Rep. Joaquin Castro is on a mission — and he needs your movie recommendations to help the cause.
Believing that Hollywood’s reliance on harmful stereotypes of Latinos portrayed as drug dealers, criminals, or undocumented immigrants contributes directly to the kind of xenophobia that drove the 2019 El Paso shooting — in which a gunman murdered 23 people in a Walmart in a racism-fueled rampage to stop what he believed was the “Hispanic invasion of Texas” — and other acts of hate, the Texas politician wants “the world that young Latinos and Latinas see on television and in the media to be a much closer match to the world they actually live in,” he tells EW. “Much closer than it was for me and so many others who are my age and more senior to me.”
EW can exclusively announce that, starting today, Castro will begin collecting suggestions from members of the public for films from Latino, Black, and other underrepresented communities that they feel best represent them, and why they should be included in his official congressional recommendation for 2023 inductees to the National Film Registry. People can submit film suggestions via an online form hosted at castro.house.gov/films or by commenting on pinned posts on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram.
“We’re 20 percent of the country, but only three percent of the films in the National Film Registry have anything to do with Latino lives and culture. So this is an effort to help do better.”
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“The Latino narrative is largely missing from the American narrative,” he explains. “So Latino contributions in business, government, culture, and just about every other space are not recognized to the degree that they merit. To me, when we think about telling the Latino story, we have to first recognize the contributions of, in this case, Latino filmmakers, actors, directors, and so forth.”
Lack of representation is something personal to the lawmaker, as it was something he experienced himself growing up. Castro recalls the first time he felt seen in media: “I was born in 1974, so I’m turning 49 this year. But I remember a few points in particular. In the late eighties, for example, when La Bamba came out, I think in 1987, and Stand and Deliver came out maybe in 1988, right around there.”
“I watched TV a lot when I was growing up. My brother and I, and we would get home and we would have the TV on,” he says. “Besides doing our homework, we would have the TV on usually until 10 o’clock, or whenever we’d go to sleep. And the world on television never matched the world outside my front door in my heavily Mexican-American neighborhood on the west side of San Antonio.”
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“If you look at the history of film, even films that were set in a town that’s heavily Latino like Los Angeles or states that are heavily Latino like Texas, there’s some films, if you go back and watch them, you can’t find any Latinos or Latinas. There wasn’t even a presence. There’s a complete invisibility where you don’t even exist,” Castro, who represents Texas’ 20th Congressional District, states.
“The Paramount Plus show, Fatal Attraction, does that well. I’m almost done with the season,” he shares. “It has a lot of Latino, Latina characters that are lawyers, the bailiff, and people working in the DA’s office. To me, that’s an example of where none of the main characters necessarily is Latino, but just to have that presence. If you go and watch it, you kind of feel like, ‘Okay, that’s what L.A. would actually be in real life.'”
“Over the years I think that has gotten better. Hollywood’s gotten better about that presence. And then the second part of that is prominence,” he says. “I think that’s the part where you see a lot more now, where you have Latino, Latina leads in positive, important characters that are often inspirational. And then the third part, I think, is the one that we still see the least, where the focus of the film is really on Latinos and Latino culture.”
He names a few examples, “Flamin’ Hot, I think it falls into that category recently, right? Blue Beetle, certainly. Sasha Calle as Supergirl in The Flash. All these. Those, to me, are in that middle category, where it’s not necessarily a Latino story, but it is a Latina who is in an incredible inspirational role, particularly for young Latinas, that we just hadn’t seen before. You know? Presence should be kind of a baseline, right?”
To ensure that Castro has time to review all the suggestions and develop his final list of official recommendations, his deadline for submission will be Thursday, Aug. 3 at 11:59 p.m. PT.The final Library of Congress deadline is Aug. 15 and the Library of Congress will likely announce the final list of inductees before the end of the year.
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