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FINAL ANALYTICAL PAPER

JOURNAL ARTICLE WORKSHEET

Title and Author: Carl Smith, “Latin America in the News,” Journal of Latin American History, vol. 13, no. 5 (1990): 11-24.

1. What is the article’s subject? What is it generally about? Does it examine a person, place, or event?

Example: Carl Smith examines the mainstream media in the United States to see if the U.S. press presents a biased view about Latin America and why.

2. Restate, in your own words without using quotes, the author's main point. Reminder: don’t simply restate what they are studying--what do they have to say about their subject?

Example: Smith argues that the majority of newspapers and television shows in the United States present a negative view about Latin America and Latin Americans. This negative view reinforces anti-Latino/a sentiment among the U.S. population.

3. Does the author have sub-points? What are they?

Example: Smith argues that the negative views about Latin America and its people as expressed in the mainstream media have a long history in the United States, dating back to the nineteenth century; contemporary images of Latin Americans in the U.S. press reinforce the idea that Latin Americans are racially different from Anglo-Americans; images of Latin America underscore negative stereotypes.

4. Do the author's main and sub-points differ from other articles/books you've read? How?

Example. No, I have read Jack Johnson’s book, Latin America in Caricature, which shows the long history of stereotyped images about Latin America in U.S. newspapers.

5. What kind of evidence does the author use to prove her/his point? Archival sources? Newspaper articles? Interviews? Census data?

Example: Carl Smith relies on newspaper articles, interviews with editors, and cartoon editorials.

6. What does he/she use the evidence to show?

Example: Carl Smith analyzes fifty newspaper articles to show that the majority of U.S.-based newspapers report only negative news stories about Latin America.

7. Provide an example of the author using evidence to prove his/her main point. Here, you may quote directly from the article.

Example: On page 20, Smith states, “in the 275 newspaper articles surveyed for this study, three-quarters of them used Latin America, poor, southern, and impoverished in the same sentence.”

8. Identify statements in the article that support, contradict, or modify the main ideas of other articles or books you've read about this topic.

Example: On page 25, Smith makes a point about the important role of editorial cartoons, which connects to the Johnson book I read.

9. What did you learn from this article?

Example: I learned that the mainstream press in the United States has an implicit bias towards showing Latin America and Latin Americans as somehow inferior to North Americans, specifically to people in the United States.

10. What other ideas or points do you think the author should have considered?

Example: I really wish the author would have compared articles in the Spanish-language press to see if the same biases appeared there. I would think, perhaps hope, that Spanish-language newspapers would not paint Latin Americans the same way.

11. Contextualize the author's argument in a broader, theoretical debate.

Example: I think Smith’s argument relates to a point raised in the Keene textbook about U.S.-Latin American relations. In another article I read by Kingman, that author stated that perceptions of Latin Americans as inferior to Anglo Americans informed U.S. policy towards the regions. Smith’s article makes a contribution to that idea.