Celebrity Latinidad on Twitter

Methods

          The first step in data collection was determining which Latina celebrities had the most Twitter followers in the US. The website Twitter Counter was used to identify the top three Latina users. As of December 3rd, 2017, Selena Gomez (@selenagomez) ranked #11 in terms of US followers, Jennifer Lopez (@JLo) ranked #14 in terms of US followers, and under the specific category of actors, Sofía Vergara (@SofiaVergara) ranked #59 in terms of US followers.
          For analysis of tweets, Twitter Advanced Search was used. To assess the use of Spanish, a search was made for any tweets containing any of the following words in Spanish: el, español, hola, hoy, mañana, sale, a, venta, la, gracias, amigo, amiga. These words were used since there is no built-in tool available to simply screen for tweets in Spanish, and these are common words found in many tweets. To assess references to each celebrity’s homeland, the corresponding Latin American country and US residence were searched; for example, “Mexico”, “Mexicano”, “Mexicana”, and “México” as well as “Texas” were searched for Selena Gomez’s tweets. Finally, the latino hashtags searched were: #hispanicsbreaktheinternet #latinosbreaktheinternet #latinosstandup #somosunavoz #Latinaequalpay #fiercelyLatina #latina #DACA #AllHairIsLatinaHair #NotYourMami #morethanalabel. These specific hashtags were chosen based on lists of recent popular hashtags trending on Twitter (#hispanicsbreaktheinternet #latinosbreaktheinternet #latinosstandup #somosunavoz #Latinaequalpay #fiercelyLatina), #latina was searched since it is a simple hashtag related to being Latina, and the last hashtags (#DACA #AllHairIsLatinaHair #NotYourMami #morethanalabel) were based on this article by Buzzfeed recommending Latina hashtags.
 

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