Hellish and Not-So-Hellish Hollywood

You know what's not a fun thing to do for Halloween? Go to a party that's not in Hollywood, then try to get back to your house that is in Hollywood.

On the other hand, AFI is holding its annual film festival, and this year, free tickets are being made available to the public. You can reserve them online pretty easily. As of posting, most screenings are open, except for the very high profile films like Precious and The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus. Even for those you can try to rush films on the day of.

Last night, I saw a beautiful film called The Two Horses of Genghis Khan (trailer). Tomorrow and Monday, I'm seeing and No One Knows About Persian Cats.

Also, there's a marathon of the original V running tomorrow on the channel formerly known as SciFi.

Now, to set back the clocks and go to bed.

¡Bienvenidos a la Boca del Infierno!

This is the result of a few things.

One, I found a new blog, SciFi Latino, by typing in the same Google search that I do every few months, "SciFi Latino". Someone else was also frustrated by the unhelpful results, and has started a blog (and a Twitter account that's keeps updated with links).

The blog will review current television series, cancelled shows, movies, books and anything else that I consider genre-worthy and where we see a Latino participating in a significant capacity. He or she may be an actor, a director, a producer—I want to reach out and get to know as many as I can. SCIFI LATINO will cover English and Spanish language media from the U.S. and abroad.

And on the front page, there's a great collage of Latinos from scifi and fantasy media.

Two, I rewatched "Inca Mummy Girl" from Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

Three, whedonland hosted a picspam challenge.

And these three things made me think, "I should do a picspam of all the Latino/a characters that appeared on Buffy the Vampire Slayer." And thus:



First, a word about methodology. To find Latinos, I read through the entire IMDB episode-cast list for Buffy. As a result, I based my list mostly on the names that got credited. When possible, I tried to get some corroboration on publicity pages or, at the very least, by seeing if the actors were credited with Latino roles elsewhere on IMDB. But Buffy's over ten years old, and not everyone kept acting since then. I may have missed a few, and it might turn out that some of the actors listed as Latino/as below actually aren't.

( And now, the pics and the spam. )

So we've looked at a total of 24 people.

1 is Spanish-American.
1 is Native American (playing a Latino).
1 is a Latino whose scene was cut.
21 are Latino/as who appeared onscreen.

Of those:
16 are men.
5 are women.
1 appeared in more than three episodes.
2 appeared in exactly three episodes.
18 appeared in only one episode.
13 appeared in only one scene.
2 were LA newscasters playing themselves.
12 were Sunnydale natives.

And what have we learned? Well, as many have noted, there aren't very many Latinos on Buffy the Vampire Slayer. On the other hand, there are more than I expected. And they are overwhelmingly male, which I wouldn't have expected, but which falls in line with a general perception that non-white groups default to male. Also, a number of the Latino/as are very light-skinned. Now I'm a mixed white Mexican myself, but it's another thing that contributes to the invisibility of Latino/as on the show. With Anglo names (or no names at all) and the overwhelming whiteness of the rest of the milieu, viewers are led to see these characters and actors as white (and also not Latino).

So it's mostly what I knew before, but with a bit more data and with lots of pretty pictures.