Americans buy more salsa than ketchup. This factoid illustrates well the fact that Latino culture and its products are becoming increasingly popular in today's American consumer sphere. In her book, Latinos Inc., The Making and Marketing of a People, Arlene Davila examines the processes and dynamics behind the marketing of Latino products and culture, and how the marketing practices associated with Latino culture are affecting the Latino population of America.
Davila frames the academic context into which this book fits. While there is a glut of marketing and advertising studies in general, ones pertaining specifically to Hispanics are noticeably lacking. She pompously generalizes the ones that do exist as "uncritical," stating that one after another they either assert Latino's "coming of age" or commodification in American society. It is in this framework that she fixes her more critical eye on the Latino marketing industry.
Davila does an excellent job of articulating the plight of Latino and other minority consumers. She details how advertising has marginalized Latinos and other minorities by relegating them to the status of "the other." This builds and reinforces racial hierarchies that serve to keep Latinos lock in an inferior status. While contemplating these divisions, Davila wonders aloud "whether the United States will ever truly be one nation." She emphasizes the oxymoron of a segmented and divided United States with her mantra of Latinos as a "nation within a nation."
Davila highlights the contradiction between the interests of advertisers and consumers in advertising. For advertisers, advertisements are a vehicle to make money. For consumers, they are a vehicle to represent themselves and have their voice heard by a larger audience. These interests often come into conflict with one another as prudent advertising sometimes calls for the misrepresentation or overgeneralization of Latino communities while prudent representation requires accuracy and destruction, not the building and reinforcement, of racial and ethnic stereotypes. Almost without fail, the interests of the advertising agencies win out, as they are the creators of the advertisements themselves.
Davila indeed has a sharply honed eye for criticism. In Latinos Inc. she is very adept at pointing out the wrongs of situations. By the end of the book, Davila has built a long list of these wrongs. However, she offers precious little in the way of solutions. For instance, in her lamentations about our divided nation, she points out what hasn't worked as a force uniting Latinos with the rest of the population (citizenship or consumership), but doesn't speculate about what could work to unit the entire population. Another example is her adamant denunciation of both advertiser's generalization and segmentation of the Latino population. She derides both of these advertising techniques and destructive and counter-productive for Latinos, yet offers nothing as an alternative to these approaches. She leaves the reader wondering if there is a happy median between generalization and segmentation on the representation spectrum, or of if the entire is invalid and an entirely different advertising paradigm is necessary. She sees bad advertising, but what is good advertising?
Davila's examination of the Latino marketing industry is Latino-specific, to be sure, but at times it could just as easily pertain to the advertising industry in general. As such, at these instances the book struggles to distinguish itself from the rest of the glut of advertising studies. For instance, she tries to that the Hispanic marketing industry is "uniquely revealing" because Hispanic advertising's need to "empathize, charm, appeal, or shock a potential consumer in thirty or sixty seconds entail a great deal of simplification and typification...bring to the surface the tropes, images, and discourses that have become widespread and generalized representations of Hispanidad." It seems that this observation can apply to any of the hundreds of generalized groups represented in advertising.
While Davila convincingly argues that the New York's Latino high diversity makes the city an appropriate focus of her study, readers may be left wondering if her study would not have been better served with a wider geographical focus. It is possible that Davila arrived at some erroneous conclusions based on this limited focus. She speaks of the political disenfranchisement of the Latino community, but in fact there are some unacknowledged segments of the Latino population outside of New York that wield considerable political influence. For instance, in 1998 in Texas, 20% of its U.S. House representatives and 19% of the representatives to its state house and are Latino (Marin, 1999 and State of Texas, 2001). George Bush enlisted the help of the Latino advertising agency Sosa, Bromley, Aguilar, & Associates to propel him to a landslide 1998 Texas gubernatorial and subsequent 2000 U.S. presidential victories (the agency helped Bush garner 49% of the Latino vote in Florida) (ABC News.com, 2001 and Hart, 2000). For comparison, Bush won 18% if the Latino vote in New York (ABC News.com, 2001). The Latino political climate of New York is not indicative of that elsewhere in the entire U.S. Nonetheless, Davilia relies heavily on examples from New York Lation political scene to back up her arguments. At the least, the counter evidence calls these arguments into question.
To Davila's credit, she successfully accomplishes her stated goal of examining the nuanced dynamics behind the Latino marketing industry. While informative and painstakingly researched, the book is neither entertaining nor exceptionally useful. Aside from the chapter on consumer focus group discussions, she doesn't do a good job of relating the very consumer-oriented subject, the dynamics and processes behind advertising practices, to the consumers themselves. This failed link leaves the book with very little relevance to anyone outside of the advertising industry.
