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Docile, criminal, and upwardly mobile?: Visual news framing of Mexican migrants and the logics of neoliberal multiculturalism

¿Dóciles, criminales y de movilidad ascendiente?: El encuadre noticioso de los inmigrantes mexicanos y la lógica del multiculturalismo neoliberal

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Abstract

This study examines visual and textual representations of Mexican migrants in English-language photojournalism over the course of a decade. We find three clusters of representations: (1) male laborers portrayed as outside the bounds of society but often unfairly victimized (2) migrants portrayed as criminal in encounters with law enforcement, and (3) all other migrants, often portrayed in ways that valorized those who had “made good” or fit in. These clusters initially appeared to employ entirely separate tropes about different demographics of migrants. However, we find that they instead often reflect the same migrant demographics in different geographies and at different moments of the migration trajectory. We argue that these tropes collectively reflect and promote the cultural and economic logic of neoliberal multiculturalism, serving the neoliberal state and legitimating the precarity of migrants in labor markets.

Resúmen

Este estudio examina las representaciones visuales y textuales de los inmigrantes mexicanos en el fotoperiodismo angloparlante a lo largo de una década. Encontramos tres grupos de representaciones: (1) hombres obreros representados como fuera de los lindes de la sociedad pero a menudo injustamente victimizados, (2) inmigrantes representados como criminales en encuentros con las fuerzas policiales y (3) todos los demás inmigrantes, muchas veces representados de forma que valoriza a los que “triunfan” o se adaptan. Estos grupos inicialmente parecían emplear tropos completamente distintos para describir las diferentes poblaciones de inmigrantes. Sin embargo, encontramos que muchas veces reflejan los mismos sectores demográficos de inmigrantes en diferentes geografías y en distintos momentos de su trayectoria migratoria. Planteamos que estos tropos reflejan y promueven colectivamente la lógica cultural y económica del multiculturalismo neoliberal, y que así sirven al estado neoliberal y validan la precariedad de los inmigrantes en los mercados laborales.

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Notes

  1. There are some key exceptions, particularly Santa Ana’s work (2013) examining representations of Latinos in network news, including visual framing. Chavez (2001) has examined images on the covers of news magazines rather than daily news. Wallen (2003) evaluated some newspaper images of migrants as part of a larger project on representations at the border.

  2. Of course, scholars have long challenged the myth of the merely “documentary” photograph or news image (e.g., Entman 1993; Abraham and Messaris 2001; Yanow 2014).

  3. We adopt the broad term “migrant” to avoid confusion with the US legal meaning of “immigrant,” which refers only to those with legal permanent residence.

  4. The San Diego Union-Tribune is the only print daily in the county focused on local news. It had a circulation of about 313,000 in a county of 1.5 million in 2008, toward the end of the years we sampled (circulation figure from “History of the San Diego Union Tribune,” http://legacy.sandiegouniontribune.com/news/metro/multimedia/history/index.html; population figures from US Census Bureau). Although we did not sample from the Union-Tribune’s weekly Spanish-language publication (named Enlace during the 2000s), an informal review suggests vastly different content, with more frequent and diverse representations of Mexican migrants and more transborderism.

  5. Besides the randomizing of weeks to sample, we made substantially different methodological decisions from Wallen, who focused only on the front pages, did not make an electronic record of her data, and did very little systematic content analysis.

  6. There were a couple exceptions in circumstances when we estimated that most readers would almost certainly assume that a person represented was a Mexican immigrant: for example, images of an agricultural worker with a Spanish name picking avocadoes, or a person at the 2006 immigrant rights protest holding a Mexican flag. We do not know the actual biographies of the individuals in these cases, but we believe that readers in this context would very likely project these representations onto Mexican migrants as a category.

  7. Some of these practices have been rendered illegal in particular locations by local ordinances or homeowners’ associations regulations that target or reference immigrant communities.

  8. For instance, the othering of nativism often also reflects racialization and claims about criminality or threats to order (e.g., Rivera 2014; Galindo and Vigil 2006).

  9. Coding from a broad conceptual heuristic is less of an exact science than coding for content, and the results should be read only as an indicator of broad patterns. To make the coding as uniform as possible, the authors discussed the categories at length and did the first half of the coding together in the same room, discussing uncertainties as we went. Our standard for inclusion was whether we both agreed that there was at least subtle evidence for a particular narrative in a photo or article. Maher completed the second half alone, after our coding norms were firmly established. An inter-coder reliability test found 79% agreement for narratives, compared with 95% for content.

  10. In many cases, the article or photo caption identified a migrant as lacking legal status; in others, it was implied by the actions described, such as being smuggled in a vehicle or crossing the border in the desert rather than at a port of entry.

  11. The terminology shift followed significant struggle to counter the common practice of representing immigrants as “illegals” or “illegal immigrants.” The AP was among the first to shift policy (Sterne 2013).

  12. Data from 2008 to 2010, from “San Diego,” research summary by the Center for the Study of Immigrant Integration, 2016.

  13. Given a lack of data on Mexican migrant labor force participation in San Diego by gender, we made inferences based on Fortuny et al. (2007), who estimated that women made up 50% of all legal immigrants and 46–47% of all unauthorized immigrants in California and Los Angeles as of 2004. In both groups, 58–59% of women ages eighteen to sixty-four were active in the labor force, a rate lower than immigrant men (84–94% depending on legal status), but still substantial.

  14. In the 2000s, Mexican nationals apprehended while crossing the border without inspection were often offered the option of “voluntary return,” meaning that there was no charge or court proceeding.

  15. The latter is something of a catch-all category, since we did not find any other especially striking divisions or differences in representations, and since the other content categories were all relatively small. We omitted the “dead body” category from narrative analysis, in part because it was a category without visual representations.

  16. The percentages in Fig. 3 show the proportion of the total items that included a particular positive or negative narrative. The numbers for each dimension do not add up to 100% because we coded each of the eight narratives separately: some dimensions were entirely absent in particular articles or photos, and some items included both positive and negative variations of a dimension (e.g., both disorder and order).

  17. For instance, humanitarian organizations working to generate public compassion for human suffering have tended to adopt women and children as “ideal victims” for their public face and image (e.g., Höijer 2004).

  18. As Blow (2015) once wrote, “Pity doesn’t dismantle privilege, but supports it. Pity requires a perch. It rolls down. Pity reinforces imbalances of power. It can be violence operating as benevolence”.

  19. Other scholars have also noted how multiculturalism has become part of the neoliberal project, for example, in the ways that the commodification of ethnic cultures generates consumption and tourism (Buechler 2014; Halter 2007).

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Acknowledgements

The authors are grateful to colleagues in SDSU’s Chicano and Chicana Studies Department, who were a generous and insightful audience as these ideas began to take shape, and to Marcial Gutierrez for his contributions as we reviewed literatures. We also thank Maria Cook, Cetta Mainwaring, Jill Esbenshade, and anonymous reviewers for wise and helpful commentaries.

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  1. San Diego State University, San Diego, CA, USA

    Kristen Hill Maher & Jesse Elias

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Correspondence to Kristen Hill Maher.

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Maher, K.H., Elias, J. Docile, criminal, and upwardly mobile?: Visual news framing of Mexican migrants and the logics of neoliberal multiculturalism. Lat Stud 17, 225–256 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41276-019-00181-3

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