The Roberts article discusses the critical response to Carmen Miranda movies and the critique coming from Latin American reviewers regarding the homogenization of Latin American countries, when she played characters from a variety of countries in movies that mixed together influences from multiple sources. This is interesting to consider in the context of what the Negron-Muntaner article discusses, with the response to Jennifer Lopez playing Selena from some Mexican-Americans, with their concern over a Puerto Rican-American actress playing a Mexican-American person or more specifically, celebrity. Negron-Muntaner analyzes the advantages of Lopez's response to this criticism, when she emphasizes the importance of being Latina more generally and thus, according to the article, attempts to help her opportunities as a Puerto Rican actress, to avoid limiting herself to only Puerto Rican roles. This is interesting in the context of Miranda, too, and the complexities of individual gains with the star system versus larger impacts for the groups that star is representing or attempting to represent. It's fair to see how multiple responses to this problem of representation are possible; Lopez's response allows for an attempt to open more Latinx actors up to getting roles, particularly Puerto Rican actors. But at the same time, the response to the Miranda movies and their homogenization of Latinx culture, echoed again in the response to Selena, might be immediately more limiting, especially for individuals like Lopez, but could aim for a future where there are more opportunities for all Latinx actors, across all variety of nationalities. Of course, we're not really anywhere close to that future and deciding between more exact representation and more opportunities in general seems like a pretty frustrating and unfair choice.
It's also interesting to think about how much perception of the star's control of their image ties into these articles. Roberts has a meaningful argument about Miranda's popularity and value being tied to her perception as a self-parody, as in control of her own image, aware of it and deliberately manipulating it. The theme of control was also significant in both articles' discussion of Jennifer Lopez, especially with respect to how she chose to express her opinions on her body. The Beltran article in particular emphasized the number of times that Lopez brought up her body or her butt in interviews etc., apparently "unprompted", which seems significant in establishing the degree to which she was actually in control of how her image was being created and perceived. Of course, the response to all of this is just what the Roberts article gets at in its conclusion, which is that even stereotypes or star images more generally that stars are perceived as in control of are still not entirely their own or entirely removed from their broader perception. The Roberts article especially emphasizes the limitations of a more complex or positive interpretation of someone like Miranda, because it comes alongside and interwoven into the extremely negative stereotypes and there isn't anything in her image that forces a more complex reading, that prevents audiences from just getting the stereotypical and damaging perception and leaving it there. And all the articles once again emphasize just how little we actually know when we try to assume what's happening with a star's control and creation of their image; we don't know how much control Lopez has over her publicity or Miranda had over hers, we're just making assumptions based off of the evidence we can gather. And even further than that, we also don't know the impact that these representations have on the stars. Playing into stereotypes and doing what you can to subvert them is one thing, which we can appreciate, but the negative impact it has on a star to reduce their ethnicity to stereotypes and only be allowed a deeply conditional resistance to those representations is another conversation entirely.
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