“Dangerous in the Minds of Barrio People”: Empowering Bicultural Latino Identity on Spanish-Language Television in Los Angeles, 1960–1990

Abstract This article focuses on the bicultural Latino identity-building discourses promoted by TV stations KMEX Channel 34 (Spanish International Network/Univision) and KVEA Channel 52 (Telemundo) through news and public affairs programming in metropolitan Los Angeles, home of the United States’s largest concentration of Latinas and Latinos. The two stations’ news and public affairs shows are historically significant for being their most extensive locally produced content and offering a valuable audio/visual representation of Latino Southern California’s cultural development from the early 1960s to late 1980s. Both stations reflected their social context, broadcasting to an overwhelmingly Mexican-heritage audience; but producers and investors at KMEX-34 and KVEA-52 also consciously sought a wider Spanish-speaking audience in Southern California by framing viewers as politically empowered bicultural U.S. Latino subjects defined by a positive affirmation of their cultural background (broadly inclusive of all of Latin America) and their integration into U.S. life through participation in electoral politics and other civic processes. Combining archival research consisting of early scripts, office memoranda, program reviews, viewer letters, oral history interviews, and analysis of extant video recordings preserved in the UCLA Film and Television Archive’s News and Public Affairs Collection, I historicize the ways locally produced programming on Spanish-language TV framed and promoted notions of an additive and empowering bicultural U.S. Latino identity.