Latinx Representation in Media and Film
Courtesy: Los Angeles Times
By Augusto Rivero (MA ’23)Despite the Latinx community’s estimated spending power of $1.4 trillion, their underrepresentation, misrepresentation, and appropriation is prevalent in film and television—from narco criminals to servants and overly sexualized Latinx women, to Ben Affleck's appropriation of Tony Mendez in Argo and Jack Black's stereotypical portrayal of a Mexican Luchador in Nacho Libre (both in Brown face). The long and arduous road to reclaiming the Latinx image requires changing the entertainment industry’s policies and representation.
Congressman Joaquin Castro, the chairman of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, has taken the lead. In an open letter to Hollywood published in Variety, Joaquin explains, “it’s clear that many Americans have a fundamental misunderstanding of who Latinos are.” He explains further, “the image of our community created by film and television has done little to counter bigoted views, and too often has amplified them.”
The origin of that distorted image predates film and television. As Ibram X. Kendi (2016) inscribed in Stamped from the Beginning, “blackface minstrelsy became the first American theatrical form, the incubator of the American entertainment industry” through 1920, when minstrel shows gave rise to racist films (p. 171). In parallel, the first known on-screen appropriation and portrayal of a Mexican migrant in brownface was by actor Wilfred Van Norman Lucas in the role of José in the infamous 1908 film “The Greaser’s Gauntlet,” directed by D.W. Griffith. The depiction of José through a xenophobic and nativist lens as a dangerous, drunkard, roamer immigrant deserving of punishment became the epitome of on-screen racial hierarchy—consequently having a damaging impact on the industry and rigging the policymaking set.
These depictions of xenophobic inferiority were also influenced by California's Anti Vagrancy Act of 1855, ordering that any Brown person who looks suspicious or dangerous, “commonly known as greasers,” should be stopped, questioned, prosecuted, convicted, jailed, and sentenced to hard labor. Half a century later, D.W. Griffith, a heavyweight influencer of filmmaking policies of that era who directed “The Birth of a Nation” in 1915, perpetuated a legacy of racial prejudice still in practice in front of and behind the screen today.
It is not surprising, after all, that Hollywood and its avid film consumers became converts—consciously or unconsciously—of the racist idea that nonwhites pose a threat, buying into a dehumanizing belief in xenophobia, exceptionalism, and manifest destiny reflected in cinema’s woeful underrepresentation of the BIPOC community. No wonder Chris Rock asks in his Hollywood Reporter essay, “is Hollywood Mexican enough?...You’re telling me no Mexicans are qualified to do anything at a studio? Really? Nothing but mop up?”
Following Juaquin Castro’s lead, we should not merely stop at reclaiming the Latinx image and space; alongside new stories with representative cast, we can dismantle racist ideas by creating new policies that govern the entirety of a production—from contracts to back-of-the-house and behind-the-screen support, from coordinators to talent. Only then, through a holistic and antiracist lens, will we truly have the power to transform the narrative and flip the script.