Is This the Quiet Revolution of Latino Representation?

Across arts and culture, Latinos are suddenly claiming space in droves—and on our own terms.

Tenoch Huerta at the Mexico City premiere of Wakanda Forever (Agustin Cuevas / Getty)

A personal obsession of mine is Freddie Prinze. Not the multihyphenate heartthrob of early-aughts cinema. I mean the other one: his father.

Freddie Prinze Sr. was a comedian and an actor who was once—for a brief moment, while he starred in one of the hottest shows in America, Chico and the Man—a household name. It was the 1970s, when there were only three national broadcast networks on television. And, week after week, Freddie Prinze—a Latino man—had a starring role on one of them, through both his sitcom turn as a Chicano mechanic in an aging white man’s auto-body shop, and his regular appearances doing stand-up or filling in for Johnny Carson on The Tonight Show. A man so funny and so famous, his face was plastered across major magazine covers and he was invited to perform at the White House. And then he died tragically in 1977 at age 22, and was quickly all but forgotten. Despite the success and popularity of Prinze, it would be more than 25 years before a primetime-network TV show hit the airwaves explicitly as a vehicle for a Latino star.

The George Lopez Show was a huge hit for the Mexican American comedian, a major pop in what became known as the “Latino Explosion” at the turn of this century. It was in this era that J. Lo and Ricky Martin and Marc Anthony entered the mainstream, and one of the most highly anticipated books to hit shelves—The Dirty Girls Social Club—centered on a gaggle of Latina girlfriends grappling with post-college life. It was, the media kept proclaiming, a cultural revolution for America. The beginning of a sea change for Latino representation in American culture.

Until it wasn’t.

Two decades later, Latinos now comprise almost 19 percent of the U.S. population, but account for only about 8 percent of published authors, 7 percent of lead film roles, and 6 percent of lead roles on broadcast TV. In the art world, Latino curators make up only 7 percent of collections personnel in U.S. museums. Latino artists contribute to less than 3 percent of the permanent collections in those museums.

And yet, here I am, coming off of a tremendous week for Latinos in American culture, feeling—dare I say it—cautiously optimistic that perhaps, just perhaps, we are gathering some collective steam in becoming more proportionately represented in American culture. Because, you know, we are Americans—nearly one in five of Americans, to be precise.

What happened last week? Well, a lot. Two marvelous books by Latinos were recognized as finalists for the National Book Award in fiction and nonfiction, respectively. In addition to making a tremendous showing at the Latin Grammy Awards, the Puerto Rican superstar Bad Bunny’s juggernaut, Un Verano Sin Ti, made history as the first Spanish-language album to be nominated for Album of the Year at the regular ol’ Grammys, placing him—and Spanish music—firmly alongside American icons like Beyoncé and Kendrick Lamar.

In the theater world, Quiara Alegría Hudes’s magnificent new play, My Broken Language, earned yet another high-profile rave (this one from The New Yorker), a triumph for both the Puerto Rican American playwright and all-Latina cast. On the big screen, the actor Tenoch Huerta continues to make history in his starring, breakout turn in Ryan Coogler’s blockbuster smash Wakanda Forever. This past week saw Tenoch’s star continue to rise with a glossy New York Times profile that centered on not only his talents, but his dedication to anti-racism and his pride in his Indigenous identity.

And over at the Whitney Museum of American Art, last Wednesday evening saw the opening of “No Existe un Mundo Poshuracán: Puerto Rican Art in the Wake of Hurricane Maria.” The robust and vibrant exhibition marks the largest exhibition of Puerto Rican art in a major U.S. museum since 1974.

This is all just a survey of one particularly remarkable week in a pretty good year. Latino writers have published some of the best-selling and most critically acclaimed books of the year in 2022, across genres. In the visual arts, Latino art was a focus of the 2022 Armory Show, a cornerstone of the New York cultural calendar. And we’ve seen Latinos claw and fight against all statistical odds to make an impact on TV, film, and documentary.

Altogether, while this might not spell a tidal shift, what we are observing is certainly a moment. And if the past can be read as a prologue, it would be wise to remember that moments can be fleeting (see: Freddie Prinze). Caveats notwithstanding, there is something about this moment that feels energetically different. The difference is detectable not only in the sheer volume and breadth of cultural disciplines where Latinos are currently leaving their indelible marks, but in the agency and diversity of what is being created. The national origins and identities of their creators are, likewise, many. They’re from El Salvador, Colombia, Puerto Rico, and Mexico; they’re Cubano, Panamanian, Afro-Latino, white, Indigenous; they’re queer, nonbinary, male, female; undocumented or not; first-generation immigrants, or second or third; working class, middle class. You name it.

We are, at this moment, not being told what we are by the dominant culture—some strange amalgamation of tacos and merengue, invented by white ignorance—but asserting ourselves as a plurality. Of experiences. Of nationalities. Of races.

In other words: Across disciplines, we are showing America who we actually are.

That, too, is what feels markedly different in this moment from the Latino Explosion or Freddie Prinze’s pioneering breakthrough. In previous eras there was, by sheer necessity, a certain requirement for Latino artists to “perform” Latinidad in order to earn their place. This was not Latinidad as we who live it know it, but Latinidad as it is perceived by outsiders, with all of its spicy, sexy, temperamental glory. White America has been periodically intrigued by “Latin Culture,” but the price of admission, to a certain extent, was historically for the invited party to sing for their supper—in Spanish, and to a feisty beat. It was required that Latinos remind the gatekeepers why exactly they had let us in in the first place.

A unifying theme of this moment is a commitment to individual authenticity to, and expression of, our Latinidad. Latino representation on our terms.

Of course, performative Latinidad will likely always exist in the mainstream; there will always be those Latino performers and creators who are more comfortable with the opportunities available to us when we stick to white comfort zones. But by and large, this moment feels electric. We aren’t just seizing cultural space, but being unapologetically us while we claim it. This might not be an explosion, or even a wave; indeed, it will likely continue to be a challenging and steady climb to become as proportionally represented in American culture as we are in America itself. But at this moment, I feel more confident than ever that when we arrive, we will arrive as a people, intact.


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Xochitl Gonzalez is a staff writer at The Atlantic and the author of its newsletter Brooklyn, Everywhere, about class, gentrification, and the American Dream. She is the author of the novel Olga Dies Dreaming and was a finalist for the 2023 Pulitzer Prize for Commentary.