While attending graduate school at Stanford University, Dr. Chon Noriega watched four films that impacted his life: “Stand and Deliver,” “La Bamba,” “Milagro Beanfield War” and “Born in East L.A.”
All four movies, which came out within a year of each other in the late 1980s, showcased for Noriega Hispanic actors and the impact Hispanics had in America. They had an indelible impact on Noriega, a film and media studies professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, who has written a book, Shot in America: Television, the State, and the Rise of the Chicano Cinema, and edited nine books on Latinos in film, media and art.
Noriega earlier this summer cohosted a month-long series on Turner Classic Movies (TCM) called “Race & Hollywood: Latino Images in Film.” Noriega and co-host Robert Osborne, a film historian and Hollywood columnist, viewed, debated and analyzed more than 30 films, from silent films from the 1920s to more modern films such as “Lone Star” released in 1996.
Noriega says it was the first time 19 of the films such as “Boulevard Nights” that featured an all-Hispanic cast were broadcast on television.
“When you look at U.S. Latinos … we’ve got fewer than 100 films in the entire history of Hollywood where there are tens of thousands of films, and that includes exploitation films,” he says. “There was a higher integration in the ’50s [with] César Romero and Ricardo Montalbán. Now, who is there? Jimmy Smits. Salma Hayek. Edward James Olmos, but it has been a while for him to be the lead character. You don’t have many in films, but the Latino population is twice as large.”
A problem Noriega sees in the accurate portrayal of Hispanics stems from non-Hispanic directors pushing Hispanic actors to speak with a certain accent, or when they try to make them darker. One example: when Puerto Rican actor Juano Hernández played a Black judge in the 1955 movie “Trial.”
“That is part of the irony. Most Latino actors don’t fit that type. Th ey have to be kind of squeezed into that type of framework, which I find hilarious,” Noriega says. “Latino is not a racial category. It is a multiracial category.”
