Latina Magazine and the Invocation of a Panethnic Family: Latino Identity as It Is Informed by Celebrities and Papis Chulos

Latina magazine is a bilingual women’s magazine that was launched in 1996 for a target audience of bicultural college-educated Latinas between the ages of 18 and 45. In an attempt to reach such a wide range of Latinas, the magazine makes an appeal to familial forms of identification, often presenting discourses of familial allegiances alongside calls for panethnic solidarity. This article presents a case study of the construction of Latinidad through a textual analysis of Latina articles on entertainment and romance and through interviews with the magazine’s editorial staff. Latina oscillates between celebrating the inclusion of Latina/os in the U.S. entertainment industry and speaking out against the criminalization of Latino men and the hypersexualization of Latina/os. This study situates the creation of Latino media in relation to theories of panethnic identification and research on the ideological function of popular culture and the marketing of ethnicity.