Introduction: Latin American diasporas

1It is estimated that more than 32 million Latin Americans live outside their countries of origin, with the majority residing in North America, followed by Europe, Asia, and Oceania (IOM, 2020). Currently, Latin American diasporas could constitute the sixth largest country in the region, and since the 1980s it has increased by more than 400%. Their origins, development, and current contemporary nature are a result of concomitant phenomena that have occurred in the last five decades. My work seeks to explore how population flows intertwine with media flows in diasporic transnational contexts. As Smets et al. (2020) addressed, contemporary understanding of diasporic transnationalism and the media implies weighing two main areas: media refers to the variability of media as objects, texts, symbols, technologies, and organizations; migration refers to the many different forms of human migration and mobilities. The analysis seeks to examine both, within states and across borders and the encounters they provoke. Thus, it becomes essential to understand the challenges and opportunities encountered when applying interdisciplinary approaches to the examination of circuits of migration, diasporization, and transnational mediated communication (Georgiou, 2012); furthermore, the agenda of any attempt to theorize and talk about their diasporic cultures is a complex and extensive one (Tsagarousianou and Retis, 2019).

2Despite the evident growth of Latin American diasporas in the Global North, research has demonstrated how they tend to remain invisible in the news (Santa Ana, 2013; Retis, 2013; NAHJ, 2006; NCLR, 1997), and when they appear, metaphors in the media tend to reflect public discourse, perpetuating a public perception that dehumanizes immigrant workers (Santa Ana, 1999) or relates them mainly with social conflict (Retis, 2006a; 2006c). Furthermore, as Santa Ana (2013) has demonstrated, newsworthy criteria for either a US Latino or Latin American story to be aired on a US television network must involve dramatic political events or involve a human calamity or natural disaster.

3Twenty years ago, the International Organization for Migration (IOM) published a pioneering review of international migration trends in each major region of the world with a discussion of migration policies. By then, it was estimated that around 150 million international migrants existed, a number that grew steadily from 75 million in 1965 to 84 million in 1975, and 105 million in 1985. The report analyzed how official statistics tend not to include many who live or work in foreign countries without documentation, confirming a trend that continues to this day: official narratives on international immigrants tend to make invisible an important group of people (IOM, 2000). The invisibility of Latin American immigrants has set a trend in the Global North (McIlwaine, Cook and Linneker, 2011; Román and Retis, 2020); furthermore, the presence of foreign workers and their families became the cause of partisan confrontations, generating a distorted perception of Latin Americans immigrants (Retis, 2006a). In other words, Latinxs are invisible in the public discourse, but when appeared they tend to be portrayed mainly with social conflict.

4The long-term and growing body of evidence on migration and mobility shows that migration is in large part related to the broader global economic, social, political, and technological transformations that are affecting a wide range of high-priority policy issues. The latest IOM’S report calls attention to the new context, claiming that we are in a period of considerable uncertainty and discontent due to a predominant and relentless focus on liberal logic and rationalism, at the expense of emotional sensitivity (OIM, 2020). The number of international migrants is estimated at 272 million globally, with nearly two-thirds being labor migrants. This represents 3.5% of the world population. More than half of the world’s international immigrants (141 million) live in Europe and North America. While the majority of international migrants born in Africa, Asia, and Europe reside within their home regions, the majority of migrants from Latin America, the Caribbean, and North America reside outside the regions in which they were born. These data help us better understand such a complex phenomenon that is usually not incorporated in mainstream media. With notable exceptions, reporting on Latin American immigrants has tended to blur a mirror in which public opinion observes the reality. As argued elsewhere (Retis, 2006a), comparing migration realities and its representation in news media helps us understand how it tends to reinforce a gap between the egotropic vision (what affects me personally) and the sociotropic vision (what affects my country) of migration. The comparative analysis of news coverage of Latin American immigrants and public polls demonstrated how and why Spaniards perceived migration as a problem for the country (sociotropic) in greater dimensions than a problem for self (egotropic) at the change of the century. It becomes essential to advance on critical and comparative analysis of the role played by the press in shaping immigration news in Europe and North America (Benson, 2013).

5Out of the 30 million Latin Americans living outside of their home countries, since the 1990s, the majority have chosen the United States as their principal destination (70%) followed by Spain, Canada, Japan, and other countries in the Global North (Pizarro, Cano and Contucci, 2014). Between 2000-2011, Spain shifted from hosting 4.5% to registering nearly 20% of Latin American immigrants in all OECD countries, while Canada, the U.K., and Japan emerged as increasingly relevant destinations. Following the 2008 economic crisis, and against all predictions, international immigration abated only slightly; many did not cease to emigrate and those already living in foreign countries did not return en masse to their homelands; nevertheless, these individuals were harmed by the loss of employment or a reduction in salary (Ibid). After the economic recession, Latin American immigrants established new strategies to continue sending remittances and attempting to ensure the stability of their transnational families by securing second employment (Ibid) or by embarking on new migration ventures. Multi-sited fieldwork has identified interregional migration circuits in North America and Europe. Latinxs have been developing new patterns of geographic transnational dispersion surpassing the initial processes of geographic concentration (Retis and Badillo, 2015; Retis, Badillo and Lopez, 2019). In recent decades, urban environments and particularly large metropolises have transformed into key centers for these movements that simultaneously form part of a phenomenon that is also occurring at the global level: since 2008, and for the first time in history, more than half of the world’s population moved to live in urban areas (54%), a proportion that is estimated to increase to at least 66% by 2050 (United Nations, 2004). Following Latinx migration patterns, studies have identified translocal circuits in global cities such as Madrid, London, New York, Miami, Los Angeles, or Tokyo (Retis, 2017; 2019a; Román & Retis, 2020).

6The comparative analysis of the migration and media binomial allows us to examine concomitant processes that have intertwined since the second half of the twentieth century. On the one hand, international immigration from Latin America increased in the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s due to the structural changes brought about by the economic, financial, and social crises that characterized these “lost decades.” On the other hand, media experienced an exacerbated concentration of ownership, combined with accelerated technological innovation. In this scenario, the effects of lower costs of transportation and information and communication services became evident. Diasporic contexts were transformed by new spaces of media production, distribution, and consumption. Territorial immigrants were transformed into digital immigrants in complex and changing processes affecting both Latin Americans living abroad and those who remain in their place of origin (Retis, 2014b).

7For the last decades, Latin Americans have been establishing themselves in diverse metropolises considered “global cities” (Sassen, 2001) that constitute centers of attraction for capital and population flows, acting as nodes within the global economic system. In the U.S., cities like New York, Miami, or Los Angeles underwent demographic transformations. Latin Americans led moderate population increases in the 1970s and 80s, and very significant growth in the 90s and 2000s. In “super-diverse” (Vertovec, 2007) European cities like Madrid, Rome or London, the increase in Latin Americans was not noteworthy until the late 1990s and the turn of the century, even later on in some north European countries like Amsterdam, Berlin or Paris. In the aforementioned U.S. cities, second and third generation Latinos are now seen, whereas in Madrid demographers begun to identify the 1.5 generation presence during the first decade of this century (Portes, Aparicio and Haller, 2009), and in London became evident the increase in the number of Londoners born to Latin American mothers (McIllwaine, Cock, and Linneker, 2010). Parallel to these population shifts, processes of technological innovation gave way to the transformation of systems of communication and information. As a result, the displacement from “mass media” to “new media” and new technologies of information and communication (NTICs) has influenced the communicative practices of Latin Americans in urban circuits of the Global North (Román and Retis, 2020).

The ways of being and ways of belonging

8In seeking to understand the complex and heterogeneous nature of Latin Americans living abroad, fieldwork relied on perspectives of diasporic transnationalism (Retis, 2019b). While diaspora refers to the community, transnationalism refers to the processes that transcend international borders (Faist, 2010). Looking to break methodological nationalism and integrating the analysis of both the context of departure as well as arrivals, critical studies welcomed the advent of transnationalism in the 1990s (Guarnizo and Smith, 1998) since the transnational lens on migrant activities allows social scientists to observe the ways some significant things are changing (Vertovec, 2004). As Levitt and Glick Schiller (2004) addressed, this approach allows us to distinguish between ways of being and ways of belonging and understand that assimilation and enduring transnational ties are neither incompatible nor binary opposites. It helps to highlight social processes and institutions that are routinely obscured by traditional scholarship, but, most importantly, helps us rethink and reformulate the concept of society such that it is no longer automatically equated with the boundaries of a single nation-state.

9The notion of diaspora and the introduction of transnational approaches can be used constructively to examine central questions of social and political change and transformation (Faist, 2010). Transnationalism –and its derivatives: transnational social spaces, fields, and formations– have been used to connote everyday practices of migrants and advocates to bring migrants to the center of the analysis (Smith and Guarnizo, 1998; Levitt and Glick Schiller, 2004). Drawing on Georgiou (2006) I argue that diasporic transnationalism is less about the place and more about space. The complex and multifaceted synergies at local, national, and transnational levels create a field of study where one can explore the emergence and development of contradictory yet viable forms of transnational imagined communities (Anderson, 2006). The diasporic transnationalism nature of diverse groups spread across the globe gives rise to multilevel and distinct settings of community life in hyperlocal, local, transnational but also translocal scale.

10Analyzing and understanding the communicative practices of Latin American diasporas requires interdisciplinary approaches in order to develop a perspective that is both comprehensive and critical (Retis, 2012). Processes of economic globalization require a rethinking of traditional ways of examining national societies in relation to network systems (Castells, 2006) that have led to the deterritorialization of social life, transformed its cultural dimensions (Appadurai, 1997; Thompson, 1995), and reconfigured nodes in the form of global cities (Sassen, 2001). In this context, links established between and for immigration networks outline new diasporic spaces relying on transborder circuits of communication and information (Retis, 2008). Drawing on fieldwork conducted in Europe and North America for the last two decades, I argue that in the study of diasporas and the media it is essential to: (1) understand socio-demographic conditions before analyzing media spaces; (2) understand the economic and political structure of the media before analyzing their discourses on immigration; (3) examine professional routines before analyzing practices in covering diversity issues; and (4) understand cultural and media consumption in countries of origin before analyzing practices in diasporic contexts. In sum, it is indispensable to build interdisciplinary approaches to understand transnational communication practices (Retis, 2014a).

11As argued elsewhere (Retis, 2019b), discursive representation of the Latinoamericanization of international migrations to the Global North resulted in a construction of their presence marked by an “us” versus “them” modality in public discourse (Van Dijk, 1991; 2000). As news media play an important role in setting the agenda, in their choices on which events and trends to highlight and which to downplay or ignore, they not only simply reflect social reality but actively shape it (Benson, 2013). Despite their heterogeneous nature, public discourse portrayed Latin American immigrants as if they were all part of a homogeneous group implementing various pan-ethnic labels: “Hispanic,” “Latino/a” or “Latinx” in the United States (Retis, 2013); “Latinoamericano/a”, “Sudamericano/a” in Spain (Retis, 2006a); “Latin”, “Latin American” or “Latinos” in the UK (Román & Retis, 2020); “Latino nikkeijin” or Latino “dekasegui” in Japan (Retis, 2019a). Mainstream media discursively constructs the figure of the Latin American immigrant as a metonym for the idea of an underclass (Craig, Pitts, & Osborne, 2011; Vargas, 2000) or uses racist metaphors to demean and dehumanize the immigrant worker (Santa Ana, 1999).

12In the United States, Latinos are made almost invisible or silently annihilated in media coverage, and when included, they tend to be portrayed as sources of societal problems. Santa Ana (2013) identified two main criteria that make a Latino event newsworthy for U.S. broadcast networks: either it involved Washington “Beltway” politics, or it was a story about human calamity or natural disaster. Moreover, the lack of diversity of producers in newsrooms but also in entertainment media serves to exacerbate these tendencies (Gonzalez and Retis, 2017). There is one of the biggest paradoxes when homogenizing heterogeneity: while Hollywood and general news have remained reluctant to include Latino groups in content or include them in a normalized way, the media machinery has and continues to pursue Latino communities as consumers (Retis, 2017; 2014).

13The majority of what is now turning into a significant Latin American diaspora in Europe started migrating during the nineties. Most of them settled in southern European countries. In Spain, Latin Americans also remained almost invisible in mainstream media coverage. Comparative analysis showed how public discourse tends to de-contextualize the transnational context of capital and population flows between Europe and Latin America, and how it influences public opinion with a prevalence of a set of metaphors related to emotions of fear or compassion (Retis, 2006 and 2016). Unlike the biological kind, cultural racism leads to over-generalizing differences and neglecting the common ground between native and immigrant cultures so as to reinforce the opposition between “us” (Spaniards) and “them” (Latin Americans) (Van Dijk, 2000; Bañón, 2002). Latin American immigrants in Spain were portrayed from what I called a media-distorted mirror: they were perceived mainly as a problem or as a threat (Retis, 2006; 2016).

14In the beginning, Latin Americans in London were a highly invisible community (Román-Velázquez 1996, 1999) and mainly unorganized due to their dispersion, the large numbers of irregular migrants, and the types of jobs they performed. Soon they became the fastest-growing migrant groups but remained largely invisible (Hirst, 1998; Buchuck 2006; Carslile 2006; McIlwaine 2007; Peró 2007; Bermudez 2011). McIlwaine et al. (2011; 2016) conducted the first attempts to provide a closer estimate of the size of the Latin American population in London and the UK. They argued that official data failed to capture the full range of experiences of Latin Americans even though they constitute the second fastest growing non-European population in the British capital, with just under 250,000 in the UK, of which 145,000 are based in London.

15Latin American immigrants in Asia are mainly concentrated in Japan. Most of them are descendants of Japanese immigrants (Nikkeis), returning to work in Japan a century after their ancestors initiated international migration to Latin America and most of them are incorporated into homogeneous segments regardless of their background (Higuchi, 2006). Despite their Japanese phenotype, most Latin American nikkeijin are conspicuous in public not only because they speak Portuguese or Spanish, but because of their distinct manner of dress and demeanor (Tsuda, 2004); some have found difficulties related to psychological stress, demographics, and immigration background (Asakura & Murata, 2006), and have developed limited political incorporation (Sharpe, 2011). Research has found that Latin American nikkeijin have become much more than ethnic anomalies in Japan. They constitute one of the largest groups of foreigners after Koreans and Chinese and despite their Japanese ancestry, most of them are treated as foreigners due to the narrow definition of what constitutes being Japanese. Research demonstrated how Brazilian nikkeijin have attracted a disproportionate amount of Japanese media attention, which has thrust them prominently into public awareness (Tsuda, 2003). As a result, even though many Japanese have not personally encountered Japanese Brazilians, most know of them.

News coverage and public opinion about Latin American migrants

16The sixth OIM report focused its analysis on the perception that several countries have regarding international immigration, because “in spite of the revolution in communications, there are many people who have inadequate information on the magnitude, the implications and the socioeconomic context of migration” (OIM, 2008, 8). The fact that the OIM dedicated its annual report to the treatment of immigration is evidence of the social significance that the topic has gained within public debate. In recent years, immigration has become a highly politicized issue and has been perceived in a negative way, despite the clear need for diversification of modern societies and economies. The OIM report notes the challenges we are facing in this era of globalization and human mobility and calls for fundamental change in the ways immigration is communicated. To facilitate intercultural coexistence and to overcome the challenges of diversity, it is essential to have a well-informed and clear debate in both the public and political arenas. The risk of maintaining the status quo is threefold: (1) Continued politicized debate will only serve to foster sectarian agendas, rather than promoting broader national, regional, and international interests. One of the greatest challenges for those who seek to foster a rational debate is to prevent migration from being used as a platform for other political, social, and economic issues (2) Negative attitudes and reactive approaches are likely to continue to dominate over positive attitudes and proactive approaches (3) Both integration and reintegration efforts will inevitably be undermined unless migrants themselves become active participants in the migration debate, rather than being the subject of debate (OIM, 2011, 8-9).

17Apart from the pace of immigration growth, public opinion is influenced by disagreement over the formal status of those who migrate internationally, whether they are regular or irregular immigrants. Preferred levels of migration are thus not reduced to a simple question of numbers posed in isolation from questions related to the origin and status of the migrants. Through the analysis of several public opinion surveys, the OIM report shows that there has been a gradual decline in support for immigration in OECD countries, notably in the second half of the 1990s, suggesting that there may be a correlative relationship with the increase in international immigrant flows (OIM, 2011). In Spain, the public perception of Latin American immigrants deteriorated in the same years that immigrant flows from Latin America increased. Of particular note is the media treatment regarding the emergence of Latin Americans in the non-European immigration context (Retis, 2006).

18The OIM report remarks how important it is to remember that people of hosting countries often have false notions of the scale and nature of immigration and the policies that influence it. In other studies, it has been demonstrated that reporters who cover news on immigration have poor knowledge of the structural conditions of international migrations, and a weak understanding of the social and cultural origins of Latin American immigrants (Retis, 2006). Based on surveys conducted in eight international immigration recipient countries (Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Netherlands, Spain, UK, and the US), the OIM analyzed how respondents tended to significantly overestimate the size of the immigrant population. Interviewees were asked to choose from “too many,” “a lot, but not too many,” or “too few” immigrants in their countries as information about the current size of the immigrant population was given out. Other interviewees were not provided with this data. The former group was found to be less likely to say there were too many immigrants in the country (IOM, 2011, 8).

19Part of the challenges for improving news media coverage or diversity, and more specifically, migrants and ethnic minorities in news coverage is the fact that demographics in newsrooms do not reflect the demographics of the society they cover. Although there has been a growth of diversity in the demographic composition of the US, American newsrooms still have more to work in terms of incorporating journalists of ethnic and racial minorities. According to the American Society of News Editors (ASNE), there has been a constant decrease in minority representation in the newsroom. In 2012, only 4% of the journalists were of Hispanic origin (1,650), which is 239 fewer than the year before and 448 fewer than in 2002. Out of the total of Hispanic journalists in newsrooms, 59% were men and 41% were women (ASNE, 2012). The majority of the population in US newsrooms were white (87% in total). Of the 35,584 white journalists, 64% of them were men and 36% were women. This unbalanced and unequal distribution explains in part why the US media tends to understand its audience as being led by middle-class white men (Weaver et al., 2006).

20For the last decades, Latinxs have been the fastest-growing ethnic group in the United States but remained with low participation in general English-language news media. In 2014, the National Association of Latino Independent Producers (NALIP) addressed this media gap: as Latino consumer power grew, relative Latino media presence shrunk (Negrón-Muntaner, 2014). Stories about Latinxs constituted less than 1% of mainstream news media coverage, and the majority of these stories featured them as lawbreakers. The NALIP survey of 19 primetime shows in 2013, revealed that there were no Latino anchors or executive producers in any of the nation’s top news programs, and only 1.8% of news producers were Latinos. More recently, the latest diversity surveys conducted by ASNE in 2019 and 2020 revealed that Hispanics comprised less than 7 % of the workforce in newsrooms. These studies confirmed the trend noted by previous reports produced by the National Association of Hispanic Journalist, The Network Brownout Reports: in 2005 they found that out of an estimated 12,600 stories aired by ABC, CBS, and NBC, only 105, or 0.83 %, were exclusively about Latinos or Latino-related issues, a slight increase from 2004 when Latino stories comprised 0.72 % of coverage.

21Quantitative studies conducted in the 1990s showed that the share of news concerning Hispanics decreased to 1% (NCLR, 1997): less than the Afro-American or Asiatic group (Entman and Rojecky, 2000). In 2006, NAHJ showed that in the case of television, the representation margins decrease much more than in print media. Only 0.83% of broadcast stories by ABC, CBS, and NBC in 2005 broached some topic regarding Hispanics. The five most recurrent topics of these news stories were those related to national government (19%), crime (18.1%), human-interest issues (17%), immigration (14.3%), and sports (11.4%). Events regarding immigration and crime are commonly represented in a negative sense in the news. A significant percentage of the featured stories lacked opinion diversity: 33.3% never mention any source, and from those that cited sources, one-third referred exclusively to a single one. NAHJ’s report demonstrated that Hispanics are non-existent in those stories not related to Hispanics. In other words, they do not appear in the image of the general public represented by the media. One of the main findings of this report noted that despite an accelerated growth of the Hispanic population, the American media, still desensitized, does not present stories about the country’s largest minority and, in respect to migratory issues, these topics are not presented from the perspective of Hispanic immigrants (NAHJ, 2006).

Latino media in diasporic transnational contexts

22Contemporary Latin American diasporas in translocal settings face challenges and opportunities both in terms of migration and media. While settling in ethnic enclaves (Portes & Shafer, 2006) in diverse cities in the Global North, they confront social and spatial inequalities around migratory experiences, workplace relationships, ethnic local media, and urban spaces. Critical perspectives challenge the geographical and media-centric focus currently dominating most urban communication research, whereby the relationship between places, identities, and the media is mostly approached in terms of representation rather than politically charged lived experiences (Román and Retis, 2020). A transnational way of belonging is about how activities are “represented, understood and translated into an identity politics”, whilst “transnational ways of being include everyday life actions and interactions across borders” (Glick Schiller, 2007 : 458). Transnational living will include the practices and social relations that individuals engage in to form transnational networks (Guarnizo, 2003). In assessing the economics of transnational living amongst migrants, Guarnizo (2003) calls for an approach that considers the cross-border relations and practices that link migrants with different places (in and outside of Britain). Transnational living is a “dynamic social field that involves and affects simultaneously actors (individuals, groups, institutions) located in different countries” (Guarnizo, 2003 : 670). It accounts for how migrants’ transnational practices influence and transform countries of origin and new localities, but it is equally important for the unintended global economic consequences of such practices (finance, trade, production, and consumption of culture). Facing the challenges of urban social stratification and discriminatory press discourse in the Global North, Latin Americans have developed diasporic transnational mediated communication spaces that coexist in the mainstream media landscape in North America, Europe, and Asia, at multiple levels and extended geographical scenarios. Drawing on Hall and García Canclini, in recent studies (Román and Retis, 2020) we examine how diaspora identities live with and through, not despite, difference, by hybridity (Hall, 1990: 235) and why since Latin Americans have experienced processes of intercultural hybridizations participating in cultural transformations generated by technologies and by changes in symbolic production and circulation, the city could become the unity that would give coherence and analytical consistency to the studies (García Canclini, 2005: 207). For Latin American diasporas in global metropolises, feelings of belonging are at times contradictory and expressed in terms of solidarity, displacement, difference, and detachment. Social networks developed through the process of finding a job and in workplace relationships, are mediated by solidarity and conflict. In these contexts, the development of local and translocal media outlets is another way of creating spaces of recognition and solidarity for a group whose everyday news consumption needs are almost absent from mainstream media outlets (Román and Retis, 2020).

23Communication mediums directed at recent immigrants came to constitute spaces for information, communication, and self-representation as well as spaces for consumption. I have chosen to call these “media spaces” because they constitute hyperlocal, local, and translocal projects that coexist with other media outlets in their manner of consumption if not in their production. Because they serve immigrant communities they may be interpreted as community media, even though the majority of them are for-profit businesses. These are projects undertaken within the framework of businesses directed for and by immigrants that in many cases paradoxically do not come from immigrant entrepreneurs (Retis, 2008). For example, in Madrid, Latino radio stations were established on the capital’s dial as part of local and regional offerings. Nevertheless, their programming and content are directed at audiences with Latin American tastes and preferences. During the Spanish economic bonanza, up to fifteen different Latino FM radio stations existed in Madrid, many of them Spanish-owned (Ibid). During the “Latino booms” in the 1980s and 1990s, Hispanic news outlets experienced their largest growth, particularly evident in broadcast media (Retis, 2019c). The need to seek out new theoretical approaches and methodologies in the study of media and the city is now noted, and includes an analytical matrix that encompasses diverse interfaces, such as consumption, identity, community, and action (Georgiou, 2013). The consequences of the relationship between media and the city are reflected in the tensions around cosmopolitization (Beck, 2009) and these tensions acquire particular weight within the most vulnerable societal sectors, as in the case of immigrants (Retis, 2008; Moreno and Retis, 2014). As argued elsewhere (Retis, 2017), my proposal is rooted in studies of immigration because they permit us to comprehend that the relationship between immigration and globalization has formed part of the modernization process, and it has played a central role in the expansion and development of capitalism (Castles and Miller, 2004; Martínez, 2008; 2011; Sassen, 2003). The liberal project regarding the circulation of capital and commodities, sustained in large part by states themselves, conflicts with the strict controls imposed on the free movement of workers and the ability of individuals to establish roots in said states (Pellegrino, 2003; United Nations, 2004; IOM, 2008).

24In more than two centuries of their existence, US Latino media have evolved in parallel to the various phases of displacement, arrival, and settlement of Latin American and Latinx communities in the United States (Retis, 2014a). Historically, Latinxs’ need for information, communication, and self‐representation has remained constant, but the role of their media has changed in different ways to adapt to the transformations of their audiences. Their profile has reflected diverse ideological approaches reflecting, in turn, the status of their audiences as immigrants, exiles, or native Latinos/as; they ranged from politically conservative to liberal; their distribution ranged from local to regional, national, and transnational; their frequency has ranged from daily to bimonthly. More recently most publications launched online versions and became active in social media. Historical analysis of Latino media has demonstrated how the increasing flows of Spanish speakers reinforced the growth of audiences for Latino broadcast media, and as the popularity of Spanish‐language radio grew in the 1960s, 16 advertisers began to realize the potential of Hispanic consumers. During the 1970s and 1980s, the broker system changed into improved marketing and programming strategies. Casillas (2014) explains how most public broadcasting stations depend on a combination of federal and local funding, and these trends became challenging for Spanish‐language community radio, while Castañeda (2014) argues that nowadays, when English‐language radio is struggling to redefine itself in light of the Internet and to survive the decline in listenership, Spanish language radio continues to thrive and extend its reach to different corners across the United States.

25As argued elsewhere (Shumow & Retis, forthcoming) the growth of Hispanic communities fueled rapid growth in Spanish‐language and bicultural media aimed at these growing—and lucrative—audiences. However, the technological and economic forces that have transformed the news media landscape in recent decades have complicated this phenomenon. At the same time that Hispanic and Spanish‐speaking audiences are finding new media catering to them, the Spanish‐language news media have been undergoing increasing concentration. Commercial news outlets attempt to capitalize on Hispanic audiences by targeting these communities, while at the same time they grapple with the challenges faced by all media as technology and market forces have transformed the industry. The fragmentation of ethnic media, which historically played an important role in the development of immigrant communities, presents a challenge for journalists working within this sphere. There are now important tensions that are developing between hegemonic narratives of economic growth and expansion driving most commercial media conglomerates and the traditional aims of ethnic and minority media in helping marginalized and disenfranchised communities find a voice within a dominant culture that often either ignores or demonizes them.

26Latino news is a product of bilingual journalism practices that require bicultural competencies to gather, assess, present, and disseminate news and information about, or relevant to, Latinx communities. Offered in Spanish, English, or bilingually, Latino media engages with the understanding of current affairs, but also the history, economics, politics, and culture of diverse groups, whether U.S.-born or immigrants, as well as their global liaisons with countries where they trace their origins (Retis, 2021). Following the complex nature of the Latinx groups in the United States, the media they produce are not a monolith but reflect the vast and deep differences between the communities they serve (Aguilera, 2020). Just as there is no such thing as the “Latino vote” (Rakich & Thomson-DeVeaux, 2020), U.S. Latino media is made up of a myriad of different types of outlets. The larger research project in which this article is based seeks to desegregate the complex components that make up the digital Latino media interactions in the American digital journalism ecology. It seeks to dismantle the tendency to homogenize Latinx communities and, consequently their mediascapes by constructing an interdisciplinary perspective that helps understand the complex, diverse, and constantly changing dynamics of Latinx communities living in a highly mediated transnational life and their media and communication practices (Retis, 2019a).

27How Latino news media is produced, disseminated, and consumed has varied considerably during these more than 200 years, but more extremely during these past two decades. Since the premiere of Latino USA, in April 1993, as one of the first experiments to create an English-language Latino-centered public radio program in NPR (National Public Radio) to the Kickstarter crowdfunding campaign to launch Radio Ambulante, a podcast that tells Latin American stories in Spanish in 2011, only two decades have passed, but the storytelling in a digital format and the sourcing of content has evolved considerably. Both, the changes of the demographics and the news media industry have converged in a conjunction in which not only have Latinx audiences grown in their linguistic complexity, but news media practices have evolved in nature (Retis, 2019b).

28The rapid changes of the Latinx news media production, distribution, and consumption accompanied the practices of their specific audiences but are also a reflection of the larger new media American landscape. The majority of adults in the United States now get their news online and are favoring mobile devices over desktops/laptops (Walker, 2019); the online space has become a host for the digital homes of both legacy and new “born on the web” news outlets; and advertising revenues across digital outlets, beyond news, are growing, with technology companies playing a large role in the flow of both content and revenue (Pew Research Center, 2019). While Latinos’ needs for information and self-representation have remained constant throughout the decades, the ways they consume their news have been changing. In recent years, and more specifically in the last two decades, technological and economic forces have transformed general news media. The fragmentation of ethnic media (Mayer, 2001) -which historically played a significant role in the development of immigrant communities- presents challenges and opportunities for bilingual news.

29In the post-digital era, Latinx journalists have encountered new spaces to communicate with bicultural and bilingual audiences in the U.S. and abroad. Seeking to fill a gap in the understanding of these new ventures, recent research studies map digital-native U.S. Latino news media by examining their online content and their strategies to produce and disseminate information about Latinx communities. Preliminary revealed that most are very young, are present where Latinx populations are growing faster (i.e., Midwest), and almost half of them produce original content for more than one digital platform. These digital-natives see their mission as informing, amplifying, and elevating the discourse about Latinx communities and are boosting the development of Latinx diasporic transnational media spaces (Retis and Cueva-Chacón, 2021).

30The rapidly changing synergies of news production, distribution, and consumption in the digital era have altered long-established journalism models. New journalism models have emerged in the American news media landscape during the digital and the now so-called post-digital era (Cramer, 2015). The expansion of the U.S. non-profit news sector since the mid-2000s was invigorated by funding from foundations and donors (Birnbauer, 2018). The rise and growth of crowd-funded journalism as a novel business model (Jian & Usher, 2014) has been examined as a result of a displacement from a mainstream media model to a more networked public sphere (Benkler, 2006). In the case of Latinx media, these new synergies require also thinking in terms of transnational and global flows and situating “diasporic cultures” in their midst, understanding them in terms of their relation to the complex ethnoscapes, financescapes, mediascapes, technoscapes, and ideoscapes that make up the global terrain and the networks that populate these (Tsagarousianou & Retis, 2019; Appadurai, 1996.)

Understanding Latinidad(es) in the Global North

31Latina/os, as a group, hold so much internal heterogeneity and political contradiction when understood as a singular identity, which is why the cultural representation of Latinidad became the terrain where scholars, critics, and educators can approach the question of coherence (Del Río, 2017). As Laó‐ Montes, and Dávila argue, it is essential to understand (1) how latinidad became not only a keyword in the field of Latina/o Studies in the United States, but also an analytical concept that signifies a category of identification, familiarity, and affinity; (2) how latinization constitutes the analysis of practices or historically framed and situationally located processes of formation and transformation (Lao‐Montes, 2001); and (3) how both constitute critical perspectives when studying the structures and dynamics behind its production, circulation, and consumption (Dávila, 2001).

32In the United States, there is a consensus on the need to disrupt the conditions of Latina/o invisibility. Anguiano and Castañeda (2014) note the large number of epistemological and pedagogical frameworks that account for the influences of race and the institutionalization of racism, many of these produced within the scholarship of critical race studies, which feature the theoretical efforts of critical race theory (CRT) and its subsequent branch Latina/o CRT, but while it has been utilized successfully in various academic fields “this analytical framework has been underutilized to examine US Latina/o communicative practices, rhetoric approaches, media spaces, audience responses, and public policy implications, to name just a few” (p. 108). Latina/os are made up of every race and myriad groups embodying a polycentric multiculturalism that defies the homogenizing narrative that paints a colorful, immigrant‐centric, patriarchal, mostly Mexican, Catholic mestizaje (Del Río, 2017).

33Researchers have taken up this challenge by creating collective academic spaces for exchange and discussions on the ethnoracial media and communications landscape in the twenty‐first century. Valdivia (2008) edited the first compendium of its kind while other scholars started publishing advances. More recently, encounters have been compiled in the volumes edited by Dávila and Rivero (2014) and by Cepeda and Casillas (2017). As Cepeda and Casillas (2017) assert, Latina/o Media studies are not the straightforward result of the Latina/o media boom in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. It traces its origins to the creation of the Ethnic Studies programs of the 1960s and 1970s, but with the growth of Latinos since the 1980s the need to create Latina/o‐specific subject matter in existing Media Studies courses became evident. Hailing from a variety of methodological and thematic approaches, during these last two decades scholars have made advances in their understanding of the complexity of Latina/o media. These studies are much needed to address a big Latino paradox: the rise of Latinx purchasing power, calculated at around 1.4 trillion dollars (Lopez, Morin, & Krogstad, 2016) with, at the same time, the increase in structural inequities. Shifting the focus to a transnational scope, one can observe similar trends when examining the origins, development, and current scenarios of cultural industries in Latin America. Moreover, comparative research across the Atlantic and the Pacific indicates similar paradoxical scopes between Latin American and its diasporas in Europe and Asia (Retis, 2014a, 2017).

Conclusion

34The formation of Latin American transnational audiences has been recognized by cultural industries rather than by local, regional, and international governments. Ethnocentric approaches tend to analyze media and cultural consumption exclusively as they relate to the migrant condition. As argued elsewhere (Román and Retis, 2020), it becomes indispensable to incorporate positions of class and structural stratification when examining these sociocultural dynamics. Latin American groups are heterogeneous, and they settle in host societies that draw from a rich hybrid cultural baggage (Retis 2019a). It is the dialogue with the host society that promotes understanding between cultures, not the creation of social hierarchies of interaction. Little can be done to make progress in this area if paternalistic or frightened perspectives remain unchanged in immigration studies (Retis 2011). For Latinx communities in London, complex and hybrid subjectivities and identities encompass multiple and multilevel positions of British Latinidad (Román and Retis, 2020). Racial and ethnic categories form a continuum where geographical origins intersect with migratory processes in dialogue with dominant understandings of ethnicity in Europe, and Asia. As examined in multiple observations and interviews, these pan-ethnic labels, as it occurs in the United States, are both contested and embraced in the diasporic media landscape. Ongoing and future research projects seek to further the understanding of Latinx diasporic transnationalism in Asian cities like Tokyo (Retis, 2019a) and European cities like Paris (Retis and García, 2021).