Gina Rodriguez's Tribute to Rita Moreno Reveals Struggles Actresses of Color Share

At age 15, Gina Rodriguez says, she’d never seen a Puerto Rican represented onscreen. “When did Puerto Ricans come about?” the Jane the Virgin actress asked her mother. “I never see us on my favorite TV shows or movies. We must not have existed back then, right?”

In a tearful speech at the Kennedy Center Honors, which was filmed earlier this month broadcast Tuesday night, Rodriguez paid tribute to honoree Rita Moreno, the second Puerto Rican to ever win an Oscar. Rodriguez said watching Moreno, who appeared as Rodriguez’s character’s grandmother on Jane the Virgin this year, gave her “hope…a reason to fight and to speak up.”

After winning an Oscar in 1962 for her turn as Anita in the film adaptation of West Side Story, Moreno turned down several roles that she found demeaning. “People said, ‘Winning the Oscar is a jinx.’ No, it isn’t,” Moreno told the Miami Herald in 2008. “It’s just that I was being offered all this terrible stuff, and I thought, ‘No, I don’t have to do that stuff anymore.’” She continued:

picture: http://www.queenieaustralia.com/pink-formal-dresses

What is interesting to me is having the vision so early and yet feeling so inferior to everybody else in the business for years and years because I believed I had to be subservient to anybody who wasn’t Latino. Before West Side Story I was always offered the stereotypical Latina roles: the Conchitas and Lolitas in Westerns. I was always barefoot. It was humiliating, embarrassing stuff. But I did it because there was nothing else. After West Side Story, it was pretty much the same thing. A lot of gang stories.

Two generations later, Rodriguez has faced similar struggles in her career. “I found it limiting to see women of my skin color only playing very specific roles as though Latino stories are different,” she said in an interview with the Hollywood Reporter last year. “I felt very limited by the opportunities I had in Hollywood to play the maid, the pregnant teen, the drug addict.”...