Latino Spin: Public Image and the Whitewashing of Race - Tapa dura

"Her invaluable scholarly treatment unearths the competing interests and race-inflected ideological tendencies behind characterizations of Latino political identity in the mainstream media." -Publishers Weekly "A wonderfully written book that cuts through the 'spin' often used to typecast the U.S.'s largest minority group. Offering a fresh and insightful take on race in America, Arlene Davila addresses popular images of Latinos and shows us the limitations of both negative portrayals and the attempts to respond to them. In this tour de force, Davila goes beyond simply describing bias to offer a transcendent vision of Latinos that challenges racism and captures the complexity of this diverse community." -Mark Sawyer,author of Racial Politics in Post Revolutionary Cuba "Arlene Davila depicts the frenzied efforts of post-industrial America to corral more than 40 million diverse Latinos into a single homogenized market. Whether it's peddling consumer goods, monetizing art and culture, engineering barrio land development, or shaping a new political voting bloc, Latino Spin brilliantly dissects Hispanic-American reality in the 21st century." -Juan Gonzalez,author of Harvest of Empire: A History of Latinos in America "A must read for students as well as a general public concerned with the future role of Latinos in U.S. society. Davila also lays the foundation for understanding events that have occurred since the book's publication."-Journal of American Ethnic History "The finest, fiercest and most piercing of our public intellectuals ... Davila is a force of nature. In Latino Spin Davila elegantly unravels the media driven sleight-of-hand that simultaneously celebrates an uber-American (and almost entirely manufactured) Latino middle class while demonizing recent Latino immigrants and the poor folks who resemble them. On a line by line, idea by idea basis Davila is simply without peer, her scholarship essential to our understanding of our New America." -Junot Diaz,author of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao and Drown