Hispanic Fanatic

As I am fond of mentioning, I live in beautiful Southern California, where I frequently soak up the sun, hike in the hills, hit the beach, and hobnob with celebrities.

Well, in truth, I have rarely hobnobbed in general, and even fewer times with anyone who could remotely be called a celebrity. But we LA residents do see A-listers out and about on occasion.

Very few of those stars are Hispanic, as I’ve pointed out before. But now we have statistical evidence that Latinos are not getting their shot at the silver screen.

A new study shows that over the last six years, there has been “no meaningful difference in the representation of characters from underrepresented backgrounds.”

Since 2008, the number of Hispanics onscreen rose from 3.3 percent to 4.9 percent. Latinos are about 17% of the American population, so Hispanic representation in film would have to triple to even be close to reflecting reality.

In fact, another study found that there are actually “fewer Latino lead actors in the entertainment industry today than there were seventy years ago.” Ouch…

Now is a good time to point out that Hispanics (including me) are avid fans of the cinema. In fact, Latinos bought more than one-quarter of the tickets to movies last year. And we don’t even want to get into how much we support certain genres (e.g., horror movies) more than most people.

But there was one positive note in the report. Surprisingly, Hispanic females were more likely to be featured in popular films than were white females or Asian females.

Still, even that comes with a caveat. You see, “Hispanic females were also more likely to be shown either partially or totally nude onscreen than any other race [and] seem to be more hypersexualized than their female counterparts from other groups.”

Yes, when it comes to American movies, Latinas are both underrepresented and underdressed.

Of course, the idea that the entertainment industry would objectify a Latina is ludicrous.

Yup, just plain crazy.

Think about the many times a celebrity has been caught muttering — or in some cases, shouting — racist comments.

Or ponder how often somebody in the public eye has issued a bigoted tweet or did something else that made his or her fans say, “Give them a break. They didn’t mean it. They’re not really prejudiced.”

The list of excuses always the following accusation: People who object to such behavior are hypocrites because, after all, “everybody has used those words.”

But is this even remotely true?

To continue reading this post, please click here.

For as long as I’ve been writing about Latino culture, I’ve referred to us as the nation’s fastest growing minority. It’s a handy little phrase when one doesn’t want to use the more cumbersome descriptor for Hispanics, which is “sexiest people on the face of the planet.”

Well, you can imagine my surprise — nay, my disappointment — when I ran into this item online:

“Contrary to perception in some parts, Hispanics were not the fastest-growing race or ethnic group in the US last year.”

What? This is madness! We’ve been number one for so long that it is our collective birthright. So who are these usurpers to the throne?

It turns out that Asians are now the nation’s fastest-growing race or ethnic group. Their population rose by almost 2.9 percent to 19.4 million, an increase of about 554,000.

Of course, Hispanics still are the second-largest ethnic group in the United States, making up 17.1 percent of the total population. And we grew at a very respectable rate of 2.1 percent, to more than 54 million.

But somehow, this comes as small consolation.

What’s most intriguing about these numbers is that “more than 60 percent of this growth in the Asian population came from international migration.”

In contrast, Latino population growth “was fueled primarily by natural increase (births minus deaths), which accounted for 76 percent of Hispanic population change.”

In essence, Latino immigration is way down, no matter what you’ve heard. So the immigrants who do get in are more likely than before to be Asian.

So congratulations to our Asian brothers and sisters. If you keep growing at this pace, it won’t be long before you have your own equivalent of the Puerto Rican Day Parade in NYC, when you turn the nation’s largest city into a swirling party that engulfs everyone nearby whether they want to be part of it or not.

It’s something to shoot for.

Congratulations to Electric Siesta, who won the contest to see Halley, a new Mexican zombie movie.

We hope to receive a review from Electric Siesta about how much he liked the movie. That is, assuming that a zombie doesn’t bite a chunk of his flesh off, thereby turning him into one of the undead and sending him lumbering across the countryside in search of fresh victims.

That would really suck.

Like many Hispanics, I love horror movies. Zombies, in particular, are perennially cool in my book. So I’m especially pleased that this site’s latest contest combines zombies with the future of filmmaking.

I’m talking about Halley, a Mexican zombie movie currently available on Vimeo On Demand. Check out the film here.

The film turns the classic zombie film into a hauntingly surreal reflection on alienation and loneliness. Halley follows the main character’s surrender to his body’s decomposition, as he withdraws from the world of the living.

I will provide the winner of the Halley contest with a free screening access code. To be entered into the drawing, all you have to do is comment on one of my posts (including this one) about anything you please.

If you win, I’ll email you the code. By the way, I won’t make your contact info public, so don’t worry about that.

I’ll announce the contest winner in the next week or so.

Until then, remember one key point:

Always aim for the head…