Hispanic individuals are already underrepresented in film, according to an August 2019 report from the University of Southern California: Just 3 percent of the 100 top-grossing films each year from 2007 to 2018 starred Latino actors as the lead or co-lead. Of the roughly one-quarter of all Latino characters shown breaking the law on film from these top-grossing movies, 61.9 percent were part of an organized crime collective, such as drug dealers or a gang.
Involving members of the community early on in the production process could remedy this in the future, said Ben Lopez, executive director of the National Association of Latino Independent Producers.
“At the level where concepts are actually being bought and developed, we can recommend writers, directors, and producers that are vetted, that have experience, that can actually be the next generation’s Spielberg or Scorsese,” Lopez said. “Those folks are not 20 years into the future. They're here already.”
Minority writers accounted for less than 11 percent of the credited writers on 41.3 percent of digital scripted shows in 2018-19 television season, according to UCLA’s Hollywood Diversity Report focused on television.
“What's missing for the Latinx audience is that they don't have a character that they can identify with on screen,” said Ramón, referencing the gender-neutral term.
That’s a missed opportunity for the film industry: Hispanic Americans make up 21 percent of U.S. moviegoers and account for 25 percent of U.S. movie tickets sold, despite making up just 18.5 percent of the U.S. population, according to figures from the Motion Picture Association’s 2020 THEME Report and the U.S. Census.
In recent years, films and television shows with Hispanic or Latin-American protagonists have pushed back against these stereotypes. Netflix Inc.’s rebooted version of “One Day at a Time” found a passionate following that launched a social media campaign to protest the show’s cancellation in 2019. (It was later picked up by ViacomCBS Inc.’s Pop network.) Disney+ also made a splash with its Cuban-American protagonist in “Diary of a Future President.”
But, according to Ramón, the fragmented nature of modern viewing has made it hard for these programs to grab the attention of mainstream audiences.
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