On Monday night, the sitcom Modern Family, which traffics in some of the worst Latino stereotypes on television, won its fifth consecutive Emmy award for best comedy.
But minutes before that predictable showing, the show’s Latina superstar, Sofia Vergara, allowed herself to be put on display as a human trophy during chairman of the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences Bruce Rosenblum’s terribly boring speech (which touched on, of all things, diversity in the business). Vergara even let herself get spun around, like a pie in a display case, to cuchi cuchi in front of a large national audience. As a Latina, I was appalled, if not exactly surprised.
Vergara has made a career by embodying Latina stereotypes – so much that even Latina magazine (which usually supports Latinas in Hollywood without much criticism) created a slideshow of the harmful stereotypes she’s portrayed on screen. On Modern Family, her character – or should I say caricature – is far louder than any Latina I have ever met, comes from a narco upbringing and has an accent so thick you could cut it. Yes, she also plays a loving wife and doting mother whose character struggles with how fast her eldest son is growing – but even that ends up stretching the loving stereotype of Latino mothers into a mockery of our community’s strong sense of family.
As a comedian, there’s obviously an expectation that Vergara will play the part of the clown off screen as well as on. But doing so in a manner that paints the women of our community as little more than ditzy sexpots is another thing altogether. As my friend, Vivian Hurtado, founder of the Wise Latina Club, told the Miami Herald last year, “is this really the most profound option [our girls are] going to find?”
Vergara is not only better than that but, given her star power, she could literally afford not to put herself on display as no more than a pretty face.
We, however, cannot afford to allow the stereotypes portrayed by Vergara to be the what that people think of when they hear “Latina”. According to the Center on American Progress, Latinas hold only 7.4% of the degrees earned by women, though they constituted 16% of the female population in 2012 – but our graduation rates are growing faster than any other group of women. We represent 36% of all companies owned by minority women in America. We are even represented on the US supreme court: the “wise Latina” herself, Justice Sotomayor, appears willing to follow in Justice Ginsberg’s steps by responding to unjust decisions without holding her tongue. Now that is a Latina stereotype I can get behind.
But it’s not all good news. You can open the newspaper one day and read a story about Leticia Van de Putte of Texas or Lucy Flores of Nevada making strides in politics, then flip the page and read how we are terrible mothers for sending our unaccompanied children away from narco violence in Central America to the US. We are said to be deeply religious, and yet also “spicy mamas”. In the US, there is little room for the Latinas who both go to church on Sundays and have fulfilling sex lives – at least, not without being some kind of hypocrite.
Perhaps as a second-generation Latina, I am just a bad Latina: I don’t speak with an accent, my Spanish is horrible and, while my mom did spank me with a chancla, I never had a Quinceañera. But each time I see Vergara shimmy, giggling, in her stilettos, it makes me miss Ugly Betty, who allowed her family to be Latino without making fun of our traditions.
It’s really not unreasonable to think that a “celebration” speech about diversity on TV would feature positive depictions of diversity, rather than a Latina women spun around like a piece of meat on a vertical spit while a white man blathers on about expanded roles for minorities in Hollywood.
After more than a minute on that “pedestal”, Vergara – a former telenovela star turned Hollywood ceiling-breaker – stepped down and shouted: “OK, enough, enough – that’s why I stopped doing those kinds of shows!” She shouldn’t have stepped up on it in the first place.
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