Mainstream media often reinforces stereotypes or excludes minority communities altogether. Scholars like Chon Noriega, Rosalinda Fregoso, and Ed Guerrero have examined how misrepresentation in the media reinforces hierarchies and limits cultural visibility. This research project explores how positive media representation can empower marginalized youth, focusing on how Chicanx subjectivity is formed and contested. This research paper draws on Dr. Renee Hudson’s work on the complexity of Latinx futurity and identity, emphasizing the empowering potential of positive portrayals in the 1997 film Selena (dir. Gregory Nava) and selected songs by Mexican American artist Becky G through Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera. In particular, I argue that Anzaldúa’s theorizing of the mestiza consciousness has not only impacted how we think of Chicanx identities but also helps to unpack how positive representations of historically underrepresented communities offer complex bicultural imaginaries of being and belonging that resonate with youth from those communities. By analyzing cultural production as a form of resistance, visibility, and healing, and identifying recurring messages of cultural pride and identity negotiating within film scenes, lyrics, and visuals, this research contributes to media and identity studies by emphasizing the power of seeing oneself reflected in authentic and multidimensional ways.

My presentation focuses on my various contributions to ongoing Latin music research by Dr. Vanessa Díaz (LMU) and Dr. Petra Rivera-Rideau (Wellesley College) during my tenure as a McNair scholar. My responsibilities ranged from assisting with the promotional plan for a forthcoming co-authored book, blending a narrative and systematic literature review focused on the contemporary rise of Latin Music, utilizing translanguaging to review and pull original Spanish and Spanglish quotes from interviewees in the book, and lastly, annotating translations of lyrics for Bad Bunny Syllabus project, contributing to digital archive and open-access pedagogical tools. Serving as a research assistant helped foster my interest in the influence of pop culture on politics as a Political Science and Sociology double major. This presentation will describe all of this in more depth. The presentation will conclude with a discussion of how my unique areas of knowledge and specialization allowed me to contribute to a diverse range of research components.

My project analyzes California incarceration in the 1990s to extrapolate manifestations of Chicano identity and a radical agency within prisons. This era is significant because it follows the expansion of the carceral system in California during the 1980s. The 1990s were also a time of increasingly hostile and punitive narratives both in rhetoric and laws that criminalized and punished Black and Brown men. I use a decolonial and critical theoretical lens to look at the material and metaphysical implications that incarceration holds on formations of identity. This is a categorically historical project. By accessing archival sources, and conducting oral interviews, I explore self-expression through writing and art and aim to record a more humanized narration of the prison’s effects on senses of self. Finally, I look at the confluence of religious expression through tattoos as forms of empowerment and cultural resistance. My work narrates a history of subversion that demonstrates the agency of non-whites against empire. Additionally, I explore the modality between the manifestation of identity inside the prison and the felt absence of incarcerated people on the outside. My project holds contemporary significance due to sensationalized narratives of growing conservatism among Latinx Americans.