Latinos in Hollywood Say Their Representation Is Going Backward

3 min read

Gloria Calderón Kellett is weighing in on the recent Deep Cuts casting controversy to highlight a bigger, systemic issue in Hollywood: shrinking opportunities for Latino actors and creators.

In an op-ed for Deadline, Gloria Calderón Kellett—best known as an executive producer, co-creator, co-showrunner, director, and actress on the Emmy-winning sitcom One Day at a Time—responds to the news that a non-Latina actress had been cast as a Mexican character in a major film. While she does not name the project, it appears to reference the backlash to the casting of Marty Supreme and I Love LA star Odessa A’zion in Deep Cuts. A’zion subsequently withdrew from the project, agreeing with the criticism and saying she was not aware the character had been written as Latina in Holly Brickley’s novel.

Calderón Kellett praises that decision, writing that the actress listened and stepped aside. “That matters,” she writes. “It deserves to be named.” According to Calderón Kellett, the real issue is scarcity. When representation is limited, she argues, individual roles take on outsized symbolic meaning. “That’s why moments like this sting,” she writes. “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.”

Separately, more than 100 Latino creatives signed an open letter released Thursday, thanking A’zion for her allyship and calling for greater inclusion of Latinos in behind-the-scenes roles and auditions for “a diverse range of roles, including non-stereotypical leads.” Actress Xochitl Gomez (Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness) helped organize the open letter, whose signees include Jessica Alba, Eva Longoria, Isabela Merced, and Calderón Kellett.

In her op-ed, Calderón Kellett describes recent meetings in which she was told that projects centered on all-Latino families are now considered “too political,” or that she could include “one Latino character. Possibly two.” She also cites a study from the USC Norman Lear Center finding that Latinos make up about one in five Americans but only around 6 percent of on-screen characters in broadcast television.

Fearing producers will respond to the controversy by avoiding Latino characters altogether, she instead urges producers to do the opposite. “Hollywood loved saying the word ‘representation,’” she writes. “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.”

Gloria Calderón Kellett speaks at the 2025 Peabody Awards.

Calderón Kellett also traces her own experience arriving in Hollywood in 1999 and repeatedly being sent out for narrowly defined roles tied to crime. “Auditions aren’t neutral,” she writes. “They teach you what the industry imagines you to be.” She recalls the first time she saw her last name on television, on Miami Vice: “I remember the flash of excitement. Finally. We’re here. And then the gut drop. He was the drug dealer.”

Unable to find space within those narratives, Calderón Kellett turned to writing, a path that eventually led to One Day at a Time, which premiered in 2017 and centered a Cuban American family. While she notes that several Latino-led shows followed in subsequent years, that progress has been erased. “Those shows are gone,” she writes. “Canceled too soon.”

She frames the piece not as a condemnation, but as an explanation of why casting debates continue to carry such weight. “This isn’t a callout,” she writes. “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.”