The Latino Waiting Game: When One Role Means Everything – Guest Column

Editor’s note: The casting of I Love LA co-star and Marty Supreme breakout Odessa A’Zion as Zoe Gutierrez in the A24 adaptation of Holly Brickley’s Deep Cuts triggered backlash online as the character is written as a Jewish woman of Mexican heritage in the 2021 novel. A’Zion, who is Jewish, exited the film on Wednesday, admitting she had accepted the role without having read the book and agreeing with the criticism over the casting. Gloria Calderon Kellett is a veteran TV writer-producer who was co-creator, executive producer and co-showrunner on Netflix’s One Day at a Time reboot. 

Recently, news broke that a young, talented non‑Latina actress had been cast as a Mexican character in a major film. The internet did what it always does and turned the moment into a referendum on her hair, her face, her worth. That’s not what this is. I have nothing against her. What I’m grieving isn’t one actress’ success, it’s the familiar ache of watching a rare opportunity slip past a community already starved for them.

Since then, something meaningful has happened. After learning more about the character, the source material and why this role carried weight, the actress chose to step away. She did so with humility and grace, openly acknowledging that she hadn’t known the character’s last name, hadn’t read the source material and had simply said yes. When she understood the broader context, she listened. And then she stepped aside. That matters. It deserves to be named.

But this moment also requires clarity, because there is a very real danger of learning the wrong lesson. The takeaway cannot be, “Well, then I guess we just can’t write Latino characters anymore.” That kind of retreat isn’t progress. It’s erasure in a different outfit. The lesson here is responsibility. It’s intention. It’s doing the work mindfully at the writing stage, the casting stage, the greenlight stage, so that one role doesn’t have to carry the impossible weight of an entire community’s longing.

Because when representation is this scarce, every role becomes symbolic, whether anyone intends it to or not. That’s the part people miss. This conversation didn’t begin with outrage. It began with scarcity. When one role means everything, the stakes become unbearably high — for the actor cast, for the actors passed over and for the audience watching yet another rare opportunity slip by.

I know this because I’ve lived inside that scarcity.

When I first arrived in Hollywood in 1999, Latino representation wasn’t just scarce, it was ruh-ruh‑rough. Still, I arrived hopeful, maybe even naïve, because I’d grown up with proof that this dream was possible. Rita Moreno showed me what survival and brilliance looked like. Celia Cruz taught me that our accents could fill stadiums. And John Leguizamo insisted, loudly and unapologetically, on telling our stories on our own terms. Those artists made me believe I could even come here and try.

So when I arrived in Hollywood, I assumed the industry simply hadn’t seen us in a while. Surely, I thought, if I showed up and worked hard, they’d remember.

Instead, I was sent out, over and over again, for the same roles. Gangbanger’s girlfriend. Gangbanger’s sister. Sometimes the grieving one. Sometimes the fiery one. Always adjacent to violence. Always defined by someone else’s criminality. It didn’t matter that I didn’t know anyone in a gang. It didn’t matter that my family history, like most Latino families I knew, was about work, sacrifice, humor, faith, contradiction, love. The narrative already had been decided.

This is the part people forget when they talk about “just acting.” Auditions aren’t neutral. They teach you what the industry imagines you to be. And when the only stories you’re allowed to audition for are wildly negative and stereotypical, that limitation becomes its own form of damage.

Seeing us portrayed primarily as criminals hurts us. Just think about it: Name five Latino TV dads. You can’t, can you? Not seeing us at all — as parents, neighbors, teachers, leads, lovers, screw‑ups, dreamers — damages us. Together, those forces shape how easily we’re dismissed everywhere else.

The first time I ever saw my last name on television, it was on Miami Vice. I remember the flash of excitement. Finally. We’re here. And then the gut drop. He was the drug dealer. So it was like, “Yay, finally.” And then, “Aw man. That’s a bummer.” That whiplash stays with you.

So I pivoted. If I couldn’t be cast in the stories, I would write them.

I worked my way up through writers rooms, learning from kind and generous writers, trusting the immigrant‑kid work ethic I was raised on. Show up early. Stay late. Do the work well. Eventually, you’d earn a turn. Along the way, there were signs that made the effort feel purposeful. Eva Longoria became a household name on Desperate Housewives. Ugly Betty didn’t just center on America Ferrera, it made her a star. Before that, ¿Qué Pasa, U.S.A.? had quietly done the work on PBS that commercial television wouldn’t. Television used to know how to make Latino and Latina stars.

That’s why it felt seismic when One Day at a Time premiered in 2017, which I created alongside Mike Royce and which was shepherded by the late, great Norman Lear. Outside of public television, Latino‑led family sitcoms were almost nonexistent. For the first time since Ricky Ricardo, and one of the very few since, ¿Qué Pasa, U.S.A.?, there was a Cuban American family at the center of a multicamera sitcom on a major platform, talking openly about immigration, mental health, queerness, class and love in America.

Jane the Virgin already had cracked the door open. Then came Vida, Gentefied, With Love, Love, Victor, Fantasy Island, The Gordita Chronicles, This Fool, Primo. Across genres, across tones, across platforms, we were here. For a moment, it felt like we weren’t just a moment. We were a movement.

Those shows are gone. Canceled too soon.

Hollywood loved saying the word “representation.” It said it at panels and podcasts. I know because I sat on more than 50 of them. It said it in press releases. It said it during awards season. It said it like a promise. And then, quietly, it stopped keeping it.

In the past six months alone, I’ve been told, plainly, that I can’t sell a show or a movie centered on an all‑Latino family. That it’s “too political” to be Latino now. I was told I could maybe have one Latino character. Possibly two. But that was it. The rest needed to be something else. More neutral. More relatable. It was disheartening in a way that felt both familiar and freshly cruel.

Around the same time, I took a meeting on a book adaptation about a Latina woman. Every creative behind the scenes — the author, the producers, the director — was white. They spoke earnestly about wanting to consult with someone eventually, because the story involved a Latina character. But they also admitted, without irony, that they weren’t sure the character’s identity was actually that important.

This was a story about a woman who leaves another country, comes to America and passes as white in order to succeed. Her identity wasn’t a detail. It was the engine. It was the cost. It was the whole story. And yet even there, identity was treated as optional.

This is what the conversation looks like when it isn’t trending. This is the math before casting announcements. This is the quiet narrowing of possibility that happens long before audiences ever hear about a project. This is why “nothing about us without us” isn’t a slogan. It’s a survival principle.

In theory, actors should be able to play anything. Acting, after all, is transformation. It’s imagination. It’s empathy. But belief only gets us so far when theory collides with reality. And reality for many underrepresented communities is not a free or fair marketplace.

One in every five Americans is Latino, yet a study from the USC Norman Lear Center found that Latinos make up only about 6% of onscreen characters in broadcast television. Six percent. In an industry that prides itself on inclusive storytelling, that gap is not an accident. It’s a pattern.

For Latino actors, writers and directors, there is no overflow of opportunity waiting in the wings. There are fewer auditions. Fewer greenlights. Fewer rooms where decisions are made. So when a role that explicitly reflects our culture, our families, our histories, goes to someone outside the community, it doesn’t just feel disappointing. It feels cumulative. It feels like another quiet reminder that even when the story is about us, we might still be optional.

This is the paradox of representation debates. People rush to defend artistic freedom without acknowledging how unevenly that freedom is distributed. I believe in artistic freedom. I just don’t believe we’ve ever been in a moment where it’s been practiced equally.

Hollywood often behaves as if inclusive casting is a gamble. But the evidence suggests otherwise. Zoe Saldaña is the highest‑grossing actress of all time. Bad Bunny will perform Spanish‑language songs at the Super Bowl, one of the most watched broadcasts on Earth. These are not niche successes. They are proof of concept.

Talent has never been the issue. Opportunity has.

And yet Latino stories are still treated as risks. Our faces are now “too political,” our names too hard to pronounce. We’re asked to wait our turn in an industry that keeps telling us our moment is coming. So we wait.

That’s why moments like this sting. Not because one actress “took” something but because the industry created a situation where one role has to carry the weight of an entire community’s longing. That’s not fair to her. And it’s devastating for us.

The timing matters, too. When brown communities are being targeted and harassed in real life, when immigration raids, surveillance and political scapegoating are part of the daily backdrop, erasure on screen doesn’t feel abstract. It feels personal. It feels like another place where we are visible only when convenient, invisible when it counts.

Representation isn’t just about being seen. It’s about being considered. It’s about who gets imagined as complex, central and worthy of specificity. It’s about who gets to be ordinary onscreen without carrying the burden of explanation. I long for that day.

So to be clear, I don’t want fewer roles for anyone. I don’t want to shrink the world of storytelling. I want it to expand and to finally reflect the country it should portray. I want a world where a single casting choice doesn’t spark grief because there are so many other doors open that one moment doesn’t have to mean everything.

This isn’t a callout. It’s a call-in. A call to be honest about the math, about the patterns and about what it does to a community to be promised recognition and then asked to wait again and again and again. It’s a call to hold space not just for statistics and algorithms but for the very real anger, grief and fatigue that come with constant erasure.

I desperately need the next generation to see the representation my community is starving for. Hollywood said “representation,” and then hesitated. What Latino audiences are asking is simple and long overdue.

Don’t hesitate when it’s finally, and organically, our turn.

Gloria Calderon Kellett is a veteran TV creator, writer, producer and director who oversaw Netflix’s reboot of One Day at a Time and has worked on such series as How I Met Your Mother, Rules of Engagement, Devious Minds, iZombie, With Love and most recently The Horror of Dolores Roach.