Memory, Identity, and Consumption (Joshua Salyers)

            Given my dissertation topic dealing with material culture, I am always aware of the creation of consumer cultures and the commodification of aspects of popular culture. Deborah Paredez’s discussion of how Selenidad opened up space for the negotiation of Latinidad or latino/a identity appealed to my interest in this. A significant part of the negotiation of Latino/a identity surrounding Selena involved how she “sold” her image when she was alive and, more interestingly, how her memory was “sold” after her death. Selena represented herself as a celebrity hero to working-class individuals, especially women, as she provided an example of an independent woman who even established her own clothing line. Selena, as a Latina in the United States, marketed her self and was later marketed in a variety of ways. Not only did she offer a figure for middle class women to identify with, she became the hyper-sexualized object of male imaginations. Paredez noted Howard Stern’s concern about Latino’s ruining the United States did prevent his “desire to consume [her] racialized female body.” Following her death, discussions about the Latino/a market to which Selena appealed the most centered around marketing investment in the Latino/a industry.

While a variety of people memorialized Selena in a number of ways, Paredez demonstrated how mainstream American Marketing forces created capital from Selena’s memory. Steven Bunker’s dissertation, Creating a Consumer Culture in the Age of Porfirio Díaz, best represents my interest in consumerism as a means of identity formation an negotiation. He illustrated that even while Porfirian officials attempted to shape official culture as an elite culture in Mexico from the 1876 to 1910, marketing forces still offered a space for working class individuals to express their identity, separate from Porfirian high culture, by consuming specific products. In similar fashion, while concerns over the growing number of Latinos/as in the United States in the 1990s became more prevalent, market forces sought to capitalize on a new group of Latino/a consumers by creating Spanish-Language market segments, depoliticizing, as Paredez argues, Latinidad into categories of capital. Paredez illustrated how People en Español illustrated the ways that Selenidad offered space for competing claims to Latinidad. Similarly, the consumer culture surrounding her life and her memory also provided a space for the negotiation of latinidad in the Latin Market place. As Anna Maria Arias put it, “Selena’s death was a turning point for the emergence of the U.S. Latino Market.