Crossing Over? Hello-o They’re Already Here

First, the well-known facts: Puerto Rican pop star Ricky Martin is enjoying phenomenal success with his first English-language album, and more Latino pop artists, such as Enrique Iglesias, are vying to do the same. This has led the U.S. media--including a Time magazine cover story--to trumpet a new “Latin crossover phenomenon.”

Now, the lesser-known facts.

One: Many of the so-called crossover artists are Americans by birth, including Martin. But the pervasive impression in the media and in the culture at large is that these artists are exotic foreigners. Example? USA Today calling Martin’s sounds “south-of-the-border,” even though residents of his native Puerto Rico have been United States citizens since 1917, and the island’s signature musical genre, salsa, was invented in the 1960s in a city south of the Connecticut border: New York.

Two: Even though in the pop music business “crossover” generally means switching genres, Martin’s music--pop by any standards--has not changed, only the language he sings in. He is not, as some publications have posited, a salsa singer.

For Martin and others, the only real “crossover” is their language; it’s an unusual category, and one that French-speaking Canadian Celine Dion managed to avoid. Latinos, even those U.S.-born like Martin, are not afforded the same leeway.

Shakira, for example, is a Colombian rock singer whose style has been compared to Alanis Morissette; her “crossover” album will consist of translations of rock songs she has recorded in Spanish. Enrique Iglesias sings syrupy ballads in the tradition of Air Supply; it’s a formula that will likely work as well for him in English. And Martin’s music, while injected occasionally with percussive instruments, is no more or less “Latin” than that of, say, Puff Daddy, who also uses Spanish phrases.

All of this has led East Harlem’s Marc Anthony, who records salsa in Spanish and R&B; dance music in English, to declare “crossover” irrelevant, venturing to say the term has only been applied to these artists because they are Latinos on the mainstream charts, not because they perform Latin music on the mainstream charts.

While no one denies that focusing the mainstream media spotlight on Latino musicians and singers is overdue, the recent storm of coverage has exposed an abysmal ignorance about the complexity, diversity and reality of Latinos and Latin music.

Lost in the recent frenzy to cover “crossover” artists have been two simple facts: Latino artists do not necessarily perform in Latin music genres; and Latin music is not always performed by Latinos.

In the case of Jennifer Lopez, who is often lumped into this nascent category, the only “crossover” is in the minds of a media establishment oblivious to the fact that she is a Bronx native who has recorded her debut album of commercial pop songs in her “native tongue”: English. Yes, Lopez has two Spanish-language pop songs on the album, but artists from Madonna to Bon Jovi have been recording in Spanish for release in Latin America for years, and yet no one has called them crossover artists.

Beyond the assumptions about Latino Americans seeming somehow foreign, there is another, more unsettling bit of stereotyping being done in the media about the new “crossover” stars.

Cliched adjectives are used over and over in the mainstream press in general but take on a different connotation when used to describe artists such as Martin, Lopez, Anthony and others. Words such as “hot,” “spicy” and “passionate” are taken, one assumes, from the flavors of Mexican cuisine and outdated stereotypes of the “Latin lover.”

And What’s With the Focus on Their Bodies?

Particularly upsetting is the media propensity to comment on certain body parts when writing about Latino artists, namely hips and rear ends.

Entertainment Weekly labeled Martin “hot hips.” And the vast majority of stories on Lopez refer to her hind side. This is no mere coincidence; several academics, including William Cronon, author of “Changes in the Land; Indians, Colonialists, and the Ecology of New England,” have shown direct links between the view European settlers took of the American land and indigenous peoples, both of which were seen as wild, sexual and, in their view, in need of taming.

Speaking of hot: According to Billboard magazine, Ricky Martin is a “hot tamale.” This phrase appears several times, and is ridiculous because Martin hails from Puerto Rico, where the local cuisine includes neither chili peppers nor tamales, both of which come from Mexico.

The recent TV Guide cover story on Martin made it only three paragraphs before calling the singer “spicy,” and a few paragraphs later made reference to his wiggling hips.

According to the New York Daily News, Martin is “red hot,” while the Atlanta Constitution calls him “hot stuff.” The Seattle Times says Martin is “incendiary” (give them credit for consulting a thesaurus, at least). The list goes on and on.

Even the New York Times has not been immune to the stereotyping; the headline of its recent concert review of Chayanne--a singer who appeared in the film “Dance With Me” alongside Vanessa Williams and who has plans to release an English-only album soon--read: Amor (Those Hips!) Pasion: (Those Lips!).

When it comes to Lopez, the coverage is even more troubling, tainted with sexism and sexual innuendo in addition to ignorance.

Lopez was called “salsa-hot” by the Hartford Courant. Like Martin, Lopez is Puerto Rican; once more, on that island, salsa is to be danced, not eaten.

The New York Daily News called Lopez a “hot tamale.”

The Chicago Sun-Times called Lopez “one hot number.”

Even in Canada the stereotypes, and mistakes, persist: The Ottawa Citizen called Lopez “a hot-blooded Cuban.”

Marc Anthony is so disgusted with the “heated” coverage he and others are getting in the mainstream press--he has been called “red-hot” by the Boston Herald and “white-hot” by the New York Daily News--that he has started refusing to do some interviews. He jokingly told his publicist that he will “jump off a bridge” if he is called “hot” or “spicy” by one more publication.

Too Complex to Be Lumped as ‘Latin Music’

To understand why this type of writing is so offensive, one must be familiar with the complex reality of Latinos and the dozens of musical genres that have been lumped into the amorphous “Latin music” category.

Most of the 30 million Latinos in the U.S. speak English as their primary language. Beyond that, they are as racially and economically diverse as the entire U.S. population. While many people continue to believe that all Latinos are “brown,” this is simply not true.

In fact, the history of the U.S. is parallel to that of Latin America: The Native American inhabitants were “conquered” by Europeans; many Native Americans were killed in the process, and Africans were “imported” to replace them as slaves. Documents from slave ships show that fully 95% of the Africans brought to the Americas as slaves went to Latin America, according to historians such as Harvard University professor Jorge Dominguez.

Brazil is home to the largest African American population on Earth, and five of every six Dominicans is of African descent. My father’s birth was dedicated to the Yoruba god Obatala, as were those of most other white kids in his neighborhood in Cuba; he has often said that to be a Caribbean Latino is to be African, regardless of color.

At this moment, there are plenty of black Latinos succeeding in mainstream American pop music, but few, if any, ever get mentioned in the Latin crossover write-ups.

In some instances, this is due to the artist’s decision not to make his or her background known. But in other cases, as in the exclusion of R&B; crooner Maxwell, who is half Puerto Rican, it’s due mostly to reluctance on the part of both the English and Spanish media to include blacks in the discussion at all.

Pop singer Usher is half Panamanian. Other Puerto Ricans include TLC rapper Lisa “Left Eye” Lopes, “Ghetto Superstar” singer Mya--who has recorded in Spanish--and rappers Fat Joe and Big Pun. And Mariah Carey, who describes her father as a black Venezuelan and who routinely includes Spanish singles on her albums for import to Latin America, is also absent from the crossover discussion.

With one notable exception in the New York Times last month, merengue singer Elvis Crespo has been left out of the crossover equation too, even though he is probably the only Latin artist who currently qualifies in the traditional sense of the term. Crespo currently has two Spanish-language albums on the Billboard 200 mainstream chart.

Some music executives, including Sony Music Chairman and CEO Thomas D. Mottola, have said outright that they are excited about Martin and other crossover candidates because these artists fill the role of the white male pop star that has been vacant since the glory days of George Michael.

While a white Latino is just as Latino as a brown or black one, it unfortunately seems that in the world of American pop culture, Latinos are still only palatable as long as they appeal to a mainstream, Caucasian standard of beauty. Jennifer Lopez seems to have figured this one out: Her naturally wavy, dark brown hair has been lightened and straightened, and her once-fuller body has been whittled down by a fitness guru to something virtually indistinguishable from the lean, muscular Madonna.

All of this brings us to the ungainly truth no one seems to want to embrace in this country: Simply, there is no such thing as a singular “Latino,” and efforts, no matter how well-intentioned, to classify 30 million racially, economically and educationally diverse individuals as one unit is ignorant--and irresponsible.

The term “Hispanic” was invented by the U.S. Census Bureau in the 1970s in order to classify a group of Americans ostensibly linked through a common language--Spanish. Hispanics, or Latinos, don’t exist in Latin America, where people identify themselves by nationality, class and race--just like here.

“Latinos” have been invented in the U.S. for the convenience of politics and marketing, overlooking considerable cultural differences and complexity that can make your head spin.

Think about this: Much of what we call “Mexican food” today is really Native American food; the unifying “Latino” language, Spanish, is a European import, just like English; the backbone of salsa music, the clave rhythm, comes from West Africa, as does merengue’s two-headed tambora drum; Mexican norteno and banda music is rooted in Germany and Poland . . . but Cajuns in Louisiana who play essentially the same stuff in French are not Latinos. Got that?

Complexity! It is anathema to good capitalist marketing plans, which promise big bucks to whomever can lasso the elusive buyers of the world. And yet history is complex--all of ours--and journalists owe it to everyone to accurately chronicle the current history of our world and one of its most powerful cultural forces: music.

We leave you with a sadly typical example of the comedy and tragedy of simplification of Latinos and Latin music. It happened, of all places, at a recent Los Angeles Dodgers game.

As each Dodger goes to bat, the scoreboard lists personal facts, including the player’s favorite band. A snippet from said band is then played over the loudspeakers. Two Dominican players both listed the New Jersey-based merengue group Oro Solido as their favorite. Yet when one came up to the plate, the folks in charge of the public address system chose instead to play . . . Ricky Martin!

To many a Dominican, the exchange of Martin for Oro Solido could be seen as a slap in the face; first, merengue is the official national dance of the Dominican Republic. Secondly, there is a long history of tension between Puerto Ricans and Dominicans over class and citizenship issues. In this context, replacing Oro Solido with Martin was not only ignorant, but possibly even insulting.

But to know this means to study history. It means entertaining complex thought. And that, in a trend-driven pop culture obsessed with simple marketing categories and the almighty dollar, is apparently too much work.