No more prostitutes, pimps, & pushers: deploying Hispanic panethnicity in media advocacy

ABSTRACT

This article explores the media advocacy strategies utilized by Hispanics in the 1980s through an examination of the National Hispanic Media Coalition’s (NHMC’s) campaign against KCBS-TV, Los Angeles. Relying on archival materials and interviews, it argues that through their deployment of Hispanic panethnicity, embodiment of respectability politics, management of the aesthetics of media activism, and reliance on post-civil rights laws, the NHMC utilized the threat of a petition to deny a license renewal as a means to enter into minority agreements with broadcasters and improve the employment of Hispanics in the media at the national level. The NHMC would be the first media organization to speak nationally and pan-ethnically for all Hispanics in media-related litigation issues and use this rhetoric as a way to push stations to comply with Equal Employment Opportunity requirements.

KEYWORDS:

• Media activism
• Latino media
• media policy
• race & ethnicity
• media industry studies

Acknowledgements

Special thanks to Alejandro Herrero-Olaizola, Yeidy M. Rivero, Colin Gunckel, Simone Sessolo, the NHMC, and the UCLA Special Collections Librarians.

Notes on contributors

Arcelia Gutiérrez is an assistant professor at the University of Kentucky, Lexington. Her research focuses on Latino/a/x media activism and advocacy from the 1980s to the present.

ORCID

Arcelia Gutiérrez http://orcid.org/0000-0002-2118-7498