<<WARNING SPOILERS BELOW>>>
My favorite actress in the 1970s was Irene Cara. She played a lot of doomed and tragic characters in various TV movies and miniseries. She played Alex Haley's doomed mother in
Roots II: the next Generation, a doomed victim of the Jonestown massacre, and an impressionable teen conned into a nude camera scene by a pervert in the movie
Fame. Her character, the title role in
Sparkle, survived to the end of that movie, but lost a sister to drugs on the way. I don't ever recall seeing her in a comedy.
Ms. Cara could sing, too. She sang all her own songs as a 1960s R&B singer in
Sparkle, plus she also sang the Top 40 theme songs for
Fame and
Flashdance.
In the black community, there was some debate as to her ethnicity. Some believed her to be half-black and half-Puerto Rican. In almost every role she portrayed black Americans. She even appeared on the cover of
Jet, where she identified herself as a "black Spanish person." Ms. Cara did not call herself "half-black half-Spanish" because both of her parents hailed from the Spanish Caribbean (Cuba and Puerto Rico), so they were both (in today's terms) "Latina/o." Her darker-skinned father was every bit as much a product of Latin American culture as was her light-skinned mother. She was born in New York to a large family of salsa musicians, but she is best known for singing disco and R&B, both African-American genres . She apparently felt herself to be a black American, having been born an African-descended girl in America, though she actually did
not have any ancestry among the Africans who came to the United States as enslaved laborers.
And frequently ignored is one simple fact, that Latin American culture is itself an African-descended culture (in varying degrees, depending on location) and that to be both black and Latina is not at all contradictory.
The real question is not why she usually portrayed the descendants of U.S.-born slaves, but why she never played a Latin American, which she was clearly qualified to do. In the theatrical release of
Fame , her charcter of "Coco" is of unspecified mixed heritage. (In the later TV series
Fame , "Coco" was played by actress Erica Gimpel and given the Spanish surname "Hernandez.").
To add insult to injury, the only Puerto Rican character in the movie
Fame , is played by white Anglo actor Barry Miller. Miller has light-skin and dark curly hair, which I guess makes him "Latin" in the mind of Hollywood casting agents. His character, an aspiring comedian who idolizes the late Puerto Rican comedian Freddie Prinze, otherwise has no interest in Hispanic culture. He even yells at his own Spanish-speaking mother to "speak English." Befriending only white students, he comes across as frustrated by his Puerto Rican familyand heritage, light enough to be something else but unable to pull it off. Irene Cara's "Coco" does not even have a family or heritage that she will share with her classmates. Her homelife remains a mystery throughout the entire movie. (the other black character, the dancer Leroy, also has no family or community)
It seems Hollywood has still not yet noticed that Latin America is full of non-white people. Three decades have not changed much. European Spaniard Javier Bardem played Mexican in
No Country for Old Men. Likewise, Spaniard Antonio Banderas played Mexicans in
Zorro and
Desperado. European-looking Puerto Rican Benicio Del Toro played a Mexican cop in
Traffic. Mexicans seem the the ethnic group least likely to be portrayed on-camera by actors of their own ethnicity. Even in the Mexican telenovelas, the lead roles (always aristocratic) go to Nordic-looking performers while the servants are Indigenous-looking Mexicans. Only in the telenovela starring the singer Thalia, did I see African descended and clearly Mestiza actors playing non-servant roles.
Just recenlty the actress/dancer Zoe Saldana played Lt. Uhuru in the latest version of
Star Trek. Ms. Saldana's online bio reports that she is of Dominican heritage, born in the U.S. and raised in the Dominican Republic. In her Hollywood roles she has played characters that might be considered "black," and yes, just yesterday, I overheard a group of young Latinas (all born after Irene Cara's heyday) wondering whether Zoe Saldana was "half-black" or "half-Dominican" or something.
Of course, Dominican culture is a partly-African culture, so there just as with Irene Cara and millions of other people, there is no contradiction between being dark-skinned and Latina at the same time.
It seems after thirty years it would not still be necessary to say this, but oh well. . .
