Deborah Vargas in her article "Representation of Latina/o Sexuality in Popular Culture Popular culture proffers a "site where this

struggle for and against a culture of the powerful is engaged: it is also the stake to be won or lost in that struggle. It is the arena of consent and resistance. Visual media historically have had a close relationship to the production and circulation of racialized subjectivities. In general, representations of Latina/o masculinities and feminities in popular culture genres and venues are constituted by racialized discourses of conquest, imperialism and colonization, consistently represented as either deviantly hypersexual or inhumanly desexual. Latina/o sexuality has been shapted by cisual media productions that leave little room outside extremes of hypersexuality or nonthreatening, infantalized asexuality as exemplified for example by the figures of the buffoon and the domesticated mother. One escapable representation of Latino masculinity and sexuality is the "Latin love" associated with Rudolph, who was actually Italian. In the early twentienth century the term Latin was not synonymous with LA but Europeans who spoke italian and spanish. As Clara Rodiguez exaplins, a key racialized shift occured in the US context when non-Hispanic Europeans such as Italians assimilate into whiteness, leaving non-European ethnics to bear the brunt of racial stereotypes of excess and deviant sexuality. for Latinas, representations of their sexuality have been dichotomised as virgin/whore or mother/prostitute. These polarized representations have their origins in the cinematic figures of the demure senorita and spitfire of the 1920s and 1930s respectively lusty, hot-tempered harlot "wild kitten" and as the critic Ramirez-Berg notes that the harlot or spitfire is usually an unmarried woman with absence of a husband signifying uncon trolled sexuality: "a slave to her passions, innately lusting for the white male". In a US context, then, representations of Latina sexuality a hot-blooded and excessive become the markers of what is morally wrong, set against the good morals and hegemonic US citizenship values of non-Latino whites. more contemporary reproductions of Latinas have desxualized their gender constructions into that of mother or domestic worker. This strategy has been the result of what I contend is a resistance strategy to correct hegemonic hypersexual representations. sacrificing mother becomes a symbol of the chicano nation. Extreme of hyper or a sexuality have left Latinas in roles that represent little agency over their sexuality. Representations of Latina/o sexuality as "exotic" often functions through the figure of the primitive dark-skinned Other. Exotic sexuality has been represented in roles that reinforce a sense of sultry beauty rooted in some distant land, signified by the dark primitive Other. Salma Hayek roles in Desperado and From Dawn Till Dusk sexuality as hot