Linguistic Capital and the Currency of Spanish in Hispanic Advertising Production

Introduction

Scholars of Latino communication studies have pointed to several demographic, political, and economic changes in recent years that have indelibly shaped the Hispanic ¹ media landscape. First, there has been a profound diaspora from throughout Latin America (Valdivia, 2008) that has been associated with deregulatory economic policies including the North American Free Trade Agreement and the Free Trade Agreement of the Americas. At the same time, there has been a proliferation of Latino-oriented media in the wake of the Telecommunications Act of 1996 (Castañeda, 2008b).

Piñon and Rojas (2011) have argued that increasing corporate investment in Hispanic media is driven by an interest in accessing a growing economic bloc with transnational ties. As a primarily commercial institution, media necessarily create programming that can deliver audiences of consumers to marketers who ultimately subsidize media production (Ang, 1991). In the case of Hispanic media, this process involves the creation of marketable and desirable audiences through programming strategies that produce and reproduce authentic representations of Latino identity. In turn, marketers speak to an audience of Latinos through advertising, inviting them to participate as consumer-citizens.

Given the importance that advertising plays in constructing U.S. Latino identity, there is a need to examine the professional practices that set the preconditions for how Latinos are represented. I focus on the advertising industry because of its role in shaping collective identity and in promoting normative patterns of consumption (García Canclini, 2001). Furthermore, advertising is said to promote a system of thought that maintains particular forms of power relations that are often invisible to those who are actively involved in its production (Bonsu, 2009; Schroeder & Zwick, 2004).

While the advertising profession is fundamentally impacted by related industries (production companies, media organizations, etc.), I focus specifically on the community of professionals who are directly responsible for the development and production of Hispanic advertising messages. Unlike other forms of advertising, however, Hispanic advertising is mediated by clients who often are neither Latino nor Spanish speaking. Given the disparities between Hispanic agencies and their clients, I attend to language ideologies (Scheiffelin, Woolard, & Kroskrity, 1998) that are embedded within advertising practice. Specifically, I examine how advertising that is developed by and for Latinos is indelibly shaped by interactions with English monolingual clients. Furthermore, using Bourdieu’s theory of practice (1998) as an analytical framework, I investigate the degree to which proficiency in Spanish serves as a profit of distinction, enabling Latino practitioners to serve as transformative agents within the field. In doing so, I draw on Bourdieu’s concepts of linguistic habitus and linguistic capital.

Background

As the media landscape has evolved, marketers have invested more resources in advertising targeting U.S. Latinos. According to Advertising Age (2012), U.S. Hispanic ad spending has topped $7 billion. While the programming that airs on Spanish language networks is generally transnational (Mastro & Ortiz, 2008), U.S. Hispanic advertising is primarily produced within U.S. borders and reflects social disparities pervasive within the nation-state (Chávez, 2013). Currently, the advertising industry suffers from a diversity drought, and despite a consumer landscape that has become more ethnically diverse, the profession itself remains primarily White (Elliott, 2006; Rotfeld, 2003).

The disparity between producers and consumers of advertising has led to the emergence of a Hispanic advertising industry whose agents have promoted themselves as linguistic and cultural specialists (Dávila, 2001). Existing research on Hispanic advertising, however, indicates that the construction of Latino identity that has been packaged and sold to primarily Anglo, English monolingual clients emphasizes the community’s continued ties to their home countries and their continued reliance on Spanish (Rodriguez, 1999). Consequently, production of Hispanic advertising has been based on the false presumption of two mutually exclusive audiences: a general market, which consumes primarily English language media, and a Hispanic market, which consumes Spanish language media.

This logic manifests itself in the tradition of disconnecting Latino consumers from general market consumers. In practice, clients will typically work with a Hispanic agency to develop Latino-targeted advertising while working separately with their agency of record to develop more generalized advertising. Given the specific context in which Hispanic advertising is produced, there is a need to understand how language ideologies shape interactions between Hispanic agents and their clients. As a theoretical construct, language ideology serves as a useful concept for understanding the relationship between structures, power, and forms of speech and for investigating the political and cultural ideologies that are enacted through language (Woolard & Sheiffelin, 1994).

In an effort to ascertain the relative value of language in the production of Hispanic advertising, this project uses Bourdieu’s theory of practice (1998) as an analytical framework. Central to Bourdieu’s framework is the concept of field, which he describes as semiautonomous spaces with their own laws of functioning and logics of practice. Fields are also characterized as hierarchical social spaces where one’s position in the social hierarchy determines one’s chances of success (Bourdieu, 1998). Furthermore, within each field, agents compete for various kinds of resources, or capital. Forms of capital are specific to each field; however, like economic capital they are unequally distributed among agents. It is the distribution of various forms of capital that determines the positions and interrelations of agents.

Bourdieu (1998) has described fields as both conservative and transformative. Agents who hold dominant positions within the field will seek to maintain the current social order. However, fields are always changing, marked by a constant influx of new agents who struggle to challenge the status quo. While challenges to the status quo are met with resistance from those who are invested in the current system, Bourdieu argues that newcomers, who possess unique profits of distinction, may benefit from shocks and changes from neighboring fields including new political orders, changes in media systems, and demographic shifts. These changes provide new agents with the potential to act as forces of transformation in that they can only establish themselves by marking their difference with existing agents (Bourdieu, 1998).

As with previous scholarship, this project understands the advertising industry as a subfield within the larger field of cultural production (Cronin, 2004), one that is occupied with the production of symbolic goods. As discussed, the advertising industry has been impacted from changes external to the field including demographic shifts and the development of Latino-oriented media. These changes have not necessarily been beneficial for advertising agents who insist on producing according to the rhythm of the old advertising life cycle, but they have provided opportunities for Hispanic advertising agents who possess unique profits of distinction.

Within each field, Bourdieu (1991) argues that some agents are more inclined to perform capably than others. Agents have, to varying degrees, an embodied, natural feel for the game, what Bourdieu refers to as habitus. Furthermore, the practices particular to a given field favor some agents over others, and it is the congruency between their habitus and the field they occupy that determines the ability for these agents to compete. In the context of this discussion, I focus specifically on linguistic habitus, which Bourdieu describes as dispositions about language acquired in the course of learning to speak in particular contexts. Furthermore, I examine how one’s linguistic habitus may serve as a form of linguistic capital, or the capacity to produce expression á propos for a particular market (Bourdieu, 1991). Here, I am interested in how Latino practitioners’ knowledge of Spanish enables them to exploit the system of differences to their advantage.

Because different linguistic competencies may serve as commodities, the knowledge of which may constitute a valuable resource for those who possess them (Del Valle, 2009), it may be expected that Spanish speakers have specific value within the field and are thus positioned to serve as transformative agents. According to Bourdieu (1991), however, everyday linguistic exchanges, however personal and insignificant they may seem, bear the traces of the social structure that they both express and help to reproduce. Thus, I am also interested in how language ideologies that exist in the larger social space impact the mobility of agents within the field and, as a result, shape the nature of Hispanic advertising.

Methods

In 2008, I conducted 34 interviews with advertising professionals working at agencies located in Los Angeles. Because this project was designed to generate insights into a range of practices within the profession, I recruited participants with a minimum of 10 years of professional experience. My rationale was that senior-level employees have a broader and deeper perspective on their profession and can draw from a range of experiences working on various accounts at various agencies. Three participants in this study had established and ran their own agencies. Three others had served in the capacity of president or managing director.

I used qualitative interviews because the method is designed to take the investigator into the lifeworld of the individual (McCracken, 1988). Although interviews are intended to allow for unprompted responses, my conversations with practitioners were not unstructured. Rather, McCracken’s (1988)theoretical concepts of field, capital, and linguistic habitus helped guide the discussion. Consequently, questions were designed to ascertain organizational hierarchies and institutional forms of currency. As it relates to language, participants were asked to discuss their proficiency in English and Spanish and to discuss their strategies for negotiating language. Finally, the interviews were conducted primarily in English, although a Spanish word or phrase often found its way into the conversation (we have a bit of a little complejo de inferioridad, no?), which I took to be gestures of in-group talk generally extended to other Latinos.

Informants were contacted through snowball sampling (Heckathorn, 2007), which is conducive to investigations involving members of the advertising community who not only know one other but also have worked and competed with one another and who largely attend the same conferences and social events (Dávila, 2001; Sender, 2004). Although interview discussions provided the primary data, I supplemented the research with documents, field notes, and participant observation at industry events, including the Association of Hispanic Advertising Agencies (AHAA) annual creative and account planning conference as well as the Advertising Age (2012) Hispanic Creative Awards show. In addition, I conducted five interviews with national clients and two additional interviews with representatives from the American Association of Advertising Agencies and the AHAA.

This project follows McCracken’s (1988) analytical framework in which analysis is conducted in three phases. In early stages, analysis is ideographic where the investigator engages in a literal reading of the interview text. Separate utterances are then placed into the context of the overall interview transcript. The second stage involves an across-person analysis in which the researcher begins to observe fields of patterns and themes that emerge from the interviews. Finally, a holistic view is taken across all interviews, and supplemental data are analyzed within the larger context.

My multiple positions as Latino, researcher, and former member of the advertising community raised both possibilities and challenges. For example, my familiarity with the advertising industry provided me with an intimate understanding of the object of study. Thus, I was able to draw on my knowledge of specific practices and professional relationships to supplement and interpret the data, what McCracken (1988) describes as a “fineness of touch and delicacy of insight” (p. 32) not available to researchers who are less familiar with the communities they are investigating.

At the same time, familiarity with one’s object of study has the potential to dull one’s senses of observation. In this case, critical distance was achieved in two ways. First, the analytical categories generated during the analysis phase were sensitized by the literature. Specifically, Bourdieu’s (1991) concepts of field, capital, and linguistic habitus provided the analytical framework. Second, Agar (1996) and Jacobs-Huey (2002) argue that when studying a community with whom one shares an affinity, there is a need to work from one position and try to incorporate other positions. In an attempt to capture different subject positions, my interviews with general market practitioners and clients played an important role in the analysis.

Findings

Discussion

When describing the importance of Bourdieu’s (1998) theory of practice as an analytical framework, Schultz (2007) argues that the concept of field is first and foremost an empirical question. Determining the structure of a given field depends on ascertaining the kind, amount, and distribution of various forms of capital, which in turn structure the relative positions of agents. Thus, researchers are called on to understand the rules that govern the field, which resources are recognized by the other agents, and which dispositions enable agents to more deftly compete within the field.

As it relates to this study, the interviews point to the limited currency of Spanish as a form of linguistic capital within the field of advertising production. Because English is the language spoken by those who hold dominant positions within the field, Spanish will only have value in specific, professional contexts. Ultimately, Bourdieu’s (1993) theory is informed by his interest in power relations and he argues that fields of cultural production are hierarchically subordinate to the field of power and class, and although fields are fairly self-governing spaces that are guided by their own internal logics, they are at the same time the product of the larger social space and determined by the structures surrounding it.

From this perspective, it is important to recognize that Hispanic agencies do not determine the nature of media marketing discourses that target U.S. Latinos. They merely facilitate them. Choices about which products are considered relevant for U.S. Latinos, what kind of Latinos fit into their corporate strategies, and how resources will be allocated toward their pursuit are ultimately decisions made by corporate clients who subsidize Hispanic agencies. Although it is to be expected that U.S. Latinos have little control over what kinds of marketing discourses are directed to Latino consumers, an important finding of this study is that they also have relatively little control over how those messages are expressed.

Ultimately the formal expression of advertising messages is controlled by English monolinguals who hold senior-level positions within the organizational hierarchy. Furthermore, the practices used to govern, approve, and control Spanish language copy reflect ideologies about language. In her discussion of the interactions between bilingual Latinos and English monolinguals, Zentella (2003) argues that the imbalance of status and power that is customary in those situations makes conversation on equal footing impossible. In the context of Hispanic advertising, the power differentials that exist informally between Spanish and English speakers are formalized within the advertising division of labor.

Furthermore, the power that English monolinguals who occupy senior-level positions wield over Spanish language copy is manifested in both explicit and implicit forms of censorship. This became particularly apparent during testimonies regarding clients’ reliance on back-translations for approving creative ideas, a process that involves ensuring that Spanish language copy can be made comprehendible to English monolinguals. Testimonies reveal that this practice has led to some anxiety among practitioners. For example, I encountered a copywriter with experience working at both general market agencies and Hispanic agencies. When asked to describe the differences between the two, she pointed to the unique practice translating her copy, stating “the thing that has been very different to me is talking about the reflection and not talking about the thing itself. You’re talking about the reflection of it and having to explain why this is important to this culture and why this is not.”

During our interview, the copywriter expressed frustration with the pressure of making her words understood or risk having her ideas killed in the approval process. As another participant explained “we’ve had so many ideas die because of a bad back-translation.” In an effort to ensure that concepts have the best opportunity to survive, participants indicated that they attempt to provide more liberal rather than literal translations of Spanish language copy. The types of translations these participants described, however, fit the description of what Venuti (1995) refers to as domesticating translations, those in which the foreignness or strangeness of the text is suppressed in an effort to make it more intelligible to the target reader. This practice, however, appears to serve as a disruption in the rhetorical exchange between clients and agencies that is typical to most advertising (Cronin, 2004). Words have meanings that are particular to the cultures in which they function, yet back-translating involves the process of disconnecting words from their referents.

It is this dynamic that has led Venuti (1995) to describe domesticating translations as a form of violence because they suppress cultural meaning to accommodate Anglo-American sensibilities, which remain “aggressively monolingual” (p. 15). In this effort to accommodate English monolinguals, the back-translation serves as a filtering mechanism that favors those ideas that are most accessible to English monolingual ears while subordinating ideas that are not as easily understood in translation.

The presumption that translation can occur without interruption was one of several normative, commonsense notions about language that influenced how English monolinguals govern Spanish language copy. Similarly, the informal reliance on linguistic gatekeepers to verify the validity of Spanish language copy reflects a double standard about Spanish that Hill (1998) points to in her discussion of Latino speech in White public space. According to Hill, English monolinguals permit themselves a great degree of linguistic flexibility. At the same time, they are less tolerant of linguistic variance among Latinos. This accounts for clients’ persistent belief that there is one correct way of speaking Spanish that can be verified by anyone who is presumed to speak Spanish. As such, no distinctions are made between speakers who may posses varying degrees of competency in Spanish.

The language ideologies embedded within advertising practice ultimately constrain the linguistic capital associated with speaking Spanish. This in turn impacts the prospects of Latino practitioners in two ways. First, producing Spanish language advertising appears to limit their professional mobility. Bourdieu (1998) argues that one form of capital can be converted into another. For example, one’s connections to any given industry (social capital) may directly lead to a lucrative job (economic capital). Although there was evidence that knowledge of Spanish served as a form of linguistic capital that Hispanic practitioners have successfully converted into economic capital, the interviews also reveal that they were less successful at converting linguistic capital into other forms of capital. Consider the following testimony in which a general market practitioner discusses the relative invisibility of Spanish language media:

(Our client) would probably get more cachet out of the English language advertising being memorable and funny and break-through than she would ever out of the Spanish language advertising, because no one’s going to see it including possibly her. I’m sure she’ll tune into it to make sure it ran but she’s not watching Univision, she’s watching ABC.

The inability for Latino practitioners to successfully convert linguistic capital into other forms of capital ultimately limits their potential to act as transformative agents within the field. Consequently, the profound demographic shifts and the proliferation of Hispanic media in recent years have not necessarily enabled Latino practitioners, who possess unique profits of distinction, to create meaningful change within the industry. Rather, Hispanic agencies appear to maintain the status quo. Interviews reveal that Latino practitioners were disinclined to challenge their clients about the racializing practices prevalent in Hispanic advertising. As with all agencies, such deference is driven by the economic leverage that clients hold over less powerful agencies, but without adequate forms of cultural or social capital, Latino practitioners were limited in their capacity to present innovative ideas, new ways of representing speech, or simply challenging clients’ misguided conceptions of language.

In her discussion of the evolving media marketplace, Castañeda (2001) argues that the proliferation of marketing directed toward U.S. Latinos does not necessarily signify that democracy is finally reaching Latino masses. Instead, it merely indicates that dominant players are using new strategies for exploiting the economic potential of the Hispanic market. By focusing on the specific ways in which language is negotiated within advertising production, the findings of this study support the claim that Hispanic media discourses are indelibly shaped by old patterns of dominance.

Conclusion

The framing of U.S. Latinos as a Spanish-speaking people has served Hispanic agencies well by enabling them to assert a unique expertise within a highly competitive marketplace. At the same time, however, the insistence that Latinos are linguistically uniform appears to serve an ideological function by maintaining relations of power. The continued practice of positioning the Latino consumer as the non-English-speaking “other” only ensures they remain foreign, perpetually disconnected from the general market yet not entitled to the same resources. But as Dávila (2001) points out, the concept of the general market is itself based on the fiction that “like U.S. society, is white, heterosexual, and ethnically untainted” (p. 219).

The hegemonic view of language that distinguishes English-speaking Anglos from Spanish-speaking Latinos seems common sense not because it reflects reality as it is, but because it reflects the dominant sense of reality. This distortion is problematic, however, because it requires a homogenous speech community, which is an ideal that runs contrary to lived experiences of most Latinos for whom Spanish, English, and code mixing are all viable linguistic options.

Recent developments within the Hispanic media marketplace suggest that there has been a softening of the strict Spanish/English binary that has long dominated the marketplace (Piñon & Rojas, 2011). In recent years, the field has seen an emergence of smaller, niche-oriented players who are creating alternative programming (Castañeda, 2008a) and representing Latino speech diverse ways. Similarly, established players such as NBC Universal’s “mun2” and Viacom’s “MTV Tr3s” are attempting to target bicultural Latinos through English and code mixing, or Spanglish. Similarly, as part of an agreement to acquire controlling interest in NBC Universal, Comcast has committed to launching several new networks targeting bicultural Latinos, including the forthcoming network “El Rey,” which will broadcast primarily in English.

Despite these developments, Hispanic media remain firmly entrenched in Spanish. Bourdieu (1993) makes clear that fields are conservative and those who occupy dominant positions within the field are not inclined to disrupt the status quo. From this perspective, established players including Univision and Telemundo are not eager to give up proprietary access to what Del Valle (2009) calls a “linguistic oilfield” (p. 43). The centripetal force that pulls the industry toward Spanish dominance became most apparent during the 2003 merger between Univision Communications, Inc. and the Hispanic Broadcast Corporation, which resulted in the consolidation of two of the country’s most dominant Spanish language media entities, each reaching 90% of its potential audience (Núñez, 2006).

Like the industry in general, advertisers are beginning to experiment with more fluid notions of language. Both industry practitioners (Newman-Carrasco, 2010) and scholars (Castañeda, 2001; Chávez, 2006) have pointed to instances of advertising messages that use code mixing. Given the evolving nature of Hispanic advertising, new questions arise about how professional practices will evolve. Copywriters have more options available to them when they are able to draw on their full verbal repertoires, but the complex negotiation of two languages does not lend itself as easily to the policing strategies currently used by the industry. Today, English monolingual clients maintain indirect control over Spanish language copy through various gatekeeping mechanisms. As they are more frequently presented with concepts written in English, or some combination of English and Spanish, however, will these mechanisms continue to serve the same function? Conversely, will clients feel empowered to play a more direct role in arbitrating, and therefore defining, Hispanic advertising?

Perhaps a larger topic for future research is to understand how the nature of competition changes when language is not the defining characteristic of the Hispanic market. Will general market agencies feel emboldened to communicate directly with Latinos without the need for Hispanic agencies to serve as intermediaries? Conversely, will Hispanic agencies become less professionally isolated and will there be new opportunities to compete with general market agencies to create advertising in English? In other words, how do the prospects for Hispanic agencies change when Spanish is no longer their unique profit of distinction? Or, does the construct of a Hispanic market become less stable without Spanish to serve as a clear boundary?