Illustration by CONNECTAS, used with permission.
This article by Leonardo Oliva was originally published in CONNECTAS and is republished in Global Voices under a media agreement.
The scene has gone viral on social media: Selena Gomez confusingly shouts words in Spanish and then sings in the same language. It's from “Emilia Pérez” and is part of the scandal surrounding the film with the most nominations (13) for the Academy Awards on March 3. It won two awards.
Despite her name, Gomez is from the US and doesn't speak a word of Spanish. Her forced accent in the film has garnered all sorts of criticism in Latin America. As did the entire French production, filmed in Europe, starring a Spanish trans actress, and set in… Mexico.
@soceleb Selena Gomez in Emilia Pérez. #selenagomez #emiliaperez #fyp #popculture #celebrity #hollywood #foryoupage ♬ suono originale – soceleb
“Emilia Pérez” was nominated for Best Picture and Best Director. It also vied for Best Foreign Film from France (despite not a single word of French being spoken).
For Ximena Méndez Mihura, an academic from the Latin American Faculty of Social Sciences (Flacso), who specializes in studying how Hollywood portrays Latin America, this film follows tradition. She says that in this industry, “Latinos are mostly characterized as subhuman natives, and women as beautiful beings associated with heterosexual courtship.” Regarding settings and countries, “Mexico is particularly associated with Indigenous villages and, in recent years, drug trafficking.” Cuba, on the other hand, “is a factory of the left.” And for Colombia “the spotlight is on danger.”
Regarding the Colombian case, just look at one of Netflix's latest releases, the series “Bogotá,” which isn't European or from the United States, but Korean, repeats the clichés. The main stereotype is the yellow filter with which it's filmed, the same one we find in dozens of other productions that try to show the unsuspecting (global north) viewer that we are in a Latin American country. In this yellowish cocktail, there's plenty of dust, desert, and poverty, along with stereotypical roles: voluptuous and sexy women, drug-dealing and seductive men. The women and men are usually expert dancers. And they all live in exotic places located beyond the (supposed) border between civilization and barbarism.
Under these premises, Hollywood has had no hesitation in casting Al Pacino as a Cuban drug lord in “Scarface,” Madonna as Argentina’s first lady in “Evita,” or Antonio Banderas as a Chilean leftist in “The House of the Spirits.” These are the direct antecedents of “Emilia Pérez,” although back then (in the 1980s and 1990s), there were no social media platforms to amplify the murmurs of indignation they may have sparked.
The following YouTube video shows some of the most recurring Latin American stereotypes in Hollywood.
Argentinean scholar Méndez Mihura did not dislike Audiard's film. She says that it has traces of the theater of the absurd addressing current themes, such as “new identities, female empowerment, and the issue of security and drug trafficking.” But she acknowledges that “if you don't take it as a film of the genre of the absurd, it can really generate some sensitivity among the Mexican people. Because, since the origins of cinema, Mexico has been telling the United States that it was not going to release films that spoke ill of its people. Thus, Hollywood had to change many things in order to be able to release its films in Mexico.”
For his part, Mexican screenwriter and filmmaker Guillermo Rivera (also a journalist and member of CONNECTAS Hub) points out that “Emilia Pérez” is “the vision of a European person, a white man from a certain part of the world, who sees all of Latin America as one color and one flavor.” It's an outlook “that others share: everything is sepia. Hollywood has always portrayed Mexico this way.”
Nicaraguan film critic Juan Carlos Ampié agrees with Rivera's point of view. Ampié lives in the United States, where the specialist press has received the film “Emilia Pérez” very well. For him, the film “is a manifestation of the insularity of film culture in the United States and Europe. We see everything they produce, but they don't see everything we do. We don't produce a similar volume either, and distribution channels are practically closed to our filmmakers.”
Ampié calls attention to the fact that the film features “many creative decisions that are more informed by ignorance than by a genuine interest in connecting with Latin culture.” He also points to the lyrics of the songs, saying “I wouldn't be surprised if they had used Google Translator to translate them.” On the other hand, he explains that the film owes its success to the fact that the most watched Mexican fiction in the United States “are narco dramas and telenovelas, the very genres that ‘Emilia Pérez’ traffics in.”
Cinema in the Trump era
One of the most active organizations working to overcome Hollywood's tendency to stereotype Latinos is the National Hispanic Media Coalition (NHMC). Last year, they launched a handbook to guide entertainment industry decision-makers in telling stories about Latin Americans.
NHMC states that in the United States “the media landscape is dominated by non-Latino white creators, executives and actors, who create a big, wide world that shows Latin American communities and identities on the screen.” These productions often portray Latinos as gang members, drug dealers or criminals, in roles with little or no dialogue, or as subservient characters with stereotypical accents that contrast with white-skinned saviors.
A recent study by the University of California's Annenberg Inclusion Initiative found that in the last two decades only 75 Latino artists have starred or co-starred in films, despite the fact that 49 percent of the population of Los Angeles is Hispanic. In those productions, only 5.5 percent of the characters are of Latino origin.
Behind the scenes, the statistics are just as bad. Of the 1,600 films reviewed, Latino directors only made 4 percent. And there was only one woman among them.
“Latinos, underrepresented in Hollywood. Prevalence of Latino/Hispanic characters in the 1600 most popular films from 2007 to 2022.” Graph made by CONNECTAS with data from Dr. Stacy L. Smith and the Annenberg Inclusion Initiative, used with permission.
As for stereotypes, 25 percent of the Spanish-speaking characters were criminals and 17 percent were poor or low-income. No one should be surprised, then, that the director of “Emilia Perez” himself said, in an attempt to defend his film, that Spanish is “the language of the poor.”
The great paradox is that “Emilia Perez” could become the film with which Hollywood's most liberal wing responds to the new era of Donald Trump. One or several Oscars given to the story of a transgender, Mexican drug trafficker: these are three identities that Trump has decided to explicitly combat with his policies.
For Méndez Mihura, in cinema, the dangerousness of Latin Americans has shifted to drug trafficking and the fight against it.
En las películas de acción de los últimos tiempos, la colonización sigue presente, pero mientras antes la dirección de colonización era de Este a Oeste (el western clásico), ahora es desde el Norte hacia el Sur (del continente). Es decir, la epopeya no ha terminado aún. Las películas de aventuras, aun cuando no pertenecen al género del western, toman algunos de sus elementos para mostrar esto. Es decir, hay territorios salvajes por civilizar y nuevas especies por educar.
In recent action movies, the theme of colonization is still present, but while before colonization was from East to West (the classic western), now it is from North to South (of the continent). In other words, the saga is not over yet. Adventure films, even when they do not belong to the western genre, take some of its elements to show this. That is, there are wild territories to be civilized and new species to educate.
As if reality imitated fiction, now Trump wants to create his own western by expelling the “savages” (migrants) beyond the border. To that exotic, yellowish and dusty place where a trans drug trafficker lives (Mexican, Dominican, Spanish, it doesn't matter) who sings her song of redemption.