Latinos Presentation

Latinos presentation

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Ortega

Leonidas Ortega

Volrick Higgs

SPC 1017

October 10, 2016

Latino Immigrant

Introduction

I am proud to identify myself as a “Latino Immigrant”. I was born in Ecuador twenty years ago and lived there my whole life. In 2014, my family and I moved here to Miami because our life was meant to be here. The perfect moment to come here was two years ago because my dad got a job here and I had graduated from high school. Now, two years after my family moved, we do not have any intention to go back to Ecuador and we think our future is here. The life of the Hispanic immigrants in the United States usually is full of challenges and obstacles because we have to deal and fight every day with the stereotypes that identifies our minority.

Popular Media Portrayals

It is very common in the United States that de Latinos portrayals in the media have negative effect for the community because they have been portrayed negatively through stereotypes and also have been excluded. Usually the media uses words such as illegal, criminal, threatening, family-oriented, hardworking, and patriotic that are contradictory words to describe Latinos (Reichard). It does not have any sense that big marketing industries always use our music, food or fashion, and Latinos remain constantly misunderstood and discriminated against. Even with good intentions, saying such things is discrimination.

They put us with a lot of negative “stereotypes”. Stereotypes are negative or positive mental images we have of other groups (McLeod) . They are a set of beliefs about attributes assigned to a particular social group and behavior patterns that become deeply rooted in our mentalities schemes. Is it fair that Americans have all these thoughts?

News Media Depictions

This issue about Latinos has become very mainstream in the last year because of the presidential campaigns that were on the new every day. As you can see the Republican candidate Donald Trump got all the attention by speaking about Latinos. Talking about Trump is one of the best way to define the term “social construction”. In an article by Nicholas Kristof for the New York Times called “Donald Trump is Making America Meaner” the writer highlights how someone given a national platform can alter the national fabric for the worse simply by setting an example of bigotry and intolerance (Kristof).

In another article by Jody Agius Vallejo with a humoristic title “Making America Hate Again”, the author shows how stereotypes actively impede social mobility (Vallejo). Donald Trump threatens an entire generation of Latino men and women and he also is socially constructing the idea that immigrant laborers are responsible for many problems in the United States.

Concept Analysis

In an interview for the Huffington Post, Marc Anthony talked about the stereotypes of Latinos. The host of the interview, Marc Lamont Hill, asked the Puerto Rican singer if he believed there was “space to have different kind of Latino representation”. The answer of Marc Anthony was very interesting. He said “As far as people being in uproar, they do not owe us anything. You have a complaint? Educate yourself, take up writing, become a producer, direct it” and then at the end of the interview he added “You know what I am saying? Get up and do it – write good material, produce good films. I am not of the mind that we are owned because ‘oh every Latino on TV is either criminal... then get up and do better” (Anthony).

During my research, I found a very interesting fact that would help to understand the term “hegemony”. According to a pool made by NBC Latino, One out of three American people mistakenly considers most Latinos are illegal (Lilley). This fact shows how, for the American people, the word “Latino” and “illegal immigrant” mean the same. Mainstream coverage of Latin people is basically related with crime, immigration and illegal border-crossing. This may be the reason why more than 30% of Americans think they are all undocumented. But that is not true at all: in fact, just 15% of Latinos in the United States are undocumented, and that number drops every year.

The term stigma is the the depreciating, indifferent, or obviously intimidating understandings people with privilege give to people they sideline, and the ways people who are marginalized come to accepts or assume those negative understandings (Fasser). As I will show you this term is clearly reflected in a phenomenon that still occurs nowadays. According to an article that the Chicago Tribune Newspaper posted in October 2015, the white men gain more money than the black men, and black men gain more than Hispanics (Marks). According to the portal CNN Money, whereas retail employees receive $15.32 per hour, on typical, while African American and Latino retail employee regular less than $ 11.75, according to a current investigation of government data by NAACP and Demos, a left-leaning think tank (Bhattacharya). The reason that this portal shows I very simply, white personnel are more likely to be stimulated to manager roles and at the same time