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#FiercelyLatina And The Missing Afro-Latinas in Hollywood

On the weekend of October 15th, 2017, several Hollywood Latinas got together for brunch at Gina Rodriguez's house. The gathering was quickly celebrated online by multiple news outlets, for its beauty of Latina representation.
Take a look at the picture of the brunch on the right. Everyone looks so happy, right? This collective of powerful women in Hollywood, coming together to discuss their need for representation, how they must be seen and heard in the media, and how their portrayals affect the Latino families that watch them in movies, television shows, or hear their music. Brooklyn Nine-Nine actress Stephanie Beatriz is quoted in Buzzfeed for saying the following about the brunch:

Fiercely Latina. #LatinaPower □□□□

A post shared by Gina Rodriguez (@hereisgina) on

"I met some amazingly smart and funny women that day, and as we all talked, we collectively agreed that there’s so much power in supporting each other. Representation matters. All of us want to see all kinds of Latinas in more leading roles in television and film, as well as producing and directing. I think it might’ve been Rosario who suggested the hashtag “fiercely Latina”, and all of us loved it. I hope that other women who identify as Latina can rally around #fiercelyLatina as a way to describe themselves: a celebration of the rich span of cultures and colors that being a Latina can look like, and as a call to shine like the fierce, bright lights that they are."
-Stephanie Beatriz on #FiercelyLatina
This collective of #LatinaPower seems so strong and well grounded, which is something that I feel many Latinas need when coming into an industry that tells them their curves are too big or they need to get rid of their accent for a role. This community building is great for women to build trust, and for women who feel lost in a world where they're consistently shut out.
However, this picture isn't the full representation of Latinas - it's only the surface. From looking at this picture, I bet you're probably thinking that these are the designated skin tones of Latinas.
However, the pictured women's skin tones range in light shades, from fair skin to tan, which is not the complete spectrum of Latina skin. What's wrong and missing from this photo is the lack of Black/Afro-Latina presence in the room. From this photo alone, you wouldn't be able to distinguish that there are Latinas darker than what Gina Rodriguez likes to call, "caramel." After this photo surfaced, the diminishing visibility of Afro-Latinas was something that's been criticized, causing people to call out anti-Blackness in Latinx cultures.
So since I just gave you a little snippet of breaking down this image, let's do a little more of an in-depth analysis.
First off, to say that there are no Afro-Latinas in this #FiercelyLatina gathering would be wrong; there is only one self-identified Afro-Latina present in this photo: Sin City star, Rosario Dawson. She's curled up, in the right hand bottom of the photo, with half of her body missing in the whole picture. Call it the size of the photo or the cropping, but there's something to note of Stephanie Beatriz who is sitting to her left, and is taking up ample amount of space with her arms resting on a hunched up Dawson. You know, Beatriz, the actor I just quoted from Buzzfeed that said "representation matters"? The one that said that Rosario came up with the hashtag in the first place? Beatriz seems to be taking up so much space that the one Afro-Latina who came up with the brunch's signifying hashtag, can't even have all of her body represented in the photo.
But what's key here to note is how people read this image after it was posted. Once Gina Rodriguez posted this image on her Twitter account, she received a series of tweets replying to the lack of Black and dark-skinned Latinas. Rodriguez only addressed one tweet on this issue (seen on the right), but the conversation in her Twitter thread continued with statements like the following (seen below):
What we need to take into consideration are the Black women and young girls who are reading this media and the response statements made by the people creating this content. What is evident in these tweets is the term, "White passing," which refers to people with lighter/fair skin that can pass for being White/Caucasian. The reason that this is brought up is due to the fact that there are no dark-tone Latinas in this picture. Although Rosario Dawson is an Afro-Latina, her physical skin tone is also lying on the "caramel" spectrum. Beatriz said that she hopes "other women who identify as Latina can rally around #FiercelyLatina as a way to describe themselves: a celebration of the rich span of cultures and colors that being a Latina can look like," however this gathering alone is not the span of Latina colors.
It is also important to note Rodriguez's underlying tone in her statement. She is trying very hard to acknowledge that the Latinas pictured above, came together for that brunch because they really, truly, wanted to be amongst other women who sought that their representation mattered the most. The sentence "lots of women were invited and these were the ones that showed" gives off the idea that she invited Black Latinas to this brunch, but they didn't care to stop by, a statement I feel is hardly true. It wouldn't make sense that only ONE Afro-Latina would show up, when these women live in a town full of working Afro-Latinas! Where was Lupita Nyong'o, Lala Anthony, Christina Milian, Tatyana Ali, Tessa Thompson, Dasha Polanco, Amara la Negra, or Zoe Saldana? Much like one of the reply tweets above, I would love to know if the women I just listed did not join in this brunch for the sole purpose that they didn't see themselves aligning their experiences with Non-Black Latinas. 
Statements like these and the exclusion of Afro-Latinas makes me think back to Charlotte E. Jacobs' essay, "Developing the "Oppositional Gaze": Using Critical Media Pedagogy and Black Feminist Thought to Promotes Black Girls' Identity Development." In this essay, Jacobs argues the need to create communities with young Black girls for a foundation of "critical consciousness and positive racial and gender identity development" (225). She utilizes bell hooks' theory of the "oppositional gaze," where hook's theory notes how Black women and girls are always looked at as "the Other," and in order to resist this otherness, Black girls must turn the gaze that is cast upon them to a gaze that supports them. By arguing the development of Black girls' critical lens and analytic skills is tied to the media that they see. Jacobs explains that centering media that represents Black girls and is made by Black women, allows young Black girls to develop a positive identity. 
In this essay, Jacobs notes that presenting Black women and girls as "the Other" in media is regularly consumed, and portrayals of Black women's bodies as "ratchet women," "baby mamas," or "Black Barbies" does not reflect Black women in a positive light. Through this set of projected imagery, the media constructs Black women's bodies to be hypersexualized, overly emotional, and uneducated in comparison to positive role models that White girls in the media are often projected as. As a solution to this problem, Jacobs argues that through schools and educational resources, we can collectively form group literacy with Black girls, where they can "potentially transform into spaces where Black girls are given the tools to recognize, critique, and push back narratives that oppress and dominate Black girls and women, particularly those messages found in the media" (226).
Here, we can use this textual reading presented by Jacobs in two different facets of the #FiercelyLatina gathering and the conversation that started after the image was projected. In one way, Jacobs offers the community setting that #FiercelyLatina is built on - finding the space to discuss how your projected body and skin tone is not being presented in an accurate way. The women that participated in this brunch got together to discuss how their status as a Latinas aren't taken seriously in Hollywood, especially in comparison to White actresses. However, with the lack of Black/Afro-Latinas present at this brunch was simply not the accurate depiction of ALL Latinas. In doing so, Black women and Afro-Latinas created their own narrative in response to the photo, and took matters into their own hands by creating their own online community. By vocalizing how the lack of Black women present is damaging to creating an all-inclusive space, Afro-Latinas were able to take up space and create the media narrative that Jacobs mentions is lacking. These women who responded to the picture sought out their own "oppositional gaze," and were able to share similar responses that other Afro-Latinas may feel, but were too scared to voice. The responses turned otherness into an act of resistance.
Works Cited
  1. “Fiercely Latina. #LatinaPower”: https://www.instagram.com/p/BaSSTWRA2cs/?hl=en&taken-by=hereisgina
  2. “Gina Rodriguez And America Ferrera Hosted A Latina Power Lunch And We’re Mad We Didn’t Get Invited” : http://www.latina.com/entertainment/buzz/latina-power-lunch-gina-rodriguez-america-ferrera-eva-longoria
  3. “A Bunch of Badass Latinas In Hollywood Got Together And It Warmed My Cold, Dead Heart”: https://www.buzzfeed.com/pablovaldivia/icons-helping-icons?utm_term=.mvPm6MDVMn#.ui9wDrOPrY
  4. “Gina Rodriguez Talks #InnerStyle: ‘It Took Me So Long to Be Comfortable With the Woman I Am”’: http://www.instyle.com/news/gina-rodriguez-talks-being-late-bloomer
  5. “Gina Rodriguez Posted A Photo About Latina Power, But Twitter Isn’t Cheering On Its Lack of Diversity”: https://fierce.wearemitu.com/things-that-matter/gina-rodriguez-latina-power-photo-race/
  6. “What the #FiercelyLatina Get-Together Got Right About Hollywood – And What Still Needs to Change”: https://hiplatina.com/fiercely-latina-diversity/
  7. Charlotte E. Jacobs. “Developing the ‘Oppositional Gaze’: Using Critical Media Pedagogy and Black Feminist Thought to Promote Black Girls’ Identity Development.” The Journal of Negro Education, vol. 85, no. 3, 2016, pp. 225–238.