John Leguizamo's Open Letter to Hollywood

Yahoo News ^ | Tue, November 1, 2022 | John Leguizamo

[nickcarraway]

You can be as talented as Marlon Brando or Ingrid Bergman, you can write like William Shakespeare or Arthur Miller, you can have the screen presence of Ryan Gosling or Jennifer Lawrence. But if you look Latino, or if you have a Latino last name, the odds are against you in Hollywood.

And by Latino, I mean born in Latin America. Not Spain, nor anywhere else in Europe. Those are white peoples. We Latinos are 19% of the population and the largest ethnic group in America, and we’ve been here long before the conquests of the 1500s. How are we not more visible onscreen and onstage? If much of the United States was Mexico until the 1840s or later, how are we not more visible?

Mexicans in East L.A. would sign up to be extras in westerns at the "casting tree" from 1910 until the 1930s. They were put in the background of a genre of film that was an appropriation of Mexican culture. The words were all Spanish: “Cowboy” comes from the Spanish word vaquero. Lassos, rodeos, broncos, corrals, ranches, the chaps, the hats are all parts of Mexican culture. The 10-gallon hat comes from the Spanish phrase tan galan. No cowboy hats were being worn in England, Ireland, Germany or the 13 colonies. But they were worn in Mexico. And yet, who were the leads in the westerns?

[antceecee]

Love them all.