Lopez Lends Her Face To A Culture Shift

Last winter, Kimlan Fong Wong and her boyfriend of several years, Anthony Taveras, stopped talking to each other for three days after she threw a vase at him during an argument. The subject: Jennifer Lopez.

“He kept calling her J. Ho,” says Wong, 29, an office manager and college student in Queens. “It was ‘J. Ho this’ and ‘J. Ho that.’ He knows I like her. I felt like he wasn’t respecting me.”

From his apartment in suburban Washington, Ramon Rivera wages his own defense of the singer/actress/entrepreneur – in his case, against his grandmother in Miami.

“Some of the older people have more traditional views,” says Rivera, 22. “So the way she dresses, or the fact that she’s been married three times, those things make people like my grandmother say, ‘Oh, no, I don’t like her.’ But I say, ‘Look at everything she’s accomplished.’ ”

Two weeks ago, Lopez’s latest movie, “Monster-in-Law,” a romantic comedy co-starring Jane Fonda, opened as the nation’s No. 1 film, grossing more than $23 million at the box office. Lopez mounted a tireless publicity blitz to support it, appearing in the past few weeks on the “Tonight Show” and “Good Morning America,” MTV, BET and the wall of your corner bus shelter. Everywhere, it seemed.

This, for some Hispanics, is how Lopez’s presence always feels.

And it’s not just because of the gallons of ink spilt over Lopez and her high-profile paramours (notably P. Diddy, Ben Affleck and now salsa superstar Marc Anthony). Or the number of times that green Grammys dress – filmy and slit from here to there – pops up on the Internet. It’s because Lopez straddles an amazing number of Hispanic fault lines, areas of often-vehement disagreement about what is and isn’t Hispanic.

The price of ambition? Check. The importance – or not – of being identified as Hispanic? Check. Of speaking Spanish? Check. Of a bodacious booty? Check. Dating white? Check. Dating black? Check. The politics of going blond? Check. And so on.

“People argue passionately about her,” says Michelle Herrera Mulligan, co-editor of the essay collection “Border-Line Personalities: A New Generation of Latinas Dish on Sex, Sass, and Cultural Shifting.” “She’s a lightning rod, a catalyst and representative for everything.”

For Hispanics who take their entertainment primarily in Spanish, she’s far from the biggest star in the firmament. For others – especially those who, like the actress herself, are strivers moving through a predominantly English-speaking world – talking about her is irresistible.

“She’s the first icon that generationally fits” the changing profile of young Hispanics, says Christy Haubegger, founder of Latina magazine who is now with Los Angeles’ Creative Artists Agency.

After decades of growth from immigration, the Hispanic population rise is now being spurred predominantly by in-country births. Although 54 percent of Hispanic adults are foreign-born, only 15 percent of those under 18 are, according to the Census Bureau. In November, Haubegger co-directed a study of more than 1,000 Hispanics ages 14 to 24 that sought to define this demographic.

What Haubegger’s team found, she says, is a “pan-Hispanic” self-identity, at odds with the way Hispanics have thought of themselves in the past.

“Previous generations defined themselves as being from a certain country – you said you were Mexican or Cuban,” she says. “But half this generation has never even been to the country their parents are from. Or they’re mixed. They say, ’I’m Colombian and Honduran.’ ”

Many of them don’t speak Spanish and don’t consider it important. They consider themselves trailblazers.

“They’d say, I’ll be the first in my family to blank – go to college, vote,” says Haubegger.

And unlike their parents, who felt they were struggling for pop culture visibility, this generation turns on MTV and sees Daddy Yankee singing reggaeton – a meld of dancehall, Spanish-language hip-hop and salsa – or VJ Susie Castillo speaking Spanish.

“They believe that they’re part of something huge, that the mainstream is coming to them to scope out new trends,” she says. “They feel like ‘Pimp My Ride’ is an homage to their culture.

“Jennifer is a big piece of that. The fact that she’s a beauty icon not just for Latinas but for the general population is incredibly affirming. So her celebrity takes on a much larger role than that of Nicole Kidman or Gwyneth Paltrow. Nobody expects from them the things these girls expect.”

In the survey, young Hispanics chose Lopez as their favorite female celebrity. (She was first overall among those ages 14 to 18.) In discussing her – the U.S.-born daughter of Puerto Rican parents, who understands Spanish but speaks it imperfectly, who defied her family to fulfill her ambition but still sings her pride at being “from the block” – Haubegger says: “They’re talking about themselves. It’s an enormous burden to put on one woman.”

But it seems to be a burden Lopez undertook, by luck or by design, probably both. (Lopez’s publicist didn’t respond to requests for an interview.)

In 1999, she told a journalist that she thought her first album would appeal to “my generation of people, who grew up in America but had Latin parents or parents of a different ethnicity.”

Three years later, talking about filming “Maid in Manhattan” in her childhood neighborhood, she was quoted as saying, “Rita Moreno never came to the Bronx when I was growing up. ... I think it’s important to do that, so people have that (inspiration) in their lives.”

In his recent book “Starstruck: When a Fan Gets Close to Fame,” author Michael Joseph Gross hypothesizes that the emotion one feels toward a celebrity is confusing feelings for a piece of work – a set of song lyrics, a role they played in a movie – for a connection with a real person.

Lopez, Gross believes, is “very conscious” of this dynamic. But in her case, he says, the connection is “not about her work – it’s her story.”

To begin with, her biography, which she repeats in every interview, reads like an immigrant archetype: Raised in a working-class part of the Bronx by a computer technician and a kindergarten teacher, Lopez started out as a backup dancer and, by dint of hard work and determination, became a powerhouse – a $12 million-a-picture film star, a recording artist who’s sold 35 million CDs, an entrepreneur whose clothing line and fragrance businesses People magazine estimated to be worth $350 million.

To some, such as Wong and Rivera, this is inspiring. To others, infuriating.

“When she first came out, it was electric,” Mulligan says. “I was in college and to see someone with a wide nose and a big (rear) – I felt like I was being born. That simply didn’t exist before in popular culture. But I’ve been so disappointed.”

She cites Lopez’s relative lack of activism compared with Hispanics actors such as Jimmy Smits and Edward James Olmos and suggests the entertainer pales next to tour-de-force Moreno.

And that continuing conversation is something with which few other Hispanic stars can compete.

“What Latina performer has a story as great as J. Lo?” Gross asks. “Salma Hayek turns in good performances in good movies. How boring is that?

“Stardom takes much more.”