Too Hot to Handle: The Dangers of the ‘Spicy Latina’ Stereotype
Though I grew up in a Latin American household, my family and I consumed an overwhelming amount of American media, despite its lack of Hispanic representation. The ABC show Modern Family was a personal favorite, mostly because of its apparent diversity: The show featured a Latina and her Latino son and a gay couple with an Asian baby, along with a number of their white family members. Gloria, the hot-headed, beautiful, and sexily dressed Colombian woman with a thick accent who married a rich white man was my favorite character. In my eyes, her fiery personality and good looks made her strong and admirable.
Sadly, when I look back at Modern Family now, it’s clear to me that Gloria mainly served the purpose of being a comic and visual relief. Her character exists to be laughed at and ogled — a prime example of an extensively normalized trope: the hyper-sexualized and oftentimes degraded/humiliated “spicy Latina.”
This dynamic started in the pilot episode in one of the first interactions Gloria has with another family member. Phil, her son-in-law, tells Gloria she’s wearing a beautiful dress, to which Gloria replies, “Thank you, Phil.” Confusing “Phil” for “feel,” he proceeds to feel up the side of Gloria’s dress until his wife, Claire, pulls him back, clarifying what she said. Gloria, though she was essentially groped and laughed at for her accent, is completely unbothered.
Though some shows are more explicit than others, the idea remains: reducing the character to her sex appeal and as an object for men’s sake. For instance, season five of Scrubs debuts a new character, Nurse Martinez, as follows: She walks sensually toward the camera while men follow and dance to maracas and bongos behind her as the narrator says that “for the men, there was a sexy new Latina nurse.”
The trope extends even further into video games, like the psychotic and aggressive Catalina from Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas. As the main character’s love interest, she intertwines violence, anger, and romance and gives mixed ideas about consent, with lines like “When I say ‘just business,’ I mean that I love you! When I say I no interested no more, I mean that I long for you!”
By now, we all know how important media representation is to minorities. Representation shapes how we see ourselves, how others see us, and what we believe is possible for us to achieve and become. When young people — especially young women in the process of developing their identities — see women whose nationality or ethnicity they identify with being constantly sexualized, it’s harmful. In fact, studies show that sexualization of this kind is linked to mental health disorders, body dysmorphia, low self-esteem, and impaired cognitive performance.
In addition to people’s perceptions of themselves, such stereotypes also influence others’ perception of those groups. Stereotypes, like the “spicy Latina,” are proven to increase rates of dating violence victimization and acceptance as well as sexual harassment toward young women. If we present Latina women as objectified sexual creatures, it follows that viewers will internalize this image and project it in their lives.
Representation is a tricky game. Arguably, misrepresentation causes more damage than a lack of representation. Presenting almost exclusively sexualized images of Latina women in mainstream media is highly misleading and ultimately harmful. Advocating to prioritize more accurate and varied representations of Latina women is the only way we can move past the trail of normalized violence and harassment the “spicy Latina” trope has left in its wake.
Latinas are more than a spicy, exotic candy available to all, and we deserve for the media, for the world, to see us as such, and it all begins with accurate representation.
