Prehistory of a Stereotype

Scholars such as Charles Ramírez Berg and Arthur G. Pettit have traced media stereotypes about Latinos to the turn of the twentieth century, ² but a look at what Whites in the American Southwest wrote and said about Mexicans in the nineteenth-century mass media reveals a much earlier origin for stereotyping. By the time the first kinetoscopes brought moving pictures to the masses in the 1890s, negative representations of Mexicans had been congealing into conventional wisdom for a half-century. In the conclusion of his groundbreaking Latino Images in Film, Berg challenged readers, asking, “How can we utilize our experience to lessen the stereotyping of Others who remain at society's fringes?” To do this, we must understand the conditions under which stereotypes brewed in the nation's media. Contemporary media scholars have examined the representation of Latinos as well as subgroups defined by national heritage and geographic origin, such as Mexicans, Puerto Ricans, and Cubans. Stereotypes about Latinos developed over decades from seeds of Anglo-Iberian hostility before the American Revolution that sprouted in a climate of increased U.S.-Mexican interaction that followed Mexico's overthrow of Spain in 1821.