Good episodes. I enjoy the variety of topics and guests you bring on.
That said, you should do an episode or series examining how public media, the broader media and entertainment industries helped make the ICE raid era possible. This didn’t happen in a vacuum. For decades, Latinos were either made invisible or portrayed in narrow, negative ways across media, advertising, and entertainment.
Advertisers played a major role. Look at current campaigns: companies routinely feature every demographic except Latinos. And when I say Latino, I’m specifically referring to people of Indigenous descent from Mexico and Central America, because this is the group most directly under attack. Latinos across the Americas share visible Indigenous features, which is precisely why they have been so easily targeted by ICE.
The media ecosystem helped create the conditions where that targeting became socially and politically acceptable.
The solution is straightforward.
Media companies and advertisers — across radio, television, streaming, and digital platforms — need to start hiring Latinos behind the mic and in front of the camera as journalists, broadcasters, producers, executives, and commentators. Latinos must also be visible in advertising not just as background figures but as buyers and consumers of goods, including technology, travel, finance, and other high-value products.
Representation in the marketplace matters because it signals who is seen as fully belonging in the economy.
Hollywood in particular should examine its role. For years the industry has failed to hire Latinos in meaningful numbers as writers, producers, executives, and leading actors. Projects featuring Latinos have often quietly disappeared or been shelved, especially leading up to the 2024 election. That deserves investigation. Did Hollywood executives get paid to drop the tiny amount of projects that were out there to help the current administration win?
So the real question is: why does the Latino community face this treatment across so many industries?
Is it because Latinos are Catholic or Christian (Evangelical)?
Is it because they have visible Indigenous features?
Is it because they represent a rapidly growing cultural and economic force?
If none of those are the reason, then another question remains: why are Catholic and Christian children living in concentration style camps with their parents, funded by tax dollars everyone in the U.S. contributes to? Undocumented or not, people living in this country pay taxes in one form or another. No one in the U.S. lives tax free.
Correcting Latino invisibility in media and advertising is a necessary step toward ending these abuses. When Latino communities are fully visible in media, economics, and public life, the conditions that allow raids, scapegoating, and attacks to occur begin to disappear.
When we get this right, it’ll open the door to something much bigger: deeper cooperation and open economic collaboration across the Americas — a future that will make the nations of the Americas one of the most prosperous regional blocs the modern world has ever seen.
Keep up the good work.
