A Roadmap to Increasing Latinx Representation in Media
Still from De lo Mio. Courtesy of Rathaus
“[Film is] the only art form that is included in the architecture of shopping malls. Many main streets of [small] towns don't have sculpture galleries or poetry salons — it's the moving image, which is this art form that nearly everybody engages with,” Alex Rivera told me over Zoom one afternoon. Rivera is the filmmaker behind Sleep Dealer and The Infiltrators, and he and partner Cristina Ibarra are building a lab for mid-career Latinx filmmakers at Arizona State University’s The Sidney Poitier New American Film School. We spoke ahead of The Latinx Project’s November 1, 2023 panel, “Beyond Latinx Erasure in Hollywood” with Dr. Ana-Christina Ramón and filmmaker Diana Peralta.
“In terms of the people who are adversaries of our community, people who want to build prisons, who want to build border walls, people who want to keep us out of spaces of education, those types of forces invest very, very heavily in messaging through media. We see it in the news and in the political culture of our country. Those forces are winning right now,” Rivera said.
It’s an ever-present trend — Hollywood rarely represents the Latinx community and when it does, it too often reduces us to stereotypes, to others’ interpretations of what it means to be Latinx. Dr. Ana-Christina Ramón, Director of the Entertainment and Media Research Initiative at UCLA, has the numbers to prove it. Since 2014, she’s been publishing The Hollywood Diversity Report. During the panel, she declared, “The Latinx community is the most underrepresented in terms of those key roles in front of the camera, amongst leads, amongst main cast roles, and amongst directors and writers.”
Along with coauthor and longtime collaborator Dr. Darnell Hunt, she found Latinxs make up “only 2.3% of leads amongst the top theatrical releases at the global box office. And then amongst main cast roles, it was 5.5%; directors, 1.1%; and writers, 1.1%.” According to the U.S. Census, Latinxs make up just shy of 20% of the country’s population. In Los Angeles, the epicenter of the Hollywood machine, Latinxs make up around half the population, which is to say, the disparity is large.
Share of streaming film leads by race/ethnicity in 2022. Courtesy of UCLA’s Hollywood Diversity Report
If that wasn’t bad enough, Ramón is ready to caution about the bright spots. She noted, “Amongst the streaming, original films, there is a bit of improvement, but it's still very low. So it's only 6.1% for Latinx leads and then 6.6% of main cast roles are Latinx, 5% directors, 4% writers.” Streaming may be more diverse for all groups of color, but Ramón sees a “two-tier” system where white creators get the big budgets and career-making opportunities of theatrical releases while creators of color get stuck in the streaming sphere, where the budgets and opportunities to make a big impact are much lower.
Acclaimed, up-and-coming filmmaker Diana Peralta is struggling to carve a space for herself at the top of that system. Her first film, De Lo Mio, is about two sisters who return home to the Dominican Republic to pack up their late father’s house with their estranged brother. She made it on a shoestring budget, outside the Hollywood machine. It debuted at BAMcinemaFest, and HBO later distributed it. Now it is available via the Criterion Collection, giving her the most prestigious success story possible for a first-time, indie writer/director.
Still, as she shared over Zoom, “I've had so many people tell me my first feature needed to be a short. And those all happened to be old white men who didn't get it. And I was like, ‘Oh, this is just not for you.’ Seeing how it resonated with not just Latinos, but also with my community, I was like, ‘You're wrong. And that's because you don't have any exposure to this culture and exposure to nontraditional Hollywood structure storytelling.’” Now she’s trying to get her second film made and running into that same roadblock — the people with the money do not understand or value Black, Latinx, and women's stories.
Breakdown of film critics by gender and race. Courtesy of USC Annenberg.
It’s a trend I see as a film and TV critic. I’m a regular contributor to Roger Ebert and Popsugar with additional bylines in publications like Vulture, Glamour, Refinery29, the now-defunct Latino Rebels, and more. I’m also the cofounder and editor-in-chief of LatinaMedia.Co, an indie publication uplifting Latina and femme Latinx perspectives in media. So my lived experience matches USC Annenberg’s Inclusion Initiative’s conclusion in its “Critics Choice?” report, which finds that white men write about two-thirds of movie reviews despite making up just 30% of the population. Way on the other side, women of color combined write 4% of reviews while making up around 20% of the population. That disparity has a clear and damaging message, telling viewers and artists alike that white guys define quality and set the cultural conversation. I shared as much during the panel, relating how criticism works as a third rail to the Hollywood ecosystem and one that is keeping our stories from being told and properly evaluated.
So that’s the problem — our society’s largest art form, the one we gather around to discuss and make meaning in our world, erases Latinx perspectives and experiences. This frustrates veteran filmmaker Rivera: “It's been 25 years literally going to organizing events around Latino invisibility in film and television. And the situation has gotten worse over that quarter century. Worse.” The result is a climate that largely ignores our needs and when it deigns to see us, characterizes our community as criminals or perpetual servants.
Thankfully, Latinxs are starting to move beyond raising awareness to finding and building solutions. That was the topic of our panel and my pre-event conversations with this impressive group of leaders. Read on to see how you can move the needle.
Use the Numbers to Explain Why Diversity Matters
There’s a reason Ramón has been compiling and publishing her reports for nearly a decade. Her team set out to make something “useful to the industry and to advocacy organizations for understanding what was going on in Hollywood.”
From talks with those groups, she learned that “the data wouldn't be helpful if we did not connect it to the bottom line.” So that is what they did. As Ramón recounted, “Diversity does sell… Increasingly diverse audiences want to see diversity on screen and want to see that reflected, not just of themselves, but of the world they experience on a daily basis.” Hollywood is leaving money on the table by not fostering and featuring more Latinx talent.
Ramón’s metrics can bolster our demands for better representation. Creatives can use them in their pitch decks, showing the hunger and market case for more Latinx content. Journalists and academics can use them in their writing, backing up assertions of underrepresentation and moving from there. And audience members can cite them on social media and with friends to prove that the erasure of Latinx communities isn’t a one-off but an ongoing trend.
Support Indie Latinx Filmmakers
Ramón’s reports focus on top box-office media and while we deserve representation in that space, it’s not the only one that exists. In fact, filmmaker Rivera said, “The hill I want to die on is Latino independent film. We're in the project of trying to figure out our community's voice. Who are we? What are the concerns we have? How do we stand up for ourselves in this medium? How do we reflect on our intimate lives and how those connect to social and political concerns? That's not going to be done by committees inside of corporations; it's going to be done by artists working that shit out on their own.”
He believes that by investing in Latino filmmakers, like Peralta, who have proven themselves with one big feature, we can disrupt the entire system. By giving those folks the opportunity to make second and third films, we would grow not only our artistic output but also our budding filmmakers’ trajectories, giving them the practice and support they need to further hone their artistry and rise through the ranks.
Rivera is doing exactly that, supported in part by the prestigious MacArthur “genius” grant. “I'm currently working on building a little island of nonprofit public support and investment in the Latinx cinematic space,” Rivera said. “[At The Sidney Poitier New American Film School], we've just started, but we should be in a position to give grants directly to mid-career Latinx filmmakers, at scale or beyond what anyone has ever done before. And sadly, that's a pretty low bar. Even despite these urgent numbers that we're talking about, there are really no funding streams committed to our community. And so we need to build them.”
For those of us without big money to contribute, there’s still plenty to do to support indie Latinx filmmakers beyond the obvious of just seeing the films. Rivera calls on academics to include these works in their curriculum, declaring, “If you're an American film school, you have to teach Latino films, it doesn't matter if you don't like them, you got to teach them. We're part of the country.” He notes that his Sleep Dealer is “more alive today” than it was upon its theatrical release thanks to its role in film schools.
Audience members should keep doing what they’re doing — showing up for experiments within the art form. Both Rivera and Peralta cited this year’s biggest film, Barbie, as a triumph of the indie scene, applauding Greta Gerwig’s rise through that system. “The idea to make a Barbie movie about patriarchy is a weird ass idea that could only come from the mind of an indie filmmaker,” Rivera said. He finds inspiration in the paths of “our Black allies and visionary directors like Ryan Coogler, Barry Jenkins, Ava DuVernay. [They are] bringing stories that resonate with history, politics, and real deep social concerns that also function as high art and high entertainment and that make money and that rock the national and international discourse. That's the space we need to be operating in.”
Don’t Wait for Permission
Filmmaker Peralta has a very clear sense of what creatives should do. “My first actionable thing that I can share with all of you who are trying to make your films is to create your own system: Find your [people who] will help make your film that first one that you are going to make with the resources you have,” Peralta said. She spoke from experience, sharing how she got her first feature, De Lo Mio made: “The thing that I leaned on a lot was to not wait for the permission from the system, that validation that I deserve to make that work. I just worked with what I had and made it the best I could. And in the result, it turned out beautifully.”
That’s a sentiment I can echo. More than five years ago, I cofounded LatinaMedia.Co with another Latina, Nicola Schulze. We met while working on gender representation in media and quickly noticed that Latinxs never seemed to make the priority list. At least part of that was because we weren’t loud enough — at the time, no one was working on increasing Latina and femme Latinx participation in criticism.
So Nicola and I decided that was where we could plug in: by using our backgrounds as writers, critics, editors, marketers, and organizers. Now LatinaMedia.Co is no longer an experiment but a thriving publication with more than 50 Latina and femme Latinx contributors who use our platform to grow their careers, engage our communities, and talk back to Hollywood. We did not wait for anyone’s permission and neither should you. Use your platform, your place in society, to build the thing that is missing. And remember to keep at it — we got our first funding for LatinaMedia.Co in year three. If we’d given up before that, we never would have reached where we are today. Persistence and instance just may be the only way we’ll ever get what we want done.
Work in Coalition and Across Fields
“This word ‘Latino’ can be so misleading for people outside of the community, because it's such a monolithic word — it does not cover the diversity within the community in itself. A Dominican is not the same thing as a Mexican is not the same thing as an Argentinian is not the same thing as a Peruvian,” Peralta said. “I don't feel represented as a director when white male Mexican directors get awards. While I'm still happy for the culture, that's not me, and I don't see myself represented in that. That doesn't mean that you've done diversity.”
The first step toward building a powerful, effective Latinx community is honoring our differences. We must refuse to negate them and instead build coalitions that actively center Black, Indigenous, femme, and queer Latinx voices. That’s the work at the community level we can all be involved in — from the words we use to the conversations we have with our friends and family members.
In Hollywood, we also need to take a multilayered approach. “If we only focus on front-of-camera representation, that's 1% of the story. We need it everywhere. And it's not, again, monolithic,” Peralta said, something both Ramón and Rivera echoed.
And the solutions won’t come from just inside the industry. Rivera cited Congressman Joaquin Castro’s work to tie tax incentives to inclusion in hiring. So, for example, in my home of New Mexico, which has the largest percentage of Latinx people and is aggressive about encouraging filming in the state, those incentives should tie to hiring people from our communities.
For her part, Ramón is calling on executives at the highest level to diversify. “It doesn't have to be only Latinx people, but it has to be people that understand the importance of the Latinx community,” she told me over Zoom, adding that it also needs to be more than one person so that they can speak out and have their voices heard. That’s a big task, but as Ramón said, “Change can start today.”
Indeed, as Rivera shared, “The opportunities are everywhere — we're in a moment to birth this thing that we need. All of us working together, creatives, executives, critics, audiences, everybody. We're in a crucial moment to decide if we're going to assert ourselves as a community in this art form or not.”
Use Your Power as an Audience Member
Regardless of profession, we all consume media and as such, we have power. “As a Latinx consumer, you are an investor in Hollywood,” Ramón said on the panel, repeating one of her favorite lines. Still, she cautioned against buying into the myth that Latinxs don’t show up for our own content. Her research shows that’s not true, even if there are some caveats.
“Latinos might not watch your TV show or movie if nobody knows about it. If it wasn't playing in enough theaters, then it's really not the fault of Latinos. It's just that how are you gonna go see a movie you’ve never heard of? Or if it's not playing in enough theaters and big, [densely populated] parts of the country that have the biggest Latino populations? You can't blame Latinos for when you underfund something,” Ramón told me. She also points out that Latinx audiences may reject something they see as stereotypical — we are tired of seeing ourselves portrayed only as criminals or agency-less servants.
“Hollywood has trained people to think that anything that is considered Latino or Latinx content, that that will equal something that's very stereotypical,” Ramón also shared. Employing her framework as a social psychologist, she noted how productions like Netflix’s Selena: The Series lead audience members to equate anything marketed as Latinx as having a low production value — a perceived pattern that may keep them away the next time.
To break it, we need new and different examples, and how we get that as audience members is to show up wisely and speak out on social media. Ramón reminded us that companies track the sentiment online and see when a product excites consumers. In addition, Latinx audience members are changing with the generations. While studios could previously count on us to go see whatever was showing, our younger folks are more discerning, demanding real and continued representation. As a community, we should follow their example, supporting meaningful art that pushes us to better understand ourselves and others.
If we do the work –– if we use Dr. Ramón’s numbers to push for more, if we support indie Latinx filmmakers like Peralta, if we make our own stuff, if we build in community, and if we use our power as audience members wisely –– we just may seize this particular moment and finally start to see Latinx representation grow across film and television. We could finally get, as Rivera describes it, “the space to reflect deeply on our lived experience as a community in this art form.” And when we do that, we will have done so much more than simply gotten a few of our stories told. We will have made the case for our political, artistic, and cultural power — to ourselves and to the broader U.S. population. What a world that would be.
Cristina Escobar is the cofounder and editor-in-chief of LatinaMedia.Co, a digital publication uplifting Latina and gender non-conforming Latinx perspectives in media. A member of the Critics Choice Association and the Latino Entertainment Journalists Association, she's a Rotten Tomatoes–approved critic who writes at the intersection of race, gender, and pop culture. Adding to her bylines in outlets like the A.V. Club, Glamour, NPR, Refinery29, Remezcla, TODAY, and Vulture, Cristina is also a regular contributor to Popsugar and Roger Ebert. She lives in Santa Fe with her husband, two kids, and rescue dog.