Aesthetics and the Marketing of Latinidad: Zoe Saldaña and L'Oreal's True Match Marketing Campaign

In this presentation, we analyze a shift in popular culture, mass media, and marketing forces in portraying Latinas/os as a diverse cultural group, rather than as a one-dimensional racial group, as it was done in the past.... [ view full abstract ]

In this presentation, we analyze a shift in popular culture, mass media, and marketing forces in portraying Latinas/os as a diverse cultural group, rather than as a one-dimensional racial group, as it was done in the past. However, the shift has had important consequences. We investigate the shift from racial to cultural representations of Latina femininity through a critical discussion of a recent marketing campaign featuring Beyoncé Knowles, Jennifer Lopez, and Zoe Saldaña. We argue that we can see here the functioning of a characteristically 21st-century aesthetics of ethnicity that works by deflecting or even negating race. We also identify the challenges that this new aesthetics creates for social perceptions of Latinidad in mainstream US culture, connecting these challenges to the problems discussed in recent theoretical accounts of “the browning of America”. We focus Saldana, since within the world of Latina celebrities in U.S. popular culture, she can be seen to embody one of the more unique sets of circumstances and combinations of ethnicity, phenotype, and character portrayals. Since Saldana’s body does not conform to Hollywood’s expectations concerning the “look” of a Latina, those with casting authority are more likely to place her in roles portraying Black or alien characters in bright colors than as a Latina. But it is the way that Latinidad has been de-racialized by the media, especially in the realm of beauty marketing that informs our analysis. We use Saldana’s role in L’Oreal’s “True Match” advertising campaign to address the de-racialization of the aesthetics of Latinidad. Our claim is that while Hollywood simplifies or obscures Saldana’s ethno-racial identity, by rendering it Black or alien, L’Oreal’s erasure of Saldana vis-à-vis race has a different inflection. If, as Beltrán articulates, Latinidad is both “a site of ongoing resignifiability—a political rather than a descriptive category,” and “a moment when diverse and even disparate subjects claim identification with one another” (2010, 9;168), and if, we should heed Dávila’s words that Latinidad can be “treated as an empty signifier within our ravenous global economy that shuns specificity, especially whenever profitable” (2014, 550), the question then is: what can we make of Saldana’s L’Oreal advertisements?