Latinas have been in American movies since American movies existed. That fact tends to surprise the students who come to our conferences, because the history is rarely taught and the record was, for a long time, not kept with much care.
Myrtle Gonzalez, born in Los Angeles in 1891 to a Californio family, appeared in something in the region of seventy silent films before she died in the 1918 influenza pandemic at twenty-seven. She is often described as the first Latina star of American cinema. A few years later Beatriz Michelena was being promoted as one of the most prominent leading women on the West Coast. Neither name is widely known today, which tells you less about their careers than about who was trusted to write film history afterwards.
By the late 1920s and 1930s, Dolores del Río was one of the most photographed women in Hollywood, and Lupe Vélez was a genuine box-office draw. Both were also boxed in. Del Río was cast as a succession of exotic foreigners — Polynesian, Spanish, Russian — rarely as an American woman, and eventually returned to Mexico, where she became one of the defining figures of that country’s Golden Age of cinema. Vélez was marketed under a nickname built around her temper. The industry had room for Latinas; it had far less room for them to be ordinary.
The most quietly revealing story of the period belongs to Margarita Carmen Cansino. Under contract, she was remade: a new name, Rita Hayworth, and a course of electrolysis to raise her hairline and narrow her face. She became one of the biggest stars in the world. The transformation is usually retold as glamour. It is also a fairly precise description of what the studio system considered marketable, and what it did not.
There is a parallel history most people never encounter at all. In the early 1930s, before dubbing became standard, Hollywood studios shot Spanish-language versions of their own films — frequently at night, on the same sets, with entirely different casts. Universal’s Spanish Drácula of 1931, starring Lupita Tovar, was made this way, and a number of critics have argued it is the more visually assured of the two. An entire body of Spanish-language work was produced inside the studio system and then largely forgotten, because it was made for an audience the industry treated as secondary.
The doors that did open
Katy Jurado was nominated for an Academy Award for Broken Lance in the mid-1950s, generally recognised as the first nomination for a Latin American actress, having already won a Golden Globe for High Noon. Then in 1962, Rita Moreno won the Oscar for Best Supporting Actress for West Side Story.
What happened next is the part worth sitting with. Moreno has spoken often about the years that followed — how the offers that arrived after winning an Academy Award were largely more of the same accented supporting roles she had just proved she could transcend, and how she turned to theatre and television instead. She went on to become one of the very few performers to win an Oscar, an Emmy, a Grammy and a Tony. But the lesson of the early 1960s was that a single breakthrough does not, by itself, change an industry’s habits.
Progress since has been real and uneven. Salma Hayek spent years trying to get Frida made and was nominated for Best Actress for it. America Ferrera won an Emmy for Ugly Betty, the first Latina to take that lead comedy award. Meanwhile study after study of speaking roles and directing credits has found Latino representation on screen running far below the share of the population — and Latina representation lower still.
Why we started HerStories
We began Latinas In Hollywood: HerStories in 2015 with a narrow, practical aim: get young Latinas into the buildings where this work happens, early enough that a career in media reads as an option rather than a fantasy.
The format has barely changed. Students come into rooms they would not otherwise enter — L.A. City Hall’s Tom Bradley Tower, CBS Studios, YouTube Space L.A., 72andSunny, Sony Pictures Entertainment, and Google, which has hosted us eleven times. Working professionals talk honestly about how they got in, including the parts that are not flattering. Then the students stand up and tell their own stories aloud.
That last element is the one people underestimate. A young woman who can hold a room while telling her own story has already learned the central skill of this business. The camera, the edit, the budget — those are craft layered on top of it.
Ten years in, the pattern is consistent. Access does more than advice. Specifics do more than encouragement: what a production assistant actually does, what it pays, who does the hiring. And a panel that looks like the students in the seats communicates something no speech accomplishes.
Myrtle Gonzalez has no star on Hollywood Boulevard. Most people reading this had not heard her name before today. The point of the work is not nostalgia — it is that the next generation should not have to be rediscovered a century from now, because this time somebody kept the record and held the door.