On April 9, 1962, Puerto Rican actress Rita Moreno becomes the first Hispanic and Puerto Rican woman to win an Oscar, for her role of Anita in West Side Story. … This is not my color.’ And he actually said to me… ‘What are you, racist?’” While many are dismayed at Moreno’s darkened appearance playing Anita in “West Side Story,” she explained, “I remember saying to a makeup man once, ‘I don’t know why I have to be this color. And it rankled that I always had to do the dark makeup… they only saw Hispanic young women as a certain color.” And it absolutely rankled that I had to do accents. Moreno went on to say, “I spoke perfect English. The actress and singer’s dream was to be just like Elizabeth Taylor - but as she explains in the documentary, “little did I know there wasn’t a chance in hell of something like that happening,” all because she was Latina. Moreno also described the carelessness of Hollywood studios towards authentically depicting people from other countries - regarding her sometimes-inaccurate accents, “nobody ever said, ‘What are you doing? What the hell is that?’… nobody cared.” Still, Moreno was just a young Latina trying to nab roles in an environment where no one else looked like her - and probably felt fortunate to be acting in those films at all. So I made up my own accents… they all sounded Puerto Rican.” About the roles, she described: “they all called for an accent or two that I wasn’t even familiar with. While that might have seemed like a dream come true, Moreno was offered stereotypical roles that were many times overtly sexualized.Ĭonstantly eroticized, Moreno is known to have acted in roles outside of her ethnicity, including of Hawaiian, Native American, Egyptian, and Filipino characters - an aspect of her career that is often rightly criticized. Moreno moved to New York City as a child, and eventually moved to Hollywood as a teenager, where she signed a contract with MGM Studios. Moreno has often spoken out about the difficulties she faced encountering both racism and sexism as a rising Hollywood star in the mid-century, most notably in the PBS documentary “Just a Girl Who Decided to Go for It.” The actress explained she never saw Latina representation on screen as a young child, saying, “there was no such thing then… certainly not for little Puerto Rican girls like me.” For So Young, So Bad, 1950 /Slz17WbwjJ- "What're you giving me with the flying fish" □ June 20, 2020
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