Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1124770
37 Q2 2019 / CINEMONTAGE As the child of a Puerto Rican mother and a Dominican father who grew up in Brooklyn with Spanish as her first language, I, like many of my fellow hyphenated Americans, learned from a very early age that I existed between two worlds. The first was that of the ethnic enclave in which I was raised — the Williamsburg of immigrant factory workers who had arrived in the 1960s, '70s and '80s in search of a better life and who would later come to be displaced by a growing tide of gentrification, similar to the one with which the characters on Vida must deal. The second world was the one we hyphenated Americans are continuously told we should take as our normal, despite the fact that it's very much designed to make us feel the opposite of normal. Every year, there is a plethora of published articles and studies detailing the huge discrepancies that exist between the actual ethnic makeup of the US population and how the TV business reflects those ethnicities. At 16 percent of the population, Hispanics are the largest ethnic and racial minority in the country (US Census Bureau, 2010). Yet their representation on television amounts to less than seven percent of programming (UCLA's Hollywood Diversity Report, 2018). For many Latinxs, myself included, it often feels as though the studio/network benchmark for what constitutes a sufficient amount of Latinx representation on television has only served to reinforce negative stereotypes and prejudices that narrow the scope of how Latinxs are viewed globally and within the specific context of US society. These limited depictions constitute a gross and dangerous erasure of the complex identities that make up the Latinx community, especially at a time when we are constantly being "maligned and vilified," as Saracho aptly put it when accepting the 2019 GLAAD award for Outstanding Comedy Series on behalf of Vida. During times like these — and during all times, really — it's important that our media landscape authentically represent the rich variety of stories that make up the American experience. For its part, Vida, and the many hands and hearts involved in its creation, aims to do just that. f * (Editor's note: Various attributes shared by Latin-American people) Vida's complete post crew, back row, from left: assistant editors Génesis Henriquez and Michael Boord; middle row: co-producer Christina Perez, post PA Azaria Inverary, editors Amy Duddleston and JoAnne Yarrow, creator/showrunner Tanya Saracho and post supervisor Christopher Castillo; front row: editor Liza Espinas, assistant editor Steph Zenee Perez and Vida post mascot/ comfort animal Temo Blanco. Photo by Raul Martin Romero