No Es Suficiente
Dani Fernandez
One of my favorite scenes in HBO’s Insecure happens in the very first episode. Issa, an African American twenty-nine-year-old woman, who teaches at an after-school youth program, is speaking before a class of students. At the end of her speech, a young girl raises her hand and asks, “Why do you sound white?”
I know how that goes.
People tell me I sound white. People say my father sounds white. I always figured that helped him close business deals on the phone. I would watch as my father slipped back into his Mexican accent around his family and then bounced over to sounding “white” around his business colleagues. Even when I was little, I understood the privilege that comes with sounding white. People trust you.
White people trust you.
But you know what you sound like when you’re a Mexican who sounds white? Pocho. You sound like you sold out.
I was reminded of this feeling when I was on a panel about Latinx superheroes at a comic convention, which is ironic because we never really had many Latinx superheroes in comics. At least not mainstream ones. Whenever someone asks me who my hero was growing up, I say Selena. She was my Wonder Woman. Who also showed me how good my boobs could look bedazzled.
Other than that, I mainly looked up to white superheroes. They were the standard for what a hero should act, be, and look like.
At this particular panel, a woman raised her hand and told the room she was spanked by her abuela when she and her siblings spoke Spanish in the house. English was the prize. Learning it was not optional. It was the one thing we needed to survive, to fit in. Not Spanish. At least not for my family, and not for hers either.
My father didn’t teach my brothers and me Spanish. If we wanted to learn, it was something we had to pursue on our own. That involved VHS tapes of a big green Snuffleupagus-lookin’ monster named Muzzy. If you haven’t learned Spanish from a dollar-store Super Mario villain, treat yourself.
Today, knowing Spanish is a plus. “Do you speak Spanish?” is a crucial question asked in auditions, on college applications, and in job interviews.
My father worked in marketing and advertising. I imagine that when you’re a Mexican man in the ’70s and ’80s trying to represent famous US brands, having a Spanish accent is not actually a plus. Remember, this was long before the days of the Budweiser Lime-A-Rita. So I doubt they thought brown businessmen knew white middle America the way they do. It was only as an adult that I understood this and why my father learned Spanish from his Mexican parents and we didn’t. The elders in my family often spoke Spanish when they didn’t want my cousins and me to know what they were talking about.
Throughout the house, I would often sing the songs my father played, without ever fully knowing what they meant.
Meanwhile, I excelled in English. If you ask my mother about what I was like as a child, she tells everyone the same thing, that “you could always catch her curled up with an apple and a good book!” I’m thirty and she still tells men I date this. Growing up, I was so obsessed with my English classes that I even took on my older brother’s assigned reading of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe and wrote part of his paper for him.
In elementary school, my class slowly started to learn Spanish, and given my last name, skin color, and heritage, everyone assumed I already knew.
I should have.
Why didn’t I?
My brothers and I went to a predominately white private Catholic school that my parents couldn’t afford but still felt compelled to send us to. That’s how important it was to them. I don’t know if that was their religious side or the need to appear successful, or both.
There were multiple years when my brothers and I shared a single bedroom. One of those years was in my tía Yolanda’s house, where my parents, my brothers and I, and my aunt and my uncle all lived together. Imagine being a young woman growing underarm and pubic hair being stuck in a room when your brothers are also growing underarm and pubic hair. We would take turns with who got to sleep in the real bed and who had to sleep on the blow-up mattress on the floor. If you were to get me drunk, I’d confess to you that I secretly cherished that time we had, living close together. Especially now that we all live in different cities and have partners and lives.
My brothers and I hated private school. I would come home almost every single day crying. There was a white girl in my class, Emily, who used to tease me for my last name.
“Fernandez? Your dad is my gardener.”
I remember I turned to her and said, “My dad works in advertising.”
School, specifically, made me hate so much of myself. I developed curves very early on while most of the girls were tiny, white, and blond. A boy in my middle school PE class convinced several other boys, including the one I had a crush on, to call me “Shrek.” That damn movie is still triggering to me to this day. I had a thick athletic build, full lips, and a lion’s mane of brown hair that my mother would sometimes spend an hour trying to detangle. My parents repeatedly told me that with my genes I would never be skinny. That all the women in my family had curves. I used to weep about it.
I’ll show you, I thought, as I developed an eating disorder. By the time I was sixteen, I was anorexic. Some days I would eat nothing but a single orange. I would cut it in sections and have a section for breakfast, a section for lunch, and so on. By seventeen, I was both anorexic and bulimic. If I ate, I threw it up. It would be years before I started dating men who liked my body the way it was and subscribed to the belief that “thicc thighs save lives.”
Because I went to school in predominately white areas, I never had my heritage questioned. I was clearly not white, and given the states I grew up in (California and Texas), everyone just assumed I was Mexican. In fact my ethnicity was always already bubbled in on my standardized tests, while other kids got to select what they identified as. This didn’t bother me; I just remember noticing it. Not until I moved to Los Angeles and started auditioning for roles did I hear from white agents that I wasn’t actually “Mexican enough.”
What? I thought. You’re telling me my brothers and I were teased for not being white enough and now we’re not Mexican enough?
Once, a casting director told me I wasn’t acting “Latina enough,” and I asked if he wanted me to do the lines in Spanish, and he said, “No, just act more Latina.” Which likely to him meant being loud and having an attitude and a quick temper. Which I certainly have, but not all Latinas have. Some are quiet and soft-spoken, and it doesn’t make them any less Latina. I know several of my African American friends have been told in auditions that they need to “black it up” or be “blacker,” as if this white casting director even knows what “being black” means.
The first year I did stand-up, I told jokes about all this stuff, about not being Mexican enough to white people. This set of jokes normally got a ton of laughs, mainly from white people. And when I was new in Hollywood, I thought, This is good. People are laughing! But they weren’t laughing with me. And I noticed sometimes when I would do this routine, some of the Latinx people in the audience weren’t laughing at all. I realized that was my fault. Because there are plenty of Mexican comics who can make fun of their families and childhood without it feeling like they are punching down. And yet it started to feel like that was exactly what this part of my routine was. I was young and insecure and needed to be accepted, and I felt my family was an easy target. I think I tried to justify this by the fact that I was teased for being Mexican in school, and I might as well use my Mexicanness to make people laugh! But it was the same people laughing each time: white people.
I stopped doing those jokes.
I remember being on another panel at a comic convention and a young Latina woman in the audience raised her hand and said she was working on a project and received feedback that one of her characters needed to be “more Mexican.” What does that mean? Should their skin color be a certain shade? Should they speak only Spanish? Is the extent of their mother’s medicine cabinet Vicks VapoRub? This is something that I and many of my colleagues have debated. What does it mean to be “more Mexican?” How can you group an entire people all together as the same? When a white person suggests something be “more Mexican” or “more Latino,” I often ask them to show me what they mean, ’cause odds are it’s stereotypical as hell. It’s what they think a Latinx person is.
I have noticed a certain thing going on with white writers in Hollywood. In an effort to capitalize on what casting directors and agents call “the diversity trend” (it’s not a trend, by the way…we are not temporary), television writers often make one or possibly two of their main characters people of color, without actually being connected to our communities. It’s one thing to select a few brown faces for a project. It’s another to have a project actually written by brown writers, meaning the brown faces are more than just wallpaper.
In a study done by the dean of social sciences at UCLA that looked at 234 original series across 18 platforms (including digital) for the 2016–2017 television season, only 14 percent of writers were from a minority group.* I also know my Latinx friends would love it if casting directors stopped assuming all Latinx people are Mexican. We don’t all sound and look the same! We don’t all know each other either. We’re not all on some secret Hollywood Latinx group text message chain…that you know of.
This disconnect between white writers and their brown characters was particularly eye-opening in a screenwriting class I took in Hollywood. Reading the scripts of several other writers, I realized they saw Mexicans only as poor laborers. And that was it. The entirety of who we are as a people often came down to poor, brown people who speak broken English. Which we know to them means uneducated. It doesn’t matter what other language you speak or how many languages you may know. If you can’t speak English, to white Americans you are uneducated. It never seems to cross these people’s minds just how diverse Mexico actually is. It has university professors, anime enthusiasts, engineers, chefs, celebrities, comic book artists, politicians, athletes, YouTubers, screenwriters, spoiled teens ignoring their parents to play on their iPhones, and Fall Out Boy concerts. Yes, Mexican people listen to millennial pop-punk bands and every single other genre of music. Yes, Mexicans can be laborers. They are some of the most skilled, hardest-working people in the world. But laborers are not all they are. Why do white people have such a narrow view of us?
Two years ago I received a script for a role in which I would play a Mexican maid to two white men. I remember noting that the one Latina in the script was serving white people.
I have heard from people in the community who say, “Well, my mom is a maid. What’s wrong with that?”
Nothing. Nothing is wrong with having a service job. In fact many of us have had service jobs in our lives. If you want to talk about a stereotype, I was a nanny to several white families for many years. But I have seen Mexican actors limited to those roles in television and film again and again. I want us to have the diversity of roles that white actors are allowed to have. That’s what I want. That’s my problem with this. That we are still so singularly viewed. And before you try to come at me with the “Well, Latinos are taking our acting jobs in Hollywood” argument, please know that we still make up only 5.8 percent of all speaking roles in television and film.
5.8 percent.
I was recently involved in a scandal when I shared audio that had been sent to me by a fellow student at my acting studio who caught the owner of our studio telling a struggling white actress in class to dye her hair, change her name to Rosa Ramirez, and start passing herself off as Latina in order to get more roles.
“Just the fact that your name is Rosa Ramirez is gonna get you a meeting…So you might try it…Go to the head-shot shop and tell them you’re Latin. Wear something fucking red. Wear some fucking sparkly earrings. Change your goddamned name, and let’s just do an experiment.”
That’s what white people think our culture is. Just some hat to try on! And if it doesn’t work, they can toss it and try on another.
Also, we don’t all wear red! I prefer purple.
There was a huge backlash from that audio clip, and even worse than the coach’s words on tape were those trying to justify them afterward.
“That’s an actor’s job. To pretend to be another person.”
An astronaut is a hat you can try on, Becky, not someone’s ethnicity. Not lying about your entire identity so you can steal a role from a Latina who is still one of the most underrepresented people in Hollywood. Over the course of this year alone I screenshot and shared with my friends several Facebook posts from white actresses asking for suggestions for more ethnic last names, saying their agents think pretending to be another ethnicity will help them get more roles. This is disgusting. I want to reiterate that this is a current and growing problem in my industry. This doesn’t fix the studios’ diversity problem. It contributes to it.
Throughout the history of cinema, we have been so limited in representation that when we finally get to move toward a few less stereotypical roles, they want to snatch those away too. They have spent their lives taking representation for granted; why would they want to change things now? Maybe, just maybe, if they were better at their jobs they wouldn’t have to steal someone else’s ethnicity in an industry already run by people who share theirs.
“But, Dani, what about when your dad sounded white on the phone to close business deals? Or Asian actors who have changed their names to sound white to fit in?” Yes, those are things people of color had to do in order to survive racism in a country set up to benefit white people. That is still the way this industry is set up, but it is slowly, very slowly, changing. I have been able to use some of my influence to get my extremely qualified and talented friends of color hired at studios. Now when I have to turn down a hosting gig, I recommend three or four other women of color to take my place so the studio can’t possibly have an excuse to replace me with a white guy.
So at the end of the day, who gets to determine if I am Latina enough? Or if you are “enough” of your ethnicity? Even though it was a joke in the show, in real life, educated women like Issa Rae shouldn’t be told they “sound white.” Because white people shouldn’t get to own sounding educated. Or American. For some reason, sounding “American” means sounding white, despite the fact that the US is a country made up of immigrants. There are Asian Americans, African Americans, Native Americans, Mexican Americans, etc., who can all sound “American.” I want to make this clear: Yes, there is a privilege to sounding American in America. But it doesn’t erase your heritage and skin color. It doesn’t erase your experience, your ancestors, or the struggles that come with being a person of color in this country. Sounding American shouldn’t mean you sound white. Because white people are not the only ones who get to claim this country. Despite what anyone may tell you, this country is also ours.
* Tracy Jan, “How White TV Writers Decide the Stories Hollywood Tells America,” Washington Post, November 6, 2017.