Actor Tenoch Huerta (The Forever Purge) spent much of the day Wednesday (February 23) using his social media platform to call on telenovela productions in Mexico to hire more Latine actors with dark skin, specifically on the shows being distributed by streamers like Netflix.
Last month, Netflix launched its campaign, “Qué drama. Novelas con N de Netflix” to produce more Spanish-language soap operas, but actors like Huerta are making it clear that greenlighting these shows isn’t enough.
Huerta has joined the organization Poder Prieto in its counter-campaign demanding that Netflix and other streaming giants like HBO Max and Amazon Prime cast more than just light-skinned Latines. Their advocacy for equality is called “Novelas con N de No más Racismo.” According to information on Poder Prieto’s social media pages, the group “seeks to eradicate systemic racism and promote empathy, joy and dignified representation.”
“In a country in which 60% of the population is mestizo and 30% indigenous, there is no way that the stars that appear in the billboards of @NetflixLAT, @HBOMaxLA and @PrimeVideoMX represent the majority,” Poder Prieto posted on Twitter.
Huerta strongly supports the campaign. “To all content producers in Mexico … ENOUGH of your speeches of whiteness, of making brown skin invisible,” Huerta tweeted. “We are the majority, but you are ashamed to live in a brown country, but you don’t mind the privileges they confer on you here, right?”
He even went as far as tweeting Vernā Myers, VP of Inclusion Strategy at Netflix, about how unimpressed he is with Netflix’s attempt to diversify its programming.
“Dear @VernaMyers … The fact they know how to speak Spanish doesn’t make them racialized people,” he wrote. “White supremacy exists in LatAm, and I’m very sorry to let you know that your platform encourages it with the absence of brown people and the white overrepresentation in your productions.”