Stereotypes that subjugate
Latinx characters in US popular culture continue to expose its imperial vocation. Review: Narcomedia, Jason Ruiz, by Gavin O'Toole
Narcomedia: Latinidad, Popular Culture, and America’s War on Drugs, Jason Ruiz, 2023, University of Texas Press
Stereotypes continue to be the secret weapon of imperialism, more deadly in their cumulative effect of subjugation through attrition than bullets and bombs.
The brilliant Edward Said was one of the first scholars to reflect on this in detail, showing how tropes in cultural production perpetuate the views of colonial subjects as inferior, subservient and needing to be saved by white civilisation.
Said’s argument was that European imperialism was not only based on weapons but also on forms of knowledge grounded in the exercise of domination employing a vocabulary that constructed and promoted inferior beings.
His seminal book Orientalism from 1978 was about the Middle East—a focus that remains critically important—yet his observations have been applied far beyond that region and remain highly relevant to Latin America.
He was observing how racist or indeed sappily romanticised stereotypes can create a worldview that both justifies western colonialism while actively shaping the world they describe in order to sustain it.
While imperialism in the Middle East was built on direct military interventions, its contemporary practices there and elsewhere are more subtle—yet no less powerful.
Nowhere is this more obvious than in the case of Latinx stereotypes created in mainstream US media, which pervade journalism, literature and television/streaming.
You only have to scan the output of Netflix to find endemic negative, and often even crudely racist, portrayals of Latinos, particularly in connection with the theme of drug-trafficking, but also commonly with the themes of rogue or failed states with unconvincing, invented names.
It is an observation that most people interested in or sympathetic to Latin America will have made at some stage in their lives, and which makes Jason Ruiz’s excellent Narcomedia: Latinidad, Popular Culture, and America’s War on Drugs the book we have been waiting for.
Ruiz examines narratives in popular culture—particularly TV and film—that rely to some extent on Latinx stereotypes: the moustachioed kingpin, the sexy narco moll, the violent gang member etc.
He cites the work of Brian Herrera on the history and discourse of the Latinx stereotype in which he notes that “stereotypes have remained insidious scene stealers, pulling focus in nearly every critical discussion of race and ethnicity in US popular performance”.
To suggest that US mass cultural production relies on formulas would be an absurd understatement, but in this case the bad guys really all do look and sound the same, as Latinos and Latin Americans continue to be framed as enemies of white America in the “War on Drugs”.
If that war costing the US government more than $1 trillion over five decades has been an ineffective and bloody failure, that is beside the point, because just as the imperial vocation persists, popular culture continues to narrate the drug trade and heroic US attempts at interdiction through Latinx and, indeed, Anglo tropes.
Ruiz explores how popular culture has connected drugs with latinidad since the early 1980s and how media representations serve “as a cultural arm of the War on Drugs”.
He notes that this is not controversial—the US government itself has engaged extensively in both partnership and conflict with various media industries over the portrayal of drug-trafficking throughout this period, with there having been several instances since the 1970s in which the federal government has investigated whether it could and should work with the entertainment industry to influence how Americans understand drugs.
His argument is that Latinx portrayals are at the heart of systems of knowledge about what drugs are, questions about preventing their use, and in particular who is responsible for US drug problems. This chimes with the work of other Latinx media studies scholars and also the broader, theoretical work of scholars such as Said.
There has been a constructive continuity in the stereotyping of Latinx characterisation—Breaking Bad and Ozark, both hailed as breakthroughs in TV, would not have existed without predecessors like Scarface (1983), which cemented the trope of the morally malign Latinx kingpin in the popular imaginary.
Ruiz brings together and analyses cultural texts that he calls “narcomedia” which he argues refer to a wide variety of cultural forms that circulate in popular culture: crime thriller movies, investigative journalism, tell-all confessional memoirs, telenovelas, prestige TV series, corridos and pop songs, big-budget Hollywood movies and low-budget art house films.
He undertakes a cultural history of drugs and media to understand how and why these narratives are constructed and a critical reading of these narcomedia texts.
In a wide-ranging survey, he examines works from Brian De Palma’s iconic Scarface and the long-running series Miami Vice to the “suburban crime dramas” that portray Mexican/Mexican Americans as threats to white order such as the game-changing Breaking Bad.
It’s a crude, propagandistic landscape in which the characterisation is often blunt and ignorant, but it is one that continues to serve the priorities of US hegemony even in a world in which narratives of diversity would seem to be challenging white supremacy.
Nonetheless, there are signs of change. Ruiz also explores how more recent narcomedia productions such as Netflix’s Narcos has turned the Colombian kingpin Pablo Escobar into a media sensation and global commodity.
He also considers the potential for popular culture made by and for Latinxs to reshape the established narratives, and how people of colour can construct their own stories outside the confines of white-centrism and the other modes of Said’s “Othering”.
Ruiz points to productions such as Mayans MC, Gentefied, On My Block, Vida, and One Day at a Time as examples of a growing genre telling Latinx stories from Latinx points of view, in which Latinos are behind the camera as well as in front.
Crucially, says the author, these examples are invested in speaking to people of colour in their audiences rather than making white audiences comfortable.
They are a good example of how cultural hegemony is always in flux and contested in a struggle on multiple fronts.