ames Rodriguez was a freshman at New York University when the then-aspiring actor first learned that his Mexican-American heritage was going to be a problem for Hollywood. He had just nailed an audition for a big feature film, but the casting director was put off by the fact that his Caucasian-like skin tone was out of sync with his last name. So he was offered the chance to read for the role of a gang member, only to be told that he wasn’t right for that, either. “I didn’t look Latino enough,” he recalls. “They basically didn’t know what to...