Latinas have played significant roles as content creators, media professionals, performers, and audience members throughout the development of film, television, radio, commercial music, and digital media culture in the United States and throughout the Latina/o/x diaspora. However, as is the case for the subjects of feminist media studies more generally, the histories of influential Latinas are rarely encountered in film and media scholarship. Similarly, they have often been overlooked by scholars who aim to recover the histories of women in film and media.
Scholarship that takes “the history and experiences of Latinas and the media seriously,” as Angharad Valdivia notes, participates in an inherently feminist intervention.1 In this regard, it is thanks to scholars such as Valdivia, Rosa Linda Fregoso, Frances Aparicio, Ana M. López, Michelle Habell-Pallán, and Frances Negrón-Muntaner, each of whom made great strides in bringing Latina histories into the realm of academic scholarship in the last...
University of California Press