Brian Herrera's fascinating and detailed history of Latina/o practitioners and representations of Latinidad in popular performance traces the cyclical nature of infatuation and disregard that American culture has had with Latina/os. Herrera describes this ‘cycle of discovery, disidentification, and dissolution’ (p. 21) with Latina/o culture as the pattern that ‘rehearses audiences’ to define Latina/os as non-white and for Latina/o actors, who occupied a liminal space between racial lines, to formulate ‘other’ ethnoracial boundaries. Herrera's genealogy illuminates the recurrence of an imminent ‘Latino explosion’ which he argues is a key repeated ritual throughout the twentieth century.
The subjects of Herrera's case studies all achieved widespread attention; whether they were well-received by audiences or financially and aesthetically successful is not the book's focus. Analysing performances, films, magazine images, television shows, song lyrics, toys and political cartoons, Herrera begins his analysis of the ‘Latin Number’ from the Good Neighbor Era in the 1930s. The book opens with the legacy of the Good Neighbor Policy that promoted pan-American exchange, resulting in the incorporation of Latino dance, music and comedy routines, such as the widely popular conga, and their disappearance until the next Latin Number arrived on the scene.
Other case studies include West Side Story’s transformation from theatre to film, which involved the reordering of numbers and the revision of lyrics and staging. One of Herrera's many contributions is in demonstrating how the work's reconceptualization as film imbued the representation of juvenile gangs with Latina/o identifications and solidified the creation of the Latino gang member stereotype. Conversely, Herrera also assesses how stereotypes are broken down, starting with the foundation of Latino Theatre and Luis Valdéz's work both in El Teatro Campesino and in Zoot Suit. Herrera argues that Valdéz executes stereotypes of Latinos, playing on the double meaning of ‘execute’ to signify how Valdéz's characters ‘enacted the stereotype so that they might eviscerate the stereotype’ (p. 139).
Herrera attends not only to particular stereotypes, but also to their origins and functions. Addressing stereotypes such as the Latin lover, the Latino gang member and the sexualized and exoticized Latina, Herrera takes the reader into the biographies of a range of performers from Ricardo Montalban to Rita Moreno. He provides an in-depth analysis of casting practices that ultimately had consequences for individual careers and the larger performance of Latinidad.
The book is structured loosely chronologically and concludes with a close consideration of how masculinity, queer identity and the AIDS epidemic factored into a re-envisioning of tropes such as the Latin lover. Herrera's work integrates gender and sexuality studies, latina/o studies, performance studies, media studies and cultural history, examining across disciplines and genres how practitioners from distinct cultural backgrounds came to perform and challenge the amalgamated concept of ‘Hispanic’ and ‘Latino’. Ultimately, Herrera's genealogy establishes that a certain level of activism is intrinsic to the labour of Latina/o practitioners as artists because of the need to constantly chip away at stereotypes. Herrera astutely notes, ‘I take it for granted that the archive of popular performance is also an archive of popular racism’ (p. 13), making evident that popular performance cannot be understood without addressing ethnoracial biases and tropes.
