Joaquin Castro: “Americans Don’t Know Who Latinos Are”

The New Yorker Radio Hour

WNYC Studios and The New Yorker

Politics, Arts, News, Wnyc, Books, David, Storytelling, Society & Culture, Yorker, New, Remnick

4.2 • 6.2K Ratings

🗓️ 21 September 2021

⏱️ 23 minutes

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Summary

On Tuesday, the U.S. Government Accountability Office issued a preliminary report on the long-standing underrepresentation of Latinos in the media. While most people consider Hollywood a relatively liberal industry, “the system as a whole is actually quite regressive and . . . exclusionary,” Joaquin Castro, the representative of a Texas district that includes much of San Antonio, says. “I’m convinced that Americans don’t know who Latinos are,” Castro tells Stephania Taladrid. Unlike Black Americans, who are linked in the white imagination to the civil-rights era and other historical turning points, Castro says, non-Latinos “don’t associate us with any particular time period in American history. They don’t know who among us has contributed to the nation’s prosperity or success. And they have no sense where to place us within American society.” What Castro calls a “void” in America’s narrative gets filled by pernicious stereotypes of Latinos as criminals and “illegals.” “There has been now, for several years at least, this dangerous nexus between representation, portrayal, and the abuse of Latino stereotypes . . . by politicians who abuse them for their own political gain. And, in that dangerous mix, in its worst form, you get what happened in El Paso in August of 2019, where a madman drove ten hours and killed twenty-three people because he considered them Hispanic invaders.” Castro suggests that states and local governments should do more to hold the media accountable, for example, by tying tax breaks for entertainment production to improvements on diversity.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to the New Yorker Radio Hour.
0:06.2	The Government Accountability Office this week released a report on Latino representation in the media, in entertainment, and news.
0:14.5	And it's pretty damning.
0:16.1	One of the congressional members who requested that report was Joaquin Castro of the 20th District of Texas,
0:22.7	a state that's 40% Latino. Castro was looking with the Congressional Hispanic Caucus at what
0:28.7	lawmakers can do to help move the needle on this issue. And he spoke with the New Yorker's
0:34.1	Stefania Teladrid. Congressman, we're here to talk about an issue that you've been fighting for over the years,
0:41.9	and that is the missing Latino narrative in our society.
0:45.8	To begin with, I'd like us to talk about education, which one could argue is really at the heart of it.
0:52.0	You grew up in San Antonio, a city that has an incredibly rich
0:55.8	Latino heritage. And yet it seems like Latino stories were barely present in your school's
1:01.6	curriculum. So take us back in time, if you will. Who are the Latinos you remember learning
1:07.4	about? And how did you fill that void in the narrative over the years?
1:12.6	I see this as a foundational problem for the Latino community and other communities in the
1:20.4	United States that we have been left out of much of the telling of American history and our
1:26.7	state histories, including in my
1:30.2	home state of Texas.
1:31.5	And so when I was growing up, the only Latinos, in this case, mostly Mexican-Americans,
1:37.6	that I remember, are Mexicans actually, that I remember learning about were the defenders of the Alamo.
1:46.2	And really not much else.
1:49.0	Maybe Henry Cisneros, who was mayor of San Antonio when I was in school,
1:54.6	but it was a very sparse presence in the telling of American history and Texas history. And that's in a state that's now
	...

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