)confi guration, and spatial and
territorial reconstitution. Latina and Latino bodies whether on fi lm,
television, magazines, the news, or other forms of mass communications
circulate as ambivalently desired, commodifi ed, consumed, marginalized,
and feared. Nevertheless, the dual representational forces of fear
and desire have the potential for reconstituting fragmentary divisions
and simultaneously disrupting the terrain for a more egalitarian cultural
politics. The study of Latinidad as a gendered and racialized practice