In her essay, “Reading Latin America Through Edward Said,” Argentine journalist Natalia Vinelli (2017) makes the case that Western news organizations too often represent Latin America through the lens of two competing tropes. On one hand, Western media celebrates the “perfect Latin American,” an ideal citizen in a global, capitalist economy. The perfect Latin American is charming, open to Western modernity, and aligned with United States interests. By contrast, Vinelli argues that newsrooms perpetuate the trope of the “authentic Latin American.” Childlike, backward, and attracted to authoritarian leaders. They cannot be entrusted with making decisions for their own futures.

That Western news organizations would perpetuate these stereotypes is not necessarily surprising. As Walter Mignolo (2005) has argued, the very idea of Latin America is an invention that has effectively served the colonial project. The term “Latin America” may purport to represent a region that exists objectively there, but it is only loosely based on geographic location. Rather, it is more useful to think of Latin America as a racialized construct, in which Spanish-speaking, racially mixed, and backward people are held up in opposition to a racially pure, functioning, English-speaking North America.

What may be surprising, however, is the degree to which large Latin American news organizations have themselves promoted this narrative that Latin Americans lack agency. In an act that Vinelli terms “internal Orientalism,” journalists working within these large, centralized news organizations across Latin America are inclined to perpetuate hegemonic discourses. To move past this way of thinking, Vinelli takes up Edward Said’s call for a decentered approach to news production. That is, to create and support alternative news organizations that do not cover Latin Americans as victims, or as infantilized peoples, but as a “diverse we” (Vinelli, 2017).