This article calls attention to the pressing need to explore commercial television’s racial, ethnic, cultural, and gendered representations across the Latin American and Spanish Caribbean region as well as documenting the ways in which non-white citizens are (and have been) coping with their social and televisual marginalization. The performance piece You Don’t Look Like provides a unique opportunity to examine how those who have been excluded from and reconfigured in the local televisual frame have negotiated their invisibility and their constructed Otherness. By reenacting some of Puerto Rico’s scenarios of blackness, You Don’t Look Like questions and denounces the positionality of black citizens in the island’s society, culture, and on television. The article argues that both directly and indirectly, Puerto Rico’s scenarios of blackness not only imply specific geographical sites within the island but also the racialized bodies and cultures that flow back and forth across the Caribbean Sea.

Name of Periodical: Global Media and Communication

Volume Number: 2

Issue Number: 3

Year of Publication: 2006

Page Numbers: 335-354