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

Background on the DREAM Act: legislative battle to executive action

First introduced in 2001 as a bipartisan bill, the DREAM Act legislation would have allowed eligible undocumented students to obtain legal status. Multiple versions of the bill were introduced since then, never receiving enough votes to pass, each aimed at students who arrived in the United States before the age of 16 who intended to attend college and had demonstrated ‘good moral character’ (Ojeda et al., 2010: 2). The 2009 revision that offered 2 years of military service as an alternative to the required 2 years of college was regarded by many in the immigrant activist community as a de facto draft (Diaz-Strong et al., 2009).

The 111th Congress’ consideration of the 2010 version of the DREAM Act bill came closest to passing. A 21 September 2010 Senate filibuster of the bill was maintained by just three votes. Shortly after, the House passed its version of the bill on 8 December, but a Senate vote to invoke cloture on its debate over the House bill failed. Intense news-media coverage followed this bureaucratic battle; initial searches for ‘DREAM Act’ on major newspaper databases for 2010 yielded more than 2000 hits. Despite the bill’s failure, news-media attention remained on the issue through 2011 and 2012, even as legislative attempts to revive the use fell flat. This was in large part due to two phenomena: (1) frustrated by the close votes in 2010, a nationwide student movement of self-proclaimed ‘DREAMers’ – potential beneficiaries of the act and their supporters, who were mostly young and Latino/Latina – staged a series of high-profile rallies and protests, many of which resulted in arrests. Activism by undocumented youth had increased steadily from the start of the millennium, hitting a previous peak in 2006 with the protests of the proposed House legislation that came to be known as the ‘Sensenbrenner Bill’, for its sponsor. But the 2010−2012 activism had more sustained news coverage in part because a media-savvy generation leveraged social-media tools (Lopez, 2013; Zimmerman, 2012); (2). In 2012, President Barack Obama issued a 15 June executive action that would provide a ‘temporary stopgap measure’ to prevent the deportation of more than 800,000 young undocumented immigrants. Known as Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, the action allowed immigrants under the age of 30 who met certain criteria to work and enroll in colleges (Preston and Cushman, 2012). The same newspaper database search for 2012 yielded more than 3000 hits. Because of this robust news-media attention, we identified mid-2010 to mid-2012 as an ideal time period to analyze news coverage.

Few, if any, studies exist on the representations of exemplars in the DREAM Act debate. Some studies explore the use of digital communication and social media in activism related to the act (Costanza-Chock, 2011; Lopez, 2013; Zimmerman, 2012). Other studies address the policy, legal, and higher education implications of the proposed legislation (Corrunker, 2012; Diaz-Strong et al., 2009; Dougherty et al., 2010; Lachica Buenavista and Beltran Gonzales, 2011; Zimmerman, 2011). This study is distinctive amid this body of research.

Mass media and the Other: semiotics, Orientalism, and non-White identity

Media production and consumption play a significant role in the cultural constructions of Other identity, as demonstrated in contemporary research in media and semiotics. Hall argues that the media is both a co-creator and a product of the ‘dominant cultural order’, which regulates meaning and power by favoring certain connotative codes over others (Hall, 1980: 134). The relationship of denotation to connotation is essentially one about power and dominant culture, Hall argues. In this theory, he draws on the 1960s work of semiotician Roland Barthes (1967) on the role of cultural context in the processing of media representation through distinct levels of meaning.

Hall emphasizes that the idea of the Other, the need to identify those outside the dominant cultural order, was essential to this process of meaning-making. He draws heavily on postcolonial scholar Edward Said’s conceptualization of Orientalism, which outlines the historical and cultural origins of Otherness. A hegemonic system of beliefs constructed by the White European West through its interactions with the ‘Orient’, or foreign East, the Orientalist ‘positions himself as outside the Orient’ from a cultural standpoint (Said, 1978: 20–21). The Oriental is irrational, childlike, ‘different’, in contrast to the European, who is rational, mature, ‘normal’ (p. 40).

Hall’s theories interweave the postmodern concepts of Orientalism with the semiotic analysis of Barthes to define the role of in-group versus out-group binaries. Hall (1997b) writes: ‘The argument here is that we need “difference” because we can only construct meaning through a dialogue with the “Other”’ (p. 235). Those deemed to be Other are not part of the dominant cultural order. Often, as in Wilson et al.’s (2013) research, this representational pattern is attributed to dominant-culture news ‘gatekeepers’ who ‘reveal how consequential they regard non-Whites in American society by determining the ways in which they are interpreted to the general audience’ (p. 128).

Kerner and beyond: the five phases of news-media coverage of non-Whites

The imbalance of power between news-media gatekeepers and the Other as a news subject came to the fore in 1968 when the National Advisory Committee on Civil Disorders, aka the Kerner Commission, addressed racial inequality in the United States in the wake of riots in the major urban centers of Los Angeles, Chicago, Newark, and Detroit. Mainstream journalists were criticized for perpetuating a ‘press that repeatedly, if unconsciously, reflects the bias, the paternalism, the indifference of white America’ (National Advisory Committee on Civil Disorders, 1968: 366).

The Kerner Report was a key turning point in an ongoing process described by Wilson et al. (2013) as ‘developmental phases commonly experienced by each of the [non-White] groups under consideration’ (p. 129). The five stages are as follows: (1) Exclusionary Phase, in which people of color were considered inconsequential and invisible to news-media gatekeepers; (2) Threatening-Issue Phase, in which people of color were presented as a ‘threat to the social order’; (3) Confrontation Phase, in which non-Whites are covered from a perspective of ‘us versus them’; (4) Stereotypical Selection Phase, in which ‘social order must be restored’ after the Confrontation Phase and news media move into a phase ‘designed to neutralize White apprehension of people of color while accommodating their presence’; and (5) Multicultural Coverage Phase, an idealized vision for non-exclusionary coverage in which ‘us’ represents all citizens (pp. 129–137).

This study focuses primarily on the Stereotypical Selection Phase and its ‘neutralizing’ representation, which Wilson et al. describe as a product of the post-Kerner ‘call for better reporting of non-White groups’ that has dominated mainstream news coverage from 1968 to present (p. 135). It is worth noting that when applied to coverage of Latino/Latinas (as well as other subgroups), the five phases are vaguely chronological, but also overlapping and not mutually exclusive. As such, Stereotypical Selection applies to coverage of the DREAM Act, but in other cases Latino/Latinas are often subject to threatening issue or confrontational phases of coverage.

In outlining the Stereotypical Selection phase, Wilson et al. (2013) argue that the use of ‘success stories’ which appear to portray non-Whites in a positive light actually reinforce the objectives of the phase because ‘(a) The general audience is reassured that non-Whites are still “in their place” … and (b) those who escape their designated place are not a threat to society because they manifest the same values and ambitions as the dominant culture and overcome the “deficits” of their racial/cultural backgrounds’ (pp. 134–135). Because these stories still coexist with dominant coverage patterns of violent, criminal, and lazy non-Whites, the overall effect is to portray people of color as ‘problem people’, who either have problems or cause problems, thus becoming a social burden for mainstream society (p. 136).

Media stereotypes, exemplars, and framing of target populations

Latino/Latina stereotypes ‘exist not in a vacuum but as part of a larger discourse on Otherness in the United States’, Ramírez Berg asserted in his 2002 study on film representations of Latino/Latinas. Such stereotypes are a product of what he calls ‘Latinism’, derived from Said’s Orientalism, ‘the construction of Latin America and its inhabitants and of Latino/Latinas in the country to justify the United States’ imperialistic goals’ (p. 4).

Mastro’s studies on the news media’s use of ‘exemplars’ in stories about issues affecting Latino/Latinas also provide a more mixed view of how negative versus positive perceptions are shaped, not only by the tone of coverage but also by the mode of coverage. Tukachinsky et al. (2011) defined ‘exemplars’ as ‘a sample of incidents from a population of all occurrences that share particular characteristics’ most commonly manifested in news media as personal stories or testimonials (pp. 720–721). In the context of race and policy, exemplars are media representations of specific individuals who might be affected by race-based policy decisions and generally evoke a sympathetic response from audiences (Mastro and Tukachinsky, 2011).

Mastro et al. (2008) found that media exposure to Latino/Latina exemplars can mimic the positive effects of intergroup interactions, such as a reduction in negative stereotyping. However, ultimately ‘exemplars are rarely randomly sampled from the population and, thus, do not reliably represent the phenomenon with which they were intended to correspond’ (Tukachinsky et al., 2011: 722). This distortion effect leads to ‘undesirable consequences’, Tukachinsky et al. posit, since cognitive heuristic processing inherently biases audiences to place more weight on exemplar-based storytelling versus data or more abstract information.

Schneider and Ingram examined policy beneficiaries from a political-science perspective, defining varying motives for the social construction of target populations affected by public policy as positive or negative. ‘There are strong pressures for public officials to provide beneficial policy to powerful, positively constructed target populations’, Schneider and Ingram (1993) argue, ‘and to devise punitive, punishment-oriented policy for negatively constructed groups’ (p. 334). The media, often in tandem with public officials and the groups themselves, manipulate these social constructions, sometimes reconfiguring them, leading to ‘cyclical patterns of corrections to the over- and undersubscription to different target groups’ (p. 342). Schneider and Ingram argue that, while powerful groups are often positively portrayed, some target populations viewed as weak and dependent are as well. This phenomenon motivates the powerful to direct policy that both helps the needy, powerless group and often perpetuates its dependency (p. 342).

Exemplars present in a variety of stories, predominantly Latino/Latina youths

During the study period, from mid-2010 to mid-2012, coverage of the DREAM Act was steady, in part because activists continued to stage high-profile protests even during the legislative and policy lulls. Peaks in coverage occurred around the 21 September 2010 filibuster, the early December 2010 attempts to pass the bill in the House and Senate, and the 15 June 2012 executive action by President Obama. Although these coverage peaks were all driven by policy events, we identified a significant proportion, more than one-third, of the 232 articles in the study as human interest. More than 40 percent were categorized as news stories focused on policy, 20 percent as opinion pieces (including editorials), and 4 percent other types of stories.

Predictably, nearly all the human-interest stories contained DREAM Act exemplars. However, nearly one-third of the policy stories and one-third of the opinion stories also featured exemplars. Many of these were brief mentions well into the stories or columns of a specific person who would be affected by the policy, but overall, 115 of all the studied articles (49%) contained exemplars. The exemplars were all in their late teens to mid-20s because the proposed law and executive decision were aimed at undocumented immigrants under the age of 35 or 30, respectively. There were roughly equal numbers of male and female exemplars. They were also overwhelmingly Latino, with 99 of the 115 stories (86%) focusing on exemplars whose origins were in Latin American countries, primarily Mexico, Central, and South America. Eight of those stories focused on East or South Asian American exemplars, and three featured exemplars of other origin, including African and European. In reality, most of the actual DREAM Act beneficiaries would be Latino, estimated to be as high as 80 percent (Ojeda et al., 2010).

DREAM Act exemplars linked to signifiers of desirable, ‘American’ cultural codes

Of our inductively coded categories, the most prominent of the exemplars’ characteristics was a young age of entry in the United States. This phenomenon had some practical purposes since later versions of the DREAM Act, as well as Obama’s executive action, required beneficiaries to have entered the United States before the age of 16. Even so, we were struck by the prevalence of exemplars who entered well before 16, as young children. For example, a Contra Costa Times article from 9 March 2012 focuses on Lucas de Silva, a 23-year-old whose parents brought him from Brazil when he was 1:

When he was a teenager, da Silva woke up one morning, rushed into his parents’ bedroom and eagerly told them he was ready to get his driver’s permit. They looked at each other before breaking the news.

‘I had grown up thinking I was completely American, and then all of a sudden my parents told me I wasn’t’, he said. (O’Brien, 2012)

In 69 percent of the articles that contained exemplars, the primary exemplar was brought to the United States before the age of 12 – an age defined in America as ‘pre-teen’. On 16 June 2012, the Denver Post reported on Obama’s executive action and included a local high-school junior, Cesiah, referred to by first name only. ‘Cesiah recalls small details about Mexico – her village and her house, though she doesn’t remember what it’s like to live there’, the article reads. ‘She has attended public schools in Denver and Adams County from second grade until now’ (Sherry, 2012). Fittingly, the headline of the article is ‘Children brought to US get break’.

In both da Silva and Cesiah’s quotes, the signifiers of a young age of entry are linked to cultural codes of assimilation or Americanness. In other words, the exemplars arrived at such a young age, and they hardly have any memory of not being American. Many exemplar stories emphasized similar cultural attributes, such a 28 January 2011 Salt Lake Tribune story focusing on David Morales, a local teenager who faces deportation to Mexico although ‘he speaks English more fluently than Spanish’ (Winters, 2011).

In one-third of the stories that contained exemplars, we found signifiers such as English fluency; American cultural preferences in food, music, or sports; and American loyalty demonstrated in acts like military service (the controversial addition to the 2009 bill and subsequent versions) or volunteer work. These connotative codes constitute a powerful undercurrent in many DREAM Act exemplar stories, suggesting that beyond legal American residency or citizenship, there is a cultural dimension to Americanness – an idea of ‘earned’ Americanness through assimilation or in-group conformity.

Equally importantly, as the Denver Post headline (‘Children brought to US get break’) suggests, a very young age of entry links directly to the idea of blamelessness since the child’s choice is wholly the responsibility of the parent or parents. In the political rhetoric around the DREAM Act, legislators and advocates frequently used the phrase ‘through no fault of their own’. In the aforementioned newspaper constructions of exemplar profiles, the signifiers of youth and blamelessness/innocence linked to cultural codes of Americanness or the ‘American Dream’. The exemplars themselves, as represented in the newspaper stories, often embraced these rhetorical strategies, as in the case of Miriam Torres, a suburban Atlanta 20-year-old who was brought to the country illegally at age 9, and the subject of a profile in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution on 6 September 2010. ‘It’s not my fault I’m illegal’, Torres is quoted saying. ‘I’m smart. I love to learn. I love to study. I want to go to college, but I can’t’ (Diamond).

Torres’ quoted assertions also point to another common set of signifiers in exemplar portrayals: thirty-four of the exemplar-containing stories, nearly one-third, contained references to the exemplar’s high grade point average, the phrase ‘good student’, or status as a valedictorian, salutatorian, or honor roll member. Even more, 51 (44%) of the exemplar stories mentioned specific career aspirations, commonly in altruistic professions such as medicine, nursing, or teaching. ‘Wendy Ramirez said she was first inspired to pursue a medical degree when her father was paralyzed after a drunken driver hit him when she was a child’, one Houston Chronicle article reads (Cruz, 2012). Despite the high numbers of ‘military DREAMers’ among actual immigrants (Diaz-Strong et al., 2009), we found virtually no exemplars who were planning to pursue military service without college. A handful of exemplars were headed to military academies or planned to participate in Reserve Officers’ Training Corps (ROTC; a college-based military program), and one exemplar wanted to be a ‘military doctor’. These signifiers link to cultural codes that reflect not only the desirable ‘American’ values of high achievement and hard work but also the ‘American Dream’ of a college education.

Furthermore, Cesiah, Torres, Morales, and Ramirez share another attribute that we identified in two-thirds of the exemplars: they are local to the newspaper’s coverage area, and their local ties are emphasized by the inclusion of specific references to the school districts they attended and, in Torres’ case, her desire to attend a Georgia university (Georgia Tech). It is common for local and regional newspapers to focus on individual in their local area, so the choices of local exemplars are likely practical. However, just as Mastro et al. likened the effects of media exposure to exemplars to actual intergroup interactions, the use of local exemplars is likely to produce a more sympathetic, hence positive, effect in readers. Dunaway et al. and McKeever et al. found in their respective studies of localized coverage of Latino/Latinas in Louisiana and North Carolina that, while increased coverage had a distorting effect related to the actual numbers of Latino/Latina immigrants in those areas, the effects on audiences were not necessarily negative. Not only were audiences moved accordingly by both negative- and positive-toned media coverage, but they were also able to distinguish media bias, and sometimes acted counter to the bias (Dunaway et al., 2011; McKeever et al., 2012).

Stereotypical selection, ‘success stories’, and ‘problem people’ complicate portrayals

It would appear that because representations of Latino/Latina exemplars in DREAM Act coverage are so overwhelmingly positive, they indicate a shift away from the historic negative stereotypes and representations of the Other described by the literature. The typical DREAM Act beneficiary is described in the studied newspaper stories as hardworking, assimilated, high-achieving in school, loyal to the United States, and blameless in their parents’ decisions to enter and/or stay in the United States without authorization. However, stereotypes can in fact appear to be positive, as Wilson et al. describe in the stereotypical selection phase, while having more nuanced Othering effects:

Examples include news stories that ostensibly appear to be favorable to non-Whites, as in the cases of ‘success stories’, where a person has risen from the despair of (choose one) the reservation, the ghetto, the barrio, Chinatown, or Little Tokyo.

Wilson et al. (2013) argue that elaborating such stories establish the dual goal of reassuring Whites that minorities are still ‘in their place’, meaning the ghetto or barrio, and so on, and that exceptional Others ‘overcome the “deficits” of their racial/cultural background’ by manifesting the values and ambitions of the dominant culture (pp. 134–135).

Signifiers of poverty or lower economic class were common in exemplar stories, and 40 stories containing exemplars, more than one-third, mentioned that the immigrant youth was unable to pay, or having difficulty paying, for college. While the latter references logically follow from the in-state tuition benefits or financial aid eligibility often associated with the DREAM Act’s promise of legal-resident status, human-interest news stories tended to hone in on concrete signifiers of exemplars’ humble roots that had no direct relevance to policy. The aforementioned Salt Lake Tribune story about David Morales states that his parents came to the United States illegally from Mexico when David was 9 and ‘hoped to find work that could put meals on the table three times a day instead of just two’ (Winters, 2011). A 28 November 2010 Los Angeles Times story contains multiple exemplars, including the rare Asian American one. Four other youths, all Latino, are featured, including Maria Duque, a student body vice president at Fullerton College whose parents brought her to the United States when she was 5 and their native Ecuador’s economy collapsed: ‘They lived in a garage the first year. Her father worked nights and her mother days in a furniture factory’. The article also quotes an expert, a Claremont Graduate University Professor, who had recently studied undocumented students in California and found that a high proportion held leadership positions at their schools. ‘It wasn’t what I was expecting to find’, Perez is quoted. ‘We always hear that poverty and legal struggles are predictors of academic failure’ (Marcum, 2010).

Perez’s quote stands in for the dominant-culture reader’s point of view, which ostensibly also expresses surprise that these exemplars have overcome the ‘deficits’ of their backgrounds. By linking the signifiers of poverty and undocumented status through their proximity, Perez’s quote also connotes a universally impoverished population. In the Los Angeles Times article, Perez goes on to underscore his disbelief at his findings, attempting an explanation of their surprising nature: ‘I was scratching my head. I double-checked and triple-checked my numbers. But the more I presented my research, the more I came to believe this is the way the students expressed their American self-identity’ (Marcum, 2010). Consistent with Wilson et al.’s construction of a ‘success’ story, the exemplars’ successes are manifested in their expression of American identity and values – thus, implicitly, poverty and lack of resources come to signify the home country or immigrant status, whereas self-determination, success, and leadership come to signify assimilation and Americanness.

Wilson et al. (2013) furthermore note that in success stories, credit is given ‘to the social system that tolerates or praises upward mobility of non-Whites’ (p. 135). In the previously mentioned story about Miriam Torres in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, signifiers of her local ties and her high academic achievement are linked with the cost of her education: ‘She attended public school in Fulton County with taxpayers spending more than $65,000 to educate her, according to state figures’ (Diamond, 2010). The connotation is clear: Americans literally have paid to make her a success, and the DREAM Act represents another US-created system that will ensure Torres can fully rise up out of the ‘barrio’ or ‘ghetto’, also at taxpayer expense.

Framed as an anti-DREAM Act argument, the signifiers of poverty and financial need become linked to cultural codes consistent with Wilson et al.’s (2013) assertion that news media continue to present non-Whites as ‘problem people’, thus leading the audience to perceive people of color a social burden (p. 136). The Atlanta Journal-Constitution story focusing on Miriam Torres follows the estimated cost of her education with a summary of opposing viewpoints on the DREAM Act: ‘Some say that money was wasted because Torres can’t legally work here. The money should have been spent on legal citizens, they said. Others paint Torres as a victim of a broken system’ (Diamond, 2010). Either ‘side’ of the argument connotes that Torres is a ‘problem’ for the dominant culture, whether American taxpayers or mainstream White institutions.

Opposition views and counterexemplars relatively rare

Tukachinsky et al. found that the distorting effects of exemplar use could be mitigated by presenting audiences with an equal number of ‘counterexemplars’ or representatives of the same racial group that contradict the stereotypes or attributes of the exemplars (Tukachinsky et al., 2011). While we did not find a single story that presented a potential DREAM Act beneficiary whose salient characteristics ran counter to those of the exemplars, it could be argued that the requirements of the proposed legislation and executive decision themselves preclude the use of counterexemplars in news coverage. We did, however, code for the presence of opposition viewpoints, whether from quoted experts or lawmakers, or summarized versions of those groups’ arguments, in stories containing exemplars. Fifty-one (44%) of the exemplar-containing stories had an opposition viewpoint similar to the following in a Washington Post story:

‘Obviously, kids in this situation are sympathetic cases’, said Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies, which favors tighter controls. ‘My real concern is that it not become a policy that all people in this position won’t be deported because that then creates expectations and that really is a formalized amnesty’. (Montgomery, 2010)