Latinos Underrepresented In Entertainment, Media Industry According To New Study

With names like Sofia Vergara, Eva Longoria and Salma Hayek in the entertainment industry, coupled with the fact that Latinos buy 25 percent of all movie tickets in the United States, it's hard to believe that Latinos are underrepresented in the field. But that's exactly what a study from Columbia University’s Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race has found.

The study -- released Tuesday in collaboration with the National Hispanic Foundation for the Arts (NHFA), the National Association of Latino Independent Producers (NALIP) and the National Latino Arts, Education and Media Institute (NLAEMI) -- had some surprising findings regarding the presence of America's largest and fastest growing minority group in the entertainment industry. First off, it discovered that Latino presence in the English-language media was minimal and even more shockingly, that there was a smaller scope for Latinos than there was 70 years ago. And while there has been an increase of Latinos in front of and behind the camera, many of the roles are highly stereotyped with “either hyper-sexualized, as comic relief, and/or cheap labor.”

“The range of roles available to Latinos is narrower now than those available in earlier decades: nearly 50 percent of contemporary Latino roles on top 10 television shows are either criminals or law enforcers," write the authors of the study in “The Latino Media Gap: A Report on the State of Latinos in U.S. Media."

Another interesting finding was the gender disparity between Latino actors and actresses. The study cited that Latino men did not play leading roles in any of the top ten films released between 2010 and 2013, and as such, they seemingly “have disappeared” from the entertainment industry. Latinas, meanwhile, have seen a small increase in supporting and lead roles.

“The success of a few Latino stars has created a widespread perception that media diversity in the U.S. is significantly improving,” said Frances Negrón-Muntaner, director of Columbia’s Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race and the study’s lead researcher, reports Voxxi. “But our findings indicate that, in some ways, it is getting worse.”

The shortage of Latinos in the entertainment industry is not exclusive to on-screen jobs, as the study found that between 2010 and 2013, Latinos constituted 1.2 percent of producers, 4.1 percent of TV directors, 2.3 percent of movie directors and 1.9 percent of writers.

The findings of the Columbia University study echo that of the 2013 study by the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism at the University of Southern California, which found that of the 100 top-grossing films in 2012, Hispanics had a mere 4.2 percent of speaking roles.