Real Stories

After writing Real Women Have Curves and winning several awards, I was certain my career was going to go places. Since then, I have been working on over ten screenplays and nine TV pilots about the Latino experience, none of which have been produced. When I started writing, I hadn't realized that committing to write about the Latino experience was like taking a vow of poverty!

The biggest myth about Latinos is that we are all recently arrived immigrants and that we are foreigners. Some of us just got here, but others of us have been here since before this was the US. My writing is an attempt to show the contributions of Latinos and the diverse spectrum of Latino experience in the US. My most recent theatrical works demonstrate this: Detained in the Desert, written in protest of SB1070, is about a third generation Latino who doesn't speak Spanish but gets racially profiled and deported. My other work, Trio Los Machos, is about the lifelong friendship of a guitar trio who met during the Bracero Program who must find their documents to prove they were Braceros and get their measly compensation that will help them get a nurse for their homebound sick compadre.

Twenty years and only one pinche movie made, the humanitarian and activist in me refuses to give up. Movies are not just entertainment; they hypnotize people into believing that what they see on the screen is real. If Latinos are constantly the bad guys, servants, or "Latin Lovers," it robs us of our humanity in the eyes of those watching these stereotypical representations. Films have the positive power to inspire and transform people, but they also have the ability to make little children believe that there is something wrong with them because they are not the right color and little girls to believe they are not the right size and should do whatever it takes to be thin and beautiful "so you can be loved," as the song goes.

How could it be possible that we are the "majority minority" in this country and yet we are invisible on TV and film?

A few months ago, I was finally convinced that my Latina detective movie was going to get made. The premise was that she's undocumented and because of that "invisible," and she could get to places that a white guy could not penetrate, and she becomes an accidental detective. My protagonist was highly intelligent and educated by a priest and even knew Latin; just because she was undocumented didn't mean she was dumb. In spite of this, the actress I hoped to attach to the script—a necessity to get a green light from a Hollywood studio—said, through her manager, that she could not see herself playing an "undocumented" and "uneducated" person. She, like too many others, equated undocumented with being uneducated. Undocumented for thirteen years, I was offended and even disgusted by that suggestion.

This was not the first time I had been told something this insulting. Not long ago, I read a letter of complaint by Carmen Finestra in the Writers Guild Magazine Written By. Finestra, known for creating the sitcom Home Improvement, has achieved most of his success in television by writing about white men and their masculinity. He was complaining that Nora Ephron, a successful film director, was complaining about "Old White Men." The reason minorities and women don't get produced, he wrote, is because he, an old white male, just works harder. He didn't understand what the big deal was about Sonia Sotomayor becoming a Supreme Court Justice. He'd had it tough, too.

I wrote a letter to Written By that was published, which basically said this: "It's too bad that wisdom doesn't come automatically with being an old white male."

It's also too bad that Finestra and others like him need to be reminded that the rest of us, who unfortunately are not old white males, have to work three times harder than him just to get our foot in the door, because we are constantly told, indirectly and sometimes even...