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Commodifying Black Latinidad in US Film

and Television
a
Isabel Molina-Guzmán
a
University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
Published online: 01 Aug 2013.

To cite this article: Isabel Molina-Guzmán (2013) Commodifying Black Latinidad in US Film and
Television, Popular Communication: The International Journal of Media and Culture, 11:3, 211-226,
DOI: 10.1080/15405702.2013.810071

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 Popular Communication, 11: 211–226, 2013
Copyright © Taylor & Francis Group, LLC
ISSN: 1540-5702 print / 1540-5710 online
DOI: 10.1080/15405702.2013.810071

Commodifying Black Latinidad in US Film

and Television
Isabel Molina-Guzmán
University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
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This article analyzes textual constructions of Black Latinidad and negotiations of ethnic and racial
identity in the cultural commodification of Black Latina/o actors. It documents the ambivalent pro-
cess of cultural commodification for producing polysemic texts of Black Latinidad that counter
dominant constructions of Latinidad as “brown” and exists in tension with dominant understand-
ings of US Black identity as static and unchanging. By expanding on research (Balaji, 2009; Saha,
2012; Watts & Orbe, 2002) that positions actors as willing participants in the production and dis-
tribution of themselves as commodities that may accumulate capital, this article situates cultural
representations of Black Latinidad in mainstream film and television to articulate the conditions
under which Black Latina/o actors gain value as commodities through the accumulation of racial
capital.

“I really don’t care if people (criticize) that a Latina was cast to play Bernie Mac’s Black daughter
in Guess Who. If I have attributes to play Arab or Indian or Filipino or Black or Latina; why should
anybody hold that against me?” says the actress by phone shortly after flying into Los Angeles from
her New York City home. (Zoë Saldana, 2005)

Mainstream news and media industry journals such as Variety and Ad Age celebrate the “brown-
ing of America” by highlighting the increased visibility of Spanish, Latin American, and US
Latina/o actors; the growing demographic importance of Latina/o audiences; and the ability of
Latina/o actors to draw in potentially more diverse and larger global audiences in the United
States, Latin America, and Europe, among other sites (Molina-Guzmán & Valdivia, 2004).
In doing so, the entertainment industry press racially homogenizes Spanish, Latin American,
and Latina/o actors as brown and racializes US Latina/o actors as culturally exotic foreigners,
a cultural process Molina-Guzmán (2010) defines as symbolic colonization. In this representa-
tional schema, Black Latino actors such as Saldana are left to carve out spaces for themselves
through nontraditional representations of Latinidad or through representations of US Blackness.
In doing so, the casting of Black Latina/o actors calls attention to the problematic politics of

Correspondence should be addressed to Isabel Molina-Guzmán, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign,

Department of Media and Cinema Studies, College of Media, 810 S. Wright Street, Champaign, IL 61820, USA. E-mail:
imolina@illinois.edu
 212 MOLINA-GUZMÁN

racialization in the United States and the flattening out of complex ethnic and racial differences
in media representations.1
By using the term Black Latina/o, I reference Latina/o actors of visible and self-proclaimed
African descent. Invoking the term Black Latina/o also highlights “the inadequacy of the Latin@
concept along with the need to broaden and complicate the notion of Blackness in the United
States” troubling the assumption that Latinidad and Blackness are mutually exclusive (Jiménez
Román & Flores, 2010, p. 10). Blackness is defined as both the material conditions in which Black
people are structured as well as the “cultural practices, social meanings, and cultural identifica-
tions” by which Black people “negotiate and construct meaningful lives” (Gray, 2005, p. 19).
Similarly, Latinidad signals the material conditions of Latinas/os and the semiotic process of
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being, performing, and commodifying US Latina/o identity (Molina-Guzmán & Valdivia, 2005).
The specific discussions of Blackness and Latinidad in this article are situated in the US context,
but Blackness and Latinidad are not exclusively confined to their articulation in the United States.
I propose that Black Latinidad functions discursively as a “cultural trope and social category over
which competing claims are made and registered” (Molina-Guzmán & Valdivia).
Sometimes codified as Black because of their skin color and Black phenotypic appearance
yet still classified as Latina/o because of their ethnicity, Black Latina/o actors must work within
an entertainment industry’s typecasting culture that privileges whiteness as the normative refer-
ent and positions Black bodies as exoticized, deviant, and consumable spectacles (Gray, 2005).
Black Latinas/os must also negotiate dominant media discourses about Latinidad propagated by
Latina/o advertising and marketing professionals since the 1970s, discourses that stereotypically
represent Latinas/os as a Spanish-dominant, panethnic group and brown racial identity that has
increasingly taken on the appearance of whiteness (Chavez, 2012; Dávila, 2009). Mainstream
US-produced film and television texts featuring Black Latina/o actors are a contested cultural
site of meaning over Blackness and Latinidad. Together the texts analyzed are complicit in the
production and disruption of racial commonsense or familiar ways of seeing ethnicity and race
in the United States and other locations where US-produced commercial media circulate. Black
Latina/o actors must negotiate these contested cultural sites by positioning themselves in relation
to representational notions of Blackness and representational notions of Latinidad.
Building on Hesmondhalgh’s (2007) conceptualization of the cultural industries “as makers
of texts, as systems for the management and marketing of creative work and as agents of change”
(p. 29), mainstream film and television texts are conceptualized as products of a capitalist sys-
tem that must be ultimately critiqued through questions of “inequalites of power, prestige and
profit” (p. 34). In particular, this article is concerned with what Garnham (1990) argued is the
partial, incomplete, and ambivalent process of cultural commodification. The ambivalent process
of cultural commodification produces polysemic texts of Black Latinidad that counter dominant
constructions of Latinidad as “brown” and exists in tension with dominant understandings of US

1 This article uses the US Census panethnic term Latina/o to refer to the general population of Mexican, Latin

American, and Spanish Caribbean people living in the United States. My use of the label acknowledges that each
ethnic/national group has a unique and specific set of historical experiences and contemporary trajectories and at the
same time recognizes the shared experiences of racialized prejudice, class oppression and linguistic discrimination. When
significant to the analysis, characters, actors, and news figures are identified by using ethnic-specific labels such as Puerto
Rican or Cuban. While I recognize the great diversity within each category, non-Latina/o populations in the United States
will be referenced through US Census racial labels such as Black and white or ethnic labels such as Asian, African, and
Italian.
 COMMODIFYING BLACK LATINIDAD 213

Black identity as static and unchanging. In doing so, this article expands on research (Balaji,
2009; Saha, 2012; Watts & Orbe, 2002) that positions actors as willing participants in the pro-
duction and distribution of themselves as commodities that “aspire to enter market relations, to
make large amounts of money, to become stars” (Toynbee, 2000, p. 2). The aims of this article
are to situate cultural representations of Black Latinidad in mainstream film and television as a
contested site of social meanings and to articulate the “racial neoliberal” conditions under which
Black Latina/o actors gain value as cultural commodities (Melamed, 2006).
Empirically, the article analyzes news interviews, film, and television texts featuring the fol-
lowing popular and profitable Black Latina/o actors: Oscar Nuñez, Judy Reyes, Naya Rivera,
and Zoë Saldana. Focusing on these actors and US film and television representations of Black
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Latinidad, I take my cue from Thomas and Clarke (2006) who argue that “though there has
been an expansion of consumer markets throughout the world, this expansion has been facili-
tated by the economic, political, and military (and I would add media) hegemony of the United
States and has therefore privileged American styles and tastes” (p. 7). US performances of
Blackness, whether through Hip Hop, television, or film, remain hegemonic within the global
media and occupy a space of representational privilege as a continuing cultural referent (Gray,
2005). This article examines the accumulation of racial capital through the ambivalent com-
modification of Black Latina/o ethnic and racial fluidity within the field of film and television
production. Through an analysis of media interview transcripts and film and television texts in
which Black Latina/o actors are featured, the article explores the challenges and transformations
in US racial formations as performed in the media and experienced more generally in US society.
Entertainment journalists, television and film directors, producers, writers, and casting direc-
tors become arbiters of the racial capital assigned to Black Latino actors and texts as cultural
commodities and symbolic objects.

SITUATING BLACK LATINIDAD

Clarke and Thomas (2006) argue for the recuperation of race as a significant site for research
on transnationalism and globalization. Recognizing that discussions of race always operate in
their local specificity even as they inform and are informed by the global, I propose the fol-
lowing: The transnational flow of Latina bodies from the Spanish Caribbean as laborers and
performers and how those bodies are themselves locally commodified and globally deployed in
US-produced popular culture, shape and are shaped by local and hemispheric imaginative pro-
cesses. Central to understanding the transnational flow of race in the Americas is the role of the
United States in mediating Blackness and Black Latinidad. US ideologies and cultural represen-
tations of Blackness influence how race is understood in the Spanish Caribbean. Consequently,
although racial formations differ across specific countries in the Americas, the Western privi-
leging of whiteness and devaluing of Blackness define the hemisphere (Oboler & Dzidzienyo,
2005).
Studying Black Latinidad foregrounds the historical transnational relations between Africa,
the African Diaspora and the Americas as well as global movements for Black equality. Jiménez
Román and Flores suggest that scholarship on Black Latinidad is central to understanding racism
and the significant role of Africa on a global level by calling attention to racism within Latina/o
 214 MOLINA-GUZMÁN

communities and critiquing the homogenizing role of Latinidad as a cultural construct. The ves-
tiges of African slavery remain most visible in Spanish Caribbean people and culture, and the
legacy of racism in the United States and Latin America makes identifying as Black and Latina/o
an undesirable proposition and stigmatized identity whether in the United States or the Spanish
Caribbean (Oboler & Dzidzienyo, 2005). Furthermore, for Spanish Caribbean communities in the
United States, their racialization as Black is also inextricably linked to general notions of immi-
gration and foreignness (Oboler & Dzidzienyo, 2005; Molina-Guzmán, 2012). From the moment
Spanish Caribbean people cross into the United States, the viability of the racial ideology of racial
mixture (trigueñidad) and its accompanying ideology of racial democracy is confronted by the
US system of binary racial politics, where the “one drop” rule of biological hypodescent classifies
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everyone in this country as “white” or “Black,” and those who cannot occupy either category as
Other and “foreign.”
In the United States, the US Census and its longstanding ethnoracial pentagon (Black, White,
Asian, American Indian or Alaska Native, Native Hawaiian or other Pacific Islander) play a crit-
ical though not exclusive role in how Latinas/os from the Spanish Caribbean are incorporated
into US racial categories. Latina/o Americans, who are now the largest US minority and number
more than 15.7%, or 48 million, of the US population, are left out of the ethnoracial pentagon
because they are not considered a racial group (US Census, 2010). Latinas/os cover the spectrum
of skin color and racial phenotype and are descendent from more than 24 countries of origin in the
Caribbean and Latin America. As the US Census constructs Latina/o identity, Latinas/os are a
panethnic group who also may identify themselves racially. Sometimes their identification as eth-
nic minorities conflicts with the racial classification of themselves or by others, while other times
both identities are reinforced and categorized as marginal. Complicating Latina/o understanding
of racial identity in the United States is the knowledge and experience many Spanish Caribbean
people have with other systems of racial classification and competing racial ideologies.
In terms of racial identification, the US Pew Hispanic Center documents that more than half
of Latinos in the 2010 US Census—53%, or 26.7 million people—identified themselves as white
alone, an increase from 2000 when 47.9% did (Taylor, Lopez et al., 2012). According to soci-
ologists, a majority select white as an identity even though they do not meet the skin color or
phenotypic definition of whiteness in the United States or Europe, a sociological process defined
as blanqueamiento (whitening) (Oboler, 1995; Rodriguez, 2000). Interestingly, the next largest
racial category of Latinas/os are the 36.7%, or 18.5 million, who opt out of US racial formations
and racial categories in the US Census by identifying themselves as “some other race” (Taylor,
Lopez et al., 2012). While some scholars propose that the decision to identify as “some other
race” signals an oppositional stance to US racial formations, others suggests that it represents a
desire to occupy less stigmatized categories of racial identity through privileging the ideology
of trigueñidad, which assumes that Latinas/os are neither white nor Black but are a mixture of
all races. Those Latinas/os who no longer believe they can occupy the category of white and
do not want to classify themselves as Black select “some other category” instead. Only 6% of
Latinas/os identify as Black on the US 2010 Census. Of those Latinas/os identifying as Black or
mixed-raced in the United States, most tend to trace their heritage back to the Spanish Caribbean,
including Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Dominican Republic. Almost 25% of US Latinas/os who
filled out the US Census identified one of these three countries as their country of heritage and all
the celebrities analyzed in this article do as well. Nevertheless, as the US Census data indicate, it
is rare to find Spanish Caribbean people or celebrities who are willing to identify as Black (Katerí
Hernandez, 2003).
 COMMODIFYING BLACK LATINIDAD 215

BLACK LATINA/O ACTORS AS CULTURAL PRODUCERS

In an article on advertising agencies, for instance, Chávez situates the Latina/o advertising indus-
try and Latina/o advertising professionals as a Bourdieu-type field of cultural production “as an
institution that is hierarchically organized and governed by their own rules where participants
compete for capital” (2012, p. 309). Defining fields as a “social arena within which networks,
relations, and struggle over resources take place” (Zembylas, 2007, p. 447), Black Latina/o actors
and media texts featuring Black Latina/o actors are engaged in the struggle to transform film and
television as a field of cultural production. By positioning film and television as part of the broader
field of popular cultural production with their own logics and practices and whose agents strug-
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gle for access to capital, the commodification and visibility of Black Latina/o actors potentially
challenge and symbolically rupture the dominant formal and informal rules that govern casting
practices and narrative structures within the entertainment media.
Black Latina/o difference contributes to slow transformations in established media industry
practices of casting and narrative, as well as audience expectations about representations of eth-
nicity, race, Blackness, and Latinidad. These transformations in casting and performance have
allowed some Black Latina/o actors to accrue increased racial capital. “Racial capital” is invoked
as a heuristic device to think through the ways ethnic and racial minority actors and the roles
they perform are culturally commodified and accumulate cultural capital. For Bourdieu (1984)
capital consisted of three elements (economic capital, social capital, and cultural capital) where
economic capital exists in the form of financial value and cultural capital refers to social and
cultural goods, skills, tastes, and education. Together all three forms of capital increase social
mobility and the ability to accumulate overall capital (Bourdieu, 1984, pp. 113–114). Although
within Bourdieu’s theoretical framework ethnicity, race, and gender were “secondary character-
istics” to class, he recognized that ethnicity, race, and gender often resulted in marginalization
and exclusion and limited the accumulation of cultural capital.
Rather than thinking of race and ethnicity as a secondary characteristic, racial capital is sit-
uated as a primary element for how cultural capital is commodified and accumulated. Industry
demands for targeting broad global audiences through the cultural commodification of Latinidad
and Black Latinidad signal the potential decentering of whiteness. Additionally, media audi-
ences’ desire to see their communities and lived experiences represented is increasing the cultural
capital of multiethnic and multiracial others and thereby the racial capital of Black Latina/o
actors.
Racial capital positions ethnic and racial identity in the popular media as a commodity, specif-
ically a product and condition of the politics of late neoliberalism (Murkherjee & Banet Weiser,
2012; Ertman & Williams, 2005). For Melamed, ethnicity and race are central to neoliberal
logics, what she terms neoliberal multiculturalism: “As racial liberalism did for US global ascen-
dancy in the early Cold War, neoliberal multiculturalism seeks to manage racial contradictions
on a national and international scale for US-led neoliberalism” (2005, p. 13). In this moment of
neoliberal multiculturalism, Black Latina/o celebrities are increasingly a fetishized commodity.
As fetishized commodities, Black Latina/o actors are valued for their global marketability, ability
to produce profits, and the celebrity culture that surrounds them (Balaji, 2009).
The ambivalent commodification of Black Latinidad allows us to “trace the complicity of
race, ethnicity, gender, nation, and sexuality with capital” (Joseph, 2005, p. 385). The racial cap-
ital of Black Latina/o actors is constrained by the racial, ethnic, gender, and sexual hierarchies
and divisions of labor that define media culture and the hierarchical organization and formal and
 216 MOLINA-GUZMÁN

informal rules of film and television production, casting, and narrative practices. At the same
time, Black Latina/o actors through their racial and ethnic fluidity gain racial capital through the
cultural struggle to commodify themselves, negotiate their symbolic status, and participate in the
transformation of the institutional status quo. The racial capital accrued by Black Latina/o actors
in contemporary media is determined in part by the ability of media producers and the media
celebrities themselves to commodify ethnic and racial difference into a desirable economic good
(Molina-Guzmán, 2010, 2012). Finally, the process of commodification and accrual of racial cap-
ital is also constrained by mainstream audience expectations regarding performances of Latinidad
and Blackness.
Often times the labor and economic capital that produces a celebrity, whether that is cosmetic
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surgery, designer clothes, or attendance at prestigious benefit events, is invisible. The increased
visibility of that celebrity appears to be seamless and effortless eliding the labor of agents, publi-
cists, and the actors themselves (Gamson, 1994). Nevertheless, the more a Latina/o actor can be
commodified, the more that Latina/o actor is financially valued as determined by their ability to
draw larger salaries and influence production decisions. So it is not skin color or ethnic identity
itself, for instance, that holds racial capital but rather that actor’s ability to parlay his/her ethnic
and racial identity into acting roles, advertising campaigns, and publicity. As US-based media
conglomerates compete for the estimated $1 trillion “Hispanic market,” actors who are clearly
categorized as Latina/o such as Sofia Vergara, who earned $19 million in 2011, or who can per-
form ethnic ambiguity such as Jennifer Lopez, who earned $52 million in 2012, are among the
highest paid celebrities (Bercovici, 2012). In contrast, Latina/o actors who are classified as Black
or who can perform Blackness (such as Zoë Saldana whose net worth is an estimated $8–10 mil-
lion) earn less than white and Black actors, experience more difficulty earning critical success,
and are greeted with a complicated reception by audiences.

COMMODIFYING BLACK LATINA/O IDENTITY THROUGH DECENTERING

LATINIDAD

Black Latina/o actors illustrate the potential for producing media narratives of Latinidad that
disrupt dominant media stereotypes of Latinas/os as hypersexualized, heteronormative and
potentially threatening ethnoracial outsiders (Ramirez Berg, 2002). At the same time, Latina/o
nationality and racial mixture is sometimes deployed by Latina/o actors to resist identification
with Blackness through the careful patrolling of who is authentically Latina/o (De Genova &
Ramos-Zayas, 2003; Hernández, 2003; Torres-Saillant, 2003). Increasingly, however, second-
generation Latinas/os deploy Blackness to trouble Latina/o authenticity and produce new claims
to citizenship and national belonging in the United States (Ramos-Zayas, 2007). Reyes, Rivera,
and Saldana are all US born; and Nuñez is Cuban born but raised in the United States. All four
actors are best known for their nontraditional performances of Latinidad.
In a show that exemplifies the neoliberal multicultural logics of contemporary television
programming, Naya Rivera’s performance of Santana Lopez on Glee (2009–current) speaks
to television’s commercial demands for ethnically ambiguous and racially undefinable bodies
that can attract the most diverse audience. The commodification of Rivera’s mixed-race German,
Black, and Puerto Rican background creates the opportunity for her to perform US Black char-
acters and racially ambiguous ethnic roles thereby producing increased racial capital. Before her
 COMMODIFYING BLACK LATINIDAD 217

role as Glee’s panethnic Latina, Rivera mostly performed supporting characters in Black situa-
tion comedies such as the Bernie Mac Show, Soul Food, Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, and The Royal
Family. The critical success of her role in Glee, which was upgraded from a supporting to a lead
character in the third season, has led to other ventures such as the development of her first musi-
cal album and her spokeswoman role for Proactiv skin care products. As a sign of her increased
cultural commodification due to her ethnic and racial fluidity, in 2012 alone Rivera made it into
People en Español for their 50 Most Beautiful list; FHM’s 100 Sexiest Women List at number
39; Maxim Hot 100 list for the third year in a row at number 27; and on AfterEllen “Hot 100 list,”
she was again ranked #1.
Not only is Rivera one of the few lead Latina actresses on a highly rated and critically
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acclaimed television program, but she also portrays the first Latina lesbian character on primetime
television. Santana is unambiguously coded as Latina on Glee, yet her specific Latina ethnicity
is not an important element of the character or the show’s narrative. Audiences only know that
Santana is Latina because of her name and references to her family. At the beginning of season
three, Santana is also depicted spewing angrily in Spanish. Later in the season her Latina mother
played by Gloria Estefan makes an appearance. Santana’s specific Latina ethnicity is never men-
tioned, and her racial identity, which is not classifiable as white nor is it classified as Black, is
rarely addressed by the show’s narrative. It is perhaps the ambiguity that defines Rivera’s rep-
resentations of Santana that allows the writers to produce a more complicated storyline about
the character. Throughout the series audiences have watched the sexually promiscuous Santana
accept her lesbian sexual desires, come to terms with her romantic love for her best friend, and
eventually cope with the consequence of coming out as lesbian to her family and classmates.
Rivera’s performance of Santana and the increased opportunities for commodifying her
celebrity is potentially transformative through its queering of Latina sexuality that troubles the
dominant stereotypical casting of Latinas. The most visible Latina characters and actors on tele-
vision such as Sofia Vergara are hypersexualized and heteronormative (Molina-Guzmán, 2010).
Rivera’s representation of Santana continues the tradition of Latina hypersexualization. However,
her panethnicity and racial ambiguity, the inability to define her as white or Black or locate her
within a specific Latina ethnicity, creates an opening for the commodification of an alternative
Latina narrative—a television narrative where Latina sexuality is not fixed as stereotypically het-
eronormative but rather is depicted as less stable and more fluidly queer. Rivera’s depiction of
Santana presents a significant point of tension with dominant mainstream narratives of Latina
femininity and sexuality. While still considered a sex symbol and commodified through her sexu-
ality, Rivera’s nuanced representation of young queer Latinidad and Latina sexuality has garnered
recognition from Latina/o and GLBT organizations. It is this role that has opened economic
opportunities for Rivera and increased her racial capital in the global media.
Perhaps indicative of the limits of neoliberal multiculturalism and Black Latinidad, Oscar
Nuñez who also performs a queer Latino role in The Office has been more limited in his roles,
spending most of his career playing caricatures of Latino stereotypes such as Captain Dwayne
Hernandez and Spanish Mike Alvarez in Reno 911! or Ramone in The Proposal (2009). Because
he cannot be as heteronormatively sexualized as Rivera, he cannot be easily commodified.
Consequently, he is often cast in ethnic specific roles thereby limiting his racial capital.

It’s just a person, but they keep going, “Let’s write something for a Latino.” No, just write something
for a dude, then hire a Latino to do the part.
 218 MOLINA-GUZMÁN

I remember when I first got here, everything offered me was, like, a valet, a security guard, a janitor,
a valet, a security guard—and after a while you’re like, “You know what? I’m just gonna wait tables
and call me when something else comes across the table.”
Unlike Rivera’s Santana, Nuñez’s portrayal of Oscar, a Mexican American character, is not
defined by the commodification of his sexuality or the fluidity surrounding his ethnic and racial
identity but located concretely within an ethnically specific Latinidad.
Dominant media narratives featuring Mexican American men are often centered on characters
depicted as hyper-emotional, heterosexually promiscuous, and sexist (Beltrán, 2010; Rodriguez,
2009). By performing the role of a comedic “straight man” to the homophobic and racist dialogue
of the other characters, the humor surrounding Oscar functions as subtle media critique. Nuñez’s
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performance of Latinidad in The Office breaks from stereotypical media narratives and is therefore
potentially unsettling to some audiences. His performance as a well-educated, culturally sophis-
ticated, and sexually reserved gay Mexican American accountant on the show, troubles popular
constructions of Latino men as hyper-heterosexual, immigrant, criminal, and foreign. Nuñez con-
sciously decenters these dominant expectations with the writers of the show noting that Nuñez,
a successful improvisational comedian, has ad-libbed some of the character’s funniest moments
(Knolle, 2006).
Nuñez’s dark skin and Black phenotypic appearance also stands in stark contrast to the phys-
ical typecasting that defines representations of Mexican men on television. From Edward James
Olmos to George Lopez, Mexican American actors with dark straight hair, much lighter skin
color, and indigenous or white phenotypic facial features are usually cast to play authentically
Mexican American characters. By casting a Black Cuban actor to play a Mexican gay man the
producers inadvertently contribute to unsettling the normative racial typecasting of Latino men in
one of the most globally popular and successful television programs. It is the commercial success
of this character that has provided Nuñez with increased racial capital, and he is slated to star in
his first dramatic role in 2013.
Like Nuñez, Judy Reyes has resisted efforts to sexualize and racialize her as the stereotypical
Latina equally resulting in fewer roles and less acting opportunities. Answering questions about
the roles first available to her, Reyes responded:
I mean, even early in my career when I first started I would be asked to do a Rosie Perez prototype or,
you know, do a heavy accent or ramble off in Spanish for people who don’t speak Spanish. It turned
out to be just for, you know, the amusement of non-Latinos. So you start to say no to things and then
people start to look at you as difficult. (Sheridan, 2006)
In contrast, her performance as Carla on Scrubs embraces her Black Latinidad and engaged in
narratives that troubled dominant representations of Blackness and Latinidad.
Because media culture is never entirely homogenous and at times may contradict the demands
of global capitalism, Reyes’s depiction of Carla destabilizes dominant media constructions of
Blackness as grounded in the United States and Latina identity as foreign, racially white, hyper-
feminine, and hypersexual. Reyes’s performance of Carla, a strong, independent, professional
Black Dominican woman, challenges the racial and economic value placed on white Latinidad,
Latina hypersexualization, and Latina panethnicity and racial ambiguity. Instead, the narratives
of the show produced a Black Latinidad that demands and celebrates ethnic and racial specificity
while breaking with situation comedies’ normative narratives about women and ethnic and racial
minorities. For example, throughout the series Carla often called attention to the specificity of her
 COMMODIFYING BLACK LATINIDAD 219

ethnic identity by humorously challenging her African American romantic partner’s stereotypi-
cal assumptions about Latinidad. At the same time, the character of Carla situates herself away
from whiteness often satirizing the white privilege of the doctors. In doing so, Reyes’s perfor-
mance of Carla locates herself within the lived experience of Blackness but outside of African
American identity. The dialogue, narratives, and character development of The Office and Scrubs
draw attention to the commodified flattening of Latinidad that often defines mainstream media
narratives about Latinas/os.
Most US productions of Latina romance going back to the 1940s depict romantic attachments
between “Latin” women and white-Anglo men. However, Carla’s romantic interest is an African
American man. Reyes and the writers of Scrubs reverse the hegemonic trend by disrupting Carla’s
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performance of self as neither essentially Black nor essentially Dominican but someone with a
more fluid identity. Thus, Carla openly rejects a romantic and cultural desire for whiteness. Since
it is much more socially acceptable to pair Latina actresses with white men, this is the only US
television representation of a Latina and African American man to date. Not only is Carla paired
with an African American man, but she is also paired with an African American man who has a
lighter skin color than hers, something that is rarely seen in casting culture where Black women
usually have lighter skin color than their romantic male counterparts. It is Reyes’ negotiation of
Black Latinidad that opens the representational space. In a media environment where light skin
colored Latinas are privileged and where relationships between Black and Latina/o people are
rarely depicted, Reyes’s Carla Espinosa breaks with dominant media discourses of Latinidad.
Reyes, who is a founding member of the LAByrinth Theatre Company, a multicultural acting
space in Manhattan, insisted that Carla be treated with complexity as a Black Dominican woman.
Scrubs’ narrative of ethnic and racial identity is therefore more nuanced. Although Carla has dark
skin, curly hair, and Black phenotypic features, her brother is performed by Puerto Rican actor
Freddie Rodriguez who looks more like the dominant stereotype of Latino masculinity—light
skin color, straight Black hair, and white or racially ambiguous facial features. Although Carla’s
brother is racially white and speaks fluent English, he refuses to speak English or assimilate to
US culture, further troubling conceptions of Latina/o racial identity and citizenship, especially
in the contemporary anti-immigration context. That it is her white younger brother and not an
elderly immigrant relative who culturally and politically refuses to speak English is yet another
play on popular constructions of Latinidad and Latina/o families. Instead, the casting of the
characters played by Reyes and Rodriguez foregrounds the racial diversity and ethnic complexity
that defines the lived experiences of Spanish Caribbean families in the United States, a diversity
that is rarely represented in mainstream US or Spanish-language popular culture.

COMMODIFYING BLACK LATINIDAD THROUGH BLACK AMERICAN IDENTITY

Despite the successful reception of some Black Latino actors in the mainstream media, such as
Rosario Dawson and to a lesser extent Gina Torres, good cinematic casting opportunities for
Black Latina actresses are rare. However, given the contemporary neoliberal multicultural log-
ics of the cultural industries, Zoë Saldana is part of a growing category of Black Latinas who
are able to commodify their ethnic and racial identity and accumulate racial capital through
Blackness rather than through whiteness. According to Melamed, neoliberal multiculturalism
integrates anti-racism into state ideology while still privileging whiteness, harnessing the labor of
 220 MOLINA-GUZMÁN

racialized marginalized bodies, celebrating the efficacy of free market enterprise, and most sig-
nificantly rupturing traditional understandings of race: “Neoliberal multiculturalism breaks with
an older racism’s reliance on phenotype to innovate new ways of fixing human capacities to natu-
ralize inequality” (2005, p. 14). Thus, for Saldana and other Black Latina/o actors, the neoliberal
multicultural logics of the cultural industries produce a unique demand for the commodifica-
tion of racialized bodies and the accumulation of racial capital. Nevertheless, the contemporary
cultural demand for Black Latina/o bodies remains constrained by continuing struggles for repre-
sentational equality and cultural visibility by ethnic and racial minority groups and by the cultural
industries desire for ever expanding global profits and adherence to whiteness as the normative
aesthetic for ethnic and racial minority bodies.
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In its “Casting Data Report,” the Screen Actors Guild reported that white actors are cast in
more than 73% of roles; casting opportunities for ethnic and racial minorities remain rare; and
casting directors remain resistant to hiring ethnic and racial minorities for characters designated
as white (McNary, 2006): “Casting directors take into account race and sex in a way that would
be blatantly illegal in any other industry,” said study author Russell Robinson, UCLA acting
professor of law. Nevertheless, calls by civil rights groups such as the NAACP and the National
Council for La Raza for increasing ethnic and racial representation in front of and behind the
camera often means that Black Latina/o actors must negotiate the expectations of audiences and
activists for ethnic and racial authenticity. Demands for authenticity often result in expectations
that producers cast characters or personalities based on similarities or even facsimile in physical
appearance and ethnic or racial backgrounds (Molina-Guzmán, 2007).
Saldana, who was born in the United States to a Dominican father and Puerto Rican mother but
raised in the Dominican Republic, presents an interesting example for exploring the ambivalence
of commodification and the production of racial capital because what makes her increasingly
commodifiable is not her ethnic ambiguity or ability to perform across racial categories—it is her
willingness and ability to perform US Blackness, indeed to perform African American identity.
As such, Saldana embodies an idealized neoliberal multicultural subject as she both benefits
from challenging dominant definitions of US racial categories and is commercially constrained
by audience’s response to her decisions to challenge these categories.

Rupturing Dominant Definitions of Ethnic and Racial Identity

Although Saldana has played a few Latina characters, such as in The Terminal (2004) and
Colombiana (2011), both movies in which she was cast against white love interests, her most
commercially successful characters are actually ethnically and racially uncategorizable or fixedly
African American. The roles credited for making Saldana a commodifiable superstar are her
portrayal of the iconic Uhura in Star Trek’s (2009), a role originally performed on television
by African American actress Nichelle Nichols, and her portrayal of the blue-hued racial hybrid
Neytiri in Avatar (2009) (Howell, 2009). Despite these successes, Saldana’s earnings are less
than major white or Black celebrities such as Sandra Bullock or Halle Berry, perhaps signaling
the low economic status of Black Latina/o actors within Hollywood’s star hierarchy.
Regardless, Saldana has turned her Latina Blackness into a commodifiable star identity.
Because she claims both a Black racial identity and a Latina ethnic identity, she challenges a
Hollywood casting culture still informed by phenotypic definitions of race. “Actress Zoë Saldana
has said her exotic dark-skinned features have probably helped her get acting roles that could
 COMMODIFYING BLACK LATINIDAD 221

go to either Latina or Black actresses” (Renteria, 2009). Furthermore, as a classically trained

ballerina, Saldana’s lithe body is sexually marketable, making it easier to commodify her in
advertising and marketing campaigns. She has endorsement deals with Lenscrafter and Avon and
was featured in a controversial Calvin Klein campaign called “Envy.” Yet, Saldana has avoided
being racialized by the celebrity media as exotic or hypersexualized, perhaps because of her own
demure personality or because of the politics of social respectability surrounding US Blackness
in Hollywood.
Saldana’s Black and Latina visibility troubles commonsense definitions of Blackness as the
exclusive identity of “African American” people and media representations of Latinidad as exclu-
sively “brown.” Thus, Saldana’s selection of roles presents a challenge to the global media’s
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tendency towards the blanquemiento of Latina bodies even as she problematically contributes to
the whitening of US Black women. She is a Latina who can perform unambiguous US Blackness
and a Black woman who performs Latinidad, and in doing so ruptures dominant constructions of
race and ethnicity in the United States and US popular culture.
Indeed, Saldana’s has spent a majority of her career portraying African American characters
in movies such as Burning Palms (2010), Death at a Funeral (2010), and Guess Who (2005). Like
other Black Latinas, Saldana negotiates available opportunities by seeking out and accepting roles
designated for Black US actresses. In a documentary on Black Latinidad, Gina Torres explained,
“When I became an actress, I quickly realized that the world liked their Latinas to look Italian,
not like me, and so I wasn’t going up for Latina parts. I was going up for African-American parts”
(Renteria, 2012). Judy Reyes shares similar experiences: “I would get really positive reactions in
auditions for both African American and Latina parts but I didn’t look Latina enough” (Renteria,
2012).
Performing US Blackness is so central to Saldana’s success that she carefully manages her use
of Spanish in interviews and discussions about her Latina identity: “The daughter of a Dominican
father and Puerto Rican mother, Saldana was raised speaking Spanish and English but restricts
use of the former in interviews for emphasis” (The National, 2011). While she rarely invokes
her Latina identity in promoting films like Star Trek or Avatar, she freely does so promoting
Colombiana. Thus, Saldana is strategic in how she commodifies her ethnic and racial identity
for the consumption of others, thereby carefully cultivating her racial capital to maximize her
circulation in the global mainstream media.
Refusing to participate in the logics of US racial formations where Latinas are classified as an
ethnic group, she positions herself across both Latinidad and US Black identity. When pressed to
identify herself, Saldana provides a complicated answer:
“When asked by journalists whether she’s Dominican or African-American, Saldana gives this
reply: ‘Yo soy una mujer negra’ (I am a Black woman)” (Renteria, 2007).
By claiming her Black identity in Spanish, she challenges the proposition that she cannot be
both Dominican and African American. In doing so, Saldana calls into question the erasure of
Blackness within Latinidad. Through claiming her Blackness, she critiques the notion that US
Black women cannot also claim an ethnic identity. Not only is claiming a more fluid identity an
oppositional move, but it is also a more effective strategy for navigating a mainstream media cast-
ing culture invested in bringing in the most diverse audiences across the globe. Ultimately, given
the construction of Latinos as perpetual foreigners always outside of the white majority-Black
minority dichotomy, Saldana’s willingness and desire to situate herself within US Blackness
positions her within “Americanness” and allows her the opportunity to increase her racial capital
through cultural commodification.
 222 MOLINA-GUZMÁN

Negotiating Expectations of Racial Authenticity

There are limits to the challenges presented by Saldana’s desire to straddle multiple ethnic and
racial identities. One limitation is created by the entertainment media’s ethnic homogenization of
Latinidad and racialization of Latinas/os as brown and therefore outside of the dominant white-
majority/Black minority binary that defines US racial formations. The entertainment industries
move towards Latina/o brownness reinforces the popular perception that there are few oppor-
tunities for coalescence between Black Americans and Latinas/os, especially Black Latinas/os
(Torres-Saillant, 2005).
Unsurprisingly Saldana’s performances of US Blackness are contested by some African
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American audiences. US-born Black actors and cultural activists see the casting of Saldana in
roles featuring US Black characters as opportunistically taking away scarce acting opportunities,
exacerbating the racial whitening of Blackness, and ignoring audiences’ expectations for racial
authenticity. For example, the backlash surrounding Saldana’s most recent role in the biopic
about iconic Black singer and composer Nina Simone point to the ambivalent commodifica-
tion of Latina/o Blackness. The controversy is illustrative of the ideological dominance of the
white-majority/Black minority US racial dichotomy that problematically reinforces the exclu-
sion of Latinidad from US Black identity. To this date more than 10,000 people have signed the
Change.org petition initially calling for the role’s recasting and more recently the boycotting of
the movie.
Public opposition to casting Saldana in a US Black role highlights continuing desires by US
audiences for racial authenticity dependent on colorism and biological notions of race. Discussing
the controversy, Nina Simone’s daughter observed, “‘My mother was raised at a time when she
was told her nose was too wide, her skin too dark,’ Ms. Kelly said in an interview. ‘Appearance
wise this is not the best choice,” she added, referring to Ms. Saldana’” (Vega, 2012). Underlying
such criticism is the assumption that authentic Black identity in the United States is determined
by a nonethnic US birth and skin color of appropriate darkness. For instance, in response to a
French poster to her blog coffeerhetoric.com, Tiff Jones the creator of the choice.org petition
commented:
Also, re: “I have a multicolor family and these subjects is very uncomfortable for me. Don’t forget
that at the end we are all dust”. While I understand your perspective, perhaps the mechanics of race
relations and colorism work a little differently where you’re from than it does here in the U.S.?”
(November 14, 2012)

The response reinforces authentic definition of US Blackness based on colorism and nation.
Although Saldana is a US citizen by birth and of dark skin color, her ethnic identity as a Latina
implicitly categorizes her as non-Black. Because embodied representations of identity become the
primary site through which authentic representations of US Blackness are performed, the com-
modification of Simone’s life through a Black Latina body presents a moment of contestation and
negotiation for US Black audiences.
Debates over casting and racial authenticity equally draw attention to the limitations of the
entertainment industry in dealing with ethnicity and race. Shifting from biological notions of
Blackness towards the commercial constraints of moviemaking, one of the most politically pow-
erful US civil rights organizations, the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of
Colored People), noted:
 COMMODIFYING BLACK LATINIDAD 223

Casting really is an issue of what actors are hot at any given moment, so the filmmakers can secure
the funding to get the movie made,” (Vic Bullock) said. “I would question the filmmaker’s ability to
tell the story more than I would question Zoe Saldana’s ability to embody the character.
Deftly moving away from discussions of the authentic embodiment of Blackness or the racial
policing of US Black identity, Bullock acknowledges the commercial demands for commodifiable
stars pointing instead to issues of narrative complexity and quality.
The Saldana/Simone controversy is illustrative of the ambivalence surrounding the commod-
ification of Black Latinidad. In response to the Simone controversy, Saldana has reiterated her
claims to both Blackness and Latinidad: “I did it all out of love. Out of love for Nina. Out of love
for my people and who I am. And my pride of being a black woman and a Latina woman and
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an American woman, and that’s my truth” (Hip Hollywood Interview, February 26, 2013). Even
as Saldana seeks to expand the commercial opportunities available to her by challenging defini-
tions of ethnic and racial identity, audience notions of Black racial authenticity potentially limit
her ability to accumulate racial capital and commodify herself through Blackness. Finally, the
casting of Saldana as a marketable performer of iconic Blackness signals the commercial logic of
an entertainment industry increasingly driven by the logics of neoliberal multiculturalism where
ethnic and racial minorities bodies are globally flexible commodities.

CONCLUSION

Ultimately, bodies marked as Black and Latino function within entertainment narratives to rein-
force and restructure the hegemonic codes of US Black and Latina/o identity. The neoliberal
multicultural logics of commodity culture, rather than erasing the significance of ethnoracial
difference, present an organizing principle for previously unclassified individuals and collective
identities through the racialization of “unstable and susceptible to strategic manipulation” paneth-
nic, mixed-race or racially flexible bodies, such as Black Latinas/os (Omi, 1996). Contemporary
popular articulations of Black Latinidad create an opportunity for studying the ambivalent
commodification and symbolic status of ethnic and racial minorities (Omi, p. 179).
Latinas/os occupy an ethnic and racial identity that is both socially constructed and embod-
ied in social reality through racial structures designed to maintain white privilege (Bonilla-Silva,
2010). For Latinas/os, in particular, representational success whether political or cultural has
often come at the expense of maintaining Latina/o exclusion from Blackness and an ambivalent
relationship to whiteness that rarely questions white privilege and norms. Often times Latinidad’s
relationship to whiteness is maintained through narratives of racial mixture or trigueñidad
grounded in uncomplicated notions of hybridity. By foregrounding Black Latinidad and the con-
tinuing negotiations faced by Black Latina/o actors this article critiques Latinidad’s mediated
relationship to whiteness and exclusion from US Blackness. Critical studies of ethnicity and race
trouble how representational discourses privilege the dominant cultural and social order and at
the same time highlight those moments in mainstream commercial media that are fragmented
or contradictory (Gray, 2004, 2005). The texts examined in this article are indicative of such a
moment by drawing attention to the ways cultural representations of Black Latinidad challenge
dominant US racial formations and mainstream media constructions of Blackness and Latinidad.
Puerto Rican, Dominican, and Cuban actors, like other Spanish Caribbeans, in the United
States negotiate racial identities by creating a postcolonial third space where a “radical hybridity”
 224 MOLINA-GUZMÁN

moves Latinidad away from whiteness through a dialectical tension with existing US racial and
ethnic categories (Valdivia, 2004). The radical hybridity of Black Latinas/os equally produces
zones of disjunctures in historically established US ethnic and racial formations. Neoliberal mul-
ticultural commercial logics and representational demands for racial and ethnic fluidity allow
some Black Latinas/os to accumulate racial capital through a limited agency over how ethnic
and racial identities are commodified. Thus, the commodification of Black Latinidad some-
times results in a socially uncomfortable disruption of dominant media and social narratives
about Blackness and Latinidad, such as those surrounding the Saldana/Simone casting contro-
versy. Other times, the commodification of Black Latinidad remains an ambivalent proposition
simultaneously limited by audience expectations of racial authenticity and insulated from the
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racist typecasting and narrative practices that often define other Latina/o actors by opening up
unconventional roles not defined by ethnicity or race.

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