Referencing Heritage
Selena Gomez’s father is Mexican, thus linking her Latina heritage to Mexico. Since she was born in Texas, both references to Mexico and Texas in her tweets were analyzed to offer a fitting comparison. Out of over 4,000 total tweets, Selena has tweeted about Mexico 7 times and has tweeted about Texas 23 times. While Selena is proud of her ties to Mexico, as she states in her interview with the magazine Latina, she is also proud of her birthplace, Texas. Still, for someone who claims to be proud of her Mexican heritage, she has tweeted very few times about Mexico, and often those tweets are talking about tours rather than heritage.
Jennifer Lopez tweeted more frequently about what she considers home. Out of roughly 12,300 tweets, she tweeted 30 times about Puerto Rico and tweeted 51 times about the Bronx/New York City, where she was born. Both of Jennifer Lopez’s parents were from Puerto Rico, which may explain why the number of her tweets about New York City was not a lot higher than the number of her tweets about Puerto Rico. However, it is also important to note that half of her tweets about Puerto Rico (15 tweets) were from this year in reference to Hurricane Maria. This shows that besides the recent natural disaster, Jennifer Lopez has not put much emphasis on her relationship with Puerto Rico on Twitter.
Unlike Selena Gomez and Jennifer Lopez, Sofia Vergara was not born in the US, so only her tweets about Colombia, her home country, were analyzed. Out of over 7,000 tweets total, Sofia wrote 81 tweets about Colombia (1.1% of her tweets), which is larger than the number and percentage of tweets about Latin roots that Selena or Jennifer wrote. It is plausible that Sofia tweets more often about her home country than the other two celebrities studied because she does not have the same connection to the US; while she has made a career and lived in the US for many years, she has another country that she grew up in and can be nostalgic about. Selena and Jennifer have ties to their Latin American countries, but do not necessarily have the same sense of nostalgia and therefore may be less compelled to make references to those countries as often. It is noteworthy that even Sofia Vergara, who was born in a Latin American country, barely wrote 1% of her tweets about her Latin roots. This is possibly due to another marketing strategy to appeal to fans in the US, but misses out on the chance to connect with other Latina fans.
