Layers of Identities as Mediators of Media Meaning

In this chapter, I have reviewed a number of the primary layers of identity that have influenced television viewing, particularly among people I inter viewed in Brazil and among Latinos in Austin, Texas. People's senses of identity in terms of cultural geography, class, ethnicity, and gender guide their choices of what to watch on television. Those viewing choices are the most basic and perhaps most important way in which people interact with television. Multiple layers of identity also guide the ways that people make sense of television and the ways in which television seems to affect them.

For example, in 2004, I joined people from the Banda Feminina Dida to watch a television program denouncing inadequate medical care for poor people. Most but not all of the people shown on screen were Afro descended. The commentary in the room at that point focused on the view ers' sense of solidarity with other poor or working-class people, like the ones on screen in hospitals and clinics. One could infer racial solidarity, too, but it was not the main issue at the moment, even though it was clearly the main issue for members of the same group a year later when they observed racial bias in a televised song contest. Clearly, people move among multiple senses of identity as frames of reference, as resources for understanding media, and as mediators of media content.

The idea of mediation has become a key theoretical principal in Latin American work about television, starting with Martin-Barbero ( 1993 ), who argued that the focus should move from the media themselves to the forces that mediate people's experiences with and understandings of media content. Both Martin-Barbero ( 1993) and Mexican media ethnographer Orozco

( 1 993) argued for the importance of considering multiple sites of mediation.

I would argue that this means consideration of mediation by multiple layers and sources of identity. As La Pastina found in his fieldwork in Macambira, senses or layers of

Making Sense of World Television 255 watch on television. In his work in this rural Brazilian community, he found

that people expressed a sense of cultural distance from the television produc tions on TV Globo, reflecting life and values in the south of Brazil. That sense

of significant difference in cultural geography between the local and the national corresponds to what I found while interviewing in Salvador, Bahia.

La Pastina also found in Macambira that gender, particularly the patriar chal culture of the town, its geographic isolation within Brazil, and people's differing levels of cultural capital, were central mediating factors influencing various individuals' readings, interpretations, and occasional appropriations of content. His fieldwork was focused on a specific telenovela, but these kinds of identities also provide filters and mediators for people's interactions with a variety of television content.

Much of this mediation process is local and interpersonal. In cases such as La Pastina's study of Macambira, local culture can be a significant medi ator of national, regional, or global television viewing. However, this local

process is also informed by previous exposure to television, to education, to travel and language learning, to advertising, to other media such as books

and newspapers, and to a variety of personal experiences, all of this creating the cultural capital that mediates television viewing. This creates both a per sonal and shared cultural prefiguration. Much of that cultural exposure, especially to television programming, advertising, and education, is most often framed by a national process, guided in many nations by explicit state

policy. So I must also put identity formation and maintenance in terms of power, as it is structured for people by national, local, and global institu tions, by economic power, and by other social forces that construct race and

ethnicity, for example. These mediations or conversations can also be multiple, corresponding to multiple identities and groups' cultural habitus. These mediations select ele ments, again within a cultural context or contexts, which are then added to the ongoing larger cultural context(s). This refiguration process, according to Ricoeur ( 1984), refigures the cultural context(s), which then becomes the prefiguration(s) for ongoing or further media consumption.

Layers of Identities as Mediators of Media Meaning