Latino identities and media use

This blog intends to complement a research project ongoing at the University of Texas' Radio-TV-Film Department about how access to and use of media, information and culture by ethnic majorities, minorities and immigrants has evolved in Austin. Please feel free to comment.

We have interviewed quite a few people from 1999 to present in Austin and will be interviewing more in fall of 2009, focusing on comparing different immigrant groups' life histories with migration, social mobility, and the use of both traditional and new media. We are already analyzing a number of the existing interviews and hope to be testing ideas out here and publishing them in various places.

One of the grad students working on the project found that a previous study by Rios and Gaines (1998) showed that Mexican immigrants also fall into the classification later suggested by Berry et al (2006), and that based on circumstances specific to the family or the group, the outcome of the acculturation process could be either primarily ethnic, primarily national, or bicultural.

My own expectation is that we will see more and more people having identities and media use that could either be described as blended/hybrid or multi-layered, like the idea of bicultural, but increasingly more complicated. People are not only just Latino, blended or acculturated, they are also young (or not), male or female, richer or poorer, more or less educated. All those layers of identity interact, I think. Stay tuned. Let's see what we find as we dig deeper. (note by Joe Straubhaar)