How Ethnic Are U.S. Ethnic Media: The Case of Latina Magazines

In this article, I review 3 waves of ethnic media scholarship, and I describe how the dominant paradigm shifted from assimilation concerns to pluralism. I used qualitative and quantitative content analysis to examine news and features in 5 new nationwide women's magazines targeted to U.S. Hispanics. Thirty-eight percent of the manifest content mentioned Latinos and 27% mentioned specific Latin American cultures. These new English-language and bilingual Latina magazines distributed in the United States had simultaneous assimilative and pluralistic functions. One function was the ability to create a pan-Hispanic identity for members of various Latin American cultures. The magazine content does not fit within the confines of current language-based ethnic media models. I propose a revised model of ethnic media that reflects dual functions of assimilative and pluralistic expression and takes into account the possibility of more symbolic ethnic media functions.