Latinx Files: In the Heights and the pitfalls of Latinx representation latimes.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from latimes.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
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This week marked the 25th anniversary of the epic fight between Julio César Chávez and Oscar De La Hoya. In celebration of this historic event, The Times published an oral history of the fight. You should read it even if you don’t know or care about boxing. Pound for pound, it might be one of the most important works of journalism about Mexican Americans written in 2021.
Chávez versus De La Hoya was more than just a boxing match. It was also “a proxy for all the complexities that come from being of Mexican ethnicity, living in a place that was once Mexico.”
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On Friday, the USC Annenberg Inclusion Initiative released a detailed report analyzing representation in front of and behind the camera at Netflix, and the numbers were dismal.
According to the report, which took a look at 126 U.S. Netflix movies and 180 scripted shows made in 2018 and 2019, only 2.6% of all stories had a Latinx lead or co-lead and only 4.5% of main cast members were Latinx.
Behind the camera, the report found that only one director, one writer and five producers had worked for a Netflix-produced film in that period. On Netflix series, only 2.7% of creators, 2.6% of producers, and 2.5% of writers and directors were Latinx.
Dorothea Lange’s legacy lives on through a fellowship at UC Berkeley
On Feb. 22 the Cal J-School presents, “Photographer Dorothea Lange and the Berkeley Connection: 40 Years of Lange Fellowship Winners.”
A photo from the project “Defy Expectations” by Clara Mokri, 2019 Dorothea Lange Fellowship winner and current student at UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism. Photo: Clara Mokri
If the past is a foreign country, Dorothea Lange’s images work as a visual time machine, providing a portal back to the dusty byways, rural backroads and prison camps that many would prefer to forget. A Berkeley resident for much of her life, Lange continues to serve as a beacon for documentary photographers, not least at UC Berkeley ever since Cal economics professor Paul Taylor established a fellowship to honor his late wife some two decades after her death in 1965.