Watching Pixar’s “Coco,” an outright celebration of Mexican culture, earn more than $700 million worldwide and be a front-runner for this year’s Oscars, it’s easy to think we’ve come a long way from when a suspiciously tanned Charlton Heston played a Mexican drug cop in 1958’s “Touch of Evil.”
But have we, though? At least Heston’s Miguel “Mike” Vargas was the hero of that film noir masterpiece. Fast-forward 60 years and I’m hard pressed to think of a film directed by today’s equivalent of Orson Welles having a Latino lead — and it’s not because I’m not thinking hard enough.
Hispanics make up about 18 percent of the population, yet between 2007 and 2016 only 3 percent of all speaking roles in major U.S. films went to Hispanic actors, according to a study from the University of Southern California’s Annenberg Inclusion Initiative. It’s particularly galling when you consider that 24 percent of regular moviegoers are Hispanic.
If you’re asking why this is a problem, I’ll just go ahead and answer the other question you’ve probably been having: Why is the new “Blank Panther” movie such a big deal? The answer to both is representation.
Now, I’m not talking about some sort of affirmative action quota or having every movie ever made having to represent the population’s diversity, but it would be nice — with so many talented Latino professionals out there — if they had the same opportunity to shine.
I still consider myself an avid consumer of popular culture, but I am but a shadow of what I used to be. Even though I grew up on the Mexican side of the border, I devoured American television, movies, comics and books. At first, I didn’t see much difference between my brother and I and Bo and Luke Duke as we rode around in our imaginary General Lee (apologies).
But as I got older — and Arturito became R2-D2 and Chuy became Chewie — I started to recognize my cultural identity and began to wonder, where are the people who look like me?
When I couldn’t find them in front of the camera, I started to pay attention to the credits. Surely there must be a few Gonzalezes in California, or at least an Avila or two? It turned out they were also missing. I finally just settled for having a connection with movie directors whose surnames my parents could pronounce without difficulty: Coppola, Lucas, De Palma, Espielberg.
I made my peace with it, I thought, but I still remember the thrill I got when watching 1995’s “Desperado” on the big screen, starring Antonio Banderas and Salma Hayek. Here was a popcorn movie, a Western (an American genre if ever there was one) and it was all just so casually … full of brown people. Had we finally arrived?
Nope. But still I kept looking.
TV is doing much better, especially with the arrival of streaming services, but I am an inveterate film lover. My idea of a great day is to spend most of it in the dark. And besides, movies are America writ large. They are how we see ourselves and how we want the rest of the world to see us. So, what does it say that over the last decade, more than 70 percent of all the characters on screen have been non-Hispanic whites?
“This isn’t about an actor getting another role, a director getting another gig or a writer doing another script, this is about how we are perceived,” said Alex Nogales, who heads the National Hispanic Media Coalition. “There are so few examples that show who we are, what we are and how much we’re worth.”
His group led a protest Saturday in Los Angeles targeting the Academy Awards to bring attention to the under-representation of Latinos in the film industry. They want to do for Hispanics what the #OscarsSoWhite campaign of a few years ago did to highlight the lack of African-American nominees at the Oscars.
The group is looking for guarantees from studio heads that things will improve, and if they don’t get an answer, Nogales said, they are ready to boycott the worst offender among the six major studios.
“We’ve been nice Mexicans all of our lives and it hasn’t taken us anywhere close to where we need to be. It isn’t like we don’t have the justification,” he said. “The evidence is right there in front of them, so how are they going to explain their way out of this one?”
A Hollywood cliffhanger, my favorite.
Perhaps this representation drought has been the middle part of the trilogy, when things are at their worst. Maybe the next sequel will have a few more Latinos. And while we’re at it, how about having it be directed by a woman? Maybe one of the heroes has a disability? Perhaps his Asian-American husband is also a major character!
I know it won’t happen overnight, the development process is long and fraught (and the industry is overwhelmingly white and male), but I look forward to the day that when someone looks up at the screen and asks, “Where are the people that look like me?” The answer can be “everywhere.”
