[Review of] Clara E. Rodriguez, ed. Latin Looks: Images of Latinas and Latinos in the U.S. Media

The anthology Latin Looks is an important contribution to the literature on Latinos and their relationship to the mass media in the United States. It builds on the earlier work by Rosa Linda Fregoso, George Hadley-Garcia, Chon Noriega, Luis Reyes, Peter Ruble, Allen Woll, and others. The book focuses primarily on television and film; however, there is no discussion of the films produced in other countries, or the Spanish language films produced in the United States. The images that are developed in music, literature, or magazines are also not discussed, although there is an admission that these are an important sources which require analysis

Afrocentrism and the Peopling of the Americas

This essay focuses on a theory of human development that has been promoted aggressively by a group of Afrocentrists in recent years - that the Western Hemisphere was first populated by Africoids or Black people who came to the Americas by way of Asia and the Bering Straits with little or no change in their physical or racial characteristics. As discussed in this article, the theory has no support in the evidence collected by scientists in various fields. The essay focuses on the basic claims and methods used by the Afrocentrists to support their theory, including their misuse or misinterpretation of mostly outdated scholarship produced in Europe and the United States during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. A brief concluding section makes reference to the potential repercussions of this theory on relations between African Americans, Native Americans and Latinos of Native American and part Native American background

[Review of] Chon Noriega and Ana M. Lopez, eds., The Ethnic Eye: Latino Media Arts

In recent years, there has been an increased interest in the relationship between the media arts and the Latino communities of the United States. A number of important books and essays have been published on the subject, most notably Chon Noriega, ed. Chicanos and Film: Representation and Resistance (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992), George Hadley-Garcia, Hispanic Hollywood: The Latins in Motion Pictures (New York: Carol Publishing, 1993), and Gary D. Keller, Hispanics and United States Film: An Overview and Handbook (Tempe, Arizona: Bilingual Press, 1994). In fact, there have been so many books, edited collections, and essays published on the subject in recent years that they are beginning to bump into each other in dramatic ways. A very recent example of this is the re-publication in Clara E. Rodriguez, ed. Latin Looks: (Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press, 1997) of Lillian Jimenez\u27s 1993 essay Moving from the Margin to the Center: Puerto Rican Cinema in New York, which also appears in this excellent, slightly earlier collection of essays edited by Chon Noriega and Ana M. Lopez.The Ethnic Eye: Latino Media Arts is in fact limited mostly to a discussion of film and video