Santa Ana, Otto. (2002). Brown tide rising: Metaphors of Latinos in contemporary American public discourse

	Santa Ana, Otto. (2002). Brown tide rising: Metaphors of Latinos in contemporary American public discourse. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press. 424 pp. $55 (Cloth)       ISBN 0-292-77766-3 $24.95 (Paper)       ISBN 0-292-77767-1 Reviewed by Mario Castro Arizona State University March 18, 2003 Otto Santa Ana states in the stimulating Brown tide rising: Metaphors of Latinos in contemporary American public discourse that his book “is [a metaphor theory] inquiry into how the general public so readily accepted [former Governor of California Pete Wilson’s] irrelevant viewpoint” that debased Mexicans “and by extension other Latinos” (p. 7). The book centers on language with attention “focused on the language of the public rebuke that Latinos suffered in the 1990s” (p. 7), a time when California voted on Propositions 187, 209, and 227. To gauge the public image of Latinos during this time, Santa Ana draws metaphor data from the Los Angeles Times, the “text media outlet with greatest influence on the California public during the 1990s” (p. 56). To Santa Ana, “Mass media are the single most influential source of public influence, public dispute, discussion, and dialogue, to wit, discourse” (p. 56) Santa Ana’s metaphoric data sources reflect the attitudes and perceptions of journalists and of other persons, for example, in instances when someone is quoted. Moreover, the metaphors reflect the attitudes and perceptions of the general public since articles are not only written but also read; that is, newspapers print articles written in a version that is agreeable to and familiar to their readers. In turn, these metaphors reenter the public discourse and shape and reinforce a limited view of the world. Most importantly, the discourse practices reproduce “the social order that maintains unjust hierarchical relationships” (p. 31). Santa Ana notes, “Everyday metaphor, as it is casually used in commonplace public texts, is a crucial measure of the way that public discourse articulates and reproduces societal dominance relations” (p. 21). Santa Ana predicts that the dominant representations in other mass media will be identical to those he reveals in the Times, although his objective is not to generalize the findings from one newspaper to all United States media. Santa Ana confirms Bakhtin’s observation that specific genre, such as the newspaper and journalistic genres, knit together features of language with the intentional aim and with the overall accentual system inherent in the genre (1981, pp. 288-9). Bakhtin adds, “Certain features of language take on the specific flavor of a given genre: they knit together with specific points of view, specific approaches, forms of thinking, nuances and accents characteristic of the given genre” (p. 289). Thus, the Times is characteristic of its genre, and its dominant metaphoric representations during the 1990s may be found in other U.S. media. Metaphor for Santa Ana “is the mental brick and mortar with which people build their understanding of the social world…. These metaphors are not merely rhetorical flourishes, but are the key components with which the public’s concept of Latinos is edified, reinforced, and articulated…. Metaphor theory provides a new account of why the nation fails to build innovation into its public school system” (p. xvi). Santa Ana implies that the U.S. does not innovate enough in the public schools because the public does not perceive Latinos to have full humanity and, therefore, full rights and privileges. Santa Ana backs this claim by showing that public discourse in the U.S., via the Times, debases and transforms the immigrant into a subhuman being. Santa Ana’s position is that “[m]etaphor, and other associated figurative language used in the daily discourse of social issues, can be studied to reveal the values underlying social order” (p. 21). Santa Ana argues that the debasing of the immigrant translates to a debasing of the Latino, although the justification for this transfer is not fully explored given the comparatively large number of Mexican origin and other Latina/o persons who are U.S. born or are naturalized citizens. The 2000 Census estimated that over 70 percent of the Hispanic population is either U.S. born (over 60 percent of the Hispanic population) or foreign-born naturalized citizens (one in four of the foreign born Hispanic population) (calculated from Therrin & Ramirez. 2000, p. 3). Santa Ana’s frequent use of a public vs. Latino dichotomy to characterize the populace of the U.S., evident for example in the title and in quotes such as “Stephen Jay Gould quotes Gunnar Myrdal on Americans’ complacent use of biological determinism to maintain social advantage over people of color,” (p. 85) does not diminish Santa Ana’s claim of a devalued status for Latinas/os and may give credence to his theory. Santa Ana reveals that the Times propagated an image of immigration as dangerous waters (p. 72). “The implications of this metaphor are extensive. Treating immigration as dangerous waters conceals the individuality of the immigrants’ lives and their humanity. In their place a frightening scenario of uncontrolled movements of water can be played out with devastating floods and inundating surges of brown faces” (p. 77). Although not noted by Santa Ana, this metaphor also lends itself to symbolic association with the border defining Rio Grande/ Rio Bravo River, with the derogatory term of “wetback” for immigrant, particularly the immigrant from Mexico, and with baptism or initiation. Each of these represents the Latina/o person in the U.S. as not fully American. From my experience growing up in the border community of El Paso, Texas, U.S. and Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua, Mexico, metaphor is most damaging not in associating the immigrant with danger, but in associating a person with illegality, with a contested citizenship, and with less-than-American status. Santa Ana finds that the dominant immigrant metaphor used in the Los Angeles Times was immigrant as animal. The Latina/o person as immigrant metaphor and its accompanying white person as Americanmetaphor are consistent with the dominant Times metaphor for immigrant that devalues persons associated with one group while privileging those associated with another group. Immigrants are portrayed as “animals to be lured, pitted, or baited, whether the instance was intended to promote a pro-immigrant or an anti-immigrant point of view” (p. 83). Santa Ana’s finding regarding the salience of the immigrant as animal construct is significant because the metaphor is powerful in creating “otherness.” The evidence supplied by Santa Ana of a debasing of the human is significant because detrimental to being able to enjoy the advantages of Americanism is being able to be classified as such. All tropes that limit who is an American, for example labels that focus on subjective attributes such as Whiteness or labels that classify groups as immigrant when all of us in the U.S. can be likewise classified, are suspect of contributing to the maintenance of existing power relations. The danger is not in immigrants drowning the U.S. The danger lies in hierarchical access to full humanity. Richard Rorty reminds: “Serbs, moralists, [Thomas] Jefferson, and Black Muslims all use the term ‘men’ to mean ‘people like us.’ They all think that the line between humans and animals is not simply the line between featherless bipeds from others: there are animals walking about in humanoid form. We and those like us are paradigm cases of humanity, but those too different from us in behavior or custom are, at best, borderline cases” (1998, p. 168). References Bakhtin, M.M. (1981). The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, Michael Holquist (Ed.). Austin: University of Texas Press. Fletcher, Scott (2000). Education and Emancipation: Theory and Practice in a New Constellation. New York: Teachers College Press. Rorty, Richard (1998). Truth and Moral Progress: Philosophical Papers. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Therrin, Melissa & Roberto R. Ramirez (2000). The Hispanic Population in the United States: March 2000, Current Population Reports, P20-535, Washington, D.C.: U.S. Census Bureau. About the Reviewer Mario Castro Educational Leadership and Policy Studies       & the Language Policy Research Unit Arizona State University Tempe, AZ 85287