The Rhetorical Construction of U.S. Latinos by American Presidents

Latino political integration into the American body politic is a theme that has entered the public agenda recently. Political leaders, researchers, activists, and media organizations have devoted tremendous energy to understanding the U.S. Latino demographic and its potential political influence. However, there are also tremendous racial and socioeconomic differences, along with varying political and citizenship histories, in American Latino communities. But instead of considering all of these variables, Spanish language ability and other cultural similarities have been treated as signifiers of community homogeneity. This article uses a critical framework to analyze how official political communication from American presidents has worked to create a purposeful Latino abstraction for political efficiency. It also analyzes public papers and speeches from the administrations of John F. Kennedy to Barack Obama to explore how presidents have constructed Latino pan-ethnicism through their rhetoric. To investigate this question, a qualitative content analysis of presidential rhetoric directed toward or about U.S. Latinos is conducted through a theoretical framework of Latino rhetorical styles. The data indicate that (a) Latino pan-ethnicism emerged in presidential rhetoric in the early 1990s, (b) Democratic presidents have deployed panethnic rhetoric more consistently than their Republican counterparts, and (c) Latino pan-ethnicism is the dominant discourse in presidential politics today. This article concludes with a call for further investigation into the political construction of a Latino panethnic identity, and it also contributes to the question of Latino inclusion in the United States by complicating traditional notions of assimilation and political acculturation.