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  1. Consumable Latinidad

Consumable Latinidad

Latina AVAs can be imagined as a ‘trusted ethnic friend’ that draw on politics of diversity and representation in hiring and design practices, ostensibly ameliorating the xenophobia shaping corporate hiring practices. The trusted ethnic friend trope draws on a variety of American discourses that construct “acceptable Latinidad.” Assimilated Latinxs have been positioned as a politically and economically valuable demographic and are often discussed as the ‘next’ big wave of voters to sway a presidential election.66 Through this discourse Latinxs are contingently valued for their potential to bolster conservative political and social agendas, appealing to issues such as strong family values, conservative beliefs around abortion, strong affiliation with Catholicism, and the ability to assimilate out of speaking Spanish as a first language.67

Film scholar Frances Negrón-Munatener names Latinidad as a technology that runs two directions− to inflame xenophobia and to appeal to the consumer markets of capitalism:

“…a specifically American national currency for economic and political deal making: a technology to demand and deliver emotions, votes, markets, and resources on the same level as other racialized minorities.”68

Dávila argues that acceptable Latinidad functions as a marketing discourse that politically functions to delineate Latinx communities who are seen as “contributors” and those who are “threats” to an American national identity and economy. She points out that though this discourse sidesteps direct engagement with race with its focus on market power, it is fundamentally tied to broader racial projects that shape the simultaneous “processes of whitening and racialization” that Latinxs are subject to “reducing the fate of the totality of the Latino population to one or another process.”69 This discourse connects to the design of the “right kind of Latina” discussed previously, but carries an additional dimension of interpellating Latinx audiences as consumer-citizens.

Latinxs have long been marketed to through mainstream commercials as an up and coming population with increasing earnings, consumer potential, and upward class mobility. 70 Deborah Paradez describes the “Latin Explosion” and “Latin Boom” of the 1990s that focused on Latinxs as a new marketing demographic with disposable income and consumer appeal.71 She notes that at the same time the 1990s also saw new forms of “nativism” arise in response to Latinx immigration into the United States. Anti-immigrant policies in the 1990s denied access to public health care and schools to undocumented people (Proposition 187); banned bilingual education in public schools (Proposition 227); cut welfare to legal immigrants through the Work Opportunity Act that; and further militarized Border Patrol further with increased funding and surveillance technologies through the Immigration Reform Act.72 Acceptable Latinidad, then, is a contingent promise of national inclusion via economic participation that depends on simultaneous anti-immigration sentiment to gain political traction and ideological coherence.

The AVA as a trusted ethnic friend appeals to the technology of Latinidad that relies on this more conservative archetype of the potential for a Latinx consumer market while also appealing to the conservative agenda of the Airus Media client base. The largest client base for the AVAs is in airport customer assistance and security screening. In December of 2016, Airus Media installed a Latina AVA at the Colorado Springs airport, the first to be used by the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) Transportation Security Administration (TSA) (figure 4). A press release describes this installation as “part of a pilot program to automate selected security screening functions.”73 The movement from Latina AVAs as information and wayfinding aids in the airport towards becoming more explicitly utilized by border patrol agencies such as DHS, suggests that the Latina identity is being used strategically to smooth the collapsing spheres of private enterprise and the state, and hail users to accept that increased surveillance that TSA invites in the name of border security. In this regard, the virtual Latina TSA agent leverages the “trusted ethnic friend” market appeal to appear as a “friendly face” to Latinx travelers, masking the targeted surveillance of exactly these populations.74

Figure 4. Screenshot of Airus Media introducing their first TSA virtual assistant on their website Figure 4. Screenshot of Airus Media introducing their first TSA virtual assistant on their website.

Further, the use of the Latina AVA for airport TSA services suggests that intensified surveillance and cooperation with Homeland Security (and related agencies) is also a precondition for national inclusion, normalizing the hyper-surveillance of Latinx communities. In an interview with Fox News, Patrick Bienvenu, creator of the AVAs, mentioned to the newscaster that he is “also talking to police stations about using them [AVAs] at some stations to help people fill out accident reports and other routine paperwork,” indicating further linkages between these technologies and law enforcement agencies.75 The structure of the information economy relies on information and data, which are constant elements in immigrant surveillance, policing, politics, debate, and control. This suggests, as Villa-Nicholas has previously argued, that the Latinx citizen-consumer has new demographic value for their data-generating potentials via surveillance.76 Latina virtual assistants reinforce the increased reliance on data and information as markers of inclusion in the information economy by embodying and hailing the data-consumable Latinx citizen.

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