In a world... where a name may be pronounced differently by native language...
1.
2. In the demo prep class I'm taking the teacher, Steve Staley, encouraged me to come up with a piece to include that had me switching between English and Spanish. I wrote a piece about a mom gushing about her new Prius and mentioning that her kids love playing with all the onboard "toys" then it ends with her turning around to yell at them in Spanish to quit touching everything. He loved it and said I should keep it.
3. My parents used to get in a lot of trouble on the school yard for speaking in Spanish to their classmates, especially my dad. In the Navy my dad was told he had better English than a lot of guys from the barrio. When my dad went into the Teacher Corps he was told he had to clean up his English (he was born in Texas and raised in Orange County, CA) because even if he was smart no one was going to believe it from a guy with a thick accent. The point of Teacher Corps was to get people from under served neighborhoods into teaching and them send them back to their own neighborhoods, hoping that someone of the same culture could reach the families better than strangers could. My dad ended up teaching geography and history in a mix of English and Spanish, typically weighted heavily toward Spanish. My mom speaks *very* clear English with little to no accent, despite having been born in Mexico and having received part of her schooling there.
3b. I once had a boyfriend remark I spoke clear English, articulate and without an accent. I attributed it to lots of Sesame Street.
Everything below the cut is just babbling with the above in the background.
Of all of the obstacles I'm looking at trying to clear in order to really move on a voice over career, you wouldn't think how to pronounce my name would be a big one. Never mind what accents or regionalisms to bring in and when.
The last time I talked about saying my name it was just getting the slate right (introducing myself & my role at the top). That's done. Now I need to figure out whether to use the pronunciation that I've used since kindergarten, the Americanized version of my name, or say it in the full Spanish....
My name, in all truth, isn't that big of a deal to me. It's only an obstacle until people know me and know what I can deliver. At the moment I'm thinking I'll just stick with the Americanized pronunciation until there's a good reason to give the slate another way, e.g. so it'll match the force/regionalism/quality of the read itself. The absolute last thing I need is for the listener to get caught up on my name and fail to listen to my read.
But as long as there is copy relevant to Southern California - or even the southwest as a whole - and I'm pretty sure not only will there be for the rest of my life, the amount of it will only grow - I'll have to figure out how to display my own native takes on how to pronounce not just the names of our cities, but our family member's names, our food, our music, our history, our colloquialisms so that agents and casting directors will believe I can sell to the target market.
For right now - and I can tell you that when writing copy and translating this has been a source of frustration - clients trying to sell to a Latino market have this idea that they can clearly and cleanly delineate between an English speaking, Anglo(give or take) market and a Spanish speaking, Latin market. But in hiring me, that by itself shows that the line is an invention. So I continually hope that advertisers and their clients will realize that the Latin market, the 2G world (2G = second generation/children of immigrants), lives in a state of perpetual assimilation and expressive progression. That is, we don't just learn to speak English, and speak properly and that's the end of it. We speak Spanglish among ourselves, and look for images of ourselves in the broader world.
Whether or not we're numerical minorities, we're treated that way in the media. But the thing about the media is that in its pervasiveness it convinces its consumers that they are of the norm, that their concerns, needs, and desires are best expressed by the protagonist of every story. The Everyman, say it with me now, always being the white male. This has been a point hard for me to explain: those of us who aren't white men forget that we're not that guy. If the media is good we buy in, and buying in means we empathize with that guy. We forget our own identities and accept that the white male is the norm against which every variance will be measured.
If I have an axe to grind on this count it's that the varied ways in which I have to count my differing from the the Everyman as a "type." But I didn't write this to grind my axe; it's safely put away, don't worry.
The thing I'm trying to tackle is the simple fact that populations don't accept a narrative, unquestioningly forever. (Particularly when the moment we turn off the TV and head out to the store or the voting booth and get told women are voting this way or Latinos prefer that we're forcibly reminded we're not part of the collective that is Everyman. *ahem* But that's a tale for another time. My axe is tricky.) So with a restive population looking for an identity, along comes advertisers and other entities created by capitalism to capture errant market forces. This the milieu I need to play in. Not that I have to put much effort into studying economy, just that I need to be clear about what problems I can solve, where, when and how. And that's not just as a voice actor, but has been the case when trying to sell myself as a copy writer & editor and translator.
So the first major point of deciding how to go about things in a commercial world is how will it play? And without a ton of money I don't get to do surveys of potential consumers, I only get to deal with the directors and agents. It's up to them to work with the advertisers (who presumably know but...c'mon) and the advertisers who presumably know also have to satisfy their clients. It's not like Gustavo Arellano who only had to convince the LA Weekly and assorted other free papers to give him column space. From there he reached out to anyone with a roving eye, catching them with a horribly cartoony face of "a Mexican" and a cantankerous, foul mouthed persona answering equally cantankerous questions. It's definitely not like Culture Clash whose salad days of workshopping in garages and relying on incendiary comedy to garner attention are long behind them. Not that they're no longer incendiary - only they've always been about more than comedy. But now they have enough cache that they're invited to do shows...even if it's unlikely they'll ever get on TV again.
Everywhere I look there are individuals and groups saying what they have to say in their own way and not asking for permission. And I can, obviously I try do that here on this blog, but that's not what I'm after with voiceover. VO, being a chunk of what I aim to have in my life, has some rules regarding how a person gets paid. It pretty much begins and ends with convincing someone. So... if I'm not convincing, if I don't sell what I came to sell but instead distract with the form of my presentation instead of its function then, very simply, I won't get hired.
The good news(?): I'm pretty confident I have a typical broad American accent. I can do any old basic everywoman in the adult range (30-50). If you just heard my voice saying something perfectly boring like "would you like fries with that?" and knew nothing else about me you'd be excused if you assumed I was white. So... That works. But the question is when copy comes along that is regional or in anyway invokes a Latin ethnicity. How much of a regionalism do I need to sell it or should I go full on for a foreign accent*? Will I shoot myself in the foot if I include such a piece in my demo? In the prepwork for a demo I can't move an inch without bumping into some conventional wisdom that's more or less one person saying "well somewhere along the way someone told me X, Y, Z." Everyone has a ton of advice and it's nearly all contradictory. But one piece of hearsay I don't have much trouble believing runs like this: A Spanish-language piece will get agents to file you for Spanish-only gigs.
Now, for the time being, I've given myself the freedom to not give a shit about race and class issues until I get friggin hired. So if it's going to be on Spanish pieces that's fine. But I know I don't sound like a straight up Spanish-language anything. I'm 2G. I spoke Spanish before English but I'm probably more fluent in English. Maybe I could even strike "probably" in that previous sentence, I'm far more prone to express myself in English - though in hard expression I'm more mercenary and will go with whatever will give the effect I want. Anyway, no one from Mexico will get confused listening to me and assume I am Mexican. I speak American Spanish, whatever that is. Given just a bit of time with my extended family and I'll be speaking what my parents call "chilaquiles" or what everyone else calls Spanglish. A faint accent will creep into my English speech, I'll pull out Spanish nouns and match them with English verbs, and the English verbs will be conjugated with Spanish forms. We tease each other for the constructions we come up with, but we roll with it.
These are the people advertisers seem to be trying to reach when they say "Latin market." At the very least, they are so out here in the Southwest. My time in New York rapidly instructed me on the other Spanish forms out there and that I definitely don't sound like them. I do not sound Cuban. Or Puerto Rican or Colombian or Argentinian. And all of those have been melting together in NYC for generations into a particular Newyorican that's as different from Southwestern US Spanish as American English is when compared to Australian English. From time to time I try to explain this to people who interview me for copy writing or translating but either I confuse them or they argue back with something that typically confuses me. I know, the smart thing is not to tell... Just promise/perform perfect Spanish and let them sort out regional issues after the fact.
*sigh* When trying to dally with advertising in any way there is an aspect of trying to peer into the future and act one what one sees. One ought to at least try to anticipate trends - one must certainly be able to discern the current ones. But leading the way is unbelievably good for business. Of course, one doesn't want to be too far ahead of the pack. That way lies trailblazing minus remuneration. But staying half a step ahead means fabulous cash & prizes, or at least a payday and a solid reputation.
So my muttering basically boils down to with the assumption that advertisers won't try to cash in on 2G markets for a while still, but that I should showcase a tiny bit of it anyway. I think.
*Long ago I got tired of seeing the same two or three actresses playing Latina cleaning ladies with a Mexican-ish accent. 1. Any one of them could bust out with a flawless American accent. 2. Maybe immigrants do end up cleaning house for white protagonists, but so do a lot of native born folks. 3. I really do get the feeling that mass media people worry about confusing audiences with people of color presenting as native-born Americans. But that means that mass media people themselves forget that the troupe of the Everyman being a white male is just a convention. I will forever love the TV show Titus for having a nurse of Korean ancestry frown when Titus senior displayed his usual crudeness in talking to her as if she were an immigrant there to eagerly serve him and dryly responded "I'm from Fresno" in perfect American.
As he often does Ta-Nehisi Coates put this in much clearer and more succinct terms, though his thesis only speaks to a section of my entry.
Click to view2. In the demo prep class I'm taking the teacher, Steve Staley, encouraged me to come up with a piece to include that had me switching between English and Spanish. I wrote a piece about a mom gushing about her new Prius and mentioning that her kids love playing with all the onboard "toys" then it ends with her turning around to yell at them in Spanish to quit touching everything. He loved it and said I should keep it.
3. My parents used to get in a lot of trouble on the school yard for speaking in Spanish to their classmates, especially my dad. In the Navy my dad was told he had better English than a lot of guys from the barrio. When my dad went into the Teacher Corps he was told he had to clean up his English (he was born in Texas and raised in Orange County, CA) because even if he was smart no one was going to believe it from a guy with a thick accent. The point of Teacher Corps was to get people from under served neighborhoods into teaching and them send them back to their own neighborhoods, hoping that someone of the same culture could reach the families better than strangers could. My dad ended up teaching geography and history in a mix of English and Spanish, typically weighted heavily toward Spanish. My mom speaks *very* clear English with little to no accent, despite having been born in Mexico and having received part of her schooling there.
3b. I once had a boyfriend remark I spoke clear English, articulate and without an accent. I attributed it to lots of Sesame Street.
Everything below the cut is just babbling with the above in the background.
Of all of the obstacles I'm looking at trying to clear in order to really move on a voice over career, you wouldn't think how to pronounce my name would be a big one. Never mind what accents or regionalisms to bring in and when.
The last time I talked about saying my name it was just getting the slate right (introducing myself & my role at the top). That's done. Now I need to figure out whether to use the pronunciation that I've used since kindergarten, the Americanized version of my name, or say it in the full Spanish....
My name, in all truth, isn't that big of a deal to me. It's only an obstacle until people know me and know what I can deliver. At the moment I'm thinking I'll just stick with the Americanized pronunciation until there's a good reason to give the slate another way, e.g. so it'll match the force/regionalism/quality of the read itself. The absolute last thing I need is for the listener to get caught up on my name and fail to listen to my read.
But as long as there is copy relevant to Southern California - or even the southwest as a whole - and I'm pretty sure not only will there be for the rest of my life, the amount of it will only grow - I'll have to figure out how to display my own native takes on how to pronounce not just the names of our cities, but our family member's names, our food, our music, our history, our colloquialisms so that agents and casting directors will believe I can sell to the target market.
For right now - and I can tell you that when writing copy and translating this has been a source of frustration - clients trying to sell to a Latino market have this idea that they can clearly and cleanly delineate between an English speaking, Anglo(give or take) market and a Spanish speaking, Latin market. But in hiring me, that by itself shows that the line is an invention. So I continually hope that advertisers and their clients will realize that the Latin market, the 2G world (2G = second generation/children of immigrants), lives in a state of perpetual assimilation and expressive progression. That is, we don't just learn to speak English, and speak properly and that's the end of it. We speak Spanglish among ourselves, and look for images of ourselves in the broader world.
Whether or not we're numerical minorities, we're treated that way in the media. But the thing about the media is that in its pervasiveness it convinces its consumers that they are of the norm, that their concerns, needs, and desires are best expressed by the protagonist of every story. The Everyman, say it with me now, always being the white male. This has been a point hard for me to explain: those of us who aren't white men forget that we're not that guy. If the media is good we buy in, and buying in means we empathize with that guy. We forget our own identities and accept that the white male is the norm against which every variance will be measured.
If I have an axe to grind on this count it's that the varied ways in which I have to count my differing from the the Everyman as a "type." But I didn't write this to grind my axe; it's safely put away, don't worry.
The thing I'm trying to tackle is the simple fact that populations don't accept a narrative, unquestioningly forever. (Particularly when the moment we turn off the TV and head out to the store or the voting booth and get told women are voting this way or Latinos prefer that we're forcibly reminded we're not part of the collective that is Everyman. *ahem* But that's a tale for another time. My axe is tricky.) So with a restive population looking for an identity, along comes advertisers and other entities created by capitalism to capture errant market forces. This the milieu I need to play in. Not that I have to put much effort into studying economy, just that I need to be clear about what problems I can solve, where, when and how. And that's not just as a voice actor, but has been the case when trying to sell myself as a copy writer & editor and translator.
So the first major point of deciding how to go about things in a commercial world is how will it play? And without a ton of money I don't get to do surveys of potential consumers, I only get to deal with the directors and agents. It's up to them to work with the advertisers (who presumably know but...c'mon) and the advertisers who presumably know also have to satisfy their clients. It's not like Gustavo Arellano who only had to convince the LA Weekly and assorted other free papers to give him column space. From there he reached out to anyone with a roving eye, catching them with a horribly cartoony face of "a Mexican" and a cantankerous, foul mouthed persona answering equally cantankerous questions. It's definitely not like Culture Clash whose salad days of workshopping in garages and relying on incendiary comedy to garner attention are long behind them. Not that they're no longer incendiary - only they've always been about more than comedy. But now they have enough cache that they're invited to do shows...even if it's unlikely they'll ever get on TV again.
Everywhere I look there are individuals and groups saying what they have to say in their own way and not asking for permission. And I can, obviously I try do that here on this blog, but that's not what I'm after with voiceover. VO, being a chunk of what I aim to have in my life, has some rules regarding how a person gets paid. It pretty much begins and ends with convincing someone. So... if I'm not convincing, if I don't sell what I came to sell but instead distract with the form of my presentation instead of its function then, very simply, I won't get hired.
The good news(?): I'm pretty confident I have a typical broad American accent. I can do any old basic everywoman in the adult range (30-50). If you just heard my voice saying something perfectly boring like "would you like fries with that?" and knew nothing else about me you'd be excused if you assumed I was white. So... That works. But the question is when copy comes along that is regional or in anyway invokes a Latin ethnicity. How much of a regionalism do I need to sell it or should I go full on for a foreign accent*? Will I shoot myself in the foot if I include such a piece in my demo? In the prepwork for a demo I can't move an inch without bumping into some conventional wisdom that's more or less one person saying "well somewhere along the way someone told me X, Y, Z." Everyone has a ton of advice and it's nearly all contradictory. But one piece of hearsay I don't have much trouble believing runs like this: A Spanish-language piece will get agents to file you for Spanish-only gigs.
Now, for the time being, I've given myself the freedom to not give a shit about race and class issues until I get friggin hired. So if it's going to be on Spanish pieces that's fine. But I know I don't sound like a straight up Spanish-language anything. I'm 2G. I spoke Spanish before English but I'm probably more fluent in English. Maybe I could even strike "probably" in that previous sentence, I'm far more prone to express myself in English - though in hard expression I'm more mercenary and will go with whatever will give the effect I want. Anyway, no one from Mexico will get confused listening to me and assume I am Mexican. I speak American Spanish, whatever that is. Given just a bit of time with my extended family and I'll be speaking what my parents call "chilaquiles" or what everyone else calls Spanglish. A faint accent will creep into my English speech, I'll pull out Spanish nouns and match them with English verbs, and the English verbs will be conjugated with Spanish forms. We tease each other for the constructions we come up with, but we roll with it.
These are the people advertisers seem to be trying to reach when they say "Latin market." At the very least, they are so out here in the Southwest. My time in New York rapidly instructed me on the other Spanish forms out there and that I definitely don't sound like them. I do not sound Cuban. Or Puerto Rican or Colombian or Argentinian. And all of those have been melting together in NYC for generations into a particular Newyorican that's as different from Southwestern US Spanish as American English is when compared to Australian English. From time to time I try to explain this to people who interview me for copy writing or translating but either I confuse them or they argue back with something that typically confuses me. I know, the smart thing is not to tell... Just promise/perform perfect Spanish and let them sort out regional issues after the fact.
*sigh* When trying to dally with advertising in any way there is an aspect of trying to peer into the future and act one what one sees. One ought to at least try to anticipate trends - one must certainly be able to discern the current ones. But leading the way is unbelievably good for business. Of course, one doesn't want to be too far ahead of the pack. That way lies trailblazing minus remuneration. But staying half a step ahead means fabulous cash & prizes, or at least a payday and a solid reputation.
So my muttering basically boils down to with the assumption that advertisers won't try to cash in on 2G markets for a while still, but that I should showcase a tiny bit of it anyway. I think.
*Long ago I got tired of seeing the same two or three actresses playing Latina cleaning ladies with a Mexican-ish accent. 1. Any one of them could bust out with a flawless American accent. 2. Maybe immigrants do end up cleaning house for white protagonists, but so do a lot of native born folks. 3. I really do get the feeling that mass media people worry about confusing audiences with people of color presenting as native-born Americans. But that means that mass media people themselves forget that the troupe of the Everyman being a white male is just a convention. I will forever love the TV show Titus for having a nurse of Korean ancestry frown when Titus senior displayed his usual crudeness in talking to her as if she were an immigrant there to eagerly serve him and dryly responded "I'm from Fresno" in perfect American.
As he often does Ta-Nehisi Coates put this in much clearer and more succinct terms, though his thesis only speaks to a section of my entry.