Advertising Age published a Hispanic Heritage Month perspective on giving a multicultural marketing makeover to abuelas.
The new abuelas—it’s time for Hispanic marketing to retire an outdated archetype
By Jorge Becerra
Few characters are as familiar in Hispanic advertising as the abuela. For decades, she has been one of the most heavily used creative shortcuts for signaling family, tradition and cultural authenticity.
But while longevity has changed what later life looks like, advertising’s version of the abuela has barely changed at all. In fact, the abuela that advertising keeps putting on screen increasingly bears little resemblance to today’s abuelas.
Recently, I started reading Andrew Scott’s The Longevity Imperative, and it got me thinking about how our idea of later life is changing dramatically, and how slowly advertising has changed with it. People are living longer, but culturally we still compress older people into a remarkably narrow set of roles.
For Latina women, that disconnect is especially striking.
According to the CDC, a Hispanic woman who reaches 65 can expect, on average, another 23 years of life. In other words, 65 is not the beginning of the epilogue. It can be the beginning of another two-decade chapter.
And those years are not necessarily being spent withdrawing from the world. According to AARP research, 62% of Hispanic adults 50-plus say they maintain a healthy, active lifestyle. And 34% are focused on learning new skills.
We are comfortable showing abuela teaching. Why not show her learning?
Working life also deserves a place in the frame. Hispanic adults have higher labor force participation than white and Black adults across the 55-plus, 65-plus and 75-plus age groups. Working longer is not necessarily a choice, but it certainly challenges the image of later life as a permanent retreat from the world.
And yes, there is also life beyond giving romantic advice to grandchildren. Among Americans 65-80, 40% report being sexually active, and nearly three-quarters of those say they are very satisfied with their sex lives. Research also suggests older Hispanic adults are having even more sex than non-Hispanic white people the same age.
That probably isn’t the abuela most advertising has been showing us.
This is a new generation of abuelas: women who are living longer, working longer, traveling, exercising, dating, creating, spending, caring for multiple generations and continuing to reinvent themselves well into what we once considered “old age.”
Yet our cultural image of them hasn’t caught up.
In AARP research, 76% of Hispanics 50-plus said older people are underrepresented in advertising, and 84% said they would be more likely to buy from a brand featuring people their age. Perhaps even more revealing, 60% said they try to keep up with trends, compared with just 24% of the general 50-plus population surveyed.
That is a very different consumer from the one much of Hispanic advertising keeps casting.
For U.S. marketers, this represents more than an opportunity for better representation. It is a challenge to rethink one of Hispanic marketing’s most persistent cultural archetypes.
The abuela can still represent family, wisdom and tradition. But she can also represent ambition, independence, vitality and possibility.
The opportunity is to give abuelas the same dimensionality we increasingly demand for every other audience.
Marcelo Arango, founder and CEO of Young Aurelius, a strategic consultancy focused on helping companies navigate demographic change, foster intergenerational collaboration and better understand older generations, believes the shift requires marketers to rethink the assumptions they have long made about aging.
“We are long overdue for a new playbook. Longevity didn’t just add years to the end of life. It created an entirely new stage of adulthood. The demographics have changed, but we are still marketing to a world that no longer exists,” said Arango.
For our industry, that should force a creative reset.
Abuela has long been one of Hispanic marketing’s most efficient cultural shortcuts. Put her in an ad, and within seconds we communicate heritage, family, care and authenticity.
But shortcuts become stereotypes when we stop updating them.
In recent years, we have become much better at questioning one-dimensional representations of Latinas, or younger generations. Yet somehow, abuela remains stuck in an outdated script.
The next generation of abuelas can still embody wisdom, tradition and connection. Those qualities have not disappeared. What has expanded is everything around them: their economic lives, ambitions, relationships, identities and sense of what is still possible.
Perhaps the most respectful thing Hispanic marketing can do is stop treating older Latinas primarily as custodians of the past.
They are also participants in the present and, most importantly, authors of the future.
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