Before you even open the new issue of Urban Latino magazine, you meet Shakira twice. The 24-year-old Colombian-Lebanese singer/songwriter — the latest victim of the Latin-music industry’s English-language crossover machine — is on the cover from her leather-clad calves on up, her wavy dyed-blond hair falling over a lace half-shirt that exposes a glowing brown midriff. She’s also on the magazine’s back cover, this time in a Pepsi ad, from her leather-clad calves on up. There’s no ideological difference between the two: on the front, she’s selling the magazine and the magazine is selling her; on the back she’s selling Pepsi and Pepsi is selling her. And both she and Pepsi are selling the magazine that is selling them both in return.

The images — the two Shakiras that really are one (it almost looks like the same photo shoot) — are replicas of each other in size and layout, except that in the ad there is no belly shot, and her hands are not on her hips but wrapped around a tall microphone stand. The front cover proclaims, "Shakira unleashes herself in English." The Pepsi ad, which is in Spanish and doesn’t mention Shakira’s name, just says, "Goza el sabor" ("Enjoy the flavor").

With the US release of her first English-dominant album, Laundry Service (Epic), the alternative-leaning pop-rock innovator from the coastal carnival capital of Baranquilla who used to perform barefoot and in dreadlocks and head-bang as hard as Univision would let her has become a belly-dancing and ass-shaking stand-in for multinational money. Groomed by the Estefans and former Madonna and Michael Jackson manager Freddy Demann, the once-difficult-to-pin-down style switcher has been made into an exotic ethnic brand: a feisty Latina with a hint of the mystical East, an exotic replicant programmed to speak the global language of commerce (English).

And it’s working. Laundry Service debuted at #3 on the Billboard 200, and her video for "Whenever, Wherever" — where Ricky Martin’s hips and Jennifer Lopez’s ass do a Moroccan table dance — became an instant Total Request Live favorite (she’s like a brown Britney!). So much so that she all but re-enacted the video for her live TRL and SNL performances, right down to the belly undulations cued to the swell of Middle Eastern strings and drum slaps.

"The structure of English is difficult," Shakira told Urban Latino. "It’s a very direct language — the language of advertising." Crossing into that language, then, leads to just that: the Latina artist-as-advertisement, the rebirth of Shakira as The Franchise Formerly Known As The Musician.

Those of Shakira’s compatriots who have rejected the English-language come-on — pop-rock fusionist Juanes, vallenato popster Carlos Vives, and alterna-faves Aterciopelados (whose lead singer, Andrea Echeverri, refused to perform as a new-school Latin spitfire when she played The Tonight Show without an hour’s worth of make-up) — have avoided these kinds of representation problems. "When someone asked me why I don’t sing in English," Vives recently told La Opinión, "I thought, ‘Why to express myself do I have to sing in that language and cover up my own?’ "

The difference between the new Shakira and her fellow Colombians is — to borrow something the great Senegalese politician and poet Leopold Senghor (who passed away earlier this month) once impressed upon his own people — the difference between being someone who assimilates and someone who is assimilated. Juanes, Vives, and Aterciopelados have assimilated foreign sounds and styles into their own, rethinking a rock-guitar solo through a vallenato accordion run, a sequenced breakbeat through the lulling rhythms of an old nightclub bolero. And that’s what Shakira did on her first five albums — but with Laundry Service she does the opposite and gets assimilated, looking and sounding the way the US market dictates that commercial Latino artists should look and sound.

For Senghor, one of Africa’s most important anti-colonial thinkers, being assimilated was a product of a colonial mentality. In a recent interview in Latina magazine, Shakira identified her "conquest" of the US music market with the Spanish conquest of her own country. "The spirit of conquest is a trait that has survived in human beings from the beginning," she explained. "I want it for the same reason the Spaniards wanted to come to America. You have to cross the oceans. To be able to sink my Colombian flag in this land, that is a motivation."

So I suppose we’ve gotten off easy. When the Spaniards sank their flag into Colombia at the turn of the 16th century, they brought African slaves, converted Indians, and exploited the local corn crop. All "this land" has been left with is another blonde with a toned midriff who speaks English and drinks Pepsi.