Chapter Title: Navigating and Negotiating Latina Beauty

Book Title: In Search of Belonging

Book Subtitle: Latinas, Media, and Citizenship
Book Author(s): JILLIAN M. BÁEZ
Published by: University of Illinois Press

Stable URL: http://www.jstor.com/stable/10.5406/j.ctt21h4z2j.5

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 1
Navigating and Negotiating Latina Beauty
I think there’s so many different people, you know. Latinas
are of so many different shapes, sizes, and colors.
—Ester (Mexican/white, 32,college advisor)

Latinas come in so many different colors and sizes—black,

white, brunette, blonde, skinny, fat, anything!
—Bianca (Mexican/black, 24, college student)

What is Latina beauty? What does it mean to look Latina? How does media’s
construction of Latina beauty match up to or bump up against audiences’
preferred aesthetics? This chapter explores Latina audiences’ attempts to
navigate and negotiate Latina beauty ideals in relation to or against dominant
U.S. and Latin American media representations. In particular, it interrogates
how Latina audiences define Latina beauty vis-à-vis representations of gender
and race depicted in various forms of Latina/o-oriented media, especially
celebrity culture and telenovelas. While these ideals, aesthetics, and practices
are related to audiences’ desired representations of sexuality, as described in
more depth in chapter 3, this chapter specifically problematizes the women’s
notions of ideal beauty that are embedded within racialized hierarchies in-
formed by both U.S. and Latin American notions of race. In particular, I
reveal here how citizenship is mapped onto the mediated Latina body in
what I view as a form of neo-mestizaje. The participants pushed back against
Eurocentric beauty regimes in order to assert a more racially diverse ideal of
citizenship. In doing so, they embodied what Gloria Anzaldúa (1987) calls
“nueva mestiza” as racially mixed and culturally hybrid women.
I primarily focus here on how Latina audiences make sense of the domi-
nant images of Latina beauty in U.S. and Latina American media because
these images are the most widely circulated depictions of Latin(a) American

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40  .  chap ter 1

womanhood. They were also the aesthetics most often discussed and contested
in my fieldwork and interviews with participants. However, it should be noted
that many of the participants did engage in countercultural beauty practices
that diverged from the chaste, middle-class archetype prevalent in U.S. and
Latin American media. These women engaged in reappropriation by reclaiming
stereotypical images. For example, some of the women reappropriated images
of Latinas as hypersexual and prone to excess in clothing, jewelry, and makeup
by donning form-fitting clothing, bright colors and prints, large hoop earrings,
multiple pairs of metallic earrings, bracelets, and necklaces, hair highlights,
dark lip colors, and bold black eyeliner. These countercultural beauty practices
are similar to the chusma (specific to Cubans), chonga (specific to Latinas in
South and Central Florida), and chola (specific to Chicanas)1 aesthetics dis-
cussed in the work of José Esteban Muñoz (1999), Jillian Hernandez (2008),
Norma Mendoza-Denton (2011), and Rosa Linda Fregoso (1999). Hernandez
(2008) urges scholars to consider these aesthetics in a nuanced fashion: “rather
than critique visual representations of these young women for reproducing
negative stereotypes,” she suggests, “we [should] read them as indexing ethnic
pride, personal confidence, and non-normative sexuality” (66). In a similar
vein, I view these countercultural beauty practices as giving Latinas a way to
contest the sanitizing and whitening images of Latina beauty that appear in
both U.S. and Latin American media.
The participants’ call for more racially inclusive imagery of Latinas in
media and more expansive beauty norms serves as a vehicle for the women
to envision themselves differently in the public sphere. This reframing of
Latina beauty and what kinds of Latinas are visually foregrounded is one
way of reimagining the self as a worthy subject of not only media content
and consumption but also production. In other words, imagining how Latina
beauty ideals might be broadened is one way that Latinas enact citizenship
through asserting their place within the public space of media. For most of
the women in this study, discussions of media (whether in the formal inter-
view setting or the more informal setting of everyday life) provided them
with their only opportunity to produce their own representations of Latina
beauty. Particularly for those who had little access to technologies of media
production such as the internet, video cameras, smartphones, and computers,
or who did not have enough free time to produce their own media, this was
a space in which all the women could participate in self-representations. In
doing this kind of reframing, Latinas perform an alternative racialized citi-
zenship that holds media accountable for including a wider array of Latina
beauty aesthetics to reflect the racial diversity within Latina/o communities.

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 navigating and negotiating l atina be aut y  ·  41

Latina/o media studies scholars study ethnicity in a rigorous and extensive

fashion, often examining how the pan-ethnic nature of Latinidad is viewed
from both within and outside the Latina/o community. However, while me-
dia scholars do explore how media depictions of Latina/os are racialized in
the United States—as criminals, as hypersexual, as underachieving, and the
like—race as a category of analysis apart from ethnicity remains understud-
ied within scholarship on Latina/o audiences. Work is needed that explains
how the multiple media systems that Latina/o audiences encounter position
Latina/os in overlapping and competing ways in terms of whiteness and racial
ambiguity. Attentive to this gap in the literature, this chapter foregrounds
race as the central category through which Latina audiences make sense of
media’s construction of ideal beauty. In particular, I explore here how the
participants defined ideal Latina beauty vis-à-vis representations of Latinas
in mainstream, Spanish-language, and ethnic media. While their interpreta-
tions of mediated Latina-ness are related to their desired representations of
sexuality, which will be explored more extensively in chapter 3, this chapter
specifically problematizes the women’s notions of ideal beauty, in and outside
media, that are embedded within racialized hierarchies. In particular, analysis
demonstrates that the participants contested the dominant representations
of Latina beauty and inserted themselves into the beauty ideal. I argue that
this departure from the Eurocentric standard of beauty in Latin American
and U.S. media is an expression of racialized citizenship through which La-
tina audiences reclaim their worthiness and belonging through demanding
more expansive representation.

Navigating Multiple Constructions of Race

Social scientists document that Latina/os make sense of race in ways that are
informed by both U.S. and Latin American racial hierarchies (Candelario
2007; Duany 2002; Roth 2012). There is some overlap between the two racial
classification systems, but there are also some distinctions. In the United
States, race was historically determined by a rule of hypodescent (i.e., the
“one drop rule”), which asserted that if someone had any black ancestors,
he or she was considered black. In Latin America, the rule of hypodescent
was applied to people with black ancestry but not necessarily those of in-
digenous backgrounds, who were permitted to move up the racial hierarchy
by way of blanqueamiento (“whitening”) through marriage and producing
offspring (Katzew 2004). The racial classification system in Latin America
also appeared to be more complex than that in the United States, as illustrated

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42  .  chap ter 1

by the casta paintings of the eighteenth century, which outlined a taxonomy

of nearly twenty mixed races (ibid.). To complicate matters, socioeconomic
class played a role in how individuals were racialized in Latin America, with
higher income, education, and prestige associated with whiteness. In both
contemporary Latin America and the United States, race and class still play
a major role in determining one’s status in society.
While race in the United States is often perceived through the lens of a
black/white binary that excludes the history and experiences of Latina/os,
Asian Americans, Native Americans, and Arab Americans (Valdivia 2010),
in legal practice all groups deemed nonwhite historically were racialized and
excluded from certain rights, such as property ownership, racially integrated
schools and housing, and intermarriage. Peggy Pascoe (2009) notes that while
miscegenation between whites and blacks was prohibited in the U.S. North
and South, in the West intermarriage was banned between whites and Na-
tive Americans, native Hawaiians, Chinese, Japanese, Koreans, and Filipinos.
Rosa Linda Fregoso (2003) demonstrates that there were also anxieties about
intermarriage between whites and Mexicans expressed in silent film in the
United States (e.g., Red Girl [1908], Mexican Sweethearts [1909], and Licking
the Greasers [1914]). In Latin America, even though intermarriage between
whites and indigenous individuals was encouraged because of blanquea-
miento, miscegenation with blacks was perceived as taboo (Katzew 2004).
As a result, Latin America more overtly fosters a pigmentocracy, where racial
mixture is the norm but whiteness is still privileged.
While race appears to be more fluid in Latin America than in the United
States, this does not mean that racism is obsolete in Latin America. Nine-
teenth-century Latin America drew from Western European racial ideologies,
including scientific racism, which placed mixed-race people lower on the
social evolutionary scale. In the twentieth century, Latin American nations
such as Mexico, Cuba, and Puerto Rico began heralding racial mixture as
a form of nation building in opposition to U.S. imperialism. In contrast to
the rigid miscegenation codes in the United States, Latin America histori-
cally celebrated mestizaje, or racial mixture, as evidence of a racial democ-
racy. The U.S. Mexican intellectual José Vasconcelos (1997) promoted racial
mixture, going so far as to claim that Latin America had produced a “raza
cosmica”—a superior and almost magical people who were of mixed race.
In so doing, Vasconcelos elided blackness. When discourses of mestizaje are
closely examined, they privilege whiteness by foregrounding Latin America’s
European roots as a result of Spanish colonization. In addition, blackness and
indigeneity tend to be erased within romanticized discourses of mestizaje.

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 navigating and negotiating l atina be aut y  ·  43

In Puerto Rico, for example, intellectuals in the 1930s tried to distinguish the
island from the United States by emphasizing that all Puerto Ricans were part
of la gran familia puertorriqueña (the great Puerto Rican family). Foreground-
ing the image of the white jibaro while also noting that Puerto Ricans have a
mixture of European, indigenous (Taino), and African roots, the discourse of
la gran familia puertorriqueña maintained a façade of racial democracy that
also erased blackness (Torres 1998). In addition, more recently scholars have
documented the racial disparities that black Latina/os and Latin Americans
face in both the United States and Latin America (Jiménez Román and Flores
2010; Quiñones Rivera 2006).
There has been some resistance to racial hierarchies rooted in colonialism
in Latin America. Impacted by the art of the Cuban Revolution, in the 1960s
and 1970s, Chicana/o and Nuyorican artists worked to remedy stereotypes in
both U.S. and Latin American culture. Moving away from Eurocentric ideals
that subjugate indigenous people and cultures as inferior, Chicana/o artists
heralded their indigenous identity by focusing on the mythos of Aztlán, the
U.S. Southwest, which before the Treaty of Guadalupe was Mexican territory.
Pre-Columbian images were common in Chicana/o art of this area, with
indigenous women revered as mothers and sexualized lovers. Consider, for
example, the film Yo soy Joaquin (1969), produced by the Teatro Campesino,
and based on a poem of the same title written by Rodolfo Corky Gonzales,
who was one of the leaders of the Chicana/o movement. Throughout the film,
artistic images of indigenous people abound alongside more contemporary
photographs of Chicana/os. Sylvia Morales’s documentary Chicana (1979)
is a feminist response to Yo soy Joaquin, but also invokes indigeneity by in-
cluding numerous matriarchal images of Aztec and Mayan art. Nuyorican
artists of the 1960s and 1970s also sought to recuperate the historical past by
invoking indigenous and African imagery. Approaching their work as exiles,
they used their art to overtly critique Spanish colonization as the source of
their displacement (Caragol-Barreto 2005). Chicana/os and Puerto Ricans
share colonized histories that are told through Eurocentric perspectives in
both the Latin American and U.S. educational systems. Artists’ recupera-
tion of indigenous and African lineages also informs audiences’ responses
to contemporary media representations of race.
Latina/os in the United States navigate both the U.S. and the Latin Ameri-
can racial systems. Especially for Mexicans, racial classification has been
arbitrary (Fernández 2012a; Menchaca 2002). For example, Latina/os were
defined as white in some states, such as Texas, and as mixed race in others,
including Indiana; and there were also states like California in which the

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44  .  chap ter 1

courts deployed a “common knowledge” rationale based on local under-

standings of racial classification (Haney López 2006; Martinez 1997). The
category of Latina/o is a pan-ethnicity that includes people of many races,
often of mixed race. As such, Latina/os challenge the black/white binary
still prevalent in the United States. At the same time, even third- and older-
generation Latina/os still work from Latin American notions of race rooted
in mestizaje. Latina/os consistently mark “Other” on U.S. Census surveys,
opting not to choose between the limited white, black, Indian American,
and Asian and Pacific Islander categories (Duany 2002; Rodriguez 2000).
Certainly, media draw on dominant notions of race in a given society. For
example, U.S. mainstream media privilege whiteness as the norm within a
colorblind discourse that claims that race no longer matters (Squires 2014).
While U.S. media are becoming more inclusive of nonwhite representations,
especially Latina/o and Asian American depictions, whites still constitute
the majority in both production and content. At the same time, Spanish-
language media has continually been critiqued for reifying whiteness as the
norm and ideal (Casanova 2011; Quiñones Rivera 2006; Rivero 2006; Rojas
2004). Ethnic media, including black and Latina/o outlets, can provide an
alternative by focusing on the experiences of people of color, but they also
privilege whiteness in subtle ways. For example, although women celebrities
of color are heralded in ethnic media, these women are usually thin and light-
skinned, with looser hair textures (Johnson, David, and Huey-Ohlsson 2003).
Furthermore, in mainstream, Spanish-language, and ethnic media alike,
whiteness appears to be the mark against which beauty is measured. Con-
sider that while more women celebrities of color are visible in contemporary
mainstream media, these women are usually racially ambiguous (Molina-
Guzmán 2013) and depart in only small ways from older ideals of whiteness
(Quiñones Rivera 2006). Thus, all three media systems define women of
darker complexions, heavier body frames, and more textured hair as outside
the beauty standard. In the case of Latinas, this beauty standard specifically
excludes indigenous and black women.
Earlier scholarly writing on Latina audiences indicates that Latinas’ notions
of ideal beauty are informed by multiple media systems (mainstream, Span-
ish-language, and ethnic media) that each have their own racial hierarchies
(Quiñones Rivera 2006; Rivero 2006; Vargas 2009).2 My research finds that
Latina audiences are mostly aware of and sometimes critical of these racial
hierarchies, especially in Spanish-language media. For example, almost all the
participants noted that in mainstream and ethnic media, Latinas are largely
represented as having olive skin, dark eyes, and long hair despite the racial

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 navigating and negotiating l atina be aut y  ·  45

heterogeneity of the Latina/o community (Dávila 2012; Rodriguez 1997). At

the same time, most participants recognized that in Spanish-language me-
dia, especially television news shows and telenovelas, women are primarily
very light-skinned, with light eyes and straight hair. Many women expressed
concern that mainstream Latina celebrities such as Jennifer Lopez and Sha-
kira were engaged in whitening their image, lightening their hair and using
skin-brightening products to attract more non-Latina/o audiences. Some
participants called for more images of Afro-Latina and indigenous women
in Spanish-language and ethnic media. Overall, most of the women felt that
the representation of Latinas in all media systems is Eurocentric and does
not reflect the racial diversity of the Latina/o community. The participants
recognize the trappings of narrow definitions of Latina beauty in media and
instead embrace a beauty ideal that is more heterogeneous and inclusive of
mestiza and mulata bodies. More specifically, this is an aesthetic ideal that
disrupts the colorism inherent in dominant beauty regimes displayed in
transnational media outlets.

Articulating the “Latina Look”

Scholarship analyzing images of Latina/os in mainstream and ethnic media
reveals that they are usually depicted as racially homogeneous (Aparicio and
Chávez-Silverman 1997; Dávila 2012; Garcia 2013). While Latin American
media privilege actors with very light hair, eyes, and skin (often blonde hair
and blue eyes), casting in U.S. media, both mainstream and ethnic, tends to
rely on what Clara Rodriguez (1997) refers to as the “Latin look,” which fore-
grounds olive skin and dark hair and eyes. Rodriguez emphasizes that media
producers base their casting decisions on the “Latin look” to differentiate
Latina/o actors from white actors (and thereby Other them). Arlene Dávila
(2012) expands on this notion of the “Latin look” by unsettling the white-
ness of Latinidad in advertising and other media. The “Latin look” reflects a
preference for light-skinned Latina/os, but just dark enough that they can be
distinguished from non-Latina/o whites. Thus, Latina/os in mainstream and
ethnic media are not just subsumed into one pan-ethnicity where cultural,
linguistic, and regional differences are flattened, but they are generalized as
a “brown race” that fits neatly in the middle of the black-white spectrum of
race in the United States. This representational strategy signifies difference
in a sanitized way that does not disrupt racial hierarchies privileging white-
ness. The “Latin look” also reifies Latin American ideologies of mestizaje
that embrace racial mixture as long as it fulfills the goal of blanqueamiento.

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46  .  chap ter 1

In addition, the “Latin look” stems from the trope of tropicalization, akin to
Orientalism, in that Latina/os are exoticized and represented as the Other
(Aparicio and Chávez-Silverman 1997).
There is a gendered dimension to the “Latin look.” In addition to the usual
racial signifiers like olive skin and dark eyes and hair, there is a specifically
“Latina look” for women. Latinas are positioned as more curvaceous and vo-
luptuous than Anglo and other women (Lloréns 2013), and also as having more
sexual prowess, plus a tendency toward excess in their hair, dress, and makeup,
and bodies that are usually in motion via dancing (López 1993; Peña Ovalle
2011; Valdivia 2000). As will be discussed in chapter 3, Latina audiences some-
times engage in self-tropicalization by reappropriating the tropicalization trope
into a discourse that affirms agency through difference. However, the domi-
nance of the “Latin look” in mainstream and ethnic media, coupled with the
preference for Nordic-looking bodies in Latin American media, creates beauty
ideals for women that are highly racialized. Hilda Lloréns (2013) argues that
the standard of beauty for U.S. Latinas is the Maja woman, who “is white or
light-skinned, has brown, green, or preferably, blue eyes, a ‘fine,’ ‘feminine’ or
European nose, is curvaceously thin, and has light brown (or a shade of blonde),
long flowing straight hair” (550). Although Lloréns suggests that the ideal eye
color for U.S. Latinas is lighter than the brown eyes that are part of the “Latin
look” favored by the U.S. mainstream media, the two ideals are similar. The
difference is that casting agents in the United States prefer Latina/os without
overt white (read: Nordic) markers like light eyes or blonde hair because they
need to register as nonwhite. While Latina/o beauty ideals might be more
celebratory of bodies that are more curvaceous and depart somewhat from
dominant white femininity (Goodman 2002; Molinary 2007), they are none-
theless steeped in Eurocentric notions of beauty that privilege whiteness
(Lloréns 2013). In addition, even the recent exaltation of the curvaceous body
in U.S. Latina/o media sets an often impossible standard of a thin body frame
with a small waist and large breasts, hips, and buttocks (Reichard 2013).
Latina audiences easily recognize the “Latina look” as a popular repre-
sentational strategy in U.S. media. Yvette, a twenty-one-year-old Mexican
college student, noted that advertisers tend to use “general Latinas” who
are olive-skinned with long dark hair, while Monica, a twenty-two-year-old
Mexican college student, expressed frustration that there is only “one Latin
look” in mainstream media. Some of the participants also discussed this
“Latina look” as an ideal beauty standard. When I asked Regina, a twenty-
three-year-old woman who migrated to the United States from Colombia as
a preteen, what she thought the perfect body should look like, it led to the
following exchange:

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 navigating and negotiating l atina be aut y  ·  47

REGINA : Tanned. A nice portion of—the proportions of a nice body—

boobs and butt.
JILLIAN : Okay.
REGINA : A very tiny waist and tall, tanned, nice hair, a big smile. The
color of the hair I don’t think it matters, but I think most of it is
straight.
JILLIAN : Straight?
REGINA : Most of the time. But definitely one of the most important
things is being tanned, and that’s pretty much what defines a Latina.
Latinas from different countries who are tanned.

It is significant here that Regina identifies “tanned” as a distinct signifier of

Latina physicality. Departing from Spanish-language media’s celebration
of very light-skinned women, Regina suggests that the Latina beauty ideal
is the “tan” woman. In contrast to the ideal of pale skin in the eighteenth
and nineteenth centuries in the United States and Western Europe, where
middle-class and upper-class Anglo women avoided tanning their skin by,
for example, wearing hats and using parasols in the sun, “tanned” bodies are
marketed as desirable in contemporary popular culture. Indeed, the tanning
industry specializes in selling bronzing makeup and self-tanning creams
and sprays, and offering artificial tans in tanning salons. Thus, the “tanned”
body not only is a signature of the “Latin look,” it is also a beauty standard
that applies to Anglos.
While twenty-three-year-old Lydia, a Mexican social worker, does not
necessarily situate the “Latina look” as the ideal, she does make a similar
comment about how Latinas are depicted as “darker” than Anglo women:
They [Latinas] are more voluptuous than what the American woman would
be. I think more curvy, darker, with the dark hair, dark eyes, darker complex-
ion. Long hair usually. Women are prone to have long hair and have thick hair.
Yeah, women are stereotyped this way because it is what you see out there.

Lydia points to how Latinas are depicted not only as “darker” than “the
American woman,” but also as more voluptuous. This comment highlights
how much of the “Latina look” emphasizes a curvaceous body. Many par-
ticipants critiqued this construction, particularly the stereotype that Latinas
have large buttocks. For example, as explored in chapter 3, several women
expressed disappointment that for mainstream media and audiences, the
indexical marker for Jennifer Lopez is her backside. Moreover, the partici-
pants expressed concern about the homogeneous depiction of Latina bodies
prevalent in media they regularly consumed: though that mediated Latina

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48  .  chap ter 1

body is “curvy,” it is still a thin body—larger bodies are still constructed as

unattractive and needing to be disciplined through diet, exercise, and plastic
surgery. In reference to the Coca-Cola ad in figure 6 (p. 89), Alejandra, a
nineteen-year-old Mexican American college student, said, “I find it ironic
that Coca-Cola says ‘de verdad,’ but then it’s not true because every Latina is
not like that. And not only Latinas have that body. There are also other races
that are also very bottle-like . . . have bottle-like figures.”
Participants also disrupted notions of an inherent, natural, “authentic” La-
tina body when they speculated that most media images, especially in print
and online media, were retouched, or “messed with,” as Monica put it. In
particular, the women suspected that visual media digitally altered models’
waists to make their hips and buttocks appear larger. While a few participants
argued that there are indeed some women who have this body type, most were
convinced that it was rare. Some of the participants expressed that they felt
“pressure” to conform to these beauty standards, though most felt that these
were impossible bodies to achieve, even if one were to discipline the body
with diet, exercise, and/or plastic surgery. Furthermore, some participants
argued that the commodities being promoted in the ads would not help them
obtain those bodies, despite the implied connection. Isabel, a twenty-year-old
Mexican college student, ended one group interview by saying, “You’re not
gonna drink Coke and look like that, that’s all I’m saying.” In other words,
though the women might have felt anxiety about fitting into this ideal body
type, they also were cognizant that these products would not assist them in
achieving it. In fact, they lamented that it might be impossible to attain this
body shape, and in some ways it was pointless to try.
While Latina audiences are certainly capable of critiquing and rejecting La-
tina beauty and body ideals reinforced by the media, Latina actresses cannot so
readily escape these expectations. Misha, a twenty-four-year-old Puerto Rican
and a struggling actress, lamented that she was typecast in auditions for film
and television roles. On U.S. Spanish-language television, she was relegated
to playing “the bikini girl at the pool,” not only because her Spanish is limited,
but also because most Spanish-language TV programming is imported from
Latin America, leaving very few roles for Latina/o actors in the United States
outside of variety shows that display hypersexualized female bodies. Misha also
faced difficulties finding dynamic roles in English-language media, noting that
casting directors expect Latina actresses to fit the “Latina look”:
That’s how people want to see me—in a tight dress with my curves kicking,
with the hips swaying. And that’s how people want to see me, and that’s how
people have always wanted to see me.

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 navigating and negotiating l atina be aut y  ·  49

Misha’s experiences hint at the challenges Latina actresses face in obtaining

roles outside stereotypes of Latinas as hypersexual and curvaceous (Molina-
Guzmán 2013). While Misha desires to be considered for roles beyond the
“hot mamacita,” she nonetheless finds her career constrained by media in-
dustry standards that provide few opportunities for Latina actresses who
don’t have what she referred to as the “Latina look.”
Latina/o media scholarship amply documents the media industries’ reli-
ance on the “Latin look” as a representational strategy. The participants’ com-
ments demonstrate that Latina audiences readily recognize and problematize
the “Latin look,” especially as in its gendered form and how it narrowly defines
Latina-ness through racially coded signifiers. While some Latina audiences
might embody or desire the “Latina look” as the ideal, many participants
were frustrated that most Latina women don’t fit this image. While Latin
American media overtly foreground whiteness as the ideal and standard,
mainstream and ethnic U.S. media use the “Latin look” as a more subtle tactic
that allows for some racial difference but does not depart much from Euro-
centric beauty standards. In other words, Latin American media emphasize a
beauty ideal that includes fair skin with light hair and eyes, while U.S. media
present a slightly browner, yet not indigenous or black, Latina standard. The
actress Sofia Vergara had a successful career in Spanish-language television
with her naturally blonde hair, but when she sought to cross over into the
English-language market, she dyed her hair darker in order to fit into the
“Latin look” of U.S. media. Latina audiences recognize these differences in
mediated beauty ideals. Some women tout the “Latina look” as a form of
inclusion within the dominant media landscape, but many harbor a strong
desire for more racially diverse images of Latina beauty. Moreover, in yearn-
ing for a less Eurocentric beauty ideal, many Latina audience members assert
a racialized form of citizenship that demands that women of all colors and
physical features be included in dominant beauty standards.

Whitening Celebrities
In addition to recognizing the “Latin look” in media, participants also fre-
quently discussed the “whitening” of Latina celebrities. More specifically,
they expressed concern about stars such as Jennifer Lopez and Shakira light-
ening and straightening their hair and losing weight as they became better
known in mainstream media. This concern was especially directed toward
stars who were crossing over from Spanish-language and Latin American
media to mainstream English-language media. The participants speculated
that conformity with more Eurocentric beauty ideals made Latina celebrities

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50  .  chap ter 1

more appealing to Anglo audiences. Latina audiences’ discernment of La-

tina stars’ changing aesthetics are a response to the Latin boom of the late
1990s, when Latina/o stars were “rediscovered” by U.S. media giants
(Cepeda 2001, 2003, 2010) and packaged in what Maria Elena Cepeda (2010,
72) describes as a more “‘Anglicized’ image.” Adds Cepeda, “It is as if by
means of hair dye and weight loss (and in [Christina] Aguilera’s case, bril-
liant blue contact lenses, as well) these Latin(a) American women have
sought to mitigate their reception within U.S. mainstream conscience, in
essence manipulating the visual in a way that renders them more ‘user-
friendly’ to non-Latinos.”
Latina audiences gestured toward Latina celebrities’ use of whitening in
order to become more palatable to mainstream audiences, or what Cepeda
(2008) has called “survival aesthetics,” in multiple conversations. Julia, a
twenty-five-year-old Mexican social worker, referred to this trend as “the
Barbie syndrome,” which includes “the transition from dark, curly hair to
straight, blonde hair.” Elena, a twenty-nine-year-old Puerto Rican who was
working as an occupational therapist, made a similar observation:
ELENA : I think the image of Latinas is whitewashed. Like it always—
when I think about Shakira when she first came out, she had the red
hair, the black hair, and then as soon as she did that English album,
she was blonde. JLo [Jennifer Lopez]—same thing. When she came
out in In Living Color she, you know—Puerto Rican from the Bronx,
dark hair. And then as she got more and more press, her hair’s gotten
lighter. Her image, her makeup is softer. It’s not that kind of—and I
understand people obviously change and whatever, but would that be
the same if they weren’t just trying to appeal to white people? I think
they’re definitely whitewashed. Even—who is it? I know there is one
actor—I wish I could remember her name—she’s older, and she, um,
I never knew she was Latina.
JILLIAN : Raquel Welch?
ELENA : Yeah, her. I just never knew. And then I was like, she is? I had
no clue. So it’s always this whitewashing. It’s either you’re this blatant
Latina, so you get treated a certain way, or you’re portrayed a certain
way or you try to whitewash so that you’re more accepted. So that’s
what I think.

Similarly, thirty-two-year-old Lisa, an HIV counselor who is Puerto Rican

and an avid Jennifer Lopez fan, perceived Lopez to be “assimilated.” When
I asked her what she meant, she responded:

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 navigating and negotiating l atina be aut y  ·  51

Assimilated because she doesn’t look Latina. She doesn’t have a—I hate to say
this—Jennifer Lopez, every time you see her, her hair is brighter, her booty’s
smaller. And you can barely hear her accent. Every time you see her, it changes,
it’s just happening, you know. Shakira! Oh my god, Shakira! What happened
to her? She looked so beautiful with her Colombiana self, and then before
you know it, she became mainstream—una blonde. And she looked horrible
. . . that hair looks yellow, burnt. So it’s either the very—the people you like
to hate, the maids, or assimilated. So there’s no in between.

Other participants made similar comments about Shakira:

As soon as she got big, her hair goes blonde. Why? Why you gotta do that?
Say it ain’t so. She totally sold out. Totally. It was like she was trying to con-
vert herself to this English-speaking American girl. She’s putting all of her
morals aside and putting all of her—what she represented and conforming to
American people. (Carmen, 25, Mexican, unknown occupation)

Discussions about celebrities whitewashing their image were a gateway for

some of the participants to talk about these beauty practices in everyday
life. For example, in one extended conversation, Elena noted that ordinary
Latinas were also engaged in whitening beauty practices:
I think there is a lot of whitewashing that goes on amongst Latinos, like dye-
ing the hair and all that kind of stuff. And sometimes—like the last time I
went to PR [Puerto Rico]. It’s been two years, and there was even more of
that kind of trying to be lighter. I think there is something to these ads [in
Latina magazine]. The fact that there are a lot of Latinos who go blonde . . .
just within my own family, a lot of people like my aunts are like, why don’t
you just go blonde? I think you would look so pretty blonde, and I’m always
like, no, I’m fine. You know, if anything, I wouldn’t go blonde. But, you know,
I think there is—I think that’s the tricky thing with media representation is
there is some truth to it, but how much is true?

In a similar vein, Lisa, as a health professional, expressed concern about Lati-

nas dyeing and straightening their hair, not only because of the psychological
and cultural ramifications of the pressure to whiten, but also because of the
potential harmful effects to the body.
You straighten your hair, but what is the chemical doing to your hair? Is it
messing up your scalp, doing something to your skin? Are you going to have
an aftereffect later on in life? That kind of stuff. Because Latina women like
to color their hair. And that’s all media. It’s pretty, so let me do it. So stuff like
what [the] long-term effects are.

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52  .  chap ter 1

It is notable that both Elena and Lisa not only identified and cautioned against
whitening beauty practices within Latina communities, but they also faulted
the media for reinforcing this norm of whiteness. These types of commentar-
ies indicate that some Latina audiences reject such pressures from both the
media and local Latina/o communities.
At the same time, beauty aesthetics can be fraught with contradictions.
While participants contested beauty practices that might be construed as
whitening (such as dyeing one’s hair blonde, straightening one’s curly or
kinky hair, or losing weight), not all of the women agreed that these aesthet-
ics are oppressive. Audrey (Mexican) and Bianca (Mexican/Peruvian), both
in their early twenties, were best friends attending the same college. As they
were discussing how Shakira’s image changed when she crossed over into
the English-language market, the following disagreement ensued:
AUDREY: I think of Shakira, and I used to like Shakira a lot before, be-
fore she crossed over. I think she sold out. I think she’s a really good
singer and all. Her music is good now, but before she was more true
to her indigenous side. I think once she started singing in Eng-
lish, she lost a lot of her essence. She got thinner. She dyed her hair
blonde. I guess she became—I had this thing. We [Audrey and her
friends] call people that dye their hair blonde colonized because
they’re colonized by the white man. So we call her colony.
BIANCA : I don’t agree with that at all. Selena was able to make music in
English.
A : But did she dye her hair blonde?
B : Who cares what color her hair is?
A : It means a lot.
B : No, it doesn’t.
A : Yes, it does.
B : I like Shakira either way, and I think she’s good either way. I think
she did a good thing. She’s expressing herself not only to people
speaking Spanish, but people speaking English, too . . .
A : It’s totally different from the music now. I think that—I mean, look
at her image before she had red hair, dark roots, and she was a little
bit chunkier. She represented more of what the Latina woman is,
whereas now she’s a stick and she has blonde hair. I mean, if she does
this and goes to America, that has to mean a lot, and I guess it’s all
capitalism because you’re trying to, like, sell yourself, but I think that
is so wrong. You shouldn’t sell yourself in order to—if you’re good at
what you do, you shouldn’t do that.

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 navigating and negotiating l atina be aut y  ·  53

B: I think that whatever color her hair would be, they would still listen
to her.
A : No, because who has blonde hair? The white girls do.
B : No.
A : She’s not white.
B : No. You had your hair blonde.
A : Yeah, that was like—I was a kid. I didn’t know better.
B : It doesn’t matter.
A : Yes, it does.
B : I disagree completely with your statement.
A : No.
B : I think that whatever color her hair is, I think she should be able
to—it’s not even selling. It’s like extending her music to other people
besides us. I think that that’s a good thing.
A : No.
B : She’s sharing it with others.
A : Okay, that’s fine.
B : Wait. Hold on. And there’s some stuff that’s in English and Spanish,
and people are like, oh, they’re a Spanish person, and then they’ll like
get into it to. It’s not only—because some like straight English.
A : No. Okay. You’re saying that, but look at it this way. Look at how she
was beforehand, and look at the after picture. Beforehand she always
only geared towards Mexico and South America. Now it’s America.
Now she’s more Americanized than anything. She has blonde hair
and she’s thin.
B : But she just learned English, so she wasn’t able to do it before.
A : But come on. You gotta sell yourself to the American people, and
she dyed her hair blonde and she’s like a stick, and a lot of American
actresses do that. A lot of people like, you know—
B : I still like her.
A : I like her, too, but I liked her better before.

I include this longer excerpt because it reveals how notions of belonging and
recognition are mapped onto the mediated Latina body. First, the women’s
discussion details some of the tensions surrounding aesthetic choices. On
the one hand, it addresses the Eurocentric beauty standards that are circu-
lated in mass media and how those standards are reinforced in the larger
dominant culture, which can shape aesthetic choices. It amply documents
that dominant Eurocentric beauty standards inform women’s sense of citi-
zenship and belonging, both in the United States and abroad (Bordo 1993;

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54  .  chap ter 1

Darling-Wolf 2004; Kilbourne 1999; Wolf 1990). On the other hand, choices
about aesthetics are also personal forms of creative expression. In the con-
versation above, for example, Audrey insisted that Shakira was adhering to
a Eurocentric beauty standard and viewed the choice to dye her hair blonde
as assimilating to U.S. ideals. Shakira’s aesthetic choices were underscored
because they occurred during her crossover into the English-language music
market. Bianca vehemently disagreed with Audrey and distinguished Sha-
kira’s aesthetic choices and musical career as separate issues.
Further, Bianca reduced the decision to lighten one’s hair to a personal
choice and suggested that women may take pleasure in aesthetic forms that
are racialized not simply as an adherence to whiteness, but as a form of
creative expression. I bring attention to these two perceptions of whitening
practices because aesthetic choices are fraught with contradictions about as-
similation and agency and shed light on issues of citizenship and belonging.
In some ways, Audrey’s and Bianca’s discourses echo binaries inherent in
African American beauty aesthetics of “white wannabe/radical black” (Tate
2008, 147) or natural/unnatural or oppressed/radicalized women. People use
these binaries to police and shame women who engage in beauty practices
that can be construed as whitening (for example, lightening their hair, or
relaxing and straightening it). Shirley Tate (2008) suggests that we instead
view these practices as broadening what it means to perform blackness rather
than as adhering to Eurocentric beauty regimes. While I do not want to strip
agency from women who might engage in these types of beauty practices, it is
difficult to divorce their choices from the racialized hierarchies embedded in
contemporary beauty norms, which continue to privilege Eurocentric physi-
cal features. Furthermore, given the prevalence of blanqueamiento practices
in Latin America in order to gain social and economic capital, there also
remains the question of who can pass for white. While not all women who
lighten or straighten their hair may do so with the intention of passing for
white, it remains the case that women who are already lighter-skinned can
more easily pass for white or at least racially ambiguous when they engage
in these types of beauty practices. As Aisha Durham and I argue (Durham
and Báez 2007), only light-skinned women (and presumably men) have the
racial and social capital to be able to perform not only whiteness but also
racial ambiguity. Women with darker complexions are less likely to pass for
white or even racially ambiguous even if they choose to partake in lighten-
ing beauty aesthetics. In other words, regardless of stylization, some women
will always be read as black or indigenous.
Overall, while there was some debate about whitening beauty regimes
among the participants, most of the women recognized these practices as a

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 navigating and negotiating l atina be aut y  ·  55

form of assimilation and resented Latina celebrities for taking part in this
process. This is a significant response given the dominance of whiteness in
mainstream, Spanish-language, and ethnic media. These sentiments can
also be viewed as a rejection of the historical pressures of blanqueamiento,
especially for women in the form of beauty aesthetics. In this way, Latina
audiences challenge dominant beauty norms, which in both Latin Ameri-
can and U.S. media pressure women to engage in whitening practices. In
rejecting these racialized beauty norms, the women instead embraced their
own aesthetic ideals as mostly mestiza and mulata women. This assertion
of their bodies as beautiful, despite pressures to conform to Eurocentric
beauty standards, is an expression of racialized citizenship whereby notions
of belonging and worthiness are mapped onto mediated bodies (i.e., Latina
celebrities) and beauty norms are questioned.

India and Afro-Latina Alternatives

Discussions of racial representation in media were also very specific to na-
tionality. Puerto Rican women more readily identified the need for more
representations of Afro-Latinas, while Mexican women were invested in more
complex treatments of indias (indigenous women). A few of the participants
expressed a desire for more racial inclusivity in representations of Latinas in
media, especially calling for more representations of indigenous and Afro-
Latina women beyond the stereotypes. Given the limited representations of
indigenous women as buffoons and servants on Spanish-language television
(and their virtual invisibility in mainstream media) and the underrepresen-
tation of black Latinas (Quiñones Rivera 2006) except as caricatures of the
oversexed mulata (Aparicio 1998; Fraunhar 2008) and the mammy (Quiñones
Rivera 2006; Rivero 2006), the participants’ choice to include more racially
diverse Latina representations is not surprising. In fact, the majority of La-
tinas represented in both ethnic and mainstream media are light-skinned,
often eclipsing the racial diversity of Latina/os. Caribbean Latina/os, who
tend to be mulato or black, are highly underrepresented in Spanish-language
media and when depicted are racialized as closer to blackness and hence as-
sumed to be more sexual and inferior, a trend, as Arlene Dávila (2012) notes,
that Dominican and Puerto Rican audiences are highly aware of and resent.
These differing perceptions of racialization are unsurprising given the dif-
ferent histories of mestizajes in Puerto Rico, which is popularly celebrated for
its racial mix of European (Spanish), African, and indigenous roots (Dávila
1997; Duany 2002; Haslip-Viera 2001), and Mexico, which is notoriously
perceived as a nation of mestizos with indigenous subcultures (Bonfil Batalla

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56  .  chap ter 1

1996; Sue 2013; Vasconcelos 1997). While there is a growing interest in indi-
geneity among Puerto Ricans on both the mainland and the island (Duany
2002; Haslip-Viera 2001), and while the visibility of the African presence in
Mexico is increasingly discussed in academic and community circles (Arce
2017; Gates 2011; Jiménez Román and Flores 2010; Sue 2013), Puerto Rican
and Mexican women have nonetheless historically been racialized (and have
racialized themselves) along a continuum of whiteness/Indianness and white-
ness/blackness, respectively.
Jovita, who is Mexican, used her own experience of being “treated like the
india” to demonstrate how media images translate into everyday lived ex-
periences. Jovita stated that she “hates” going to Mexico City because “I just
hate how I see people treated and how I’m treated.” She went on to discuss
how the india is predominantly represented:
The india, india, you know—from plaited hair to comical almost. Unedu-
cated or kind of the buffoon whore, and her ultimate dream is to be beautiful,
blonde, and be loved by a man who is not dark-skinned . . . indias are not as
important and are ugly . . . usually. They are disregarded or dismissed. They’re
in a subservient position to other people who have higher rank or more power.
And they’re, you know, the American version of a hillbilly or a hick.

Jovita situated the construction of the india within a racial hierarchy that
intersects with class, arguing that “the class system rules. And the lighter you
are, the farther you go. Socioeconomic status is really wrapped around also
color code.” Twenty-nine-year-old Luz, who is Mexican and was working as
an office assistant, reiterated the same type of characterization of indigenous
women, noting that they are especially represented as inferior and not to be
taken seriously in telenovelas. Ester, a thirty-two-year-old college advisor who
is Mexican/white, argued that it is usually the “glamour girl” (read: white or
light-skinned mestiza woman) playing an “indigenous woman because she’s
got braids in her hair.” In these ways, hair and other physical features become
markers for indigeneity. In other words, while the indigenous woman is vis-
ible, especially on Spanish-language television, either she is a minor, inferior
character or she is played by a lighter-skinned actress in a rags-to-riches
(read: india-to-white) fairy tale. For these reasons, Jovita and some of the
other women sought to redefine themselves against these representations of
la india as unworthy or inferior to white women and therefore sought more
empowering images of indigenous or indigenous-looking women.
Indigenous women were not the only group whose depictions in Latina/o
media were discussed. Some of the women also complained about the lack

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 navigating and negotiating l atina be aut y  ·  57

of complex depictions of Afro-Latinas, including both mulatas (mixed-race

women) and morenas (black women). Several participants mentioned that
there are few representations of black Latinas in Latina/o media. Adriana,
a fifty-two-year-old Puerto Rican adjunct professor/poet, noted that “very
seldom do you see African-looking Latinos, and again you get that kind of
color split.” Elena explained to me that she had stopped reading Latina, a
bilingual magazine targeted to U.S. Latinas, because of the following:
Now that I’m thinking about it—because I remember one of my friends. She
is from Panama, and she is very—people assume she’s black. She’s very dark-
skinned. Her hair, everything. So, she was saying how come they don’t have
any people that look like me in this Latina magazine? And I was like, oh, you’re
right. It’s always again that very whitewashed—very light skin.

In sum, these comments reveal that some Latina audiences desire much more
dynamic and fluid representations of Latinas in terms of race. Some partici-
pants sought to reclaim the representation of indigenous (or indigenous-
looking) women as beautiful, smart, and competent, while others desired
more images and content on the particular experiences of Afro-Latinas.
Several of the women also expressed an interest in coverage of issues of race
within the Latina/o community as an integral part of Latina/o news media.
Overall, some of the women were especially invested in making more visible
women who are usually invisible in Latina/o media, particularly indigenous
and Afro-Latina women.

Contextualizing Beauty Ideals

Latina audiences’ contestation of Eurocentric beauty standards in both Latin
American and U.S. media may be informed by local, national, and global social
movements. Many Latinas in Chicago are exposed to various forms of politi-
cal consciousness surrounding issues of race, ethnicity, gender, class, and im-
migration. At the local level, Latina/o politics is nothing new. Latina/os in
Chicago, especially Mexicans and Puerto Ricans, have struggled for civil
rights together since at least the 1970s (Padilla 1985), and in doing so, they
have cultivated political alliances and a form of lived Latinidad (Rúa 2012).
In particular, the historically Puerto Rican community in Humboldt Park is
overtly politicized due to activism in the 1960s and 1970s that led to an FBI
investigation, and to its various cultural and educational institutions that
foreground the experiences of Puerto Ricans (Ramos-Zayas 2003). Since at
least 2006, Chicago has also been a visible leader in the immigrant rights

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58  .  chap ter 1

movement (Pallares and Flores-González 2010), hosting large marches and

rallies, and being designated as a sanctuary city in 2012.
The racial heterogeneity of Chicago’s Latina/o community also played a role
in the participants’ readings of beauty. Chicago is home to Latina/os of many
different national origins. Reflecting this diversity, some of the participants
in this study were of mixed ethnicity. A few of the women identified as half
white and half Puerto Rican or as half white and half Mexican. Others were
what Frances Aparicio (2009) calls “intraLatina/o subjects,” Latina/os who
are from two or more Latin American countries. Given the ethnic landscape
of Chicago, most of the “intraLatina/o subjects” in this study were of Mexican
and Puerto Rican origin. This particular positionality might have informed
their perceptions of racialized beauty regimes, since some women of mixed
ethnicity overtly compared aesthetic expectations for white Anglo women
(e.g., as very thin, blonde, with light eyes) to those for Latinas (e.g., as more
curvaceous and brunette). A few of the participants who identified as half
white also noted that they could see these aesthetic differences embodied in
their own families, distinguishing the beauty regime practices of their white
parent’s family from those of their Latina/o parent’s family. Also, as will be
discussed in the next chapter, most of the participants differentiated between
Mexican and Puerto Rican women on the basis of their physical features and
attractiveness, reinforcing stereotypes that Puerto Rican women are more
voluptuous, with wide hips and large buttocks, and Mexican women are more
frumpy and dowdy (De Genova and Ramos-Zayas 2003; Pérez 2004). Some
Mexican/Puerto Rican women described the pain of hybridity (Valdivia
2004b), of being neither one nor the other. Simone, a Mexican/Puerto Ri-
can woman in her mid-thirties, shared a painful experience regarding her
participation in a local beauty pageant for the Puerto Rican People’s Day
Parade. Although she was eligible to enter the pageant, given that one of her
parents is Puerto Rican, and although she did indeed win the crown, some
of the parade attendees told her that she was “not really Puerto Rican.” These
experiences of realizing differences and specificities within Latinidad, and
also being policed as inauthentic based on one’s hybrid Latina/o subjectivity,
are consistent with Aparicio’s (2009) findings about “interLatina/o subjects”
and seem to shape how some of the participants view beauty standards within
and outside Latina/o communities and media.
Latina audiences’ perceptions of racialized beauty may also be shaped by
national and international social movements such as the global organizing ef-
forts for indigenous rights. Indigenous mobilizations, including the Zapatista
movement, make visible the historical and contemporary marginalization of

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 navigating and negotiating l atina be aut y  ·  59

native people. Central to indigenous movements is the recuperation of the

worthiness and dignity of indigenous ways of life, including aesthetics. The
recent surge in indigenous Latina/o immigrants to Chicago, many of whom
do not identify as mestizo and for whom Spanish is their second language,
with an indigenous language as their native tongue, has also increased the
visibility of indigenous peoples and issues within the local Latina/o com-
munity. Also influential is the growing Afro-Latina/o consciousness in Latin
America and the United States, which is challenging long-held ideas of ra-
cial democracy embedded in the ideology of mestizaje. Certainly, the grow-
ing Afro-Latina/o consciousness has partly been influenced by the African
American civil rights movements in the United States, particularly the “black
is beautiful” movement in the 1970s, which contested Eurocentric beauty
regimes and celebrated darker skin and more textured hair. In addition,
given the large and visible presence of African Americans in Chicago, La-
tina audiences might also be influenced by local black politics of aesthetics.
Lucila Vargas’s (2009) research with Latina teens in North Carolina reveals
that Latina audiences consume black media, such as the cable network BET,
in addition to mainstream and Spanish-language media. Thus, it is safe to
speculate that Latina audiences’ notions of beauty might also be informed
by African American communities, social movements, and media, especially
among participants with an antiracist beauty consciousness.
While Latina audiences indicate that media are not the sole purveyor of
beauty standards, media representations do play a significant role in reinforc-
ing dominant ideals against which women measure themselves and which
they aspire to achieve (Wolf 1990). In my interactions with the participants, I
found that there was little overt criticism of heteronormative Latina feminin-
ity. While many of the women were highly invested in challenging hypersex-
ual discourses and imagery (the reason for this is theorized below), very few
questioned the reproducing of hegemonic beauty ideals and practices steeped
in dominant notions of femininity. Fifty-two-year-old Adriana noted that
older women are not really represented at all (except to sell anti-aging prod-
ucts), whereas twenty-five-year-old Lillian, a law student who is Mexican/
Puerto Rican, expressed the desire to have short hair, which goes against the
ideal for Latinas (and really all women) of long hair. However, these ruptures
were few and far between. Instead, most of the women discussed the gains
derived from performing normative femininity, while hegemonic beauty
ideals went unquestioned. Thirty-five-year-old Veronica, who is Mexican/
Puerto Rican and was working as a bank manager, recounted to me that she
had competed in a local beauty pageant to boost her self-esteem, saying, “I

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60  .  chap ter 1

wanted someone telling me, ‘Hey, you’re pretty.’” Here Veronica illustrates
women’s performance of dominant femininity for social gains (see Bordo
1993). In this case, she was taking part in the beauty pageant as a way to seek
social approval of her beauty and acceptability as a woman.
Even when some of the women did engage in the celebration of nonnor-
mative Latina aesthetics, as embodied in celebrities like reggaetón artist Ivy
Queen and mainstream actresses America Ferrera and Sara Ramirez, these
were negotiated identifications, with the hegemonic elements of these icons
preferred over the more subversive. In the case of Ivy Queen, for example—
who has embodied hegemonic beauty since her musical crossover with her
straight blonde hair, form-fitting outfits, and makeup, and at the same time
performs a “butch” femininity in her vocals (see Báez 2006)—some of the
women commented that they were fans, though they viewed her as “ugly”
and criticized her for looking “unnatural” (read: abnormal) because of her
mix of dominant and alternative aesthetics. On the other hand, many of the
women readily identified with Ferrera, and to a lesser extent Ramirez, for
challenging the ideal of the thin female body by having larger frames. While
Ferrera (a size 8) and Ramirez (a size 12) are far from overweight, let alone
obese, and while both still conform to Hollywood glamour aesthetics on the
red carpet by sporting straight hair, donning feminine designer gowns, and
wearing makeup, the two actresses are heralded for offering “new” ideals of
not only Latina beauty, but women’s beauty in general. In many ways, these
discussions mirror scholarly literature about the slain Tejana singer Selena
(see Aparicio 2003; Arrizón 2008; Paredez 2009; Vargas 2002a, 2002b) that
argues that this icon simultaneously reinforced and countered colonial, Anglo
beauty standards. I want to suggest that while Ivy Queen, Ferrera, Ramirez,
and Selena are shifting notions of female beauty in popular culture, they are
doing so in a limited way, as their challenge to hegemonic beauty entails
subtle changes that only slightly confront what dominant society values. For
example, all four of these icons are lighter-skinned (not one is Afro-Latina
or very dark-skinned), they are all of medium body weight, and they all
style their hair and makeup in ways that are consistent with dominant U.S.
fashion.

Conclusion
Latinas are the largest bloc of cosmetics consumers, buying over 25 percent
more than other women in the United States (Breast Cancer Fund 2005;
Costantini 2011; Nielsen 2015). Thus it is safe to assume that beauty practices

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 navigating and negotiating l atina be aut y  ·  61

are a significant part of many Latinas’ lives. Second-wave feminists (e.g., Wolf
1990) dismissed beauty as an arena that was not empowering for women, but
as indicated by Latinas’ consumption of beauty products and engagement
with beauty practices—in both mainstream and countercultural forms—
aesthetics are important to Latina audiences, as the body is a space where
tensions over race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and class arise (Beltrán 2002;
Hernandez 2008). Feminized forms of popular culture, including beauty
practices, have historically been considered frivolous by feminists and non-
feminists alike and are often viewed as compliance with the dominant culture.
The women’s responses detailed in this chapter, however, suggest that beauty
is racialized and that audiences are invested in aesthetics because they can be
markers of recognition and belonging. Feminist media scholars are seeking
a fuller understanding of the role of feminized forms of popular culture for
ordinary women in their everyday lives (Levine 2015). For example, a woman
may get a manicure and pedicure; have her hair cut, colored, and styled; and
shop for clothing as a way of disciplining her body to fit particular notions
of femininity. At the same time, these leisure practices can provide her with
a temporary break from a difficult day at work and serve as a source of self-
care, escape, and glamour while offering her a space in which she can enjoy
the company of other women (Ruiz 2000).
In both U.S. and Latin American media, dominant beauty ideals usu-
ally manifest as Anglo features (light skin, hair, and eyes), thin bodies, and
middle-class aesthetics. In this way, whiteness is maintained as the norm,
and hybridity is acceptable only in sanitized forms (Molina-Guzmán and
Valdivia 2004; Shugart 2007). This chapter has illuminated how Latina au-
diences recognize Latina beauty regimes in media and how they redefine
and broaden ideal Latina aesthetics on their own terms. As the dominant
racial model in Latin America, mestizaje has historically shaped beauty ide-
als in Latina/o communities. Is the beauty ideal that the participants in this
study produce a reinforcement of the dominant ideology of mestizaje? Yes
and no. Some of the women do reproduce mestizaje through celebrating the
tanned or brown body, but others offer a broader beauty model, predicated
not solely on mestizaje (though it certainly draws from it) but insistent on
overall racial inclusivity. In this sense, most of the participants’ beauty ideals
would be best described as a form of neo-mestizaje, in which racial mixture
is celebrated but blackness and indigeneity are also recognized as beautiful.
In this way, Latina audiences reimagine Latin American and U.S. beauty re-
gimes by demanding that the historical invisibility of black and indigenous
women be remedied, and by exposing and challenging the racial exclusions

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62  .  chap ter 1

and privileges within mestizaje. Audiences recognize that there is a racial

continuum among Latinas, and they expect media to represent it. I argue
that the participants’ beauty models are not simply a Eurocentric reinforce-
ment of mestizaje, but rather something more expansive that disrupts media’s
narrow construction of Latina beauty by challenging the “Latin look” and
demanding more racially inclusive representations.
These findings have larger implications for how race is accounted for in
Latina/o audience studies. Consistent with Ginetta Candelario’s (2007) re-
search on Dominican women’s perceptions of race and beauty, Latina au-
diences are not just looking toward Eurocentric beauty standards. Instead,
most women embrace a beauty ideal that fits more aptly within mestizaje,
or what I argue is neo-mestizaje, in which the “brownness” embodied in
the mestiza or mulata body is celebrated. Whiteness is not the pinnacle of
beauty aspiration, but something more in-between or racially ambiguous is
desired. Candelario (2007) found that the beauty ideal for most Dominican
women includes straight dark hair, a stylization that celebrates an indigenous
look and yet is not read as black. While the participants in my study did not
overtly cast blackness as ugly, the “tanned” or “brown” body was regarded
as the ideal among most of the women, regardless of ethnicity, class, or
sexual orientation. Some of the more progressive participants even sought
to recuperate indigenous and black looks. Previous research (Casanova 2011;
Rivero 2003; Vargas 2009) has found that Latina audiences do not overtly
challenge Eurocentric beauty ideals. This study, in contrast, reveals that some
Latina audiences actively challenge mediated images of beauty, engaging in
what Shirley Tate (2008) calls “beauty citizenship,” whereby women expand
what is deemed beautiful. Engaging in a racialized “beauty citizenship” is a
reimagining of the self as belonging by using beauty as a gauge to measure
worthiness in media representation. Perhaps in this way, Latina audiences
demand that Gloria Anzaldúa’s (1987) “nueva mestiza”—as a hybrid, mixed-
race, and resilient subject—be recognized and celebrated across transnational
media landscapes.

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