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DAS0010.1177/0957926515605962Discourse & SocietyAna

Article

The cowboy and the goddess: Television news mythmaking about immigrants

Discourse & Society 2016, Vol. 27(1) 95–117 © The Author(s) 2015 Reprints and permissions: sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/0957926515605962 das.sagepub.com

Otto Santa Ana

University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), USA

Abstract This is an empirical examination of contemporary US network television news stories about immigrants that is informed by myth and film genre scholarship. A review of a full year (2004) of network news programs determined that two age-old story-types constituted the base narrative of all the news reports regarding immigrant voyages and apprehensions. One ancient storytype, currently manifest as the American Western, occurs when the news story protagonist border patrol agent portrays the American cowboy archetype. A US foundational myth is based on this story-type. The second story-type derives from a journey myth of Inanna, a Sumerian goddess. These two millennia-old story-types accounted for all the network evening news stories immigrant reports. Western news stories rearticulate nationalism, while the Inanna news story contests the nation’s foundational myth. Thus, on this topic, journalists write about immigration to entertain and indoctrinate, as much as to edify.

Keywords Immigration, myth, narrative, television journalism

An ideology is always a derivative thing, and the primary thing is a mythology. People don’t think up a set of assumptions or beliefs; they think up a set of stories, and derive the assumptions and beliefs from the stories. Things like democrat, progressive, revolutionary: these are comic plots, superimposed on history. —Northrup Frye

Corresponding author: Otto Santa Ana, César E Chávez Department of Chicana and Chicano Studies, University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), 7361 Bunche Hall, PO Box 951559, Los Angeles, CA 90095-1559, USA. Email: [email protected]

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Discourse & Society 27(1)

Introduction Bold statements about the relationship of narrative and ideology, like the epigram of Northrup Frye,1 should be assessed with empirical scholarship on television news discourse because, in spite of significant erosion of its viewership, network television news programs remain the nation’s most important source of understandings about the nation and the world (Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, 2012: 1). Television news viewers still assume that network news reporting provides an accurate and authoritative daily accounting of America’s unfolding reality, due to its superior production values and sophisticated technology. The viewers’ trust may be enhanced, and American democracy as well, if television news journalists recognize the essential narratives of their craft. This article explores the fundamental messaging of network news stories about unauthorized immigrants. People tend to believe that they get facts from the newspapers, radio, or television news reporting, even if, relatively sensationalized rendering of facts, but it is not at all possible to report news events objectively. Knowledge is constituted, it is not found whole. Roland Barthes noted that narrative is a fundamental element of human consciousness, but its very omnipresence hides its distinctive features. Hayden White presented a definitive critique of 19th-century historians for believing they could give a truthful accounting of history. The problem was not a matter of content, but form. To tell a story about the facts of an event fundamentally changes the relationship of the facts to people. White argued that before the raw facts of a historical event are reported, they are mere data points without orientation, social meaning, or truth-value. However, to tell a story about the facts necessarily transforms those socially meaningless points of information into a normatively meaningful story (White, 1980). Similarly, while journalists may presume that good copy relays the facts of an event transparently to the news consumer, no one can avoid one constraint of human cognition: we can only interpret facts that are enveloped in a normative cloth of a narrative. To explore Frye’s claim, I analyzed a complete set of a year’s network news stories about immigrants, employing narrative analysis with semiotics and film genre tools to deal with the multimodality of television news stories. I also engage a portion of the vast scholarship on mythology to investigate what Claude Lévi-Strauss called mythopoesis, the mythmaking process. I am not interested in myth in the search for transcendence like the German Romantic poets, as folklore like the Brothers Grimm, or as a Jungian depth psychoanalyst. Rather, I am concerned with the constitutive force of myth as discourse. By myth I mean a ‘foundational belief within a given culture at once necessary and fictive’, a seemingly indispensable ritual that enhances and codifies societal beliefs in order to safeguard and compel its moralities (Von Hendy, 2002: xi–xii, 208). Communication theorists and genre scholars have long argued that cultural products of mass media serve to define and reinforce societal moral and esthetic categories in the exercise of social power, and hence are contemporary expressions of myth (Bird and Dardenne, 1988; Anderson, 2007). Following the aphorism that myth is a ‘necessary fiction’, I ask the following: What narratives does network television news use to make sense of Latino immigration? What is at base in these narratives? What are their social effects? But first I must describe the corpus.

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Methods to study network news I draw on an analysis of television news that assessed a comprehensive database of network television programs. In the 366 days of 2004, during the principal evening news program, four major television networks broadcast over 12,140 individual news stories. But only a small subset of stories, between 96 and 118, involved Latinos as the primary newsmaker of the story, so the nation’s news viewers obtain a distorted view of US Latinos (Santa Ana, 2013).2 I focus on the one Latino topic that is overrepresented. Clandestine immigrants comprised no more than 18% of the total US Latino population (Suro et al., 2007: 11), but at least 31, or 26%, of the total Latino news stories dealt with the topic of immigrants crossing or attempting to cross the border into the United States. So we will analyze the immigrant voyage or apprehension stories in terms of narrative. To begin my exploration, I looked for the repeated semiotic patterns of storytelling in each of these 31 stories, first by describing the multimodal semantic units for each scene and camera shot (Santa Ana, 2013). Then I looked to see how these units contributed to the narrative of the news story, and tried to interpret the patterns in a manner that is consistent with the findings of film genre and myth studies. I came to believe that these 31 news stories about immigrant apprehensions are built on two myths, or what Frye (1957) called story-types, namely traditional storylines that are recognizable as the same story rendered across time and across cultures. Each story-type is associated with its archetypal hero. After I describe the first story-type, in the body of this article, I will test this two story-type hypothesis.

American western The first story-type I will discuss became apparent almost immediately. When the Border Patrol agent is the protagonist in the news story about immigration, journalists are using the American western genre. The other news story, when the immigrant is the protagonist, displayed a remarkably well-defined narrative pattern, but its story-type was not easy to recognize. This second news story was clearly not a conventionalized genre, even though it exhibits all the hallmarks of a myth with its archetypal heroine. I will return to this second story-type later, but first I will discuss the US western narrative, which as a genre has been analyzed intensively by film and television scholars – but not recent scholars of journalism. In the following sub-section, I provide a descriptive breakdown of the first two scenes of #48, a typical network television news story about immigration.3

One western news story, #48 On 30 April 2004, NBC Nightly News aired a 131 second, eight-scene news story composed of 38 separate camera shots.4 Scene 1 is made up dramatically of one camera shot. Anchor Brian Williams sits at his desk in front of a full-wall screen that will display a montage of six video clips that prefigures the narrative. The news story begins dramatically with a wide shot of the entire stage, zooming past the anchor to the images on the screen behind him. There, viewers see clips of men in hooded jackets with their hands on

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their head walking in the desert at night. A mid-shot of a barb wire fence zooms into an extreme close-up of just one barb of the fence. As Williams introduces the story, this image is juxtaposed to a very wide angle video clip of a line of people moving across an immense desert, to visually express the extreme rise of criminality crossing borders: NBC News ‘In Depth’ tonight: The rise of illegal immigrants flooding across the Mexican border into the U.S. There’s been a jump of 25 percent in just the past six months, which translates into as many as 2000 illegal crossings a day. NBC’s James Hattori explains what’s driving this desperation.

With the help of effective visuals, Williams melodramatically frames immigrants as an increasing criminal menace and asks James Hattori, an NBC correspondent, to address a key immigration issue that the networks tend to neglect: What makes immigrants so wretched that they undertake life-threatening voyages? The narrative is set up visually in Scene 2 before Hattori finishes his introduction. In this scene, viewers are offered 12 camera shots that illustrate the cycle of unauthorized immigration apprehension. Shot 1 takes NBC viewers into a border patrol truck driven by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent who points out features of the landscape. This is followed by a down-the-line shot of a border fence along the rolling hills of Nogales, Arizona, that contrasts Mexican poverty with US prosperity. Shot 3 introduces the protagonist, Border Patrol Officer Joe Penco. Hattori voices-over his first words, ‘In Nogales, Arizona, the “Spring Rush” is on for Border Patrol agents like Joe Penco, coping with an influx of Mexican workers seeking farm jobs’. As he speaks, viewers see a quite obviously staged ankle-level camera shot of women walking along a desert road. Shot 5, in contrast, then offers footage that does not seem staged of immigrants carrying large backpacks, purposefully moving along the desert trail in single file. Throughout the news story, the cinematic emphasis is on the numbers of immigrants; no immigrant is named or granted any subjectivity (Poindexter et al., 2003). In the next shot, Officer Penco explains the movement of immigrants: ‘Traditionally, they return in the spring months’. The migratory animal theme is visually reinforced in the next shot, an extreme wide angle on a group of immigrants moving across a desert plateau. An ICE helicopter long shot follows 30 people moving across the desert in single file. Correspondent Hattori’s professional newscaster voice-over takes over from Officer Penco, ‘But after four years of decline, there’s an apparent surge in illegal immigration’. Viewers now see people climbing over the international border’s 12-foot fence strung with barbed wire, then two people running headlong across a desert, as if being chased. Next, a single ICE agent in spotlights is illuminated against nighttime darkness. The television audience can make out that she has custody of a group of immigrants squatting on the desert floor. In the next shot, viewers see and hear an ICE agent slam the padlocked metal door of a van with crouching figures inside. Hattori finishes his backgrounder, ‘Nationwide, 530,000 people have been detained for trying to cross the border over the last six months, a 25 percent increase compared to last year. And more than half were picked up in Arizona’. The visual motif in Scene 2 dehumanizes immigrant workers, as a seasonal catch-and-release cycle of migratory animals. This motif becomes the

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assumed background information of this NBC story onto which Hattori adds a narrative conflict: this year is marked by many more immigrants. By the end of Scene 2 the cinematic semiotics, the use of constituent metaphors,5 and Hattori’s narrative allow everyday news viewers to recognize the standard trope of this news story. In his report, Hattori disregards anchor Brian William’s probing question about the source of immigrant desperation, and instead develops in #48 a conventional narrative with a predictable plotline, conflict, and cast of characters. Regular network news viewers will tacitly recognize the standard news narrative, where little new information can be expected and typical omissions are left unmentioned. At the end of #48, viewers in 2004 may have believed there was an increase in immigrant numbers, when at the time no reputable sources believed there was an increase and in hindsight no increase took place (Santa Ana, 2013: 253–254). Subsequently, Scene 3 will reinforce the cycle theme of immigrants: some will be caught by ICE agents and sent back to Mexico, where they will try to cross again. In Scene 4, Hattori gestures with outstretched arms to a vast empty Arizona high desert, stating that because there is no barrier, ‘this is why’ immigrants migrate. In Scene 5, he presents the obligatory spaghetti western Mexican town, including stray dogs crossing an unpaved main street with norteño music in the background. The subsequent scenes (which will not be described here) continue the narrative to its foreseeable end.

Testing television news use of the genre When the Border Patrol agent is the protagonist, one narrative undergirds all immigration stories, the American western genre. Barry Keith Grant (2012) defines genre films as ‘commercial feature films that through repetition and variation, tell familiar stories with familiar characters in familiar situations. They also encourage expectations and experiences similar to those of similar films we have already seen’ (Grant, 2012: xvii). Judith Hess Wright expands on this, calling them discursive formulas made up of recognizable elements that create an imaginary world masquerading as reality for ideological purposes as well as ritual, emotional ends. She notes that western genre films (versus sci-fi, horror, and gangster genres) assert that ‘the violent act can become morally right when it occurs within the confines of a code … in defense of one’s life and property’ (Grant, 2012: 60–63). The western has been extensively described in film studies that focus on cinematography, narrative or ideology, using a wide variety of methods. In his highly regarded compilation of film genre scholarship, Grant discusses the structuralist methods of Will Wright. Wright undertook a narrative analysis of each top grossing western movie for a 40-year period, from 1930 to 1970. He tracked the paradigm and syntagm of each movie narrative. I tested the American western story-type hypothesis by employing Wright’s method to determine whether the television news stories about immigration parallel the movie western narrative structure. Wright noted that the paradigmatic functions of the genre included several dualities, such as good/bad, civilization/wilderness, manly/ladylike, and so forth. The syntagmatic function, namely the genre’s plot progression, is as follows: society gives the hero special status since only he can defend a vulnerable society from the threatening uncivilized wilderness, personified as villains. So, the hero faces

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down the villains. The western movie hero invariably succeeds, which restores balance to society, and society embraces the self-effacing hero. The hero tends to be a more fully elaborated character in films, while society and the villain remain ‘undifferentiated’ as flat characters (Wright, 1975: 40). The basic narrative centers on a hero who stands outside of a society that is threatened by uncivilized villains. They can only be stopped if the hero moves with violent prowess to defend the town folk who live at the edge of civilization. I compared Wright’s parameters to the 31 news stories about immigration. Of the 14 stories that reported on immigrants crossing the United States/Mexico border, all employed what can be called a western genre news narrative with the plot progression that Wright found in western films (see Table 1.) The near perfect parallelism of paradigm and syntagm constitutes evidence that the western genre is employed in news stories about immigration, with one difference. While the western film hero safeguards civilization, in the western news genre the hero fails to set the world right since he cannot stop immigration. In Table 1, I also track the conventions of western film that are present in news stories about immigrants crossing the United States/Mexican border. Beyond the narrative, these genre conventions include the desert setting, western iconography, and the roles played out in a particular social relationship: the hero, a hetero-normative taciturn White male (no women or men of color were featured); the villains, in which the Indians have been replaced by Mexicans; the town folk, namely decent and likable Whites; and civilized society, which is characterized as vulnerable to the encroaching wilderness. The Great American Desert remains the principal setting for the immigration news stories, even if situated in a 21st century metropolitan city. Four news stories that aired in 2004 (#15, #24, #28, #30) are set in Phoenix, Arizona. NBC’s Brian Williams in #15 notes that smugglers were now invading the White American sanctum of suburbia, concealing clandestine immigrants behind padlocked doors, and Border Patrol officers worked with local sheriffs and metropolitan police officers (respectively, the classic and the updated western hero) to apprehend the smugglers and immigrants. Like Williams’ team, the CNN video editors in #28 and #30 emphasized the criminality of both smugglers and their ‘human cargo’, and how the joint forces of ICE agents and local law enforcement worked heroically to restore the sanctuary of the American tract home. In the end, these stories are consonant with the conventional western genre. These western genre cinematic conventions are also expressed in news stories of only a couple of minutes’ length, as in #79, which is entitled ‘Illegal Immigrants busted in Texas’. The story, illustrated primarily with Homeland Security surveillance footage, is that border patrol agents pulled over suspicious trucks. The video reveals hidden immigrants, the smugglers’ contraband. In #48 and #116, viewers see a border patrol agent scanning the horizon with binoculars from a military jeep, and immigrants cross the desert single file with camerawork that makes them blend into the desert scenery. The latter images are often displayed in the establishing shot of the news story, as in #17, #48, and #77. Finally in #117, the CBS television news audience is introduced to Walter Kolbe, a grandfatherly Arizona rancher. With a magnificent western visual backdrop worthy of John Ford, the telegenic Kolbe stands in front of the Chiricahua Mountains to present the plight of his townsfolk. Speaking in soft tones that make his message more

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Santa Ana Table 1. Western news story cinematic conventions. #

Protagonist

Antagonist

Narrative

Setting

Iconography

15

Police

Smugglers

17a

Border patrol

Mexican

160 immigrants in suburbs Bush’s immigration initiative

City versus suburb, home, dead bolts Immigrants prepare to cross, Tijuana, Brownsville, desert, dead bodies

24

Police

Immigrants

Phoenix suburb ‘drop house’ Tijuana rest stop, Brownsville international bridge Phoenix suburb

28

Police

30 33

Immigrants in suburbs Immigration raid

‘Illegal immigrants’ Police Human Human smuggling; smugglers Immigrants as victims Guatemalan None War hero

48

Border patrol

Poverty in Mexico

75

Border patrol

Captured immigrants

77

US rancher

79

Police

89a

INS

109

Mexican

Deportation strategies fly detainees deep into Mexico Naturalized American Dream citizen versus ‘American nightmare’ Immigrants Would be immigrants ‘busted’ Immigrants Deportation strategies using air flights None War hero

116a

ICE agent

Immigrants

117

US residents Immigrants

Phoenix suburb Phoenix, borderlands, desert Guatemala, Iraq

Increasing AZ borderlands, immigration ‘flood’ Mexican town

ICE controls immigrant ‘flood’ AZ referendum to cut immigrant healthcare

Detention centers, Mexico

Police tape, fence, suburban ‘drop house’ Suburban house, detained immigrants Desert, dead bodies, border fences, helicopters War, street children, an orphanage, US suburban house Humvees, barbwire fences, dusty Mexican towns, desert Border fence, desert, dead body planes, rescue, desert

Borderlands ranch, Los Angeles Texas

Border fence and guns, immigrant’s US home

Borderlands, desert, Mexican towns and cities Iraq, contrasting US households, military cemetery Desert

Body bags, desert detainee holding center War footage, one grieving family versus another family eating turkey Humvee, tracking immigrants in desert Cowboy hat, child’s swing set, border fence

Bisbee, farmworkers, borderland ranch

Footage of immigrants and police (brief story)

AZ: Arizona; INS: Immigration and Naturalization Service; ICE: Immigration and Customs Enforcement. aSignificant elements of both western and Inanna story-types found in single news story; so the news story appears in both Tables 1 and 2.

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compelling, he says, ‘These people still flood across and they are ruining our healthcare system and they are ruining our schools’. CBS correspondent, Charles Bowen, demonstrates his own affinity with the rancher by walking together in a camera two-shot. As they examine evidence of migrants’ passing, Bowen voices-over, ‘From Walter Kolbe’s backyard, you can see Mexico, and the backpacks and water bottles abandoned by the nightly wave of illegals crossing over’. The correspondent also matches Kolbe’s inflammatory language, using ‘illegal’ as a noun.6 Bowen ends this scene with a mid-shot of Kolbe, once again in front of the picturesque mountain backdrop speaking in a soft voice that quakes with anger: ‘We say to our politicians: “If you’re against it, then do something. Stop this raping of our country”’. Notwithstanding his bigoted speech, the CBS news team portrays this western rancher as a sympathetic figure.

The West It almost goes without saying that ‘the West’ is the fundamental construct that provides the narrative arc of most of the network news stories about immigration. The West is the setting of the everlasting frontier, historian Frederick Jackson Turner’s infamous thesis about the American nation. In his classic 1950 monograph, Henry Nash Smith set Turner’s thesis into its historical context. Nash Smith noted that crucial to Turner’s 1921 [1893] thesis was that the frontier fashioned a superior man: The wilderness masters the colonist. It finds him a European in dress, industries, tools, modes of travel, and thought … It strips off garments of civilization and arrays him in the hunting shirt and the moccasin … The man … must accept the conditions which it furnishes, or perish … The fact is, that here is a new product that is American. (as cited in Anderson, 2007: 20)

Twentieth-century historians have thoroughly condemned Turner’s thesis because it encapsulates US history into a single proposition, promotes the fiction of American Exceptionalism, expiates the evils of genocide, glorifies the violence of Manifest Destiny, and remakes US imperialism to be just and liberating – since it brings civilization to the wilderness (Kenworthy, 1995). Yet Turner was on to something; Eldon Kenworthy called Turner’s thesis the foundational myth of the United States (Anderson, 2007: 25). Nietzsche characterized a myth as a foundational belief within a given culture at once necessary and fictive. It is significant to and for the culture, and despite its ‘manifest implausibilities, is coherent and logical and represents, above all, a culture thinking about itself’ (Silverstone, 1988: 29). The aforementioned descriptions of film genre by Grant (2012) and Wright (2012) also concisely captures the features of myth. The myth’s narrative form is formulaic, familiar, acceptable, and somehow reassuring to the members of the culture, that they may be considered ‘public dreams’ (Silverstone, 1988: 29).7 Television news is one contemporary medium that carries what David Thorburn (1988) calls the ‘consensus narrative’, that extends back as far as our records go (p. 56). Thorburn compares television today to the Greek chorus, which attempted to speak for and to the whole of culture. Both Homeric epic poems and today’s news stories (Bird and Dardenne, 1988) articulate the culture’s widely comprehensible and accessible

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plots, character types, cultural symbols, and narrative conventions. Thorburn contrasts the history of consensus narratives from Aristophanes’ theatric conventions and Homer’s legends of Troy in dactylic hexameter through Shakespeare’s Elizabethan pentameter, to the formula of silent movies and television’s ‘the segmented abrupt rhythms and formal and thematic conventions of situation comedy’. In all these instances, storytelling is a ritualized experience for audiences in which the entirely unoriginal public dreams about the ‘dominant pieties’ of the culture are continually restating, rehearsing, and revising in a culturally licensed medium (Thorburn, 1988: 60). Consequently, it should not be surprising that the larger-than-life US archetypal hero, the American Cowboy, has a lineage older than the country. Richard Slotkin (1973) noted that it is a reflex of the European myth of the gallant knight defending the castle of his king. Walter Wink (1998) argues that these are reflexes of what he calls the redemptive violence myth, which has existed ‘since the rise of the great conquest states of Mesopotamia’, and is the basis of all Western myths of empires and nations based on conquest (pp. 39, 48). In each manifestation of this myth, the hero’s violence is invariably praised as ‘regenerative’ or ‘redeeming’.8 The myth legitimates the power of the elite, justifies the brutal subjugation of the weak, orders violent ethnic cleansing of state enemies, and transforms national histories of imperialism into natural history. The American western genre is found everywhere, from children’s television programming, adolescent movies, to myriad forms of adult entertainment with great variety of form and content.9 While the western has clearly been a vehicle for commercial entertainment, I argue that it also serves as a story-type for news reporting.

The audience Genre films, like myths, depend on their audience’s prior knowledge for their meaning and purpose. From previous exposure, the audience in a movie theater recognizes the western story-type in the structure and themes of a new movie. Barry Keith Grant (2012: 20) attributes to movie viewers certain cultivated expectations about the genre and that their interest is sustained by the creativity used to tell a story they already know. The typical viewer anticipates the standard narrative arc, the expected cast of characters, and the moral order that is played out. The viewer will recognize and may identify with the western hero, who typically is a larger-than-life heterosexual White American alpha male who acts to protect a vulnerable society. While maintaining an unstated code of honor, the hero violently confronts and ultimately defeats the threatening enemy. The genre consumer at some level acknowledges Turner’s myth that the cowboy brought civilization to the Great American Desert and that the wilderness forged a new superior man, a White American demi-god who sweeps the nation clean of savagery with redemptive violence. For a moment’s escape, the audience members surrender themselves to the illusion of the western myth. In contrast to two-hour movies, news audiences watch 20- to 150-second reports on White House politics, the state of the economy, major league pennant races, and reports of similar duration about immigration. Given the brevity of television news stories, the viewer depends on television news intertextuality. Just a news anchor’s spoken word or two plus a visual icon flashed on the screen will be enough for news viewers to tacitly

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recognize the genre, since the key word or image is a ‘repository of rarified meaning’ into which ‘societies encode their hopes, dreams, and cultural values’ (Barthes, 1972 [1957]; Howells, 2003, as cited respectively in Santa Ana, 2013: 186). The redemptive violence myth underlies Turner’s thesis of the West. Some film critics, such as Grant (2012: xviii), claim the western movie genre’s popularity is due to the viewers’ desire to believe that their increasingly complex world can still be comprehended with a simple narrative centered on a White hero besieged by nameless antagonists in the Great American Desert. But news viewers know in #48 that border patrol agent Joe Penco cannot save America – he’s no John Wayne or Clint Eastwood. NBC portrayed him as a foot soldier on the frontline of a futile war. So why are news viewers, among the most knowledgeable segments of society, willing to revisit the demoralizing narrative? Judith Hess Wright (2012) offered a germane response: In the western every man who operates solely with reference to this strict code lives and dies redeemed. He has retained his social and moral honor. The code provides justification; thus it allows for a guiltless existence. On the other hand, we do not know ourselves when, if ever, violence is justifiable. We have great difficulty in forming a personal code [conforming] to the large, impersonal legal code set up to regulate our unwieldy, decaying economic structure. The source of the satisfaction we get from the western is evident. Momentarily we understand the peace that comes from acting in accord with a coherent moral and social code and forget our fragmented selves. Many critics have seen the western as a glorification of traditional American individualism. On the contrary, the western preaches integration and assimilation and absolute obedience to the laws of the land. (p. 63, italics added)

The Code of the West is increasingly anachronistic for today’s news viewers who have experienced the steady diversification of the national culture of their childhood. The border patrol agent, with whom they may identify, represents the last line of defense against the incursion of the villain of the western hero and his society, Mexicans and their cultural stamp. So Officer Joe Penco defends an allegorical nation that plays proxy for White American hegemony. And the news audience watches the old narrative unfold as its hero carries on his sworn duty and code of honor in the face of inevitable defeat.

Inanna Apart from news stories employing the western genre, other news stories about immigrants are not built around a conventionalized US genre. When the immigrant is the protagonist, or is otherwise provided with substantial subjectivity, in a news story, in my view it refers to a time-honored Inanna story-type. Because the Inanna story-type is not a genre, news viewers will not be able to readily identify a given report as story-type in the way they recognize the ubiquitous western genre in new reports.10 Nevertheless, I claim journalists employ major elements of the Inanna story-type to write about transnational voyagers.11 The story-type comes from a time before the patriarchy. It derives from one of the 5000-year-old myths surrounding Inanna, the Sumerian goddess of fecundity and war (Meador, 2001).12 Although there is much to learn from the willful goddess, for the

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present purpose we will focus on Inanna’s voyage myth, her descent to the netherworld. She decided to visit the netherworld, the realm of the dead, on the pretext of attending a funeral. Among the Sumerians, whether god or human, only the dead could cross from the ‘land of light and life’ to the netherworld. Thus, her voyage was an audacious worldchanging venture (Katz, 2003: 178). Inanna did not dress in the expected somber mourning attire, but wore the seven accouterments of her power: her royal robes, a headdress, breastplate, wig, necklace, and a golden ring. She also carried her measuring rod. At the first gate of the netherworld, the gatekeeper demanded that Inanna relinquish her measuring rod. When she asked why, the gatekeeper said, ‘It is the way of the netherworld’. So Inanna complied. She passed through the seven gates, at each removing a piece of clothing. Inanna was literally stripped of power when she reached the throne room of the netherworld. Nevertheless, as she boldly reached for the throne, she was instantly killed and was hung as a decaying corpse on a meat hook. For three days and nights, fear reigned in the land of light and life. At last, she was resurrected.13 In the end, Inanna had failed to take over the netherworld, but she crucially learned who aided her and who did not, and took her revenge accordingly. Thus, the principal consequence of her voyage was gaining self-knowledge (Katz, 2003). In short, the core motive of the goddess Inanna was to strive to the limits of her agency. The Sumerians never portrayed her actions as aberrant or irrational. In a pre-patriarchal world, her activity was natural and potent and did not require the legitimation of masculine authority; her impulses are recognizable as the entirely human aspiration to undertake great ventures, such as leaving hearth and home to undertake a perilous journey to unknown lands for the sake of family.

Immigrant Inannas I argue that while journalists may be unaware of this ancient story-type (in contrast to the totally conventionalized western), nonetheless, they employ the archetype’s misery and moxie when reporting on immigrants, who I call immigrant Inannas. Since the Inanna story-type is not a genre, the Inanna news story-type appears to viewers as individual human-interest stories. Still, I will demonstrate that many parallels to Inanna’s descent to the netherworld myth are expressed in the 21st-century news stories about immigrants (see Table 2). In the immigrant Inanna news story, the protagonist’s journey also leads to internal revelation. The immigrant’s story is also based on self-reliance; the themes of her journey are mettle and misfortune. The journalists recount that the immigrant, after her home economy betrays her or criminals terrify her, undertakes the dangerous journey against two adversaries: implacable nature and the soldiers of the State. This journey also strips her of her vestments of autonomy. She first gives up her home when desperation compels her to leave. To start on her journey, she relinquishes her wealth to pay the passage. Then when she begins her furtive journey, she sets aside her political and human rights. The fourth vestment she gives up to cross over is her liberty, since she must place herself in the hands of smugglers. At another gate of the netherworld, she forsakes safety since she must face the desert as well as the cruelty of gangs and cartels that regularly rob, rape,

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Table 2. Immigrant Inanna news story cinematic elements. Theme: cycles of violence and vulnerability

Visual motifs: tribulations, losses, dead end work, permanent liminality

Immigrant Congress, anti-immigrant experience in US shadow economy groups

Running across freeway, hiding for 20 years

Peruvian mother

INS

Hiding, discovered, and family disarray

Footage of migrants running across freeway, US flag, sewing machine, agricultural fields Suburban home, ankle bracelet, family photos

11

Cuban family

Ocean

Open ocean travel in car

1950s Buick on pontoons

12

Cuban family

Ocean

Cuban flag, 1950s Buick

14

Dominicans

17a

Nicaraguan and Mexican

Poverty, smugglers ICE agents, desert

Last minute Coast Guard rescue Two prospective immigrants prepare to cross

57

DREAM Act students

Immigration control advocate

Thwarted American Dream

63

Dominican

Poverty, ocean

Open ocean travel in car Ocean voyage, Mona Passage Elder is more aware, younger traveler less concerned about dangers Denied dreams of other US youth through no fault of own Open ocean danger

74

Dominican

Poverty, ocean

78

Guatemalan

US immigration policy

81

Dominican

Poverty, ocean

83

Migrant workers

Hurricane, FEMA, that is, US government

87

Immigrant game show contestants

Game show producers

#

Protagonist: Antagonists: unauthorized state policing transnational agents and nature

1

Mexican grandmother

7

Narrative: compelled to leave home, face danger, with no relief

Undocumented immigrant ‘shackled’ electronically Immigrants and Coast Guard rescuers ‘Road to freedom’

Ocean rescue footage Tijuana waystation, Brownsville international bridge, desert, body bags

Mock high school graduation ceremony, US flag, certificates of high academic honors Rescue by Coast Coast Guard emblem, Guard ‘Danger at Sea’ graphic, grainy rescue footage Rescue by Coast Open ocean danger Ocean bound Guard unseaworthy boats, destitute village Children’s party Extralegal status Immigrant family photos, crashed car, impedes parents tragedy when Guatemalan funeral from attending children die in US procession, religious children’s funeral car accident icons Rescue footage, Rescue by Coast Ocean danger unseaworthy boats, Guard crossing Mona emaciated people Passage Compares hurricane Immigrant life in US Wealthy White women acutely vulnerable, versus pregnant Latina, effects on rich upscale house versus during a natural White American mobile home disaster women and poor immigrant Latina Stylized Green Card, Parody of immigrant Symbolic voyage stylized risky tasks, experience ordeals, an border fence, Statue of unattainable Liberty objective as game prize

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Santa Ana Table 2. (Continued) #

Protagonist: Antagonists: unauthorized state policing transnational agents and nature

Narrative: compelled to leave home, face danger, with no relief

Theme: cycles of violence and vulnerability

Visual motifs: tribulations, losses, dead end work, permanent liminality

89a

Immigrants

INS, poverty, smugglers

Deportation strategies

116a

Migrants

INS, smugglers, desert

Migrants ‘caught between hope and fear’, Border Patrol

Desert detainee holding center, body bags Desert, map graphic, jettisoned belongings, ‘Dangerous Crossing’

117

Mexican, Angélica

Years afraid in Tucson shadows

34

Cubanb

INS and antiimmigrant citizens Ocean

Detainees compelled to cross again Cross desert and defy border patrol only to learn sad truth Perpetual netherworld limbo

35

Cubanb

Ocean

Inner-tube on open ocean Cuban flag, inner-tube on open ocean

106

Cuban dancersb Cuban dancersb Cuban dancersb

Cuban government Cuban government Cuban government

Ocean, then rescue on a Florida beach Open ocean, then rescue on a Florida beach Voyagers compelled to seek asylum Voyagers compelled to seek asylum Voyagers compelled to seek asylum

107 108

Rescue by Coast Guard Rescue by Coast Guard Political defection Political defection Political defection, US–Cuba governments tussle

Underexposed footage of immigrant

Performers on and off stage Dancers on stage, marquee Entertainers in business attire, not dance clothes

The Inanna news story is not a conventionalized genre. For this reason, Table 2 lists its narrative elements, themes, and associated visual motifs, not any cinematic conventions. INS: Immigration and Naturalization Service; ICE: Immigration and Customs Enforcement; DREAM: Development, Relief, and Education for Alien Minors; FEMA: Federal Emergency management Agency aSignificant elements of both story-types found in single news story, so the story appears in both tables. bThe United States has maintained a ‘wet foot/dry foot policy’ regarding Cuban immigrants since 1995. Those who succeed at setting foot on ‘dry land’ can request political asylum, which in one year leads to permanent residency. These transnational voyagers escape the US netherworld. For example, in #34 and #35, a Cuban immigrant who was pulled out of Florida waters unconscious by passers-by, the reports noted, would soon gain US citizenship. However, Cuban migrants apprehended on the open ocean, as in #11 and #12, are treated as unauthorized migrants and can be summarily returned to Cuba. Journalists use the Inanna news story-type to describe the ordeals of both Cuban groups.

and abuse her. And when she arrives at the border, she will face the militarized border patrol, as well as US police departments across the country. At the border, she then surrenders the hegemony of her language and culture, since she crosses into the United States culture that denigrates her. Finally, like the goddess, each day an immigrant dies attempting to cross the Great American Desert (Cornelius, 2005). As a mortal, however, the immigrant Inanna has no chance of resurrection. Today’s journalists who write sympathetically about immigrants describe these seven types of travails. There is one significant difference between the Sumerian goddess and today’s all too human transnational voyager. The goddess’ journey clearly ends when she leaves the

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netherworld to return to the ‘land of light and life’. In contrast, contemporary clandestine immigrants remain trapped in a sort of netherworld. They may cross the desert successfully to live and work quietly in the United States for years, but they can be arrested and be deported at any moment, due to their extralegal status. In terms of mythmaking, permanent liminality is a contemporary plotline alteration to a story-type that has existed for five millennia. Following is a descriptive breakdown of #116, a very accomplished ABC/BBC news story that employs the Inanna story-type.14

One Inanna news story, #116 Scene 1 begins with the standard mid-shot of ABC Sunday anchor, Terry Moran. Behind him viewers see a digital screen map of the United States and Mexico overlaid by the title ‘Dangerous Crossing’ and a rare static photo of a man straddling a barbed wire fence, his face hidden in a hoodie. Moran speaks gravely: A Texas jury resumes deliberations this week in the trial of two men charged in a tragic and disgraceful episode of human smuggling. Nineteen illegal immigrants died in the back of a stifling truck last spring. The accused were allegedly transporting the immigrants across the Mexican border. As the BBC’s Matt Frey reports for us tonight, the stream of immigrants is as constant as the dangers they face.

The news story introduces both story-types. The graphic confirms Moran’s statement about a ‘constant stream’ of immigration. He also underscores the ‘constant … danger’ the immigrants face, mentioning the trial that represents immigrants as human casualties. Moran segues to the main story where the Inanna story-type dominates the next two scenes. In Scene 2, the audience sees successive shots of a van on a very wide dirt road in a vast desert, traveling toward the camera. The first shot shows it at a distance, the second much closer. BBC correspondent, Matt Frey, begins his voice-over by saying, ‘Late afternoon rush hour on a dusty road in Mexico’. While his words create a narrative dissonance because only one van is shown, his voice does not signal irony. ‘Every one of these minibuses is heading to the U.S. border. Twenty miles to go and there’s a Mexican government checkpoint’. The dissonance is reinforced as the van travels further from the camera, creating the visual effect of an abstracted voyage. In shot 5, the van is stopped and Mexican officials are asking questions. Frey continues in voice-over as Scene 3 begins, The passengers are unwilling to talk. Caught between hope and fear, they come from every corner of Latin America. Some have paid $5,000 or more to a people smuggler to get this far. When night falls they’ll sneak across the border into the U.S. and what they hope will be a better life. They and thousands like them everyday.

He sums up their story while five camera shots superbly project the humanity of these voyagers. The first is a close-up of three men. Their indigenous faces are more tightly centered telegraphically by the beanies and heavy coats they wear to repel the winter desert cold. They are unfazed by the camera’s stare and tension builds as the lens lingers

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four full seconds – a network news eternity. It trains on them so long that viewers recognize the regular blinking of the men’s steady gaze. The second shot more closely frames another young man who returns the audience’s gaze for a while and then leans forward out of view. As the lens refocuses, the audience realizes another man is already gazing directly at the camera. For once in a rare role reversal, the television news voyeur becomes the object of the immigrant’s gaze (Kress and Van Leeuwen, 1996; Lister and Wells, 2001). Another close-up of another stoic man is followed by panning to a sixth passenger who nods minimally to the overheard official’s instructions without lifting his gaze from the camera. Reminiscent of Dorothea Lange portraiture, these compassionate video images are intensely rendered. The next shot shows the other voyagers, whose expressions range from apprehensive to indifferent. The camera moves to a near close-up of a young woman who also defies the audience’s voyeuristic intrusion. It then turns to a final person, a woman in her 20s, zooming in so tightly that viewers will note her perfectly symmetrical features and flawless skin. Her eyes repeatedly shift away from the camera and back again, ‘caught between hope and fear’. For 24 seconds, the camerawork insisted that the news audience see these silent voyagers as individuals, not as mere placeholders in a political debate. The scene continues with an over-the-shoulder shot of a Mexican official standing outside of the van. Frey continues his voice-over, ‘The Mexican officials no longer try to stop them. Instead they hand out leaflets telling them how not to die in the Arizona desert’. The viewers see two final point-of-view camera shots of hands passing out and opening pocket size four-fold leaflets with simple drawings and brief texts. The camera crew depicted these silent passengers with an unusual depth of subjectivity for the US news viewing public. Scene 4 abruptly shifts to introduce another narrative, a western genre story with a genial Border Patrol agent (which will not be described), but the story returns in Scene 5 to the Inanna narrative when Frey formally introduces the desert as another antagonist in the voyage of today’s immigrant Inanna. Through the sun’s glare, the camera pans from a close-up of a cholla cactus to a fierce desert panorama. The next shot of an empty plastic jug on the desert floor signals the voyagers’ battle with nature: ‘Forget about fingerprints or visas, here the biggest obstacle is the desert. Last year 600 people died of thirst crossing the border … ’ The plastic bottle cross-dissolves in Scene 6 into a close-up profile of two immigrants, ‘ … but even this isn’t enough to deter the desperate’. In the next shot, the news audience sees Frey speaking with two women who he introduces by voice-over: ‘In Phoenix I met two sisters from Honduras. They crossed the Rio Grande last month and almost drowned’. The camera offers a mid-shot of the two sisters. One gestures over her head to indicate the height of the water, expressing revulsion among a full range of emotions, while in utter contrast her sister remains impassive. Frey translates for one sister: ‘“ You know full well, there’s no dignity in any of this. You come here to work and just to work. It’s all about survival”’. In this way, Frey offers his concluding perspective on the immigrants’ voyage. As the camera zooms out beyond it to the immense expanse of the desert, Frey closes his news story with a voice-over, ‘Only one in three migrants gets caught. Matt Frey, BBC News, Arizona’.

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Frey sensitively rendered the immigrant with complementary metaphors in his exceptional news story (Santa Ana, 2002: 145). He characterized the immigrants as desperate humans, as individuals fighting for their lives in the desert, and people insisting on their dignity. Frey enriches the viewers’ sense of the voyagers by casting their travails as events of human consequence, not in terms of standard western genre plot moves. The camerawork of this BBC/ABC news story was particularly successful at granting these individuals full subjectivity even when they remained anonymous, so the news viewers perceived them as travelers on a perilous voyage, not criminal invaders or migratory animals. For 150 seconds, viewers witnessed what it means to be an immigrant Inanna.

Other Inannas in news stories Table 2 lists the news stories that are catalogued in terms of the Inanna story-type. Since this story-type is not a genre, it is not signaled by an iconic set of conventionalized features, in contrast to the western genre’s predictable elements. Accordingly in Table 2, I categorize the Descent to the Netherworld story in terms of its themes of violence and vulnerability, its narrative (namely an unavoidable personal journey into an unending liminal state, punctuated by a series of losses and ordeals with the State and Nature as adversaries that results in little sense of accomplishment, even if one survives), and associated visual motifs that signal this narrative. As can be seen in Table 2, the immigrant unmistakably plays the protagonist in 11 news stories in our year-long sample of 12,140 stories, or 9.3% of all Latino stories. Beyond the stories that cast immigrants as protagonists, several news stories depict immigrants with some degree of subjectivity by expressing Inanna voyager attributes. Thus, I argue that elements of the Inanna story-type are regular features of television news stories about unauthorized transnational workers. The most sympathetic news story representations in our 2004 sample are composed for the Dominican voyagers. The stories are primarily built around the Coast Guard protagonists, with dramatic footage of courageous rescues of ‘audacious’ and vulnerable Caribbean voyagers who are forced to take to the sea due to, for example, in #14, ‘dire economic conditions’. Moreover, news stories regularly report with a certain degree of sympathy about immigrants who have been caught, for example #78, or who were caught and deported. Deportation does not end their ordeal; the economic coercion to seek work remains so the desperate are compelled to undertake another voyage. Of course the news stories do not characterize immigrants in terms of the goddess’ superhuman powers, but the immigrants share with the goddess a willingness to undertake exceptional endeavors for their children’s sake. Journalists often play up this as one of the most admirable attributes of our species. For example, in #89, in a Mexico City shantytown a father’s words are superfluous to explain why he will soon undertake a perilous desert trek again, as he tenderly cradles his infant daughter dressed in sparkling whites in his work-stiffened hands. The Inanna stories reveal the dark flipside of American Dream narrative. In my reading of network news reports based on the story-type, even when they live undetected in the United States, immigrant Inannas have not escaped the netherworld of being an illicit labor force. On the other hand, stories such as #77, about people who regularize their

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status, or in #34 and #35 which describe a Cuban who washed up on a Florida beach unconscious on an inner-tube raft and subsequently was designated a political refugee, are exceptions that delimit the scope of the Inanna news story-type. Thus, the limiting case of immigrant Inanna news story is the American Dream narrative, since in the latter the protagonist becomes fully vested in the US society.15

Conclusion Network news journalists in 2004 used only two story-types, the Inanna and the American Western, to capture the complexity of the stories that constitute the US immigrant experience. The struggle between the intrepid goddess who arose in a pre-patriarchal society and the stoic warrior who defends the patriarchal order now plays out on US network news. In terms of content, the Inanna news story troubles the unreal clarity of the omnipresent western. The Inanna story challenges the values of the western myth, foremost by allowing US news viewers to see the immigrant as a real person, rather than the cowboy’s caricatured antagonist. In terms of form, the viewer treats the western genre differently from the Inanna news story since it has no instantly recognizable cinematic conventions. While all western news stories are read as instances of a single genre, each Inanna news report is read as a unique ‘human-interest story’ about an individual voyager or two (Lule, 2001: 119–120). In contrast, the unmistakable patterned plot, theme, and motif of Inanna stories are not instantly recognized. Still, each Inanna story overturns the western’s premise that American cowboys bring righteous order to the uncivilized, thus inviting the audience to reconsider its moral posture. These news stories subvert the US values of nationhood by recounting the misfortune, ordeals, violent exploitation, and death of real individuals. Since vulnerability and violence are twin themes of immigrant Inanna news stories, the news audience will feel less satisfaction at the punishment meted out against defenseless men and women by border patrol agents. Finally, the Inanna immigrant stories contest the patriarchal ideology of the West. The story-type of a third millennium goddess, conceived and worshiped in the time before the patriarchy, gives journalists plotlines of personal fortitude and moral purpose, counter-stories about people who must contest the normalized physical correction of women and people of color who challenge the fortress of White American masculine privilege. Whether reported in the news or not, these voyagers have no choice but to gamble their lives crossing a pitiless desert or taking to the open ocean in inner tubes. They defy migra agents in military uniforms, not as an invading army but as committed parents seeking modest wages for their children’s sake. Such actions dispute the legitimacy of the patriarchy. Thus, the rituals of regular movie viewing and daily television news viewing serve similar purposes. Each engages its audience by recounting discourses that reaffirm the values of the national culture. Just as the Sumerians and the Ancient Greeks enjoyed repeated retellings of their epic poems because they knew all the characters, plot twists, and how the story ends, today’s moviegoers experience the satisfaction watching the replay of foundational narrative that promulgates nationalist ideology (Grant, 2012: 29). Likewise, news reports present the events of the day by dressing up traditional morality

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tales that justify a political order. Anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski’s (1948) mid-20th-century estimation of what myth serves, what he calls ‘primitive’ culture, is apt for today’s television news audience: Myth fulfills an indispensable function: it expresses, enhances and codifies belief; it safeguards and enforces morality … Myth is thus a vital ingredient of human civilization; it is not an idle tale, but a hard-worked active force: it is not an intellectual explanation or an artistic imagery, but a pragmatic charter of primitive faith and moral wisdom. (p. 202)

Nietzsche famously noted that myth is a ‘necessary fiction’, a narrative which journalists declaim whether or not we recognize its untruth. The network newsrooms today use only two story-types to relate our nation’s immigrant experience. The news media frequently present the western genre news story that sustains the nation’s foundational myth of an America that beats down others until they accept the US hegemony. Such a repressive narrative is at odds with our increasingly post-patriarchal and heterogeneous national order. However, when juxtaposed to the western myth, Inanna news stories are liberating since they validate the immigrants’ complaint as they interrogate the violence of the western hero. Mythic story-types have persevered for millennia in part because they are retold across time with fluid plotlines that clothe a fundamentally unchanging epistemic core, and offer swift imaginary escapes from the angst of the human condition. It turns out that the network evening news, as well as the movie house, features the archetype cowboy as a national heroic diversion from our complex world and banal lives. Nevertheless, most US journalists believe that the public needs ‘accurate, comprehensive, timely, and understandable’ news, and that their craft is a ‘cornerstone of our nation and our liberty’ that bolsters democracy. Today’s news viewing public will not be able to escape, much less successfully address the mounting challenges of 21st century globalization if all it sees are reruns of Frederick Jackson Turner’s discredited vision of America. Since journalists invariably use story-types to drive the plots of daily news events, they should take stock of the mythic cloth in which they wrap the facts.16 Acknowledgements I am grateful to María Teresa Guerra and Rebecca Pappas for pushing me to think more deeply about network news mythologies. All shortcomings in this analysis remain my own. I want to thank the University of Texas Press for allowing me to draw upon certain sections of my 2013 book, Juan in a Hundred: Representation of Latinos on Network News.

Funding The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Notes 1. Cited in Saluskinszky (1987: 31). Franz Boas previously observed that American Indian myths are built out of preexisting stories (Von Hendy, 2002: 218–219). 2. The skewed distribution and negligible frequency of network Latino news stories was not unique to the year 2004. I elsewhere demonstrated that the distribution and frequency patterns

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had not changed from 1990 to 2010 (Santa Ana, 2013). In a separate study of the same four networks from 2008 to 2014, Subervi (2015) confirmed, “the patterns of coverage … have remained practically frozen in time. Year after year … Latinos and Latino issues are included in approximately one percent of the stories of what those outlets consider newsworthy happenings in the United States. Moreover, the primary topics of that meager coverage remain focused on Latinos as people with problems or causing problems. In this case, on news related to immigration or crime, or at times both combined.” (p. 19)

3.

4. 5.

6.

7.

8. 9.

10.

11.

Thus, the distribution and frequency patterns of stories about Latinos have not changed in the past 25 years. Orthographic conventions: in Santa Ana (2013), the television network news stories for the year 2004 on Latino topics were cataloged in an appendix, #1–118. I employed the cognitive linguistic convention of using small capitals to indicate metaphors, and used italics to signal spoken news report texts as well as individual lexical items. For ease of comparison, I retain these orthographic conventions in this article. This description draws on the detailed critical social semiotic analysis of #48 in Santa Ana (2013: 120–124). In #48, when the news correspondents use the terms flooding and surge, and speak of a migratory animal cycle in reference to immigrants, they are uttering instance of the pair of constitutive metaphors that demean immigrants, immigration as dangerous waters and immigrant as animal. On the basis of an empirical study of public discourse based on cognitive science principles, Santa Ana (2002) argued that constitutive metaphor guides the public discussions of political topics by encoding social values and relations, in this case that immigrants – in contrast to citizens – are less than human. More recently, Santa Ana et al. (2007) found that the news media discourse on immigrants had changed to the now pervasive metaphor, immigrant as criminal. Santa Ana (2006) criticized journalists who use such partisan language, which is not politically neutral. See Santa Ana et al. (2007) on journalists’ use of the metaphor, immigrant as criminal. “Genre films … temporarily relieve the fears aroused by a recognition of social and political conflicts; they helped to discourage any action that might otherwise follow upon the pressure generated by living with these conflicts. Genre films produce satisfaction rather than action, pity and fear rather than revolt. They serve the interests of the ruling class by assisting in the maintenance of the status quo, and they throw a sop to oppressed groups who, because they are unorganized and therefore afraid to act, eagerly accept the genre film’s absurd solutions to economic and social conflicts.” (Wright, 2012: 60) Slotkin (1973: 5) and Wink (1998: 42–62), respectively. Also see Anderson, 2007: 35 and Spector, 2010: 22. Anderson (2007: 17) distinguishes two kinds of westerns: films that turn on Turner’s thesis, and those that do not, such as High Noon (1952, directed by Fred Zinnemann). Alternatively, see Cawelti (1970) and Wright (1975). The Inanna story-type is only found in bowdlerized tales such as The Wizard of Oz (directed by Victor Fleming, 1939) or Alice in Wonderland. Viewers may not recognize the fearless third millennium BC goddess behind the dream sequence stories of little girls. Corporate mass media have been criticized for subjugating traditional mythic heroines (Edwards, 1999). Film studies discuss the perennial appeal in oft-repeated stories that are based on underlying epistemic trajectories or myths (Anderson, 2007; Cawelti, 1970; Grant, 2012). Some myths in

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12.

13.

14. 15.

16.

Discourse & Society 27(1) the Western tradition are conventionalized, that is to say genres, while other enduring myths have not become conventionalized. Unlike mythic women of later periods, she is not the object of men’s ambitions and passions, as is Helen. Unlike Medusa, she is not the victim of a god’s lust; nor is she a forsaken Phaedra, the wife driven to madness. Elements of her stories suffuse Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, but she does not harbor Eve’s guilt, since her story was recorded before the days of Abraham (Bahun-Radunovic and Rajan, 2011). Stories and poems praising her are preserved on clay tablets from the earliest Fertile Crescent writing (Kramer, 1961: 16). Inanna had a strongly defined personality. She was proud; she destroyed Kur, an inimical mountain that failed to show her sufficient deference (Kramer, 1961: 82–83). She walked among men to choose her lovers, and was notoriously indifferent to them. She exacted sexual attention, not as a neurotic woman, but with the insistence of nature. Audacity was her watchword: she took the 100 elements that were the foundations of civilization from another god who fought her to regain them. But she prevailed and conferred them to her devotees at Ur, her great city-state. Dalley (1989: 158). Katz (2003) notes that the Sumerian goddess was associated with the planet Venus with its distinctive yearly and daily cycle. The goddess’ voyage imbued with human character the yearly change of seasons, as well as the celestial body’s apparent daily death and resurrection in its complex astral apparition cycle. For a detailed critical semiotic description of #116, consult Santa Ana (2013: 140–145). An anonymous Discourse & Society reviewer requested current corroboration of the storytype patterns that I report for 2004. A review of 2014 news stories confirmed the two narrative patterns. The major national immigrant event in 2014 was the unexpected humanitarian crisis of over 68,000 unaccompanied Central American children and their mothers arriving at the US border. This event, which overwhelmed the US government’s capacity to care for the refugees, became journalism’s newsworthy immigration story of the year. The heartrending story crowded out the limited airtime that seemingly is allotted to Latino topics, because similar numbers of news stories about Latinos were aired, but many fewer stories dealt with the apprehension of adult immigrants. A Lexus Nexus search of the 2014 abc, nbc, cbs 6:00 pm evening news evening programs yielded 22 immigration stories. Of these stories, three involving child refugees were structured with an American Cowboy narrative; six about child refugees employed features of the Inanna story-type. Thus, 40% of all immigration stories gathered using a search engine was based on the two story-types. The remaining 60% did not discuss the voyage or apprehension of immigrants. Instead, it centered on national politics on immigration policy (two national policy stories; three stories on the political demonstrations sparked by the arrival of refugee children; three about the Obama administration’s inability to deal with refugees; three on the statistics of refugee children). Finally, two stories gathered in the computer search were unrelated to immigration (one domestic kidnapping incident; one on a border agent charged in a killing). Thus, all the 2014 news stories of these television networks reporting on immigrant migration or apprehension employ the Cowboy or Goddess story-types. Since immigration is a global fact of the present era, this myth and genre analysis might provoke reconsideration of immigration news stories. Will Western archetype reflexes be promulgated by other news services in the Western tradition, for example Mexico (Guerrero and Campo, 2012); Guatemala (Verdugo, 2007); Spain (Alonso et al., 2011; Zapata-Barrero and Van Dijk, 2007); European Union (García Agustín, 2008), Italy (Sciortino and Colombo, 2004) and; Sweden and Finland (Horsti, 2008)? And what archetypes will guide news reports about immigration in cultures that are not part of the Western tradition, for example Singapore (Lim, 2010); Malaysia (Don and Lee, 2014) and; South Africa (Danso and McDonald, 2001; Murray, 2003)?

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Author biography Otto Santa Ana is Professor in the César Chávez Department of Chicana/o Studies at UCLA. As a critical discourse analyst, he studies how the mass media reinforces unjust social relations. This article constitutes the culminating chapter of his recent book, Juan in a Hundred: Representation of Latinos on Network News (University of Texas Press, 2013). He is currently writing a book about laughter and humor, attempting a consilience of biological and social scientific and humanist studies of this feature of human nature.