9121: Clichés, Not Contrived.

From The New York Times…

Flaunting Latino Clichés in Effort to Defuse Them

By Tanzina Vega

FOR some Hollywood movies, clichés are everything. An asteroid destroys a major city. A shadowy figure appears behind someone in the reflection of medicine cabinet mirror. A Latina maid marries a successful businessman and lives happily ever after.

A new ad campaign for the New York International Latino Film Festival makes fun of those clichés with the goal, its organizers say, of attracting attendees while also drawing attention to the blatant stereotyping of Latinos and others in some big budget movies.

“It was really intended to poke fun, but underneath there’s some truth to them,” Elizabeth Gardner, an executive director of the festival, said of the ads. “That doesn’t mean we’re suggesting anyone should boycott movies.”

Calixto Chinchilla, another executive director, said the festival started 1999 as a way to empower the Latino community and to develop audiences for Latino films.

“At the time there wasn’t really much that targeted the second-generation Hispanic,” Mr. Chinchilla said. The advertising for the festival has evolved from being focused on promoting a young, hip and urban event for Latinos to a broader goal. “It’s the art first and culture second,” Mr. Chinchilla said. The festival will take place Aug. 15-21 in New York.

To promote itself, festival organizers hired Wing, a unit of the Grey Group of WPP that specializes in the Latino market, as their new agency of record.

Gustavo Asman, the chief creative officer at Wing, said the campaign had to be provocative enough to attract New Yorkers who can choose from a wide variety of cultural events, while also appealing to a broad audience of Latinos and non-Latinos alike. “How good are the films and how interesting is this going to be for you regardless of your ethnicity?” Mr. Asman asked.

Some of the ads began running in a handful of New York movie theaters at the end of July, and additional spots will start being shown on television on Monday. Print ads will begin running the first week in August in The Daily News, Time Out New York, Latina Magazine, Hombre and other publications. The budget for the campaign is estimated to be $500,000 to $ 1 million, though much of the effort is pro bono.

The video ads, directed by Pepe Puenzo, feature a variety of scenes in a casting room with a director holding auditions. In one scene, a fruit stand vendor hurls himself on the floor, simulating a variety of car accidents. “That was a school bus,” screams the actor after tumbling to the ground. “Totally different technique,” he says.

The exasperated director, wearing dark-rimmed glasses and a sweater vest, replies, “I’ve seen everything I have to see. You’re very good at what you do, but we’re trying to do something else.”

A second scene features a scary man in a wet, black raincoat who appears in the mirror of a medicine cabinet after it is closed. “We’re kind of not looking for those clichés, you know?” the director says.

To poke fun more directly at Latino stereotypes, some of the print ads feature graphics that chart things like the roles of Latinas in movies. The chart shows the “maid” category as the highest by far, beating out surgeon, judge, architect and entrepreneur. A similar chart illustrating the gardener’s name in a movie shows the names José, Ramón and Juan dominating the name Steve.

William A. Nericcio, a professor at San Diego State University and the author of the book “Tex{t}-Mex, Seductive Hallucinations of the ‘Mexican’ in America,” said stereotypes of Latinos were part of American culture and that the ads were capitalizing on them effectively.

“With tongue in cheek, they are asking us to change our position when it comes to Latinos,” Mr. Nericcio said. The video ads, which were heavy on humor and light on cultural references, helped to blur the lines between the Latino and non-Latino market. “There’s a definite de-emphasizing of in-your-face Latino-ness,” Mr. Nericcio said. “It’s not Pancho Villa with a camera in his hand.”

Pancho Villa may not be directing any of the spots, but his likeness does show up in a second facet of the campaign where the agency, Wing, advertises itself.

Print ads that say “Let Your Latino Out” and show a thin man dressed in a fitted black suit, white shirt and straps of bullets encourage viewers to take a photo of themselves with the man’s handlebar moustache under their noses. A video ad for the Web shows a man who looks in his bathroom mirror and finds a long, dark wiry hair poking out of his upper lip. When he tries to yank the hair out, it becomes, you guessed it, a large, hairy moustache.

“Stereotypes are the baseline,” Mr. Nericcio said. “They’re a given; they’re not going anywhere.”