A lot of young Latino actors have said to me, ‘Why can’t we get an Oscar? Why can’t we be nominated?’ And the terrible truth is that if you don’t get the right parts, you’re not going to be. Are you going to get an Oscar nomination for one of those Judd Apatow movies? Not likely, no matter what nationality you are.
I remember watching ‘Sesame Street’ as a kid and loving that there were Latino characters on there.
When I first arrived in Los Angeles from New York in 2004 to try to break into television, I couldn’t believe how segregated it was – how many neighborhoods were nearly all-white or all-black or -Asian or -Latino.
The ‘Perez’ in me was the outsider, the Latino guy, the homosexual, the person who stuck out, and the ‘Hilton’ referred to Hollywood, the mainstream.
If you look at history, at the first time hip-hop was invented, there was a Latino right there. How they got erased, I don’t know how that all came about.
What ‘March’ is saying is that it doesn’t matter whether we are black or white, Latino or Asian. It doesn’t matter whether we are straight or gay.
I’m finding that I’m working with more and more Latino artists, and that’s exciting.
And my point was one I think that you’d agree with, which is there’s no room in America for a black racist, a Latino racist, or a white racist, or an Asian racist, or a Native American racist. Now, we’re either color blind or we’re not color blind.
A lot of the reason the Universal version of ‘Heights’ went away is that they were afraid they didn’t have a big enough Latino star to bankroll this movie. The people I dealt with at the studio who wanted to make this movie were very passionate about it.
I’ve done movies for certain reasons; I did ‘Anaconda’ because the black man lives. Simple. The black man isn’t dead in the first three pages, like Jurassic Park. It’s like, ‘The black man kills the snake with a Latino girl? Damn! I got to do this.’
I’m passionate about mobilizing young Latinos to get to the polls, so I’m involved with Voto Latino. Latinos are a vital but underrepresented force in this country.
Hopefully, in not a too distant future, we will see a Latino president, and who knows how’s that going to happen. It’s just a matter of time.
Despite all the evidence that Hispanics are not single-issue voters, Republican candidates are told that if they say harsh things about sanctuary cities, American jobs lost to illegal labor, or scandalous border security, Latino voters will punish them by voting Democrat.
I always wanted to be the first true Latino to break the American barrier, to be on the American charts.
I’m delighted to carry on in the tradition of the great reporters like Edward R. Murrow, Ernie Pyle, and Geraldo Rivera to probe vitally important issues of the day, starting with whether I’m Hispanic or Latino.
Latino people have come up to me and said they were motivated to become a lawyer because they saw me play one on TV – and you can’t discount how great it is when they tell me I was the first.
The reality is that diversity as an overall subject has to continue to be addressed onscreen. That goes beyond having a gay superhero. There should be a black superhero, a Latino superhero and, while we’re at it, we still aren’t seeing nearly enough women behind the scenes and as the anchors of movies.
