CSREA’s New Book Talks highlight new and notable works studying race, ethnicity, and indigeneity from scholars both internal and external to Brown. They facilitate thought-provoking and critical engagement with emerging scholarship.
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The next New Book Talk invites Mary Beltrán, author of Latino TV: A History. The text asks: whose stories are told on television? Who are the heroes and heroines, held up as intriguing, lovable, and compelling? Which characters are fully realized, rather than being cardboard villains and sidekicks? And who are our storytellers? In this first-ever account of Latino/a participation and representation in US English-language television, Beltrán offers a sweeping study of key moments of Chicano/a and Latino/a representation and authorship since the 1950s. Drawing on archival research, interviews with dozens of media professionals who worked on or performed in these series, textual analysis of episodes and promotional materials, and analysis of news media coverage, Beltrán explores the histories of Latina/o television narratives and the authors of those narratives, shedding important light on how Latina/os have been included―and, more often, not―in the television industry and in the stories of the country writ large.
This event is moderated by Paula M. L. Moya, Director of the Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity and Professor of English at Stanford University.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Mary Beltrán is an Associate Professor of Radio-Television-Film and a Faculty Affiliate of Mexican American & Latina/o Studies and Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. She specializes in critical studies-driven scholarship at the intersections of film and television studies, Latina/Latino and ethnic studies, and gender studies. Informed by her prior careers as a journalist and social worker, Dr. Beltrán writes and teaches on race, class and gender and the U.S. media industries and U.S. television and film history, with emphasis on U.S. Latina and Latino representation and authorship. Sheis the author of Latina/o Stars in U.S. Eyes: The Making and Meanings of Film and TV Stardom, co-editor of Mixed Race Hollywood, and author of the newly released Latino TV: A History. Dr. Beltrán is the Associate Director of the Latino Media Arts & Studies Program in UT-Austin’s Moody College of Communication.
ABOUT THE MODERATOR
Paula Moya is the author of The Social Imperative: Race, Close Reading, and Contemporary Literary Criticism (Stanford UP 2016) and Learning from Experience: Minority Identities, Multicultural Struggles (UC Press 2002). She has also co-edited three collections of original essays: Doing Race:21 Essays for the 21st Century (W.W. Norton, Inc. 2010), Identity Politics Reconsidered (Palgrave 2006), and Reclaiming Identity: Realist Theory and the Predicament of Postmodernism (UC Press 2000). Her teaching and research focus on twentieth-century and early twenty-first century literary studies, feminist theory, critical theory, narrative theory, interdisciplinary approaches to race and ethnicity, and Chicanx and Latinx studies. She loves her family and is proud to be from New Mexico.
To order a copy of the book, visit the Brown Bookstore.