Contextual Construction of Latinidad

• In Event: 129 - Section on Latino/a Sociology Roundtables (one-hour)
  In Refereed Roundtable: Table 02. Acculturation and Construction of Latino Identity

Abstract

Past research on the narratives surrounding Latinos in popular media has focused on the negative depictions arguing that Latinos are framed as immigrants, criminals, a cultural threat, and that the usage of martial and maritime metaphors dominates the discussion of Latinos. Another strand of research claims that the construction of these narratives in popular media is complex, involving multiple, contradictory depictions of Latinos and input from multiple stakeholders. In this project I take a more inductive approach to analyzing the construction of Latinidad in popular media without privileging one construction over the others. Building off of research that argues that the meaning is contextual, I analyze newspaper text that mention the terms “Hispanics” or “Latinos”. I run a topic model on the three largest national newspapers to extract topics that are used when discussing Latinos. The advantage topic modeling has over other methods is that the algorithm creates topics (lists of co-occurring words) without any input from the researcher, thus allowing for a more inductive look at the context within which Hispanics are discussed and, by extension, the narratives framing Latinos. The results show that topics dealing with immigration and crime do arise, as is argued by some researchers. However, topics dealing with elections, sports, and marketing also arise. Additionally, over time the use of topics has changed. This research supports the argument that depictions of Hispanics are complex, involving multiple dimensions, and that narratives are not static but changes over time.

Author

• Jean Nava, Princeton University