NEWS
A post-NAFTA star
- By Reed Johnson,
- Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
May 28, 2006 - Send comments on this story to calendar.letters@latimes.com
- http://www.latimes.com/news/custom/showcase/la-ca-eva28may28,0,6489414.story?
Texas-born Eva Longoria is a phenomenon by herself. But she's also part of a bigger happening: A growing hybrid pop culture with a bilingual sensibility all its own.
QUICK, somebody, seal the border! Call out the
National Guard, the Minutemen, the Motion Picture Assn. of America!
Round up the chief accomplices — Gael García Bernal, the writers of
"Desperate Housewives" — and notify Congress muy pronto.
America is being invaded by Mexican culture, and our republic may never
be the same.
This spring, the barriers that once used to keep
out the southern hordes (telenovelas, ranchera tunes) began to
crumble like the walls of the Alamo. In March, the L.A. Coliseum played
host to some 60,000 screaming pubescent devotees of the Mexican pop
group RBD, a spinoff of the Mexican-import TV show "Rebelde," which has
teeny-boppers swooning on both banks of the Rio Bravo. Meanwhile,
Televisa, the Mexican network giant that produces "Rebelde," has become
one of the leading candidates to acquire Univision Communications Inc.,
the nation's preeminent Spanish-language media conglomerate.
But none of these events could have prepared Americans for the, ah,
cultural temblor of this month's issue of Maxim. There at center stage
in the lustful laddie magazine was Eva Longoria, the Mexican American
model-actress who plays the sultry, strong-willed Latina trophy wife
Gabrielle Solis on "Desperate Housewives," the hit ABC prime-time soap
opera that wrapped up its second season last week. Reflecting
both the show's success and her own surging career, Longoria for the
second year in a row topped Maxim's "annual Hot List," besting such
fair-skinned rivals as Lindsay Lohan, Scarlett Johansson and Keira
Knightley.
Granted, this news bulletin is unlikely to sway the deliberations of the
U.S. Senate as it ponders a slew of controversial immigration reforms.
But at a time when Mexico and the United States are again struggling to
sort out their tangled political relationship, the Texas-born Longoria
is a potent symbol of how Mexicans, and Mexican Americans, are
dramatically reshaping U.S. pop culture — and being reshaped by it. More
specifically, Longoria represents the emergence of a new hybrid popular
culture with a frisky, bilingual sensibility all its own.
The political brouhaha over the vast numbers of Mexican illegal
immigrants pouring into the United States is likely to be with us for
years to come. But lost in the uproar over demonstrators waving Mexican
flags, and the Spanish-language version of "The Star-Spangled Banner,"
is that most Mexican and Latin immigrants, particularly children and
young people, begin to assimilate American cultural values practically
the moment they set foot in the United States, even before some of them
learn to speak English.
"The whole acculturation process begins the minute they cross that
border," says Manny González, vice president and managing director of
Hill Holliday Hispanic/abecé, a Miami-based ad agency that specializes
in the Latino market. In fact, González says, there are two concurrent
transformations happening today. "While American mainstream culture is
changing because it's being Latinized, Latino culture in itself is
changing," he says.
The resultant phenomenon goes beyond the periodic "Latin crazes" that
have swept America every decade or so, then vanished as suddenly as they
began, says González, who was born in Ciudad Juárez and moved to Los
Angeles with his family as a child. The new wave is not merely a
tokenistic fad, like Carmen Miranda turbans, Ricky Ricardo's mambo club
on "I Love Lucy" or the Puerto Rican singer Ricky Martin livin' la
vida loca. Fernando Valenzuela on a corn flakes box is one thing;
Longoria in a wet negligee in the pages of a leading men's magazine —
or, in more formal attire, doing charity work on behalf of Latin
Americans — is quite another.
*
Through the mainstream
TO begin with, Longoria, 31, cannot be viewed simply as the latest
incarnation of the exotic Latin American Other, like the Mexican screen
goddesses and pinup girls of old. The former Miss Corpus Christi is as
much a U.S. citizen as any Boston Brahmin descended from Cotton Mather.
Her path to showbiz stardom is similarly mainstream: talent show
contests, some modest TV parts ("General Hospital," "Beverly Hills,
90210") before landing her current breakout role. So there's no need to
trot out the usual metaphors about the "spicy" new ingredient in the
national stew. Longoria's success story is as American as apple pie, or
hot sauce. She even likes guns — what's more American than that?
At the same time, Longoria takes evident pride in "mi sangre mexicana,"
"my Mexican blood," as she has put it in interviews. Unlike some members
of previous generations of Mexican American and Latin American
performers who dyed their hair and ditched their Spanish surnames,
Longoria consistently emphasizes her roots. A Los Angeles resident, she
serves as national spokeswoman for Padres Contra el Cancer, which helps
Latinos with cancer. She also worked with the John Kerry-John Edwards
campaign to spread the 2004 Democratic presidential nominees' message to
Latino voters.
As an apparent testament to the image she projects, Longoria hosted and
co-produced the 2006 ALMA Awards, which were taped this month at the
Shrine Auditorium and will be broadcast June 5 on ABC. The awards are
presented by the National Council of La Raza, the largest U.S. Latino
civil rights and advocacy organization, roughly the equivalent of the
NAACP.
In Mexico, the second season of "Desperate Housewives" has been running
Tuesday evenings on the powerful national TV Azteca network, while the
first season is being rebroadcast on the same network Monday through
Friday evenings — a measure of the show's popularity here.
In recent months, Longoria has spent time in Mexico City, Baja
California and her ancestral homeland in the northern industrial city of
Monterrey, where the local paparazzi received her like visiting royalty.
She is, one might say, our first post-NAFTA sex symbol.
"She's very proud of her background," says Liza Anderson, Longoria's
longtime personal publicist and friend. "It's something that definitely
makes up a major part of who she is." (Longoria was busy heading to the
Cannes film festival last week and couldn't be reached for an
interview.)
Stephen Palacios, executive vice president of Cheskin, a Bay Area
consulting firm with an expertise in Hispanic marketing, says that
Longoria's identification with her Mexican roots reflects a phenomenon
seen among other second- and third-generation Latin Americans who were
educated in English and raised on U.S. pop culture. "What we find is
that assimilated Hispanics are often looking to what we call
'retro-acculturate,' to reclaim aspects of their ethnic identity," he
says.
It's the flip side, he suggests, of what the Mexican-born actress Salma
Hayek has done in crossing over to make Hollywood movies and becoming a
regular presence in U.S. media. "Maybe Salma and Eva are somewhat
representative of the trend toward biculturalism but from different
starting points," Palacios says. A handful of bilingual stars such as
Jennifer Lopez, of Puerto Rican ancestry, and Thalía, the Mexican
singer, actress and one-woman business conglomerate, are other examples.
Ironically, Longoria has said that as the youngest of four sisters, and
the only one with dark hair, eyes and skin, she was called prieta fea,
the Mexican equivalent of ugly duckling. But rather than disguising her
Latin features, she has made them her professional calling card,
endearing her both to Mexicans and Mexican Americans (not to mention
L'Oreal, which has signed her to a fat endorsement contract).
Since "Desperate Housewives" began airing south of
the border, Longoria has become a favorite of the Mexican media, in part
because she has embraced rather than downplayed her heritage, as the
Mexican edition of Marie Claire magazine pointedly noted in a May cover
story.
Longoria's adulterous "Desperate Housewives" character also is turning
some cultural stereotypes on their head. The show, an American Gothic
take on suburban living, is itself a hybrid of satire and drama. Aided
by deft scripts and a preternaturally shiny production design, the
lovelies of Wisteria Lane bend postwar clichés about infidelity, status
envy and spiritual malaise amid the well-kept hedgerows.
This may be especially true of Longoria's
Gabrielle, a social climber who married way, way up into a life of
pampered boredom. As one of the few middle-class Latinas to be depicted
on a prime-time show, Gabrielle is a pop culture novelty. But she has
other taboo-tampering qualities as well: she not only dominates her
nice-guy husband — an upending of traditional Latin machismo — but has
had a fling with her young Anglo gardener.
In Mexico's rigidly moralistic telenovelas, philandering females
are summarily flogged for these sorts of moral transgressions. But
Gabrielle, like a modern-day Becky Sharp, dances around her
peccadilloes.
She also differs physically from the typically blond, light-skinned
actresses on the telenovelas that are produced by Mexico's
Televisa network and air in the U.S. on Univision. Ironically, while
Televisa (via Univision) serves up light-complexioned heroines that
reflect Mexico's own seldom-acknowledged ethnic prejudices, ABC is
offering Mexican American viewers in the U.S. a Latina character whose
skin tone and eye shade are far more likely to accord with their own.
It remains to be seen how Longoria's image will evolve as she segues
from TV into feature films. She has finished making the indie "Harsh
Times," starring Christian Bale. "The Sentinel," released this year,
with Michael Douglas, in which Longoria plays a Secret Service agent,
was widely panned.
*
A history of blending
WHAT Longoria personifies, on screen and off, is cultural duality,
the notion that two different things can share an identity without
sacrificing their distinct individual properties. For centuries, this
has been an essential component of Latin American identity and thought.
It is expressed most succinctly in concepts such as mestizaje and
syncretism, the mixing of clashing ethnic and cultural attributes,
literally through sex and figuratively through the interchange of
traditions, customs and beliefs.
To Mexicans and other Latins, this type of cultural blending — of pagan
and Christian gods, opposing philosophical systems, bloodlines, musical
styles, whatever — is as old as the pyramids at Teotihuacan.
But north of the border, historically, the idea of cultural mixing has
been tainted by fears of miscegenation, more bluntly known as
"interracial sex," one of the hobgoblins of the Anglo-Saxon mind. Our
popular culture is filled with images of tragic Spanish American or
Mexican American "half-breeds" caught between two worlds, from "Ramona"
to Jennifer Jones as the doomed, mixed-race Pearl Chavez in King Vidor's
nutty, hysteria-laced western "Duel in the Sun" (1946).
As America's newly anointed sex goddess, Longoria — not unlike Jesse
Owens or Jackie Robinson before her — is undermining an old-fashioned
racial ideology whose locus is human sexuality and the human body. So is
Longoria's paramour Tony Parker, the San Antonio Spurs' star point
guard, who was born in Belgium to an African American father and a
European mother and raised in France. Both are part of the massive
remixing of hyphenated-American culture underway.
Evidence of this two-way transformation abounds. In a recent "Saturday
Night Live" broadcast, Colombian pop star Shakira belted out one song in
English ("Don't Bother") and the other in Spanish ("La Tortura"). This
summer, Jack Black will star with a mostly Mexican supporting cast in
"Nacho Libre," about a priest who becomes a Mexican free-style, or "lucha
libre," wrestler (a sport that has gained a U.S. cult following among
non-Latinos).
Top U.S. publishing houses like Alfred A. Knopf are putting out
Spanish-language editions of quality literature, such as Gabriel García
Márquez's memoir "Vivir para contarla." Viacom's MTV has announced that
this year it will launch MTV Tr3s (pronounced "MTV Three," or tres,
in Spanish), with a bilingual format targeting bicultural U.S. Latinos
between 12 and 34.
"It's to give them the voice and kind of the validation that they are
leading today's pop culture," says MTV publicist Emma Carrasco. "That's
true across all trends, whether it's style or fashions or music."
At last week's Cannes Film Festival, after all the hoopla over "The Da
Vinci Code" was deflated by mediocre reviews, the media masses turned
their attention to fresher efforts such as Richard Linklater's "Fast
Food Nation," an adaptation of Eric Schlosser's nonfiction bestseller.
The movie, which stars Ethan Hawke and the up-and-coming Mexican actress
Ana Claudia Talancón as an illegal immigrant working in a fast food
restaurant, was labeled by a New York Times critic as "the most
essential political film from an American director since Michael Moore's
'Fahrenheit 9/11….' "
Talancón, a former Mexican telenovela star, personifies the new
breed of frontera-straddling young performer. The prototype, of
course, is García Bernal, the 27-year-old from Guadalajara who burst
into global cinematic consciousness a few years ago with very different
portrayals in two watershed Mexican movies, "Amores Perros" and "Y Tu
Mamá También."
Fittingly, his next role, in James Marsh's "The King," will be as a
Mexican American vagabond named Elvis who arrives in a small Texas town
seeking the father he's never met, a Baptist preacher played by William
Hurt. The theme of a cross-border search for a missing identity — a
long-lost part of one's self — also animates John Sayles' "Lone Star"
(1996) and Tommy Lee Jones' "The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada"
(2005).
This phenomenon of inhabiting more than one culture simultaneously,
without feeling a sense of conflicted loyalties, differs in important
ways from Chicanismo, the political-cultural movement that arose among
Chicanos (people of Mexican descent born in the United States) in the
1960s. Chicanismo was a survival strategy for members of a minority
group struggling to get along in a society that treated them as
third-class citizens. By necessity, its supporters felt, Chicanismo
often took an aggressive stance of resistance toward mainstream U.S.
culture.
The new dualism favors assimilation over resistance. Rather than being
grounded in identity politics, it's being fueled by technology and the
free flow of goods, ideas and talent across an increasingly open and
globalized border. This border is not merely a physical place. It exists
on the airwaves and in cyberspace as well, in big urban centers and
remote pueblitos.
Its influence is especially evident among Mexican Americans and other
Latino American youth, who are seeing themselves reflected not only in
TV, movies and books but on millions of individual MySpace.com pages.
They're wearing LeBron James jerseys, but they may root as hard (or
harder) for El Tri, the Mexican national soccer team, as for the U.S.
squad in the upcoming World Cup.
"In a sense, mainstream media have opened up a Pandora's box. Now that
they've teased Latinos and young Latinos in particular, they will want
more," says analyst González. "That is the crux of what this
transformation of Latinos is all about: What media entity out there,
Spanish or English, will do a better job of reflecting the reality of
what Latinos are experiencing today?"
For many Americans, especially in the heartland, the size of last
month's pro-immigration demonstrations registered as a profound shock.
Where did all these people come from? some wondered aloud. It was
like finding out at middle age that you have a half-sibling your parents
never told you about.
But the cultural inter-connectedness of Mexico and the United States
should be seen less as a revelation than as the inevitable rediscovery
of a centuries-old family tie. We always have shared some of the same
DNA, whether we knew it or not.
Staring at each other across the border and increasingly through the
kaleidoscope of pop culture, Mexicans and Americans have come face to
face with their own double nature — dramatized, for the moment, by an
iconographic young actress at home in either world
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