Beyond the positive–negative paradigm of Latino/Latina news-media representations: DREAM Act exemplars, stereotypical selection, and American Otherness

Abstract

News-media research on coverage of Latino/Latinas has historically focused on negative stereotyping, particularly as threatening, criminal, lazy, or a burden on society. The 2010–2012 newspaper coverage of a proposed immigration policy commonly referred to as the Development, Relief, and Education for Alien Minors Act provides a distinctive case study, one that addresses a subgroup of Latino/Latinas that inherently defies traditional stereotypes. A mixed-methods analysis of the use of exemplars in newspaper coverage of the Development, Relief, and Education for Alien Minors Act reveals that an emphasis on signifiers of hard work, academic achievement, self-determination, and other traditionally ‘American’ cultural codes, juxtaposed with signifiers of poverty and financial need, constitutes a stereotypically selective ‘success story’. Such semiotic codes construct the exemplars as a dependent target population that must assimilate American values in order to overcome the ‘deficits’ of being Latino/Latina and undocumented. News media, part of the dominant culture, become complicit in mediation of Americanness in its legal and symbolic senses.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 14 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.