Brownface!

 
Introduction

Brownface refers to the creation and propagation of racist Latino/Hispanic stereotypes and caricatures. "Latino" is the umbrella term for people of Latin American descent that in recent years has supplanted the more imprecise term "Hispanic." Cuban Americans, Puerto Ricans, Mexican Americans, and any people who trace their ethnic roots back to Central or South America are considered Latino if they live in the United States. 

Racist Latino Stereotypes

Hispanic Americans, like many other minority groups in the US, have long suffered from the effects of racial stereotyping. Typical stereotypes include: the Greaser, the Lazy Mexican, the Latin Lover, the Mamacita, maids, slum dwellers, drug addicts, gang bangers, feisty Latinas, the Mexican Spitfire, and the Exotica. 

Hispanics have been portrayed by the media as lazy, unintelligent, greasy, criminal, and alien. Their contributions culturally, economically, and historically have never been properly documented or appreciated. Instead, Hispanics in general, and American Hispanics in particular, have been the victims of racist stereotyping in an unbroken string of images and portrayals that began with the battle over Mexican land in the Southwest as America expanded during the frontier era. 

In the United States, especially in the Southwest, Manifest Destiny meant taking land from Mexico, displacing Mexican landowners, subjugating the natives, and exploiting them as cheap and expendable labor. In order to rationalize the displacement of the Southwest Hispanics, as they had done with American Indians in the East, Latinos—whether U.S. citizens, newly arrived migrants from the south, or Latin Americans in their own countries—were thought of as lesser humans. 

During the California Gold Rush, as many as 25,000 Mexicans arrived in California. Many of these Mexicans were experienced miners and had great success mining gold in California. Some Whites believed their success was a threat and began intimidating Mexican miners with violence. Between 1848 and 1860, at least 163 Mexicans were lynched in California alone.

An anti-Mexican law enacted in 1855 in California was thinly disguised as an anti-vagrancy statute but commonly known as The Greaser Act. The law defined a vagrant as "all persons who are commonly known as 'Greasers' or the issue of Spanish and Indian blood... and who go armed and are not peaceable and quiet persons." The law was repealed a few years later.

In the 1940s, imagery in newspapers and crime novels portrayed Mexican American zoot suiters as criminals. Anti-zoot suiters sentiment sparked a series of attacks on young Mexican American males in Los Angeles which culminated in what became known as the Zoot Suit Riots. During the worst of the rioting approximately 5,000 servicemen and civilians gathered in downtown Los Angeles and attacked Mexican-American zoot suiters and non-zoot suiters alike.

Hollywood operates on stereotypes as a shorthand way of defining characters in ways that are easy for audiences to identify and digest. But a steady diet of negative stereotypes as portrayed in the media can be very destructive to young people if there are also very few positive role models that they can identify with.
 
 

The Latin Lover

The Latin Lover stereotype was first popularized by Italian actor Rudolph Valentino and became a film standard after his performances in The Sheik (1921) and Son of the Sheik (1926).
 

The Domestic

Hispanic domestics are a staple in media depictions of affluent American families. The Hispanic Maid and Gardener stereotypes speak heavily accented English liberally sprinkled with Spanish words and phrases. 
 

The Male Buffoon

The Male Buffoon always plays the fool for comic relief. He is childish, simpleminded and bumbling. 

The Harlot

The Harlot is lusty and hot-tempered; a slave to her passions.

The Female Clown

The Female Clown is the comic counterpart of the Latino male buffoon and, like the harlot, exemplifies a common device that the Hollywood narrative employs to neutralize the screen Latina's sexuality. This is a necessary requirement because the hero must have a reason to reject the Latina in favor of the Anglo woman, thereby maintaining the WASP status quo. For that to occur, the Latina's sexual allure must somehow be negated. 

The Bandito

The Bandito is dirty and unkempt, usually displaying an unshaven face, missing teeth, perhaps a gold tooth, and disheveled, oily hair. The face is scared and scowling to complete the easily recognizable stereotype. He is vicious, cruel, treacherous, shifty, and dishonest; psychologically he is irrational, overly emotional, and quick to resort to violence. His inability to speak English or his English with a very heavy Spanish accent is Hollywood's way of signaling his feeble intellect, a lack of brainpower that makes it impossible for him to plan or strategize successfully. The bandito lives on in American film as Latino drug runners, Puerto Rican toughs in New York, and East LA homeboy gang-bangers.
  

What these stereotypes all have in common is that they reduce to a one-sided, superficial and exaggerated depiction the real variety and depth and complexity of a struggling people. Significantly, the underlying social issues affecting Latino life in the United States have seldom been addressed in Hollywood films, and hardly ever have Latinos been portrayed as people in control of their lives, capable of standing up for their rights, or having an interest in their own future.

Brownface in Film and TV

Throughout the 20th Century, actors, writers, and directors often brought their personal prejudices to their work, portraying a world of stereotypes: sombreros and serape-draped Mexicans taking siestas on sidewalks; Mexicans consuming only the three diet staples of chile, tacos, and liquor; the Hispanic inevitably seeking political and social guidance, acceptance, and "enlightenment" from Whites. Portrayals were so insulting that for several years Mexico banned American movies due to their negative depictions of Mexicans.

As early as 1908, D. W. Griffith's The Thread Of Destiny used the term "greaser" to identify a Mexican bandit. Later silent films took this portrayal and expanded it in such films as Tony the Greaser (1911), The Greaser's Revenge (1914) and Broncho Billy and the Greaser (1914). At a time when revolutionaries were struggling to free Mexico from the Porfirio Diaz dictatorship, Hollywood completely ignored the revolution in Mexico in favor of using Mexican banditos and peons as convenient props for Westerns. 

With the advent of sound the stereotypes remained, although it did go through some modifications — such as that of the Cisco Kid film series produced during the 1930s and 1940s. Unlike the traditional Mexican bandit, portrayed as foul and greasy, the Cisco Kid was a more refined Californio, a dashing Robin Hood type. But he was definitely the exception. His sidekick, "Gordito," or "Pancho" in some films, was a weak, bumbling fool. And the Kid often had as adversaries the greasy bandit types from which the Kid had evolved. 

Another very popular stereotype was Hispanic men as weak peons. Typically the ignorant peon occupied the landscape while the White cowboy was portrayed as heroic and gallant. Mexican peons were usually the nondescript, cowardly audience for a gunfight, a guitarist playing in the background to a romance by the White protagonists, or a target for sharp-shooting cowboys. One wonders how such films as The Magnificent Seven (1960), Viva Maria (1965), The Wild Bunch (1969), Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969), Two Mules For Sister Sara (1970), and countless spaghetti westerns, could have been made without the prop of complacent, weak, and illiterate peons whom the heroes could variously rescue, defend, organize, or slaughter -- depending on the plot.

Hollywood films have produced equally denigrating portrayals of Mexican and Chicana women. One example is the series of films about the "Mexican Spitfire," films with titles like Hot Pepper (1933), Strictly Dynamite (1934), The Girl From Mexico (1939), and Mexican Spitfire (1939). A variant of the Mexican spitfire was Estelita Rodriguez's portrayal of the "Cuban fireball," in such films as Cuban Fireball (1951), Havana Rose (1951), The Fabulous Senorita (1952),  and Tropical Heatwave (1952). And another variant was the popular image of Carmen Miranda as a saucy, exotic dancer with fruit-laden hat and fiery temper in films like That Night in Rio (1941) and Copacabana (1947). Again, the message was the same: the Latin woman represents a hot-blooded temptress obsessed with carnal pleasure.

Rita Hayworth was born Margarita Cansino and was renamed by Columbia Pictures to downplay her Spanish roots-- a practice common for any ethnic actor. But her difficulties in finding work were obviously more easily overcome than those of her Latino peers. Looking back at what should’ve been choice roles for Latinos reveals a parade of Brownface minstrelsy. Marlon Brando as Zapata, Telly Savalas as Pancho Villa, Warren Baxter as the Robin Hood of El Dorado, Charlton Heston as a Mexican copper in Touch of Evil and Lou Diamond Phillips in just about everything he does.

With the emergence of situation comedies, westerns and cops and robbers programming on television, stereotypic renderings of Latino types were borrowed from motion pictures and incorporated into a variety of television programs. For example, the comic Mexican buffoon stereotype portrayed early on by Chris Pin Martin as "Pancho" in the Cisco Kid film series, evolved into such characterizations as "Pepino" in The Real McCoys television series; Sgt. Garcia in the Zorro series; and "Chico" in the Chico and the Man television series.

In similar fashion other Latino stereotypes were brought into television. The Mexican bandit and docile peon became familiar parts of the Southwestern U.S. landscape in television series such as WYATT EARP, CHEYENNE, GUNSMOKE, THE RIFLEMAN, or WANTED: DEAD OR ALIVE. The Latino criminal emerged in his own right as perhaps the single most common type of Latino in police series such as IRONSIDE, POLICE STORY, KOJACK, STARSKY AND HUTCH, MOD SQUAD and others.

Speedy Gonzalez was one of the few Latino characters children were exposed to on television throughout the 50s, 60s, and 70s and he was the equivalent of the Mexican Sambo. His overactive libido, huge sombrero and thick accent came to represent Mexico for generations of Americans. His cousin and sidekick, the lazy, drunken Slowpoke Rodriguez was even more offensive.

Perhaps the most blatant example of racial stereotyping involves Black Hispanics. Despite the fact that 18% of the population of Latin America is of African descent (compared to 12% for the United States), appearances or roles for Hispanics of African descent have been virtually non-existent on U.S. television. Black Latinos also complicate the casting for marketing campaigns and programming directed at Hispanics. Most surprising is the fact that Afro-Latinos are conspicuously absent from most Spanish-language TV programming in the U.S.

Even though Hollywood filmmakers stopped the practice of using Whites to portray Blacks and Asians on screen long ago,  Whites have continued to portray Chicanos and Hispanics into the contemporary era. And White Hispanics are the preferred as sophisticated Latinos, whereas the non-white or mixed Latinos are generally relegated to supporting roles as drug mules, banditos and gang-bangers. 

How Racial Stereotyping of Latinos by Media Shapes Attitudes

A recent poll by the National Hispanic Media Coalition called, "The Impact of Media Stereotypes on Opinions and Attitudes Towards Latinos" proves that negative media portrayals in media contribute to negative opinions of Latinos and immigrants by non-Latinos. The major findings:

1. News and entertainment media have a strong influence on non-Latino perceptions about Latinos and immigrants.

2. Media portrayals of Latinos and immigrants can diminish or exacerbate stereotypically negative opinions about them. 

3. Those with more direct interaction with or knowledge of Hispanics hold more positive views of the group and its members. Those holding very negative views are often those with little direct exposure to Hispanic Americans.

4. Negative portrayals of Latinos and immigrants are pervasive in news and entertainment media. Consequently, non-Latinos commonly believe that many media-promoted negative stereotypes about these groups are true.

5. People exposed to negative entertainment or news narratives about Latinos hold the most unfavorable and hostile views about Latinos.

6. Conservative radio and Fox News program viewers are less familiar with and less favorable toward Latinos and immigrants on nearly every measure included in the survey.

7. The most commonly held Latino stereotypes run parallel to those reflected in the media. Participants were asked to recall the kinds of roles they see Latinos play in television and film. The top three roles non-Latinos see Latinos play are: criminal or gang member, gardener or landscaper, and maid or housekeeper.

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Racial and Racist Stereotypes in Media