BY MEG SULLIVAN
UCLA Today

“The relentless flow of immigrants.” “Awash under a brown tide.” “Human flows ... remaking the face of America.”

In the past decade, such deprecating metaphors have permeated media accounts of the growing Latino population in the United States, paving the way for the victories of three state ballot propositions targeting immigrants and Latinos, a UCLA linguist argues in a new book.

“Far from being mere figures of speech, these metaphors produce and sustain a negative public perception of the Latino community and its place in American society,” Otto Santa Ana writes in “Brown Tide Rising: Metaphors of Latinos in Contemporary American Public Discourse” (University of Texas Press). “Because these characterizations preclude the view that Latinos are vested with the same rights and privileges as other citizens, they primed the pump for the passage of Proposition 187 (against state-sponsored assistance for immigrants), Proposition 209 (against affirmative action) and Proposition 227 (against bilingual education).”

An associate professor in UCLA’s César E. Chávez Center for Chicana/o Studies, Santa Ana tabulated and analyzed all the metaphorical language used by one major metropolitan daily — the Los Angeles Times — in coverage of the propositions between May 1, 1992, and July 31, 1998.

Among his findings:

• During the six years Santa Ana identified metaphors, Latinos were characterized in deprecating terms in 90% of cases, with abundant comparisons to disease, weeds and animals.
• Santa Ana was able to find only one affirmative metaphor — the immigrant as angel — in the entire six-year period, and the characterization was used exclusively by clergy.
• Of the more than 1,500 metaphorical references to the United States that were identified by Santa Ana, 98% characterized the nation as a body or a home; in all these cases, immigrants or immigration were characterized as a threat to the national health or hearth.