Forget Taco Bell... Yo Quiero Justicia

Guess what time it is...
It's cliché time!

We live in America! The UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. We're free! We can pursue happyness happiness! With enough hard work and perseverance, anyone can achieve just about anything they put their minds to and be rewarded for their efforts!!! [IN THEORY.]

"Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free... [so that they may work repetitive menial jobs, for no money, no respect, and be subject to discrimination and alienation.]"


As discussed in the Gitlin article, there is a sense that the media marginalizes human beings as secondary to the objects that they own. The car is personified and replaces the idea of the human with a mechanical object that, in reality, does not have emotions nor a practical function. I see the same linear thinking when looking at images of immigrants and minorities in the media. Personally, as a San Diego native and the daughter of a Mexican immigrant, I have seen the dichotomy of American culture. America promises sidewalks paved in gold and a world of opportunity. It isn't until they've arrived, that they realize that this is farce; America promises back-breaking labor at $5.25 (or less) an hour and a loss of identity. And yet this is far better than what they are promised in their own distinctly poor homelands.

Growing up in a border town, I was given context for the immigrants' plight. Each day hordes of people run to the border to secure a better life for themselves and their families. American media trivializes this idea of "running to the border" by marketing TACO BELL in the same way-- Make a run for the Border. Think about it-- you can go buy cheap, fakey Mexican food at all hours of the night from the same people who actually did make a run for the border. Ironically, they probably never fathomed that they'd be working in a place where they're ice cream scooping refried beans and squeezing tubes of sour cream into cardboard taco shells. Cross the border and you'll find out that the alternative to selling Taco Bell tacos and living in tiny shoebox-sized apartments is pimping out your six-year-old child to sell Chicklets and living in tiny shoebox-sized huts made of flattened tomato cans and cardboard. Sons and daughters are sent to the U.S. to make enough money to eventually bring the entire family and save them from the numbing poverty that plagues Latin America.

Latinos, particularly "illegal immigrants," are marginalized into one huge collective group, stripping the individual of their own identity and applies a truckload of stereotypes in order to keep hierarchy alive in American culture. Marx would agree that the working class, those working the menial jobs, will prevail, feeding on the "goodness" that can be, theoretically, found in every person (cough-employer-cough). Here's the catch-- the employer isn't looking at his Latin employee as an individual with a family to feed and rent to be paid; rather he's looking at this faceless droid as cheap labor. The Latin individual is blank, devoid of identity-- of self worth. Rather, Latin Americans must resolve to be a part of this network of stereotypes that the media tends to proliferate.


In my search for clips of Latinos in the Media, I've found evidence that Latinos are nothing more than nondescript, chihuahua-loving, taco-eating, slow, dirty, border jumping, party-loving, egotastical, menial workers. Isn't there more to this group of people than what the media paints them as? Yes. Does the average American care to dig further than what they've seen? No. That's the problem, we're not making the effort to defuse these predetermined ideas.

In short, we live in a land based on the exploitation of non-citizens.