Political rhetoric on immigrants and drugs reflects how Latinos are portrayed in pop culture

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So much of the rhetoric around immigration leading up to Election Day has been about drugs.

Former President Donald Trump and his running mate have made the narrative that immigrants are bringing drugs to America central to their immigration message. The reality is, most drugs smuggled across the border are smuggled through U.S. ports of entry — by U.S. citizens .

But Jason Ruiz says the story connecting immigrants to drugs is an old one — and it has to do with how Latinos are portrayed in pop culture.

Ruiz wrote a book about it. It’s called “Narcomedia.” The Show spoke with him more about it.

Full conversation JASON RUIZ: I think Latinos have been at the center of war on drugs narrative since the ’70s and ’80s when Nixon and then the Reagan administration really declared drugs as public enemy number one. But the history is a lot deeper than that. If we go back 100 years or longer, you see that pop culture was presenting drug problems as part of race problems. African American cocaine users in the early 20th century as as particularly threatening to the U.S. body politic or Chinese immigrants and the opium den as a site of danger and despair in pop culture.

So I think the bigger argument is that drugs have always been racialized in us pop culture and political culture. The enemies change over the decades and over the years though. So what I started noticing is that in the ’80s, Latinos really become a focal point, a source of a source of anxiety in American pop culture and political culture based on a variety of factors including immigration and the so called cocaine crisis of the ’80s and ’90s.

LAUREN GILGER: Yeah. Why do you think we are so obsessed with these kinds of stories in America, in particular and in pop culture, like they seem to repeat and still today to repeat.

RUIZ: This is a question that really haunts me because we do keep telling the same story over and over again. If you look at some of the narratives of the early ’80s that were really anxious about Latino immigration — “Scarface,” a famous example.

Lots of episodes of “Miami Vice” and other TV crime shows in the eighties. Those stories are very similar to some of the stories that you see in more recent texts like “Sons of Anarchy” or “Narcos” and that whole “Narcos” universe that’s been created on Netflix. I’m not exactly sure why we could tell the same stories over and over again. But I’m pretty sure that we, we do keep consuming them.

GILGER: I want to ask a question about how these kinds of stories play in other parts of the world, like in other countries. I wonder like in Mexico or in broader Latin America, do you see a lot of the same kinds of Narcomedia stories?

RUIZ: I do. Mexican pop culture is full of Narco stories, and you could go back to Narco Corridos from decades ago that often celebrate drug kingpins, drug lords, but also reflect the anxieties in Mexican society about what does it mean that we’re a drug producing country?

But I think an even better example than Mexico is Colombia because as you can imagine, Colombian history is really marred by the cartel era in the eighties and nineties and mainstream Colombian popular culture has been much more anxious about representing that era.

A good example of that is Pablo Escobar. If you look at a famous Colombian telenovela that your listeners could watch on Netflix, it’s called “El Patrón Del Mal,” which kind of translates to the Lord of Evil.

In Colombian popular culture, Pablo Escobar is considered like public enemy number one, the worst guy that ever lived, the worst thing that ever happened to Colombia. That’s how Colombians have narrated the Pablo Escobar story.

In “Narcos” — a show that look, I’m a fan of — but in “Narcos,” Pablo Escobar is a much more complicated figure. He’s not just intrinsically evil. He is kind of an antihero like you’d see in “Breaking Bad” or “The Sopranos.” So what I argue in the book is that in Colombia, the stakes are a lot higher for how you would represent Pablo Escobar because he did wreak so much havoc in the country.

GILGER: So I want to ask about that right because I think the depth, the nuance, the kind of character building that antihero story that we see so often in U.S. pop culture today — whether it’s Walter White or Tony Soprano — is often not the Latino character. But it is when it comes to Pablo Escobar in Narcos. Are there a lot of examples of that?

RUIZ: Short answer, no. But I’ve got to tell you, this is so complicated for me because on the one hand, Wagner Moura’s characterization of Pablo Escobar in “Narcos” is a masterpiece. He gives depth and nuance to a character that is so often just a bad guy. The Latino bad guy is something we’ve all seen in pop culture for our whole lives.

It’s very rare that you get a Latino character that has so much nuance and depth. But I can’t help but also notice that one of the most delicately and deeply painted portraits of a Latino character, a Latin American character, is a bad guy, is one of the drug dealers that have done the most harm to Colombians, to Americans, to the world.

One of the most successful criminal enterprises in world history was led by Pablo Escobar. And we don’t see a lot of U.S. pop culture that gives everyday Latinos that much depth or humanity really.

GILGER: Yeah. So I want to talk about the harm that that does, right? Like the pervasiveness of these kinds of narratives in American media. What does that do to the broader Latino community or psyche?

RUIZ: Such a good question. And I think with my students, I’m always trying to get them to go beyond just “I need to see people who look like me on screen. I need to see people who have my shared experience on TV, or in movies.” That’s true, and that’s important and role modeling and is good.

But I think there’s something so much deeper going on as I got more deeply into the research for the book, I started feeling very frustrated that for Latino viewers, it’s not just about seeing yourself represented on screen, but it’s also about who is really portrayed as a fully fledged human being on screen. And Latinos have been excluded from that for so long for, for most of media history. And we’re talking about film and TV, Latinos have been bad guys. They’ve been background actors, they’’ve been maids or busboys.

They haven’t been granted this full humanity that media gives to other groups.

GILGER: So it’s not just representation, it’s what kind, right?

RUIZ: Exactly.

GILGER: So I want to ask you before, I let you go, Jason about some of the rhetoric today that we’re hearing around Latinos in general. We’re just weeks away from a very consequential election. We’ve got so much immigration rhetoric in the kind of pop culture psyche right now and in the political sphere about immigration, about immigrants bringing drugs, about this sort of connection between certain people from certain parts of the world and drugs and problems in this country. Do you think there’s a connection there, between this kind of narco media and what we’re hearing today?

RUIZ: Of course, I do, there’s a very observable connection. If you go back to Trump’s original comments about the bad hombres that caused sort of a media moment. If you look at the full transcript, it’s about drugs, actually. He’s saying these are bad guys bringing drugs into the United States, and he repeated this narrative that connects drugs and Latino immigrants again in the one debate with Vice President Harris.

Of course, a tiny percentage of immigrants from any country are connected to the drug trade or the drug economy. But this type of generalization is an old trick, as we can observe from 50 years of what I call Narcomedia, but it’s effective, and it’s been working for him.

KJZZ's The Show transcripts are created on deadline. This text is edited for length and clarity, and may not be in its final form. The authoritative record of KJZZ's programming is the audio record.

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