Hispanics in entertainment

“The greater the feeling of inferiority that has been experienced, the more powerful is the urge to conquest and the more violent the emotional agitation.” This quote by Alfred Adler, Austrian psychologist, accurately depicts the emotions experienced by the inferior Hispanic minorities in entertainment media. Entertainment media provide audiences with a medium in which they may view certain races, minority groups, and individuals in particular historical contexts. Hispanics, in particular, are regarded as inferior in mass media and entertainment media. Even before the dawn of film, Hispanic stereotypes have existed. Such stereotypes are usually presented in “limited ways that reinforces their inferior status, while denying that it exists” (Larson, 2006). This can be accomplished in a number of ways, primarily through exclusion, stereotyping, and various system-supportive themes (Larson, 2006). The films presented in the subsequent paragraphs each deal with Hispanic stereotypes, although they all deal with them in different manners. In the coming pages, we will see Hispanics criminalized, sexualized, as well as degraded in three different movies, first, The Good, The Bad and The Ugly, second Born in East L.A., and third, Spanglish. Firstly, The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly is a 1966 spaghetti western, directed by Sergio Leone, and was the third movie in the Dollars Trilogy. In essence, the film tells a story of three men who are in hot pursuit of buried treasure. Clint Eastwood, Lee Van Cleef, and Eli Wallach portray the film’s three title characters. Eli Wallach plays a Hispanic character named “Tuco,” who is depicted as the inferior, violent villain. Tuco teams up with “Blondie” (Clint Eastwood) in order to devise a plan to continually gather reward money from Tuco’s bounties. The third character, Angel Eyes (Lee Van Cleef), also learns of a trunk of gold and sets out to find it. After leaving Tuco to die in the desert, Blondie gets a taste of his